AO World plc

So, good morning. Well, it's great after two years to finally be back in front of you and thank you for those of you that have made the effort to come along today. And what are two years it's been with all the ups and downs that that has involved? Well, we've cemented the progress of last year with a step change in scale and consumer behaviour. But there have been and will continue to be a tonne of challenges that we have to navigate. We're now in the thick of peak trading and the whole Black Friday period and forecasting this back in July was always going to be interesting. We had to take into account predicting the total online market, the jobs market, oil prices, wage inflation, container shipping prices and overall consumer demand and yet land all that on a sixpence over a two to three week period. We're genuinely looking forward to the market normalising and the last six months have very much felt like running up a down escalator. So Mark's going to talk you through the numerical output and the market dynamics of all that and give you some context of it all on a two year view, which I think is the most helpful way to do it. And then I'm going to come back and talk through more strategically and in some detail actually about the opportunities and the challenges that we face. And overall I'm delighted to report that we have continued to deliver brilliantly for customers in both territories and that is and remains our number one priority because it is ultimately our long-term growth engine. So for now I'll hand you over to Mark to take you through the numbers.

Good morning, everyone. As John's just mentioned, it's great to have you all join us today. As we look at our high-level revenue results, COVID distorts the baseline, making reporting more difficult. So rather than focus on explaining the comparative period, here we look on a two-year view. Over this period, which we think is a more useful comparison, the UK reported a CAGR of over 28% and 37% in Germany. This very strong growth proves we are winning new customers and existing customers are repeating, something John will talk more about later. We do note consumer price inflation as a result of product cost increases is supporting the overall market in the current financial year in both of our territories. In our strongest category of MDA, we've grown our overall market shares in both the UK and in Germany, and have been able to treat many more customers, like our grants, in the process. In the UK, we've grown our total market share from 15% pre-COVID, that's the six months to September 2019, to nearly 20% in the first six months of the year. Given that the online MDA market grew significantly over the last two years, our share has decreased slightly. In Germany, we have grown our share of both the overall market and the online market when compared to pre-COVID. However, both are down compared to the half-year 21 COVID comparative. Gross margin, which you'll recall is a basket of product margin, services and delivery costs, remains stable in the UK despite the impact of the cost of recruiting and retaining drivers, which has been material. The driver issues impacted the period by about £5 million, but on a run-forward basis probably brings gross margin down by about 200 basis points. We expect this to normalise in the fullness of time as it is passed on to consumers, but have little visibility today as to exactly when. We have also experienced significant product cost inflation at around 10%, which was mostly passed through to customers in the same way our competitors have. Category mix had little impact on our gross margin compared to the prior period. In Germany, increased volume from third party logistics contracts kept gross margin stable, offsetting the slight decline in product margin resulting from increased competition. UK margins remain higher than those in Germany. This is now mainly due to the effect of leveraging logistics costs, but it also includes warranties and commissions not currently offered in Germany. Moving on to SG&A in the UK, costs as a percentage of revenue have increased when compared to the comparative period. In warehousing, we have significantly increased our footprint to deal with higher volumes and we are also holding more stock than normal to mitigate constraints on product availability. We've also increased expenditure on brand and marketing. Whilst maintaining performance marketing, we've launched the AO Bear, sponsorship of the AO Arena, and other events and sports sponsorship. Our most significant investment has been in capability, which is reflected in other admin costs. In the second half of FY21, staffing levels increased in our retail operations to support significant growth. This accounted for circa £5 million, with inflationary pressures and share schemes adding another £2 million to staff costs. We've also expensed £2 million on the ERP discovery phase and a further £7 million on IT and data projects. In Germany, warehousing and other admin were broadly flat as a percentage of sales compared to the prior period. The change of cost was particularly seen in marketing, where expenditure was up by just over 1% of sales, period on period. As German shoppers have moved back to their traditional ways of buying, competition in the online space has intensified. The traditional store-based retailers and Amazon are all now working out how to take a share of the online market. This has driven up the cost of clicks, in some cases more than 100%. We've made a conscious decision not to chase the market higher, and whilst we've seen a 25% increase in our rate of spend, given the changes in the market, this is clearly less effective in driving revenue. On a half year basis, just walking through UK EBITDA, revenues were up slightly and we can see that in trading. Cost to deliver has increased by just over 11 million. This includes the driver issues we've spoken about and the increase in capacity we've invested for in logistics. In recycling we've seen favourable output material prices compared to the prior period and in mobile we've seen resilient underlying profitability without last year's write-offs which we saw as customer behaviour changed. We've spoken about marketing costs, inflation and investment in capability and that brings us to the £10.6 million of EBITDA for the first half of FY22. In Germany, in the comparative period in Euros, our EBITDA was a loss of €4.2 million. Trading was slightly up as a result of third-party logistics and a small revenue growth in the period. The remainder of the movement we've already discussed in SG&A and that delivered the EBITDA loss in the period of €7.1 million. So looking at the major working capital movements, inventories have been high for most of the period as we've maintained increased stock levels since the end of the last financial year. This is in response to the continued global component shortages and supply chain disruption, ensuring that we could continue to respond to customers with our excellent AO service and have our teams focused on making their mums proud through a challenging period. In the medium term, we would expect stock levels to normalise back below 30 days. UK trade and other receivables increased by just over 10 million from year end, reflecting an increase in revenue in B2B, the timing of supplier support and an increase in accrued income from insurance sales. As our rate of growth has fallen in the period, our inventory levels have been reducing, trade payables expressed as a number of days has also fallen since year end. We would expect this to normalise towards the end of the current financial year. Net working capital in Germany decreased marginally from £17.8 million to £17.1 million and this reflects a consistent balance sheet from the period end. At the end of the period we had liquidity headroom of £66 million despite the deployment of working capital to ensure we continue to deliver for our customers. Capital expenditure in the first half was £4.5 million and this was predominantly continued investment in the recycling facility, outbase fit out and IT equipment. In the second half of the year we now expect capital expenditure to primarily be on ERP systems at around £6 million and development of our London Creative Hub of about £5 million. We no longer expect to invest this year in the second recycling plant that we mentioned at our full year results. We note in our overall net debt of £102 million, £20 million relates to borrowings in the traditional sense and the remainder being the net of cash of £11 million and leases. We would anticipate some of the working capital deployment to reverse with increased profitability, but overall we expect the level of liquidity at the end of this financial year to be similar headroom to the end of this period. The first half of the year has been a period where our mission was to cement the revenue gains of Covid, but with a number of macro and market challenges we could not have anticipated. In April, at the start of our financial year, we planned for continued revenue growth and built the cost base necessary to deliver that growth. We had to make a judgement at a time when customer and market behaviour was impossible to predict and John's already touched on that multitude of challenges. We expect further unpredictability as we lap the period where stores were opening and closing under Covid restrictions. Product allocations, particularly in newer categories, continue to constrain revenue growth and cost inflation is having a material impact. Peak trading at this point is softer than we anticipated only eight weeks ago. We now expect full year group revenue to be between flat and 5% down year on year, with group adjusted EBITDA in the range of 10 to 20 million pounds. We have a strong business model and we've continued to put fuel into our flywheel, which John will talk about shortly. We're providing an excellent customer proposition which underpins our repeat revenue and that gives us confidence in our future growth. John, back to you.

Okay, thanks Mark. So, well there you have the financial output of the last six months, but importantly the board and the management team continue to be as confident as ever in the strategy that we outlined to you in the summer. When we take a step back from the short-term noise, All the macro market changes we believe are aligned behind us, whether that's the long-term migration to online, some people still working from home, our brand growth, repeat sales gathering pace, or our new categories both building and cross-pollinating each other. All those things drive our flywheel. Strategically scale matters on many fronts. Our infrastructure and in-house capabilities have never been better, whatever the short-term cost that that may be. Brands are also now wide awake to online and they firmly see AO as best in class. AO will become the global destination for electricals through choice, service, personalisation and the price that we can offer our customers. And we remain unchanged in that belief. We're now lapping last year's period of exceptional channel shift in both the UK and Germany, and we have materially cemented the gains that we made. And while none of us are truly delighted by the resultant profitability, the structural changes to growth whilst continuing to deliver exceptional service for customers have really been our primary focus. Building on this step change for long term is what our strategy is all about. The supply chain headwinds for our retail business have actually also provided tailwinds to our B2B business, as others have, I guess unsurprisingly, faced the same challenges but without our scale or capability to react. And this has enabled us to deepen our relationships with almost all of the major house builders, for example. But again, we've still been constrained by driver shortages, particularly in our installation fleet. In fact, the first half of this year has been capacity constrained by driver shortages across all categories of driver, whether that be HGVs, seven and a half ton home delivery drivers or our installation fleet. And we've made conscious decisions to prioritise quality over quantity. And that has unquestionably affected our sales volumes. I'm pleased to report that other than pockets of volatility, that issue is materially fixed, albeit with a permanent step change in cost that Mark mentioned earlier, given the wage inflation that we have seen. And we expect, as Mark mentioned, about 200 bps of margin to be the impact of that. And as we look to the second half, we continue to see meaningful supply chain challenges which manifest in poor availability in certain categories and particularly our newer categories where we've got less scale, experience and leverage and where we are still learning. Newer categories are also more affected by the technological manufacturing challenges that's driven by a lack of chips. And a good insight into the seismic impact of this is when a manufacturer of the scale of Apple has to reduce global manufacture of iPads by about 50% just to divert resources to iPhones. Unsp Plc Unsp Plc Unsp Plc Which when you only get 35 American side by side fridge freezers in a container, that equates to about $300 more per product just on shipping. And that's for a product that retails at anything from about £400. So it's been a really volatile period, which we expect to continue into the next financial year. There have been lots of challenges for us and our partners to navigate, particularly in forecasting as we lap periods where stores were open or closed and major demand spikes with some sales brought forward and I think others inevitably deferred. But we've taken and will continue to take the actions to address and mitigate these issues, and will maintain our world-class customer service, something that we will never sacrifice for any short-term costs, however material, as Mark highlighted earlier. Everyone at AO is invested in our long-term success as part of our value creation plan, and so I'd like to extend thanks to all AOers who continue to serve our customers brilliantly. I'd also like to acknowledge the support of our manufacturer partners who, despite their own significant challenges, consistently have stood shoulder to shoulder with us as we navigate these challenges together. We're a growth business and we give customers a better way to buy electricals in an enormous total addressable market. What we sell, how we sell it, who we buy it from and how we deliver it all repeats globally. And on a two-year like-for-like basis, group revenues grew about 67%, with our UK business growing about 65% and revenues in Germany growing about 88%. The market is migrating online, and it has been for the last 20 years. This shift was accelerated by the pandemic, but the long term direction of travel really is just one way. And that's also true of manufacturers as well as customers who now think with a digital first mindset. And I'll talk in a moment in more detail about the fundamentals of our strategy and the progress that we've achieved and continue to see. In July, though, I said our medium term ambition was for double digit growth across the group and international expansion with three additional territories. So to be clear, this is absolutely still our plan. And for clarity, when I say our ambition, my perspective of a high growth business is one that grows at more than 20% over the medium term. And we've averaged 23% compound annual growth since our IPO back in 2014. We must though be mindful of the constraints and the volatility that I mentioned earlier, particularly in the short term. I believe we'll fundamentally deliver this medium term growth by obsessing about customers rather than short term profit. And our consistently high Trustpilot and Net Promoter scores underline the customer obsession through culture is our differentiator. We've built and continue to nurture a high performing team and strong partnerships with manufacturers who increasingly see the value of our complete platform. As I've said, in our industry, scale matters. So as a snapshot of our business today for materiality on scale in the UK, we amaze about 12,000 customers a day through 23 live outbases with just over 1.7 million square feet of central warehousing. And this scale gives us the capacity to offer the widest choice, the most competitive price, and the most flexible delivery options. We've maintained world-class net promoter scores of over 80 in the UK and we recently hit 300,000 Trustpilot reviews, giving us an overall rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars. Germany is on the same path to scale, with the same structural benefits and crucially has a net promoter score that actually outperforms the UK. As a group, we served around 4 million customers last year, and we're encouraged to see an improving rate of returning customers and frequency of purchases. Interestingly, German customers repeat faster than those in the UK did, and customers during COVID repeat faster than customers pre-COVID. The 2 million new customers in FY21 provide the biggest single injection of future business we've ever had in a single year. And I expect we'll see more of them than ever repeat this financial year. Expansion into categories beyond MDA is a fundamental part of our strategy. Being the destination for electricals means having an expansive curated range of products across all electrical categories to serve the widest possible customer base. It increases the frequency of purchase and it allows cross-selling into new categories and builds long-term relationships with our customers. And I'll show you shortly how all categories feed each other through frequency and familiarity underpinned by our amazing service. We can say with confidence that customers are buying products in categories that are new to AO when we give them the right price, range and delivery proposition. And this graph shows how that looks in the UK over time and how the most recent cohort in 2020 is behaving very differently to others. In Germany there's still a huge opportunity for us to grow in both MDA and non-MDA once more categories are also introduced there. So, looking at repeat customer behaviour in a little more detail. If customers bought MDA as their first purchase, almost 23% of them then went on to buy SDA. 14% bought AV, 8% bought consumer electronics, and 2% bought gaming. And this shouldn't be a surprise really because SDA was the first category we launched after MDA, followed by AV, and so on. Similarly, of the customers who first bought SDA from us, almost 27% went on to buy MDA, 15% bought AV, 11% consumer electronics and 3% bought gaming. And turning to those customers who first bought AV from us, almost 30% then bought MDA next, 24 SDA, and 15% bought consumer electronics and about 5% on gaming. And finally, of the customers who first bought consumer electronics, 24% of them went on to buy MDA, 22% bought SDA, almost 17% bought AV, and nearly 7% bought gaming. In the UK two and a half years ago, newer categories were a drag on our profitability as we built scale. For context on the progress we've made, all categories are now at worst contribution neutral. And picking out the TV category, we've almost doubled our total market share and improved our product margin by almost 10% over the last four years. And a full range of services comes with these expanded categories. And we continually improve our best-in-class delivery, easy returns, product installation and setup, and of course our recycling propositions. We're in no doubt that we will drive higher customer lifetime value and share of wallet through this approach. But these things just don't happen overnight. Our lower frequency of purchase means it takes longer than a weekly grocery shop, for example. We know that our right to win in these newer categories is lower, and we're working to create compelling reasons for customers to shop with us in these categories. Hopefully, the progress that we have made so far gives some support to our confidence that we will become a minimum 10% market share player in all new categories that we're in. And the great news is that the lessons that we are learning through this process all repeat across territories. So our virtuous cycle is the decision to reinvest shared economics in our flywheel. We make things ever better for customers, innovating and investing bravely, which generates scale. And we leverage that to keep driving our flywheel. Our structural advantage is our ability to leverage our fixed cost base investment over a greater addressable market in the medium term. Our model is cash generative and capital efficient, and scale leads to operational gearing as a result of sales growth. We've made a dramatic improvement over the last two and a half years in our directional selling capability through our investments in technology, trading team and of course our trusted brand. And to bring that to life in the UK, in one of our biggest categories of laundry, up to 60% of sales are now directionally sold into a defined range of products. And this improves margin, of course, engagement with brands, supply chain efficiencies, as well as delivering better value for our customers. Over the last six months, We've seen the first early outputs of our investments to improve the website customer journey. We're moving towards a more customized approach by category and away from a one size fits all. And it has been a huge undertaking over the last couple of years involving a complete redesign and a total overhaul of all creative and a category by category refresh of all content and features. We've started laying the groundwork for this in our TV category and I'm really encouraged with the early reaction from our customers. 84% of customers begin their shopping journey online and so being the destination for information is crucially important to us as it is for manufacturers to explain their products brilliantly as you can see here on the video. The commonality of products and brands across territories is a significant advantage to our model. It means everything repeats across territories. We're able to invest more centrally in the quality of how we tell product stories brilliantly. And we're soon to be opening our new London Creative Hub to further drive our innovation in this space. My brief to the team has been simple. To do to product content on the screen what Pixar did to transform the world of animation when they launched Toy Story all the way back in 1995. We are as committed as ever about being the long-term partner of choice for brands. And we see that being reciprocated such that these investments are now increasingly investments in content that we make together. We've built an operational model in Germany that with growth will deliver profitability. Growth is now good for us and it delivers contribution that further allows us to invest in more growth. We're improving our proposition. We've opened three new outbases in the summer and we've invested in our warehouse and delivery fleets. We've also secured five new third-party logistics clients which help us to further leverage that logistics infrastructure even faster. And through our One AO approach, Germany of course also benefits from the custom category developments that I've just talked about and from all the other site improvements that we roll out. We've got an enormous opportunity here and our suppliers are now willing us to succeed. Our progression over the past two years has been hard earned, but we've created a better way to shop and we're determined to build on that with investment in proposition and brand awareness. It has, though, become more competitive. And actually, that's a good thing for our market in the long term. However, in some areas, the cost of digital marketing has more than doubled over the last year, as traditional retailers see the opportunity that we see, and are frankly working out how to compete online. For example, the cost per click of TVs has increased 116% year on year. And from a market perspective, 19% of MDA was transacted online pre-pandemic and that clearly rose massively as stores were closed. But now stores are back open, the online penetration has dropped back to just below 25% for MDA. So in that context, our two year growth number of 87% highlights the share gains we have made, even if we expect the absolute sales number to drop back a little on a full year basis. And as I mentioned earlier, with the increase in marketing costs, we have a structural brand disadvantage in Germany, given how much younger we are in the territory. And that's why we're investing in building brand awareness from SEO and PR and our first TV advert over there for a few years during peak trading. And over the last two and a half years, we have fixed the fundamentals of our P&L in Germany. So to be clear, the product margin is now materially commensurate with the UK. The cost to make a delivery is exactly where it should be at this level of volume and it reduces with scale while our overhead is now right sized for that business. So our P&L structurally is in good shape and we're getting to work on driving more traffic and sales at a sensible cost. The opportunity also remains huge to replicate what we do in further territories. The total addressable market, let's not forget, for Western Europe is worth 158 billion. And it is absolutely still my belief that over the next five to 10 years, more than 50% of that market will be transacted online. Unsp Plc Unsp Plc Unsp Plc Unsp Plc I'm also relaxed if it becomes six. We will do what is right and we will not rush to hit a headline. In the UK, we're continuing a significant programme of brand building. Our customers love their experience with AO and we want them to love our brand as well. People forget what you tell them, but they remember how you made them feel. And Bear, the AO Teddy, was one for everybody that made the effort to come to take away, is proving particularly memorable. Concerts have returned to the AO arena, and we've been really, really pleased with the engagement from ticket buyers and artists alike on stage. Our partnership with Sailsharks has again brought the AO brand to a whole new audience, both on the pitch and online. And it's early days for both of these partnerships, but there's a ton of potential for direct engagement and wider brand building. And we'll share more about that at full year. The trial we have in Tesco stores has, since unlocking, brought the brand to even more potential customers where they usually do their weekly shop. Given the disruption over the last 12 months, the trial remains ongoing and we haven't yet reached any conclusions on how to roll that out. What is clear is that whilst building brand takes time, it remains one of our biggest opportunities when you compare the muscle memory infused trust that some of our competitors have. And it'd be true to say that in new categories, we are still earning our right to win. We're still developing our brand and establishing relationships with new customers. But once they've experienced the AO way, they do tend to love us and they become fans. And that is a genuine asset for our business. Caring for people and the planet, I think is common sense, but I think it's business sense as well. We want to make our grandchildren just as proud as our mums are. We've helped our customers to recycle over 2 million fridges, a great example of how our vertically integrated recycling facility gives us a unique ability to manage the impact of future climate regulation and help customers live more sustainably. We're also in advanced discussions with manufacturers about using our recycled plastics output in their new products. This has huge potential in offering a low carbon and cost effective alternative to the use of raw materials, as well as diverting plastics that have traditionally been difficult to recycle into longer life products. It's been more complex in truth than I could ever have imagined to get to here. But we hope to be selling these products next year, probably about a full two years after we really wanted to start doing that. But I'll finish where I started. The macro picture for AO is really bright. And the short term challenges that we are facing, I believe, are exactly that, short term. We'll continue to think long-term and invest accordingly, while clearly navigating those short-term issues and the uncertainty that they generate. We'll continue to put customers first, to innovate for them and deliver our amazing service. We'll continue to believe in shared economics as a value model and so we'll invest in our flywheel to drive further scale. I still believe passionately that this formula will create incredible long-term value for our people, our share owners, and I'd really like to thank them both for helping us to build the future of AO with us. So thank you very much and let's take some questions.