WH Smith PLC

Good morning, everyone. I'm Carl Cowling, Group CEO, and I'm here with Robert Moorhead, our Group CFO and COO. It's great to see those of you here in person, and welcome to everyone who has joined the webcast. As usual, we will give you an update on our performance for the six months ending the 29th of February, 2024, and we'll also run through the highlights and important strategic growth opportunities for the Group. In a moment, I will hand over to Robert, but let's start with an overview of the half and turning to slide three. We have a clear strategy to continue to build a world-class global travel retail business, and this is being executed well. As a result, we have delivered another good half, delivering profits of 46 million pounds, with total group revenue up 8%, and we continue to invest for further growth. And I'm particularly pleased with our performance in Travel UK in the half, which grew its profits by 19%. We continue to see strong momentum across all our markets as we benefit from growing passenger numbers and space growth opportunities. The team has been working exceptionally hard and we have successfully opened 53 new travel stores across all three divisions. And we now have a new store pipeline of over 80 stores, one are due to open over the next three years. Finally, the board has today announced an interim dividend of 11 pence, reflecting its confidence not just in this year, but in the group's excellent prospects. Turning to the next slide. Before I pass over to Robert, I just want to tell you why I'm so pleased with how the business has evolved into the global travel retailer we are today, and explain why there is so much more room for growth across each of our divisions. As many of you know, we have spent the past couple of years transforming the travel business from a news, books and convenience retailer to a one-stop shop for travel essentials. This is going extremely well. And what's most exciting is that there's still a long way to go to maximise all of the opportunities that exist. By using our forensic approach to space management, we are able to consolidate categories and introduce new ones such as health and beauty, tech accessories, and of course, food to go. We are identifying the best ranges to ensure we provide landlords and customers with an optimal proposition for our passengers. Our ATV is still only around 10 pounds, so there's plenty of scope for growth. The most vivid examples of this successful transformation are in our largest stores at Heathrow, Gatwick and Birmingham. What's important here though, is that the model works across all of our stores and channels. We've been rolling this out in the UK and we're seeing really positive results. And yet we're still only at the start of this journey across our international and US businesses. In North America, where our strategy has been to grow our market share, we have all of this to come. If you then look at space growth, the group has an enormous opportunity to grow its space in both existing and new markets. We have a highly scalable proposition. We are now in 32 countries and the opportunities are significant. And finally, a key growth driver is passenger numbers, which are forecast to grow in the short and medium term. All of this is focused on driving strong revenue growth, EBIT margin accretion, and generating high levels of cash as we scale our fixed cost base. I'll now hand over to Robert.

Okay, good morning, everyone. Let's start off with the group financial summary. As usual, the numbers I'm gonna refer to are pre-IFRS 16, and there's some bridges to IFRS 16 in the appendix. We had a good half with headline profit ahead of last year at 46 million. Revenue at 926 million was up 8% on last year and EPS was 24.4 P up 5% on last year. We're investing for growth. The free cash flow in the half was an outflow of 56 million, reflecting the investment that we have made in the first half, and as expected, the increasing seasonality of the group as travel becomes a bigger and bigger part of the business, and I'll come onto all this later. We've announced an interim dividend of 11p per share, which reflects the strong business performance, our strong cash generation, and our confidence in the outlook. As before, we expect the interim to reflect about one third of the dividend for the full year. Let me just remind you that last year was the first interim dividend paid post COVID, hence the large percentage increase for this year at the interim stage. It is illustrative of the strength of our cashflow that at the same time as investing in our business and increasing our dividend, we are seeing our leverage fall. As at the end of February, it was 1.8 times versus 2.0 times last year. So turning now to the analysis of revenue. Total group revenue for the half was 926 million, up 8% on last year, driven by all three divisions in travel. Travel was 72% of group revenue, and this will increase further as travel continues to grow and we open more stores. Current trading remains good. Like-for-like revenue in travel was up 10% year on year and up 15% in total on a constant currency basis, reflecting a strong operational performance and the continuing increase in passenger numbers. All three divisions saw strong revenue growth in the half. We opened 53 stores and expect to open around 110 stores by the end of this financial year. I'll come on to the divisional performance in travel in a minute. Our high street business, including the internet, performed in line with plan, generating revenue of 256 million. Current trading too is in line with plan. So let's look at travel in a bit more detail on the next slide. Travel performed strongly in the first half, a performance that has continued into the second half with the first seven weeks up 9%. Starting first in the UK, Total revenue was up 15% on 2023 and up 13% on a light for light basis. In all three channels, we saw the benefit of our four pillar strategy, which Carl will come on to in more detail later. Air was up 14% on a light flight basis and in total, and we expect further growth in the second half as passenger numbers continue to increase. Hospitals were up 16% in total and 14% like for like. And rail was up 17% in total and 13% like for like. Overall in UK travel, we opened five new stores in the half and expect to open 15 in the year, in line with our expectation of opening gross 10 to 15 new stores each year. In North America, we also saw a good performance. Total sales were up 13% on a constant currency basis. We've combined our core MRG airport business with our in-motion business, bringing a number of strategic and operational benefits, which Carl will touch on in more detail later. As we continue to roll out tech accessories into our MRG stores, we report one like-for-like metric for our North America air business going forward. This now accounts for approximately 75% of total North America revenue, and in the first half, we saw air like-for-like up 2%. We are seeing air passenger numbers grow and strong demand for our travel essentials categories. We're excited about the prospects for our North American business, not only in growing market share this year and into future years, but also from applying our forensic approach to retailing as we gather increasing amounts of data on how our stores perform. The rest of the world continues to grow too. We opened 35 stores and total sales were up 24% in the half on a constant currency basis. We opened our first of six stores in Budapest, and we continue to see passenger numbers increasing in Asia and Australia back towards 2019 levels. Current trading and travel has been good. As expected, we've seen lower growth in the second half to date, which reflects the annualization of the strong recovery in passenger numbers that we saw through the second half of 2023. Spend per passenger remains strong. And in North America, the change in the growth rate reflects the timing of the new store opening program. So turning now to the income statement. Headline profit before tax was 46 million, up on last year, driven by travel, which delivered a profit of 50 million compared to 47 million last year, and travel generated nearly 70% of group profit from trading operations, and that proportion, as for revenue, is going to grow. In UK travel, profit improved by 19% from 31 million to 37 million due to higher revenue and improved margins. We expect further profit growth in the second half. North America, now our second largest division by profit, delivered a profit of 14 million in line with last year. In North America, we've increased revenue and improved gross margins, and at the same time, we've invested in our store estate and to support growth. In the rest of the world, the loss of one million reflects pre-opening costs and investment in new stores as we continue to build the business in this division. Our travel business is better placed than ever. We have significant opportunity to grow space and increase revenue each year into the median term, which together with our forensic approach to retailing and cost leverage also drives EBIT margin accretion. High Street delivered a profit of 22 million as expected. We still see significant scope for cost savings, particularly rent, and the business is on track to deliver around 13 million of cost savings in this financial year. Overall then, group profit from trading operations was 72 million. Central costs are flat year on year. Financing costs at 13 million includes non-cash accretion of four million relating to the convertible bond. So that results in headline profit before tax at 46 million ahead of last year. So turning now to the cash flow. We are a very cash-generated business, and as we become increasingly travel-focused, this will grow further. There are three key points to note on the free cash flow for the first half. First, we generated 94 million of operating cash flows as the business increased its profitability in the period, reinforcing the point on cash generation that I've just made. Second, the investment made in the business with capex in the half of 65 million, including the new store opening program. We opened 53 new stores, including a further 13 in North America. We anticipate our investment for the current year to be around 140 million, which includes opening around 110 new stores, reflecting both the opportunities we have, plus our confidence in the markets in which we operate. We're getting good returns on these investments, generating a rookie ahead of our cost of capital in each of the three divisions. Third, as expected, working capital was an outflow of 68 million, which mostly relates to the seasonality of the business as travel continues to grow. The balance then is primarily the investment in new stores. Taking into account the working capital cadence and the level of operating cash flows generated in the second half, we expect to generate a substantial free cash inflow for the full year. So turning now to the net debt. Net debt at the end of the half was $437 million, giving the group a leverage of 1.8 times EBITDA compared to 2.0 times last year. As well as the free cash flow, we then had $51 million of outflow on non-trading items, of which the biggest items were the $27 million final dividend payment announced in November and paid in January, and $12 million to the ESOP. The group has a five year, 400 million sustainability linked facility, which was drawn by 176 million as at 29th of February. We also had the convertible out to May, 2026. So we have plenty of liquidity and capacity to invest. And just to remind you, the coupon on the convertible is fixed at 1.625%. We have a strong balance sheet and our leverage ratios continue to fall as our profits grow. We expect full year net debt to be around 330 million and to be inside our leverage envelope. Let me move now onto our capital allocation policy. We remain focused on maintaining an efficient balance sheet and on our disciplined approach to capital allocation. First, investing in the business where returns are ahead of our cost of capital. We're investing for growth, growth in new stores, refurbishing our existing estate, and winning better quality space. And we have plenty of opportunities to do this. The returns we get from this are good, with Rokey in the UK at 32%, for North America 15%, and rest of the world at 16%. Second, paying a dividend. We recognize the importance of a dividend to many of our shareholders. So we have a progressive dividend policy and would seek to grow our dividends at least in line with EPS growth with a target dividend cover of 2.5 times. The board has proposed an interim dividend of 11p. Thirdly, undertaking value creating acquisitions in the travel space. And finally, we have a long track record of an optimized balance sheet and returning surplus cash to shareholders via buybacks. I'll now hand back to Carl to talk about the operational performance.

Thank you, Robert. At the beginning of the presentation, I told you about our key growth drivers, and underpinning these is our forensic approach to retail. This attention to detail is a key driver of our success. We are now a multi-format, multi-brand global travel retailer operating over 1200 stores across 32 countries with significant growth opportunities. And while each of our divisions is at a very different stage in their evolution with the US only at the beginning of this journey, we are seeing good results and we are continuing to win new space globally. We have seen a strong track record of success through the development of our one-stop shop for travel essentials format. As you've heard, this approach presents good growth opportunities across each of our divisions into the future. And we never lose sight of the importance of maximising the returns of every metre drop of selling space across every individual store. Finally, as you would expect, we are always committed to tight cost control across the group. Turning now to Travel UK, which is our largest division. I'm very pleased to say that we have had an excellent half of strong growth with first half profits up 19% to 37 million pounds, and a strong half of like-for-like revenue growth up 13%. The business is benefiting from the successful execution of our four pillar strategy, space growth, increasing spend per passenger, category development, and of course, cost management. We continue to invest and we are on track to open around 15 stores in the current financial year. The majority of these in our hospital channel. And we see this annual space growth of around 10 to 15 new stores in UK travel extending into the medium term. We remain focused on driving spend per passenger and ATV and this is delivering excellent results with revenue growing ahead of passenger numbers. Turning now to our performance in air in the UK. And I'm pleased to say that we've delivered an excellent performance across our UK air channel with light for light revenue growth of 14%. Our one-stop shop format is delivering good results across all our airports, improving profitability and generating significant opportunities. If we take our flagship store at Birmingham airport as an example, which opened in November, we have been very pleased with the performance of this store, which is trading ahead of plan. Birmingham is our largest UK travel store covering 6,000 square foot of selling space with a localized design tailored to the requirements of the landlord and providing passengers with a bespoke customer experience. Encompassing everything you would expect from a WH Smith, as well as a broader product range including health and beauty, tech zones, food to go and coffee. By widening our offer and creating a fast, convenient shopping experience, customers are putting more items in their baskets, which in turn increases our spend per passenger and drives ATV. As I said at the beginning of the presentation, the exciting part here is that this is a highly scalable format and not only applicable for our largest stores in air, but any store of any size. Turning to the next slide. The hospital channel is a successful channel for us and is the second largest by revenue behind Ayr. We continue to execute our strategy, which has delivered a strong performance in the half with like-for-like revenue of 14%. Our success in hospitals illustrates our ability to generate increased profitability from our stores by improving our retail proposition. For example, tailoring our product offer to the specific requirements of hospital staff, patients and visitors by providing an increased range of food, health and beauty and tech accessories. It's a growing market and we're on track to open eight stores this financial year. We see plenty more opportunities for us to continue to grow our space and improve the retail proposition under our broad suites of brands and new formats. And we continue to invest across our existing store portfolio as well as driving further growth with a strong store pipeline. Turning to rail, where we have delivered another strong performance despite industrial action, with like-for-like revenue up 13%. In line with our other channels, we continue to focus on investing in new formats, improving our ranges to increase spend per passenger and customer conversion and to also driving ATV. This includes adding a new in-motion store to Euston Station and widening our health and beauty ranges across many of our stores. Moving on now to our North American division on the next slide. The most exciting opportunity for growth is our North America division. I spend a lot of time in the US. Only a few weeks ago, I was in New York with a team visiting over 30 of our stores there. Our approach here is inevitably different to that in the UK, as it's still at a much earlier stage of development. Much of our focus and energy in the US is centered on winning and opening new stores and building our market share to 20% over the next four years. Interestingly, we are currently part of more live tenders at any one time than we've ever been involved in before. If you look at space alone in North America and take the top 70 airports, there are a total of around 2,000 news, gift and specialty shops across these airports, of which we operate or have won 260. And on the screen, you can see our position in the top 25 alone. The dark blue shading shows our presence currently within these top 25 airports, and the white space shows the scale of the opportunity in our categories by location. I think it's very clear to see from this data why we have many reasons to be optimistic about our North American division. Let's now turn to the next slide. As I've said, North America is our most exciting growth business, and we see excellent prospects to grow this division in airports where we continue to perform strongly. During the half, we delivered profits of £14 million, with total revenue growth of 13%. A key driver of our growth has been our ability to win significant new tenders. As I've already said, we are currently part of more live tenders than we've ever been involved in before. We now have a new store pipeline of over 50 stores, one due to open. During the period we opened 13 stores including new store openings at Denver, Los Angeles and Salt Lake City airports and we're seeing good returns. We have a very busy second half with a further 30 stores due to open this financial year. North America now represents around 50% of our international store estate and the potential for further growth is really substantial. In addition, we continue to focus on improving both the quantity and quality of our space, which I'll come on to, as well as providing landlords with an attractive proposition, focusing on bespoke stores and localization. We are confident that there are many more tenders to come, and with our record of success, you can understand our confidence in building market share. Turning to the next slide. And I thought I'd update you on what we've started doing within the existing business to make it better and more efficient and optimize the opportunities that exist. As a retailer, what is really exciting for me is the scope to improve the quality of our space and apply the learnings from our UK stores to this division. We continue to invest significantly both in new stores, as you've heard, but also improving the operational performance and margins of the business. Firstly, now that some of our stores have been trading for an extended period, we have the data to allow us to start applying our forensic approach to space management. A really good example of this is where we've introduced tech accessories into our MRG stores and operationally merged InMotion into MRG. This now means we have one manager per terminal in airports resulting in efficiencies and also an improved retail offer for customers and landlords across our estates. Secondly, we've been reviewing our ranges and we're introducing more drinks chillers into stores by increasing the space for drinks by around 20% for an average store. Another good example, as we do in the UK, is the introduction of improved planogramming for each store so we can better analyze and manage space on a store-by-store basis. All of this will drive better returns, and just to be clear, we're only at the very beginning of this journey. In addition, we have invested in furthering our supply chain capabilities on the East Coast with a new consolidation center being implemented in New Jersey. This will provide key supplier efficiencies by combining all direct deliveries from our suppliers to New York and Atlantic City into one delivery center, enabling a single combined delivery direct to our stores. We have also further invested in our head office infrastructure to ensure we can support our ambitious store opening program. All this investment has meant that we've seen profits flat in the half. However, these investments put us in a very strong position for the second half and beyond. Turning now to the next slide and our rest of the world division. Our rest of the world division is very much about investing for the future. We have a very clear strategy here to continue to enter new countries using our three operating models of directly run, joint venture and franchise, and build our presence over time to leverage our fixed cost base and grow net margins. and the scalability of the group's retail formats is very clear, having entered 29 new countries since we opened our first international store in 2008. From this base, there are still very significant market share opportunities in the international travel retail markets, and I'll come onto this in a moment. We also continue to be successful in winning new tenders by using our expertise from our North American division to localize our retail proposition in more stores across the world. And we see further good opportunities across all markets. And as you would expect, we are focusing on driving ATV and spent per passenger by doing similar work to that in the UK by expanding our categories and introducing a broader offer for customers to include tech accessories, health and beauty, and food. Turning now to the next slide and building the store pipeline in the rest of the world. We're in a strong position. Where we're opening new stores, we are pleased with their performance and we tend to track significantly ahead of the previous incumbents. We have opened our first stores at Budapest Airport, which is a new market for us, including our flagship store, which you can see on the screen. This is a great example of how we've localized the store design to create bespoke stores and we see further good opportunities across all markets. In addition to Budapest, we've also opened stores in Australia, Spain, and Sweden, with a further 16 stores due to open in the second half. Turning now to the next slide and the outlook for our global travel business. As I said at the very beginning of this presentation, my confidence in this business is underpinned by each of our key growth drivers. New space and improving passenger numbers, but also broadening our categories and improving our ranges to increase spend per passenger and ATV. Each of our divisions are at very different stages of evolution, and we're equally excited about their prospects. In the UK, it's all about continuing the transition to a one-stop shop for travel essentials. In North America, our energy is focused on winning and opening new stores and increasingly to manage the space we operate more effectively. And in the rest of the world, we continue to build from a small base, improve our retail offer and build scale to leverage our fixed cost base. We continue to win new tenders and our new store opening programme is on track. Passenger numbers are forecast to grow, so this combined with our own initiatives puts us in an excellent position to deliver this year and beyond. Turning now to the high street. During the half, we delivered a good performance in line with expectations delivering profits of 22 million. As we grow travel, this division is becoming an increasingly smaller part of the overall group. It now accounts for around 15% of group profit from trading operations, but it's profitable and highly cash generative. We continue to manage our space in High Street to maximise returns and maintain a flexible cost structure, and it continues to deliver good results. As part of this space management, we have recently signed a new exclusive agreement with Toys R Us to deliver a further 30 store-in-stores in the second half of this financial year. This follows a successful launch last year and will provide customers in these locations with an improved toys and games offer. During the half, we have delivered savings of 8 million pounds in line with the plan, and we're on track to deliver 5 million of savings in the second half. These savings come from across the business, including rent reductions at lease end of around 40%, as well as logistics and supply chain efficiencies. And just to remind you, we have a very flexible lease portfolio in the high street with short leases where our average lease length is now just under two years. This has set us up very well to respond quickly to changing market conditions. We have around 475 leases due to expire over the next three years. Given this rolling programme of lease renewals, we therefore have further opportunities to renegotiate our occupation costs going forward, and we expect rent reductions to remain a key component of our future cost reduction strategy. Even after years of savings, the high street cost base is still substantial, and we continue to see opportunities for further savings. Turning now to our ESG commitments. We have excellent sustainability credentials and we continue to make good progress. We know that our customers, our colleagues and business partners all want us to act in a responsible way and that operating sustainably enables better business performance. You can see some of our achievements on the screen, including being a top performing specialty retailer in Morningstar's Sustainalytics ESG benchmark and being awarded a AA from MSCI ESG ratings. Our scope one and two emissions continue to fall and more than 25% of our supply chain emissions are now covered by science-based targets, demonstrating good progress towards our targets of 30% by the end of the year. We continue to champion children's literacy in partnership with the National Trust. Our financial assistance is providing direct early year supports to families and communities where help is needed. Turning now to our final slide to summarise. The group is in a strong position and the second half has started well. As you have heard, we see good growth opportunities across all three travel divisions. It is very evident that our travel business is highly scalable and we now have over 1200 stores across 32 countries. We are a highly cash generative business and we have announced today that we will be increasing the dividend reflecting the board's confidence in the future prospects of the group. Finally, we are confident we're on track to deliver the full year in line with expectations, and we remain fully focused on creating value for our shareholders. So that's it from me. Thank you, and we'll now take your questions, starting with those of you in the room.