May 21, 2025
2025 earnings call transcript
Our analyst
Read of this earnings call — headline is the investment verdict. Research synthesis, not investment advice.
Hold: RS Group delivered resilient execution but not yet investable growth, with revenue down 1% reported and 2% like-for-like, while adjusted operating margin fell 100bp to 9.4%.
The bull case is improving cost control, £200m+ free cash flow, 1.1x leverage and at least £15m of further FY2026 cost benefit; the tension is that management declined to provide an organic-growth forecast, digital sales to smaller customers remain weak and the recovery still depends heavily on PMIs.
- Fy2025 Results
- Cost Savings
- Margin Recovery
- Distrelec Integration
- Digital Demand
- Rs Pro
- Tariffs
- Working Capital
Near term
- Weak UK and broader EMEA PMIs remain the main demand risk; management described the UK as still tough despite RS outperforming its market.
- Completion of the Distrelec Netherlands distribution-centre exit by the end of June should provide savings, but the migration of product, routing and website data carries execution risk.
- FY2026 organic investment is expected to rise to roughly £35m-£40m, while systems and digital-platform rollouts may create initial disruption before benefits emerge.
- Tariffs have had no visible direct impact, but North American product origin includes approximately 15% China and 30% Germany/rest of Europe; broader tariff effects on PMIs remain a risk.
- Working-capital improvement supported more than 110% operating cash-flow conversion, but management acknowledged an in-year benefit, including roughly three days of DSO improvement.
Longer term
- Management targets at least £45m of medium-term cost efficiencies, equivalent to roughly 150bp of margin improvement, but the remaining savings are more difficult and require process and systems investment.
- RS Pro reached 14% of group revenue and management sees potential to approach 20% over several years; success depends on range selection, brand building outside the UK and avoiding supplier cannibalisation.
- Services and solutions are showing better structural traction: like-for-like revenue grew 6%, digital procurement grew 4%, and large-customer revenue grew 6%.
- The business has substantial distribution capacity, reportedly 40%-50% physical inventory headroom, which could support operating leverage if industrial demand recovers without major incremental infrastructure spending.
- Analysts pressed on competitive exits and market share, but management offered mainly qualitative evidence of share gains from smaller non-digital distributors rather than quantified share data.
Red flags
- Management explicitly avoided giving an FY2026 organic-revenue-growth number when asked, instead pointing investors back to PMIs and the medium-term ambition to grow at twice the market.
- Digital like-for-like revenue declined 2%, with weakness concentrated among medium and smaller customers; management characterised the issue as manageable but did not quantify a clear recovery path.
- The strong cash-flow result was partly driven by a one-off working-capital release, so the >110% conversion rate should not be extrapolated directly.
- A prior-year US inventory-provisioning error required restatement, highlighting control and consistency issues even though FY2025 profit was unaffected.
- The first £38m of savings included relatively easier duplication and integration actions; management acknowledged that future savings require more complex process, application and systems changes.
- Competitive commentary remains difficult to verify: management cited share gains and one or two financially challenged local distributors, but said there had been no material change in the competitive landscape.
Forward outlook
| Metric | Period | Range | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| gross margin | FY 2026 | — | official guidance |
| operating margin | FY 2026 | — | management target |
RS Group plc – Full-year results 2025
Wednesday, 21st May 2025
RS Group plc – Full-year results 2025 Wednesday, 21st May 2025
RS Group plc – Full-year results 2025
Simon Pryce
Chief Executive Officer, RS Group plc
Welcome
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the RS full year results presentation for the 12- month period ended 31st March 2025. Thank you for joining us here today. Thank you for joining us online. And thank you all for your continuing interest in the RS group. I am pleased to report that 12 months in to our quite ambitious multiyear plan to enhance and improve RS, we are making really good underlying progress in all areas of our business and will highlight that as we go through the course of the presentation today. Although the unwinding of post pandemic trading benefits and the challenging macro environment continues to impact our financials and to slightly mask the sustainable and underlying improvements that are going on and are in train across the group.
However, by focusing on the things that we can influence and executing well to our plan. We are now in much more control of our own destiny as we continue to position ourselves effectively for the acceleration as markets recover and we returned to more sustained growth and so on to the presentation itself. I am going to share some detail on what we have done this year. Kate will then take us through how this has been reflected in our numbers and our regional performance. And then I will wrap up by sharing what we are focusing on going into
2026. And our presentation should take around 35 minutes, but we will leave plenty of time for questions at the end, and we will aim to get you all away by 10:00.
Health & Safety
Now, as you know, at RS, we like to start all meetings with a health and safety and a values moment. And so, first, I would like to point out the fire exits to those that are here in the room back corner. There are no planned fire alarms. So please, if you hear one, leave in an orderly fashion and follow the instructions of the fire marshals who will be wearing high vis vests. But at RS, safety is not just about physical well-being, it is about mental well-being, too. And that is why, to mark World Mental Health Awareness Month, nearly 200 of us at RS around the world joined our Lifeworks Employee Resource Group initiative, Move for Mental
Health.
The object is simple but powerful. We are going to walk to raise awareness of mental health in the workplace. And of course, moving also is good for our own physical and mental well- being. We started with an ambition to walk collectively a kilometre in May for every colleague statistically likely to be impacted by mental health during their working lives. We passed that goal of 4350km by week two. And so, we have extended it, and I fully expect the 200 of us to walk over 10,000km this month, each kilometre a message of awareness and support. And this is an example of what RS is all about. It is our values in action. It is one team doing the right thing by coming together to raise awareness and make every day better for ourselves and for each other.
2025 Performance
So into the presentation itself, fiscal year 2025 was a year of significant underlying progress at RS where, thanks to the continuing efforts of our great people, we delivered a pretty
2
RS Group plc – Full-year results 2025 Wednesday, 21st May 2025 resilient and in-line performance. We are executing against our plan effectively with clear prioritization, improved accountability, enhanced agility, and as a result, much improved delivery. We are performing, as we should, delivering more predictable outcomes even in difficult markets and continuing to take market share. We are managing the things that we can control better taking action early, delivering restructuring and integration benefits ahead of plan, improving efficiency and managing costs appropriately. And we are beginning to see the benefits in our underlying operating metrics of our continued strategic investments, and all of which gives us great confidence in our ability to drive stronger growth and operating leverage, which in turn will generate significant value for all of our stakeholders over time.
And we have done all this and made all this progress, despite the difficult market backdrop that we have operated in.
Better Execution
Now expanding on each of these themes in turn, as this slide suggests, we are executing more extensively because of the extensive changes that we have made here over the last over the last two years, we have now got a strong, diverse and stable leadership team with enhanced capabilities and a breadth of experience. And most importantly, a common set of aligned objectives. The second block as set out in our Capital Markets Day in September, we have got a clear and focused strategy and an integrated and multi-year action plan to deliver it with much more systemic, systematic and rigorous resource and people prioritization.
We have implemented changes to our operating model and ways of working to create clearer accountability and to support better execution. And we are more process focused, and that is highlighting opportunities to harmonize, automate, and improve delivery through more rigorous program and change management. And importantly, we are actively monitoring progress with much more effective management oversight, all of which is driving clear prioritization, that enhanced accountability that I referred to and much better visibility, agility and ultimately delivery. This year, we performed much more as we should. As the chart on the left-hand side here shows, it is one we have published before. It plots our like for like revenue growth, the red line against the RS weighted market PMI, which are the grey bars.
Revenue Growth
It shows that the post-pandemic, mainly electronics trading benefit that we saw from the second half of our financial year in 2021, had broadly unwound by the first half of 2024. And it also shows that PMI data throughout this period has been below 50 and certainly has been in decline since Q2 2023. And despite this, our revenue performance this year returned to its more close correlation with PMI and has even started to outperform in the second and third in the third and fourth quarter of this year, despite actually PMI softening a little. And this reflects some of our strategic initiatives beginning to deliver. And whilst it is difficult to measure market growth and share in the high service distribution space, the proxies that we use, which tell us we are continuing to gain share such as supplier support, supplier reported, channel relative and absolute growth and web enquiries all indicate that we are performing better than the market.
And now, and most importantly, we are performing predictably. And part of this is because in
2025, we were much more effective at managing the things that we control. As you will hear from Kate shortly, our growth accelerators continued to outperform the broader group. We
3
RS Group plc – Full-year results 2025 Wednesday, 21st May 2025 are managing our variable and fixed costs better, exceeding our expectations on restructuring benefits and taking additional in-year action to reflect a more difficult than anticipated trading environment, and are actually our headcount reduced by over 4% during the year. And although we increased strategic investment to £31 million this year, we did actually defer and reprioritize nearly £9 million of strategic investment to later years. And Kate will expand on both these things in her section.
Growth Acceleration
We accelerated delivery of integration benefits, commencing the early exit of our distribution centre in the Netherlands, originally operated by Distrelec, and this will generate significant additional cost savings in future years. And we are driving greater efficiency through reducing complexity, removing duplication, and this will continue as we improve collaboration and begin to harmonize our processes. And finally, and importantly, much more focused balance sheet management has led to over £200 million of free cash flow this year, strong cash conversion, and as a result, leverage remains towards the bottom end of our target range.
And all of this demonstrates that we are able to exercise greater agility in our execution, investment and cost management.
And on this chart, we are just showing you where the focus of our £31 million of organic OPEX this year, and our £35 million of related CapEx has been spent, sent has been spent and the light red is the capital expenditure and the darker red is the OPEX. And in customers, we have got cleansed and much more granular data and have rolled out improved tools to enhance our customer understanding in products and suppliers. We have launched major systems improvements to accelerate new product introduction in solutions. We have re-platformed and upgraded our principal digital procurement solution, and we have enhanced our service offerings in customer experience. We have developed an upgraded digital platform for roll out across the group, and launched an extensive systems upgrade that will ultimately allow real time delivery tracking.
And in operational excellence, we continue to integrate this into RS at an accelerated pace, whilst better leveraging automation and our global shared business services capability ability to optimize our operating costs. And all of this highlights the significant strategic and operational progress that we have made this year. And with that, I am going to hand over to
Kate, who is going to share with you how this has all been reflected in our numbers.
Kate Ringrose
Chief Financial Officer, RS Group plc
Strategic Direction
Thank you, Simon. Good morning, everyone. I have seen significant improvement in RS and a greater understanding of our strategic direction, analysing our commercial KPIs better and what levers we need to pull to optimise our performance, and how to respond to external factors. We have navigated the difficult market well, executing better and staying focused on what we can control. Building the foundations to take the opportunity to benefit from greater operating leverage as market conditions improve. So let's move on to what is behind the numbers. This slide summarizes the results for the 12 months to 31st March 2025. Year on year revenue decreased by 1%, and that is 2% on a like for like basis. Having adjusted for
4
RS Group plc – Full-year results 2025 Wednesday, 21st May 2025 acquisitions, trading days and FX. Trading was slightly stronger in the second half in Americas and Asia Pacific as PMIs improved and we traded against weaker comparators.
2025 Results
Our adjusted profit before tax reflects the market backdrop and our actions taken on normalized costs, which have all set inflation, as well as the increase in organic investment.
Adjusted operating cash flow conversion has been very strong at over 110% as we released working capital in the year through improved working capital management. Our ROTE decline reflects an 80-basis point impact from last year's acquisitions, with the remainder due to lower profit, partially offset by reduced capital employment. And our full year dividend increases by 2% to 22.4 pence per share, consistent with the progressive dividend policy. Our digital like for like performance of -2% largely reflects the market decline. And as Simon mentioned, we can see material declines in online footfall for some of the key words we are bidding for, albeit our conversion rates are improving following our search tool investment.
The majority of the digital revenue decline is in web sales, and that is to medium and smaller customers.
Services solutions revenue grew by 6% like for like as we have had success in targeting high value corporate customers who are increasingly using our digital procurement solutions, which grew by 4%. We have restructured our business model for RS integrated supply, improving the commercial offer, and we are pleased with the progress that the team is making with new profitable contract wins, improved contract management and a doubling of the order book. I am also pleased with the performance of our own brand, RS Pro, which grew
2% due to range development and end to end sales and marketing focus. RS Pro now accounts for 14% of group revenue. Before I leave this page, you will also have noticed our full year 2023 and 2024 inventory provisions have been restated for an adjustment in the US to reflect the correct application of the group inventory provisioning policy. This is further detailed in note 12 of the RNS, but there is no effect on our full year 2025 numbers.
Revenue
All right, let's turn to revenue. Group revenue was broadly flat with like for like revenue declined 2%, largely due to lower volumes with minimal price inflation. There was a full year benefit from last year's acquisitions, Distrelec, Trident and a forex impact from a stronger dollar. Average order value declined slightly, whilst average order frequency increased marginally, and in our three product categories, facilities and maintenance and other industrial categories grew 3%. Automation, control, electrification and testing measurement fell 2%, and these two categories cover around 80% of our group revenue. Our weakest category is in semis and passes cables and connectors, which declined 8%, reflecting weak end markets.
We have been active in managing our cost base, and as you have heard from Simon earlier, we exceeded our expectations on restructuring and integration benefits and this in part offset inflation and normalization of incentives. We took additional short term cost action, recognizing a difficult trading environment. I have updated the cost bridge that I have shown you in previous sessions, so that you can follow the change in OPEX over the year so that we can all align on a good starting point. I have rebased 2023, 2024 OPEX to exclude the £13 million cost to achieve last year's benefits, which, as a reminder, we show above the line that
5
RS Group plc – Full-year results 2025 Wednesday, 21st May 2025 gives us a baseline starting point of £9.39 million. As we step through the chart from left to right, we include the full year impact of acquisitions, small single digit increase in inflation, and normalization of employee incentives. We have increased our organic investment by £7 million to £31 million, which is £9 million below our original expectations. And that is because we optimized our pace and our sequencing of our investment spend appropriately. This leads to a cost base of £9.94 million before management cost savings.
Integration & Restructuring
We executed the integration and restructuring plans to generate another £29 million of ongoing cost savings by removing labour and facility duplication. This cost £17 million, which is a payback well below 12 months. We have also delivered over £38 million of cost savings over sorry. We have now delivered over £38 million of cost savings over two years, which is above our £30 million target. And this leaves us with an ongoing cost base before in year one-offs of £965 million. During the year, we identified a further £13 million of one-off savings, including the early termination of a lease agreement in the first half general belt tightening and spending and delaying vacancies. The £17 million, which I referred to above of restructuring and integration costs, which we incurred in year, were again recorded above the line. So our operating costs, including one off costs and benefits, finished the year at £9.69 million. R.
So let's bring this all together. Our adjusted operating profit margin reduced by 100 basis points to 9.4%. The most significant movement in that being inflation in the cost base. Given there is little revenue and COGS inflation during the year in gross profit. Let's move on to our region, starting with EMEA. Total revenue declined by 1%, including an extra quarter contribution from Distrelec. Like for like revenue declined 3% with weak industrial production output and ongoing economic weakness across the region and within the region, we saw
France outperform, helped by more resilient industry verticals. The UK suffered from weaker demand since November, and Germany be impacted by a higher exposure to manufacturing and automotive industries.
Americas
In Americas, our total revenue fell 3%, which is largely a result of the weak dollar during the year with like for like revenue. Flat economic weakness in the US and Canada through most of the year impacted business confidence, as evidenced by the weaker PMI data. Although this showed some signs of improvement in the fourth quarter, our operations in Mexico performed well as we expanded our product and service offer against a strong economic backdrop. Like for like gross margin was down just 0.1 percentage point, and the 4% decline in like for like operating profit reflects the revenue decline and increased organic investment, including within Mexico, which was partially offset by operating cost discipline.
Asia Pacific
Moving on to Asia Pacific. Total revenue grew 2% with like for like flat. We saw improving momentum during the year with like for like growth in the second half reflecting signs of market recovery, especially in Southeast Asia. We have been developing our industrial offer, focusing on high lifetime value customers and expanding our service solutions offer, helped by the acquisitions of Domnick Hunter and Trident. And we are pleased with the success that we are having with RS Pro in the region. Operating profit increased by £1 million with
6
RS Group plc – Full-year results 2025 Wednesday, 21st May 2025 evidence of improved operating leverage emerging. I am pleased to report strong free cash flow with an operating cash flow conversion of over 110%. The lower EBITDA was partly offset by an improvement in working capital with better working capital management, especially in receivables. Capital expenditure remains stable at 1.2 times depreciation and supports our organic investment and strategy. Notably, physical and system infrastructure.
Net debt decreased to £364 million, resulting in a gearing ratio of 1.1 times, which gives us good headroom to consider. Inorganic opportunities and our cash generation, balance sheet and debt facility headroom provide plenty of capacity for continued strategic investment, and our clear capital allocation policy hasn't changed. First, we prioritize organic investment to support organic growth, especially in strengthening our physical system and process infrastructure. And this will increase next year and continue at around about 35 to £45 million as previously signalled.
Acquisitions
Second, acquisitions in this globally fragmented market can accelerate our strategy, especially small bolt-ons. We remain value and capacity disciplined in our approach, assessing and building a pipeline of acquisitions which, if executed, are targeted to cover a cost of capital within three years. And third, we believe in sharing cash generated with shareholders through a progressive dividend policy. And where we do not have sufficient value creation opportunities in organic and inorganic investments, we will return excess capital to shareholders. Our full year dividend in 2024, 2025 grew by 2%. We expect future increases to continue to be in the low single digits until dividend cover is rebuilt. We targeted return on capital employed of over 20%, and leverage an efficient balance sheet within a range of one to two times net debt adjusted EBITDA, depending on prevailing market conditions and acquisition opportunities.
2026
Finally, to give you some help on factors to consider when you are thinking about full year
2026, we believe that the work we are doing to improve the operating performance of RS puts us in a strong position to drive greater operating leverage when the markets return to growth. We are planning for gross margin to be broadly flat, with pricing discipline maintained, whilst recognizing gross margin can be impacted short term by a variety of factors, including forex and inflation. We plan to increase our spend on organic investment next year to within the lower end of the guided range of 35 to £45 million per annum, and we anticipate similar cost inflation to that seen in full year 2025 of 3%, including higher labour costs and additional UK national insurance costs.
We announced a further £30 million cost savings program, which is now complete, and a further 150 basis points of margin improvement through cost savings over the medium term.
I approximate that to be around about £45 million of cost, and we are making inroads into that target and will continue to do so in full year 2026. We expect during this coming year that further cost efficiencies, combined with cost synergies delivered from integrating
Distrelec, will deliver at least a further £15 million of cost benefit. The associated cost to deliver these benefits will be in the region of 10 to £15 million. Higher depreciation from our capital investment spend and further normalization of our employee incentives will be about 5 to £10 million of increase.
7
RS Group plc – Full-year results 2025 Wednesday, 21st May 2025
We are proactively managing costs and have demonstrated our ability to flex expenditure as required. Remember, as shown on our cost bridge slide on slide 11, that our underlying cost base for 2024, 2025 was £965 million. Stripping out one-off cost benefits and expenditure, we will continue to target cash conversion to exceed 80%. There is no change to our capital expenditure guidance at around £50 million. And we continue to support the physical and system infrastructure investment with our CapEx, including progress on the 2030 ESG Action
Plan guidance points, which include trading days and forex unchanged tax rate, and a summary of the operating cost actions is included on slide 34 of your pack.
Tariffs
And with the final word on tariffs, we are not currently experiencing any visible direct impact from tariffs. And we are closely monitoring this evolving situation. We are fully engaged with our suppliers on their response and to support our customers in meeting their needs, and we would expect to pass on any price increases as suppliers adjust. And we have the system capability to manage those changes given our global reach, broad product offer, wider supplier base and supply chain management expertise, we have the opportunity to offer alternative products, manage supply disruption and minimise our direct and indirect exposure to tariffs where necessary, whilst mindful of the impact of tariffs that it may have more broadly on PMIs and the macro environment. I would like to now hand you back to Simon.
Simon Pryce
Chief Executive Officer, RS Group plc
Strategic Action Plan
Thanks, Kate. And now, in this last section, I just like to share with you a bit more detail on the significant progress that we are making against our strategic action plan, where we are focusing on going into 2026 and where we are in our broader strategic and operational improvement journey. So this is a slide some of you will recognize from our Capital Markets
Day in September. And it is our pictorial plan on a page. It is how we intend to become first choice for customers, first choice for suppliers, and how we will accelerate sustainable value creation for all of our stakeholders. So what have we done and what are we planning to do?
At the core of our wheel, core to everything we do is people. And for people, for us, it is all about further aligning and developing our people and leadership capability and capacity.
Our people actions in 2025 led to greater focus and empowerment, more accountability and responsibility. And we did see a small drop in our October engagement survey. Although perhaps it remains at high levels, and it is perhaps not surprising given the difficult market environment in which we have been working and the level of change going on at RS. But pleasingly, our most recent survey, which is just coming to a close now, is showing significant improvement in engagement in all areas. So in 2026, we will be focusing on equipping our leaders with greater agility and flexibility to better manage and lead continuous change and moving to a more skills-based organisation, particularly in key functional areas like finance, product and supply chain and people as we continue to build a greater organizational agility, efficiency and competence to support our strategic opportunity.
8
RS Group plc – Full-year results 2025 Wednesday, 21st May 2025
Customers
In customers, it is all about prioritizing the most valuable ones whilst continuing to serve all who buy a broad mix of industrial MRO products in small volumes, but doing so in more effective cost to serve. In 2025, we aggregated and cleansed our customer data and enhanced our data capture mechanisms and put in place the tools to enable us to develop much more targeted sales approaches and to clarify those costs to serve. We defined and put in place standardized and forward-looking operational metrics to monitor our progress. And as we move into 2026, we will start to use this data and advanced segmentation capability to provide much more tailored and effective sales, service and marketing efforts to our customer base.
Digital Front End
We will also be using our improved digital flexibility to optimize our digital front end in markets where there are significant cultural variations, such as China. And all of this allows us to better prioritize the right customers with the right products and the right services efficiently and at an effective cost to serve, all enabled through the use of proprietary data and enhanced data platforms. In products and supplies, it is about strengthening our technical product offer through value sharing partnerships with strong suppliers and by developing more curation for our customers. In 2025, we made material changes to our systems to allow increased local sourcing and stocking, and introduced a new product management capability to materially accelerate both our capacity for new product introduction and our speed of adoption whilst migrating sourcing to improve sustainability and stability of our supply chain. And this is particularly true in RS Pro.
2026 Focus
And moving into 2026, our focus is on optimizing our product management systems to accelerate the availability of relevant technical data and improve our customer experience, building out further our RS Pro range and upgrading our pricing capability and processes to make us more effective value-based prices. And all of this is creating greater flexibility and allow a better sharing of the value we create for both suppliers and customers. We are continuing to focus our solutions and service offer during the year, we re-platformed our e- procurement offer in Americas and Asia Pacific, enhancing content and order processing with new software planning tools.
Now, as you heard from Katie earlier, under new management, we have also refocused the
RS integrated supply business to drive standardization and automation, which will lead to greater cost efficiencies and better scalability. And as we enter 2026, we will continue to develop our digital product solutions, our technical solutions, and to leverage closer relationships between our integrated supply business and the broader RS as we pursue greater scalability and enhance value through our solutions and our services. And we continue to strengthen and tailor our customer journey for a seamless omnichannel customer experience in 2025. As you heard from Kate, we have introduced a major artificial intelligence enabled enhanced search capability across the group, and commenced the development of a major upgrade to our digital commerce platforms, with release one actually launched in
Americas just after the year end.
9
RS Group plc – Full-year results 2025 Wednesday, 21st May 2025
Systems Upgrade
We have also launched an extensive systems upgrade in EMEA and APAC that will, whilst causing some initial disruption, ultimately allow us to deliver real time delivery tracking to our customers. Going into 2026, we will be further enhancing our digital commerce platform and begin rolling it out in Europe, and will also launch the real time tracking functionality to customers that we have done all the base work to enable and start to better tailor our customer experience using, again, our extensive proprietary data. That is all enhanced by artificial intelligence and machine learning enabled platforms. And of course, we are improving our physical, digital and process infrastructure to make it more efficient, more agile, and more scalable to better support our strategic direction of travel and ultimately to improve our operating leverage.
In 2025, we made really good progress in a number of areas. In addition to commencing the closure of the Distrelec central distribution centre, we have also expanded our capacity and capability in our DCs in both France and in the US, and we have begun the simplification and upgrading of our technology stack, retiring over 40 applications during the year. And we have now commenced our middle and back-office transformation planning. In 2026, our focus will be on continuing the exit from Distrelec CDC and upgrading our warehouse management systems in the UK and continuing to selectively invest and automate our distribution infrastructure in Europe. We will also commence the final phase of the integration and start decommissioning the district technology stack.
And on the process side, global end to end process owners will be defining harmonized processes for application across the group and will begin driving standardization where it makes sense. And we are well into the next phase of operational improvement work at RS, which will further increase efficiency, reduce cost, and ultimately support accelerated growth and much improved operating leverage. So bringing this all back together, we are 12 months in to our ambitious multi-year plan to enhance and improve this group. And we continue to invest despite the tough markets that we have seen this year.
Improvement Plan
This chart reflects the progress we are making and the increased confidence we have in the plan as we execute it. The chart on the left-hand side of the page is a repeat of what you saw, which allocates the OPEX and the CapEx that we will be spending over the next four years to the areas in which we will be driving improvement. And remember, Kate referred to that 35 to £45 million of elevated OPEX or so that will incur. And this will drive at least a further £45 million of efficiencies and cost reductions. And then the chart on the right-hand side is a directionally correct representation of how these costs and these benefits are expected to come through over the next four years.
And as you can see from the chart, we are beginning to build real momentum going into next year. We will, of course, continue to be agile in our cost management, as we have demonstrated this year, but with benefits already beginning to come through in our operational performance, we do have increased confidence that these investments will drive accelerated and long-term value creation. And as we enter 2026, markets remain challenging, with Americas and Asia Pacific probably more resilient than EMEA, and particularly in the UK,
10
RS Group plc – Full-year results 2025 Wednesday, 21st May 2025 as you will have noted from the PMIs. However, we remain confident that once PMIs recover, structural industry trends will return our markets to growth.
And therefore, whilst we will flex effectively, as we have demonstrated this year, we will continue to execute our improvement plan to drive and improve the quality of RS and to position us best for accelerated growth. To realize the significant value opportunity that exists here, from being uniquely placed in fragmented markets and well-positioned for when they return to growth, which they will, through driving market share gains through a differentiated and increasingly differentiated technical and digital product and service solutions offer, through improving and continuing to improve the efficiency of our global infrastructure, to enhance that operating leverage and enhancing it all with disciplined acquisitions that accelerate growth and value creation. And as we do that, we will increasingly become sustainably first choice and drive sustainable value creation for all of our stakeholders.
Conclusion
And to conclude, I am extremely proud and hugely grateful of the efforts of our great people who continue to embrace the changes that we are making and are working extremely hard to deliver them. This stuff is not easy, and it can be frustrating, particularly when difficult markets mean that you cannot immediately see the benefits of all your hard work in the headline financials. But thanks to the efforts of the team, we are making real and significant underlying strategic and operational process progress. And this is giving us increased confidence, increased confidence in our ability to deliver on those medium-term objectives that we have set out for you in the past, growing at twice the market, with mid-teens adjusted operating margins, generating over 80% cash flow conversion, and delivering returns on capital well in excess of 20%.
That brings us to the end of the formal presentation. I am going to open up the meeting to questions. We will take questions in the room first, if that is okay. There are a couple of people with mics. If you can raise your hand, state your name and the institution that you represent, we will take questions and we will also then take any questions submitted online.
So give me two seconds to go and sit down, then stick your hand up and thank you.
Q&A
David Brockton (Deutsche Numis): Good morning. It is David Brockton from Deutsche
Numis. Can I ask two questions in relation to tariffs, please? thanks for setting out the minimal direct imports that you fill the business has into the US. I guess that was somewhat contrary to my prior view of. I thought it was minimal from China. I am just wondering if you could just give us a rough split of the proportion of products that are sourced from Europe and the UK, as well as China into the US if you are able to. Or any sort of directional indication there. And then secondly, in relation to tariffs, it is very encouraging that the businesses have seen improved performance through Q3 and Q4. And I think you noted that it was ahead of PMIs due to the sort of strategic initiatives that are coming through. Have you ruled out any pull forward of orders ahead of tariffs in that in those numbers? And just wondering what you are seeing on a ground level there. Thanks.
Simon Pryce
Thanks, David. I am going to give Kate a bit of time just to check the origin data for our for our Americas business. But the reason, the reason that you see relatively
11
RS Group plc – Full-year results 2025 Wednesday, 21st May 2025 little direct import into America is a lot of a lot of us are suppliers will import from where it is manufactured into their own stock centre, stock holding centre in America, and they will ship from that to us. So we are generally all bar about 5% of our North American revenue is actually tariffed, but quite a lot of it comes from all sorts of different places. Have you managed to dig that number out yet?
Kate Ringrose
Yeah. I mean, when we are looking at country of origin, bearing in mind that this country of origin into the US, not necessarily directly to us, if that makes sense. So in terms of China, it is about 15% is country of origin. Then we have got sort of Germany and
Europe and the rest of Europe at about 30% combined. And then it is a range of other places after that.
Simon Pryce
So do we see any evidence that tariffs are driving accelerated growth and pull forward? We do not see any of that. directly, David. But perhaps that is in part because of the demand we are satisfying. Generally, it is high complexity, small volume specialist manufacturing and mainly break fix MRO so people are tending not to try and project forward what machines might break. They are still buying that sort of as and when they need it. And I think maybe just standing back a little bit from tariffs, we do not see any short-term impact.
There is lots of admin costs associated with it. But actually, there is probably a bit of price inflation that gives you some gross margin opportunity as well. And our business model enables us to take advantage in a tariff environment. One of the things you heard me refer to is we have done quite a lot of system change over the year that allows us to now adopt product at multiple locations across our global network and distribute out from them. So being a broad MRO based distributor, global with global operations and an ability to operate, we have 2500 suppliers. An ability to switch product and provide alternatives across the globe, I think positions is quite well in a tariff environment.
David Brockton (Deutsche Numis): Thanks very much.
Simon Pryce
Hi, Karen.
Karen Tso (JP Morgan): Hi. Thank you for your presentation. Karen Tso[?] from JP Morgan.
I have two questions, please. One is around the delta of the £31 million organic investments versus the range you mentioned around defer for the future years. Just curious around if you could elaborate around the thinking of that and how should we think about the lower end range of the 35 to £40 million for next year? And then my second question is around probably also for Kate of the free cash flow improvement with better working capital. Just trying to understand, should we interpret this as more of a one-off, or is there kind of any structural changes you mentioned for the working capital management? Thank you.
Simon Pryce
So I think I will start and then hand it over to Kate. Karen, just on the £31 million of strategic investments we have made, being at the lower end of the range we guided to, sort of two things going on there that resulted in a deferral into later years of some of that investment. One is continuously analysing the scheduling and interdependencies of some of this investment work and de-risking it by moving bits and pieces of it around. And a little bit is also the person on my left who has got an appropriate stick when we need it. It does show that we can be effective and agile and manage our investments to the trading environment that we find ourselves in without losing the significant opportunity that is out there. And indeed, we do not think we have pushed any of it to the right with this deferral. In fact, we
12
RS Group plc – Full-year results 2025 Wednesday, 21st May 2025 think we will be more efficient with that spend. Anything you want to say on this year's spend, and then the free cash flow, Kate?
Kate Ringrose
Yeah. Really, what we are reflecting here, Karen, is having taken a really good look at what projects we are live what is the interdependencies that we have on the projects that are either starting or in train and also what the right resourcing expertise that need to be applied. A lot of what we have done in terms of looking at what we wanted to spend this year and where we have landed, is making sure that we are doing that efficiently and effectively, and also clearly conscious of the broader environment that we are in. So pacing is important because otherwise there is a risk you do not spend the money well. So that is why we are looking to an increase certainly into this year. I am guiding to kind of the lower half of the 35 to £45 to somewhere between 35 and £40 is probably where I would expect you guys to guess where we end up. And we will update you along the way.
With regards to the free cash flow, fundamentally, what we did this year is we took a really good look at what was going on in cash flow, our forecasts, our metrics. Really a lot of measurement around DSO, DPO. The inventory turns are like things you'd expect us to be looking at really closely. We have in the year, achieved a bit of a working capital release by improving metrics, and one of it was putting in an additional system capability within receivables. That just allowed us to do that better within a year. So what I am expecting going forward is for us to at least maintain the quality of those metrics. But there is an in year one-off release that results in improving, for example, DSOs by I think it was around three days that we improved it by across the piece.
Karen Tso (JP Morgan): Thank you.
Annelies Vermeulen (Morgan Stanley): Hi. Good morning. Annelies Vermeulen from
Morgan Stanley. I have two questions as well please. So firstly, on RS Pro, you talked about range development. I was wondering if you could expand on that in terms of what you have been adding on the RS Pro side. And the two percentage points increase, is that are you actually seeing customers convert from branded to own brand, or is it just incremental sales of the newer brand own brand products that you have launched? And perhaps you could comment also as you accelerate that, how you are managing your supplier relationships as to not upset them too much if you are switching to branded? Second question a little bit shorter.
Just on the headcount reductions, 4% this year, could you comment on how much of that was natural attrition versus active headcount management? And are you happy with where headcount is today? If you never know, volumes do come back and things start to pick up again, do you feel you have got the right people count in place? Thank you.
Simon Pryce
Thanks, Annelies. On RS Pro and range development, and one of the things we now understand much better about RS Pro is that brand development is really important. And in the UK, the RS brand has got nearly 90 years of investment in it. In other parts of the world, the RS Pro brand is relatively new and that it is important that we build brand strength and understanding Before we launch a huge range of products into those markets. It is also a learning for us that we need to launch products that our customers want to buy and that do not compete with our suppliers, and that is always a constant balance that we are driving. But we have much more data and knowledge now that allows us to influence what products we do actually source with RS Pro. And of course, we are always monitoring that it is not getting in the way or cannibalizing some of our some of our supplier relationships. In fact, some of our
13
RS Group plc – Full-year results 2025 Wednesday, 21st May 2025 suppliers actually supply us with those products for the RS Pro brand. So often, it is done in conjunction with our suppliers, not isolated from them.
But this will be a slow and continuous build of an important of an important range of RS Pro products, that over time, we would continue to expect to see RS Pro grow as a percentage of group revenue. And I think up to 20% over a number of years is the sorts of targets that we are looking for on headcount and headcount reduction. Some of it is hiring freeze, but quite a chunk of it is, is people actually leaving the organization. Now, a chunk of that is to do with the combination of Distrelec and RS, where taking the best of both but we did identify some duplication. I think those that headcount reduction is relatively permanent. We still have very significant capacity in the business, both from a physical and people and process capability.
The one area where you are likely to see headcount increase as volumes increase, and as we go back to growth, is in the physical distribution centres themselves. But that is a relatively small proportion of our total labour base. So I do not envisage a huge labour influx as we move into growth.
Annelies Vermeulen (Morgan Stanley): Thank you.
Ryan Flight (Jefferies): Good morning. Ryan Flight from Jefferies here. Three from me if I may. So first one on pretty high-level competitive landscape given the tough operating environment. I wonder if you could give us an update on whether you have seen some exits.
Number two, you have obviously seen a little bit of a drag from the smaller customers in digital. I wonder if you can give us some more colour on the kind of dynamics behind that and what is required for that to turn. And then third, the bullet point on shareholder returns beyond the dividend. I wonder, again, if you could give us some extra colour =on what would be required. Is there a floor to leverage and your thinking behind that? Thank you.
Simon Pryce
Competitive landscape. Look, it feels to us like we are taking share from the smaller, local, non-digital distributors, really across the globe. We have seen one or two get into financial challenges, but we have not seen a material change in the competitive landscape anywhere we play. I mean, interestingly we refer to our acquisition pipeline and our rigor around value. We certainly feel that perhaps some of the sellers in today's world are not necessarily reflecting the reality of the environment that we are trading in, and that value tension is keen at the moment, but we will see how that plays out.
On the sort of smaller customers in digital, Kate referred to the fact that we are seeing less of those smaller customers, and that is the area of our business that continues to decline a bit.
A lot of those customers are buying one off electronic components, but also, those buyers are probably the most price sensitive in our portfolio. And of course, we are there to satisfy immediacy of need and availability, and that comes with a price. So I think we continue to monitor that. We are continuing to create a much more targeted approach to ensure that we can meet those customers' needs, but at the right cost to serve for ourselves, but we do not regard it as a major issue. Shareholder returns.
Kate Ringrose
So, I think pretty much consistent with what I said. We have got a clear order of capital allocation, and we hold to that. With regards to leverage, we give guidance around broadly one to two times leverage where we are. And absolutely, we are on the lower end of that at the moment. And as we have said, we are actively monitoring and looking at a pipeline of acquisitions, and those are the dynamics that we look at across the piece. Do we
14
RS Group plc – Full-year results 2025 Wednesday, 21st May 2025 have good opportunities to deploy our capital in organic and inorganic? And if we do not see those opportunities over a period of time, then we look at the right options to return capital and cash to shareholders. That is I do not think there is much more I can add to it other than what I have said.
Simon Pryce
I think we have got we see plenty of opportunities for value, creative deployment of our capital today. We do not think we are sitting here with surplus capital. If it does get to that point at some stage in the future, we will of course look at how best to get it back to shareholders. Thank you.
James Rose (Barclays): All right. James Rose from Barclays here. I have got three, if I may. The first is, do you have a view on what organic revenue growth could be for this year, and can you grow it twice the market as per the medium-term plan? The second one is you mentioned growth with smaller customers. But on the flip side, growth with larger customers seems to have gone a bit better in FY 2025. Is that something you can progress further in FY
2026? I appreciate your thoughts there. And then lastly, can we have an update on the UK business? The last time we heard from you that was a bit more challenging.
Simon Pryce
Thanks, James. If you will forgive me, I won't ask the first bit of your first question. What do I think growth will be next year? I think what we have said relatively consistently here is a good indicator of the market environment that we are facing will be provided to you by PMIs and what they are doing. I think even in a relatively flat industrial environment, we can continue to grow. And we are very comfortable that the work we are doing, and we have even demonstrated to ourselves in the last couple of quarters that we can continue to grow even when markets are tough. But giving you an absolute number on that, I suspect, is probably something I will get into trouble for doing. And if I knew, I would probably be sitting on a beach drinking pina coladas, not sitting here because I would be able to predict the future.
So what I can tell you is that that our business, as we have demonstrated this year, can operate in pretty much any sort of environment. And the most important thing is medium and long term. We absolutely see the structural drivers that return our markets to growth, and our ability to grow at twice those markets is probably underpinned by the work that we have done this year. You are right about large customers. We talked about focusing on high lifetime value customers, and we did grow our large customers about 6%.
Kate Ringrose
Yeah, revenue in that group.
Simon Pryce
Revenue 6% last year. We anticipate that continuing to grow going forward.
But our strategy is about focus on those high lifetime customers, but do not forget everybody else because there is still a big proportion of our business. So ensuring that using the tools we have put in place today ensure we have the data that allows us to offer those smaller customers the products and services they need at the right cost to serve is also part of what we have been working on, will continue to work on going forward. Then the UK. The UK is tough. Just go and look at what the PMIs are doing. After actually quite a positive start to our fiscal 2025 in terms of PMIs, they turn pretty rapidly um sort of in the last quarter of the calendar year, and they have not really recovered. Now we are actually doing relatively well in that environment, but the broader market in the UK remains challenging.
James Rose (Barclays): Thank you.
15
RS Group plc – Full-year results 2025 Wednesday, 21st May 2025
Rory McKenzie (UBS): Good morning. It is Rory McKenzie from UBS. Firstly, can you give us more detail on the error you found in the inventory measurement? And why was that reported as a restatement rather than a £19 million extra cost of provisions this year, if that makes sense? And then secondly, I think in the release you referenced, average order value was down and frequency was up. Has that been a trend all year long as you have dug into that? What does that that represent? And I guess that that brings in a way a form of margin pressure that mix changing. So has that changed or how you think about either our pricing or how you build your model for cost to serve? Thank you.
Simon Pryce
Thanks, Rory. Do you want to take the accounting one?
Kate Ringrose
So the dynamic around the inventory measurement. So firstly, it is just answer the question as to why it is the prior year adjustments as opposed to in year. So a prior year adjustment is where you correct for the incorrect application of a group policy, which is what we are talking to here. We would do something in the year if we had a change of estimate. So this is not a change of estimate. This is when we have really gone in and rigorously looked at how the group policy was applied across the group. There was an area where it had not been consistently inappropriately applied and that related primarily to prior years, and therefore, we have adjusted accordingly.
Simon Pryce
I think on the question, Rory, about average order value frequency, you are right. Average order value is down a bit, frequency is up. A couple of things driving that I think firstly, when times are tough, people tend to buy for what they need, when they need it.
They also tend to buy - they tend to run machines longer, do less planned maintenance and overhaul and therefore have more immediate need and therefore are ordering just that thing because that thing broke. So there is a bit of that going on.
The other thing that is going on is we are coming off three years or two and a half years of post-Covid trading when a number of our product categories, supply chains were very difficult and constrained. And we did see a big run up in average order value over that period because people weren't just buying for immediate need, they were also buying for availability. That has unwound, and I think what you are seeing now is people back to buying break fix MRO as break fix MRO. Does it create additional margin pressure? It does a little bit because you are shipping more parcels for the same amount of revenue, but it is not a massive it is not a massive margin headwind. So it does not change our view of what those medium-term margin targets can be.
Tom Cullen (Investec): Yeah. Morning. Tom Cullen from Investec. Just picking up on comments around the closure of the Distrelec DC in the Netherlands, can you just remind us of where you are currently in terms of capacity levels across the various DCs that you have, and your view on sort of headroom and what competitive advantage that might give you in this environment? Thanks.
Simon Pryce
Thanks, Tom. Yeah. So we accelerated, we negotiated an early exit out of the
Distrelec's central distribution centre in Holland. We are in the process now, actually, most of the way through, moving that product from Holland, mainly into our Bad Hersfeld distribution centre in Germany. That is actually quite, it is a surprisingly complex thing to do because not only do you have to put the stuff on a truck and ship it to Germany, you have to rebuild all the routings and the pricing manuals and the data content that allow people to find it on your
16
RS Group plc – Full-year results 2025 Wednesday, 21st May 2025 website and as they order. And we are pleased with the progress that we are making and that will be closed by the end of June. But that is still leaving us with very significant capacity, both process and physical, across the network.
We are continuing to invest on a three-cycle basis to build that capacity and also increasingly to automate it, which creates more capacity. So investments in the US and in France we would not need to add any additional physical distribution to get to get back to volumes that are well above where they were at the prior peak. It is difficult to estimate that specifically, but we have got 40 or 50% physical inventory capacity if we need it. It is slightly the opposite. We need to make sure we can continue to apply very effective inventory management and only build physical inventory into that capacity as and when we can sell it.
Sandra Hedstrom (Stifel): Hi. Sandra from Stifel. Two questions from me, please. Firstly, on bolt-on M&A, is that something that is on the agenda in the upcoming 12 months? I think you said valuations is probably not reflecting where the market is and a lot going on internally. And then secondly, on the 150 basis points of cost savings, appreciate what sort of eight months on from the CMD. Any change in thought on how that could be phased, or any areas which are showing more promise than you would have thought eight months ago?
Simon Pryce
Thanks. I will do bolt-ons and then I will leave Kate to answer the question on the 150 basis points, which I might add my colour to at the end. On bolt-ons, yes, absolutely, they have and always have been on the agenda. We acquired Trident at the beginning of the year. Very pleased with that fitting well into the business and performing very well. I alluded to a good pipeline, but not necessarily an alignment of buyers and sellers' views. We will continue to monitor those and to see what happens over the year. But the pipeline is pretty strong at the moment, I would suggest. And then have our views on £45 million changed very much?
Kate Ringrose
Well, let's just kind of repeat that orientation, because I recognize there is a lot of numbers that sort of fly around. So originally, we talked to a £30 million target, and then we updated that to an additional 100 and 150 basis points, which in this presentation today are, for ease of reference, converted to, looks like around £45 million. So of the £30 million target, we have already delivered that. So from last year and this year, we have delivered £38 million in total. We are looking at a further at least £15 million in full year
2026.
I would say with regards to what we have done, the easy stuff has been done where we have identified duplication, where we have got and identified the integration, cost savings and benefits, we have identified what they were well on the way. And we have talked about
Distrelec, and we are now moving on to things that I would say are a little bit more tricky.
They do require more in terms of process investment system investments, removing duplications of applications and the like, but we are underway. It is a multi-year program, but we are underway, and we will continue to review what savings we can make and update you accordingly.
Simon Pryce
And that is what I thought the finance director would say. And I am far enough away to say, I think a year in, we are more than comfortable with the sort of 150 basis points, £45 million. We think there is more to go for. As and when we can quantify it, we will, but it is as a result of the work that we are doing. I am not sure that it will need a
17
RS Group plc – Full-year results 2025 Wednesday, 21st May 2025 huge amount of additional work. So I think you should assume that that £45 million number is solid and probably a bit conservative. And until then, FD[?] kicks me, but we will keep you informed as we see an opportunity to evolve that. Just conscious of it being 10:04. We have got some questions online, Lucy, that we can just.
Lucy [?]: I think most of them have been covered, but one of them is just to clarify, Kate, on the £13 million of in-year sort of cost savings, they talk obviously the have identified the £5 million from the DC exit. Can you give more detail on the £8 million? Is it repeatable please?
Kate Ringrose
Sure. So, you would always expect in a business like ours with a cost basis, that there is a degree of choices that you make within you as to where and how you spend some of the more discretionary spend. How you deal with vacancies, how you deal with travel, how you make other in-year choices. And that is effectively what that £8 million is, is choices that we have made, recognising a more challenging market that we saved this year.
In any year, we would look to do that. In any year, we would look around those different discretionary choices that we'd make in order to manage our cost base. So are those direct choices repeatable? No. Are other choices makeable? Yes. Is how I would hold that number.
There is flexibility in our cost base. We manage it very vigorously. You would obviously expect us to be able to do that.
Simon Pryce
Okay. Conscious it is 10:05. Thanks very much for your attention and your time and look forward to seeing you all over the course of the year. Thank you.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]
18