Volex plc

And welcome to the Volex half-year results presentation. I'm going to provide you with a summary, as always, before handing over to John, who will give you more detail on the performance in each market. Following this, I will update you on our strategy before we take questions at the end. Before we turn to the results, I'd like to talk to you about a further step in our strategic journey. I'm delighted to be able to announce here, although you've already seen the R&S, that Dave Webster has agreed to join as our non-executive chair, enhancing an already exceptional board of directors. Dave has unique industry experience. In his current role, he has led the transformation of CPM, a global leader in advanced process automation equipment. Prior to that, and importantly, he was the driving force for growth and transformation as the CEO of Electrical Components International or ECI, a leader in consumer electrical and off-highway harnesses. He brings decades-long customer relationships in our space, particularly in North America, strengthening the board's insight. His experience will be invaluable as we scale our North American operations and deepen our customer partnerships in this important market. Now, this month marks 10 years, believe it or not, since I joined the board of Volex and became executive chairman. In effect, combining the chairman and CEO roles, I came into a business that was in decline with less than $400 million of revenue and a market cap of about £50 million. In fact, it had dropped down to about £30 million at the lows. And I set about building a new organization, including talent from within Volex, who had not been given the leadership they deserved. And there were many people who we inherited inside of Volex who were and remain exceptional partners in this journey. So with an excellent team to support me, a lot of hard work and endless travel, we've created one of the true standout success stories in UK industrials. And the significant architect of this success is John Malloy, our global COO. He will continue in the same role and is every bit as committed to the business as I am. And the two of us talk literally every single day, seven days a week. Both of us have very significant personal investments in Volex. Indeed, my move into the chief executive position in Volex merely underlines my deep and ongoing commitment to driving further growth and customer engagement, and I will continue to lead from the front, delivering our ambitious plans and bringing in new customers. None of this would be possible without John Bowden's commitment exceptional financial skills and cool head as the business has become increasingly complex. I'm also incredibly grateful to John for the role he plays in this company. So thank you, John. I'm very much looking forward to working with Dave and the existing board to pursue growth across our markets. There are substantial opportunities ahead and we have very big ambitions. This is a sensible time to align more closely with corporate governance best practice given the scale of our organisation and the strong performance we are setting out today. So moving on, we've delivered another excellent first half with revenues of $584 million at an operating margin of 9.8%. We've generated further strong organic growth at 13% despite a challenging macroeconomic backdrop. In particular, we've seen very strong growth in electric vehicles and data centres, and later in the presentation, John will take you through exactly what has happened in each sector. The strong performance is proof that our strategy is working. Investment we chose to make in previous years is supporting growth this year and beyond. Our capabilities make us a first-choice provider of critical connectivity solutions for global technology businesses. As the world changes, we're changing with it, and we are evolving our footprint to follow the demands of our customers who are reconfiguring their supply chains to deal with tariff challenges. Our move towards centres of excellence where we can deliver a range of the most advanced Volex solutions in a single location has resonated strongly with customers. It also gives us the opportunity to rationalise smaller sites, thereby improving the overall efficiency of the group. We continue to win new projects with our customers, particularly with electric vehicle customers and in the North American off-highway space. Our first-half performance positions us strongly relative to our five-year plan, which, as you may recall, sees us getting to $1.2 billion of revenues by the end of FY2027. And our strong results for the first half are another significant step towards these objectives. So before we break out the individual markets, it's worth talking about how our customer-centric approach delivers deeply embedded customer relationships, giving us confidence in our strategy. As you should all know by now, we work with the biggest technology brands in the world who have earned recognition as leaders in their fields. They trust us to deliver manufacturing solutions that either meet or exceed their quality, reliability, and functionality requirements. Although our assemblies might be a small part of a large and complex system, they play a critical role every time. There is no difference whether we are powering a domestic appliance that brings convenience to everyday life or connecting the key components at the heart of life-saving medical technology. We've built a business that revolves around the customer. We anticipate their needs and rise to their challenges. Our engineers define innovative production solutions and optimize processes for products that are assured to perform in challenging environments. This creates strong customer lock-in and sticky relationships. In many cases, regulatory requirements form a barrier to our substitution in the supply chain. In others, our deep expertise and consistently strong delivery position us as a preferred manufacturing partner. So this customer-led approach, disciplined reinvestment and daily operational excellence form the foundation of a business that compounds value over time. Many of our largest customers have been working with Volex for longer than I have been operationally involved in the business. And over the past decade, revenues have trebled, driven by expanding share with existing customers, winning new projects and customers and a targeted acquisition strategy. Operating margins have strengthened from 2% to a consistent 9% to 10% range, maintained successfully for the past year. And as a result, operating profit has grown from $7 million in FY16 to $106 million in FY25. And this performance reflects stringent cost control, relentless operational improvement, talent attraction and retention from the top to the bottom of the organization. plus targeted investments in future growth, each aligned with our customers' priorities. This combination of growth and margin expansion has translated into basic earnings per share rising from 1.5 cents in FY16 to over 36 cents in FY25. to steadily build capability, deepen relationships, and deliver consistent, sustainable returns, creating value that compounds year after year. So I'll now hand over to John to take us through the financial performance and the end markets.

Thank you, Nat. So first and foremost, I'm incredibly pleased with the results that we've been able to deliver. And this is an excellent performance, $584 million of revenue in the first half of the year, which represents organic growth of 13%. Profitability is towards the top end of our margin target at 9.8%, which means we've delivered $57.2 million of adjusted operating profit in the first half of the year. With lower interest costs, that means we've increased basic earnings per share by 30% to 19.7 cents per share on an adjusted basis. We've maintained a strong track record around return on capital employed, despite the investment that we've made in our business, which includes putting in additional working capital to support our customers. As a result, we've stayed at 20% return on capital employed. These results are an indication of a business that is in great shape and navigating a dynamic market effectively. Over the next few slides, I'm going to take you through what we've seen in each of our end markets. So starting with electric vehicles, we've established a market-leading capability in electric vehicles and are recognised for our proficiency in both designing and producing key components to power the next generation of transport. Our long-standing partnerships with leaders in EV technology have positioned us well to support a broad cross-section of the EV market. Much of our 13% organic growth has come from expanding our capabilities laterally to meet evolving market demand. This includes delivering complete AC charging solutions through integrated end-to-end manufacturing. Consumer demand for electric vehicles has continued to grow in our key markets in the US, Europe and China. EV sales as a percentage of new car sales recently hit 30% in Europe and 58% in China. While changes in government incentives in some key markets such as the US may soften short-term consumer demand, long-term prospects across key geographies are strong. Our footprint allows us to be flexible around customer requirements. For example, we are moving a new program to Mexico to support a customer's tariff optimization strategy. And while this will push out the timing of the initial ramp up, it is exactly the type of this dynamic problem solving that strengthens relationships. With enhanced capabilities supporting a wide range of global automated brands, we have confidence in our ability to grow in EV in the medium term. It's worth starting the explanation about consumer electricals with some context about the performance we've seen over the last 18 months. We had what you might call a post-destocking rebound in the first half of FY25 when we hit $132 million of revenue. This normalised to $125 million in the second half of FY25. For the first half of this year, we delivered $126 million, slightly down versus a year ago and more in line with the H2 performance. This represents an organic decline year on year of 6%. Mainz Voltage power cords continue to represent the largest share of what we do. We work with some of the biggest consumer brands in the world, where reliability, reputation, and customer experience are key priorities. These brands choose Volex because they have confidence in our ability to exceed their quality and safety demands. Vertical integration and scale in this market means that we have relationships with all the major domestic appliance manufacturers. This is giving us significant traction as we continue to push our harnessing capabilities, an area where we see strong opportunities for growth. In fact, harnesses and other complex assemblies now constitute almost a third of revenues. In the second half of the year, we have a new incremental harness project in Europe. We've seen some secondary impacts from tariffs on European domestic appliance manufacturers. Some of the Chinese competition have reallocated their marketing spend from the US to Europe and are pushing inventory into the European market in response to US tariffs. This is likely to result in some short-term rebalancing with medium-term growth weighted more towards harnessing opportunities. So now moving on to medical. And although medical is the smallest of our sectors, we proudly support healthcare innovators whose technologies are transforming patient outcomes and improving lives. Our assemblers distribute power and data through sophisticated medical equipment, ensuring reliability, accuracy and patient safety. The first half of the year has seen disruption in demand for complex medical devices. Reductions in spending for both medical research and public healthcare and the impacts of tariffs are leading to reduced or delayed orders for some large medical equipment. The effect is different between different customers, with some customers continuing to increase demand during the period, but others looking to reduce orders and manage inventory levels. We have the flexibility to manage this variability within our operations and support customers' demand pattern shift. It is against this backdrop that we saw sales in the medical sector decline by around 10% organically during the first half of the year. It is likely that the uncertainties caused by the impact of tariffs and policy changes will continue in the short term and will result in a headwind to medical demand. However, we remain very positive in relation to the medium term. This is partly due to our success in winning new projects with significant medical brands, expanding the range of customers that we work with. In addition, structural growth drivers are very strong in this sector, with rising demand due to demographic change and advances in technology creating new diagnostic and treatment options. And with our significant and in-depth understanding of our customers' requirements, we are well positioned to meet the needs of these healthcare innovators. We've seen excellent organic growth of 48% in complex industrial technology, with data centres a significant part of that, but we've also grown across the other categories. Outside data centres, which I'll come back to shortly, we're delivering complex assemblies, both wire harnesses and printed circuit board assemblies, into highly specialist and demanding applications. Our customers need exceptional quality and complete confidence that the solution will work first time and every time. Meeting their challenging technical and scheduling requirements takes coordination across our operations and engineering experience to support the build process. When we successfully deliver, we unlock additional project opportunities and further repeat business, which contributes to our growth. We are well positioned in the US market with advanced facilities which are accredited to deliver defence and aerospace projects. This includes involvement in major programmes that are stepping up to address current defence challenges. Our overall organic growth outside data centres was over 20% and much of this came from defence projects. In parallel, we're seeing increased demand from core industrial applications such as building environmental systems. Although the end uses are different, in all cases, customers are relying on us to deliver a complex solution with maximum reliability in a competitive way. Our additional capacity in Mexico is an important part of fulfilling these requirements. In data centres, we're supplying high-performance copper data interconnects operating at speeds of up to 800 gigabits per second. These cables form the critical physical links between servers, switches and storage systems within data centre racks, enabling ultra-low latency, high bandwidth connectivity for AI and cloud applications. Growth in data centre investment globally is fuelling demand for these products, and revenue is up by 80% compared to the comparative period. As with so much of our portfolio, our ability to manufacture in a variety of locations gives us a competitive advantage in the ever-changing tariff landscape. And finally turning to off-highway where we've delivered really strong organic growth of 20% in the first half. This included a project for specialist military vehicles in Europe that doesn't repeat in the second half of the year. This was a project that we were able to win because of our ability to move quickly and respond to customer demand. Our success in this market is down to supporting specialist vehicle manufacturers in areas such as construction, agriculture and large passenger vehicles who have demanding requirements across a significant variety of products. Our ability to leverage our advanced manufacturing platforms to deliver efficient and repeatable solutions despite variable lot sizes is a differentiator in this market. We're making excellent progress in North America where we've expanded capacity and we have highly skilled engineers and sales colleagues who are securing new project wins. This comes at a time when US-based manufacturers are looking for regional production to manage their supply chain objectives. So let me step you through what we've achieved in margins during the period. As usual, we're blending together various operating margins across our entities and then adding an investment in capacity growth and capability expansion. These investments include adding additional manufacturing space or additional salespeople. On a year-on-year basis, we've improved our first half margins to 9.8%, which is towards the top end of a five-year plan margin range of 9% to 10%. In achieving this, we have identified cost optimisation improvements worth 0.7%, which broadly offsets with the impact of inflation during the period. The optimisation includes further benefits from rolling out automation as well as productivity actions highlighted as part of the integration of Murat Tijeret. We also achieve savings through site rationalisation of 0.5%. We have a mixed benefit which reflects lower consumer power cord sales and higher revenues from our data centre customers. There is a small adverse impact from the weakening of the US dollar which is our main sales currency. 9.8% is a strong first half result, particularly given the amount of investment that has gone into our business recently. And that will come back to the theme of investment shortly. So now moving on to cash flow. As in previous years, there are some factors in the first half that tend to result in lower cash generation in H1 compared to the second half of the year. EBITDA was up to $73.6 million, a 20% increase over the comparative period. Capital expenditure was lower at $21.3 million, which is approximately 3.6% of revenue and well within the 3% to 4% range that we have guided to. Once again, we had an increase in working capital and higher inventory was a big driver in this. About half of the increase in inventory is coming from data centres, where we hold stock in hub locations to support timely fulfilment of demand. The remaining increase in inventory is across our other go-to-market sectors and reflects the impact of increased demand as well as building buffer stocks to support relocation activity. Part of this expansion includes an increase in defence projects where we hold a greater level of raw materials for operational reasons. Interest and tax are similar to the comparative period which reflects the timing of tax payments and current debt interest costs in our growing business. The repayment of leases shown below free cash flow includes the exercise of an option to secure the freehold of two existing sites at a significant discount to market value, providing greater security and control. Our covenant net debt ratio, which is our preferred way of looking at leverage and excludes operating lease commitments, improved from 1.3 times to 1.1 times, giving us balance sheet strength and flexibility. Our capital allocation priorities are unchanged from prior years. Our primary focus is on organic investments. In addition, we continue to explore acquisition opportunities in a disciplined way. I will now hand back to Nat to update on our strategy.

Thank you very much, John. I wanted to return to the key pillars of our strategy and outline how this contributed to our first half performance. So first and foremost, we're in the right markets where we are winning new business. I'm particularly pleased with the progress we've been making in off-highway. in North America. Our team is getting a huge amount of traction with customers who are looking for a high-quality and cost-effective solution. It's an opportune time for Dave Webster to join our organization. And later this month, Dave and I will be on the road meeting with our customers and visiting a brand-new site we are opening this month in central Mexico. The substantial growth we have delivered in the last two years reflects our ongoing investment programme. For example, our product development strategy in EV is delivering growth. Our global capacity investments have given us capability in the right locations to support our customers' tariff mitigation strategies. This is particularly the case in Mexico, where we have an abundant pipeline of opportunities, many of them new just in the last six months. We are a critical manufacturing partner for our customers who depend on our engineering capabilities, our attention to detail, and our ability to meet challenging specifications. We build deep relationships by exceeding their expectations. Moving complex production from a competitor or between sites is a big decision. In the last 12 months, we relocated multiple programs for our customers without any major surprises, and they have confidence in our ability to deliver. Our people are central to our performance. We trust our teams to deliver. We put our skilled managers at the heart of customer relationships. With the demand into our facilities in North America, we've been augmenting our team in the region, and we are seeing the benefits of this. And finally, acquisitions have been a significant element of our growth story, although it's just over two years since our last deal. In the first half of the year, we looked at a handful of varied opportunities, but nothing met our strict criteria. With a huge amount of organic growth and new customer programs to deliver, we are looking for well-run businesses with strong management teams that can slot into our organization. We are continuing to pursue some very interesting opportunities, but we won't compromise on our acquisition criteria. Every deal we do has to be the right deal for Volex. This investment approach is an important part of how we drive consistent growth and how we position ourselves to win incremental programs with new and existing customers. The qualification process we go through for major new programs is understandably stringent given our critical role. We build capacity ahead of demand based on market knowledge so we can dedicate space to customers during the qualification process. This has been very successful. Take Batam, Indonesia, where we now have almost filled the additional space we opened last year, and also Tijuana, Mexico, where we are experiencing strong demand for tariff-free manufacturing, having doubled the size of the facility last year. And this month, as I mentioned just a moment ago, we are opening a further purpose-built site in central Mexico, doubling our capacity in this area. However, footprint is only part of the story. We need to have the right capabilities in our facilities to support evolving requirements and to enhance efficiency. An increasing number of our new programs are built to be highly automated from day one. And in addition, we are retrofitting automation technology to existing lines, reducing operating costs and enhancing throughputs and yields. Our vertical integration is at the core of our competitiveness, and this differentiates from many of our competitors, and we are currently rolling out additional specialist wire products that we extrude ourselves as well as making complex plastic components and connectors in-house. Our investment in product development focuses on both power products to meet evolving demands in the EV space as well as the next generation of data center cables. and we continue our strong focus on cash payback, with the majority of capital programs achieving cash payback within two years and often much quicker. This market-leading approach to investment, it helps us secure benefits quickly and gives us confidence to continue investing in our business. So it seems like yesterday, but we are three and a half years through our five-year plan. And our first half revenues of $584 million is a significant demonstration that our strategy is working. It's also proof that we are rapidly closing in on our target of achieving $1.2 billion of revenue. We've been comfortably maintaining our operating margins towards the upper end of the 9% to 10% range. We're achieving this even after significant investments in growth. And this gives us a high degree of confidence that we will achieve the five-year plan. So now is the time to summarise our performance and take you through the outlook for the second half. These are, once again, excellent results, a real achievement against a backdrop of tariff-related uncertainty and difficult macroeconomic conditions. And our growth is proof that the strategy is working, powered by our investments in incremental capacity and capability. And in addition, as we scale up the business, we continue to achieve healthy margins at the top end of our target range as our operating leverage increases. We have confidence to invest and to pursue acquisitions because we have a strong balance sheet and very significant financial flexibility. And looking forward, we are off to a very good start for the second half of the year. We are mindful of the challenges from short-term uncertainty, particularly arising due to tariffs. However, this is a diversified business with deep, long-term customer relationships. Those customers have supported our ability to grow despite these tough conditions, and we expect second-half revenues to be broadly in line with the first half. In fact, we see the changing global trade environment as an opportunity for Volex. With our geographic capabilities and ability to support customers moving manufacturing between countries, we are well-placed to secure further growth. And given our sustained focus on long-term value creation and our tremendous progress against our current five-year plan, we have started working on a new five-year plan. And this new plan will reflect the strong and scalable business we have created and set our ambitions for both revenue growth and margin improvement for the next stage in our journey. We will share this plan with investors in due course. And now we would be happy to take your questions. Please.