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Hello, and welcome to the Spectris Quarter 3 Trading Update Conference Call. My name is Emily, and I will be coordinating the call today. [Operator Instructions] I now have the pleasure of handing the call over to our host, Andrew Heath, Chief Executive. Please go ahead.
Thank you, and good morning, and welcome to this Spectris Q3 trading update. I'm Andrew Heath, and I'm joined by Derek Harding, our CFO, to discuss our performance in the third quarter of 2021. Thanks to the continued great work for the whole Spectris team, we delivered a solid trading performance in the third quarter, very much consistent with our expectations at the half year. All our businesses continue to perform well. The strong recovery in our end markets has continued. And additionally, the execution of our strategic growth initiatives has helped us to grow ahead of the market, as we focus on supporting our customers and launching new products and services. We've said at the time of our half year results, the supply chain issues were frustrating but manageable, but that we also foresaw the situation potentially becoming more challenging as we move into the second half. That is proving to be the case as many other businesses are reporting. We are now finding that in the short term, the supply chain is constraining our ability to translate our very strong order intake to sales. And we are, of course, working diligently to mitigate this impact, and we continue to deliver for our customers. Now despite these short-term headwinds, we are maintaining our full year guidance of 10% to 12% like-for-like sales growth. The strength of our order book gives us good visibility for Q4 and support our outlook for the remainder of the year and also provides further momentum heading into 2022. Looking at our performance in more detail. We have seen our order book and pipeline continue to expand, supported by the strong customer demand for our products. Orders grew 31% on a like-for-like basis in the quarter and 21% up year-to-date. For the group as a whole, like-for-like sales increased 12% in the third quarter and year-to-date were 13% higher. Like-for-like sales have also -- were also higher in all our end markets year-to-date. Now energy and utilities is our only major end market that is still lower, but that is progressively improving. And encouragingly, we saw an automotive return to growth in Q3, and that's now recovered to flat year-to-date. Like-for-like sales increased in all regions, with the strongest performance in Asia, and we saw continued strength both in China and South Korea. In North America and Europe, like-for-like sales were 11% and 9% higher, respectively. Turning now to our businesses. In Malvern Panalytical, we recorded a 10% increase in like-for-like sales in the last quarter, and that's up 18% year-to-date, with particularly strong growth into Asia. Notably, sales into academic research have recovered well after closings impacted demand last year. Our sales in the pharma customers continue to be robust, especially for our systems and especially into Europe. And we're also experiencing good growth now in primary and advanced materials. At HBK, like-for-like sales increased 16% in the quarter, increasing the year-to-date growth to 11%. As I mentioned, the automotive sector returned to growth this quarter, with like-for-like sales higher in all regions, especially Asia. Since February, orders continue to rise every month across our product portfolio, with machine manufacturing being a continued standout performer as it has been since 2020. At Omega, our strategic initiatives are helping drive the recovery of performance here with like-for-like sales 11% higher in Q3, 13% up year-to-date. The website improvements, new product launches and sales channel expansion strategy are all driving growth, especially in North America, ahead of the market. And sales in Asia are also significantly up. In Industrial Solutions, here, we posted a 9% like-for-like sales increase over the past 3 months, with continued strong demand from pharmaceutical and semiconductor customers after a lower first half sales into energy and utilities did return to growth in the quarter. And overall, ISD is up 11% on sales year-to-date. I just want to inform you that I was looking forward to sharing more about our ISD businesses later this afternoon with Mary Beth Siddons, our President of Industrial Solutions. Unfortunately, Mary Beth has had to travel back to the U.S. this morning at short notice due to urgent family reasons. Her mother is quite unwell. Accordingly, we will be rescheduling the presentation we plan to make this afternoon to a later date. As I'm sure you would agree, family comes first. Turning now to our balance sheet and M&A. Our businesses remain highly cash generative, and we ended the quarter with net cash of GBP 58 million. This is after the payment of the acquisition of Concurrent Real-Time, which completed in July. In October, we also completed our GBP 200 million share buyback program. Over the last few months, we've also made a small acquisition, an industrial analytics software acquisition from VIMANA. It will bring data analytics expertise and a proven data management technology platform, hopefully to advance HBK software strategy. And we'll be forming a new engineering center of excellence around this technology, focused on data management and IoT platforms. We continue to review and review our opportunity pipeline for further acquisitions. And on the divestment side, we expect to complete the NDC Technologies transaction before the year-end and have advised the financial impact in today's press release. At our H1 results, we set out our net zero targets. I'm very pleased to say that they have now been validated by the Science Based Target initiative. In support of our ambitious targets, we have implemented a group-wide energy management system, and we're also undertaking a series of energy efficiency audits to monitor and report our energy data. Underlying our commitment to the Race to Zero, we've also signed the 1.5-degree Business Pledge. To support our employees and in recognition of World Mental Health Day, we launched our Be Kind to your Mind program and hosted a series of presentations on mental health and well-being. And in support of our communities, our STEM program is being advanced, with numerous outreach events in the quarter. And work also continues on the Spectris Foundation, and we are on course to make our first donations before the end of the year, which is clearly an exciting development. So in summary, I'm very pleased with our results in the third quarter. As I said, we delivered a solid performance. Our order book has continued to expand, providing momentum through the end of the year and into 2022. While the supply chain issues are annoying, we're having to work hard to mitigate the impact. The order book provides good visibility for Q4, and we are affirming our outlook and our expectations for a 10% to 12% like-for-like sales growth for the full year. I'm also very pleased with how the group is continuing to deliver on our strategic objectives of organic growth and margin expansion. We have worked hard to get into this position, but we're well positioned in attractive growth markets that are increasingly being supported by sustainability thematics to provide long-term value to our shareholders. And with that, I'll happily open up to questions.
[Operator Instructions] Our first question today comes from Mark Davies Jones from Stifel.
The supply chain constraints, obviously, we're hearing an awful lot about this at the moment. And encouraging that you're sustaining the revenue guidance, but any commentary on what it might mean for costs and profit drop-through? Is there any change to the picture there, either in terms of more inflation that will take time to pass on or just in terms of business mix as those impacts get felt in terms of what you can actually ship?
Mark, thanks for your question. As I said here clearly, supply chain constraints, we're not immune. It's clearly annoying, but our teams are working really hard to mitigate the situation as best we can, and we're taking all sorts of actions to keep our production lines going and to continue to serve our customers. From a profit-cost perspective, I mean, our outlook remains unchanged from the half year. I mean we always knew that we were looking at a larger second half and, therefore, anticipated that the supply chain makes that back in the summer might struggle through the second half of the year to support what we were seeing in terms of our order book growing and sales expansion through the second half, as I said, is previously the case. From a cost perspective, we are seeing input cost inflation. We are having to pay extra freight costs, et cetera, to get product ships. It's also -- it's not just semiconductors, where we're seeing some price inflation. However, as you can see in our statements, from a pricing perspective, we are still being able to offset that input cost inflation through pricing. We have -- all of our businesses have effectively implemented another price increase since June. So all the businesses are effectively -- we review their prices through the year, and that's our second sort of price rise for the year. And clearly, we're looking at what we'll be doing in the start of the new year as well on pricing. So it's good that we're able to offset that. We are also seeing some labor cost inflation. As we've said, sort of the half year. Just depending on exactly where the sales end up for this year, we may see some extra costs having to be -- to support that. But we are being very disciplined right across the group in terms of where we let cost come back in. But as I said, our outlook remains the same as we anticipated at the half year.
Our next question today comes from Jonathan Hurn from Barclays.
Just a few questions from me. I think the first one, just can you just talk a little bit more about the order intake that you've seen? Maybe just give us some color in terms of the order of where it sits at the moment. And how much visibility you have on that order book going into 2022, please? And then just lastly on that, where is the margin of that order book currently sitting? I mean obviously, you're pushing through price increases. That's obviously probably more relevant to new orders. In terms of that sort of order book, are we seeing a sort of a higher margin now coming through there? That was the first one.
So I mean on the order intake side, as I said, Jonathan, we are effectively seeing growth in all of our key end markets other than energy and utilities, which is currently recovering. Automotive has gone back to flat. Pharma, as being one of the standout areas, we've certainly seen a very strong recovery in pharma sort of restarted from June last year and has carried on, particularly helping sort of Malvern Panalytical, PMS and, to some extent, Servomex. The semiconductor market is very strong, which again is supporting Malvern Panalytical, PMS, Servomex, in particular. The machine building within HBK was strong all the way through 2020, and the momentum there has continued through this year. So overall, feeling really good about the way the market responded. They're coming back. And additionally, as I said, also the sort of academic research that remain was 11% of our revenue back in '19 dropped to 7% last year. That's now back in double-digit growth territory. So we're seeing very strong demand really across the board. And one of the questions will be is that just a sort of post-pandemic rebound? Or is it just sort of people restocking? And we don't really see either of that. You can see in our Q3 order intake, over 30% up on orders in Q3. We feel this is very much sort of sustained demand coming through. And as I've said before, really from a restocking perspective, other than sort of a bit of exposure in Omega and Red Lion, all of our other businesses, their orders are very discrete to specific customer projects or specific customer requirements. And typically, our customers just don't buy our equipment to put it on the shelf. So we feel certainly very good about the level of order growth that we're seeing.
Okay. Great. Very clear. Second one is just on the bottlenecks. Can you just -- you're seeing, obviously, the supply chain constraints. Can you just give us a little bit more color, a little bit more depth just in terms of essentially where that's coming through on a business basis, please?
Yes. So Jonathan, it's Derek here. Where that really presents itself is probably similar across the wireless sector. So electronic chips is an example of things that are causing difficulties. And it's often just 1 or 2 components that's either stuck in a port somewhere or stuck on a container and/or in short supply or maybe other people are hoarding them or over-ordering them or whatever. So there's just a shortage of things like that, that really presents itself in our ISD division with some of the products that we're building for the clean air purity work, either in semicon or in clean room technology. It also has an impact on some of our parts within Malvern Panalytical. So those are examples where that comes through. But even down to simple things like cardboards as we head into Christmas and packaging, resins, across the board, there are things just not flowing in the way that they would normally flow. So I guess, it just makes -- it makes life a little more complicated than normal. So it's a range of things. And I guess in the U.S., labor is well documented, labor is a challenge as well, getting people back to work and getting people, particularly sort of on the distribution side of things or the shop floor side of things. That's also a challenge but manageable.
Very clear. And maybe just one last quick one. Just in terms of that sort of 12% like-for-like growth you saw in Q3. Can you just tell us how much of that is pricing? Obviously, you're pushing for price rises. How much sort of that is coming through from that, please?
So that's truly the need. You say how much is down to price versus...
Yes, sorry. So basically, what I was just trying to understand -- trying to get a feel for obviously, you're pushing through price increase, saying that you're managing to get them away. Obviously, you're seeing 12% in the quarter. How much of that 12% was essentially volume and how much you're currently getting through in price, please?
Well, the majority is volume. I mean the -- we've put in there the sort of -- in our trading updates, the net pricing benefit we're receiving, which is just over GBP 7 million year-to-date. So that's really the sort of delta on the pricing over and above the offset against input cost inflation. So the vast majority in reality is volume, with a little bit of price on top just off -- which is net above the cost inflation pressures coming through.
Our next question comes from Harry Philips from Peel Hunt.
Just a few questions on Omega, if I may. Just in terms of how Omega sources from overseas and domestically, if you could just maybe shed some light on that. I'm just curious around the comments on the sales channel expansion. I know you touched on it at the half year, but just maybe a little more detail on that. Is there anything in particular that is driving very solid growth, 11% in Q3? And then lastly, again, I know it's something you've touched on in the past. But what really gets Omega going here beyond maybe an acquisition? What is the catalyst? Because it has been sort of bobbing along, if you like. And I know you've put a lot of time and effort into it and resourcing to it. But as I say, are we any near about sort of defining moment where it steps into gear?
Yes. Okay. Right. So 3 questions around Omega, and I'll take them in turn. I mean just on the sourcing, I mean, we do source globally into Omega. Clearly, I think it has more reliance on the sort of a local supply chain in some of our other businesses. But we do buy quite a lot of components out of China and Asia in support of Omega. But fortunately, there is -- they're less dependent on electronics and semiconductors versus maybe any of our other businesses at the moment. So they are seeing sort of less disruption from that perspective, which is helpful. Their bigger challenge, as Derek mentioned, has been actually sort of labor, sort of shop for warehousing labor, where in the U.S., the social benefits program coming up at COVID took a lot of people out of the workforce and has put constraints sort of locally. So it's made the labor market much tighter, particularly in sort of the New Jersey area where they operate. We've had to do some sort of extraordinary sort of recruiting activities brought in, dedicated recruiters to make sure we've got the right staffing levels. But at the same time, we are also implementing some automation and also improved systems to sort of either both automate or simplify what we're doing so that we -- to some extent, sort of reducing the skill level, which is helpful. So we're managing it, as Derek mentioned, but it's one of the things we are having to manage [ on to run everything ] else. In terms of the sales channel expansion, I mean, really pleased with the relationship with Newark. And it's only the sales into Europe were up about [ 80% ] year-over-year. And that's on top of a high-growth as well as in 2020. So the relationship with Newark is going really, really well. We're also in the process of expanding that relationship into Newark's parent company to sell into Europe and into Asia. I mean they're a large operation globally. So we're -- sort of the next step of that story is expanding through new experience, say, into the European market and the Asian markets. And that's been one of the big drivers as to why the sales are up this year. But overall, a 13% growth for Omega is up well above sort of North American IP for the year. So it's certainly responding to the treatment that Amit and his team are bringing there, which leads on to your last point about what's the catalyst as well. Our focus is all about how we scale and we go up. We -- the cost base, although the fixed cost base increase as a consequence of a lot of the investments around the new e-commerce site. We've talked about that previously. And therefore, we'll be able to get the margins back to where they've been before, up in sort of the high teens, does require the business to be scaled up. There are -- there's always opportunities to improve operational efficiency, but there's not a huge amount of -- that itself isn't going to solve the situation. We absolutely need to be really driving the top line scale in the business. And it's really around the 4 things we talked about in the past around making sure we have a really good website experience, refreshing the product line up, continually driving the sales channel expansion and looking at some of the sort of international opportunities beyond North America. So that strategy is working for us at the moment. Good to see the growth coming through. But clearly, we need to be convinced that, that growth rate can continue for at least a couple of years in terms of getting the business to the scale it needs to be to deliver the margins or we'd want out of it.
Our next question comes from Robert Davies from Morgan Stanley.
My first one was just around, again, some of the supply chain disruptions. You mentioned sort of the chip shortage being an issue. What are you hearing from your customers in terms of potential time line for resolving some of these things? Is it just sort of figuring your territory, nobody really knows at this stage and sort of best guess? Did they give you some sort of guidance on when things should normalize?
Well, Robert, I'm not sure we're necessarily the experts here in terms of being able to predict what is the next term. But certainly, we are talking to a lot of industry analysts, talking to suppliers, talking to our customer base. And I think the general feeling is that the supply chain constraints are going to carry on into next year into the first half. And then for semiconductors, there are going to be specific constraints, I think, all the way through next year, potentially the beginning of '23 for certain things, although it should progressively ease from next year through next year. And that's really the premise under which we are working. As such, we are taking steps in terms of forward ordering protection stock, looking at various scenarios to make sure that from an inventory perspective, we are protected. I mean fortunately, whilst the chips are really essential from a product functionality perspective, from a cost point of view, they're typically not a high part of our billing material. So from an inventory perspective, it's not overly expensive for us. But equally, we're also looking at where we need to redesign some of the printed circuit boards to basically put alternative chips in. I mean one of the phenomenon we are seeing is that the rate of obsolescence, it effectively has increased because you always get obsolescence within semiconductors, which is the chip technology and also advanced, and they make so many before they go on to the next generation. But what is clear, it was clearly happening, is that some of the lower volume chips just on -- they're just being end of life, whilst the focus is on driving the volume for the many. So our engineering teams are having to spend more time on effectively managing the obsolescence and the redesigning, designing some new chips out. Now as we said before, that's nothing new for us. We know how to do it. It's just the volume has increased, so the work level increased despite the...
That's great. A couple of others. One was just on raw materials and hedging. Is there any hedging you do on raw materials? And I guess I'm asking in the context of your price increases. Is that something that sort of happens [ as a step opportunities ] and there's a bit of a lag between when you kind of see a hit and then you put the prices through? Is it sort of fairly instantaneous? How often do you have those pricing discussions or price changes with customers?
Yes, that's a multifaceted question. I mean typically, we don't hedge on raw materials. I mean we hedge it as a translational FX level. So we've clearly known where -- which countries are buying, what currencies versus what currencies you're receiving? And is it all that off as most everything else? And typically, we are buying above volume that either that would warrant us doing that. And then I think -- what was the second part of your question?
How often are we having in terms of pricing?
So I mean, we -- typically, a lot of things we do, we're running on sort of either long-term contracts or blanket contracts. But inevitably, they are defined period of time. When they come to the end, then that's when you end up with the price discussions. So we're not immune from this. We are seeing prices going up. But as I said, so far, positive to see that we're being able to offset that through our own pricing. And customers are being very accepting about the situation.
And I think -- I mean, the important thing there, we're not giving out more detailed numbers today. But from a margins perspective and a gross margin perspective, we're able to hold our own. I think that's the key.
I see. Okay. And then my final one is just around, I guess, the medium- to longer-term potential of the group and what you're thinking about from portfolio. You've obviously done quite a lot of tidying up over the last couple of years. Is there kind of coming out of COVID a different view from the management team around sort of potential targets or end markets that look more or less interesting than maybe they did 6 or 12 months ago? Or is it sort of the original plan is still in place and nothing's really changed, looking for small bolt-ons and that kind of thing?
Yes. Look, it's more the latter than the former. I mean we continue to keep our strategy under review. And as I said before, all of our businesses have to continue to earn their right to stay within the portfolio. I think we're very disciplined about looking at the assets we have and their potential to deliver value going forward. If any time, we see things have changed and we're able to take a different view. But I think in terms of our sort of end markets, as I said before, the sort of 5 key end markets that we've talked about since the 2019 Capital Markets Day around pharma, automotive, semicon electronics, primary advanced materials and sort of tech at industrials, we see all of those coming back strongly which is good. But at the end -- beyond that, I sort of said right at the end of my opening, we are seeing that a lot of our end markets really fit with our purpose around harnessing the power of precision measurement to equip our customers make a little cleaner, healthier and more productive. And there's quite a number of sustainability thematics that are playing strongly now into those end markets. So mobility within automotive, electrification of transport, the whole energy transition, managing both in terms of new energy sources as well as managing emissions, carbon capture, et cetera, associated with fossil fuels through to food, agriculture. And then I think for us, one area that we naturally, we're starting to look at is around sort of water purity, water quality, where a lot of our technology actually might be a good fit for that market. So not only do we see for those sort of environment or sustainability thematics, underpinning the markets that we've been targeting on and very much sort of supporting our R&D strategy. But also, I think there are new adjacencies and opportunities for the group as a whole. So we'll be talking more about this next year as we go through our strategy refresh in 2022.
Our next question comes from Richard Paige from Numis.
Just a couple of questions from me, please? First of all, obviously, you've highlighted the academic spend recovery you've seen, and particularly Asia. I was just wondering more regionally what you're seeing given the governmental policies pushing that agenda? And then secondly, hope all is well with Mary on Industrial Solutions. I was just wondering, given what you said and particularly, I would highlight PMS has done really well. I was just wondering if you could give a bit more color around the mix of performance within those businesses, within that division.
Okay. I mean on the academia point, as I said, I mean, really good to see that market recovering. I mean we're about, I think, sort of high single digits now in terms of the market recovery for the year. We've typically seen it come back regionally as the economies have opened up. But the -- typically, it's being supported by, again, a lot of the areas that we're focused on around pharma, health care. Certainly, the whole vaccine antiviral drug development has been a big part of that. But equally so as electrification of transport, electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles, battery technologies, advanced materials there, but also in terms of advanced materials and research for semiconductors. I think they are all powering that sort of recovery in the academic research area. And we certainly saw sort of China or Asia come back first, but then into North America and Europe. So it's pretty much a comeback as the economies have reopened. And then on your question about ISD, yes, apologies that we've had to postpone this afternoon. We did consider just carrying on, but I thought it was part of the real value of having the session was to sort of introduce you personally to Mary Beth and to allow you to ask her questions and to get her direct views on the business she's now leading. So I think in terms of protecting the quality of that, we decided to postpone it. But hopefully, we'll be able to reorganize it in the next few weeks. In terms of the mix of performance, I mean, PMS has certainly been a standout performer. Its revenue is split 50-50 between sort of aseptic, pharma, life science, food applications and 50% into semiconductors. Both markets have been growing very strongly. We have leading products there that are able to measure the highest fidelity in terms of an accuracy around impurities and in the characterized particles. So it's certainly a great pit for what's going on within the market. Servomex, we're seeing very good recovery in its sort of purity, high-purity gas analysis and side of the business, the sort of health care side, the oxygen sensors have actually held up quite well. I mean we did have a real boost last year through oxygen sensors demand for ventilators. That has tailed off, but other oxygen applications have come through to replace them. So that market has been pretty robust. And then as we talked about, the other sort of 60% exposure for Servomex' into sort of industrial process and energy applications, and that market has just been slower to recover, but it's recovering now sort of given Servomex' good momentum going into next year. And Red Lion is seeing good demand in terms of sort of the industrial automation suite to perhaps improve our end support. However, all of its -- all the products it sells are stuck with semicon -- with chips. So they are wrestling day to day with getting product out to customers. So they are one of the businesses that is being really constrained in terms of translate their order book to sales at the moment. But again, we talked about that.
Understood. One more, if I may, just on employee -- just the employee costs, coming back to the cost equation. I assume you do most of your contract negotiations at the beginning of the year. So therefore, is that -- do you see that more as a headwind into '22? Obviously, you've spoken about the impact in Q4 in terms of getting people on board. But I'm just wondering what sort of headwind we might see in '22 relative to '21.
Yes. So we've -- we typically, across our businesses, sort of do it -- the pay increment goes in at the end of Q1. So what we saw at the half year already had a full quarter of that impact in the half year. We're certainly not anticipating doing an extraordinary pay rise between now and the end of Q1 next year. But obviously, it will be a key part of our budget consideration as we put the numbers together for next year in terms of what we're seeing on the labor inflation front. I mean we have made some adjustments in some of our businesses where just the market rates have moved, so we've had to make some adjustments. But again, I think most of that we did in the first half. So that will come through some of the first half anyway.
I think the other thing I'd add, Richard, is obviously, with the Spectris business system, the focus that we have on improving efficiency, we don't necessarily accept that labor inflation is something just flows straight through. So there's a conversation to be had to make sure that we continue to be effective and efficient to try to present some of those headwinds as well.
We have no further questions. I will now hand back to the management team for closing comments.
All right. Well, thank you very much, everyone, again for joining. We will be announcing a revised date for the ISD market presentation shortly. Thank you for your questions. As always, appreciate your interest in us and the questions you asked. So just to sort of summarize and end, as I said earlier, I'm really pleased with our performance in the third quarter. It was a solid performance, very much in line with our expectation at the half year. We've talked about our order book. It's very robust. It provides momentum for the rest of the year and also going into 2022. As I said, I believe we are well positioned off the back of the market recovery with all the investments that we've been making in our strategic growth initiatives. So thank you very much for participating in the call today. And I look forward to speaking to you at our Industrial Solutions presentation when we reschedule it and, obviously, next February, along with our full year results. So thank you very much, and stay well. Be safe.
Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. This now concludes today's conference call, so please now disconnect your lines.