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.