N Brown Group plc

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to NBRAND's full year results for the year ending February 2022. I'm joined by Rachel Isard, our Chief Finance Officer. Let's turn to the agenda for today. First, I'll give you an update on our highlights so far this year. Then I will hand over to Rachel, who will take you through the group's financial results. I will then return to talk in a little more detail about our KPIs and our strategic progress, and then look ahead to our strategic focus at FY23. After that, we'll open for Q&A. I'm pleased with the continuing progress that we have made in the financial year. Whilst the consumer environment has remained volatile, we have continued to make progress across our business. Customers have responded well to our improved product ranges. And we saw that reflect in the 9.9% strategic brand product revenue growth we delivered. And the number of active customers returned to growth for the full year for the first time in four years, up 4% for the full year. This is a business which is now in a stronger position than pre-pandemic as a result of all the work we have done over the last few years. We continue to be cash generative and deliver double digit EBITDA margins and are pleased to report EBITDA growth in line with our guidance. The year was one of unusually low levels of consumer credit defaults as our customers transitioned through the pandemic. As a result, while profitability was boosted by the strength of the financial services margin, it allowed us to more than offset the increased investment we've made in areas including marketing, as well as a normalisation in other costs compared to last year at the onset of the pandemic. We also continue to have an incredibly strong balance sheet, which is a point which I think sometimes gets missed. Adjusted net debt of £259 million is nearly twice covered by our net customer loan book. We also update today on our legal disputes with Allianz. We have recorded a provision in our FY22 results of 28 million as an estimate for accounting purposes for potential costs of settlement or reward at trial plus future legal costs. We've also been making good progress with our sustainability strategy, something which has been deeply embedded in the DNA of NBrown for many years. More on this later. And we've taken the opportunity to refine our strategic focus, heading into FY23 to make Enbrown a simpler, more focused business, able to allocate colleagues, investment, and marketing spend in the most effective manner, and which I'll go through later. I'll now hand over to Rachel to talk you through the financial results.

Thank you, Steve. Let me start with giving you a financial summary of the group's performance in the year. The overall group revenue was down circa 13 million, which is a result from key drivers. First of all, the closure of fig leaves, which reduced both revenue and costs with a net neutral impact on earnings. Then lower financial services interest income as the customer loan book entered the year smaller. Managed decline of the non-strategic brands product revenue. And finally, offset by strong strategic brands product revenue growth, which is now above pre-pandemic levels. Now, we've highlighted the 9.9% growth in product revenue from strategic brands on this slide, and I'll cover that later in more depth. Growth profit margin has improved by 4.9 percentage points, driven by a high financial services margin in the period, which I'll also talk to you later. It's more than offset the OPEX cost-to-sales ratio normalising post-pandemic, with the 36% in the period well below the pre-pandemic level of circa 40%, as we have retained efficiencies and flexibility. Now combining the growth margin step up with the OPEX cost normalizing led to an adjusted EBITDA of $95 million, $10 million favorable to the prior year. Combining that $10 million additional EBITDA with a $3 million reduction in interest costs from reducing net debt and optimizing our funding facilities drives the adjusted profit before tax position of $43 million up $13 million or 47%. Unsecured net cash was $38 million lower than prior year. We successfully introduced flexibility into our funding facilities this year, allowing us to voluntarily reduce our FS securitization draw below the max available for this size of loan book. And at year end, this underdraw was circa 61 million, leaving net cash at 43 million and optimizing our finance costs. And the full value of the securitized facility remains available if required. So combining the cash and the undrawn amount on that facility gives us a total of 103 million. ahead of last year's 80 million, as we have continued to generate cash in the year. Finally, adjusted ETS of 7.69 pence reflects the profit growth of a prior year, offset by the full-year effect of share dilution due to the equity raise in November 2020. Looking at the revenue performance in more detail, there are three distinct drivers. Firstly, the closure of fig leaves and the managed decline of the non-strategic brands. Second, the lower interest income on the financial services loan book, which entered the year smaller than the prior year. And third, the growth in strategic brands' product revenue, which is now above pre-pandemic levels. The brands included within strategic on this slide of J.D. Williams, Simply B, Giacomo, Ambrose Wilson and Home Essentials posted 9.9% product revenue growth, which is a significant improvement over last year's 6.9% decline. Within this, we have seen strong demand in clothing and footwear, and we anticipate some further normalization in the market towards these categories in FY23 as customers return to previous patterns of life and refresh their wardrobes. I'll talk more around product mix and returns rate on the next slide. Simply Be and Giacomo were the first of our brands to benefit from the refresh of both brand profiles and product ranges. These brands both delivered growth rates in double digits in the year, and both now have their highest ever active customer files, having returned their growth trajectory after a dip caused by COVID last year. We're confident that the investments we have made in brand and product will continue to result in growth from our strategic brands. Product revenue from other brands has declined by approximately 30%. Now, just over half of this is from Figleaf clothing. The impact of ceasing to trade House of Bath and High and Mighty as B2C brands now annualized, with the impact from fig leaves no longer causing a drag into FY23. So that covers the product revenue side. Let's move into financial services. FS revenue was down in line with the smaller opening debtor book due to those lower product sales from last year and continuing solid customer repayments. Now, we know FS revenue follows product revenue with a lag, and this can be clearly seen in the visuals on the slide, showing a clear revenue trajectory. As I said on the previous slide, we saw a strong return into clothing and footwear in the year. Looking at this on a mixed basis, clothing and footwear reflected 66% of the FY22 mix, an increase of the 59% mix seen in the prior year. However, it's notable that the mix is still around five percentage points behind the 71% seen in FY20, as the normalization has phased in through the year. We do expect, then, some further normalization of clothing and footwear mix into FY23, in particular in half one, as customers continue to refresh their wardrobe and purchases are triggered by the likes of holidays and events. Now, clothing and footwear remains the heartland of our business and where we see the most opportunity for future growth. As the mix has moved back into fashion and customer behavior normalizes, we've also seen an increase in customer returns of 4.5 percentage points year on year. But versus two years ago, we are still down circa 4.3 percentage points, with approximately two-thirds of that driven by mix of clothing and SKUs, and one-third driven by the improvements in our product ranges underlying, which is great to see. As a result, we see some further normalization in the returns rate to go in the first half of FY23 as that mix continues to flow through, but believe we are well-placed to hold on to the underlying improvements in returns rates achieved through our improved product offering. Group's adjusted gross margin was 49.3% compared to 44.4% in FY21. Product gross margin improved in the second half of the year, up 0.5 percentage points compared to a decline in half one of 2.8 percentage points. And that's despite the highly elevated freight rates in both half one and half two, which I'll come on to shortly. So on a full year basis, product gross margin declined by circa one percentage point. The main causes of this have been, number one, freight rate increases. We experienced significant increases towards the end of FY21, and this has intensified, driving a circa one and a half percentage points drag on product gross margin. At the time of our interims in October, we anticipated rates to remain high for our FY22, then normalise back down. However, as explained in our four-year trading statement in March, due to the ongoing elevated levels, we have revised those expectations and believe the rates will continue for the foreseeable future. Second driver, mixed effects in trading. We've pulled a variety of levers in the year. With the mix back into clothing, there is a natural upswing in margin versus homes. We've also actioned a level of price rises in response to the freight rates. And finally, we've needed to keep a flexible, active approach to discounting and promotion, as the online market has had challenging points throughout the year. In total, across those areas, we saw a benefit net of approximately one percentage point to margin. Third driver, due to the low levels of write-offs in financial services, we have claimed back a lower amount of associated VAT bad debt relief. Now, this gets credited to the product growth margin, as we can only reclaim it due to that combined benefit of being a combined retail and credit provider. This net reduced product growth margin by circa half a percentage point. This leads me on to the largest part of our movement in group growth margin, financial services, where we saw a 16 percentage point increase year on year. Turning to the next page, I'll talk you through the main components of this. The FY22 FS margin rate reflects a number of non-underlying factors, which are important to talk through to better understand both the year just finished and understand the trends into the new year. In our trading statement in March, we communicated that we expected the FS margin rate to normalise post-pandemic to a low to mid-50% range, and that's very much where our underlying margin rate for FY22 finished, at 52%, around 10 percentage points lower than the 62% we reported as our margin rate. Now, there are three main components of the 10% delta between the two. Firstly, a 15.4 million overlay in the bad debt provision was made last year end, as we looked ahead into COVID uncertainty. Now, customer's behavior was actually better than expected in the year, and the provision was only partially utilized, with 13.7 million released into FY22, reflecting a one-off benefit of around six percentage points within our reported margin. Secondly, we have seen a lower-than-normal level of write-offs this year, circa 16 million lower than a normal year. Customers have been supported through the pandemic, with government schemes reflecting unprecedented conditions within the consumer credit market. Repayment rates have been higher than normal, and arrears rates have been low within the year. This has also benefited reported margin rates by around six percentage points. Thirdly, and going the other way, with a net drag on our FY22 margin rate of two percentage points, we made an additional provision of 5.8 million at the year end for future economic uncertainty as a result of rising inflationary pressures and the associated risk of higher defaults linked to this. To give you a sense of this in the actual customer data, normally we see high retail sales on credit in the peak period in the second half of our fiscal year, and then slightly higher write-off rates associated with that peak spending circa six months later in the half one of the next fiscal year. Looking at the first three bars of the top graph showing half one performance, you can see how low half one this year was compared to the previous two years for write-offs. This shows the benefit of customers being supported through the pandemic with higher repayment rates and lower write-offs. By half two in FY22 conversely, this has moved back to a more normal level. On a full year basis, this meant that write-offs and other recoveries were circa 14 million lower than prior year. In the bottom graph, IFRS 9, we look ahead at future expected credit losses. At the end of FY21, we had a significant overlay for COVID uncertainty, with the average rate increased to circa 14%. At the end of FY22, we have reduced that to circa 12%, but that's still higher than pre-pandemic norm, despite a more up-to-date book. as we're looking ahead now at a year of heightened stress for the UK consumer. This slide on adjusted operating cost ratios demonstrates the flow through of the changes we've made over the last few years, holding the level of efficiency below pre-COVID levels with a higher level of volume variability to match our revised digital retail model. Operating costs were particularly low in FY21 due to actions in response to the first COVID lockdown that included materially reducing marketing spend stopping all but essential other spend and utilising the furlough scheme to protect employment. In comparison to last year, marketing and production costs have increased by two percentage points as a percentage of group revenue. Half of this is due to investing in brand building to support strategic brands, with the remaining half driven by a combination of cost inflation market-wide for digital marketing channels and the mix back into higher cost per click and higher returning clothing SKUs. The admin and payroll cost increase reflects last year's sensation and deferment of non-essential spend and a greater level of investment spend now being expensed rather than capitalised. Now, this change to expense rather than capital is a non-cash impact, moving costs up into EBITDA, but with an associated reduction in amortisation expense. Net, over time, we believe this to be a circle one percentage point reduction in EBITDA margin with a net neutral impact on PBT. And finally, warehouse and fulfillment costs have increased, driven by circa 6% more items shipped. Now that's higher than the revenue growth due to that product mix change and the step up in returns. The group is involved in a legal dispute with Allianz. The eventual financial outcome of the dispute is highly uncertain for both parties. We believe that it remains economically rational for the parties to settle the dispute and have made an accounting provision of 28 million to cover settlement, or award at trial, plus future legal costs. Outside of this, there were no new exceptional charges in the year. Last year's exceptional costs of 10.2 million covered a range of items, including redundancy costs and the impairment of assets on brand closure. Cash generation has continued to be healthy. This slide shows how the EBITDA of 90 million has converted through to net cash generation of circa 22 million. Now, starting at the top, we have seen investment in inventory and working capital of circa 15 million. During the first lockdown last year, we focused on selling through our existing inventory and kept it tight through the second half, enabling us to start FY22 in a clean position. And by the end of FY22, we have seen an increase in inventory of circa 10 million, reflecting a combination of buying into new product volumes, but also the increase in freight rates, which are captured within the year-end cost price on the balance sheet. Customer loan book in financial services has contracted slightly this year, which net has released working capital, as when the customer repays us, the amount we repay the bank on the associated securitized funding is circa 72% of what we loan out, so net funds are returned back into the group. We also saw a non-cash movement in EBITDA for the IFRS 9 provision for bad debts, which we covered in the previous slides. Non-operational cash flows of 51 million include a capital investment of 20 million, which is in line with last year. It also includes exceptional cash outflows and tax and treasury charges, which are lower than last year as we reduce exceptional cash flows related to previously provided charges and we see lower interest costs as we bring our net debt down. We expect the level of capital expenditure to increase in FY23 as we invest in our strategy. Across all these categories, we net generated £22.4 million, which added to the strong position from prior year and gave us the opportunity to pay down debt further. Hence, we have taken the opportunity to reduce our securitisation facility draw, approximately £61 million below the max level for this size of loan book, leaving net cash of £43 million and optimising our finance costs. Now, the full value of the securitised facility remains available if required. There are some specifics within our cash and funding positions which are worth explaining on this slide. The three key points to highlight are, firstly, we have unsecured net cash of 43.4 million at the year end. After including the amount voluntarily underdrawn on the securitization facility of 60.1 million, this reflects a figure of over 100 million, which is ahead of last year's comparative due to the cash generated in the year. Secondly, the securitization funding of $302.5 million is well covered by the customer debtor balances, with our gross debtor book being $578 million at year end. Thirdly, rolling the two components up to our combined adjusted net debt figure, we have net debt at the year end of $259 million, which represents a further reduction over $40 million in the year. You'll see that about half of this reduction is due to the cash generation. the 80.8 million increasing to the 103.4, with the other half due to the reduction in securitization borrowings, the 381.9 million moving to the 362.6 million. Now, with the first of these, that reduction in cash was policed by the continued cash generation in the business. And the second of these, the change in FS securitization borrowings, this is a function of the debtor book having reduced, as we explained earlier. and we aim to see securitization borrowings return to growth along with the debt of books in the future. So we rebase net debt in FY21 to a manageable level and have further improved this into FY22. Looking ahead, we see controlled growth in the debt of books and associated securitization borrowings as a success factor, but target keeping corporate financing in a net cash position. So now, looking ahead and guidance for our new financial year. we are reiterating our guidance for FY23 EBITDA to be similar to FY21's reported level. The trading environment has become more challenging since the start of FY23, with inflation impacting consumer confidence. So we're now expecting softer volumes and revenue growth than previously anticipated, but we expect to be able to mitigate these through our continued focus on product margin rate, where we saw an improved trajectory at the back end of last year, and volume variable cost savings. Product margin improvements are supported through pricing in response to cost inflation, the movement of product mix back into clothing, and the continued use of data. Our expectation is for continued growth in strategic brands' product revenue and managed decline of heritage brands. The rate of decline of FS revenue will continue to improve, as we went through earlier, and we expect FS margins to normalize. Also anticipate an increase in the cost-to-sales ratio due to the heavy market-wide cost inflation, plus holding to investments in strategic areas, including brand above-the-line marketing. Finally, we expect to maintain a strong unsecured net cash position and for year-end adjusted net debt to be in line with FY22. Now, with all that, I'll hand you back to Steve to talk you through the progress on our strategy this year.

Thank you, Rachel. I'll now talk about some of the strategic progress that we've made in the year. We've made good progress across our strategic pillars, and there is real momentum across the business. Picking up on a number of areas of progress, we said at the start of the year that, with a greatly improved brand and customer proposition, we would increase investment in marketing activity to build customer awareness of our brands. At JD Williams, we launched our brand ambassador partnership with Davina McCall and Amanda Holden, increasing visibility and relevance with our target customers. Both women represent the brand's values and are aspirational for the JD Williams target audience. At Simply Be, marketing campaigns showcased our core message around inclusivity and fit. Elevating the importance of product where fit is key and we've increased our use of influencers as part of our brand building strategy. At Giacomo, campaign workers focused on positioning size as a positive, working with influencers such as Big Zoo to build credentials in the market. We've been accelerating our use of social media and are seeing very positive results. We now have over 2 million social media followers, an increase of 10% on last year. In addition to our social media and brand marketing activities, we've invested in our in-house content production capabilities. This allows us to create high-quality content tailored to each brand's style, whilst also enabling us to tailor the content to different media, such as social or video. And as it's in-house, we do this at an efficient cost per unit, aligned to our objective of delivering a sustainable and efficient cost base. Now moving on to product. We've invested in our in-house design team and improved product, which has led to greater customer purchase frequency. We've been investing in our in-house design team and the proportion of unique product designed in-house is now at 53% across women's wear and men's wear. I've spoken before about our good, better, best price architecture and creating product which represents great value and great quality whilst introducing brands which stretch the range within the best category. We've made progress on replacing elements of third-party ranges with more aspirational products. We launched new third-party brands on our website, including Nobody's Child and Hope and Ivy on Simply Be, and built on existing relationships such as Ralph Lauren and Hugo Boss on Giacomo. Our clothing, footwear, and beauty range breadth continues to be optimized in order to create a clearer customer proposition and buying efficiency, reducing by 7% to 25,000 SKUs during the year. We've increased range sizing to become a more inclusive fashion provider, moving from 10 women's wear size options to 13. Moving on to home, we have been evolving the category with an acceleration of our own home and furniture design product, which is unique to us. now at 70%. Home is sold across a number of our brands with JD Williams as a multi-category platform representing the largest share at 39%. We've also secured more premium brands such as LG and Samsung and grown our existing offer in areas which resonates with the customer at key times. We see an opportunity for customers to shop more aspirational products with flexibility around payment options in conjunction with our credit account. Now on to digital. Investing in our digital capabilities is a key part of our strategy. We've made significant progress in ensuring that technology is established for release of new front-end websites from FY23. SimplyBee will be the first trading website to be migrated, with beta testing currently taking place. And finally, in financial services, we've continued to focus on enhancing our existing proposition, including a six-month interest-free credit offer for our customers. Our medium-term strategic priority for financial services remains building a new, more flexible FS platform, which will enable us to launch new credit products that will widen our appeal to customers. We have completed a detailed design phase for the new financial services platform which will commence build in 2022. Last year, we started providing a range of digital customer metrics to help track the progress of our business. As we move forward with strategic change, there's plenty of opportunity to further progress this. But as I look at these KPIs, I see continuing signs of improvement. Today, I'd like to highlight five of the KPIs. First is the 5% year-on-year increase in website sessions. This is as a result of the progress we've made improving the brand and customer proposition in our target segments, as well as the investment we've made in marketing. We recognize that this isn't as strong as the first half of the year as we lapped lockdown periods post-Christmas 2020, but does represent real progress. Second, average order value rose by 3%. We've been able to pivot back from casual clothing purchases during the early part of the pandemic towards higher price dresses and outerwear, adapting as the customer mindset shifts. Third is our total active customers. The number of customers who have been active with us in the year have grown by 4%, representing a return to full-year growth for the first time in four years. We're really pleased about this. This is through momentum in our strategic brands, which saw active customers grow 6%. Total progress is masked by the managed decline of non-strategic brand customers, as well as the closure of brands such as House of Bath, which we closed last year and folded into Ambrose Wilson. Fourthly, our arrears rates have seen an increase of half a percentage point, reflecting some normalization against the low rates of last year as a result of an unusually high propensity of credit customers to pay down balances in FY21, but still significantly lower than pre-pandemic. Finally, touching on NPS, we recognize it's down on last year as a result of global supply chain disruption, and particularly a lack of drivers during peak due to COVID-19. NPS remains an important metric for us and one which each of our strategic focuses, including brand, product, and customer experience, feed into. At M Brown, we are fully committed to embedding sustainability throughout our organization, our product ranges, and all of our processes. We are now two years into Sustain, our leading sustainability strategy. To highlight a number of our achievements and commitments, in the year. The responsibly sourced product now makes up 30% of our own brand clothing and home textile ranges, achieving our target for FY22. We have achieved the 2030 target of the British Retail Consortium Climate Action Roadmap for the second year running, with all electricity purchased from renewable sources. And finally, following a successful trial of green polyethylene, or PE, dispatch bags last year, We have now fully rolled these out at our shore distribution center. This has saved over 400 tons of CO2 compared to using virgin material. Now moving on, looking ahead into FY23, I'm going to talk to you about our ambitious and exciting plans for the future and how we've evolved our business strategy to take us closer to our vision. Over the last few years, we've undertaken a program of transformation to become a leading digital retailer. We have a clear vision, mission, and purpose that puts customers at the heart of everything we do. We reset our strategy almost two years ago with a clear focus on five strategic pillars and three enablers. And we've achieved a huge amount so far through the refocus and simplification of our brand portfolio, improvement in our retail products and credit propositions, and investment in our digital and data capabilities, all whilst navigating a global pandemic and increased regulatory environment. As we've emerged from the pandemic, we've taken stock of our business and the broader e-commerce environment and evolved our strategy to make sure it's focused on driving the business to growth. As a result, we've simplified our strategy to make it more focused on the things that have the biggest impact for our customers and support the growth ambitions of our business. We will prioritize money, time, and resource on the biggest priorities with the greatest value. This is a strategic evolution, not a revolution. We've refined our priorities through greater focus to set ourselves up for success for the future. And these iterations will make Enbrown a simpler, more focused business, able to allocate colleagues' investment and marketing spend in the most effective manner. We'll focus on growth through three strategic brands, Simply B, J.D. Williams, and Giacomo, allowing further simplicity, rigor of execution, delivery of strong customer propositions, and marketing efficiency. Home remains an important category, and our focus will shift to growing this through our multi-category platform of JD Williams, enabling marketing efficiency and cross-shopping. We'll establish our remaining brands as a heritage portfolio, including Home Essentials and Ambrose Wilson, focusing on stabilization and value protection rather than growth, with no further closures planned in the near future. We'll fully integrate our flexible credit offer into the core of our customer value proposition, and we'll elevate data as an asset at the core of the strategy, driving daily decision-making and activating a unique data pool. The result of this is an evolution in the focus of our strategic pillars to the following. build a differentiated brand portfolio, elevate the fashion and fintech proposition, transform the customer experience, win with our target customer, and establish data as an asset to win. I want to talk you through each in turn so you can understand more about what it means and why they have evolved. The first pillar is about building a differentiated brand portfolio. Now, we've done a huge amount of work over the past two years on clarifying our brands, looking at brand purpose, target customer, and the overall proposition. This has already yielded some good results. We will now focus our growth efforts on three strategic brands, which are JD Williams, Giacomo, and Simply B. Simply B is an inclusive fashion brand for young women. Simply Be already has a strong emotional connection with customers who resonate with our size-inclusive messaging, and this is what gives us the right to win in this space. At Giacomo, we want to elevate its status in the UK as a menswear platform for all men, and our marketing approach is evolving to showcase the styles, brands, and sizes relevant for every man, and which will be showcased through the year. Customers love our one-stop shop of own brand essentials matched with amazing third-party brands available for men regardless of size. JD Williams is a fashion and lifestyle platform for women. As it's already a platform today, it's a one-stop shop for fashion and home with a blend of own brand and third-party brands. So our ambition is to capitalize on this position. Oxendale, our Irish brand, will also become part of JD Williams in the future. We are also mindful that our brands Ambrose Wilson, Fashion World, Marisota, Home Essentials and Premier Man represent a significant proportion of the business. These brands remain important for value as we focus on growing our strategic brands and will form our heritage brand portfolio. These heritage brands will focus on serving their existing customer bases, which are some of the most loyal and longstanding customers. Our strategic and heritage brands are both extremely important to the health of our business and make a meaningful contribution both financially and to the customers we serve. A huge amount of work has been put into improving our retail proposition over the past few years. We've built a design team with excellent creative talent, which means we can truly create unique products for our customers that they can't get anywhere else. We'll continue to go with the mix of our own design product to build handwriting and uniqueness. We will also continue to offer the best third-party brands in the market to excite our target customers. We'll build on the strength of our existing partnerships, on broad new brands, and continue to build momentum in premium labels. And we'll bring a greater mix of our supplier chain closer to home as we rationalize and drive efficiency through our boats. Flexible credit has been a core part of our offer for many years, and we know the connection between our retail and credit offer is the secret source of our business, enabling customers to buy what they want and manage how they pay for it in a way that suits them. These two elements are intrinsically linked as part of the experience of shopping with our brands. There is no separation between retail and credit. It's all the same customer and the same experience. In recognition of this, we have set up a new squad with people from across financial services, marketing and digital technology, who are focused on building one truly seamless journey for our customers. As a digital retailer, technology is key, and we know that to best serve our customers, we must deliver a fantastic experience. We will continue to invest in modernizing and upgrading our technology estates to transform our customer experience and give us the flexibility for future innovation. We anticipate a launch of our new website later this year to customers on Simply Be to be followed by other brands. This will provide easier navigation and reduce friction in the checkout. We've also started to build a new platform for financial services, which will help us evolve our credit proposition with more products and a better digital-first service for our customers. The new front end to the website and the FS platform are key strategic focuses for the business as we look forward to building on the progress which has already been made. And we are implementing a new product information management system, or PIM, which reflects the importance of fit to our proposition. It will provide a more consistent customer experience and drive lower returns through increasing the accuracy and completeness of content across channels. Being clearer on who our customer is allows us to refine our proposition to tailor their needs. It also allows us to be more effective with our marketing strategy. We have identified three core priorities. Retaining our high-value loyal customers. winning back high-value lapsed cash and credit customers, and a targeting of a new, younger generation of customers. This year, we will focus on the first two, which are retaining and winning back loyal customers. This is a huge opportunity. There are 4 million lapsed customers out there to whom we can re-engage. To facilitate this, we've established a dedicated CRM team who will be looking at how we can re-engage with these customers and get them shopping with us again. Data was already an enabler to our strategy, and we've elevated it to be a core part as we move forwards. We want to use our data to help better decision-making in the business to enable teams to be empowered and move at pace. To do this, data is going to be fundamentally embedded in the business. Last year, we saw huge success with the build of our internal tool, PriceTagger, which helps us optimally promote product using price elasticity curves. It's also replaced the third-party products that we used to pay for, so this is more aligned to our sustainable cost-based focus. Building on the success last year, we have four focus areas for the year ahead. Dynamic pricing and promotions, which is all about in-season pricing adjustments. Markdown optimization, which defines optimal timing and size of end-of-season markdowns. Customer-centric buying, which is making in-season buying adjustments based on early detection of sales performance and online traffic movements. And in-session personalization to help show the right customers to the right products based on their personal profile. We'll also be investing in our data platform, ensuring our data is governed and managed in the right way and has the right infrastructure to support how we want to use our data in the future. As previously communicated, we have a medium-term target of 7% for product revenue growth. Alongside this, we have a business which generates a superior level of EBITDA margin, given our integrated retail and financial services proposition. As Rachel said earlier, we've seen an increase during the year in the proportion of spend, which is included within operating expenses rather than capital, which is a theme we will continue to seek. This increases operating costs and reduces depreciation and so nudges down the EBITDA margin rate. So we've tweaked our medium-term EBITDA margin rate targets to 13%. There is no impact cash from this and no significant change to the bottom line, just an accounting impact at the EBITDA level. We are confident in achieving these medium-term targets, which will deliver significant returns for shareholders. Over the last year, we have continued our progression with growth in strategic brands, product revenue, and customer numbers, despite what has been an ongoing volatile consumer environment. We have delivered EBITDA growth and in line with our guidance. We see consumers responding positively to our improved product offering and our brand propositions. We have a strong balance sheet and continue to be cash generative. Inflationary impacts mean that we are cautious in the short term, but we remain confident in investing in our evolved strategy and in achieving our medium-term targets, which will deliver significant returns for shareholders. And now we'll turn to Q&A. So if you're not already dialed into the conference call, please do so now, and we will take questions in a moment. Thank you.

If you would like to ask a question, then please dial in for the conference call and press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. Our first question comes from Clive Black from Shore Capital. Clive, please go ahead.

Good morning, Rachel and Steve, or Steve and Rachel, whichever way you prefer it. Thank you for the presentation. A few questions, if I may. Firstly, I'll deliver them one at a time, probably the easiest. On the infrastructure, particularly around the evolution of financial service platform. Can you give an indication of, A, the timeframe for that work, and, B, what sort of benefits you anticipate that bringing to both customers and the business, please?

Sure. Hi, Clive. It's Steve. I mean, I think the sort of key perspective is let's start with the sort of benefits first of all, and then we'll talk about our overall program and the way of working. We see at the moment a business that would benefit from modernizing its credit products further to enable us to sort of support choices by customers in a way that's right for them over time. So ultimately, the way that I think about this is we're effectively creating products in the retail perspective, which is getting more and more aligned to our target customer, and we need to do the same in financial services. Now, the benefits, therefore, you would see probably twofold. You would hopefully see a sort of a bigger take-up from a sort of credit perspective, but also you should, if that sort of works over time, start to see shopping behavior change as well to benefit us as well. So we are quite excited about it. However, I'll come back to the sort of, you know, where the business is. So, in previous updates, I've talked about, you know, choices. We had to make a choice. The choice was to focus on the retail front-end websites, first of all, and then we would move to the financial services engine. The main reason for that is that we believe the benefits in the retail side outweigh the sort of longer-term delivery of the financial services piece. A lot of our pages are currently written on static code. When we move to our new websites, it won't be static code anymore, which means that we can improve our SEO and our natural search as a result of making sure that the synergies are there in the wording. So that's one example. The second is that the new websites are mobile enabled and adaptable, whereas our current website is built on older technology, which is more desktop enabled. And the majority of our traffic is now, as it is most places, more smartphone. So the benefits of getting the experience right on the retail side outweighed the sort of choice when it came to financial services for that one to come second. I'm excited about where we are, but we are embryonic in relation to the build on financial services because we spent our time focusing on one clear outcome, which is to improve the experience for customers in our retail side. We are now setting that up as an incubator squad. It has started. We spent 12 to 18 months in discovery phase, and we're very clear what we're doing, very clear how we're going to do it, and we have started. And I'll update further on that as we go.

Okay. But that sounds then, Steve, it is still a relatively medium-term project to finalization.

Absolutely. Correct. Yeah.

And then a second question I think related to – definitely related to credit – is in some respects you talk to reduce consumer confidence and indeed softer current sales or recent sales, but also I guess particularly given the wider commentary that demand for credit may be even greater, particularly amongst low-income households. So I just wonder how you are going to balance that and Indeed, what recent trading is telling you about the nature of the credit book and risk?

Yeah, so I'll cover that at a high level, first of all. I don't know if Rachel might chip in on this one as well. But, look, I mean, what we've seen in recent weeks, I would say weeks rather than months, is higher levels of interest for our credit product. So the sort of initial start of this sort of inflationary pressure that consumers are under is leading quite squarely to a nominal increase in interest to our credit product. So that's really good. So that's a good thing for us. We're very happy about that. The sort of flip side of that and why we remain cautious is, you know, I think it's well documented, no different in M Brown as it is anywhere else, that the economic conditions for consumers a stretching and we therefore were very early into the year. We are happy to see the increased take-up in credit, but clearly we're cautious on short-term guidance really just around that volatility that exists in the market. So at this stage, we're not seeing anything that would make us change that view. Everything's wrapped up in the guidance. We were delighted to sort of hold the guidance. We will offset the sort of the sort of perhaps softer sales with improved revenue, improved margin, and actually lower costs as well in relation to operation costs. So, you know, we're sat here with a sort of decent position, which is why we've reiterated guidance, but it is early on in the year, and that's the key message for me. Rachel, is there anything you want to add to that?

So it's still over 80% of our retail sales are made within a credit account. So we don't enforce that. We allow choice to our customers across all our brands, but we're seeing a slight pivot back into choice into credit, Clive, both for existing customers utilizing their credit account versus they can always pay on cash, and a slight tip-off in new applications, new customers coming in, applying for credit. I think it's worth noting we are a well-experienced credit provider in their prime, subprime territories, So we're well experienced in how we do credit risk at the top of the funnel and we're holding our bar on our credit risk acceptance. So we could accept a considerable amount more than we are at the moment, but we're holding our risk profile. But even within doing that, we are seeing a higher proportion of new credit, new customer signups being credit. It's kind of early days. It's a slow moving ship credit and purposefully it's a slow moving ship because we make sure it is from a credit risk management perspective. But definitely we feel it's a good year to be offering a credit proposition to our customers to help smooth out the payment profile through the year. So it's not big shocks into people's outgoings. They can smooth it through the year with the credit proposition.

Okay, thank you. And then finally for me, can you just say something about your marketing strategy and costs? Because you've had a big reduction in paper utilization in recent years. Has that process now been completed? And how do you see the profile going forward, please?

Yeah, again, Rachel and I do a double act here. So I think it's important to note that two to three years ago, we were sort of very clear this was going to be a digital business and that we have taken choices, very focused choices as a result. But at the same time, we've been building our capabilities. And I talked a bit about that in the presentation, but I just want to reiterate those. You know, investing in our own sort of digital lab so that we can effectively create video content internally, that's really important to build out our social media presence. I said that we've got over 2 million social media followers. It's actually probably closer to 2.3 million. It's growing all the time. And this is enabling us to work with influencers to enable us to sort of build bigger reach in a different way to how paper used to operate. Now, this is very, very important for us. it was a conscious choice that we made, and we are seeing that. So where we are investing, we're investing into sort of campaigns like the Live Louder campaign with Big Zoo, who did a great job for us in Giacomo, and we've got all sorts of things going on in relation to J.D. Williams and Simply Be as well. And I think the key critical point for us is that we moved away from perhaps the... the sort of older way of operating as a sort of retailer to becoming the sort of digital retailer that we want to be. And we're building that very well, thanks. So with that, we'll go to Rachel. I don't know if there's anything you want to say around the sort of cost distribution there.

Yeah, so to be clear, we do still do a level of paper, Clive, because we see it as a targeted kind of drops on some of our older brands. So winners booklets rather than once a season a big book. We use it to bolster and then it more and more just drives traffic into the website to do the digital sale because in particular at the older age range and some of our brands like Fashion World or Oxendale do actually appreciate and you can see the incrementality and we test it through the data science teams rigorously that they can do the feedback loop of what paper's working, what paper's not. We don't do the blanket book, we don't do the blanket drops, but we do targeted drops where we know it can have incrementality. And sometimes actually it will be social media channels for those older brands. But the broad majority now, as Steve said, is through the digital channels below the line. And then we do a range, and we've reintroduced this year, a range of above the line marketing. Some kind of media spend in terms of TV and radio. A lot of out of home spend. And then a lot of complimentary social above the line channels as well as the below the line channels through social. So if you follow us on Instagram, we're doing a lot more on Instagram, including trialing shopping through from Instagram. So we're getting more and more of a digital footprint in particular on Simply Being Giacomo, but starting to see more of that build on J.D. Williams and some of the others as well. So a real reset. And then what we're seeing in terms of the step up in cost to sales ratio year on year, Half of it is getting back into the above the line, so six million more spend on above the line marketing. And the other half is the performance marketing across the industry. We're seeing cost inflation in particular from Google and Facebook. That's not bespoke to us, that's bespoke to everybody because everybody pays the same. We all bid for the same words in the same way. So about half cost inflation, half an active choice to get back into brand marketing. But reset, but significantly versus two, three years ago.

Really appreciate it. Thank you, guys.

I think Matthew had a question as well.

Yeah, our next question comes from Matthew McEachran from Singer Capital Markets. Matthew, please go ahead.

Yeah, thank you very much indeed. Yeah, I've got a few questions and probably maybe just go through them one by one. Quite a few on financial services again, actually. I mean, there's been a few trends, obviously, in the year just reported, and some of these may reverse, and one of them is potentially you know, early repayment and, you know, early collection. So I'm thinking that that's probably already changing. And you've obviously got an improving product sales trend. And you're also talking about credit performance or credit interest and participation on the rise. So I think the question for me is it seems to me like FS income is probably going to inflect into growth quicker than might otherwise have been the case. Guidance is unchanged on that. Do you want to just give us a little bit more granular detail in terms of how those building blocks play out? And is it a Q1 or is it a Q2 or is it H2? When do you think that the business moves back into FS income growth again?

Yeah, thank you, Matthew. I mean, just again, I'll just reiterate that we've seen nominal sort of increases in credit interest. So just to go into that, it hasn't doubled overnight. It's a sort of step forward. We are seeing it. We're pleased with it. But I think given the sort of size of the tanker that from an FS perspective, there's something I do know about is it takes a while for that to sort of play through into sort of revenue. Now with that, I'll hand over to Rachel just to sort of cover that point.

Yeah, so you asked about repayment rates. So absolutely through the pandemic, we saw repayment rates step forward and we're not alone in that. By the look of our peers, communications out in the market, they were seeing similar. So What we're actually seeing with the customer loan book that we had muted resale sales at the start of the pandemic and we had a higher repayment rate and we had lower write-offs, but net the book was contracting because customers were paying back. We've seen that normalized back. We're not seeing lower repayment rates than pre-pandemic yet. Absolutely not. But we're seeing more normal repayment rates versus FY21 and FY22. But as Steve said, it is a slow supertanker to move. When we're talking about credit sales penetration, you're talking about going from kind of 80, 81% to 82, 83% type kind of move. You're not talking about going from 80% to 90% credit sales penetration. And then in terms of that turning into interest income, it takes several months. Obviously, we're happy if a customer stays up to date and doesn't generate in a risk position generating income. But it does take a while for that balance to build into an interest-bearing balance. So we normally say six to nine months in terms of the flow through of changing upfront sales behavior into something that would actually start hitting the financial services P&L. So it won't be Q1, Q2 where that change in credit penetration turns into something in the FF P&L. It will be the back end of FY23 and into next year. They're all healthy, strategic moves for us in terms of building long-term shareholder value. We could change that via lowering our bar in terms of our credit risk acceptance, but we wouldn't be willing to do that in terms of the credit risk management.

Yeah, that's very clear. Okay, thanks for that. I wouldn't say you put it up in flashing light, but the new FS platform, I mean, actually, it's quite far down the road. Could you just clarify what payment options you currently offer to consumers? Obviously, you've got an interest-free period. You've then got the move into interest-bearing. But do you have variance on pricing for risk and buy now, pay later? Do you have variance on those already in place or not?

What we've been doing over the last few years, Matthew, is making sure that our product is as fit for purpose in a modern environment as it can be without, obviously, the big structural change where things start to become more personalized and a bit more dynamic, let's say, for want of a better phrase. So we do operate... You know, it's very simple in my mind. We operate a revolving credit facility. You know, people come to us. They spread the cost. They pay for it when they believe there's a minimum payment. They can pay more than that. You know, they can choose to sort of manage it. And what we've been able to do is overlay a few different sort of product variations that sit within it. So an interest-free period for our customers, which is a great opportunity. situation for customers in a world where everything's going up in price. So as that's happening, we're making it easier and we're making it more affordable. So from our perspective, there are a range of those types of things. They're more targeted. They're a little bit more cohort driven, as in a bunch of customers rather than personalization. And that's how I see the evolution when we deliver on the financial services platform. That will be about... you know, essentially creating something that provides a bit more sort of personalization in the engine for individual customers, as opposed to thinking about it in relation to products. But, you know, we are happy with where we are. We have been running a credit business for quite some time. You know, the business is strong in this area, and we continue to evolve it, and we continue to sort of see that as a positive.

And if you look at the numbers, we've got circa 1 million statemented credit accounts. So we've got a long-standing existing base that works well with a revolving credit facility. We know that isn't as modern or as exciting as it needs to be for new customer acquisition, but in the meantime, it does work well for the base and does work well for this customer segment in a difficult year. Circa 1 million credit accounts

is pretty high relative to the market outlet yeah yeah okay no that's super thanks for that um in relation to your undrawn position in the securitization facility i think i understand why you're doing that it looks very sensible but could that end up being a structural shift to funding more of the book internally or do you think this is probably more just a transitional temporary

So for me, I love flexibility. I would always want to maintain that flexibility in the banks are comfortable to maintain that essentially offset mortgage approach. And it's the right thing to do in the near to medium term, in particular, whilst we're waiting to close out the Allianz and we're getting back in terms of investment. So I would always look to have that structural flexibility. Would we need to be running with that level of headroom on a normal basis? No. It's always good to be in a net unsecured cash position though, so we are targeting rather than on the corporate side. So in the slide, we tried to be really clear between FF financing versus corporate financing. On the corporate financing side, our committed target is we'll keep that in the positive net cash position. Does it need to be as strongly positive in the net cash positions we are at the moment in the medium to long term? No, but it means we're well set to close out the Allianz case, make sure we can invest and make sure we can ride out further volatility. So we'll stay net positive cash, we'll absolutely stay flexibility, because I think it's helpful for us to be able to flex as needed, and then longer term, I think it will settle.

Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. Thank you very much. If I could just chat one more in, if that's okay. You've talked a lot about the balance sheet, and that was one of your opening remarks, Steve. I think the business also retains... quite a considerable amount of freehold property. Can you just remind us of the value of that and confirm whether that's book or market value?

Value is always what somebody's willing to pay. And at the moment, we're not out there selling them. So we have three main properties that you're talking about, Matthew. So we've got Griffin House that we're sitting in, which is in the northern quarter in Manchester, which is our headquarters. It's a freehold asset. We also have Shore and Hadfield, which are our distribution centres. both also freehold assets. So they're not on balance sheet, as you say, but they're available if we so need. We don't need at the moment, and that's a good place to be. So as and when we look over the medium to longer term, change out our operational facilities, it's a good way to self-fund doing that change, to be blunt, in terms of adding them to longer term. And then we've got no plans in the near future to get out of Griffin House. It's a good asset for us. It's an ongoing low operating cost. We don't have the liquidity or the funds. But we have those three facilities. And it gives us the ability to wait and utilize them at the right time. But we don't need to utilize them at the present time.

Yeah, that's great. Absolutely. I mean, do you want to, can you just give us a sort of approximate value of the three assets? Just for clarity. Even if it's not, I won't hold you to it.

No, in terms of if you won't hold me to it, very easily it would be 20 million a pop for each of the three. Yeah, okay, yeah. But that would be relatively low value.

Interesting, yeah.

I think what you'd look to do is do it in the right time in the right way with a package deal. But we don't need to do it at the moment, and we're eating through our plans as we go. As Steve said, it's new front end, then it's FS platform, then in the medium term it'd be operations, but we're not constrained at the moment. and Griffin House does what it needs to do for us. Yeah.

Yeah, so no plans to do anything with those properties is my... No, no, I'm not asking you for that.

I'm just asking from the perspective of, you know, you've got your net debt almost twice covered by the net book, and then you've got assets here, and, you know, you've got your EBITDA margin guidance intact. So, no, that's really very helpful. Thanks, guys.

Yeah, thank you, Matthew.

Thanks, Matthew. All right.

So I think unless there's no further, we've probably run out of time anyway, actually. So I'm just going to sort of thank everyone for joining. Key message again, business really pleased with the progress, actually. We're making good strategic progress. We're cautious on the short term. Enbrown is no different to any other business. But we're very happy to continue to invest in our strategy. We believe it's taking us in the right direction. And with that, I'll wish you a very good day.