N Brown Group plc

Hello and welcome to the Enbron interim results call. My name is Laura and I will be your coordinator for today's event. Please note this call is being recorded and for the duration of the call, your lines will be on listen only mode. However, you will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the call. This can be done by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad to register your question. If you require assistance at any point, Please press star zero and you will be connected to an operator. I will now hand you over to your host, Steve Johnson, Interim Executive Chair and Chief Executive Officer, to begin today's conference. Thank you.

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Enbrown's interim results for the 26 weeks ended the 31st of August 2024. I'm joined by Dominic Appleton, our Chief Finance Officer. Let's turn to the agenda for today. First, I'll give you an update on our highlights of the half. Then I'll hand over to Dominic, who will take you through the financial performance and the outlook for the full year FY25. I will then return to talk in a little more detail about our strategic progress, our KPIs, and the marketing activity underway in H2 as we look to make continued progress in the product revenue trajectory. After that, we'll open up for Q&A. We're pleased to be able to talk to you today about another good half of progress at M Brown. Last year, we returned to profits, and our customers are benefiting from our transformational priorities we have invested in. We followed this up in H1 with year-on-year profit growth, and we've continued the momentum with strategic progress. Our profit performance has been achieved in a continued soft market through a focus on profitable sales, margin, and cost discipline. Adjusted EBITDA of $18.8 million is up from $17.5 million last year, and adjusted PBT of $3.6 million is up from $0.1 million last year. Capital expenditure stepped up to $14.5 million aligned to our transformational priorities. J.D. Williams' mobile-first website successfully launched following the previous launches on Simply Being Giacomo. Following the launch at the end of FY24 of our product information management system, otherwise referred to as PIM, we have now rolled this out on all strategic brands and our new financial services platform is making good progress and is now in testing. After the higher capital expenditure, we have remained cash generative and continue to have a strong balance sheet with total accessible liquidity in excess of £150 million. This provides a solid base for the continued investment in our priorities. And our customer receivables book continues to significantly exceed our adjusted net debt, and we have no unsecured borrowings. Our full-year adjusted EBITDA outlook is unchanged, and the product revenue trend at the start of Q3 is showing encouraging progress. We commenced rebalancing the cost base into marketing in H1 and brand building activities underway at the start of Q3 as we anticipate a continued improvement in the product revenue trajectory in H2.

I'll now hand you over to Dominic to talk you through the financial results. Thank you, Steve. Let me start with giving you a summary of the group's financial performance in the half.