Halma Plc Unsp/Adr

Good morning and welcome to our half-year results presentation. I'm pleased to report good progress in the first half. We've delivered record results in continued strategic investment. The group performance once again demonstrating the strength and success of our sustainable growth model and the long-term growth drivers that underpin our diverse portfolio. It's been a period with multiple economic and geopolitical challenges, and our companies have responded with great skill and agility to overcome these whilst also addressing new growth opportunities. And for this and their continued dedication and commitment, I wanted to start today by saying thank you to everyone at Halma that has contributed to these results. we can all be proud of what we've achieved. Steve will provide more details with regard our financial performance shortly. However, in summary, great to report that we delivered record revenue at £951 million, record profits at £178 million, and an interim dividend increase of 7%, reflecting our confidence in the future. Also positive to see our recent M&A momentum reflected in these results, with both revenue and profit benefiting by over 5%. And this growth delivered with a resilient operating margin at 20%, while further enhancing our growth opportunities through increased strategic investment, with over £150 million invested in R&D, CapEx and M&A during the six-month period. We invested over £50 million in R&D. This reflects our individual company's confidence in developing new products and services for their customers, supporting their long-term growth prospects. And excellent to see that momentum in M&A continue, with three acquisitions in the first half and a further two announced since the half year end, which brings our maximum total consideration in the year to date to £126 million. This continued strategic investment, supported by strong cash conversion at 96%, and the continued strength of our balance sheet. The current operational environment presents both challenges and opportunities. Our continued success in these varied market conditions is enabled by our sustainable growth model. This model is a well-established system and it means that we continue to benefit from our focus on those markets aligned to our purpose. All of these markets underpinned by resilient long-term growth drivers which present substantial opportunities for growth. We benefit from the strength of our financial model. enabling continued high levels of investment, both organically and through M&A, to drive future growth. We benefit from the agility that comes from our devolved autonomous operating model. This alongside our continued focus on ensuring that we have the best talent and that we enable their success through our collaborative and entrepreneurial culture. And finally, We see the benefits from the end market and geographic diversity across our portfolio. The core elements of our model remain the same. And within it are paradoxes that our leaders are having to constantly navigate. The delivery in the short term and continuing to invest for the long term. Consistent performance and innovating to disrupt. relishing their full accountability for strategy through to execution and leveraging the support and expertise that they have access to across the Howman network. And it's easy in volatile times like these to become consumed by the needs of today. And in that distraction, forget the help and inspiration that can come from such a powerful network. Our company leaders have access to a significant knowledge and experience base across our portfolio of nearly 50 companies. This in addition to that experience and knowledge from those in our sector teams and central functions. Our leaders can augment or complement their own market and operational capabilities. And this balance between maximizing the benefits of our autonomous model and leveraging our scale was the focus of our latest annual leadership event, Accelerate, at which we brought together over a hundred of our senior leaders. And you'll hear more about that later in the presentation about just how valuable this combination of our autonomous model, diversified portfolio, and our scale are to the leaders around our group and how this, alongside our model, gives us continued confidence for the future. But first, let me hand over to Steve for more details on our financial performance in the first half.

Thanks, Mark. Good morning. As you've already heard from Mark, we have delivered good first half results, achieving record levels of revenue and profit. Given the varied market conditions that have prevailed in the period, they demonstrate the strength of the Halmer model. In particular, the diverse portfolio that the group has built up. Due to the first half performance and the momentum we take into the second half, we are on track for the full year. So let's take a look at the first half results. We've delivered good growth and returns. Revenue, 951 million, which is up a healthy 9%. In terms of profit, you can see that we've added earnings before interest and tax to the slide for the first time. This is to more clearly show the underlying performance and aid comparison with our sector peers. The adjusted EBIT is up 7%, with the margin resilient at 20%. If we look at profit after interest costs, then the adjusted profit before tax is up 3.4%, resulting in a return on sales of 18.7%, which is well within our 18 to 22% range. Interest costs are up due to higher interest rates and the higher average net debt levels. In the half year, the company has invested over £150 million to support future growth. The R&D spend was up 5% to $52 million. Such investment is fundamental to maintaining and improving our market positions over the medium term. This level of R&D investment equates to a strong 5.5% of total group revenue and reflects the confidence our operating companies have in the future. Also in half one, we made three acquisitions, two standalones and one bolt-on, and invested nearly £80 million. It is good to see the healthy M&A pipeline converting into quality acquisitions. We've made two further bolt-on acquisitions since the end of September, and so the total acquisition spend for the year to date is now at £126 million. It is also great to see the acquisitions we've made in the past 12 months contributing more than 5% to both revenue and profit growth in the half itself. These investments are enabled by the group's strong cash generation and healthy balance sheet. So let's look at some of the metrics behind these. Cash conversion at 96% is well above our target level, and as we guided last year. We expect cash conversion to continue to stay ahead of 90% for half two. Net debt to EBITDA at 1.4 is at a comfortable level despite the continued investment and higher interest rates. Finally, our continued growth, cash generation and healthy balance sheet support an interim dividend increase of 7%. This maintains our long-term progressive dividend policy, signalling our confidence in the future. So now let's look at revenue in more detail. This slide provides a bridge of the year-on-year revenue growth of 75 million, or 8.6%. Organic revenue growth was 5.4%. If we look at price and volume, price increases provided around 2% of the growth, and that is at the upper end of our historical typical range of 1-2%. The price causal was higher in the safety sector, in particular in some of those companies most exposed to electronic components. We expect the benefit of price increases to the group to be a little bit lower in the second half as we cycle against price increases that were made last year. Volume increases were well within the historic range, driven by continued underlying demand and supported by our order intake, which remains ahead of last year. Next, acquisitions, including the likes of IZI, FIRE Pro and VTech, made a good contribution to revenue growth of 5.5%. Finally, there was a small currency drag of 2% due to the strengthening of sterling. Based on latest currency rates, we expect a similar headwind in the second half. Now let's look at the revenue through a different lens. This slide analyses the revenue growth by region. On the left-hand side, you have reported revenue, and on the right-hand side, you have organic constant currency revenue, OCCY. It is pleasing to see broad-based revenue growth, with revenue growing in all regions except Asia Pacific on both a reported and an OCCY basis. If we now focus on the chart on the right that analyses OCCY, we saw strong growth in our two largest sales regions, the US and Europe. which make up around two-thirds of the group revenue. In the US, the key driver was the environmental and analysis sector, with very strong performance in photonics, which more than offset the decline in spectroscopy. In Europe, the key driver was the healthcare sector, with a very strong performance in the eye health therapeutics. The performance was supported by the safety sector, which also delivered a good performance in both the US and Europe. UK growth at 3% reflected a strong performance in the environmental and analysis sector, which was then partially offset by the safety and healthcare sectors. Asia Pacific was 7% lower, reflecting weaker trends in China, but partially offset by strong growth in Australasia. For context, China now represents 5% of group revenue. If we move from revenue to profit, Profit was up 3.4% at the reported level and flat on an OCCY basis. OCCY growth was flat during the period due to the good performance in both safety and healthcare being offset by the adverse E&A performance. I was particularly pleased to see the safety sector recover from a difficult half two last year and that recovery was in line with our expectations. I will take you through the individual sector commentaries in a few moments. Moving on to acquisitions. They made a good contribution to the half year profit of 5.2%. This reflects the strength of the businesses we acquired over the last 12 months. As with revenue, there was a small currency drag of 1.8% from the strengthening of sterling. Now let's return to the return on sales performance on the next slide. This bridge slide reconciles the half one return on sales performance of last year to this year's performance. Last year's ROS of 19.6% was unusually strong due to the effects of exiting the COVID period. In fact, it was 30 basis points ahead of the average of the half year position for the five years prior to COVID, which you can see as a line on the chart. Year on year ROS moved 90 basis points lower. Two thirds of that was due to higher interest rate costs. If the impact of the higher interest costs is excluded, then our return on sales in the first half is in line with the pre-COVID average of 19.3%. The higher interest costs are the result of both higher interest rates and higher average levels of net debt. This is the first year of substantially higher interest rates, and it is our objective to absorb these higher costs in the medium term. Let's now move on to the sector commentaries, and I'll start with the safety sector. I was pleased the safety sector's performance improved in the first half in line with our guidance. As you'll recall, the sector achieved good top line performance last year but experienced a significant ROS contraction due to supply chain issues. We expected to see ROS improvement throughout this year and that has come through in the first half. ROS is up 110 basis points versus last year and up 260 basis points versus the previous six months. In half one, the sector continued to see good revenue momentum. Revenue growth was strong at 13% and positive across all regions. It has also included a good contribution from acquisitions. Europe, safety's largest region, stands out as having seen the most benefit from recent acquisitions, in particular from VTech and FirePro. Good OCCY revenue growth of 7% was also broadly spread across regions and subsectors. All regions grew well on an OCCY basis, except the UK. There was a modest decline in the UK, which reflected the end of a significant road safety contract in the urban safety subsector. In other, we saw strong contributions from FirePro in Africa and near Middle East. There was also a healthy organic performance in industrial safety in the near Middle East and fire safety in Canada. Profit was 19% higher and included good OCCY growth and strong benefit from recent acquisitions. It was also great to see that the companies within the sector remained well invested to support future growth. Turning now to the environmental and analysis sector. The environmental and analysis sector saw good reported and OCCY revenue growth of 8% and 9% respectively. By region there was a very strong growth in the US, driven by the photonics segment, which is experiencing an acceleration of demand for technologies that support the transformation of data and digital capabilities. The strong photonics performance was partially offset by substantial revenue declines in spectroscopy. This reflected weaknesses in a number of its end markets, including biopharma, quality testing of semiconductors, particularly in the Chinese market, and consumer electronics. These effects were amplified by disruption arising by the deployment of a new IT system in one of our spectroscopy companies. This has since been stabilised. Performance in the Asia-Pacific region, which was down 26% on an OCCY basis, primarily reflected these weak spectroscopy trends. UK growth was strong, benefiting from momentum in water infrastructure arising from the increase in project tenders as part of the UK regulatory water cycle. Europe saw overall modest growth, with good performance in most business segments, partially offset by the decline in spectroscopy. In terms of profitability, ROS declined a substantial 390 basis points to 20.9%. This decline in margin largely reflected the significant revenue decline in the higher margin spectroscopy segment. We'd expect a significant improvement in half-two ROS, with continued momentum in photonics and water infrastructure, and in spectroscopy from the actions taken on the cost base and the stabilisation of the IT system. During the first half, the sector continued to invest at a good level. In particular, the sector made two acquisitions, VIR, a bolt-on for Minicam, and Suatronics, a standalone company. Following the period end, the sector made a further bolt on acquisition of Alpha Instramatics. Now let's turn to the healthcare sector. Overall, the healthcare sector has seen modest reported revenue growth, but a good profit performance. The 4% revenue growth in the period included a positive contribution from IZI Medical, which was acquired last year. the overall organic revenue growth was flat, and this reflected a diverse range of performances at the sub-sector level, which I'll explain before moving on to the performance by region. Our companies in eye health therapeutics and analytics and sensors perform well due to the high patient caseloads and the demand from healthcare providers for communication and software systems to improve the efficiency and patient outcomes. However, the acute therapeutic subsector was adversely impacted by OEMD stocking and by the budgetary caution of healthcare providers. These adverse trends also affected our smaller life sciences subsector, which declined substantially. These impacts were compounded in life sciences by global macroeconomic headwinds and low demand in China, where we have a significant life sciences footprint. Turning to revenue performance by region on an OCCY basis, we saw the US experience a modest decline, reflecting the subsector trends I've just described. Europe grew strongly, mainly reflecting the momentum in eye health therapeutics. The Asia-Pacific region declined, reflecting the high life sciences footprint to China. In terms of profitability, ROS increased 140 basis points to 23.4%. primarily reflecting a higher gross margin as a result of portfolio mix and ongoing pricing discipline. It was also good to see the continued high levels of investment in R&D. We now turn to the company's cash flow performance. This chart effectively summarizes the group's cash flow for the first half. I'll just pick out three key items. The strong EBITDA generation of 218 million is typical for the group and an important part of the sustainable growth model. Next, the net acquisition spend mainly reflects the three acquisitions and the one disposal made in the period. Just as we've seen in this half year, these acquisitions will become a source of incremental EBITDA in future periods. Working capital outflow was much improved as expected because we were cycling against the significant inventory build-up in the previous year. Other comments I would make regarding working capital. The first half typically has seasonally higher working capital demands due to the timing of bonus payments. Cash conversion was strong at 96% and ahead of our 90% KPI target. Strong working capital control is an important activity within the group, and for me personally, a focus area as we look to maintain our high returns. Now let's look at our financial KPIs. I've considered most of these KPIs already, so I'll limit myself to a few points. Organic profit contribution was flat in the half due to the mix of sector performance but we expect this to be positive at the full year. It was good to see a strong acquisition profit contribution of 7.1% on a pre-interest basis and 4.5% on a post-interest basis. EPS is up 3.5%, driven by the reported profit growth, which includes the benefit of the acquisitions made. Rotick at 13.2% remained high and well above our weighted average cost of capital, which is around 9%. The change from 13.8% in the prior year mainly reflects the impact of higher interest rate costs and flat OCCY profit growth in the period. I'd expect to see a stronger number for the full year. Moving on to my last slide. These graphs show the 10-year performance of the group at the reported revenue and adjusted profit level. It's excellent to see the 10-year CAGR above 10% for both metrics. It demonstrates the effectiveness of the sustainable growth model, which is at the heart of our business. As a group, we have a relentless focus on delivering strong growth and continued high returns. We constantly scrutinise our own performance and find ways to improve it. This is especially important in the new macroeconomic environment, which is characterized by higher interest rates. I've been encouraged, now 11 months into the business, by the openness with which the group critiques its own performance. And that's what we need to do in order to maintain the trends that are on these graphs. A small example of our focus on returns. In recent months we have increased our emphasis on repatriating cash to the centre from the operating companies. This is now a greater priority due to the higher cost of capital. This has included a renewed focus on cash pooling arrangements, cash flow forecasting and liquidity requirements. Optimising returns is an area of focus for me and one of Mark's four priorities as outlined in the full year results. I will now hand you back to Mark to provide a further update on the business and those four priorities.

Thanks, Steve. Always great to see that growth in revenue and profit over a 10-year period that has had a number of varied market conditions. And as Steve says, enabled by our model, which gives us that ability to continuously evolve as markets change. And our model also underpins the priorities that I highlighted at the full year. First, organic growth, our top priority. Second, inorganic growth, remaining disciplined in our approach to acquisitions. And third, maintaining our agility and making sure we have the very best talent close to our customers. And then fourth, as you've just heard from Steve, maintaining high returns as we invest for growth. I remain confident that we can deliver against all four of these priorities. And I wanted to share with you today the reasons why. So let's start with organic growth. Organic growth is the cornerstone of our financial model. but its heart is our purpose to grow a safer, cleaner, healthier future for everyone every day. Our purpose is the start point of everything we do. It provides a north star for the group and is consistent throughout the individual drivers of our growth. And if we start with our markets, Our purpose points us to our chosen markets of safety, health, and the environment. They all have global potential for long-term growth and consistently high returns. And they provide end market and geographic diversity in our portfolio. And their growth underpinned by resilient long-term growth drivers, such as changing demographics, increasing demand for healthcare, environmental pressures and ever-increasing regulation. And these markets with returns supported by our leading market positions in those carefully chosen niche markets where we can offer significant value added to our customers through our differentiated products and solutions. Next, our decentralized business model, which gives our companies autonomy to take the best decisions based on their market expertise and the specific factors that are impacting their markets at any given time. It empowers them to act rapidly without having to ask for permission first. It places our people close to our customers, allowing them to respond quickly to those changing needs, new market opportunities and new technologies. And our business model also accelerates our company's growth through our central enablers and our company networks. supporting our companies to grow internationally, to deploy technology effectively, and to recruit and retain the very best talent. And having the best talent is a critical component in delivering superior performance, especially so in a decentralized autonomous model. And in the same way that we choose our markets with care, we're highly selective in the talent that we recruit. We want leaders who are passionate about making the world a safer, cleaner and healthier place. We want them to have bold ambitions and to be competitive in wanting to succeed. They should be happy to be accountable for their own performance. But we also want them to work together as leaders, driving the power of collaboration and innovation across their teams and Hauma as a whole. So our culture is entrepreneurial and high performance, but it's also highly collaborative and inclusive. grounded in our DNA, recognizing the power of diverse teams and networks between companies to share best practices, to share insights, to share knowledge and experience. More to come on this shortly. And it's these cultural drivers that are underpinned by transparent incentivization, which is aligned to our long-term ambitions. Our company leaders are rewarded on an EVA basis, and this is a consistent basis across all levels of our senior leadership. It rewards both the delivery of consistent long-term growth and also the returns that our companies drive above the cost of capital. And alongside that, to ensure that we're maintaining that longer term outlook and ensuring that we're aligned to the wider interests of the group, a part of that award is deferred and paid in how much shares. This drives our leaders to balance strong performance in the short term with a longer term view. It encourages them to continually invest to maintain their company's strong positions in innovative solutions to the problems facing our customers, or investing in talent and infrastructure to support their future growth. This investment ensures that they retain their competitive differentiation over the long term. They're doing this through product innovation, technology, and deep application knowledge. And then finally, we relentlessly monitor performance. This allows us to allocate capital to maximise growth and returns. We're constantly challenging ourselves and asking, are our companies aligned to our purpose? Do they continue to benefit from our long-term growth drivers in the niches in their markets? And can they deliver the growth and returns that we require over the medium term? And if required, we can move quickly and effectively. And it's this combination and interaction of each of these separate elements that's driven our historic growth. And I'm confident that they'll drive further strong growth in the future. So looking now at our inorganic growth, the other half of our growth ambition, which has many of the same fundamentals as our organic growth. We want to acquire great businesses in niche markets aligned to our purpose. We ensure that they have strong leadership teams, and then we invest in them and support their growth and returns over decades to come. There's a number of reasons supporting my confidence that we can continue to drive strong M&A growth over the medium term. And the first of those is just the sheer scale of the opportunity. We've got a healthy pipeline of well over 600 companies. In any one year, we're actively assessing around 10% to 15% of these companies. And of those that we're assessing, we acquire on average about 10%, a highly selective process, meaning we never feel compelled to do a deal. Next, our track record. We've completed over 150 acquisitions in the last 40 years. And in my time on Halmer's board, we've bought more than 40 companies. Not only does this give us deep experience, increasing our likelihood of success, but it also builds our reputation with company owners for buying and successfully investing in and growing companies. Prospective sellers can talk directly with founders who have sold their companies to Houma about their own individual experiences. Third, our deep market knowledge. Typically, the companies that we buy are in or adjacent to markets that we already know well. This means that we can capitalize on the expertise of our people who are living and breathing them every single day. And ahead of entering new markets, we invest a lot of time in building up our knowledge and understanding of those markets and how they operate. Next, our financial and organisational models. They've been designed to incorporate high levels of M&A activity. Our substantial financial capacity and our strong cash flows allow us to fund our M&A activity from internally generated funds. And we have a highly scalable structure. It allows us to incorporate new companies without significant integration hurdles. The next element is our experienced teams. We have significant M&A resources with nine divisional chief executives who chair our groups of operating companies spending half of their time on M&A. The M&A process is led by our DCEs. And we now also have company MDs and presidents who are more familiar with M&A. They've been increasingly active in acquiring companies as bolt-ons that enable them to expand their market reach or extend their technology. And these DCEs and our MDs are supported by our three dedicated sector-specific M&A teams. And these teams ensure the quality and consistency in our M&A processes, and they make sure that we drive that focus on pipeline management and market mapping of targets that are aligned to our sector strategies. Our approach is relationship-led. That combined effort from our DCEs, MDs and the dedicated M&A teams means that we're able to build strong long-term relationships with those companies in our pipeline. And they're typically small privately owned businesses that we're looking to acquire in private transactions. We build that deep understanding of their markets and their culture, and we also make sure that they're clear about the benefits of joining Hauma. We offer a long-term home for companies which are looking to benefit from that continued autonomy, but also want support to achieve their growth ambitions through our growth enablers and our company networks. So to bring it to life, let's just look at two examples that bring out many of these themes. And I wanted to start with Apollo, a business that many of you know. We acquired Apollo in 1983 for around £700,000, a fire safety business. Fire safety offers us substantial growth opportunities, and that's driven by increasing urbanization, growing needs for safety and efficiency, and of course, ever stronger regulation. And all of these have been consistent drivers behind Apollo's growth for the last 40 years. And that growth has been impressive, with compound annual revenue growth of 8% over that 10-year period that Steve shared earlier. And Apollo now today has over £150 million of revenue annually. Not a bad return on investment. Not only has Apollo been a fantastic business in its own right, it's also helped us build on knowledge around the fire market. And this has given us the understanding of new market opportunities within fire across a variety of technologies and in different geographies. And if we look today, we have wired, wireless and temporary fire detection businesses and a range of fire suppression technologies. Our geographical reach ranges from Europe to the Americas and to Asia Pacific and Australia. All these companies benefiting from those same long-term growth drivers as Apollo. And today our fire companies, united by that common purpose around fire safety, represent just under 20% of the group's revenue. And we continue to see substantial opportunities for future growth within the segment. Our M&A strategy is, as I say, driven by our purpose. It's aligned with our growth strategy, and this allows us to target new acquisitions in markets that our companies already operate in, but at the same time also explore new and adjacent market spaces in line with our sector strategies. And our acquisitions this year are great examples of this strategy, and they demonstrate the opportunities that we can access with this approach. If I just take LaserSafe, for example, it further broadens our position in industrial safety. And the Apriomed adds bone biopsy technologies to IZI, a company which we acquired only a year previously. But let me just focus in on Sewertronics, a great example of another subsector that we have around water. And we're really pleased to welcome Sewertronics to Halma in May of this year. As we look back, we bought our first water company, Hanover, in 1981, which was focused on water treatment. This, at the time, highly aligned with Hamer's already long-established focus on environmental monitoring. And as we did back then in the 80s, we still see water as an attractive area for growth. It's a life-critical resource. It's increasingly polluted, more than ever in short supply, and especially given climate change, and of course subject to high levels of regulation. And over time, as we've added a number of businesses to our portfolio that have all been focused on water network monitoring and testing, we also identified wastewater as an adjacent segment where we wanted to operate. And this led us to our first interaction with Sewertronics in 2019. One of our divisional chief execs met the Sewertronics team at a trade show. They then developed the relationship over the next few years as Sewertronics established a solid track record of growth and performance. And as I say, it was then great to complete the deal this year, adding the efficient and safe repair of wastewater pipes to our existing capabilities. And if we look today, we now have a cluster of seven individual companies in E&A formed from over 15 acquisitions, each focused on that core problem of water scarcity and pollution. And together they represent around 10% of the group's revenue. And as with FIRE, we remain excited about the opportunities for further growth in both existing and adjacent markets. So turning now to agility and talent. As you've heard, our focus on talent culture and maintaining our agility is a critical element in the successful delivery of growth and high returns. And this topic was also a specific focus of our recent Accelerate Leadership event. I believe it's a significant asset in continuing to build our competitive advantage, but don't take it from me. Let's hear from some of our leaders and share some footage from our Accelerate management conference.

When people ask me, how does the HALMA model work for an MD? I say, look, for me, it's the best of both worlds.

There's that being part of something greater and bigger.

You're not on your own. There's a lot of people out there you can talk to.

Whilst the companies are all autonomous, we all have networks that we can share and work together in. I think it's a really nice balance of I can truly define my own destiny and there's a whole bunch of support here to help us make it happen.

One of the great things about being a managing director was that peer group of other managing directors and all the other businesses that you get to work with and you get to know and there's the best practice sharing. But you become quite a close-knit team and you share ideas and you work together, but you also compete. I was just going to say. Absolutely. As much as you want everyone to be a success, you also want to be one of the people that's doing great.

I think, Homer, the key expectations of a leader are... You have to deliver, but it's really about how you deliver. And I think bringing a high curiosity, a low ego, a willingness to work and partner with others, invest in people, those are the things that really, I think, make a difference for the key leaders at Houma.

This network of leaders is a huge competitive advantage for the group. And I just encourage you all, our time together, create new relationships, explore new ideas, grasp those opportunities.

I guess a lot of it comes down to the network. It's a really powerful support that you can move fast and move forward and at the same time you have this huge powerful network around you if you need it.

You've got to be curious, you've got to be willing to collaborate, you've got to be willing to fail and get up and learn and do it all again. every day, even when it's uncomfortable.

Where have I had disappointments? I think it's all about stepping back, thinking what I could have done differently, how I would attack it, and just examine some of the decisioning that I'd taken along the way. So not everything goes to plan.

I feel a real sense of accountability for how our operating company performs. So that makes it both a challenging but really rewarding job.

You're not doing it alone. You have your team, you have the Helmer network, but you have the agency to make the decision.

Fantastic reflections there from our leaders on our model. And just to pick out a couple of examples, I thought the way that Tom spoke about the benefits that come from our scale and from our networks and collaboration was really powerful when he talked about the best of both worlds and that he felt that he could define his own destiny while, in his words, getting a whole bunch of support to do so. It was also fantastic to hear from Joe Smith talk about that focus on the collaborative network, but also that competitive drive to be the best. And finally, it was great to see the quote at the start of the clip from our annual report in 1973, just an excellent example of how the fundamental elements of our model have remained unchanged. So to conclude, Houma's sustainable growth model continues to enable our ongoing success. It underpins our four priorities, which remain unchanged, and I'm confident that we can deliver against all four of these priorities. we see substantial opportunities in our markets and have made significant investments to ensure that we have both the capabilities and resources to pursue them. As we've heard, we've made good progress in the first half in what have been varied market conditions, and we're on track to make further progress in the second half of the year. Our order intake is ahead of last year and close to revenue in the year to date. And we expect to deliver good organic constant currency growth in the year as a whole. And our current expectation is for full year profit to be in line with consensus. That's the end of the presentation. And now we have time for some questions. There are two ways that you can ask your questions. You can either raise your hand using the tool at the bottom of your screen, and I'll invite you to ask your question verbally, or you can type the question, which Steve and I will read out and then answer. So just starting with Scott, I can see you've got your hand up. So Scott, we'll come to you first.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Can you hear me okay?

Yeah, all very clear. Thanks, Scott.

Excellent. Well, congratulations on another fine set of results. So just two quick ones for me. Just the confidence of achieving good organic growth in the second half. And you talk about order intake. Could you just give us a little bit more detail about the visibility you have and some of the dynamics there, some of the standouts? And then the second question is just a bit more color around profitability and E&A and how you see that developing. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Scott. Steve, do you want to pick up on order intake?

Yeah. So at the moment, order intake is healthy. It's ahead of last year. Also good to see that our book to bill is close to one. It's in the high 90s. If we look at the overall order book as well at the moment, it's probably down about 8% from where we were at the full year, but it's still probably about 30 to 40% above the sort of historical norm for Hauma. So there's still a very strong order book. So we are seeing that normalise a little bit, but probably if we're honest, it's normalising slower than we thought. So the order situation is healthy and that gives us good confidence as we go into half two and we think about the organic revenue growth for the second half.

Thanks, Steve. And I guess we've also got a question from Stefan with regard to ENA. So let me just read that question out, because I think we'll cover off both of those at the same time. So Stefan's question is, please discuss the outlook for ENA for H2 and 2024. How long will the softness around spectroscopy continue? Does your order book point to a better demand going forward again?

Yeah, so... So if we step back on E&A and what are we expecting in half two? First of all, I'd probably talk about photonics and the water infrastructure. Those two subsectors represent about 60% of that sector, and both have achieved very strong growth in the first half, photonics particularly strong. And we're expecting both of those sectors elements of the ENA portfolio to accelerate their growth in the second half. So underpinning our ENA performance will be that growth. In terms of spectroscopy, to come on to your question, we're not expecting an enormous bounce back in the second half. What we are expecting is far less of a drag and far more of an improvement, basically because of four factors, really. One is we have taken eight actions on the overhead base. We've managed to take out about 30% of the overheads there without hurting our growth prospects. So we did that work in half one. We'll see the benefit of that in half two. We have stabilized the IT. We talked about the disruption caused by the IT. That's now been stabilized, so that won't be a drag in half two. We have got better visibility of orders coming through and there are some pockets of improvement. So that's good to see that coming through as well. And we're seeing some green shoots in the end markets. But as I say, we have not factored in a bounce back in spectroscopy in the second half. You know, we've been very modest in our expectations. But because we've taken these self-help measures, we are expecting that to improve for spectroscopy as a result. And we are expecting photonics and water infrastructure to strengthen and accelerate their growth, which was very strong in the first half anyway. And as a consequence of all of that, we think that the E&A sector will see a significant recovery in the second half.

Thanks, Steve. Just looking at the calls online, so maybe we'll go to Mark Davies-Jones. Hi, Mark.

Hi Mark, thanks for taking the question and thanks also for the additional colour on how you've built those sort of clusters of businesses around fire and water. Obviously the DNA of the business has stayed very constant over time, but you've tweaked the structure. Do you think there's going to come a time when three sectors has to become more? Because fire looks like it's almost a sector in its own standing right at the moment. Are you happy with how the setup between sectors and divisions and operating companies works presently or does that need further tweaking as you go forward?

Yeah, thanks, Mark. In terms of the immediate future and certainly out over the short to medium term, the structure is absolutely right for how we are today. But your point is absolutely spot on. We've designed this structure to allow us to have that scalability within the org model. So we do have the ability to bring in a fourth sector. We have the ability to bring in other companies through our M&A strategy. And I don't see that, as I say, in the immediate short term. What I do see, which I think is the point that you make, is if we do move to a fourth structure, it's more likely than not to come out of one of our existing subsectors, delivering that level of growth where it makes sense to have a separate sector and to have a separate team.

OK, thank you. That makes sense.

Thanks, Mark. And just looking, hand up. So Callum, Callum Battersby.

Great morning, guys. Couple of questions from me, please. Firstly, I just wanted to ask about the relationship, as you see it today, between leverage rates and your return on sales target. So I suppose last time rates were where they are today. How am I had to let me lower leverage? and therefore a lower impact from interest costs on what's now an increasing drag on ROS. I guess I'm asking, are you fine with continuing to target the same level of growth from acquisitions if that means a greater drag on ROS over the coming years? Or are you seeing that as taking a more balanced approach to limit the drawdown on the RCF and maybe not grow gross leverage too much from this level?

Steve, do you want to pick that one up?

Yeah. So so in terms of leverage rates, as you say, our leverage has remained relatively flat at 1.4 from the full year to the half year. In terms of the increase in interest rates, you know, that that's probably adding sort of 50 to 60 basis points onto our or taking 50, 60 basis points off of our roles. As we've alluded to in the presentation, we do actually see ways that we think we can absorb that in the medium term. As a consequence of that, you know, we think there's sort of three buckets of areas where we think we can absorb those costs. I think about it in terms of organic, inorganic and balance sheets. If I think about it in the organic terms of things, you know, we continue to invest. We add real value to the customer. So I think we've got pricing resilience and pricing opportunities there. Also, I think there's operational efficiencies that we can probably get at and also right size some aspects of our overheads and central costs. So in terms of organic, I see real opportunities there. In organic, we continue to invest. In the portfolio, but we're very disciplined with our acquisitions in terms of we're looking for roles of creative acquisitions, which which bolster the performance of the group. Also, we continue to look at the portfolio to see if there's any drag within it and whether we need to make adjustments there. And finally, in terms of the balance sheet, you know, we look at the cost of debt. Clearly, that's gone up. So we're looking at factors in terms of cash efficiency. I gave some examples of where we're improving our cash efficiency as a group in terms of repatriating cash quicker. But also there's other aspects we can do to optimize our working capital. So overall, that increase in interest expense increases. we think we can absorb in the medium term that said you know i do think that interest expense will come down a little bit as well as interest rates peaks so in terms of the impact of leverage to to m a i don't see that having a significant impact clearly at the heart of our model is that we generate high levels of cash through our organic cash contribution uh and we're confident with the guidance that we've given that we'll see strong cash generation in the second half of this year so

i'm not concerned about the interplay between those two at the moment all right that's really clear thanks steve um if i could just ask one more um follow up to the last question on um the e and a margin um at the folio you were talking about expecting that to recover back to the pre-covered average um and i would have seen the first half as that's broadly what's happened but it sounds as if you think the margin should improve into h2 So I guess kind of what's the medium term view from here on what the margin of that business looks like? Will it settle kind of close to the 24, 25 we saw over the last couple of years or kind of roughly the level as today? What are you expecting?

You know, we expect a substantial recovery in the E&A margin. I don't think it'll get all the way back to where it was, you know, historically. But I think we'll see a substantial recovery in the short term.

The medium term view is that we see that recovery back to where it's been. Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

Got it. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Callum. Just going then on the phone to Jonathan, Jonathan Hearn. You're on mute, I think, Jonathan. OK. Yeah, perfect. There we go.

Perfect. Thank you. It was just a couple of questions. One, the first one was just on your sort of Asian exposure and obviously the performance there. I mean, as we go into the second half, what are your views in terms of that geography and how it develops and Obviously, it has been tough in the first half. Do you need to take some costs out in that region going forward? That was the first question.

Sorry, Jonathan, you broke up. Was that Asia-Pacific stroke China that you were talking about region-wise?

Yes, sorry about that. Yes, yeah, Asia-Pacific stroke China.

Yeah, okay, let me pick that up. I think first thing to do certainly with Asia Pacific is pick up on the point that that a little bit like many of the things that we're seeing today is down to the portfolio. So actually really good growth in Australia, but more than offset by a decline in China. Again, just worth giving a little bit of context that what we're talking about with China is 5% of our group revenue. But then if we do dig into what have we seen in the first half of the year, we've actually seen a good recovery in safety with growth in China, recovery in industrial activity post the lockdowns at this time last year. In healthcare, again, a little bit mixed, but we've actually got a relatively high life sciences content in the region. So we've seen pressure there. I'm sure you've heard lots about life sciences globally, but we've got that in China. And then finally, the flow through with E&A. We've got quality testing with our spectroscopy, quality testing of semiconductors and wafers in the region. So that's been under pressure. So you take a big step back. And fundamentally, you look at the long-term drivers in our markets and we're confident of the growth in the region. And therefore, we're making that decision that we've got the appropriate level of investment. We see the region as an opportunity for growth in the future, but we'll balance that off with taking short-term actions as appropriate, given the revenue pressures.

Okay, that's very clear. Thank you. And just a second question was just on digital. I don't think you really mentioned that in your Obviously, it's been a focus in terms of sort of driving growth for Houma. Can you sort of just update us where we are on sort of the digital strategy, the growth rates in the first half on that side of the business, please?

Yeah, the digital content of our revenue is remained in line with where it has been historically around 40% of our revenue. So growing in line with the group. As we've talked about before, it's all about the portfolio and a number of our businesses are now at 100% digital revenue. Others will be more down the line of a mechanical device. It's all around what's relevant for those individual businesses, for those customers, and solving those big problems that we're solving through our purpose. So very much still an enabler in the business. As we've talked about before, the real positive now is that that's just embedded in the organization. It's a critical and required component of many of our solutions and will continue to do so. The one change, as you know, that I made six months ago was just making sure that we had our investment in the centre in the right places. And Catherine's doing a great job in the centre in terms of building out a team of experts just to help and support our companies in that go to market with their digital solutions.

And if I could maybe just. Just quick, the last one. Just in terms of that order book, obviously you've given us a feel for that book to build, but in terms of that order book, is that all deliverable in H2 or does some of it sort of stretch into the following fiscal year?

Some of it definitely stretches into the following year as well.

Okay, Jonathan. Thanks. Thank you. Lovely, sorry, we lost you a bit there. Okay, just looking on calls and I'll come back to some of the submitted questions. So David, David Farrell.

Hi, guys. Thank you very much for taking my questions. I've got two, please. Firstly, on pricing, I just kind of wondered kind of post the inflationary period we've had, whether or not you think your kind of salespeople are more emboldened for asking for price rises and therefore historically, we might see kind of that one to two percent range you talked about be a little bit higher because, you know, they just feel they can push pricing a bit stronger.

Thanks, just to make a point. So I know Aurelio's also got a question on pricing. So again, let's cover both of those off. But the exact question was pricing. Are you finding pricing discussions more difficult with customers? Has Houma ever seen price declines for the group? So slightly different question.

So questions coming from sort of both angles, as it were. I think stepping back, the The nature of our products and our market positions are we have very strong niche products. They're very sticky. We spend a lot of R&D in order to develop and maintain those market positions. That does give us really good pricing resilience. And what you saw in FY23 was us putting prices up about 4%. It was interesting when we were in that high inflationary pressure that when you go and talk to our businesses and they make the pricing decisions, we don't. You know, they were keen to recover the increased costs that they were suffering, but not to gouge their customers because customer intimacy is one of the strengths a lot of our businesses have. When we look at what's happened in half one FY24, we typically expect our price causal to be 1% to 2%. And it's been at the high end of that. It's been at about 2%. It's been slightly higher in the safety sector. But overall, there's been good pricing resilience. And it's been great to see gross margin flat in FY23 and also in half one of FY24. So overall, I think we're not seeing pricing declines. We're seeing good pricing increases. In terms about being emboldened, I think over the last 18 months, 24 months, our businesses have got better pricing. and are focused on it more. But there is this relationship that they have with the customers that says they're not looking to gouge, they are looking to maintain their gross margins and to price the value that they're providing to the customer and hence why they're always focused on the R&D and their market position. But I think our pricing perspective is pretty good at the moment. but i have to go back all the way to the operating model you know the pricing decisions at the uh operating company level they know their markets and they know their customers and price accordingly okay thanks um and then the second question i've got i couldn't help but noticed uh you're now reporting the benefit of acquisitions on a pre and post interest

uh basis and obviously that comes back to an earlier question around the higher interest charges i just kind of wondered therefore in the kind of near term while interest rates stay high do you think the five percent inorganic profit growth target post interest is a viable one or are we going to have to settle for a period where perhaps that can't be achieved

Well, I think I sort of look at it a different way. Maybe I'm guilty of this because I'm the new boy in. But, you know, if you look at the annual report and accounts that we issued in the summer, we actually provided the number of pre and post interest there as well. And we provided it even when we met the 5% on a post interest basis. And frankly, when you look at these numbers, clearly on a pre-interest basis, we've hit it at 7%. And on post-interest, we're not too far away at 4.5%. So it's not a case of we're changing the metric or something like that because we are or are not hitting it. I think one of the questions that we've been discussing internally is, are we conflating long term dynamics with short term dynamics? So the reality is we fund our acquisitions through the cash we generate and the acquisition profit is a long term acquisition. So is it right to look at it pre or post interest? The reality is I think there's merit looking at it both ways, and hence we've provided that clarity. So, you know, you can raise your money, take your choice, look at it either which way.

Okay. David, from my perspective, just thinking of M&A, fundamentally our financial model and our growth strategy remains in terms of strong levels of organic growth, high levels of cash generation to self-fund M&A moving forward with those aspirations of seven and a half, seven and a half to double every five years and our minimum KPIs of five and five that you saw in those long-term trends, we've been able to achieve that 10% growth. over a 10-year period and beyond. So I hope that my presentation today has helped get everybody to at least a level of confidence that is shared with me in terms of our ability to continue delivering both the organic growth and the inorganic growth moving forward.

Okay, thanks very much for that. Cheers.

Great, thank you. And then just going to Rory, raised hand.

Hi, good morning. It's Rory from UBS. Can you hear me okay?

Yeah, we can hear you, Rory. We just may need you to speak up a little bit, please.

Sure thing. Yeah. Thanks for taking my questions. I've got two. You've talked about absorbing those higher net interest costs, but you've actually guided to a lower number for net finance expense this year than you did at the 23-year end, despite having done some acquisitions in the intervening period. So that seems like But can you just go into the details on what driven that, please? And then I'll come back on the second one. Thank you.

So on interest expense, we just continue to be more efficient with the way we're doing things. So as I said in my presentation earlier, you know, one of the things that we've looked to do is repatriate cash from our operating companies quicker. It sounds very basic and it is very basic, but if we can move the cash to the centre and pay down our debt faster, we incur less of these higher interest rate debt costs. That's one of the things we've done. Other things we've done is using different facilities. So when we make a very short term borrowing because we're funding an acquisition for a few days, if we use a money market line rather than the RCF, With the RCF, you have to have the borrowing for at least a month, and we only want the borrowing for a few days. So using the money market line has saved us interest expense there. So we're looking at lots of small ways to make improvements in the way we're managing our cash and being more efficient. Some of that's now coming through in the forecast and the guidance that we've given.

Yeah, and I think the key here is this is a medium term approach. that we're talking to. We've got to be really careful that we don't start making short-term decisions in the business to hit a specific target when we know that delivering the growth at high levels of returns and continuing to invest in the business, that's what's going to drive our growth over the medium and long term.

Absolutely. Got it. Fantastic. Thank you. A second question, you pointed to that order book still being 30% to 40%. up. I was just wondering if you could talk or if you have visibility on what specific sort of subsectors comprise that heightened order book versus the Halma history. I'm thinking particularly around sort of photonics. I think there's a strong order book there with some nice long-term contracts and maybe just on photonics specifically, you know, what are the sort of the margins within those longer-term contracts and what visibility they give you looking out, you know, how long is that visibility in photonics? Thanks.

Well, in terms of photonics, you know, we have good visibility looking out. So, you know, we can look out probably the best bit of 12 months there. And, you know, we've got strong growth expected and it'll be accelerated growth, which was one of the factors that we'd built into our guidance, you know. I don't want to get into lots of detail on the detailed order book. As I say, it's in good shape compared to where it's been typically and historically. You know, we're seeing some normalization of it, but we're still a long way from that. So our order book is 30 to 40 percent larger than the typical level that we've seen for Houma. pre-covid so some of that normalization will take place but i think it's going to take a good 12 plus months to to work through all of that there are some swings and roundabouts in the in the sectors and sub-sectors but uh that's a level of detail i don't have at the end for this conversation thanks steve excellent all right perfect that's really helpful thank you so much

Thanks, Rory. So just picking up on a couple of other questions that we've had posted that we haven't picked up on as yet. There's a question here from Aurelio. Could you please comment on customers' budgetary restraints like that some healthcare companies and what indications you're getting from OEM's re-inventory levels. So maybe I'll pick that one up, Steve. I guess in response to that word that we've used a lot already this morning is it is a portfolio for us across healthcare. What we've seen in the first half is very strong growth in our ophthalmology therapeutic sector. We've also seen strong growth in our sensors and analytics subsectors. What we have seen on the flip side is weaker demand in life sciences that we've touched on and somewhat weaker demand on patient assessment. So I think for us, as we're thinking through the budgetary pressures, we are seeing that globally. both publicly and private systems, they're having an impact on their short-term allocations of budgets. All of that said, if you take a big step back and think of the end markets that we're in, again, over the medium term, we still see those long-term growth drivers. In the immediate short term, from a destocking perspective, where we are seeing it, certainly in life sciences, There's a few indicators of modest recovery in those markets, but we're again not expecting a big bounce back in the second half of the year. And again, for context, life sciences makes up around 15 percent of the sector of health care. And I guess the final point I would make is with those budgetary pressures, a number of healthcare providers are really tackling those challenges of increases costs such as labour. And what we're then seeing is an increase in demand for efficiency and automation, which is serving that growth that we've seen in sensor and analytics. So very much going forward, we're not immune to these challenges, but it's going to be a portfolio effect again for our healthcare sector in the second half. And just one, sorry, I've got two other questions here. One again, Aurelio on R&D versus M&A. Sorry, it's bouncing around on the screen. Should we see these as a trade-off or can you continue to run higher R&D than historical levels as M&A spend picks up. So once again, if we step back, our model's very clear.

Our number one priority is organic profit generation. That generates the cash. We then look to invest that cash. Our first priority is to continue to maintain our position with our existing businesses. So it's to invest in the CapEx and the R&D. Our next priority then is in terms of M&A and then it's with regards to making returns to shareholders. In terms of the R&D spend, the R&D spend is going up because our revenue generation is so strong. But in percentage terms, it's staying fairly flat around five and a half percent. I'm pleased to say in FY23 and what we're seeing in FY24 is we're not making trade-offs, as the question alludes to, because we can do both. And with the guidance that we've given you this morning, I would expect us to be able to invest in R&D the way we need to and continue to pursue quality acquisitions.

So I think our model is very clear. One final question from Stefan. Other buy and build peers have recently talked about transaction multiples coming down. Do you see the same within your M&A fund? Stefan, I'll pick that one up. I guess the easy answer is no, we're not seeing a reduction per se in multiples. And I think really you've got to take that step back. We are looking to buy high quality businesses with hammer-like financials. We're looking to acquire businesses that aren't for sale, often in private transactions. So As yet, we certainly haven't seen that downward pressure. Will it come? I don't suspect that we'll see a material decline in the multiples that we're paying, because as I say, we're looking at high quality businesses that we can bring into the group and help them grow for decades moving forward. Okay. It doesn't appear that we have any other hands up. So the last thing for me to say is to say thank you for your time. Thank you for your questions. And we'll speak soon.