Dunelm Group plc

So good morning and welcome. Good morning and welcome to the Dunelm Interims presentation covering the first half of our financial year 2022. My name is Nick Wilkinson and this morning Laura Carr and I are in person and live from the offices of Peel Hunt in London. I trust that wherever you are, you are safe and well and feel connected with us on the continuing story of our business. Thank you for your interest and let's get started. Here's our running order this morning, nice and simple. I'll shortly hand over to Laura, who'll take you through the first half financials, and then I'll be back to talk through our plans for the future. I'll also give you a longer-term perspective on our growth, what's driving it, how are we compounding our sales, which parts of our plan and our strategy are driving growth, and what's to come. But that's for later. Let's get started. So with a spring in our step and a photograph from our gorgeous spring collections, onwards. It's another clean sweep in terms of our financial metrics. So no lockdown closures in these six months against the prior period when we had those rolling circuit breaker lockdowns. But plenty of market wide headwinds in this period to navigate in terms of supply and supply chain operations. So I'm delighted with how we've done on the top line. Customer numbers looking strong and up over 6% and drop through into profit and cash also very good. The strength of our balance sheet allows us to pay both an interim and a special dividend as we move back into our leverage range once again. As ever, our focus is on growth with good operational grip. So let me just give a very brief summary of what's been going on in the half and then I'll hand over to Laura. The graph on the right shows 12-month rolling sales. So the 12 months to the end of half one is basically calendar year 2021 at £1.4 billion turnover. But that includes the lockdown periods that were taking place this time last year from January until the middle of April when our stores were closed. So rather cheekily, we've extended the line based on our current trajectory, as you can see on that graph. And looking across that turbulence of the lockdowns, you can see we're both a bigger business and that we're growing strongly. was driven in the half by executing the plans we have to continue digitizing our business our digital platform extends our reach which grows our brand and allows our product offer to broaden because we can list promote and sell a wider choice of lines this in turn encourages us to invest in further improving those products in terms of design development and supply capabilities and at the same time our physical shopping experience is also moving forward Digital investments like Click and Click, which was over 10% of our store sales in December and January, but also non-digital investments, so investing in new stores and refits. Our stores feel strong and increasingly they differentiate us from competitors, whether pure plays or legacy physical retailers. Finally, I'd highlight in the half a successful addition to our fulfilment capacity at two sites through own and partner operations, which will be important to future growth. So after another good half of growth and progress, we're a bigger and a better business. And we remain extremely ambitious. Our goal is to be the first choice for home for more and more UK home lovers. I'll be back to talk about that later, but now on to the numbers, and I'm delighted to introduce you to Laura.

Thanks, Nick. And morning, everybody. I'm now going to take you through the financial results for the 26 weeks ended the 25th of December 2021. As Nick has already said, we delivered a very good performance in the first half across all of our key financial metrics. Strong top-line growth, accompanied by continued gross margin improvement and good leverage of our operating cost base led to profit before tax of £140.8 million, up 25% compared to the same period last year. If we compare the profit before tax to the same period in FY20, which was a pre-COVID time period, our first half PBT is up £57 million, or 68%. Our strong profit performance translated into cash, with free cash flow conversion of 74%, and we ended the period with £48 million of cash on the balance sheet. Given the strong trading performance, strong balance sheet and our confidence in the future, the Board has declared an interim ordinary dividend of 14 pence per share and a further special dividend of 37 pence per share. Total sales of 795.6 million pounds were up 10.6% versus last year and up 36% compared to the same period two years ago. Digital sales made up 33% of the sales in the half and have more than doubled since the comparative period in FY20. As Nick has already mentioned, the comparative period included store closures, including the regional lockdowns which impact both the digital and the non-digital sales penetration comparatives. With our total offer open throughout this half, we've been especially pleased with the strong performance in stores, demonstrating our customers' commitment to our friendly and convenient service. We saw growth across most of our product categories with strong performances in furniture, which grew over 30% in areas such as dining chairs and beds, driven by improved availability and new ranges. And a good sell-through in our Christmas gifting and decorative products also helped our seasonal ranges. We continue to gain market share during the period and using our weekly GfK analysis, we outperformed the homewares panel of retailers by 14 percentage points during the half. Additionally, our GfK data for furniture categories shows that we also continue to outperform the furniture market and gain market share. Gross margin was 52.8% during the half, up 80 basis points compared to the same period last year. This strong result was driven by a high sell-through of our seasonal ranges and the effective provisions that we took in the comparative period last year relating to the stores being closed as we entered our winter sale period. This was partially offset by the impact of the summer sale in Q1 of this year. We expect that the second half margin rate will be significantly lower than the first half in line with our historical trends as we will likely have two sale events during this time period, both our winter and our summer sale, which we expect to revert to its normal timing in Q4. We estimate the impact of these events to lead to full year FY22 gross margin being around 30 to 50 basis points lower than in FY21. As expected, inflation on commodity prices and freight rates is now impacting the cost of stock purchases. We are closely collaborating with our committed suppliers to create sourcing benefits, managing the mix of products across price bands and, where appropriate, increasing retail prices. Due to our stockholding levels, we expect the impact of these pressures to grow as we move into FY23. We remain committed to providing great value for money for our customers and feel confident that we will maintain margins in line with our financial model. Operating costs increased to £277 million, an increase of 8.4%. The operating cost to sales ratio of 34.8% was better than expected as a result of the strong performance in stores, where the additional sales dropped through at a very high contribution rate. Compared to the prior year, the net impact of the reintroduction of business rates, offset by the repayment of JRS monies, was to reduce operating costs by £3 million in the period. Costs grew by £8 million as a result of the additional volumes, and there was a £4 million higher accrual for incentive schemes in the period, reflecting the more positive outlook for performance compared to the same period last year when our stores were closed and the four-year outlook was very uncertain. We invested an additional £5 million in supply chain, including the new e-commerce and furniture sites which came on stream at the end of the period and will enable our future growth. This number also included additional storage costs relating to our decision to hold higher inventory levels to mitigate the ongoing global supply chain disruption. Also in line with our ambitious growth plans, we invested a further £7 million in growing our capabilities, including £5 million in digital and tech, mainly relating to additional headcount in our digital engineering crews, and £2 million in product development and supply. These investments are already contributing to our growth and will support further development of our proposition, enabling better decision-making and optimising efficiency in the future. Looking at the interest line in the P&L, interest expense was £4 million lower than last year, mainly due to the movement in foreign exchange gains and losses on dollar-denominated bank balances. The effective tax rate was 19.5%, slightly ahead of the headline rate due to a level of non-deductibles and the higher availability of capital allowances. Diluted earnings per share were 55.4 pence per share, up 25.6% compared to last year. Cash generation remains a key strength of our business model. We delivered £106.3 million of free cash flow during the period, a free cash flow conversion of 74% of operating profits. Cash from operating profits increased due to the improved profitability and we had a £21 million working capital outflow, mainly driven by the increase in inventory levels. Net tax paid was slightly lower than last year as we received some tax rebates for R&D claims during the period, and capex was £14.2 million, including a significant proportion of the two new supply chain warehouse fit-outs, plus the one new store in the period and the multiple refits as part of our ongoing refit programme. We ended the period with £47.7 million of cash on the balance sheet, even though we'd paid out £179 million of dividends during the half. And in December, we announced that we had successfully refinanced our evolving credit facility and were delighted to have put in place a new sustainability-linked RCF facility, which closely ties our sustainability ambitions into our bank facilities. Given our strong financial performance in the period and the confidence in the future outlook, the Board has declared an interim dividend of 14p per share, up 2p or 16.7% on the equivalent amount last year. Additionally, we are pleased to announce a further special dividend of 37p per share, which will be paid in March. This special dividend will again take us to the minimum target leverage range. We're retaining a level of prudence in the balance sheet given the uncertain macroeconomic outlook, but note that the business remains highly cash generative and that we are committed to our published capital policies. As usual, I've pulled together the guidance points for the remainder of FY22. It is worth noting that the second half comparatives to FY21 are impacted by both the extended store closure period that we had in the third quarter last year and the strong reopening that we had from April. You would need to go back to FY19 to get a clean comparative period for the second half, and as that was before we did our digital re-platform, the business is now on a different scale. Beyond the noise in the comparatives, we expect to show continued strong growth and market share gains. We expect that the full year operating cost to sales ratio will be slightly lower than our medium term guidance model of 38% given the strong performance in the first half. Investments in the second half will be slightly higher than the first half as we continue to invest in our capabilities to underpin the development of our proposition. Turning to cash, and we noted in our second quarter trading update that we continue to build inventory levels to mitigate the ongoing disruption from supply chain. We expect our full year capex spend to be around £30 million, with two new smaller format stores being opened towards the end of the half, and we'll be continuing on with our store refit programme. And finally, just a note to highlight that this year we'll be reporting a 53rd week for statutory purposes, and we will provide a full 52-week equivalent information on the P&L, but it may have a small favourable impact on the year-end cash position. That concludes my summary of the first half results. And I'm now going to hand back to Nick, who's going to talk us through how we're moving forward as a business and how purpose is impacting everything that we do. But before we do that, we thought you might like to see our latest advertising campaign. So if the tech works, I'm going to run VT. Thank you.

It's all about how splendid. We don't want to stand out too much. You're just like everybody else. Being the same.

Being the same.

Being the same as everybody else. No! Did the neighbours see? I don't care. You can't even colour that. It worked. In more ways than one. Thanks, Laura. Yeah, that TV commercial, Done Your Way, aired in the autumn. It's back on screen shortly. And I guess it's confidence comes from our sense of purpose. The pandemic taught us the power of values and of purpose. And ours is to help create the joy of truly feeling at home now and for generations to come. We've long held the belief in the business right from the start that our products are for everyone, for all tastes and budgets, and are offered without judgment in a positive and inclusive way. At the same time, we're now ensuring that sustainability is becoming embedded throughout the company and everything that we do. We're excited to have come a long way in the half around this, and in particular, we now have a comprehensive roadmap for our scope one carbon reduction plans. And on scope three, which is by far and away the biggest element where we need to make a difference, we're busy learning and testing, and our eyes are opening to the scale of what needs to be done and the opportunity, if we carry on learning, to be a leader here. What we hadn't expected when we wrote our purpose was that it would equally well apply to our 11,000 colleagues. In hindsight it's obvious they're no different to our customers and we use the phrase feeling at home wherever you work to describe how we'll navigate the changes to hybrid working that we're now embarking on. We want to be a leader here too and are excited about the greater access we have to talent based on working in different ways. We're thrilled that our ShareSafe scheme has been a good one for the almost 1,000 colleagues taking part in it. So with our purpose resonating, we're ambitious about our brand, about being a good company, and about profitable growth. Now, I promised you not just advertising, but a longer term perspective on our growth. So let me do that now. And I think there's some interesting things here to talk about. So often long term growth gets lost in the focus on quarterly trading. And here we've used global data to split out market growth from share gains over the last 10 years. And it's a consistent picture. If we just look at the last five years, 85% of our sales growth has come from share gains. And that's not different over 10 years or indeed over the last two years during the pandemic. If anything, our sales grew a little bit faster during the pandemic. Of course, 10 years ago, we were driving share gains by opening stores, becoming a national retailer. So what's driving them now? The answer is that for the last five years, it's really been driven by the compounding effect of digitising the business. This has allowed us to grow our product offer, our brand and our retail system all at the same time. We'll take those one at a time, starting with product. Busy slide, let me explain. We're seeing broad-based growth across all of our categories. The big numbers at the bottom are the respective contribution to our five-year cumulative growth from each of those five groups of products. All are growing well and all have headroom. So let me just explain the chart. We operate in dozens of different home categories and subcategories. And in this picture, we've mapped all of those into five broad shopping missions, which is a categorisation we use in our consumer research. I've listed on the page some of the examples of where products sit in those different broad categories. And we've talked at Trading Updates in the past about how we're seeing growth across all areas. And this is another way of showing that, but now with some numbers and over a meaningful period of time, five years. So we're not growing in furniture rather than our heritage categories. We're growing in both. And we're also seeing share gain across the board, not just where our shares are lower, where there's enormous headroom, but also we're gaining ground where our shares are higher. Let me also use this slide to make a couple of other points. The average item values shown there are a useful reminder that we're a low-ticket retailer. Our overall average item value across both stores and online is about £13, just under £13. And even in the furniture-dominated category on the right, ours is a relative to competition low AIV of only £120. And the breadth of categories on this page reminds us that home is an extremely broad and diverse addressable market, with customers seeking to fulfil a range of different missions in different rooms and making different choices based on very personal criteria of where to spend money on their home. We are positive about the outlook for the market in home post-pandemic. Our research shows an enduring change has happened in how consumers think about their home and their love of the home, both in terms of function as a place now of work and exercise, but also as a place of well-being where I feel safe, in control and able to be me. Respondents to our weekly monitor of attitudes tell us they intend to carry on focusing on both of these areas and at the same time to begin doing more socialising at home. So on from productivity. to brand, and in terms of brand long-term growth, the key number here is the 30 million in the top left. Over a five-year period, that number has grown by 30%, so 3 million more active customers than the brand had five years ago. And the key point is that that growth is across all age groups, all regions of the country, and all income bands. If I just go through those in turn, in terms of age groups, growth has been slightly higher than average amongst both younger and older customers. And in terms of regions, which is in the middle of the slide, whilst we did have a Midlands heritage for obvious reasons, our regions continue to grow everywhere. And London and the Southeast are growing at 47% over a five-year period. Indeed, that London and Southeast growth is contributing 40% of the incremental customers, so 1.2 million of the three, over the last five years. And that's without opening a lot of shops. In terms of income groups, finally growth in all groups slightly higher amongst the less affluent and also amongst the most affluent. Why is this important? Because the broader our brand appeal, the more home lovers who see us as their brand of choice, the higher we can grow our market share. And at the same time as product and brand, we're growing our retail system. Our digital growth is 5X over five years and it's incremental growth. We now use the word retail system to describe all the channels that customers use to discover, purchase, and receive their goods and services. And the key point is that the growth in digital sales has not come at the expense of non-digital sales. Indeed, our average store sales are 30% higher than they were five years ago, fueled in part by customers shopping for click and collect and ordering larger items for home delivery from in-store colleagues, but only in part. So even our store sales are underpinned by digital capabilities. In previous presentations, we've described the same picture, but using customer data. So to update you briefly on that, now 37% of our active customers in the last 12 months have shopped digitally or across both channels. And that's more than a doubling of the number from a couple of years ago. And those who do shop multi-channel and multi-category shop five times as frequently and spend six times as much as a single category, single channel customer. You've seen that analysis before. I can confirm that in the latest cohort stats that we're looking at, there's a consistent pattern here in terms of how those cohorts are performing. So I've covered product. brand and retail system, all being digitised and all working together. And moving forward, what's our plan? Well, to carry on doing exactly what we've been doing for the last five years. There's loads of headroom to go for. As we talk about investing in the business, we talk about proposition development in terms of product, services and experiences, but also about building capability and capacity. So a few stories for the future. I'm going to start with proposition and product. Three pictures, all telling stories, which I think are very interesting. We've never felt more confident in our ability to design and source beautiful, high quality, fantastic value products for our customers. And to this, we're adding more know-how in terms of sustainability. So first picture, an own brand Churchgate, which we've developed for home accessories in the last 10 years, named after one of our first shops in Leicester, which we've now extended into freestanding furniture for kitchens and living dining rooms. The collection's got 45 options. It's absolutely beautiful. It's a fraction of the price of high-end brands. It's made from high-quality oak veneers, and we'll be extending into solid wood as we gauge the level of customer interest. Base units and top units separately are available and are priced at around £400, and it's available from the early summer. So in the middle... An example of how we're managing price and range this year. It's constant, detailed work. And there are no headline numbers in this presentation about price because every range is different. And many decisions are yet to be made because every choice that we can make at the latest point is making us more adaptable. Indeed, keeping things adaptable and dynamic is one of our tactics. So in this picture, there's a simplified illustration of the 15 different price quality tiers we have for fitted sheets. And after lots of work with our suppliers, we've now reset this range. So what have we done? One of the in-out promo lines we've been running was a £6 fitted double sheet. It performed well. We've now made that a regular line. in four colourways. It'll occupy the good position, so the opening price point, in our regular range. The former product at this tier is now going up by £1 to £10 and will carry on in our range but in our better set of options. It's a popular seller. But the main better option will be 100% cotton sheet, which stays at £14, and where we're extending the choice to 25 different colorways. And at the very top of the range, we have a product at £65, which spec for spec is 50% cheaper than alternatives in the market. So across the 15 different product tiers in this range, five are going up in price by about 10%. 10 are unchanged. And our entry price good product is becoming cheaper. And the promo slot, where that entry price came from, where we're now off sourcing new ideas for promo lines to bring in new prices, new specifications and new designs. As I said, it's constant detailed work and it's what we do. The third picture shows a new collaboration with the Natural History Museum, which we're launching this week. It's a range of beautiful and long-lasting home products designed with the museum to reflect their collections and their ethos. From a sustainability point of view, we've designed for longevity and durability. using the most responsibly sourced materials possible. And again, where possible, we're using Second Life packaging, so recycled packaging. There's a collection for children, another celebrating the museum itself, which includes furniture, prints and accessories, inspired by the museum's buildings and fittings. And another themed around special natural habitats that are in danger. Through this collaboration, we are learning and hope to educate customers and ourselves so that they can make more informed choices about living sustainably. You can see we're having a lot of fun at the moment on product and we hope to see many of you tomorrow when we're launching the natural history range and you'll see other products there too at an event designed for influencers and consumer press, which will be all for us in the evening. So lots going on on product, just three stories there. I'm going to do three stories now on services and experiences. We've just rolled out textile take back services into all of our stores. and we're quite simply stunned by the response from customers coming back into store with unwanted textiles. We don't incentivise them because we don't want to encourage early replacement, and we accept textiles wherever they've been purchased. Our work with the Textile 2030 Partnership suggests that the biggest single contributor to carbon reduction in the supply chain will be from the use of recycled materials. An example of that, the sofa here, is made to order in the UK. It's a 25-year frame guarantee. and the fabric is 67% recycled content, and the filling is 50% recycled plastic. The next picture is of a recently refitted Eastbourne store, which I think some of you may have been to. It's a major refit with a big frontage improvement funded by the landlord, and a new concept cafe, which has been really well received by customers. We've put a similar one into the new store, which we opened recently in Beverley in South Yorkshire, a former Debenhams, and we'll try more in some of our second half refits. We are delighted with the paybacks we get on both new and refitted stores. As Laura said, we're doing five more refits in the second half and expect to open two new stores. The final picture shows a list of page, a product details page and the checkout from our website. With the maturing tech and product management capability, we're improving site speed and the quality of experience at key points of the customer journey. We're also getting very good levels of account sign-up, that's to new accounts, which is a recent feature of our website, with the use of sign-up prompts during the checkout process. We've landed some proposition enhancements like SofaSizer and Room Planners and have a much more comprehensive product roadmap now established across all of our focus areas for proposition development. As you can tell, we're pleased with the returns we're getting on our investments and the capabilities we're building. This has made us confident to invest in capacity, such as in fulfilment, but also in processes and systems. At the heart of our plans, we'll carry on gradually increasing investment levels in digital and technology. As one illustration of how much of our focus is in this area, 60% of our 2022 grad intake will be in tech, engineering, product management and insight and analytics roles. At the same time, we're also investing in product, i.e. merchandise product, development, sourcing and supply talent as we increase the breadth and depth of our ranges and invest in know-how in circular sourcing. That's happening in parallel to a multi-year programme to upgrade our commercial processes and the tools that we use, including master data management, range planning and forecasting, which we've been running now for almost 12 months. These commercial processes will support our scaling and proposition development for many years to come. So we're confident to carry on investing in the capacity and capabilities to digitize the business. We're enjoying learning. These days, over half of the conversations around the exec table are about digital product roadmaps, technology, and data. And half of the exec team sitting alongside Laura and I have grown up in purely digital businesses. So the quality of our collective thinking is developing all the time. We're hungry to carry on learning and developing. So time to draw things to a conclusion. We've delivered another strong performance in the first half of FY22 with good growth in customer numbers, further market share gains, strong sales growth and particularly strong profitability. Trading to date in the second half, including our winter sale event, has continued to be encouraging and the board currently expects that full year profits will be in line with recently upgraded market expectations. Of course, yet again, we're presenting good numbers with confidence in our strategy at a time when there's a lot of focus on external macro issues. And once again, my message is that we feel well-placed, very well-placed to navigate these. As a value retailer, price and quality, i.e. value, remains the most important thing we offer our customers. With a largely own-brand range offering outstanding quality for all budgets, we are well-placed to carry on doing this as a wave of inflation rolls through. With a high proportion of continuity products and deep relationships with our supplier partners, as well as a simple business, we're confident we can carry on building long-term share gains and profitable growth. At the same time, the raised importance of home in a complicated, changing world will carry on, and sustainability adds another dimension on which to innovate and offer our customers value for money. So we remain energised and focused on continuing to develop our customer proposition and deliver against our renewed purpose for all of our stakeholders. We'll therefore carry on prudently investing and scaling our investments and carry on building a bigger and better-owned business. I'm fortunate to be part of a great team and a great business. Thank you to all of my colleagues and thank you for your attention.