Press Releases

Preliminary Statement

Electrocomponents plc, the leading high service distributor to engineers worldwide, today announces its results for the year ended 31 March 2009.

SUMMARY OF RESULTS

⁽¹⁾ Underlying revenue growth, adjusting for currency and trading days

Financial Highlights

• Economic conditions impacted sales: first half underlying growth 1% and second half decline 11%
• Good gross margin management with second half gross margin higher than the first half
• Operating costs reduced at constant foreign exchange rates
• Headline profit before tax of £86.6m, down 10% year on year
• Strong free cash flow of £78m representing 118% of profit after tax
• Robust financial metrics with interest cover of 13x and net debt to EBITDA of 1.7x
• Major £281m bank refinancing concluded during the year with a maturity of 2012

Operational Highlights

• 10% growth in e-Commerce sales with the share increasing from 31% to 36%, exiting at 40%
• Leadership teams in Europe and Electronics strengthened
• Actions taken to reduce costs by £18m pa, with a reduction of around 8% of the workforce
• Strengthened electronics offer, with 10,000 new products and improved price competitiveness
• Successful launch of electronics production packaging in the UK, Europe and Asia Pacific
• Higher margin, own brand portfolio outperforming the market

CURRENT TRADING AND OUTLOOK

In the first eight weeks of the new financial year the sales trend has been similar to the final quarter of last year. Year on year Group revenue has declined by around 17%, the UK by around 14% and the International business by around 19%. Within International, Continental Europe has declined by around 17%, North America by around 23% and Asia Pacific by around 15%. The Purchasing Managers' Indices in our major markets have shown some stability in recent months, albeit at low levels.

Our strategy remains unchanged. We will continue to strengthen our electronics and e-Commerce offers to better serve customers' needs and drive our market leading offer for maintenance customers. An increasing number of strategic initiatives will be introduced into the market as the investments we have made over the past few years deliver.

The Group is well positioned for the future with a broad spread of international businesses, extensive product range and customer base, high service offer and realigned cost structure.

IAN MASON, GROUP CHIEF EXECUTIVE, COMMENTED

“We have responded swiftly to the economic conditions by continuing to implement our strategy and reducing our cost base. Our free cash flow has been robust and we have a strong balance sheet.

The focus in the coming year is to exploit the opportunities in the market by accelerating the implementation of the strategy while maintaining the financial strength of the business.”

Enquiries:

* Available to 15:00 on 29 May 2009, thereafter 01865 204000

The results and presentation to analysts are published on the corporate website at www.electrocomponents.com

Definitions of terms:

In order to reflect underlying business performance, comparisons of revenue between periods have been adjusted for exchange rates and the number of trading days (underlying revenue growth). Changes in profit, cash flow, debt and share related measures such as earnings per share are at reported exchange rates.

Headline profit: a profit of £9.9m (2008: charge of £1m) was reported in the year for items excluded from headline profit. Details of the items are given below the Income Statement. Key performance measures such as return on sales, EBITDA and ROCE use headline profit figures.

Notes to editors:

Electrocomponents plc is the leading high service distributor to engineers worldwide. The company which was founded in 1937 is listed on the London Stock Exchange, employs around 6,000 people and has operations in 27 countries, serving another 43 countries through distributors. The Group satisfies the small quantity needs of its customers who are typically electronics or maintenance engineers in business. Electrocomponents sells around half a million products to 1.5m customers, through catalogues, over the internet and through trade counters. Products include electronics, electrical, mechanical, automation and health and safety components. The offer to engineers is valuable to many of our 2,500 suppliers, who would otherwise find the small order and immediate dispatch requirements of such customers difficult and costly to satisfy.

A large number of high quality goods are stocked, which are dispatched the same day that the order is received. The average customer order value is around £100 although the range of order values is wide. The Group's large number of customers is from a wide range of industry sectors with diverse product demands.

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