Luceco plc

Okay, good morning everybody and thank you very much for coming here this morning to hear the results from Luceco for last year for 2023. So I will use the bleeper. The highlights. So revenue of 209 million last year, 206. Adjusted operating profit of 24 million last year. It was 22 million. I would say that was an OK year in a very difficult market. Although the top line actually grew by 3 million, If you look through the overstocking, destocking, our sales actually fell by approximately 5%. There was a 20 million overstocking in 2021, and there was a 5 million destocking in 2022. So if you look through that, our sales actually declined. And we think they declined slightly less than the market. We think our markets were down about 6%. Our sales looking through destocking were down about 5%. But the headline number is that the revenue was actually up. Operating profits also up. Obviously overheads increased a lot. We gave a significant salary increase at the start of last year. But our gross margin that started last year quite weak in the mid-30s ended the year much stronger, up to 40%, and has carried on at higher levels into this year. That is what basically drove the higher operating profit. Our cash flow performance was 18 million, quite a lot less than the previous year. But the previous year, we were very overstocked. So we had a big working capital benefit. Last year was a much more normal year. We did actually spend two and a half million pounds on a warehouse for Kingfisher. So we can add that back to the cash flow, which was therefore almost 10%, which is our sort of long-term target. And that left our balance sheet relatively unleveraged at 0.6 times. And adjusted EPS was flat. We had a higher tax rate than the previous year where our tax rate was extremely low and slightly more shares in issue because the LTIP owned slightly less shares. And the dividend, we have increased slightly up to 4.8p. And with that, Will, I'll hand over to you.

Or maybe you could talk to the next slide if you like.

Okay, I could do. Yeah, so some of the other highlights. As I say... It was a difficult year for the market. However, we managed to grow our sales, mainly because of less destocking. However, some of our businesses actually performed very strongly, particularly LED lighting projects. High energy costs meant that some of our infrastructure businesses, where we're doing LED retrofits, actually had a very strong period. And as I say, the gross margin improved throughout the year. Also, another highlight was the growth of our EV business, where the sales were up by 44%. And despite the fact that the EV market as a whole has been weaker than forecast, we think this is an area where we can show significant growth in future years. And I'll talk quite more about that later. I've talked about the cash flow. And over the last four years, our cash... generation has been £90 million, slightly more than 10% of our sales. That has allowed us to make acquisitions and we were very pleased in March to announce the acquisition of D-Line for £6.8 million. That's a highly complimentary deal that we think will hit in very well with the rest of the group.

And with that, Will, I will hand over to you. Thank you, John. And good morning, everybody. Reviewing the income statement, our revenue at 209 million reflected a strong performance, especially in our hybrid channel, which delivered near 30% improvement to approximately 50 million pounds, or now some 24% of total group sales. We mentioned at the half year that the second half offered an easier comparative given the experience that we had at the end of 2022. This was particularly the case in the hybrid channel. Our LED lighting projects team continued to perform well. The high cost of energy is encouraging demand for energy saving lighting projects. You will have seen that we took a small equity position in E-Energy PLC, which is a growing customer for this LED projects space. House building took a knock in 2023. It remains under 5% of our total revenue, so the market decline did not have a material impact on the group. Gross margin for the year was 39.4%, the same as delivered in the first half. most key raw material costs have eased. With the exception of copper, which was relatively stable throughout much of 2023, it has though recently increased in price. Our Jiaxing production facility is delivering productivity improvements helped by it having a better level of volume to work on. Currency gave us a headwind in 2023. We follow a policy to place forward cover which naturally delays the consequences of currency movements. The RMB has been declining against sterling and we are now seeing this benefit coming through our cost base. The currency tailwind we carry into 2024 is currently mitigating both the higher freight costs caused by the traffic diverting away from the Red Sea and the recent increase in copper commodity prices. Overheads at 58.3 million pounds were up 6 million on 2022. As John mentioned, the majority of the increase year on year attributable to the higher wage and salary costs implemented towards the end of 2022, together with the return to normal sales and marketing activities, which were constrained somewhat during the COVID period. Inflation has until quite recently been running at a higher level, especially in the UK, and there is a consequent upward pressure on payrolls. Adjusted operating profit, as John mentioned, was £24 million at the top end of the range we shared in our January trading update. Nope. Our tax rate has stepped up somewhat in 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, which have not repeated. The increase in the tax rate to just over 18%, together with approximately £200,000 increase in our finance charge, led to earnings per share in line with that delivered in 2022, despite the increased profitability. Thank you. Revenue bridge. This slide provides a bit more detail on the drivers of our revenue performance. The most significant changes I mentioned occurred in our hybrid space and within it, especially our wiring accessories, which recorded a marked increase compared to 2022. As we highlighted partway through last year, retail suffered as the UK consumer turned away from residential DIY because of the pressure from the increase in the cost of living and so reduced discretionary spending. Although the post-pandemic destocking came to an end in the first half of 2023, the DIY market decline meant our retail channel did not show revenue progress over 22. Efforts over recent years to rebalance our revenue towards professionally installed products, particularly those installed in non-residential settings, allowed us to mitigate the slowdown in DIY and benefit as high energy prices continued to support demand for LED retrofitting. Professional projects again showed good progress of the year. It's difficult for us to be precise about the exposure we have to the new house building sector, because we don't have perfect sight of who our wholesalers sell on to. We do, though, estimate that our overall exposure to new house building is under £10 million of sales, and so we didn't suffer overall as much as some from the slowdown in this sector in 2023. You will recall that we closed our German and French operations in 2022. Together, they delivered nearly £3 million of revenue. in the first half of that year, hence the revenue rejection from acquisitions and closures that you can see in this slide. Thank you. Now looking at the profit bridge. Pleasing to share the strong underlying operating profit improvement of nearly 16% over 2022. As I said, our Jiaxing facility got busier in 23. A higher proportion of wiring accessories are manufactured in-house, and so revenue growth in this segment improves utilization at Jarshing. More on underlying progress on the next slide. But just touching on currency, which has been a headwind during 23, we spoke about this during the year, as we could predict the impact of the forward contracts that we have in place. Our approach is to buy and sell forward currency in tapering layers that go out plus or minus some 12 months into the future. As rates move in our favor, as they have done over the last year, this approach delays the realization of the benefit. Without currency impact or on a constant currency basis, we would have been ahead at adjusted operating profit level by just over four million pounds or over 18% in 23 against the year before. The small effect of acquisitions and closures shown here reflects the removal of the German operation I meant earlier, and the fact that Sync EV became a subsidiary in the first half of 22. Moving on to improving momentum in 2023, looking more deeply into our P&L comparison back to 22 shows the progress in gross margin. It's pleasing to see our gross margins back into the 39% plus range delivered through raw material cost reduction, the improved freight market for much of 23, favourable product mix and efficiencies at the Jiaxing manufacturing facility now able to operate at more sensible volumes and so make better use of the automation equipment that has been installed there over the last few years. The scale of the improvement was tempered by the currency headwind. The well-publicized shipping impact caused by the conflict in the Red Sea is affecting us so far in 2024. To date, it's nowhere near the cost impact we saw from shipping during the pandemic. And so far, we have been able to mitigate it, as I mentioned earlier, through savings elsewhere. We do, though, of course, continue to watch this carefully. This gross margin improvement was in part countered by the effects of the increasing cost of living, especially in the UK, and a return to more normal levels of variable pay. Together, these increased our payroll by just under £4 million. We mentioned earlier last year that the median pay rise for the UK was 7.5%, with the lower earners gaining over 10%. There has again been an increase in the national living wage in the UK. Again, we have tapered our payroll increases. So those higher up the scale have received less of a percentage increase than the lowest paid. Luceco has historically enjoyed higher sales in H2 than H1. 23 showed a return to this more normal pattern after the exception to this in 22. Looking at the operating segments, there's two key features. Wiring accessories perform well in 23, recovering from the low of 22, especially so in the second half and through the hybrid channel. You will recall that this channel is heavily represented in our FOB program, where customers collect product from the ports in China. The second being the improvement in profitability within LED lighting following work on product cost. Revenue here reduced by some 3 million from the closure of our German operation in 22, as I mentioned. And our Spanish operation also declined as we repositioned it to focus more on its growing retail opportunities and less so in the professional wholesale space. UK LED projects, though, was a real success, capitalising on the continuing trend for LED retrofitting in non-residential. Finishing up on the numbers, this slide summarises our working capital cash flow and debt performance. In short, we spent much of the time explaining the normalization in the first half of 2023 as the business returned to a balanced position post the customer destocking in 22. The second half cash flow improved markedly and beyond my expectations in part through the success of a focus program ensuring our stock was well managed. The progress in inventory management has released some 15 million pounds of cash over the last two years. At the same time, our overdue debtors metric has not deteriorated. It is likely that our working capital will absorb some cash if market conditions improve and the DIY sector returns to growth. Our existing 80 million bank facility coupled with our covenant leverage ratio of just 0.6 times gives us capacity to explore more investment, both organic and through M&A. We've deployed some 8.6 million, as John mentioned, of this capacity so far in 2024 through the bolt-on acquisition of D-Line, which we completed at the end of February. And with that, I'll hand you back to John to talk through our business review and outlook. Thank you.

So a bit more on the market. We track various different metrics. Quite a useful one is the Barclaycard consumer spending, so the green line in the top left. I mean, it's a seasonal measure, but you can see has been very weak. Generally, when you move house, that's when you spend money on a house. So housing transactions on the right hand side have also been extremely weak. That has driven residential RMI at about minus eight. And overall, if you look at our markets in which we operate, as I said earlier, we think the market was down about minus six. We were down less than that if you look through the destocking, so we point to small market share gains. But we would hope, looking at housing transactions on the right, have slightly improved. And I think that the more recent data have been even stronger. And as and when interest rates come down and the housing market returns to something like normality, we would hope that home improvement spend would improve and the market will look quite a lot better. I mean, new residential housing minus 17%, as Will said, that's a relatively small segment for us, but minus 17% is a pretty vicious number. There is a lag between housing transactions and an improvement in the RMI spent of maybe six months, something like that. But we would hope in the second half of this year and into next year, as interest rates come down, the market will significantly improve. But it has been quite tough, as you can see. Our strategy, harness power sustainably. OK. As I've spoken over many years, product development for us has been an extremely important driver of our growth. Not being able to go to China for three years, where most of this activity takes place, was definitely a significant headwind for our business. So being able to go back to China and re-engage with the factory on these processes has been hugely important. EV charging is an area where there's a lot of MPD happening, and we've done a lot of work also on the DW Windsor acquisition in integrating that with the group supply chain. As you can see, that's had an extremely beneficial impact on the gross margin of that business. We hope that The NPD that we've got going on in home energy management systems, which is sort of connected to EV, will be a future very exciting project for the group. Thank you. As we've spoken in the past, new regulations in our space have been driving an increase in the complexity and therefore the cost of our products. And we also hope to benefit significantly from the transition to net zero and the general trend for electrification of the home. I mean, solar panels are gonna be increasingly popular, and when you install those kind of new systems, all the sort of add-ons, you know, bits and pieces are bits and pieces that we can and we do supply. A little bit more about our acquisition on D-Line. It's a similar playbook to acquisitions that we've done in the past. So there will be a significant supply chain benefit by utilizing our group expertise in the Far East and elsewhere. But there's also in this case a significant sales synergy. They have a sales team of three. We have a sales team that are able to sell these products of about 40 people. So it's a product range that will fit extremely well with the rest of our business and we are confident that we can improve the gross margin with the supply chain activity and also significantly improve the revenue by utilizing our sales resource onto their product range. And another reason why we like the business particularly is they have a warehousing facility in North America. You will recall that we exited North American operations in 2018. But we still have customers there. And we've been looking for a profitable way of having boots on the ground and a warehousing facility back in the US. And this acquisition gives us that. About 40% of D-Line sales are actually in the US. Will mentioned that we invested in a significant customer for us. It's actually the largest customer we have for LED lighting retrofits. As a result of that investment, we are able to grow our share of their wallet. And as the business grows, we think that will be a very good thing for us to have done. So... you know, low carbon product sales, we already have a lot of them, EV, obviously, LED lighting. But we hope to expand into this area and take advantage of the net climate goals. And we've got some exciting product development coming in this area. I also spoke earlier about the um investment we've made in a new facility for kingfisher lighting this is a business that we bought in 2017 and since then it has grown significantly both in terms of revenue and in terms of profit so more on the net zero um Home energy management systems are a combination of EV chargers, solar, and also batteries. And it's a system that allows you to make the most of your solar power, whether you're putting it in your car or into a residential battery. We don't plan to get into the solar install business. put everything downstream of that, we are planning on moving into including batteries. This is a natural add-on to our EV business and we believe will be a huge market segment in the future. Capital allocation policy, this is just a repeat of what we've had at every results presentation, really, for I think probably the last four or five years. We pay a dividend of between 40% to 60%. This year, I think it was 43%. Our capex is up to 4% of revenue. I think last year it was 7 million, but that included the acquisition of the warehousing facility. Our business is highly cash generative. So M&A is a constant activity for us. We've done one deal this year. We would hope to do another deal before the end of this year. And if we can't do any of that, obviously buybacks or special dividends could be on the agenda. OK, now to the outlook. As I said, our markets have been very weak. Housing transactions minus 20. But I think this is pretty close to the cycle bottom or the bottom of the cycle. There is a bit of a lag between transactions and RMI spend. But I would hope that towards the second half of this year and into next year, our markets will improve. Infrastructure has remained quite strong. I mean, ironically, inflation coming down is partly because of energy costs coming down that actually is extremely beneficial for the larger part of our business, not so beneficial for the sort of LED retrofit side of our business. But overall, of course, is a benefit. We outperformed the market last year. We hope to outperform the market again. We believe that innovation of new products, particularly home energy management systems, which we'll be launching later on this year. We have a strong order book. Ironically, the situation in the Red Sea slightly increases our order book because FAB customers need to hold slightly more stock as a result of longer transit times. But that hasn't been that significant. As I said, our gross margin improved, particularly in the first half of last year. We started the year sort of 35. first half of last year up to 40, and that gross margin has continued to improve. We would therefore think that operating margins hopefully will be stronger this year than they were next year. Uncertain macroeconomic environment for sure, but I think compared to the uncertainty that we had this time last year or we might have spoken about in the autumn of 2022, I think the market is looking a lot more stable and we, I think, should be very well positioned for the business to move on from here. And with that, I will hand over for any questions. Yes, Evan.

Morning. Two questions, if I can, please. Firstly, just when you think about the sort of hybrid customers, so clearly you've performed well in that channel during 2023. I guess within that typically you're over indexed to wiring accessories within that channel. Obviously that's helpful for the margin. Given the sort of backdrop you point to for the overall market, what's the sort of position of the hybrid retailers currently just vis-a-vis kind of the order book, the outlook, their ability to outperform what's been a challenging market? And secondly, just in terms of D-line, The deferred consideration is quite material relative to the initial, so it sort of points to some quite strong potential there. What's that sort of mainly dependent on? Is that sort of reflecting the North American opportunity you pointed to, or how should we be thinking about that?

Yeah, okay, thank you. I mean, hybrids, I mean, they look like they did well. But actually, that's where the overstocking was mainly. So if you look through that, they did OK. Kingfisher's results were out yesterday. France was very weak. UK was OK. They announced that they were opening another 40 ScrewFix stores. That's helpful for us. I can't really speak about their current trading. I mean, obviously, we can see how we're doing with them. I mean, it's okay, I wouldn't, you know, it's nothing spectacular. But, you know, Screwfix has been an enormous customer for us, and Toolstation is a growing customer for us, and I think as they take market share, and they continue to take market share, and they've done it over many years, we are overweight in those guys against our general position in the market. So as they take share, therefore we take share. That has been the case for a number of years, and I can see no reason why that would change. The deferred consideration on D-line is actually about one specific possible... Well, one is now dead. It was about two. One has fallen over. The other one is it's a large US retailer... They thought they had a chance of gaining some significant listings within that retailer. Frankly, we weren't so sure. We did a deal whereby if they did, we would share some of the gross margin upside for, I think, a period of two to three years. I think it's unlikely to happen. But I hope to be proved wrong.

Yeah, I think in the announcement, we talked about it, if it came off, it would be a bit transformational. So not really in the sort of base model that we went forward with, to be honest.

Right. Okay. Thanks. Yeah.

Thanks, Kevin.

Thanks, Kevin.

Thanks. It's Ed Press from Librem. With regards to growth so far in 2024, has that been driven by same trends as last year? Or is there something new in there that wasn't included in 23?

Interesting. Well, there's less destocking. I mean, there was some destocking, right? And actually, the destocking that occurred last year occurred at the beginning of the year because it was a carry-on from the very dramatic destocking in 2022. So you would expect, if there was an absence of destocking in the first half of this year, you would expect there to be some growth reflecting that. And as I mentioned, the Red Sea issue slightly increases in a customer's nervousness and therefore might be a little bit of restocking or you could even call it a little bit of overstocking again. I think those two issues but the LED business has continued to be strong. I can't really point to anything significant. I don't think the markets improved much. As you can see, I think actually if anything, the market has continued to weaken. I could point to hopefully market share gains. The EV business has been strong still and it continues to grow. We launched quite a lot of new product ranges. Opening up for China, that is a real thing. Not having been able to go to China for three years, a business which is very reliant upon that for its product development, that was a major issue. I think all those things kind of point to a slightly better outlook.

Are you able to remind what your market share in EVs is? I've got 4.4.

I think 4.4 is probably about right. I'd like to think maybe it's now 5. I think it is increasing, actually. So the first thing we did, well, one of the first things we did was to move the product out to our factory in China. That gave us a better cost position. We then re-engineered a product and had a relaunch of a new version midway through last year. That product has been very well received. Currently, it's a very narrow product range. It's only residential AC charging. We are going to launch in early autumn some more commercially-based products. Again, relatively low power, not the sort of stuff you get on the side of the motorway, but for more sort of commercial applications, you know, car parks, schools, hospitals, hospitality, hotels, that kind of thing. And again, we have made those at our own factory in China. I think we have a very competitive position. So I think that hopefully will be something significant. But currently in the residential space, I would say our market share is around 5%. Yeah. I mean, our aspiration, obviously, is to have a big have a high mark. And the business is growing. I mean, it's growing month on month. So I think using our route to market using our relationships with the electrical wholesale channel, and other activities we've got on in the marketing space and sort of direct to consumer, etc, which they this business did not have before, I think we can, I think we can definitely increase our market share. And it is a major focus. Thanks, Ed. Any other questions? Yes, thank you. You're not allowed back next year if you don't ask a question, by the way.

No, you'll be encouraged to come back next year if you don't ask a question.

Charlie. Thanks. It's Charlie Campbell at Stifel here. Two or three, I suppose. They're all sort of slightly related, really. Just wondering, the Kingfisher lighting number you gave sails up 49%, I think, in five years. What are the main moving parts of that, just so we can understand that and think about prospects going forward? Secondly, do you track percentage of sales from new products? You know, products developed in, I don't know, over the last two or three years, just to get an idea of what impact that has. And then thirdly, you talked about energy management in homes. Just wondering whether that's a market you can address organically or you would need to acquire complementary businesses to serve those markets?

OK, thanks, Charlie. Kingfisher, I mean, general market share gains, but also particularly we moved into the sports business, the sports segment. Utilising our own manufacturing in the Far East, we managed to develop a range of lighting for, for example, football pitches. And I think actually in the last results, we did reference some sort of FA activity that we're involved in. But we also do other kind of sports activities. facilities like tennis courts etc and that business has grown from nothing this year will be something like 4 to 5 million reasonably high margin so that's quite a lot of Kingfisher's growth and the rail sector is a sector we weren't really that strong before we're doing quite a lot of HS2 not as much as we might have hoped to have done but Yeah, but I would particularly point to the sports sector. And we install that product as well often. So we're not just selling the light. We're actually selling the whole solution. We put the masks in the ground. We put the lights on the top. We design it. And it's quite technical, because the light's got to be sort of uniform across the pitch. And it mustn't overspill into the council estate on the corner of the pitch. So it's a bit more technical than you would necessarily think. And it's an area where we have become quite good and quite expert. New products. I mean, there's new products and then there's new product variants. So there's lots of new product variants we're doing all the time. You know, different types of wiring accessories with different finishes and different materials. I think we referenced 13 million last year. That's probably product variants. But yes, maybe in the next presentation, we'll put a bit more detail around actual new products. You know, like a USB socket, which is something which has been big for us now. You have a USB-C socket, which is the new version of USB-C. So that's a lot of new products. I would call it a new product. Others might say that's not a new product. It's just an evolution of an existing product. So it kind of depends how you define it. But if you define it quite loosely... then I would say quite a lot, probably 30% every two years. But if you define it quite narrowly, actual real new products, which isn't a variant of an existing product, it's probably quite a lot lower than that. Home energy management systems, batteries and stuff. I mean, the acquisition that we did of the EV business is the segue into that. because you've got a solar panel. You don't want to sell energy to the grid, because you don't get anything for that. You want to put it in your car, and or put it in a battery, and or put it in your hot water system. And you need to control all of that energy flow in the most economic way. So we don't need to make an acquisition. We've already done that. so we can organically expand into this category. And others in the EV space are also doing that. But I think it will be a very big market. Any other questions?

We have some questions from the webcast. Adam Forsyth from Longsburg Capital has a number of questions. His first is, is the growth in hybrid coming from trade or retail customers? Is there an element of channel switching from retail to hybrid? That's the first question.

Okay, so hybrid in our business actually means... Those customers who deal with the consumer and the trade, that's what we call hybrid. And the main customers in that segment for us are Toolstation and Screwfix. they are both consumer facing and also trade facing. That's why we call them hybrid. I think probably their online presence means they are probably picking up trade from the consumer. I mean, Amazon for us is a highly growth, is a business which has been growing strongly. There is an ongoing switch to people buying more of this kind of stuff online. But I also think that screw fix are probably taking market share from the wholesalers as well. So I think they're probably taking market share from both.

Yeah. The next question from Adam is, given the strong margin improvement in LED lighting, are you seeing lower LED costs driven by lower material costs? Are new LED technologies like Pearl still a long way off?

Like what, sorry? He's just showing off, I think. Thanks, Adam. Yeah, look, LED costs have been continuing to come down. I mean, not at the rate that they were before. I mean, a panel light we used to sell for 60 quid, we now sell it for 8 quid or something, like a square, you know, two-by-two panel. They have come down a lot. That has slowed, but still costs are coming down. There's a lot of capacity in the Far East. And the technology of the chips improves, so the heat is less, which means you need less infrastructure to hold the heat and get it away from the product. But actually, I think I would point within our business, the lighting margin has improved actually because of mix more. It's a channel mix, so sort of more projects, more sophisticated sort of sports lighting like I talked about in the Kingfisher case, more sort of controls, basically more complicated, sophisticated products with a higher cost to serve, but also a higher gross margin. Whereas when we launched LED originally, I think a third of our business was light bulbs. That became highly commoditized. We no longer sell light bulbs. We sell very few. We have moved into the high margin project space. So that's really the reason that the overall margin has improved.

Another question from Adam. Cash conversion is not expected to be as strong going forward, given working capital inflow was almost neutral. This suggests working capital cash outflows next year. Where do you expect to see this? Stock or payment terms?

So I guess we're hoping to return to a bit of growth at some stage. Clearly, as John mentioned, that will in part be affected by the wider economy. I guess lots of people are expecting some sort of interest rate reduction later in the year that might drive some change in behaviour from consumers and from DIY discretionary spend. We're a distribution business, so we have to make sure that we've got the right type of stocks available to be able to respond to when that comes. So I guess they're sort of linked in a circle. We're hoping for some growth at some point from the market, and I would expect that we'll need to put some inventory in place in order to be able to make sure we satisfy that.

Shall I? I mean, yeah. So net working capital is about 35% of revenue. So all other things being equal, a 10 million pound increase in revenue is a 3.5 million pound increase in net working capital. If the business doesn't grow, obviously it'll throw off more cash than if it does grow. I think there's a little bit more work we can do on stock, although the Red Sea issue, of course, is not helpful because the transit time from China has gone up a lot. So we have a lot more stock in transit on the water in containers. So that is a headwind for the net working capital percentage, which may increase a little bit because of that. But improving systems, which one can always do. Rationalizing the product range, which one can always do a bit of. But equally, investing in all these new areas like EV and batteries, which are quite high value. So definitely the business will consume more cash as it grows. And I've given you the numbers so you can do the maths.

And the final question from Adam. What do you see the impact of last year's Kingfisher and the Centre for Economics and Research and Business Research report on labour shortages in electricians out to 2030?

Yeah, that's interesting. Frankly, I don't know. I think one of the reasons that the... market hasn't been quite as badly hit as maybe some of the economic indicators would suggest it might have been is because the bottleneck was lack of tradespeople anyway. So demand actually wasn't being fulfilled in the first place, if that makes sense. I don't know. Maybe Keir Starmer will take us back into the EU and we'll be fine. Let's see. I don't know. I think it's a problem. We do a lot on working with apprentices, on training. electricians trying to get their loyalty early on and maybe we should be doing more and I think the industry probably should do more in this case I mean actually you know it's a it's a good it's a good skill it's a highly paid profession I mean why is there a shortage and I think a lot of Activity is going to happen in the solar space. A lot of activity is going to be happening in the heat pump space. A lot of activity is going to be happening on the whole sort of energy transition like we've discussed. And that is going to require more labor probably than is available in the market. But the market normally has a way of resolving these things, and sometimes quicker than people think.

So we'll see. And the final question we have from the webcast before I hand back for any closing remarks is from Mark Simpson at Excellent Investing. Have you seen any progress on building, manufacturing, geographical diversity?

um well we've definitely done a lot of work on it um i i was in vietnam yesterday um and we are doing a lot of work on it um i think we're gonna probably start some light manufacturing in mexico where we have a we have a we have a very successful business now in monterey And as our U.S. business grows, with D-Line and with other brands, we think that Mexico would be a good place to start some light manufacturing. And then we're working with M&A Outfits, looking at... acquisition opportunities in Mexico, in India, in Malaysia, and in Vietnam. So we're fully cognizant of the China risk, or the perceived China wish, which seems to be getting lots of attention currently. And I think that we will do something. The immediate news is that we are starting to do something ourselves from a greenfields perspective in Mexico. But we remain actively looking for acquisitions in other low-cost countries with manufacturing diversification. And we've spoken about wanting to buy a business with a brand operating in its domestic market, which we can grow, but also use as a China Plus One strategy.

Thanks, John. Those are all the questions. Unless there are any further questions in the room, I'll pass back to you for any closing remarks.

Will, do you want to make some closing remarks?

No, other than to say thank you very much for attending and asking a range of wide and interesting questions. And I guess we're quite pleased with the performance that we put in in 2023. And we look forward to hopefully some improvements in the market in 2024 that we'll be able to talk to you about later in the year. Thank you very much.

Thank you.