Essentra H1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
July 29, 2025

Key Takeaways

  • Neutral Sentiment: Revenue was down 1.1% on a constant currency basis in H1 but showed sequential improvement from Q1 to Q2, with Europe recovering from a low base, the Americas returning to growth, and Asia up 9.5%.
  • Positive Sentiment: Adjusted operating profit of £16.5 million delivered a 10.8% margin in H1, and management expects margins to expand in H2 through pricing actions and operational efficiencies.
  • Positive Sentiment: Strong cash generation with 105.5% free cash flow conversion and net debt at 1.5x EBITDA leaves the balance sheet well-positioned for further M&A opportunities.
  • Positive Sentiment: A forensic pricing programme is standardizing discounts and optimizing average selling prices, with early benefits evident in Q2 and anticipated to boost margins and new business wins.
  • Positive Sentiment: Footprint optimisation—including closing the Costa Rica site and exiting Japan—alongside investment in US automation is set to reduce costs and improve customer service in H2.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Essentra H1 2025
00:00 / 00:00

There are 3 speakers on the call.

Speaker 2

Good morning all. Welcome to Essentra plc Half Year Results for 2025. I'm Scott Fawcett, Chief Executive. Delighted to be with you again, joined by Rowan Baker, our CFO, who will take us through financial highlights. A quick summary from me as we start. Pleasing set of results. The market continues to be, I guess the best definition heard yesterday was choppy, so it's clearly not plain sailing. There's still enough macroeconomic chall, but pleasing set of results with some clear progression and sequential improvement from what was a very tough end of 2024 for us. Revenue 1.1% lower on a constant currency basis. Slightly different performance by the three regions, which is as we described coming into the year. Europe coming off a very low base, again showing some sequential improvement both from a second half into the first half and also from Q1 into Q2.

Speaker 2

Americas returning to growth in the period, which is great, and Asia continuing to see growth through the first half as well. I think importantly we are seeing some sequential revenue and order intake improvement, which gives us some enthusiasm as we head into the second half as well. Very much still controlling what's in our control, seeking to win new business in markets that are more positive, typically that energy transition and digital infrastructure markets, often driven by our access hardware or increasingly some of our cable management type products as well. Lots of work on new product introductions in the first half and a number of other commercial and operational initiatives in place.

Speaker 2

We have done a couple of footprint changes, which I'll talk through in the regional slides, and also some good work on pricing, which I think both Rowan and I will both touch on as we go through as well. Overall we remain well positioned. We will continue to work the market as we see it. If market volumes do improve, we're in a very, very good place to take advantage of that. Lots of flexibility in the footprint, lots of good support in the organ to enable us to take advantage of that growth as it does come through. Balance sheet remains strong, giving us optionality around acquisition as well. I'll give a quick update towards the end in terms of where we are from an M&A point of view.

Speaker 2

Overall pleasing set of results, very much in line with our expectations and some improvements as we're coming through the quarters, which give us a good position to start H2. With that, let me hand over to Rowan, who will take us through the financial performance.

Operator

Thanks very much, Scott. Good morning, everyone. Just turning to our financial results for June 30, 2025, a few key highlights for you. Revenue stood at £152.4 million and adjusted operating profit of £16.5 million with a margin of 10.8%. As Scott said, this is doing exactly what we thought it would, exactly as was well flagged in terms of the margins moving year on year. Adjusted earnings per share were at 3.4 pence and we had an excellent level of cash conversion at 105.5%. Our net debt to adjusted EBITDA stood at 1.5 times. That ratio has risen since the year end and that is a function of our 12-month EBITDA rather than our net debt because our net debt stayed pretty consistent with the year end position. Our return on invested capital, again a function of those lower earnings, was at 9.3%.

Operator

We've declared an interim dividend per share of £0.008, which will be paid in October. Taking a look at the income statement, you can see at the top there, revenue down by 1.1% on a constant currency basis. That read through to a gross profit of £66.5 million at a gross margin of 43.6%. That's down on the prior year and that dilution is mainly due to volume, our geographic sales mix, and Turkish wage cost inflation. Actually, that was a bit challenging in Q1 to be able to offset with pricing, given all the currency dynamics there as well. We've put a lot of effort into cost control so that we could offset some of that margin variance. By the time we get to adjusted operating profit, the margin was offset slightly to get us to a 10.8% operating margin.

Operator

Whilst we're on operating margins, we are expecting H2 to improve and that will mainly be driven by commercial and operational initiatives that have already been actioned. In the first half, we have taken some action on our footprint and Scott will update on that when we come to the regional updates in a moment. We have put a lot of emphasis and effort into our pricing initiatives, which is starting to show some benefit as we've moved through Q2. That sets us up well for that margin improvement in the second half. Moving further down the P&L, net finance expense remained consistent year on year at £4 million, leading us to an adjusted profit before tax of £12.5 million. Our effective tax rate was a little bit lower there at 22.4% due to the fact that we released a tax provision in Germany.

Operator

That gives us an adjusted basic EPS of 3.4 pence. Just a word on revenue, there are some moving parts here in a mixed picture as Scott highlighted. That 1.1% constant currency revenue variance year on year is made up of 4.5% negative in EMEA. That is a sequentially improving position that we see throughout the first half of this year, really starting from the challenges that we had in half two last year. Americas is pleasing actually at plus 0.7%, particularly given the tariff challenges that took place in April and May. APAC performing strongly at plus 9.5%. Those movements are mainly in volume, but as I said we're just starting to see some of that pricing improvement come through. As we move through Q2 we are seeing good sequential improvement compared to that half two 2024 exit run rate with further momentum seen Q1 into Q2.

Operator

The other thing to mention on this chart is we can see the FX translation, so FX impact minus 3.5%. That equates to about $5.5 million of revenue explained by that FX movement. Of course, don't forget that we are against some strong comparatives in half one and those will ease through the second half. Adjusting items, fairly straightforward position here. We have our software as a service costs consistent year on year. That's mainly our ERP deployment, $4.9 million. We've got some costs relating to acquisitions, disposals, and restructuring. We also have our legacy defined benefit pension scheme charge of $0.8 million and some other provision releases which get us to $5.7 million overall. You can see that's lower than the prior year and we would expect that to be in the region of $12 million for the full year, so pretty much double what we've got there.

Operator

Moving on to cash, we perform strongly on cash. Adjusted free cash flow of $11.9 million, we have strong cash flow conversion, 106%, well ahead of our 85% target. Just a couple of points to note on the chart there. The first gray bar, that's working capital. I want to make the point that that isn't related to inventory investment. That is more a function of increased level of debtors that we would get in the half year compared to the quieter activity, particularly in Europe, that we would have around the Christmas period at year end. That's mainly that, and CapEx sitting at around 3% of sales. That's a function of strong cost control in the first half. Our guidance is normally 4% to 5%. I would say for this year we'd see sitting slightly lower at more like the 3 to 4% level on CapEx.

Operator

Moving further on through the chart, we have an adjusting items bar £5.9 million, broadly equivalent to the P&L cost there, but then we also have legacy items on there. We had an outflow for a specific provision actually in relation to a property that sat with the old Essentra. All of that, of course, leading us to a pretty consistent picture on the net debt, £68.7 million against the £68.2 million that we opened the year with. During the period, we also took the opportunity to exercise our plus one extension for our RCF, which secures our funding up until 2030. This gives us a strong funding position to take us forward, obviously with the same banks on the same terms. Good to see some of you here today. Thanks for coming and looking forward on the cash, we are expecting a couple of inflows in the second half.

Operator

Not exactly in control of the timing, but we do have these on the balance sheet already, so you can see them there. It's the final tranche of the deferred consideration from the filters transaction, is sort of equivalent to the one we had in November last year. That's held on the balance sheet for just under £10 million, and then we have a couple of assets held for sale on the balance sheet at £10.7 million, which we are well progressed with the sale of, which we're expecting to come in in the second half. That's all I wanted to cover really in terms of the half year results themselves, and just looking forward to the medium term, I just wanted to bring back slide which is exactly as was presented at the full year just to draw your attention to a couple of points on this slide.

Operator

This sets out our margin target, 2030 margin target of 18% at the adjusted operating margin level, and a couple of things to note here. 2025 we absolutely said would tick backwards in terms of the margins. Now that's, that's clearly exactly what we're seeing in the first half. We do expect some margin improvement in the second half, but overall for the year we're expecting margins to be down compared to 2024, that being due to the geographic mix, bringing back of variable compensation, and we also said we would offset whatever we could with driving efficiencies through the business. There's a number of moving parts in this chart, so won't go through it all. It remains exactly as we previously obviously set out, so all the assumptions remaining the same. I just wanted to draw your attention to the final bar really on the chart.

Operator

We do have some market growth assumptions within this chart. It is a tough market out there. I just wanted to make the point that if you look at the end of this chart, what we're really saying here is that with these relatively conservative assumptions for market growth, we can get to that 18%, but we also have optionality with the way we get to the 18% because actually you'll note the M&A section to the bar at the end. Ultimately, some sort of combination of the M&A and the market growth could get us to the 18% in the varying proportions according to what we're seeing in the market at the time. We do have that optionality to bring in M&A to help us to get to that 18%. With that, I will hand you back to Scott for the regional updates.

Speaker 2

Perfect, thank you. Okay, let's walk through each of the three regions and talk about the dynamics for each. Europe minus 4.5%. We talked and obviously talked a lot at the start of the year about H2 performance in Europe. It really was a challenge for us both with the challenges we had with inflation and devaluation in Turkey, but also underlying market growth in Europe given weakening PMIs through the second half of the year. Great to see progress from that second half and that exit rate and also progress Q1 into Q2 and good levels of new order growth supporting us at the start of H2 as well. We are seeing the greatest strength in access hardware led by the Turkish business, which is great from a revenue point of view and does have this geographical mix dilution effect on margins unfortunately.

Speaker 2

Again, we're looking to win that in growing markets. Energy transformation and digital in particular, I guess pleasingly, and it's been a while, we have added resource back into the business in both Turkey and in the BMP business in Milan in Italy as we're starting to see demand become greater than our capacity to serve that demand. Lead times are starting to extend. Once to get on top of that, service is really important to us as a business. We have added direct labor back into those two facilities. That's a positive sign as we're trading through Q2. Please say four more ERP deployments in the first half. Sweden and Finland at the start of June, Italy and South Africa at the end of June, all gone very well. However, overall we have seen this temporary margin dilution.

Speaker 2

Both the underlying volume decline hitting operational gearing, the sales mix, impact from Turkey, Turkish inflation and also investing in service has led to that negative margin movement. We do see margins improving as we're coming into the second half. Our expectation is that revenues will remain broadly the same on a sales per day basis and that along with our pricing initiatives will help us drive margin and revenue growth for the second half of the year. I think really interestingly, from a cross-sell point of view and a performance of our acquisitions point of view, we continue to see good revenue driver coming from the last two acquisitions we often talk about. Our key value driver for acquired businesses is taking their products and cross-selling them to our existing customers.

Speaker 2

We broadly doubled the run rate from H2 last year into H1 this year across both BMP and in Wixroyd, again demonstrating that inorganic growth strategy does work and we can drive revenue and synergies from that. Moving over to Americas, great to see Americas coming back into growth in the period. This is despite some uncertainty around Liberation Day; we actually had a stronger Q1 than Q2 in the Americas. The exit rate for Q2 has come back to strength, but April and May were definitely a little bit weaker just given the uncertainty in the marketplace. Again, will remind us on the tariff position. Our direct tariff exposure is minimal, in fact possibly advantageous to us. The impact on the wider economy and the uncertainty in the wider economy is unhelpful.

Speaker 2

We definitely felt some of that during April and maybe May, but June has recovered into that Q1 rate of growth, which is encouraging. We are positioned to manage those tariffs. We have had some price increases, both general price increase, but also in reaction to some of the tariffs that have been in play through Q2. The team have done a great job of protecting margins through that process. Typically, we're manufacturing more in the U.S. than our average competitor, where we are buying goods from Asia. All of our competition, so the market will absorb pricing in that situation. In terms of self help, we are in the process of closing our site in Costa Rica. Clearly always a difficult decision to close a facility. In this case, we are moving that manufacturing capability over to Mexico.

Speaker 2

We have this large site in Mexico that's been open for a couple of years now, underutilized. We can get better absorption through that site with this move. As importantly, we also improve customer service because we significantly reduce leakage lead times by moving from Costa Rica to Mexico. Costa Rica will actually cease manufacturing this month. Mexico has already started the manufacturing of this product line and that will come fully on board during Q3. As we come through the year, we're expecting more gross margin accretion, both the operational activities we've undertaken, but also the full impact of pricing that's come into place during Q2. Americas is probably the strongest region of the three for pricing through Q2 and has got good momentum as we're coming into the second half. Just to show that it's not all cost cutting in Essentra, we do invest in the business.

Speaker 2

We're running CapEx around 3% of sales, so slightly below our long-term average. This is one of our larger projects that's come to life in the first half. A $1.3 million investment in a new manufacturing capability in Erie. This is a dip molding machine. Any of you who have been to any of our facilities here or in the U.S., we run this in three or four sites, but it's a new generation, much quicker cycle time, much better efficiency, better quality, lower waste. A great example of us investing in the manufacturing footprint to drive efficiencies and drive margins as we trade through the rest of the year. Nice to see that coming online as well. Finally, into Asia. Good to see consistent growth in Asia. As we saw coming out of 2024, China is a little mixed domestically.

Speaker 2

We've seen quite a weak demand in some of our access hardware products, stronger demand in some of our electronics products. Every silver cloud has a black lining for us at this point in time. We're looking at this and wondering whether some of that upside is driven by tariff ordering ahead. We'll watch that. It's not going to be material from a group point of view, but just looking at that China trading as we come through Q3 in particular, we are still seeing good growth in access hardware around the rest of the region. That's been a big driver for us in the first half. Some good investment in Southeast Asia in the first half of the year. The first of our new generation websites have gone live in Vietnam. This is new technology, new user interface, new product taxonomy.

Speaker 2

This is a platform that we'll see rolling out across the rest of the group in the next couple of years. We also put some additional stock into Thailand, into our manufacturing site in Rayong to better serve the domestic market in Thailand. Sales and marketing activities going live this month to drive that initiative. Nice to see Southeast Asia having some momentum as well. From a footprint and cost point of view, we've amended our go-to-market in Japan. Historically, we had a small local team and a 3PL warehouse. We haven't successfully grown the Japanese business for a number of years. We've taken the decision to close our legal entity in Japan and withdraw from the market in terms of our own footprint. We're partnering with one of our distributors in the market.

Speaker 2

We're giving them a little bit of gross margin but saving quite a lot of SG&A in the process. That has incremental benefit for us into the second half of the year as well. We are seeing a little bit of margin dilution in Asia-Pacific from some large customer transactions right now, expecting that to normalize as we come through the year. Pipeline looks strong, some pricing coming into play. Same story as the other two regions. Asia margins will improve as we come through the rest of H2. That's it from a regional point of view. If we move forward and just step back and think about the strategic update and positioning of the business, let's remind you of how we make money and why we make money. We have uniquely positioned ourselves as an expert in five different product technologies.

Speaker 2

These have predominantly grown through acquisition over the last 15 years and we now have these five areas whereby we're manufacturing and able to demonstrate that expertise. We're taking those five products into a broad industrial customer set, focusing our efforts on these five growth markets which we think will outperform the industrial cycle. This is where we're seeing some reasonable growth in the first half, particularly digital infrastructure and the energy transition segments. Conversely, the weakest performance sections in the first half were automotive and the consumer electronics products. Exactly those B2C markets that we've been reducing our exposure to over the past decade. We typically win business by being able to demonstrate the expertise here into one of the customer sectors. The real key magic for us is then growing our customers by taking them across more than one product sector, cross-selling them into different product areas.

Speaker 2

You see a little bit of the success of that coming through those BMP and Wixroyd numbers where we cross-sold those newly acquired products into our existing customers. Keeping customers by offering them great service is clearly the key. It's more of a service-led proposition than price-led proposition. We're selling these small, relatively low cost but critical components where service really is the key dynamic for our customers underneath the business. Anybody who has the opportunity to come to one of our facilities, it's a high transaction business. There are half a million transactions flowing through the business. Tens of thousands of customers, tens of thousands of products. It's that high mix that creates the value, that creates the margin.

Speaker 2

Anybody could sell millions of a single component to a single customer, but you're not likely to make the types of margins that we make through this high mix type of business model that we've developed. That high margin generates good cash conversion, as Rowan's demonstrated, which we can then reinvest into the business for future growth, be that on new products, sustainable products, which I'll talk about in a moment, into our sales and marketing efforts, and into accretive M&A as well. Very much a self-fulfilling wheel coming through that value creation. A quick reminder on footprint. We've talked about a little bit of footprint changes this year in terms of Costa Rica and Japan closures, but we still have a very well-invested local-for-local footprint.

Speaker 2

I think if you sat back and thought about a perfect world, we have too much capacity and too much footprint, but in a world of uncertainty, in a world where we expect markets to recover at some point, the footprint will put us in a very good position to take advantage of that and to navigate through any uncertainty or further trade challenges that do occur. Pleased with where we are from a footprint point of view, a little bit of work in the first half to remove a little bit of excellent success, but generally that flexibility puts us in a very strong position to react to any market activities, be that a return to growth in markets or be that a different trade policy outcome. Frozen a little, frozen a lot. She can force me forward. Perfect. Thank you. Moving on to sustainability.

Speaker 2

Sustainability remains important to our customers. We have large parts on offer which are plastic products in their nature, so it is important we continue to look at ways to reduce the carbon footprint of both our operations, but also our products. Great progress in the first half. We continue to drive a lot of material trials, both recycled content and also bio-based materials through our center of excellence here in the UK. We have now launched our first 100% post-consumer recycled product to add to our post-industrial recycled products that we've been running for the last couple of years. So recycled content back above 20% and also from an energy point of view, we actually look like we're going to hit our SBTI 2030 target by the end of this year.

Speaker 2

Again, looking to reset that and continue to see positive movement in terms of our ESG ratings and breaking news of this week. Just received our Ecovadis gold medal, which is great and great progress. Thank you again to everybody who's been involved in achieving that. Moving on to M&A, the M&A pipeline continues to be active. We have a broad pipeline covering the geographies, covering our different product areas. We are rigorous in terms of our discipline here, so we always look for accretive M&A. That 15% year three ROIC is a really important area for us, and we're managing our valuation expectations in line with broader market softness. Active conversations are continuing. We talked about three at the full year results.

Speaker 2

Actually, all three of them are still live and active now, and hope that we can come back to you guys at some point later, Q3 or Q4, with positive news from an M&A point of view. Moving on to outlook, where does that leave us? With the first half very much as we expected, we are seeing some signs of improvement as we trade through the year. As we've talked about, PMIs have nudged back above 50 globally, and that impact on our underlying trading volumes has also continued to be more positive. I guess encouragingly, from an orders per day point of view, we've seen a good level of orders per day through Q1 and Q2. Actually, probably most encouraging, Q2—Q1's typically our largest orders per day. We do see some annual orders getting placed at the start of the year.

Speaker 2

To almost match that rate into Q2 is probably the standout performance and obviously puts us in a good position as we're heading into the second half of the year. Obviously, we've been working through difficult markets for some time now, so we're not over celebrating or over relaxing, but there are some encouraging signs in terms of order momentum and the wider market right now. Therefore, we remain unchanged in our expectations for the year. We have done exactly what we thought in H1, and we're well positioned for the second half of the year. We do think the trading conditions will continue to be mixed. No doubt there'll be another challenge thrown upon us during the second half, but we have enough levers to manage through. We're expecting H2 margins to expand. Our assumption is a continuation of Q2 volumes.

Speaker 2

Effectively, the pricing initiatives taking place in all three regions, footprint efficiencies, and some of the optimization that we've done in the first half are also delivering value, all of which will help us achieve our full year expectations and leave us on track for our medium term as well. Overall, looking forward, we remain focused on market share growth. This remains an excellent business. We are very well positioned. We sell these low cost but essential products into a very broad range of customers. We've built a very broad range of products that nobody else can match. Service differentiated rather than price differentiated. Lots of flexibility in the footprint to be able to react to the market, be that market growth or market dynamics changing.

Speaker 2

Very well positioned to navigate through the market, whatever gets thrown at us in the balance of the year or moving forward if and when markets do recover. The operational gearing we all know is very strong in the business. We can take advantage of that as some normality comes back into the industrial landscape. That's it from us. All that remains is for me to give a big thank you to everybody inside Essentra for all their hard work through the first half. It continues to be challenging, it continues to be exciting, but lots of good things going on. Hopefully we've touched on some of those today and we're well positioned to ride into the second half as well. With that, I will open up to Q and A.

Speaker 2

Do you want to come down the front and we'll run the front row of our analyst community to write down three questions. I'll do one at a time. Thank you. Good morning both. Andrew Douglas from Jeffries. Can you talk, and I think this might be for Rowan, a bit more about the pricing initiatives and the dynamic pricing that you guys are probably not the right word, but kind of rolling out use of data to try and push pricing through. Can you just explain how that's going and what else is needed to be done on pricing, please?

Operator

Yeah. Okay. We've had quite a big push on this and really, as you say, using the data in the organization. We've had some pricing analyst support and some consultancy help with this as well a little bit. It comes down to a few things. It comes down to how we're controlling our discounting, ensuring that we are able to keep good control of that and that we can see actually where discounting has been given. It comes down to average selling prices. We often can get a wide range of selling prices actually by product for various reasons. There may be some high volume coming through there that commands a different price. Ultimately, when we look at it, it gives us an opportunity to bring the pricing as a whole more up to that average. You look at the outliers, bring those up.

Operator

It's a forensic look at that, also looking at lower margin and where we've got lower price and lower volume. Ultimately, a customer perhaps we've agreed a price with long ago that actually the volumes have come down but we haven't addressed the pricing. It's a very forensic, very detailed look at it and one of the advantages it gives us as well is the price setting going forward. Ultimately, you know, we have our sales teams out in the field trying to set pricing. When there's a range of possible prices and a range of customers, it will actually give them more guidance as to how to set that price in the first place. That won't come through as a pricing benefit. That'll come through in the new business.

Operator

Ultimately, yeah, we have been looking at this in a really detailed way, getting that consistency using the data and we've been rolling that out through the course of the year and starting to see that benefit towards the back end of Q2 as things have been actioned.

Speaker 2

Perfect. It looks like ERP rollout's going well. Can you just remind us what's left? I think it's UK and Turkey. Okay, and Turkey, exactly. UK planned for December, Turkey somewhere around the summer next year. UK requirement sessions are underway now. We'll be going into build shortly for that. That should be a reasonably, try to use the word straightforward process, but it's basically taking what you've done previous across Europe and just rolling it out. It's the biggest manufacturing site we will have done. We've got manufacturing in Barcelona running on the new platform. It's a bigger manufacturing site. That's where our attention efforts are. The warehousing, sales, finance processes we're pretty comfortable with. The real key focus is on the manufacturing process flows. That's where the requirements are in and that's where the testing we're really focused on.

Speaker 2

Lastly, on your strategy slide, you had defense as one of your five key markets. Can you just talk about how that's progressing and if there's more stuff that needs to be done to make sure that you're benefiting from what's going to be a buoyant defense market across Europe? We've done various sales and marketing campaigns during the first half of the year and they are progressing. Relatively small base for us. Also, our defense business can be two or three tiers away from many tier one defense contractors. It could just be somebody making a metal cabinet that ends up being somewhere through into the defense sector. We are seeing some good progress, we are seeing some wins of business. Both access hardware product wins going into specialist vehicle sectors.

Speaker 2

Armored vehicles tends to be an area that we do do well, and also some plastic components going into some other areas as well. There are some wins coming through. It's a relatively small number and it's quite a fragmented market for us. It could actually be in a tier 3, which may not immediately look like defense, but we're putting some focus onto it and there's quite a nice marketing campaign that's been developed to help the sales teams. Thank you.

Speaker 2

Thank you. Andrew Nossi from Peel Hunt. Just following on that pricing point, when we look through the second half and into next year, how much of your pricing benefits that you're thinking is coming from that pricing sophistication, pricing agility as opposed to just passing on increased inflation? I guess high level, we're still in the very early stages of that pricing agility and smartness.

Operator

That's actually a really hard question to directly differentiate between the general pricing action and the more specific. It's really providing the tools to inform those price increases, because a blanket price rise of X% may not be the way to go. It may be better to look at individual products and individual customers and do it in a more targeted way, rather than a blanket rise, which in a tough market may be more difficult to get through. I can't really differentiate exactly between the two, but generally the business has done a very good job in the past of outperforming inflation with its pricing, and we've done that without this level of sophistication behind it. We should be able to outperform what we've delivered in the past using that.

Operator

We are very arguably at the early stages of actually understanding all that pricing.

Operator

Yes, we're only just rolling out, so the benefit will be yet to come over time.

Speaker 2

Yeah, we've seen 2% of the total opportunity. You're probably surprised.

Operator

Yeah, exactly.

Operator

The second point around the footprint changes obviously put in place in the first half, if we subscribe to the view of improving markets, do you see more opportunity to tweak that footprint?

Speaker 2

No. I mean, on the surface, yes, but given the way the world operates, and also it's been a while, when there is an upcycle, volumes do return to the business quite typically very quickly. Therefore, having flexibility in the footprint will be important to us. We have no intentions to change further. I think if we were in a very benign market that was never going to recover and the world was trading beautifully with each other, then there'd be an argument we should further reduce footprint. That's not the environment we find ourselves in and I think we'll benefit from that flexibility. Admittedly, higher cost base than you may want to have in a benign market, but when volumes do recover, they're likely to be quite quick and therefore having that flexibility would be important.

Speaker 2

Great, thank you. I have three, but perhaps do them one at a time, if that's all right. Interesting order per day chart in the outlook with Q2 versus Q1. Could you perhaps provide a bit more detail in terms of what like for likes were in the three different regions in Q2 versus Q1.

Speaker 2

From memory, Americas was stronger in Q1 than Q2 and a like for like I think plus 3 minus a little bit, broadly getting nods from Claire, which again was very much around the April May period where it slowed, and actually that more like plus 3 trajectory is how we exited the year. Europe got better. I can't quote you but 6 and 4 or something against the overall decline or 6 and 3. Progress. Asia actually slowed first quarter into second quarter, but still both pretty strong. Asia broadly the same, Europe improving, Americas slightly worsening, but on a Liberation Day impact. Sequentially, if you look Q1 to Q2 on a daily run rate basis, Americas and Asia-Pacific were broadly stable and Europe had some growth Q1 into Q2. That's despite the Americas Liberation Day challenge, as we saw.

Speaker 2

In the presentation, there's one comment that you expect gross margins to improve in the Americas in the second half, and then also you sort of talk about the footprint. Just wondering what's driving that gross margin improvement in the Americas, and what's the EBIT margin benefit from closing Costa Rica and Japan, not perhaps in 2025, but on a sort of 2026, 2027 basis.

Operator

Gross margins in Americas second half mainly driven by pricing and the cost of recovery, weaker move. Those two things, primarily the site closures themselves on an annualized basis, will drive sort of $1 million to $1.5 million of benefit to the business.

Operator

Finally, you stressed the point that the working cap outflow in the first half was not due to inventory. What level of inventory investment would you have to make as the market improves? Obviously, it depends on how quickly, where, et cetera, but can you perhaps give us guidance in terms of what we should be thinking?

Speaker 2

Two thoughts. We're still sitting on more inventory than we need for the current level of demand. We have flexed that inventory around a little bit. We had inventory going into Germany at the end of last year to support the German go live. That's gradually coming down. We actually have put in inventory into UK manufactured products ahead of the ERP go live at the end of the year. That inventory, it's not sat in the UK, it's currently sat between Germany and Poland. There's been an inventory investment and despite that, the overall inventory has remained stable. We're slightly ahead of demand from an inventory point of view to manage through the ERP. To make sure we're managing that well, we probably should come back and model precisely. We get great almost up gearing impact through inventory.

Speaker 2

Your inventory and revenues are not flowing anything alike in line with each other. It's probably a 4 to 1 ratio or something. Sweating the inventory asset just becomes much easier as revenues are increasing. There will be a drag. We've put an even better stock modeling solution in place, it's Anaplan Connected Planning, which will look at all of the demand history but also now looks at things like PMI data as an input into our stocking position. We're not just relying on history. That will give us the algorithm that drives that inventory position and we'll be true to that. We won't over manage that because we know service is so important.

Speaker 2

We'll definitely invest where it tells us to invest if market indicators on our own revenue trends are saying it needs to add inventory, but it definitely is a big gearing impact on the inventory base in reality. James. Hi, James Biff from Deutsche Numis, can you comment in a little bit more detail about what happened in Turkey during the first half of the year within EMEA? Specifically, how much of the gross margin diminution was a function of what happened in Turkey and just give a little bit more background and context around some of the pricing challenges within that business you start. It was a continuation of what happened at the end of last year, our unfortunate downgrade in September last year. Over half of that was down to the movements in Turkey first half versus second half.

Speaker 2

We've seen that come into this year but improve through the course of the year. The situation we've had is we had a very high minimum wage increase in January. The Turkish lira remained strong, so we couldn't offset all of that through pricing. Domestic Turkish demand still remained relatively sluggish because our customers were struggling with the same dynamics that we had that improved quite dramatically to the point of 1,000 basis points on Turkish margin Q1 to Q2. Q2 has got much better than Q1. Q1 was pretty horrible as the lira has devalued more strongly through Q2, and we've just put some pricing in place that will have a further impact. If we look at the gross margin challenge in Europe, about 40% of that is negative up gearing just given revenue.

Speaker 2

About 40% of it is Turkey impact, which is an impact of both the weaker margin and the growing element of Turkey as part of the overall, and then the rest of it isn't then linked to us managing pricing and inflation and the like.

Operator

I have literally nothing to add.

Speaker 2

Oh, good. I could talk about hyperinflation accounting next.

Operator

Please do any more for any more. Great.

Speaker 2

Okay, thank you all for your time. We will be around if anybody has any follow-up questions, but thank you for listening and look forward to H2.

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