Wincanton PLC
LSE:WIN
Earnings Call Analysis
Q2-2024 Analysis
Wincanton PLC
Wincanton's half-year report for the period ending September 30, 2023, commences with a picture of resilience against a murky macroeconomic backdrop. The company outlines the industry's broader challenges, including heightened inflation, surging interest rates, and tepid consumer confidence, all contributing to lower group revenue and profits year-over-year. Despite this, Wincanton has made strides in its dedicated e-fulfillment operations, meeting performance expectations with a net cash position of GBP 15.6 million. Notably, strategic transitions away from risk-laden volume-dependent transport contracts towards open book pricing models underpin a commitment to sustainable models and growth.
Wincanton reported a 7.8% decrease in revenue (GBP 695 million) compared to the previous year, mainly due to a strategic departure from exposed closed book transport contracts. Aligning with this strategic thought, despite some client losses and lower volumes, Wincanton's profit of GBP 22.6 million remained in line with market expectations. Tom's discussion highlighted a solid cash flow increase of 38.4%, robust free cash flow, and a maintained dividend, reflecting a pivot in the company's capital allocation towards fueling organic growth, investing in technology, and enhancing shareholder returns with a GBP 10 million share buyback initiative.
Wincanton emphasizes its commitment to technology as a lynchpin for future expansion. With the company focusing on automation and digitization, particularly in warehousing and transport operations, it sees organic investment as the path to unlock growth. The company is explicit about its investment criteria: expecting over 20% return on capital employed and aiming for a maximum 4-year payback period. The firm identified substantial opportunities in developing proprietary warehouse automation technologies, which it projects will rapidly interface with existing operations and adapt to the increasingly scarce labor market, thus resonating with the rising demand for innovative supply chain solutions.
Furthering its commitment to corporate responsibility, Wincanton has made significant strides in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) areas. The Net Zero roadmap and partnerships, like the one with IKEA for zero-emission services, showcase the company's ecological initiatives. Concurrently, Wincanton's work in the social sphere, including community engagement through its '1 million hours mission,' and its emphasis on strong governance practices, such as cybersecurity and ethical business conduct, fortify its corporate citizenship stance.
Despite ongoing retail volume pressures influenced by challenging economic conditions, Wincanton remains on track to meet its financial targets for the fiscal year 2024. The company's multidimensional approach, balancing diversification with strategic exits from high-risk areas, positions it well to navigate the landscape and capitalize on the growth in supply chain outsourcing. Wincanton's unwavering commitment to investing in automation, technological enhancement, and transport optimization, coupled with its refreshed capital allocation strategy, pave the way for sustained profitability and shareholder value in an economy marked by inflation and uncertainty.
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-- of Wincanton's half year results ended 30th of September 2023. I'm going to move straight to Slide 2 and the disclosure statement that I'm sure you're all always familiar with. So the agenda for today. In a moment, I'm going to take you through a short executive summary covering the main themes of Wincanton's performance for this half year. I'm then going to hand over to Tom to talk us through the details of our financial performance. He's also going to cover our new capital allocation framework that we've announced, given the fantastic progress that we've made in dealing with our legacy defined benefit pension scheme. I'm then going to return to give an update on progress with the delivery of some of the key elements of our strategy, particularly focusing on growth in our pipeline, on technology development and of course, on ESG. Finally, we'll conduct a question-and-answer session. So moving to the executive summary for this half year. Overall, the group has delivered a resilient performance despite a macroeconomic backdrop of inflationary pressure of higher interest rates and lower consumer confidence. As we forecast, the group revenue and profits were lower than a year ago. However, we have continued to see growth in our dedicated e-fulfillment operations, and we are meeting expectations. We also have a clear strategy and are making really good progress against delivering it. In transport, we're moving to pricing models based on open book principles, where we do not take risk on volumes. In warehouses, we have a strong foundation of open book business, and we remain confident in the prospects for our shared user closed book operations for specific sectors. Wins in key renewals with the likes of Sainsbury's, with Seagen, Jet 2, the Conran shop and Sephora are evidence that Wincanton is a trusted service partner in our industry. We closed the half year with net cash of GBP 15.6 million. In a period of comparatively high interest rates, Wincanton's strong balance sheet and investment optionality is a significant advantage. Furthermore, as previously communicated, the triennial review of the group's pension scheme has yielded a substantial cash flow upside to a business that was already highly cash generative. Wincanton's pension scheme has been a substantial drag on the business for many years, and it's taken considerable effort and skill from past and present management teams and also from the pension trustees as well as patients and shareholders to get to this great position. As a result, we will today outline our new capital allocation framework. Whilst our primary focus remains on investing in our business to drive organic growth, we are launching a GBP 10 million share buyback program to enhance shareholder returns as a direct consequence of the improved pension position. The organic investment focus for the business remains absolutely on technology, developing products specifically for the transport market and for warehouse automation. We will be investing in people and skills in software and hardware and in software and hardware to deliver transformational supply chain value for our customers, but with clear expectations on returns for the group, driven by a disciplined investment appraisal. We continue to believe in the resilience of our model underpinned by the long-term nature of our customer relationships, and we are seeing evidence in our recent wins and through an enlarged future pipeline of opportunities that the current environment is leading businesses to consider outsourcing even more seriously. I'm now going to hand over to Tom to take us through a more detailed financial review. Thank you.
Thank you, James. I'm pleased to be here this morning to talk you through our performance for the first half of FY '24. Let me begin with a summary of our year-on-year numbers. The group achieved revenue in the first half of GBP 695 million. This was 7.8% lower than HY '23, principally reflecting our strategic exit of exposed closed book transport contracts. Revenue, excluding these transport contracts fell by 3.7%. Within these revenue numbers are the net customer gains and losses as well as some lower volumes within our open book customers. Of note of the losses of Morrisons, HMRC and Wilko, offset by considerable growth in our new expanded Sainsbury's contract and sustained growth with our e-fulfillment customers of Wickes and IKEA. We're pleased to announce that half year profit is in line with our expectations and those of the market. The group achieved an underlying PBT of GBP 22.6 million. As a business, underlying PBT is weighted to the second half, reflecting our customers' seasonal peak. We expect this distribution to persist in full year '24. The margin impact was driven by weaker retail volumes and a slight shift in the profile of new business wins, particularly large open book transport contracts in grocery and consumer. These new contracts have sent a significant low-risk revenue stream, albeit at a lower margin than that achieved in some of our other customer segments. Strong free cash flow and impressive balance sheet continue to be key strengths of Wincanton. Free cash flow increased 38.4% year-on-year, and we ended the first half with a net cash addition of GBP 15.6 million. We have decided to hold the dividend at the half year '23 level of 4.4p, reinforcing our commitment to appropriate capital allocation and ongoing shareholder returns. Our confidence in the trajectory of the business and the opportunities of the outsourced supply chain market is based on our heritage and understanding of the group's primary value-generating activities, which are never fully captured by the traditional sector view. So therefore, I take a moment to talk through our performance on a bioactivity basis, which is the next slide here. Now you'll have heard James and me talk about open boot warehousing and closed book transport, and it's an important way of thinking about our business, giving a fuller sense of what we do, where we can invest and how we historically have been growing. So I'm going to talk to this slide in some detail, taking each activity in turn. As it was immediately apparent is that the group formed 2 key activities. Warehouse outsourcing, the receipt, storage and dispatch of goods, which are the top 2 rows here and then transport outsourcing, the collection, movements and delivery of goods, and that's the bottom two rows. And then within that, there are 2 commercial mechanisms through which we perform these activities, open book contracts and then closed book contracts. As will be familiar with you all, Open book is essentially a cost pass-through by which we encounter manage a customer supply chain function for a management fee. Starting at the top row, open book warehousing currently represents 43% of the group's revenue and has grown with a 3-year CAGR of 10%. These are lower risk contracts. They provide an effective hedge against inflation and offer consistent but lower margins with the opportunity to enhance returns through productivity gain share mechanisms. These are typically contracts at significant scale, where labor forms the majority of the pass-through cost base. They therefore also provide the platform and the opportunity to deploy robotics and automation, which James will talk about more later. Closed book warehouse contracts are the invest, where customers outsource their supply chain to encounter fixed fees. It is the second more on the table on the left. With no operating cost pass-through, cost management sits solely with Wincanton. Consequently, closed book is higher risk, but also offers the potential for greater value capture where we can leverage scale and drive volumes offering a shared user environment. Our core markets for closed-book warehousing are defense, infrastructure and high-volume in fulfillment, where shared user warehousing, coupled with automation, offers a compelling value proposition to the market. We have invested significantly in this market with our automated rocking facility and Signia and revenues have consequently grown at 14% over the 3-year period. And thirdly, transport, which is an established strength of Wincanton. It's a market which we have brand recognition and considerable heritage. Open book transport has represented 37% of our revenue in recent years, again, with a strong 3-year CAGR of 6%. The key opportunities in this market include deployment of optimization technology, seamless subcontracting and customer capacity maximization. -- again, more from James on this later on. All 3 of these activity lines are core to our business. And we've spoken about closed book transport in recent updates, and this is a segment that we have been consciously exiting. On protected closed book transport is a highly exposed segment, reallocating capital away from closed book transport has commenced at pace, and we expect the proportion of our revenues from such contracts to continue to reduce. The GBP 35 million reduction on year-on-year revenues represents the end of close book contract with Hisilicon Weetabix as well as customers within our mechanical offload network. Hopefully, this has been helpful because we intend to use this bioactivity view in future communications. For consistency, let's turn to the Buy sector view as well. The sectorial view of the business is familiar to you all. Let me run through. So e-fulfillment had a standout revenue performance, growing 11.7%. The growth was driven by strong performance in our partnerships with some great brands, including IKEA, Wickes and the White Company. The year-on-year fall in public and industrial revenue was driven by the previously announced HMRC contract loss. Public and industrial is a strategic sector for Wincanton, and we've seen a strong year-on-year performance in the defense market where we have extended our partnership with BAE. Our foundation markets, grocery consumer and general merchandise, both experienced lower year-on-year revenues driven by volume headwinds and contract churn, including the exit of closed book transport contracts. So to put these results in context, let's look at some of the headwinds faced by the industry and the broader U.K. economy. The external macro environment continues to present challenges. I'd like to touch on the key characteristics of the current environment is especially relevant to our customers and through our business and demonstrate how our business continues to respond. Let's start with the first one. And the past 2 years, which have witnessed a profound decoupling of retail value and volume. As you can see from the left-hand side, product volumes have diverged from sales volumes since 2021. The shift has been particularly stark in food retailing, where consumer baskets have simultaneously contained less but cost more. We've seen this secular volume shift manifest in the revenue of our foundation sectors, which are exposed to consumer end markets. Our response has been tight management of the cost base, coupled with a focus on sales, account development and a derisking of those areas with acute volume exposure as discussed in relation to the closed book transport. This volume and value decoupling is a clear consequence of higher inflation experienced in the U.K. We have continued to experience a net year-on-year inflation impact on the cost base. Much of this has been driven by the increased cost of labor at 6%, with labor expenditure accounting for 60% of total operating costs. In aggregate, the group has experienced cost inflation up 3% for the half year. The year-on-year increase in labor costs included pay rises for frontline workers during the cost of living crisis. We continue to maintain strong working relationships with unions due to our balanced approach. On the other cost categories reflects a mixed picture of persistent inflation in some areas and deflation in others. Vehicle and subcontractor expenses have declined driven by lower fuel costs and an easing of the widely publicized driver shortage, which has set acutely in the prior year. It's worth reiterating that 80% of the group's revenue comes from open book contracts where cost changes are passed through to the customer. It's the balancing closed book where the rest opportunities of an inflating and deflating cost base are more acutely relevant, where we seek to drive the benefits of continuous improvement and utilize contractual rate reduce -- the consequence of the U.K.'s recent inflationary pressures has, of course, been higher interest rates. Since the last half year update, the Bank of England base rate has more than doubled. Whilst this significant jump represented financial dilemmas for some companies, we have benefited from a strong balance sheet and effective capital management, minimizing the impact of high capital costs, which we believe will persist for the long term. Our net cash position for the period was particularly strong at GBP 15.6 million, and net interest paid on borrowings was GBP 2.8 million. Our interest cover, defined as EBITDA over interest expense stood at 4.5x against an RCF covenant of 3.5x. We have a net cash position and have the use of GBP 175 million multibank syndicated credit facility. The average headroom on the facility was GBP 134 million in the first half, reflecting the group's disciplined management of working capital. Our balance sheet, cash conversion and cash flow is a huge strength of Wincanton as illustrated in our cash flow statement. Starting at the top. EBITDA, as discussed in the financial summary, reflects a lower margin mix for the period. We had a tax inflow of GBP 3.7 million, reflecting overpayments in full year '23 Net interest, which includes GBP 3.9 million interest on finance leases grew to GBP 6.7 million, reflecting the high interest rate environment. On the outflows of our right-of-use assets increased year-on-year, reflecting the group's investment in lease assets in Rockingham, Harlow, Rochester and inward. We expect CapEx to be weighted towards the second half of the year with first half CapEx representing investments in our Halo 2-person home delivery facility and our cross dock automation program with a leading U.K. retailer. The GBP 11.3 million pension deficit payment represents the total FY '24 outflow and the final contribution required into the scheme. We count is a highly cash generative business reflected here in free cash flow of GBP 24.5 million, a total increase in cash was GBP 2.4 million, taking the closing position to GBP 15.6 million. And now moving up a level from the half year view of cash to look at a 5-year view of cash which is GBP 304 million total for the 5 years. Over the past 5 years, the single biggest use of free cash flow has been pension deficit payments. 35% of total free cash flow has been dedicated to support the scheme. And the strength of the scheme is testament to the group's commitment of capital in recent years. With the material improvements seen in the pension scheme and the ceasing of group contributions, we will have a significantly enhanced share of free cash flow to dedicate to growth and shareholder returns. As a quick reminder of the pension position. The scheme has performed very strongly. The 2020 actuarial deficit of GBP 154 million has been transformed into actuarial surplus driven by group contributions, the performance of the scheme underlying assets and a small shift in mortality assumptions. Firstly and most importantly, the outcome is an excellent result for the members of the scheme, providing additional confidence that the scheme liabilities are backed by a portfolio of high-quality assets. The triennial valuation also has significant implications from the business perspective. deficit recovery payments have ceased, all conditions on shareholder returns removed and new covenants established, which represents significant headroom for the group. The actuarial surplus at the 31st of March was GBP 3.9 million. This has further strengthened in the first half and stood at GBP 9 million at the 30th of September. We continue to review all options available to the group and reiterate that the 2023 triennial valuation is an extremely pleasing result for all stakeholders. And this pension position means that the financial groundwork has been laid for the group to reorder its capital allocation priorities. And therefore, pleased to share with you the Wincanton's capital allocation framework. I'd like to walk through each part of the framework as this model demonstrates exactly how we are actively managing the group's capital allocation. Starting on the left-hand side, the group's sources of capital are twofold. As a highly cash-generative business with strong conversion, our free cash flow is our principal source of funding. Equally, we have a board-approved leverage of up to 1x IAS 17 EBITDA. This leverage flexibility gives the group additional optionality and the headroom to invest in long-term value-enhancing growth opportunities. On the right-hand side, you'll see our 5 core capital priorities, which fall into 2 categories. baseline capital allocation and allocation to opportunities. These allocations are deliberately ordered and reflects how we manage capital. Firstly, business as usual, CapEx is a core baseline priority. This is required to support trading and our market-leading fulfilled operations. Secondly, we are committed to shareholder returns. We aim to grow the dividend in line with earnings, hold the dividend at the prior year level in the absence of earnings growth. These are the baseline capital hurdles the group must always cover before allocating capital to increment opportunities. Moving next to opportunities. Organic growth is the next allocation priority. We have a strong pipeline of organic opportunities and a robust appraisal approach with investment hurdles set at 20% return on capital employed and a 3- to 4-year payback period. James will unpick this further in the next few slides. Growth through inorganic opportunities comes next. We have a well-established process routinely staying in the market for capability-enhancing opportunities. And finally, reinforcing our commitment to shareholder returns, we intend to return excess capital to shareholders via a mix of share buybacks or special dividends. Before James goes into detail on point 3 here, let me finish this financial update by updating on the interim dividend and how we are applying the new capital allocation framework. As discussed, the Board has agreed to hold the interim dividend at 4.4p. Whilst earnings have reduced in the period, this reflects the Board's confidence in cash generation and the future growth of the business. As per prior years, we expect 1/3 to 2/3 split between the interim dividend and the final dividend. The interim dividend will be paid on the 15th of December. And finally, as per the new capital allocation framework, we are also launching a GBP 10 million share buyback program in the second half, delivering enhanced shareholder returns from the capital we have available. I'd now like to hand back to James, who will provide a strategic update and outlook for the full year.
Thanks, Tom. Now to talk about how we're going to spend it. So as Tom says, I'm now going to go through a short strategic update for the group. Going to start with returning to a slide I talked about in a previous results presentation around wins, renewals and our general pipeline. I think as you'll have heard before, we've got a well-defined approach to business development within the group and to driving growth. We aim to win across all our 4 sectors, even though, as Tom slide said, we do split between strategic growth and foundation growth, but we absolutely intend to grow in all 4 of them. The majority of our pipeline, as you'd expect, it's a funneling approach sits in early-stage proposal validation and creation. Once we've been down selected by the customer, usually with 1 or 2 other providers, we enter the closing negotiation stage before hopefully moving to what we call contract or contracting, which is where we would be in exclusive contract negotiations. Finally, at the end of it, we declare our wins, aiming to achieve between GBP 100 million and GBP 200 million of annualized revenue on each year. The number of opportunities from 1 year to the next or during the year, as you'd expect, ebbs and flows. However, we are seeing in the current economic climate and increasing companies exploring first-time outsourcing opportunities as they look for transformational value. So Tom talked about that divergence of value and volume the volume issues are not just there for third-party logistics companies, such as Wincanton, they're also the same for in-house providers. So it brings in new discussions. And I'd say in support of this, obviously, I can't go into detail about what customers may or may not be in that pipeline. But in support of this, our active pipeline of opportunities are 25% higher than they were this time last year. So definite evidence in there. Tom also talked quite a lot about transport, and I want to go into a little bit more detail here. Wincanton has a well-established reputation as a major player in the U.K. outsourced transport services. And as Tom's slide said, we have over GBP 700 million in annual revenues and growing. Even with our strategic exit from closed book lane rates, this part of our business will absolutely continue to grow. We've invested in planning and optimization technology over the past few years to strengthen our position as operators of customer fleets and new Sainsbury's Primark and Nelo contracts demonstrate our reputation and the growth potential that we have in this market. Onboarding 3,500 colleagues and 6,000 pieces of equipment from Sainsbury's and managing their subcontractor activity is an excellent illustration of this -- of the trust that customers are prepared to place in us to manage and to optimize their fleets. But alongside this, we've continued to develop our strategy to use technology to deliver seamless subcontractin transport into the haulage market. Our aim is to provide a uniform customer experience for quality, visibility and data reporting regardless of who owns the vehicle that is making the delivery. Digital forwarding models in the U.K. are still pretty early in their development because of the characteristics of our market. But we believe our scale, knowledge and the technology investments that we're making can make us a major player in the asset-free space. Most importantly, we believe that a combination of managed customer fleets and the digital marketplace model together can provide Wincanton with true competitive advantage in what is in the U.K., a GBP 30 billion transport market. So Tom is also very clearly explained, I think, through various charts, the additional cash that we now have available following the latest review of our pension scheme. And I want to reiterate that my priority is to invest that money into the business for growth. I want to cover the area of our policy now that is related to that organic growth and to focus on the biggest opportunities we see for the group to increase returns, and that is agile automation in warehouses. We're continuing to make progress in developing technologies that will generate real value for customers and allow us to take a greater share, 2 of which I'm going to illustrate on the next slide. However, we've also set 2 clear principles for our organic investments, and we'll be very open with the market and with customers about these. Firstly, more than the 20% return on capital employed; and secondly, a maximum full year payback. The chart on this slide shows how we believe value can be shared with customers to deliver on these principles even in an open book environment. I mean, I covered that quite a lot of the full year. With labor costs rising and availability in specific geographies falling, customers are increasingly of the view that doing nothing is not an option. It's critical that our investments in warehouse automation technology are both repeatable and have widespread industry application. If we're going to make rapid progress in this area, we need to create plug-and-play proprietary solutions that interface in a matter of months into existing operations. And the 2 examples on this slide both have that very real potential. Firstly, we're working with a major U.K. retailer on a cross-stock model that utilizes robot technology to speed up the currently manual process, increasing both the quality and accuracy of pick store cages and using fewer people. This example is working in a chilled chamber, a notoriously difficult environment to recruit and retain staff. But it will work just as effectively in ambient conditions. We are investing Wincanton Capital and creating a scalable solution that will be applicable to hundreds of warehouses in the U.K. alone. Secondly, we've worked with a food manufacturer to design container unloading automation to speed up a low-value labor-intensive process. Thousands and thousands of containers are processed manually in the U.K. every day. So the market for such a product within warehouses is enormous Clearly, though, all this technology, the people effect upon our business is fairly significant. And whilst developing technology solutions to solve problems like the ones on the 2 on the last slide is absolutely critical. We do very much need to take that into account because this represents a strategic shift for the Wincanton business. And we need a lot more people to be skilled in the development and implementation of completely new ways of thinking and of working. This slide illustrates how we're adapting our approach to a more engineering and technology focus at the grassroots level, but we'll also need to be making more investment in the sales, in the solutions and the commercial teams to increase the speed of our transformation in this area and the strategic shift of the Wincanton business. Finally, I'm pleased to provide an update on the group's efforts around ESG. On environment, clearly, our industry is a key piece in the net zero jigsaw. And when Canton has previously laid out our Net Zero road map. Progress depends on innovation and partnerships, and we're doing both. As a great example, we were delighted to support IKEA in delivering a 0 emission final mile service by 2025, principally with the introduction of a full fleet of electric vans at our new Dartford operation. So good that the Prime Minister came to see it. Meanwhile, a team of Wincanton's next-generation leaders have spearheaded the trial of innovative recyclable workwear. This project focuses on the circular economy and builds on the existing strength of our supplier ecosystem. The trial has led to Wincanton being named a launch partner in Arco's recent circular economy paper. On the social front, our colleagues have been clocking up the hours in our 1 million hours mission through which our teams dedicate time and energy to a wide range of causes further embedding Wincanton into the many communities in which we operate. And lastly, we maintain a strong focus on governance. Risk management is ever more important and colleague engagement key to maintaining a strong line of defense. Our recent Governance Day was a brilliant example of how we can engage colleagues on diverse topics, including cybersecurity, modern slavery and reinforce our group-wide code of conduct, the Wincanton Way. So finally, then moving to the outlook and summary. The group continues to execute our strategy and is committed to delivering sustainable supply chain value through having both great people and great technology. The Board remains confident in the group's strategy and expects to deliver revenue and profit in line with market expectations for FY '24. And we see that as no small achievement in given the current macroeconomic environment. We've delivered a resilient performance during the first half of the year despite that macroeconomic backdrop characterized by persistent inflationary pressure, elevated interest rates and weakened consumer confidence. We do expect retail volume pressure to persist in the near term. But despite this, the group's diversified sectors, commercial discipline and customer relationships ensure that Wincanton is well positioned to deliver on its strategic ambitions. I am particularly pleased with the progress we've made exiting unprotected closed book transport contracts and proactively changing the focus of our business as well as continuing to invest in supply chain automation, transport optimization and operational excellence. As reflected in our new capital allocation framework and the confidence of the Board, we are maintaining our dividend year-on-year and returning value to our shareholders through a share buyback program. Strong cash generation and the result of the 2023 pension triennial valuation will accelerate the group's investment in sustainable and margin accretive growth and enhance shareholder returns. Thank you. We'll now move to the question-and-answer session.
Robin Byde from Zeus Capital. Could you talk a bit about the competitive landscape, particularly as you pivoted to more offering more 4PL services and also more automation. I mean, are you, for example, coming up against some new competitors that you haven't seen before? And then I guess as a sort of second question to that, could you talk a bit about contract pricing as you renegotiate some of your major contracts?
Yes. So the transport market is an interesting one. And clearly, although everybody is delivering stuff from A to B, there are various sort of commercial models that sit within it. What we're seeing at the sort of asset end of the market, there are a number of holes that have gone our business. Unfortunately, the volume chart that Tom showed will illustrate the less things are moving around the U.K., and therefore, the demand is lower and we're seeing some of that supply contract. But we tend to see the haulage market or we want to see the haulage market in the future as partners rather than competitors. So our competitors -- if you think about the 2 parts of the transport market I talked about, on the managed fleet side of things, competing for the Sainsbury's the Primark, the new looks. That's very much GX, DHL XPO and all formidable competitors, but we think we've invested substantially in the technology. And we think the fact that we're winning customers like Sainsbury says that we can do well in that market, and we'll continue to do so. The 4PL piece is interesting because it's still pretty new to the U.K. And you'll know this, but in Continental Europe or the U.S., whether there have been traditional brokerage models, pen and paper, brokerage models -- it's much easier to switch to digital 4PL because they just digitize an analog process. Whereas in the U.K., things have been much more driven around asset providers who do a certain amount of the work and then subcontract it to others. So the competitive landscape escape is still pretty fragmented, and that's one of the main reasons we think is an opportunity. And as I said in the slide, if you put the 2 things together and say, "Hey, we can be the best at managing fleet to at least right up there in terms of managing fleet. And we've got this 4PL technology. You put those 2 things together, and I'm not sure that anybody has that as well as we will have it. From an automation perspective, again, a really interesting question and an interesting marketplace. Look, our competitors you can go on LinkedIn, you'll see our competitors are talking as much as we are about technology or again, the big ones that ceasing the DHLs. We think we're innovating better than they are. We think we've got better technology, but I guess we would say that wouldn't we. There's more than enough opportunity out there for all of us. So I'm not too worried about what they're doing, talking about something like container destuffing, thousands and thousands of containers more than enough opportunity for people to go out there. And the real threat to the industry are integrators, so not the traditional competitors. And today, we're all partnering with those integrators. And the real threat is if one of those integrators gets big enough that they're more able to go directly to our customers and cut third-party logistics industry out. I think the good news for us at the moment and the opportunity is that those integrators tend to be pretty small businesses, and they're very resource constrained. So we have a window of opportunity and with the cash that Tom has talked about to invest heavily in that area so that we -- that doesn't become a risk to us and instead actually becomes a significant opportunity. I'm sorry, I forgot the last bit of the question.
Just on contract pricing... And environment contract.
Contract pricing is as it always is in our industry, incredibly competitive. I think you don't have a lot of public comparisons for us anymore in the U.K. because nobody declares their profit in the U.K., but I think if you look back over the long run, everybody is at roughly a similar margin, and that hasn't changed, although, as I said in the presentation, that's why warehouse automation is so exciting because it is a step change in value delivery and will provide an opportunity for the whole industry to increase its margins by investing for its customers.
It's Alex Paterson at Peel Hunt. Can I ask a sort of a series of questions on the area of automation and robotics. If you look at the pipeline you were talking about, can you say how much of that would be in those kind of areas? And what is the sort of the constraint in winning these contracts? Is it that you need to develop more of a certain scale or actually, you've got the skill, but you need to scale it up? Or is it on the customer side? And can you also say of your existing revenues, how much of that would be suitable within the warehousing side for automation and robotics? Is it the majority? Or are there chunks of it perhaps construction and industrial, which are not going to be suitable at all?
So yes, a lot I could give you a very long answer to Alex -- so we see the primary opportunity for automation in warehouses as being around picking and roughly 35% to 40% of our labor in our existing warehouses is involved in picking. So you're talking about maybe 100 feet about sort of 4,000-ish-ish people. And it's not about replacing all those people. It's about bringing technology to sit alongside them to take out the sort of unproductive activity of walking up and down aisles and bringing goods -- anybody who went to the Capital Markets Day we did in Rocking Signia will have seen the theory of that. So the the opportunity exists across our warehousing fleet estate. Clearly, there are some industries slow-moving warehouses, maybe in things like the defense sector, where there's less of an opportunity. But as you know from our obsective view and now from the view Tom has given you around open book and post-work warehousing, the majority of our warehousing business is in retail or associated retail work. So therefore, the opportunity is pretty substantial. But the key, as I said in my part of the presentation is it's about developing what we would call plug-and-play technology. So the difficulty isn't the robot, people can develop robots that go turn left and right and spin around and do whatever. What you need to be able to do is integrate them into customers on our own software to make them work in warehouses. And the key is to be able to do that without too much disruption to the customer system. And the reason for that being that you don't want to have to have them on your time line in terms of them making changes in their systems to really do it. You want to go in and go look, we just need to plug our pipe in and then we'll do the rest on our side. And that's how you drive those 90-day implementations, not 9 months or more implementations. So our focus right now through the kind of case studies that I talked about is on developing that technology. Once we've got that, the second phase and the area where we really need people is in what we would call solutions. So it's almost sort of consultancy. You have to be able to go in to customers. You have to look at their warehouse, you have to take their data and you have to go, I've got my plug-and-play solution over here. If I plug this into your warehouse, this will be the benefit that you'll get. That then allows us to -- in that -- the chart that showed the difference in the value. It allows us to calculate what our cost is. We know what the customer's existing cost is and allows us to develop pricing that ensures that we get a higher part of the value. So that's why I say you develop the solutions first because you didn't get anything to sell, then the rest of it is relevant. But we're close to the point where we've got things we can sell. We now need to invest in solutions and commercial people to make sure that we can turn that into significant value for the customer, but more importantly, a greater share of the value for us. And once you go beyond that, whether it's a warehouse we run today or not almost becomes irrelevant because we would have technology as a stream within our business that was going out looking for opportunities where that software fits perfectly. So we might have, I don't know, 20 cross-stock operations across Wincanton. -- but if they are 200 in the country and for whatever reason, we can't persuade the customers to do 15 of them to do the ones in our network, client going to talk to customers who are not in our network, and we'll use that as an angle to either take over management of their warehouse or perhaps even just implement the technology in their warehouse and sell that on a closed book basis. So it all starts with that solution development and having those products. And as I said in my answer to Robin, -- the great thing is that nobody really has got very far with that. And the ones that are developing good products are still quite small organizations. So if in Canton can really get hold of those proprietary solutions, that it's really exciting time for the industry. Did that answer all of your...
Well, I was going to say the only other bit was the sort of the constraint. Obviously, you're developing the technology, but clearly, you're being -- you're being sort of nominated for awards on what you've managed to do so far. So it's clearly working very well. So what's the sort of constraint for faster adoption people?
All about people. I mean, although this is technology, so the exciting people talking about technology, but you need the people to develop the technology. And then more importantly, it's a consultative sale. We have to have people who can go in and take data and reimagine customers' warehouses. And it's something that if you look at the big fixed automation sort of dematic and caps of the world, they have highly developed teams that will go into a warehouse and design those kind of solutions. But those solutions are very fixed, and they're very, very capital intensive, and they take a long time to implement. But we need that kind of capability, but for agile solutions. And we know how we're going to do it, but it's a little bit chicken and egg. There's no point in bringing in a load of solutions people until you get absolutely confident that you've got a product that works. And the cross-states on there, I won't name the customer. We went up and as an exec team recently to see it. And it's fantastic, you immediately see the opportunity. The opportunity is very visible, and it is picking for a number of product lines. But already inside the first 2 months of implementation, the team are reimagining the product, not reimagining the hardware, but they're saying, yes, if we could just configure this differently if we could move this and we could -- so it's -- there's a very rapid process of continuous improvement. I've just got to make sure that we get to a point where we say, look, I get there's another 10% of value here, but actually, this is good enough. It's going to deliver huge value to customers, let's get it going and let's put the foot down. So it's all about people. It's all about capability and it's all about making this industry an exciting place for technologically minded people to come.
It's in related effectively with that, with the constraint being people and perhaps the risk of the integrators getting too large in places. Do you think there's M&A opportunities in that specific space to buy in some of that expertise rather than I don't know, perhaps grow it organically, get people into that side. Could you go faster if that was a potential route you clearly have the balance sheet to do it?
Maybe I think as Tom said, when he talked about the capital allocation framework, when it comes to inorganic, we're looking for capability, right? We're not just looking at the volume we're -- of course, there might be synergy plays out there that might be interesting to us. But our primary focus, if we're going to look at inorganic investment is around building the capability of the business. that is one option. Partnership also works. So we partnered with 2 or 3 organizations over the last couple of years to develop solutions. We're partnering with somebody on that cross dock. The container destuffing, is more us doing it ourselves and buying directly from the hardware business. But yes, we consider all options, Steve. We need to do it quickly. But it's a very fragmented space. So it's not a case of sitting down and horizon scanning and saying, here's 10 different integrators in the U.K. that could be interesting to us. Yes, the potential partners are pretty small -- and so yes, we keep looking.
Morning. In relation to the closed book transport, as you're exiting that business, you haven't converted to give them to try and get them onto a closed book. Like are they having success there? Or are they just walking away and going elsewhere?
Mixture, Andy. So we have had some customers that we are converting across on to open book models and some have bought a way. A lot of it depends on how procurement led the processes -- so if the process is very procurement-led and they buy closed book lane rates, they take a lot of persuasion to release that power from the process. If it's more of an operator-led conversation, then you can have a better conversation about look, you don't need me to take all of the risk to encourage me to provide you with supply chain value. But again, it's $30 billion transport market, although we never want to lose customers, I'd rather find the ones that want to work with us in the way we want to work than try and push water uphill with customers that are very focused on I need guarantees, I think close with lani. The other thing I would say is it's quite -- I always say our industry does pretty simple things, right? We store stuff, we pick stuff. We deliver stuff. The way we charge for it and the way the industry charge for it is really can get really complicated. So one of the things with closed book loan rates is I'm not going to do closed book lane rates where Wincanton takes the risk. But if I can help a customer with their procurement and there's a whole year that says, I will do a closed book land rate for 3 years. I'll guarantee the price from X to Y is Z. I'll pass that on to the customer. They can have closed book lane rates by working with me, it's just not my risk. I've backed off my risk with the customer. So again, it's quite a sophisticated conversation sometimes, and we're on that journey of persuading people where that value is where wind counts providing the value. The critical thing for us is the technology and providing that visibility and that data reporting that's seamless regardless of whether it's delivered by Tom Hinton Logistics or buy an asset that's owned by a new timber by a customer-owned asset or a wind cantered asset. It's that seamless experience that we're looking to drive. It's interesting, we saw a tender recently. I haven't named the customer, but it was a tender that was written, as I would write it exactly in the model that we're taking on. So that's very encouraging. But we see plenty of other tenders to just say, here's our spreadsheet, please fill in the closed book on rate -- it's an evolving picture
Joe from HSBC. You're obviously talking about the buyback there in terms of deploying the capital allocation strategy. When do you think you'll be in a position to deploy some of that cash flow towards the investments that you're talking about? And secondly, on the pension, obviously, the contributions have come to an end. What's the plan for the pension from this point forward?
So I'll let Tom answer the second one on the second bit. The first bit is the share buyback we've announced matches the amount that we thought we were going to have to put in the pension fund for the second half of the year. I intend to make it difficult for Tom to do any more beyond that by finding those organic and maybe inorganic opportunities that fit with our criteria before you can get to #5 on the allocation. So next year, FY '24.
And then from a pension perspective, we expect that surplus to continue to grow. So as your asset continues to outperform, you're only marginally versus the market. You expect the surplus to continue to grow and you move closer to getting to a full buyout position. And that will take -- our view is that you get to a buyout position in kind of 5 years' time. So what the plan for the pension is to manage it prudently as it company is. So no more contributions going from the company. The pension gets managed prudently and we'll move towards a buyout position. However, lots of things can change, but that's the plan to move towards that over a 5-year type was William is behind you. Do I get that right?
Gerald Khoo from Liberum. Two for me. You've talked a lot about warehouse automation. I'm just trying to understand in terms of the warehouse estate, how far along are you now in very rough percentage terms? And where do you hope to be in, say, 3, 5 years' time to get a sense of starting points and rate of progress? And secondly, on closed-book transport, I mean, how does the tail run off? And what's the bottom line exposure. In terms of the customers you've either part company with or converted to open book, were they the worst contracts? Or are you stuck with the worst contract? What does the sort of mix look like? And what's the profit exposure as you run off close book Transport?
So again, I'll let Tom answer your second question, Gerald. The first one is a great question, and it's one we get from the Board, and we're still wrestling with it a bit in terms of the KPI for how we're doing in automation. So I think my primary answer to you is, let me come back to a full year with how we want to measure it. We've tried it in a few ways. A few results presentations ago, we talked about the percentage of the estate that had automation. Frankly, it looked too good. If you start to well, there's a bit of automation here, a bit of automation there. 40% of our estate has got. That's not an accurate reflection of how far along the journey we are. But equally, if you -- we played with things like a KPI and number of robots Well, it depends on how you define a robot, right? So that can look too bad. So we're still wrestling with it by full year. I think we'll have a better handle on how we want to judge that KPI, and we'll come back to you. But this is a really good point.
And then on the revenue side, so we're down at about 11% revenue now, closed book Transport, and we expect that to continue to fall down to probably about 5% ramp. And the reason why you maintain about 5% is you still have 2-person home delivery 2 personal delivery where we have the warehouses. We have invested in it. We have some great customers. We're going have M&S as a customer in there. We will continue on the 2-person home delivery and to get protection around that volume protection around it. So we will still have some closed book. I think it's going to come down to about 5% in FY '26. So next year, maybe it will be down about kind of 78%. And then the year after that, I think the rump were down at about 5%. But as you said, as I said, that's our role then is to protect that as much as possible contractually.
I think it's important to say the 2-person home delivery side of it. In primary transport big trucks, we don't see a competitive advantage in owning the asset. Anybody can own the asset. In 2-person home delivery, having a network adds value to the process, you give a customer national coverage. You recruit and retain people to do quite difficult jobs, heavy lifting and going into people's homes. So that is one where we see being an asset owner is an advantage. If you're an asset owner and you have a network, it's really -- you end up with a lot of closed book because you can't really have multiple customers in a network on an open book basis because you end up having to share their data and they wouldn't accept having their data shared with each other. So 2-person home delivery is one we still really believe is a bit of a jewel in the Wincanton Crown. So as Tom says, that will always be that run-up. It's not a rump, that gem No. matches to that. Conscious is just ticked past 10:00. Any final questions? Good. Well, thank you very much joining us and see you all again soon. Thank you. Thank you.