Luceco plc (LUCE) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning everybody and welcome to Le Seco's first half results presentation for 2025. Thank you everyone who is joining on the webcast. Revenue approximately £126 million up almost 15% on last year. Operating profit of circa £14 million up almost 10% on last year. adjusted operating margin of 11%. This is slightly down on last year, reflecting the investments we are making in the future growth, especially in the energy transition business. This is mainly engineering activity, but also the software development. And the benefits of this will start to come through in the second half. Thus, I expect the full-year operating margin to be ahead of last year. As we know, our second half is always significantly stronger for us than the first half, and this year that will be particularly so. Leverage at 1.6%, our dividend up almost 6%, and EPS slightly ahead of last year. As I said, first-half revenues up almost 15%. This is partly due to M&A, but also extremely strong growth within the EV category. When we bought the business in the 12 months up to acquiring it in 2022, Pinky V turned over 4 million and this year should be closer to 18 million. We lost approximately 1% of the group revenue in the first half due to tariff issues in the US and other international weakness was a timing issue which will come back in the second half. There was an FX headwind because of the weaker dollar. Chinese New Year holiday in January this year was particularly early which meant that strong FOB shipments were pushed to the end of last year as we were concerned about possible disruption. This impacted the first quarter's revenues and hence like-for-like growth of only 4.6% in Q1 versus 3.2% in Q2. H1 was also impacted by some supply issues which are now resolved. We have seen a further pic...