Volex plc

Good morning, everyone.

Sorry. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Volex Half One Results investor presentation. Throughout this presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions in the box below and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. These will be available via your InvestorMeet company dashboard. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. I'd be very grateful to remove that from your screen. Just simply click yes, no, or do it later. I'd finally like to remind you that this presentation is being recorded. I'd now like to hand over to Nat Rothschild, the chairman of Volex. Good morning to you, Nat.

Good morning, and good morning, everyone. And you can tell that I'm very eager to get going. My name is Nat Rothschild. I'm the executive chairman of Volex PLC. Welcome to our half-year results and update on our acquisition of DECA. I'm joined by John Bowden, our group CFO. and also John Malloy, our Chief Operating Officer. I'll begin with an overview of our performance and an update on our acquisition of DECA. So let's turn now to slide number two. John will then take you through our financial performance before I return to discuss our outlook and summarize our performance. There will be plenty of time for questions at the end. So let's get started. We delivered another robust performance in the first half, despite the challenges that we faced from COVID-19. We increased our underlying operating profit by 31% to $20.8 million, which is a record for Volex. With revenue of $202 million in the first half, this represents an operating margin of 10.3%, which is by any metric an excellent performance. This is a strong performance as well within the backdrop of the pandemic, demonstrating the benefit of the strategic improvements we have made to diversify and strengthen our operations in recent years. Today, we are also announcing the acquisition of DECA. This is a fantastic business, which will significantly develop our scale in the global power products market. I will come back to this shortly and take you through the highlights of this transaction as well. Against the backdrop of the ongoing uncertainty caused by the continuing pandemic, we continue to maintain significant headroom and financial flexibility. We closed the first half of the year with $32 million of cash in the bank. We have also extended our revolving credit facility and now have a facility of up to $100 million to allow us to pursue value-accretive acquisitions. Our strong performance in the first half of the year has given us the confidence to increase our interim dividend by 10%, and we will be making a payment of 1.1 pence per share next month.