Luceco plc

Good morning everybody and welcome to Le Seco's first half results presentation for 2025. Thank you everyone who is joining on the webcast. Revenue approximately £126 million up almost 15% on last year. Operating profit of circa £14 million up almost 10% on last year. adjusted operating margin of 11%. This is slightly down on last year, reflecting the investments we are making in the future growth, especially in the energy transition business. This is mainly engineering activity, but also the software development. And the benefits of this will start to come through in the second half. Thus, I expect the full-year operating margin to be ahead of last year. As we know, our second half is always significantly stronger for us than the first half, and this year that will be particularly so. Leverage at 1.6%, our dividend up almost 6%, and EPS slightly ahead of last year. As I said, first-half revenues up almost 15%. This is partly due to M&A, but also extremely strong growth within the EV category. When we bought the business in the 12 months up to acquiring it in 2022, Pinky V turned over 4 million and this year should be closer to 18 million. We lost approximately 1% of the group revenue in the first half due to tariff issues in the US and other international weakness was a timing issue which will come back in the second half. There was an FX headwind because of the weaker dollar. Chinese New Year holiday in January this year was particularly early which meant that strong FOB shipments were pushed to the end of last year as we were concerned about possible disruption. This impacted the first quarter's revenues and hence like-for-like growth of only 4.6% in Q1 versus 3.2% in Q2. H1 was also impacted by some supply issues which are now resolved. We have seen a further pickup in demand in Q3, which I think is most likely market share gains, and so hope to finish the year with light-for-light growth closer to our 5% organic target. As I said, the primary driver is the energy-related products, the energy transition-related products. We have recently launched our new battery system, more about which later, and have been awarded Hive EV chargers into Centrica. This is a large project on which we have been working for a long time. It is mainly a software project because we have to get our product to integrate with the Hive ecosystem. The integration of the recently acquired businesses is also going well, and we are on track to achieve the targeted synergies, which mainly come about through integration with the group supply chains. And within D-Line, we've also been successful in winning significant new business as a result of leveraging group customer relationships. And with that, Will, I'll hand over to you.

Thank you, John. Good morning, everybody. Let me start by pulling out some of the key themes within our numbers. You will have seen the top line numbers from the announcement this morning, but the key points for me would be continued progress, albeit with some seasonality in the first half temporarily suppressing our margin. Slide six, income statement. Overall revenue at £125.7 million grew 14.7%. A strong contribution from our recent acquisitions was complemented by like-for-like growth of 2%. A good achievement against the backdrop of a lacklustre market environment. We're seeing increasing demand for our DIY products. At this stage, we anticipate modest market growth this year, and so we expect to be able to continue to deliver above-market growth. As expected, D-Line and CMD contributed just under 23 million pounds to revenue in this half year. Both integrations are progressing well and we look forward to seeing further benefits flowing through our results over the coming year. Our infrastructure business, DW Windsor, is having a much better time in 2025. We're very pleased with its first half performance. will recall we discussed how by its nature as a projects operation it can be vulnerable to the flow of construction projects which has slowed this time last year john has already mentioned the success of our electric vehicle charger offering which continues to grow at an excellent pace we saw over 90 growth in the first half of 2025 as ev charger sales hit 8.3 million pounds We also expect this to continue into the second half and beyond as the new Hive contract begins to bring volumes through. Our gross margin for the half was 42%. Our raw material bill remained well controlled and factory efficiency continues to improve. Our goods continue to travel around the south of Africa rather than through the Red Sea. This has become more the norm now and so we have not seen spikes in freight costs this year. We expect our usual second half weighted sales pattern this year, though you'll remember gross margins can sometimes be a little lower due to less favourable mix in the second half. Operating costs are up in 2025, the majority of the increase coming from the acquisitions of D-Line and CMD. An operating margin of 11% is a good performance at a low point in the market cycle. slightly below this time last year because some seasonal factors accelerated revenue back into 2024. I said at our full year results meeting in March that the timing of the Chinese New Year meant our retail and trade customers needed to stock up before the end of 2024 to avoid empty shelves in early 2025. The impact is noticeable in a half-on-half comparison. However, I expect we won't notice in the full year performance. Our interest bill has increased as expected following the additional borrowings we incurred to fund last year's acquisitions. We've secured a new revolving credit facility totalling £120 million, which will give us the necessary capacity to continue to pursue our strategy. We make over 80% of our profits in the UK, so the increase in the UK corporation tax rate to 25% has affected us. I have mentioned previously that as a consequence we expected our effective tax rate to rise. This half year, however, we have seen a reduction in our tax charge because we are now able to access some historic tax losses in the USA, a helpful side benefit from the D-line acquisition. We're pleased to report a 3.5% improvement in first half earnings per share and our board has consequently increased the interim dividend to 1.8p, an increase of almost 6%. Revenue bridge. This slide provides a bit more detail on the drivers of our revenue performance. The most significant improvement for this half compared to the first half of 2024 is the additional £15.5 million from CMD and D-line. Both are performing well. D-Line has been with us long enough now to be realizing some revenue synergies, which John may well discuss a bit later. Our like-for-like increase of 2% reflects a 3.6% growth in the UK, a solid market outperformance in our core market, helped by excellent EV charger progress. Our organic overseas operations in the Americas and the Middle East have had a slower time in the first half of 2025. I have confidence that our Middle East team will again deliver a strong second half. The organic Mexican and US operations, though, are experiencing the direct and the indirect impacts of the new tariff environment. Fortunately, they are relatively small parts of our business today. The seasonal faxes I mentioned earlier impacted our organic wiring accessories segment much more than the others, leaving it somewhat below the performance it delivered in the first half of 2024. The segment now includes the contributions from CMD and D-Line, which is why overall wiring accessories revenue is up some £15 million, half on half. The adverse currency noted here is a consequence of the FOB sales that we make in US dollars. profit bridge. This slide shows the key drivers of our adjusted operating profit performance. D-lines and CMDs lives within Luceco have seen good starts. We look forward to further improving contribution as we jointly deliver on the synergies. As we have said the synergies associated with the sourcing of product to the Luceco in-house manufacturing center in Jiaxing will take time to come through into our results. We had planned to make more use of our China sourcing capability in support of D-line, but this makes a bit less sense in the current tariff environment, so alternative cost opportunities are also being pursued. Less progress in organic adjusted operating profit this half, however we continue to see the benefits of efficiencies coming through the factory. Copper and sea freight costs have been more contained this half, but the seasonal split between H1 and H2 is expected to be a bit more pronounced at operating profit level than last year. Our organic operating costs have increased by £1.9 million. driven by labour inflation, but also targeted investments to secure additional future sales. Very pleasing to see the LED segment delivered a 6% operating margin in this first half, a substantial improvement on the first half of 2024. Improving trends. Looking more deeply into our P&L comparison back to 2023 shows the continuing progress in gross margin. It's pleasing to see our gross margins now up to 42% delivered through raw material cost control and efficiencies at the Jarshing manufacturing facility. This improvement was in part countered by the increasing cost of living, especially in the UK, and the select investments in certain overhead areas, which we believe will improve the business going forward. We've mentioned in the past the decisions to increase marketing spend and a more focused EV charger team to pursue opportunities. These have and will add cost, but should provide revenue benefit in the future. Lucico has historically enjoyed higher sales in H2 than in H1. We expect this year to follow this normal pattern. Adjusted free cash flow bridge. Lucico's working capital profile reflects the seasonal nature of some of the business. This is ordinarily reflected with a higher requirement in the middle of the year. I mentioned at the full year results that certain customers increased their deliveries in November and December. Last year, creating an unusual sizeable increase in our accounts receivable. From a cash flow perspective, it's pleasing to see this reversing during the first half of 2025. As I've mentioned, our interest bill increased when we acquired the two businesses last year. We have since secured a new bank facility with capacity to allow us to continue our organic and M&A strategy. The majority of the cash tax benefit was caused by a refund from 2022-3 and our RDEC receipt, which we'll keep. The remainder is timing, which I expect to reverse in H2. The cash flow benefit from our ability to now utilize the US tax losses, though, will help our future cash tax flows. Finishing up on the numbers. This slide summarizes our working capital cash flow and debt performance. Starting at the top left of this chart, our inventory levels are usually higher in the middle of the year than at the year end. Mid-year 2024, our inventory stood at 54 million pounds. Since then, we gained some 5.3 million of additional inventory through the acquisition of CMD. You will recall that we gained some 5.6 million pounds inventory as we acquired D-Line earlier last year. And the shipping route around the South of Africa continues to leave our stock in transit at some elevated levels. Lusico's working capital profile usually reflects the seasonal nature of some of the business. I've said before that our bank net debt and adjusted free cash flow historically show working capital sits around £10 million higher in the middle of the year than at the year end. This year, the unusually high accounts receivable balance we arrived with into 2025 has offset most of the cash cost of the normal inventory build. The bank net debt position at June of some £68 million sits comfortably within our £120 million borrowing facilities. And with that, I'll hand you back to John to talk through our business review and outlook.

Thank you, Will. We at Luceco believe we are well positioned to deliver growth ahead of the market. And this slide indicates how we think we can do that. Our sustainable competitive advantage is our ability to innovate and manufacture high quality, low cost branded products, thus ever expanding the portfolio into our extensive distribution networks. And we have a strong track record of doing this across multiple different product categories. and we can further accelerate the growth by using our cash generative model to fund further product and or distribution expansion via M&A. There are structural growth opportunities that exist for our industry due to the electrification of energy sources, heating, and transport. For example, if a heat pump is installed in a property, that will require an upgrade to the main power system utilizing our hardware. And more specifically, we now have approximately an 8% market share and growing of new installs of cloud connected residential electric vehicle charging points. Our strategy is therefore to strengthen our position in these high growth segments while continuing to grow our market share in the core business and can be summed up as product innovation combined with our extensive distribution network, which we can both expand organically and via M&A. Slide four illustrates some of the high-growth structural markets that we are now exposed to. And you can particularly see on the right hand side that the residential EV market in which we have a growing market share is in its infancy. And if we can continue to grow our share, which I believe we can, then only the EV segment of the energy transition piece should be a very significant category for the group. Moving on to the next slide. So most of these products that I'm talking about and all of the EV charging and home energy management systems products are made at our own factory in China, just outside Shanghai. And we have a video here that shows the operation. So we built that from scratch. We bought a field in 2007. There was nothing in Jiaxing at all at that time, and now we have a business that turns over almost £100 million. But combining our manufacturing capability and our innovation capability with our unrivaled distribution network And here you can see some of the customers and the channels in which we operate. Architects, consultants, contractors, developers, end users, electrical wholesalers, we basically deal with them all. Hybrids, from which we mean the likes of Screwfix and Toolstation. Screwfix, as we know, is a very large account for us. Then we have the online and the retail piece. Amazon is increasingly important, but we have unique positions within Wix, Argos, B&Q, etc. I think in the UK we have something approaching 10,000 distribution points for our products. And the strong track record of innovation. Next slide. The strong track record of innovation. I'm going to illustrate here with another video. This is a product that we launched last month. We looked at the EV charging category. What everyone else does is they put a big ugly box on the outside of your house. And the socket is inside that ugly box. And the electronics and the communications, because all these things are cloud connected, sit inside that big ugly box that you put on the outside of your house. What we thought is, why don't we separate just the socket from the ugly sort of box of electronics? So we created a product called Link. No one else has done this. We've managed to patent the idea. And we're now going to show a video.

Minimal in design, maximum in performance, Sync Energy Link, the smallest, sleekest home EV charger on the market. Available in a surface-mounted format for fast, low-cost installs and a recessed format for maximum curb appeal, Sync Energy Link has a patented two-part design. letting you install the control box separately from the socket, providing a smaller footprint and a neater finish on your driveway. With maximum protection, power and control over your EV charging. Connected by the Sync Energy app, one app for all your home energy and EV charging needs. Take advantage of premium features. TariffSense. Connecting you to any UK tariff. Giving you real-time insights and total control over your charging costs. Auto Solar Charge. Harness your excess solar power to charge your EV directly from the sun. Charge smarter. Drive cleaner. Link by Sync Energy.

Yeah, so that voice is entirely AI. Quite interesting what you can do. But anyway, we launched that product last month. We air freighted over a small amount of stock that we sold out very quickly. The main shipment arrives like now. It's had an extremely strong feedback response from the market and we think will be very successful. We are also launching, in the process of launching this month, home energy management systems, our battery solution. And I have another video here that we're going to show you about that.

Energy prices are volatile. The grid is under pressure. Homeowners need resilience, not uncertainty. Sync Energy presents to you Flow. The smart home energy management system designed to work with both the grid and renewable energy sources. Charge and store energy when it's cheap from the grid. And keep what you capture from the sun with solar. Use the energy you've banked day or night when prices are at their highest. All managed in one place with the Sync Energy app. One app for all your home energy management and EV charging needs. Installation is simple, expansion effortless. thanks to the hybrid inverter and modular batteries. Everything you need in one smart stack. Lower your bills. Be in charge of your energy. Flow by Sync Energy. Sustainable power made easy.

Very good. So mainly these new areas are about software and about cloud connectivity, which has some other benefits, which we'll talk about more later. But it's quite a new area for Luceco. A few years ago, we were a mechanical switch specialist. More and more, we are becoming a solutions and a systems specialist. And we'll be making big investments in this area, which the benefits of which will come through in the future. Additionally, our core as I said earlier, is highly cash generative and we have a track record of doing M&A. We did a couple of deals last year. We haven't done a deal this year. The main rationale is a sales synergy or a product synergy to buy distribution or to buy technology. In SyncEV, we bought distribution and technology. In CMD, we bought a whole new office power customer base, which we didn't have before. And with D-Line, we bought a product which we can sell into our existing networks. All of those acquisitions are performing as we hoped they would. I mean, for example, the product cost synergies on CMD look like being something like 2.5 million, which is about 25% of their costs of sales or about 10% of their revenue. So their gross margin goes from almost 50% to 60%. We, at 1.6 times leverage, obviously have room in our capital structure, but we don't have any deals that we're working on currently. But we say here that by 2030, we could spend approximately 100 million on further M&A, making some assumptions, obviously. The areas that we are looking at mostly now are in this energy transition space because we believe that we need more of a structural growth story. Finally, on the outlook, in line with expectations. So the sales out of the retail hybrid, especially the online channels, have been very strong recently. Larger projects are hard to predict. High volumes are hard to predict. But we are very confident that the business will perform in H2 at least as well as required. And with that, I will hand over to any questions.

Morning. Kevin Fogarty from Deutsche Numis. If I can just kick off with two, please. In terms of the Hive announcement this morning, accompanying the interims, it kind of feels like it's a different channel for you guys in terms of to serve. I wonder if you could just talk about how different a sale it is into a customer like that. Could you sort of quantify perhaps where it could go or what it could be or just give a view in terms of materiality? Sure.

Thanks, Kevin. It was quite a complicated process to get it over the line. I mean, it's mainly a software play because we need to integrate our charger with their ecosystem, as I said earlier. And we've been working on it for about the last nine months. Materiality... Hive have very big ambitions to be the ecosystem of choice in the residential home for heating controls, for EV controls, for solar battery controls. I think they're currently doing about 10,000 units, which is what we'll take on, and they're hoping to grow it at sort of 20% to 30% a year. That equates to roughly next year somewhere probably in the region of £2 million to £3 million of sales. We think in the second half of this year it could be somewhere between half a million and a million. So it's material. It's not huge. But it's growing. And I think more than that, it indicates our technical expertise and the credibility that we now have in the market as a supplier of these products.

Sure. And presumably it opens up that sort of market to you with other customers?

Yeah. I mean, we're speaking to lots of the majors in this space. Yeah. And also potentially batteries, obviously, would be a much bigger opportunity if and when that happens.

And just as a second question in terms of the acquisition integration, could you just sort of quantify where we are in terms of, you know, obviously there's been investment in Jiaxing. Where are we in terms of kind of tooling being set up? to sort of create that supply chain?

Well, I mean, if I... OK, so I'll talk about the two. I'll talk about... Well, I mean, if I talk about the three, I mean, Sync EV has entirely moved now into our own factory. They were originally using third parties in Bulgaria, actually, but we moved that quite quickly into our own factory, and it's a very high-margin segment for us as a result, and we renamed it Sync Energy, as you can see. Um... So D-Line was the next one. I mean, the production synergy has taken a bit longer than we would have hoped. The quality of the product or the sort of technical aspects of it, although it's a simple product, it's not entirely straightforward to manufacture. But that will all be in place for next year. And the cost saving there is somewhere between half a million and a million. Additionally, with D-Line, we've won about three million pounds of new high margin business. So we will have more than doubled the profitability of that business within two years of owning it. I mean, I mentioned a number of two and a half million on the product cost savings. There will be other sort of back office, you know, synergies. But that will take time, probably 18 months to enjoy. And then you've got you've got a supply chain full of stock, et cetera. So you will get, I would think, at least half of the impact of that next year. But and then all of it the following year. OK, thanks very much.

Morning. Adam Forsyth from Longspur. Just a second one on Hive for me, just on the integration you talked about. Is there any material cost of that? Is that something we might see in H2?

No. I mean, it's internal resources. There's no third party cost. Yes, it's been a big project. Yes, it has taken a lot of resource on our side, but it's, you know, it's normal course of business. Yeah.

And in some ways, there's a lot that Hive does that feels quite similar to the Sync app. I mean, do you see that as competition?

Ultimately, it is competition.

And they're happy with that at present?

Well, I'm happy with that. That's good. I mean, yeah, look. I mean, Hive have a very successful ecosystem, which they're building out. and ultimately they'll want to control heating, heat pumps, EV batteries, the whole lot. I would think maybe we'll end up wanting to do that as well. But there are an awful lot of homes in the UK, and I don't expect anyone will have all of them. So hopefully there's a bit to share.

Could you actually be supplying Hive controllers? Could that be a business line for you?

We're talking to Hive about other products. We've spoken to them in the past about other products. We are working with them at other products, but it's early days on that. Yeah.

And if I could just ask a different question on tariffs and the Chinese impact of tariffs around China. Are you seeing any second order effects from that? I mean, is there any sign of other Chinese manufacturers dumping products in your markets?

Second order effects impacting us would be weakness in the Mexican economy. We have a business in Mexico which has been growing at 20% compound year on year, which is not going to grow this year because uncertainty has not been helpful for the Mexican economy. We haven't seen... you know, Chinese dumping or any other impact really in our market. I mean, as you know, you know, China to Europe hasn't changed. And the product that goes into the U.S. in our category is not the same as a product that goes into Europe and definitely not the product that goes into the U.K. You know, U.K. wiring standards is very different. So there's not a whole load of American switches that can turn up here. because they're totally different. So we haven't seen an impact of that, no.

And the statistics show that we're continuing to win market share, so I guess

so far but it will i mean it has there is a tariff from uk into america so it has impacted the d-line business a bit which has an american operation so some of the cost savings that we've been able to make from resourcing we've had to give back because of a higher tariff from europe into the us um so you know i it's had an impact on our business but not a not a big one great thanks I should add, we moved some stuff from China to Vietnam. thinking we were trying to be quite clever. And then, of course, Vietnam got hit with quite a significant tariff. So we're just working that through. I mean, there may be the Vietnam tariff on our products into America is 20%. In China, it's 45%. So it might be possible that the Vietnamese thing is affordable. And we can get some price increases, and that's an option.

Hi, Ed Press from Bamberg. Firstly, EVs. The growth's obviously been strong there so far this year and sort of going back a couple of years. Have you seen any change in competitive behaviour? Have there been any new entrants into the market? Anyone cutting prices to look to take share?

There are lots of new entrants, Ed, but these things are quite complicated and they take quite a lot of support. They're all cloud connected. You have to have, therefore, a support team talking to customers all the time if they're having difficulties. We haven't seen anyone being super cheap. And our market share grows, which would indicate that we can beat what competition is coming in. And I think probably it's likely that there will be a thinning out of competition, actually. I think a lot of people in this space aren't making money. You saw what happened to Podpoint. I mean, Podpoint have changed their business model very much now. It's a sort of subscription model. We have the ability to be very competitive on these things if we want to be, because we're making them in our own Chinese factory, which I don't think any of our competitors are doing. But we're choosing to make quite good margins. And the market continues to grow, maybe not as fast as forecast, but it definitely continues to grow. And we got our first order this morning from the Middle East. So, I mean, we currently were only talking about UK. I think there's international opportunities as well.

uh i think you know as i said in earlier i think you know if we can continue to grow our market share slightly and the market explodes like it will this should be a very big business for us cool thank you um q3 trading you've said that performance has been strong so far is that a continuation of the same in q1 and two or anything else different driving it

Well, I mean, it's probably fair to say that Q1 was a bit impacted by what might have gone into November and December last year because of the timing of Chinese New Year. So I guess the fact that Q2 was stronger than Q1 was probably more Q1 was a bit light. The order book going into Q3, yeah, has left us in a great place. So, yeah, we're quite pleased with where we sit at the moment.

And as I mentioned earlier, we had a few supply issues. I mean, sort of technical sort of plating and other problems on some of our decorative wiring accessory finishes in the H1 which impacted sales a bit. We had some, we just had a few issues which we've now resolved. We track, you know, sales out of our major customers. We've always spoken about what we call EPOS. And it remains strong. And if anything has improved, we've done a lot of work on digital assets and we've done a lot of work on our online presence. So how our products look and look online, you know, you know that I mean, those videos we built in-house. We've invested a lot in marketing activities and we've had a particularly concerted push on, as I say, our online presence. So the likes of Screwfix, Amazon, those customers with big online multi-channel offerings are doing well and I think maybe we're doing better because of that activity that we've been working on. We increased our marketing spend as a business by a couple of million quid over the last few years. And I think that's beginning to come through. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Thanks. So, yeah, I mean, Q3, I think, is going to be quite strong. And then Q4, you know, there are some projects knocking around which may or may not happen. If they happen, we might have quite a strong end to the year.

Cool. Thank you. And then leverage. Are you happy to take it towards the top end of the one to two times range in the current environment, or would you prefer to be de-levering at this point?

Is that a question for both of us?

The current environment implies you think there's something wrong with the environment. Maybe you think the environment might get worse. Does it get worse? I mean, maybe it gets a little bit worse, but it's not, I mean, you know, I think it's quite, you know, our markets are quite weak. I doubt they get much worse.

And I'm the cautious one of the pair, as you know, but I mean, I'm very happy to say that, you know, if you looked at the second half of 22, which was actually when things really got a bit tough for Lucico. uh... you know the top line declined to some extent we had some destocking amongst the customer base but in that six month period the business delivered thirty million pounds of cash flow so you know the nature of the balance sheet that we have means that if life does get tough this business you know is able to turn it into positive cash so it gives you quite a level of confidence so i'm I'm happy at the leverage level that we have at the moment. I'm happy with the policy of one to two times. John's extremely successful history came from a private equity world that lived with much, much higher levels of leverage than that. I mean, the business generates very nice, strong cash flows.

Yeah, I mean, our policy is one to two times, not one to one and a half times. So I guess until we change that policy, that probably is the answer to your question. But yeah, I mean, I think we wouldn't want to push it too high unless we had quite a clear path back down quite quickly. Not because of what we think, because of what your clients think.

Morning. Sam Cullen from Peelhunt. I've got a few also. You talked about software a few times. How should we think about software and software services going forward? Is there potential for that to be a revenue generating part of the business in terms of all the data you're collecting? Can you sell that to someone? Is it worth cash to some other customers? Or is it a pay to play and this is what you have to do and invest in to access that market that's going to grow four or five times over the next...

Sam, there's something called DSR, demand side response, which we're going to talk more about later when it's a more material number in our business. But basically the grid will pay he who controls an EV charger to have control of that charger in an emergency situation. So, there are and there will be revenues that having our own cloud app infrastructure controlling these EV chargers, there will be revenues that result from that. Now, up until beginning of this year, we were using a third party cloud infrastructure and app to control the chargers. We've built our own now. Part of the reason for doing that is to take advantage of these revenues from the grid. Now, it's early days. We have got some money so far, but we're just learning all about it. It's what Podpoint talks about a lot. They called it their flex revenues. so basically the i mean so ev charges take a huge amount of power they basically take as much power as the rest of your home if you're charging your car that's as much power as your house will use for the whole day actually more probably the ability for the grid to be able to flex the energy in these chargers is very useful and if you have control of the charges which we will do if they're on our app on our cloud system, you will get paid for that. And we'll talk more about that later. But yes, I think that will more than cover the cost of the software development.

Thank you. The second one was on the M&A front. I'm conscious you said there's nothing in the funnel as it were at the moment, but are there areas of distribution that you feel you're weak in and would like to move further into or flags on the map that you're missing?

Well, not, I mean, our UK distribution is pretty extensive, and I would say almost complete. Our international distribution is, you know, quite, as you know, quite limited. For a distribution play, it's probably more likely to be international. For a product play, it could be anything. But we look at a lot of stuff. When I say there's nothing that we're actually actively working on now, that doesn't mean we're not looking at a lot of stuff because we're constantly... obviously receiving ndas and iams and we're constantly looking at businesses um but you know we obviously say you know we say no to a lot of stuff and we want to we want to get the right thing so so i'll see and we're quite interested in the energy transition space clearly which john's talked about so you know some opportunities in that space if they're affordable could be quite interesting Yeah, so international distribution for these new products would clearly be interesting. We don't need to buy that in the UK because we've got all the relationships we need here, but we don't necessarily have those relationships elsewhere.

And the last one is for Will, the last one. US tax losses, you've obviously made use of them in the first half. How much more is there to go on that, I guess?

Oh, I don't think we've actually disclosed the total amount, but... Now's your moment. Yes. I have a practice of trying to keep new information to written documents. It will run for many years. So, Lusico in the past did have its own presence in the USA. We exited that some time ago. and the fact that we now have, which was one of the reasons that D-Line was an interesting opportunity. We now have a new facility in Kentucky, and that enables the existing Luceco business to be reasonably profitable over there as well. So quite a few years to come.

Hi, James Wood from Canaccord. A question quickly on EV, just the replacement cycle and the charges. If you could remind us what that is, please. And then just one on gross margins. Really good progress, obviously, in the first half. Where do you think they can get to for the full year and beyond?

Well, the residential EVs we sell have a three-year warranty, so we hope they will fail after three years and one month. We'll see. They are switching quite a lot of power. They are generally sitting outdoors. I mean, that link thing might last a bit longer, actually. But it's early days. We've only been in the market for four years. There will be some innovation. I mean, so vehicle to grid or vehicle to home. So basically using your car battery to power your home. because car batteries are going to be large, I mean they are large, will probably mean that all the chargers we're putting in now get replaced by that upgrade at some point in the future. So, I mean, how long are they going to last? I mean, they're not going to last as long as a mechanical light switch, but they should probably last three to five years, I would guess. But I'm slightly guessing. It depends how well they're installed, how much they're used, blah, blah, blah. But there could be a major technology change because currently these are only one way. So currently they're going from home or grid power into car. The next evolution is to come back from car into home and or grid power. So that will probably mean that all the ones we're selling now will become obsolete if that new innovation is required.

Can there be a drive from utilities to get people onto new generation chargers, I guess, once that happens. Make their infrastructure more efficient.

It's an ability, it allows the grid to smooth demand, which will become an increasing problem when you have renewables because, you know, renewables are unreliable. And the same, you know, that's part of the advantage of having one of our flow batteries, but equally you've got a big battery sitting in your driveway. So being able to access that as well through the charger. Yeah, so that will hopefully be a very healthy replacement cycle. Yeah, I mean, I will mention weaker H2. I mean, that historically has sometimes been the case. I think the synergies that we're making on some of the M&A, also product mix, the EV category for us is high margin. One of the reasons the group growth margin has improved is because of more EV.

And the sort of project nature of some of the businesses. So things like CMD are more project driven. We've made some investments and we've grown our LED project side. I mean, the nature of the project side of the business is You know, often it's a higher gross margin, but clearly you have a higher cost to serve. So we end up with a bit more overhead base. But the gross margin, because clearly customers are happy to pay for something that's been specifically engineered for them. So...

I mean, if the quantum of the synergies come through, as per the numbers I gave earlier, you can work out the impact on gross margin is not immaterial. I mean, it maybe pushes next year's gross margin a bit higher. There are other variables. I mean, the Chinese currency is a bit stronger than it was, particularly against the dollar. You know, the dollar is quite weak. So there are, you know, copper is quite strong. So we're going to have to do some price activity. We hedge copper, but obviously not forever. There may be a little bit of margin erosion around some of those movements. So there are quite a few moving parts. Freight is actually very cheap and is going down in cost. The world seems to have got used to going around the bottom. But it's not always only within our control. There are a few external factors in there. I would have thought next year I would be disappointed if the margin didn't improve further, mainly because of the synergies on the acquisitions plus, you know, the product mix, you know, more towards higher margin EV and stuff.

Charlie Campbell at Stifel. Just one, actually. about EV charges and batteries and the role they might play in the future home standard in new homes in the UK sort of, I suppose, from next year onwards, whether that's an opportunity.

Yeah, I think it's a big opportunity. I mean, as you know, by law, all new homes have to have EV chargers now built into them. The Link product is particularly good for new homes because if you're putting it in at the point of constructing the home, it's an easier install. And we think for higher-end developments, the Link will be a very good product. But also, new homes have been mandated to have solar. And solar only really works well if you have a battery. because you want to obviously store the energy when the sun is shining and use it when it's not. And if you sell the energy back to the grid, you don't get much for it. Therefore, you're much better off using the energy that you've got from the sun rather than putting it elsewhere. And to do that, you need a battery. But they're quite expensive, these batteries. So I think higher-end homes maybe will put them in as standard. I think most homes will probably put them in as an option. But equally, if you've managed to get your EV charger on the wall, you're very likely, ultimately, when it comes to someone putting in a battery, they're likely to put in your battery because they need to work together. So I think the fact that solar has been mandated onto new homes is a big opportunity. We were expecting that, and it indeed has happened. It would be interesting to see what happens with future governments. They might have a different view.

I think that's it.

Do we have any online questions? Are we not taking them? Okay. Great. Will, do you want to make the closing statements?

So I guess a pleasing set of numbers. Some elements of the outside market are not in a fabulous place, but again, Luceco is able to demonstrate through its... you know, key competencies, its competitive advantages that we can, again, outperform and continue to deliver. So, and we're, as you've heard from John, we're very excited about, you know, the further growth and further future for EV chargers. pleasing to see a recognition from a customer such as Hive, which demonstrates the excellent product that the team have created within Lusico. And we look forward to some of the further opportunities that may come from the likes of HEMS. So it's quite an exciting time to be involved in Lusico, I would say. Thank you very much for your questions and your time this morning.