Luceco plc

All right, thank you very much, everybody. Luceco interim results for 2023. The RNS out this morning. And those results are slightly ahead of what we forecast in our half-year update at the end of July. Revenue of 101 million, which is 5% down year on year, and adjusted operating profit of 10.8 million, which is 6% down year on year. This reflects a return to extremely strong gross margins, which we can speak more about later, but they should be higher in the second half also. Adjusted EPS of approximately five pence, higher levels of interest and also tax mean that is a minus 13.8% year-on-year reduction. And the covenant net debt ratio of 1.3 at the lower end of our targeted range of one to two times. So, the business has performed stronger as the half has gone on. I think the first quarter was minus 13%, and the second quarter was stronger, and the third quarter will be stronger still. You will recall that in 2021, our customers overstocked themselves by approximately 25 million. In 2022, about 20 million of that has been reversed. And in the first half of this year, the final 5 million of the destocking has taken effect. And we don't think there is any more customer destocking to impact our business in the second half. The RMI market, which is a major area in which we operate, has, however, been weak. Housing transactions, housing starts, mortgage applications, all of those key performance indicators that we follow have been extremely weak. However, new house building is a very small part of what we do. And infrastructure and non-residential demand has actually been quite strong. So overall the performance of the business is slightly stronger than we were hoping for at the start of the year. On the gross margin side obviously there's been a huge reduction in the cost of freight and other raw materials including copper have also been weak and the RMB i.e. the Chinese currency is also weak, but we've had hedging in place for this year. But as we move out of that hedging into future years, that will be a significant tailwind for our gross margin. So the businesses that we have acquired recently, i.e. DW Windsor, which we've now owned for about 18 months, and the Sync EV business that we've now owned for just over one year, have performed extremely well in the first half. And DW Windsor's operating margin will be over 10%. And the EV business has grown further with a strong pipeline of new products. For the outlook, we have said that although some of our core markets remain weak, we have made further progress since our update in July, and we now expect the full year to be ahead of last year, when we made 22 million operating profit. However, the economic situation is uncertain. In my view, the consumer feels a bit stronger. Housing is obviously quite weak. Infrastructure, other construction, is okay. High energy costs mean that LED lighting retrofits have actually been very strong and our infrastructure businesses such as Kingfisher and also D Lovely Windsor are performing very strongly. But the housing thing is a drag and we remain to see how that will play out. And with that I will hand over to Will who will take you through some more of the numbers.

Thank you, John, and good morning, everybody. Let me start by pulling out some of the key themes within our numbers. So slide six. Overall revenue decline of 5% and on a like-for-like basis back 5.8%. We've seen a slowdown in underlying demand in the DIY sector, which drives about 30% of group revenue, but demand from other areas of the construction market has remained relatively robust. Our gross margins have continued to recover following the lows of 2022, as much of our raw material bill and our freight costs have reduced. This has in part been offset by higher operating costs, especially wage inflation. We said earlier this year that our median pay rise was 7.5% coming into 2023. Overall, just about maintained operating margin at 10.7% to the prior year. We're pleased to be able to confirm that post-pandemic destocking, which was such a theme of the second half of 2022, appears to have come to an end during the first half of 2023. I'll get into the numbers in detail on the next slide. Reviewing the income statement, you can see that revenue came in at just over £101 million. That was 5% lower than the first half of 2022. Less of a decline than we'd anticipated. The reduction in DIY demand was expected. Against that, we have enjoyed a stronger performance in the LED space and especially in lighting projects. The high cost of energy is encouraging demand for energy saving lighting projects. Gross margin for the half was 39.4%. Pleasing to see this recovering back to levels we expect at Luceco. This recovery is more a feature of the easing of input cost pressures, including freight, which has returned now to pre-COVID cost levels. Most key raw material costs have eased, perhaps with the exception of copper, which is proving somewhat sticky. Production volumes have recovered at our manufacturing facility and as a consequence, overhead recovery levels are improving. There will naturally be a lag between this happening and it's showing fully in our cost of sales because the improving cost profile has to work its way through our inventories. Overheads were 29 million pounds. with the majority of the increase year on year attributable to the higher wage and salary costs implemented towards the end of last year and a return to more normal sales and marketing activities, which were constrained during the COVID era. Inflation has been running at higher levels, especially in the UK, and there is a consequent upward pressure on payrolls. Adjusted operating profit was £10.8 million, slightly ahead of that anticipated in our July trading update. Our tax rate has stepped up somewhat in the first half of 2023. We continue to take advantage of various government incentives. As we said earlier this year, there were some one-off benefits in the 2022 tax rate. The increase in the tax rate to just over 18%, together with the approximately £400,000 increase in our finance charge, led to a reduction in earnings per share of approximately 14% to 5p for the first half. So on to slide eight, revenue bridge. This slide provides a bit more detail on the drivers of our revenue performance. The most significant change to our revenue for this half compared to the first half of 2022 occurred in our retail space and specifically our portable power offering in this space. Retail suffered as the UK consumer turned away from residential DIY, facing the pressure from the increase in the cost of living and so reduced discretionary spending. The hybrid channel recovered during the first half of 2023 from the customer destocking experience in the latter part of 2022. However, the retail side was still suffering from destocking during the first half of this year. Efforts over recent years to rebalance our revenue toward professionally installed products, particularly those installed in non-residential settings, allowed us to mitigate the slowdown in DIY and benefit as high energy prices drove strong demand for LED retrofitting. Professional wholesale and projects now make up over 50% of our sales, helping to cushion us somewhat from the short-term consumer demand changes. There has been much comment recently concerning the new house building sector. It's difficult for us to be precise about our exposure to this space because we don't have perfect sight of who our wholesalers sell to. We do though estimate that our overall exposure to new house building is under 10 million pounds of sales. The reason acquisitions and closures is not a larger positive given the improvement from our recently acquired EV business is that 2022 saw the end of our German and French operations, which delivered sales of nearly 3 million in the first half of 2022. So moving on to the profit bridge. This slide shows the key drivers of our adjusted operating profit performance. Overall, the story comes in two parts for understanding the like-for-like operating profit increase of 7%. I'll pick this up in more detail on the next slide. But here, currency has been a headwind during the first half. And from the forward contracts we have in place, we can see that it will continue to be so for the remainder of this year. Without currency impact or on a constant currency basis, we would be ahead at adjusted operating profit level by one million pounds in the half. The small effect of acquisitions and closures reflects the removal of our German operation as I mentioned earlier. So moving on, slide 10. Looking more deeply into our P&L comparison back to 2022 shows the continuing progress in gross margin. It's pleasing to see our gross margins back towards 39 plus percent delivered through raw material cost reduction, the improved freight market, favorable product mix and efficiencies at the Jiaxing manufacturing facility, now able to operate at more sensible volume levels and so make better use of the automation equipment that has been installed there over the last few years. This improvement was in part countered by the increase in cost of living, especially in the UK. And as we return to more normal levels of variable pay, together these increased our payroll by just under 3 million this first half. We did mention earlier in the year that the median pay rise in the UK was 7.5%, with the lower earners gaining over 10%. Luceco has historically enjoyed higher sales in the second half than in the first half. Last year was an exception to this as customer de-stocking affected the normal seasonality. We expect this year to follow the more normal pattern, but of course, we remain cautious given the uncertain economic world we are currently operating in. So moving on to slide 11. Finishing up on the numbers, this slide summarises our working capital cash flow and debt performance. In short, as we mentioned in our July trading update, our business has returned to normal post the customer destocking seen heavily in 2022 and continuing to some extent into the first half of 2023. The customer destocking reduced our sales below the level of the natural market demand. The lower quarter four sales meant much lower trade debtors at the end of 2022. The end of the post pandemic de-stocking means sales have returned to more normal levels for quarter two, 2023. And so naturally our trade debtors have returned to more normal levels. The cashflow consequence of this has been an outflow of some 11 million pounds from trade debtors normalizing. Our overdue debtors metric has not deteriorated and our inventory has been well controlled during this transition. With the exception of 2021, which was affected by the first phases of the pandemic, Luceco has typically experienced a working capital cash outflow during its first half of each year. 2023 is a typical year in this respect, only amplified by the recovery of our trade debtors position that I just mentioned. The cash outflow we see in the first half of 2023 is therefore unusual in scale and we expect positive cash flow for the second half of this year. With that, I'll hand you back to John to talk through our business review and outlook.

Thank you, Will. So firstly, the markets in which we operate. Do we need to move the, yeah. Thank you. As I said earlier, the consumer is feeling slightly better. If you look at the top left, consumer spending on DIY year on year We will recall during the pandemic, there was a massive boom in the DIY market. So we entered the second half of last year with very weak comps. And there was some improvement into the summer of this year. And then we think that possibly the poor weather in July has impacted that again in a negative way. But overall, the consumer feels a bit better. I mean, we look at the EPOS sales. Sorry, by EPOS, I mean, we look at the sales out of our major retailers. In the first half of the year, they were negative year on year. And in the second half of the year, they've actually turned positive. So that is a trend that I think probably continues. If you look at the bottom left, it splits where we do our business and what we think those market segments are experiencing. So residential RMI, which is about 55% of our turnover, UK forecast for the year is minus 8%. New residential housing is minus 18%, but as Will said earlier, that is a relatively small part of what we do. Non-residential RMI, that's sort of LED retrofits particularly, is flat. But actually, for us, we have been experiencing strong growth in this market. And new infrastructure, again, is flat. Overall, the UK market for us, we think, is going to be about minus 6%. we are anticipating that our revenues news will actually show growth this year. So you could say that we're gaining market share, but actually because of the de-stocking impact on last year, the picture is a bit more difficult to read. Overall construction market on the right hand side you can see is actually still showing some growth. So moving forward, how we've been able to grow our business over time. NPD has been a major part of our growth story, new product development. And you can see the EV charger market is forecast to grow by approximately 50% over the next two years. We have a 4% market share currently, but we are hopeful of growing that significantly. And as more complicated regulations come into the market, that will drive further revenues for us. LED lighting becomes more and more efficient every year and thus the payback on LED retrofits become more and more attractive. So schools, hospitals, warehouses, local authority buildings, the ROI on an LED retrofit is now actually less than one year. And the climate emergency is also driving a huge amount of electrification in the residential space. Something like 14 million EV chargers have to be installed. And the regulations now that all new housing with off-street parking has to have an EV built into it at the point of construction. and 28 million homes will require some kind of low-carbon heating solution. We're not obviously involved in heating solutions, but all of these solutions require electrification, and we are involved in the infrastructure that has to be put around that. Furthermore, M&A will be a significant part pillar of our future growth. Since 2019, the business has generated 100 million of free cash flow at a margin of 10%. And our EBITDA to net debt ratio at the year end could be less than one. And we have a strong pipeline of M&A. Turning the page. As I said earlier, new product development has been a major driver of our historical growth. We have big engineering teams, both in the UK and in the Far East. and we are constantly adding and innovating new products. On the right hand side here, you can see some of the areas where we have been concentrating recently, particularly Kingfisher Lighting and the DW Windsor business and the new EV business, where we have a very strong pipeline of new products. particularly in the commercial and the three-phase area. Overall, sorry, on the next slide, we have been investing a lot in contractor engagement, in training the new generation of contractors so they will want to use our products. This is a major area of focus for the business in future. On the climate side, we are now operationally carbon neutral, and there's a lot of further work going on in this area. In terms of people, as Will mentioned earlier, we gave a 7.5% pay rise last year, and we have completed over 4,000 jobs training sessions for our staff. In terms of the outlook, yeah, so the markets in which we operate are certainly in recession, but as I said earlier, I think the consumer side of the business is improving, and the housing side, which is particularly weak, is where we are underrepresented. Overall, we estimate the market is down, as I said earlier, approximately 5%. So notwithstanding that, we believe now with our order book that the full year 2023, three will be significantly ahead of last year. I mean, historically, our second half is a sort of 55% of the group. Last year, the second half was actually weaker than the first half. That has never happened before. That is because the destocking that occurred last year mainly happened in Q4. Assuming that does not happen again, we would expect the second half to be considerably stronger than the first half. The gross margin should also be stronger in the second half as a reduction in the freight and other input costs works its way through inventory and into the P&L. I mentioned the Chinese currency earlier. I mean, that is at a 15-year low. It's actually 7.3 this morning. We have hedging in place this year, which has cost us approximately 2% of our gross margin in the first half. As and when those hedges run out in future years, we should see a significant tailwind on our gross margin. Having said all that, we remain mindful of uncertain macroeconomic environment and the potential this may have on our core markets in the future years. And with that, I'll hand over for any questions.