Sosandar Plc

Good afternoon, everyone. Today, we're going to review the results for FY24. However, the main focus of the presentation is to look at our journey to increasing profitability and realizing the full potential of the brand. So to take you through the agenda for today, we'll take a moment to look at where we are now as a brand. Steve will cover financial results and Q1 trading update, which leads us into our focus on profitability. Within this, we're going to look at margin, scale, opening stores, and how stores will enhance margin and expanding the brand further.

Hello, everyone. So just to kick off, I'm just going to summarize the key points that we're going to be covering in the presentation today. We've built a fantastic brand from scratch to achieve well over 40 million of turnover selling through multiple channels. We focused on building and growing scale to achieve that success. We're now at a scale where we can focus fully on realizing the profit potential of the business. We made the strategic decision in half two of last year to significantly reduce price promotions, and this proved highly successful in terms of driving margin and profitability. Then in Q1 of this financial year, we've reduced price promotional activity even further, and that has driven an even stronger uplifting margin of 670 basis points, achieving a margin of 63.4%. Yes, revenue has been impacted in Q1, as you would expect from that reduction in price promotion. But by prioritising margin and profitability rather than revenue, we've had a huge positive swing in PBT. So therefore, it's clear that the right course of action in order to drive sustainable profit is to continue with this focus on margin for the rest of the year, reducing price promotional activity to the same extent that we've reduced it in Q1. We realise it's very early in the year to be adjusting year-end revenue assumptions, but we think it's better to take that decision now, be clear on that decision with shareholders so that we can fully focus on margin and profitability. We predict that revenue will be on a par year on year, but margin will be significantly improved. So we'll generate the same revenue this year as last year, but with a significant increase in profit to a million pounds rather than the small loss we achieved last year. In future revenue will grow again, but at a higher margin delivering greater profit. We're also very excited to share with you today where we are with our imminent launch of our first shops in Chelmsford and Marlow. We'll demonstrate how our strong cash position will enable us to execute our store rollout programme from cashflow. And we'll also show that not only will shops be profitable in their own right, but they'll have a compounding effect on all our other channels.

When we launched Asanda, we recognized a demographic of underserved customers in 30 plus age group, and we've built a very successful brand addressing this demographic. This morning, over a million women opened their wardrobe and had a Asanda garment inside. We've had over a quarter of a billion sales today, so we've learned everything about our customer. You can see on this chart that we've sought to build a brand by reaching customers in whatever way they want to shop, taking a measured approach to expanding our channels. To take you back over our journey, we launched in 2016 and built the entire business on our own website, Susanda.com. We were then approached by Next and Marks & Spencers, who are obviously the two biggest retailers of women's wear in the UK, and we began selling through them in 2020. We're now a top-selling brand with both of these. We then added more successful concession partners, for example, Freeman's, and then added a wholesale arm to the business too, which included nine Sainsbury's stores. Last year, we successfully launched internationally through Globally and took on our first international third party in Australia. And we are now imminently about to launch our own stores in the UK.