SSP Group plc

Brilliant. Listen, it's nine o'clock, so we'll get started. Morning, everybody. And thank you for joining us today for the SSP interim results presentation. Indeed, it's great to see so many people here in person. Good for our business, too, to have people traveling. So, but delighted to see you with us this morning. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Patrick Coveney. I'm the new chief executive. of SSP and I'm joined here today for the presentation by Jonathan Davies, our Deputy CEO and Group CFO and in the room by several other members of our team and in particular I just wanted to point out Miles Collins and Sarah John from our Group Exec team who are working with us on the results and we'll be talking with many of you later on today. Before I start though, I just wanted to say a proper hello to everyone, both all of you here in the room and joining us on the call. I'm delighted to have joined SSP. Prior to joining, but in particular in the first two months in the role, I've already taken the opportunity to see as much of the business by getting into the business and meeting as many colleagues, clients and brand partners as I can. I've received a fantastic welcome so far. It's been humbling, actually. But I'd like, if I could, to give a particular thanks to Jonathan, who has been an enormous support to me and whose skill, empathy, passion for, and incredible knowledge of the SSP business has been a fabulous resource that's helping me massively on this transition. I'll talk more about what I'm learning and how those learnings and on the ground insights are informing my judgment for the potential of SSP later on. But turning now to the agenda for this morning. We'll start with me briefly setting out the highlights of our performance for the first half. I'm then going to pass over to Jonathan, who will share the detail of the financial performance and the business features that drove that. I'll then come back in to give some early perspectives on what excites me about joining this business and touch on some of the specific opportunities that we'll be pursuing through the rest of this year and into 2023. And lastly, we'll close with a question and answer session, taking questions starting with people in the room and if we have time from those joining us remotely by phone. Before Jonathan takes you through the detailed results though for the half, I wanted to set out the highlights as I see them, being a relative newcomer to the business with a somewhat objective perspective. Cutting to the chase, I've been deeply impressed, not only by the level and pace of recovery, but importantly by the trajectory of that recovery and how we're managing the business and each of our stakeholders through this rapid rebuild. We've been able to combine agility with tight financial and capital control as we've delivered strong sales while minimising cost and cash outflows, sustaining critical client relationships and selectively capturing multiple in-market competitive opportunities. This recovery is going nicely. As Jonathan will set out, in the first six weeks of the second half, group revenue has averaged 83% of pre-COVID levels, and we're currently operating with more than 2,200 outlets representing 81% of our pre-COVID estate. Critically though, we're also setting up the business for the long term with a higher than average client retention rate, which is a testament to the strength of our client relationships and how we've worked collaboratively with clients through COVID. Now, not only have we reopened many of the outlets that we closed through COVID, but we've also started to mobilize units that we previously secured. And importantly, we've won further new units this year, leaving us with a pipeline that now equates to approximately 500 million of annualized new sales over the medium term. Jonathan will set out each of these three elements of this pipeline in a few minutes. Of course, there remains uncertainty in our markets, but we have a strong foundation, a robust balance sheet, and considerable internal and revenue momentum going into the summer. So it's against that backdrop and those foundations, and notwithstanding the awareness that we have of the short-term supply challenges and macroeconomic situation, that we have the confidence today to give more granular and specific outlet guidance for FY22. Traditional guidance, if you like, which Jonathan will come to in a moment. So now, Jonathan, over to you.

Thank you Patrick and good morning everybody. Just before I kick off, I'd like to say that I'm delighted to have Patrick now on board. He's really hit the ground running as you'd expect. He's been to a lot of countries already and he's having a very, very positive impact on all of our teams. And on a personal note, I've known Patrick for several years and I have to say I'm really enjoying working with him and importantly so is the rest of our executive team. Now, looking at the highlights for the first half, we've delivered a very good set of first half results, particularly given the emergence of Omicron during the winter. As you can see, ultimately, the impact was fairly modest. If we look at the headline numbers, sales were around 800 million and that was at 64% of pre-COVID levels and EBITDA was positive at 15 million compared with a loss of 110 million last year. On the same basis, operating loss was 36 million, representing a profit conversion of 22% on the sales reduction compared with 2019, which was ahead of expectations. The cash outflow was only 31 million, helped by the ongoing recovery in the sales over the period. And this left net debt at 340 million at the end of March. Now, as we've done in a number of results recently, over the next few slides, I'm going to talk about the numbers pre and post IFRS 16. And then when I've finished with the accounting, I'll move on to talk about the performance of the business. So looking at the overall P&L, you can see that as in previous periods, the impact of IFRS 16 is mainly reflected in lower concession fees and offset by a higher depreciation charge. The net result of these impacts is that the operating loss is 16 million higher under IFRS 16, But this is just because of the IFRS 16 concession fees, not including the benefit of short term minimum guarantee waivers amounting to 19 million, which was a measure put in place, especially for the COVID period. So these have been treated as exceptional profits. If we included these waivers, the underlying operating loss would be broadly similar under both treatments. Looking further down the P&L, pre IFRS 16 the underlying net losses were 67 million and EPS was a loss of 8.4 pence a share. The net losses were higher at 98 million mainly reflecting the higher interest charges arising from the unwind of the discount on the fixed lease liabilities. Now offsetting these net losses was an exceptional profit of 85 million So looking at the non underlying items, you can see this includes the short term fixed rent waivers of 19 million that I've just mentioned. However, the major component of the one-offs was the profit on the de-recognition of the net lease liabilities of £62 million, which was a direct result of the successful long-term lease renegotiations where previous minimum guarantees have been removed or replaced with more flexible rental arrangements such as a direct link to passenger numbers. By the way, these include the impact of the new legislation in Spain, whereby pre-COVID minimum guarantees all now are linked to passenger numbers. So if you looked at the balance sheet and the IFRS 16 lease liabilities over the last couple of years, you can see that they've fallen significantly from about £1.5 billion in March 2020 to about £800 million in March this year. This reflects this ongoing success in renegotiating these minimum guarantees and essentially making them variable with passenger numbers typically so that they now fall outside the scope of IFRS 16. And this is an important commercial point for us because clearly it gives us much greater protection on the downside in the event of any further volatility in sales. So now moving on from the accounting and talking about the business performance. Sales have recovered strongly as soon as the Covid restrictions have been lifted, which was very much what we saw last summer and into the early autumn. And that was certainly the case prior to Omicron. And you can see this from the chart. Now, since January, when sales were just over 50% of pre-COVID levels, we've seen this rapid bounce back to 83% in the first six weeks of the second half. And that pace of recovery has been pretty consistent across all of our major markets. So from a low point in January, following the outbreak of Omicron, you can see that continental Europe, North America and the UK have all recovered very sharply to well over 80% of pre-COVID sales over the first six weeks of the new half. Now in the rest of the world, the picture you can see is slightly more mixed, albeit there's a strongly improving trend. So we've seen good recoveries in countries like India, Australia, Thailand, led by domestic air travel. But in countries like China and Hong Kong, notably, the travel sector remains almost closed. And frankly, we expect this to continue over the summer at least. The strong recovery in passenger demand has been very much led by leisure passengers as people have taken holidays and continue to visit friends and family. The shift in mix towards leisure travel has also helped drive sales growth ahead of passenger numbers across both the air and the rail sectors, as leisure travellers typically spend more than their business counterparts or commuters, mainly because of their longer dwell times. On top of this, in airports, the additional immigration checks due to COVID restrictions, whilst unfortunately causing a fair degree of disruption to travellers, have undoubtedly increased dwell times over the COVID period and therefore improved our penetration levels. In rail, the more flexible working hours that we're seeing amongst commuters have smoothed out some of the normal rush hour peaks. And again, that has helped us drive penetration levels during the weekdays. Now, as we move into the summer, we expect to see these trends continue with a further increase in passenger demand driven by leisure travel and broadly following the normal seasonality of our business. So we anticipate that sales will continue to run at around 80 to 85 percent of pre-COVID levels over the second half. notwithstanding the well-documented supply side challenges as we're seeing right across the industry as it fully remobilises. So this would equate to around 2 to 2.1 billion of sales for the full year. Now, turning to profit. Firstly, a look at the shape of the P&L. You can see gross margins were up by 1% against pre-COVID levels. A strong performance, particularly given the challenges of low volumes. And again, demonstrates the effectiveness of our range and menu engineering programmes. Clearly, this will be particularly important as we look forward in an inflationary environment. Labour costs have been reduced by 28%, but compared to 2019, again helped by our ongoing efficiency initiatives, including the further rollout of digital ordering and payment technology, as well as access to furlough schemes in many continental European markets. You can see concession fees were only 90 basis points above 2019 level as a percent to sales, which of course reflects all the work I've just described in terms of renegotiating minimum guarantees. And as has been the case throughout the pandemic, We've been very effective in mitigating the impacts of lower passenger levels on our cost base by opening and closing units very flexibly in line with demand as well as flexing trading hours. And the next chart demonstrates this. Again, a chart we've shown before. You can see that over the last 12 months we flexed the number of trading units with demand and now have 2,200 units or about 81% of our estate open. You can also see from the chart that we didn't really take extreme action in January in the face of Omicron, anticipating the drop in passenger numbers would probably be for a limited duration. All of this, of course, has put us in a really strong position for the rapid recovery in spring, which we're seeing now. So if I look at the overall profit conversion. The profit conversion on the lost sales compared to 2019 was 22% in the first half. So very consistent with the performance throughout 2021 and slightly better than the guidance that we'd previously given of 25 to 30%. It's worth remembering that that guidance was given at the onset of Omicron when the level of government support was still somewhat unknown. Now, looking forward to the full year, As I've mentioned a moment ago, we're anticipating sales to be somewhere in the region of 2 to 2.1 billion. So with sales in this range, we would expect EBITDA margins to be between around 5% at the lower end of that sales range to about 6% at the higher end of that sales range. And this is entirely consistent with the profit conversion guidance that we've previously given. Our medium term expectations remain unchanged. That is for a return to broadly pre-COVID levels of sales and EBITDA margins by 2024. So, looking to cash flow, underlying free cash flow was a usage of 31 million, helped of course by the positive EBITDA, and an inflow of working capital of 15 million, driven by the increase of sales between September and March, which has helped rebuild our negative working capital, offset by a small reduction in the level of payment deferrals that we've spoken about in the past. We would now estimate the value of those deferred payments to be in the region of £120 million, but we'd expect no more than two-thirds of that at most to unwind during the second half. You can also see we've invested 42 million in capital projects in the first half, and that's due to a few projects being delayed due to the onset of Omicron, but we're still expecting to spend something in the region of 150 million in the full year. And to complete the picture, you can see that cash interest was 16 million, so well below the accounting charge, and the cash tax was minimal. This left net debt at 340 million at the end of the year. Finally a word on liquidity. Overall liquidity was 607 million at the end of March and that's of course having paid down the 300 million CCFF facility in February. So that's really all I wanted to cover in terms of the numbers. Let me move on now and talk a little bit about the key drivers of our performance. The performance drivers in our business will be very familiar to many of you in this room. And they're based on delivering top line growth through a combination of like for like sales and net contract gains alongside a programme of ongoing efficiency initiatives whilst delivering high returns on every pound of capital investment in the business. As you know, we've a very strong track record prior to COVID based on this proven financial model and one that I'm very confident we will return to in due course and will continue to deliver good returns for all of our stakeholders. In addition, we've continued to reinvest and strengthen some key areas of the business over the last couple of years with a focus on our customer proposition, especially our brands and concepts portfolio, our technology, our people, and we continue to work on embedding sustainability throughout the group. Now, let me expand on one or two of these drivers. So firstly, a reminder of the base case scenario that we set out with our rights issue last year. We expected passenger numbers would recover to around 75% of pre-COVID levels in the 2022 financial year and about 90 to 95% in 2023. This was driven by the assumption that we would see a swift recovery in leisure traffic once restrictions were eased, but a slower recovery in business and long haul air travel and commuter traffic in the rail sector. Although we didn't anticipate the temporary interruption caused by Omicron, I'm pleased to say that our current trading remains closely in line with the base case we set out then. Clearly, it's impossible to forecast the precise pace of the recovery, but we still feel that the base case remains a very reasonable scenario for the next few years. Now, turning to business development. We've consistently demonstrated high retention levels across many years, generally in the region of 80%, but they've been even higher during the COVID period, as many of our clients have been willing to extend contracts rather than conduct full tender processes, given the backdrop of market uncertainty. Nevertheless, we have seen some clients running full RFPs. One of the most important in the first half was at Arlanda Airport in Stockholm. And we're delighted to have secured 21 units there, building on a very long standing relationship. We've also continued to mobilize the pipeline of previously secured contracts. And one of the most significant is Dublin Airport, where we're now well into the program of what will ultimately give us 27 units there. Turning to new business wins in the first half. The pace of business development continues to step up. So in the first half, we secured an additional 80 units, which will deliver around 75 million of annual sales. Recent examples of new contracts include in Belgium, where we've completed the small acquisition of Colmar, which runs 14 units, mainly in railway stations where we're already present. In Guadeloupe, in the French West Indies, we've built on last year's success at Martinique Airport. And we've added new units to our existing operations in many sites, including at Chicago Midway and in Bangalore. Now, looking at the overall gains and what that all adds up to, if we include the new wins in the first half, The pipeline at the end of March stood at 230 units. Those are units that we've secured but are yet to open. And we think those will open over the next two years. And overall, these units should contribute about 300 million of annualised sales in the medium term. Now you can see from the chart that the pipeline of units yet to open is fairly well diversified across the globe, although North America and continental Europe represent over 60%. We expect the capital investment behind these to be in the region of 110 million or so. Now, in summary, if we take the current pipeline and add the incremental stales still to come from the units that were opened pre and post COVID, but have yet to trade for a full year or trade at normal volumes, the overall secured net gains are expected to be in the region of 500 million by 2025. This would represent another 18% of our 2019 sales base. So put simply, that means the secured units or opened units really will deliver something like five to 6% of net contract gains over a three year period, which is very much in line with what we saw over the three years prior to COVID. Now turning to our balance sheet and our financial capacity. Our priorities for the use of cash remain unchanged from previous years. Our number one priority is to invest in organic growth, as typically this is where we see the best returns. But we'll also, of course, review M&A opportunities as they arise, albeit as ever selectively. Our target leverage remains unchanged. That is in the region of one and a half to two times net debt to EBITDA. And once we return towards this range, we will, of course, reinstate dividends and consider cash returns to shareholders or buybacks, as we did in the years prior to COVID. However, as we've said previously, we see many opportunities to secure additional new business over the coming years, particularly given the backlog of tenders and transport infrastructure investments that are gradually restarting. Now, under the base case scenario and with leverage in that target range, we would expect to have financial capacity for an additional 425 to 475 million of investment to drive further business growth. This is higher than our previous estimate of 350 to 400 million, reflecting the stronger than expected cash flow and balance sheet position. However, I stress our first priority will as ever be to demonstrate financial discipline and securing high returns on investment. A word on the current market environment now. As you'll all be aware, the whole industry is facing significant inflationary pressures for many well-documented reasons, including food, commodity and energy price increases, the conflict in Ukraine, the lockdown in China and low labour availability post-COVID. Whilst to date the impact has been limited, We are expecting inflation to step up through the second half and into next year. Our approach is, of course, to mitigate these inflationary pressures. And we have plenty of levers to work on, as indeed we show on the chart. However, ultimately, where we can't mitigate these pressures, they will flow through into pricing very much as we're seeing across the high street today. But where we see food cost inflation, we are re-engineering menus and ranges, switching between different proteins depending on commodity prices. We're changing recipes more frequently depending on produce prices and seasonality. And our strong supplier relationships and fixed price or fixed inflation contracts are continuing to give us some protection at the moment and will do so for much of the second half. Where we see pressures on pay and pay rates and labour availability, we'll continue to simplify menus to reduce the need for skilled labour, as well as focusing on grab-and-go formats rather than full service, and we'll increase the use of customer-facing technology as well to help. So in summary, managing inflation is very much part of our business model and we've demonstrated over many years an ability to mitigate the impact of inflationary pressures on our margins. And finally, a word on our sustainability programme. Embedding sustainability across the business is a key priority for us, underpinning the delivery of long-term sustainable value for all our stakeholders. As a reminder, we launched our sustainability framework back in December, focused on three key pillars you can see on the chart. We've set some very stretching targets, but we've got some real momentum and are well on the way to delivering those. You can see a few examples on the chart, but just to highlight one. Reducing food waste is key to our net zero strategy. And through our partnership with Too Good To Go, we're selling surplus food at discounted prices in over 400 of our units across 10 countries. Not only does this reduce food waste, it plays an important social role in helping to tackle food poverty. So now let me pass back to Patrick to give you some early observations and talk about priorities for the business over the coming months. Thank you.

Thanks a lot, Jonathan. I'm going to now share some initial observations about the business and our priorities for the rest of FY22. Although clearly I'm new to this role, I'm not actually a stranger to SSP. I've joined from Greencore, where I served as Group CEO for 14 years. Greencore was not only an SSP supplier, but more broadly, it was a food-to-go peer, being a fast-paced, consumer-focused, culinary-led fresh food company, and also a long-standing supply partner to some of SSP's biggest UK and US brands and clients for more than a decade. And of course, since last summer, I've been working hard to understand the essence and the potential of SSP. But my focus in starting formally Enroll has been to dive head on into the business. I've got out into the business to see hundreds of our restaurants, bars, coffee shops, and convenience outlets, meet many of our teams in person, observe customers firsthand, and sit down face to face with clients and brand partners in each of the United States, in Ireland, in the UK, in France, in Sweden, and in Norway already. In addition, I've had the opportunity to meet and work closely with our leadership teams, chairing two of our executive committee meetings already, attending three PLC board meetings, and importantly, diving into the re-forecasting process that underpins our FY22 outlook that we shared this morning, and engaging with colleagues more broadly around the world. Already, I feel part of the business, but I'm also building a more granular sense of SSP, and importantly, I think I'm thoroughly enjoying my time in SSP. Let me now share some of these perspectives, starting with why I think SSP is a brilliant business. We've got strong foundations on which to build. First, SSP sits at the intersection of two exciting and growing markets, travel and food. There's high structural growth potential as more and more people across the world want to travel. But critically, the demand for food and beverage solutions at those travel locations is becoming ever more important. We have a set of strong and complementary businesses across the world. To pick out one that is central to our strategy. Our North American business is well positioned. It's all about air, catering to leisure and business travelers, consistently building scale and market share overall and importantly at key airports, but with serious headroom for further share gains and growth for the next decade. US airports are largely locally owned. So our strategy of localizing our offer to both consumers and local communities, bringing a sense of place to those airports has been incredibly successful. We're executing that strategy by combining SSP scale capability and domain expertise with innovative airport specific partnerships and with a set of locally relevant brand owners to secure and deliver broad multi-outlet contracts with our airport clients. Throughout we execute with strong financial and capital discipline. Second, we have a track record of operational excellence, most recently evidenced during the radically different ramp down and ramp up phases of COVID. What we have you see is a nice balance between local ownership, autonomy and entrepreneurship, with appropriate scale and capability at regional and global level, with a deeply embedded culture and set of processes to ensure financial, capital and returns discipline. Third, I've been really impressed by the senior leadership team and the wider management and team capability at all levels. They've done all the right things through COVID, keeping our people together through what's been an incredibly bruising time, retaining key people and enhancing engagement levels as we've ramped back volumes and outlets across the world. In particular, and this brings me to numbers four and five on the slide, the team have lent in hard with key clients and brand owners during this uncertain period. At a time when, to be candid, many of our peers went missing. And in many instances, we've actually strengthened these critical longstanding relationships during the COVID period. You see this quantitatively in the improved contact retention metrics that Jonathan referenced earlier. But I've also heard this qualitatively too firsthand in my multiple direct engagements with key clients and brand owners across the world over the course of the last five months. Simply put, we have momentum. a strong pipeline and a mandate from our clients and customers to do more. And lastly, our balance sheet and liquidity position is strong and improving. of course we're grateful for the support that we've received from shareholders and debt holders over the past two years. This support protected the business when it needed protection, but it now creates the opportunity for us to go after the many growth opportunities that we've outlined already, but of course in the disciplined returns way that so characterises how SSP operates. I've seen many opportunities already through my early engagement with the business and I wanted to touch on five themes this morning. First, it should go without saying that our immediate priority will be to support and sustain the business and our people and teams through the build back of revenues, profitability and returns. Allied to this, we can see great opportunity to build further on our strong pipeline, particularly in developed large markets, most especially North America, where we already have strong teams, strong market positions, locally relevant strategies and impressive recovery momentum. But importantly, where there is material white space in the market for further growth. Building on our expertise in developing brands and concepts and using our wealth of customer insights, I also see a greater opportunity to deliver offers that better appeal to the tastes of post-COVID consumers. We're already doing this with new concepts that I've already visited, like Eatery in Orlando in Sweden, Brooklyn Diner in LaGuardia in the United States, Soul & Grain coffee shops in the UK, most especially in Victoria Station, and the Fallow Casual Dining concept, which will be one of our largest single restaurants, which we're bringing to market in June in Dublin Airport. This approach of developing on-trend and scalable concepts across the key formats in which we operate and which we can then roll out at the concept, albeit tweaked by brand level across the world, will be an important feature of our approach going forward. An important part of these propositions is getting the food quality right. And I see opportunities to bring more consistency in the quality of our offer, of course, appropriate to the brand, price and value propositions that we need to hit. And we're doing this around the world and our exec team are already working hard on it. Automation, digital and technology matter. From our perspective, they add real value in three related areas. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, it's to play to customers' increasing comfort and expectations to be able to use digital channels to order and pay across all formats. but also it enables us to achieve a step change in the efficiency of our supply chain configuration, which will be very helpful in offsetting some of the inflationary pressures and supply chain pressures that Jonathan outlined earlier. And lastly, it matters for our clients who want to be on the front foot in terms of technology. And finally, we're making good progress in developing our approach to sustainability. Really embedding this into the way we do business, coming at it from a perspective of purpose and not just measurement and compliance is not only the right thing to do, but it's what our clients, consumers, investors, and critically our own colleagues and teams want us to do. We've already made some significant achievements with colleague engagement levels notably increasing and achieving our senior level diversity targets three years early. I'd also like to acknowledge this morning the extensive community support in multiple forms that our teams are providing to Ukrainian refugees and Ukrainian communities in response to the tragic events that are unfolding there. This support is evident right across the group, but it is, of course, most visible in our central and northern European businesses. More broadly in terms of sustainability, we will be launching our first standalone comprehensive sustainability report later this year. So to finish our presentation then, we have momentum within the business right now, revenues recovering nicely after the impact of Omicron early in the calendar year, led by a resurgent in leisure travel across the world. We've delivered positive EBITDA thanks to the revenue recovery, but supported by the financial discipline and first-class operating efficiency of SSP. Importantly, we have done a very nice job of retaining high levels of our existing contracts, and we have secured many new business wins, all reflecting our longstanding and trusted client relationships and how we engage with those clients through COVID. Building now on a strong pipeline of new contract wins, with a track record of success in this space, a disciplined approach to delivering returns, and the scale of the financial headroom, we have the ability to take advantage of market opportunities right across the world. As Jonathan laid out, it's an important step change for our business today to feel confident enough on our trajectory to be able to give more precise guidance. namely that we expect full-year sales to be in the region of 2 to 2.1 billion and full-year EBITDA to be in the range of approximately 5 to 6%. So thank you for taking the time to listen to us this morning. I'm going to jump back to the desk here and Jonathan and I will take Q&A starting in the room. Do you want to moderate here, John?

Jamie, I think if you push the button on the microphone in front of you, wait a couple of seconds, it should come on.

Hello, Jamie from Morgan Stanley. Just on the 80% to 85% sales guidance for the second half of the year, I'm just wondering, first of all, that doesn't imply much of an improvement from the most recent 83%. Is that because you're seeing signs of weakness, or is that just natural conservatism? And also within that 80% to 85%, what is the sort of volume recovery? Clearly, we're on a three-year stack of pricing and contract gains. I'm really wondering about the underlying like-for-like recovery sort of from there. And then if I can ask on costs, what is your basket of costs in terms of labour and food inflation? And are there any permanent savings we can expect to continue given the slide or overhead savings, et cetera? Thank you.

Yeah, let me give a kind of higher level answer to both of those. And John, you might jump in on the split between price and volume in revenue and how that's changed over the years. So, I mean, the first thing to say, Jamie, is we're delighted with the recovery. I think in truth, where everyone was sitting in January, if you'd offered us 80-25% for the second half, we'd have bitten your hand off for it. We're in a space here of good news and trying to call just how good the news is, if I could phrase it in that way. We're two months in, right? And so, you know, two months in at 83% is, you know, is what we've, you know, what we've incurred so far. But the, you know, I would draw your attention to the fact that we are... We're seeking to achieve two things in terms of where revenue comes out. One is the percentage against COVID-19, but also we've got this very, very strong seasonal uplift that you would have as well. So revenue is likely to get stronger pretty much every week as we roll forward through the summer trading season. We've chosen the guidance deliberately. We think that would give us a very nice outcome. We've ranged it, reflecting the fact that we could do a little better, probably. But there are some features that are just probably worth drawing your attention to that might cap just how quickly the percentage comeback could be. So one is... the ability of airports in particular to ramp up volume really quickly in terms of passenger travel. And so you can see that in the much publicized discussions on queues at airports, security clearance for security personnel and other people in airports. So we feel very, very good about underlying demand. We're building that demand back strongly, but we're choosing just to be a little cautious about the extent to which that flows through in the rest of the year, in part because we think our clients are going to feel under pressure in terms of meeting, particularly the leisure air demand through the summer, and that's evident right across the world. On cost, the only thing I'd say before I hand it over to Jonathan on that is... I've come from a business where cost of sales is a much, much greater proportion of overall sales than is the case in SSP. Of course, we've got lots of different formats, but our cost of goods is... 25% to 30% of sales. It's not 60% of sales like you'll see in some food manufacturers or in some traditional retailers. And there is a ton of really, really good work that's happening in the business around range configuration in particular, product configuration within range, and use of technology solutions, clever buying, and so forth that's enabling us to mitigate some of the inflationary pressures that we're finding. That probably won't be enough. So you will see us having, as Jonathan said, you will see us having to mitigate some of these pressures through pricing as well. But we are conscious that we both have and will have travelers and consumers, some of whom will be under real pressure in terms of their spending ability, and we will want to have ranges that work for them. So I think the best thing we can say is, The guidance recognises that we'll fully recover inflation through a wide variety of different approaches, both within our supply chain and as needed in pricing, but with a lot we can do and are doing in the supply chain of our business.

So I think the only one we've not really touched on there is the price versus volume question, Jamie. So I think if you look back to 2019, I think this is your question, what's the accumulative impact of inflation over that period? The reality is over the COVID period and even now in the first half, We've not really been putting through exceptional price increases, quite the contrary, really. So we would estimate that it's probably something like something in the region of 10% or possibly high single-digit inflation over that period. Clearly, that will probably step up in the near term for the reasons Patrick has just explained.

And contract gains over the last three years, pretty minimal to strip those out? Because the 80-85% includes contract gains and price.

It does, yes. The contract gains are probably, again, in sort of mid-single digits, which, again, is part of the build, absolutely right.

But it's tricky to factor that in too much, Jamie, when we've gone from having 1,000 units open last year to 2,000 units open now. So it's really in that framework that you set out as to what the future looks like, Jonathan, in the future.

Yeah, as ever, quite difficult to unpick inflation from volume, but that will be my broad guidance. Tim.

Yeah. That's better. Tim Barrett from Numis. I had a similar question really for 2023, the minus five to minus 10%. How much of that is due to lagging markets like China and the rest of the world? And is there some caution in there around commuter in rail, which is something you talked about quite a while ago, but where you're cautious? And then my second question was on utilities, just whether that's an issue or is it all wrapped up in concession fees? What's your exposure there? Thank you.

So with regard to 2023, I mean, it's a good question. The first point I would make is it's unknowable and we're not going to give guidance, which is why we've referred back to the base case we set out at the rights issue, which we think is probably... as reasonable a scenario as any at the moment. But you're right, actually, the issues that you've got to remember. And by the way, I think this also pertains to Jamie's first question about the second half. Although we are seeing a very strong recovery now, we do face some structural factors. So I don't think we're going to see commuters back in the same numbers in the near term. And certainly business travel is going to be curtailed. So in very broad terms, if you go back to the scenarios we set out with the rights issue, We said that we thought the strong recovery in leisure and the natural secular growth in leisure travel in the air sector would broadly speaking offset a slight reduction in business travel and ultimately in the medium term we'd end up at a broadly sort of fully recovered position versus 19%. Whereas in rail, we said we thought that the passenger numbers were probably in that same time frame be in the range of 90 to 95 percent, reflecting the fact that about half of our business, if you look across Europe in rail, is commuter based and about half of it is leisure based. So I think, you know, we'd stick to stick to our guns on that at this stage. Clearly, all of this, of course, is notwithstanding the benefit of all the new business that we're going to bring on. Ali, sorry, Tim. Sorry, apologies. Utilities, it's a good question because in over half of our business, the utilities are passed through to us from our clients. So yes, over time we will see that escalate, but it's in a sort of complex web of service charges. So we have some protection. I wouldn't want to overplay it, but we have some protection from the escalating utility costs. Thanks, Tim.

Ali. Good morning. Ali Nakri from HSBC. Just in terms of the new wins, how many of those are organic new sites that you'll have to build out versus taking over sites? And then has anything changed in terms of the tendering environment given the traffic recovery, either in terms of the deals you're winning or the competitive activity? And then I suppose we've alluded to it enough, but... Given H2 is a seasonally stronger part of the year, the drop through in H1 has been as strong as it has been. Are you just being purposely more conservative on the drop through in terms of the EBITDA range?

Okay, thanks. All good questions, Ali. So I think the first one is quite simple. I mean, our expectation is that, you know, pretty much all of that pipeline is organic growth. We will have to put capital into it, which is where that figure of about 110 million comes from. There is the one case which I referred to in my presentation of this small business, Colmar, where it is an acquisition. But again, the metrics will not be wildly dissimilar. In regard to the competitive environment, I think it's fair to say that during the Covid period, even now, the competitive environment is slightly more benign for sort of reasons that would probably be fairly obvious, with still market uncertainty remaining. I think we and our competitors are probably all being a little bit cautious when we make rent offers as part of full tender responses. And we are also, for example, always looking for downside protection in the event of further volatility. So we're looking for no mags or mags which are manual guarantees linked to passenger numbers in almost every case. So I think that's helping a little bit and that's certainly what we're seeing in the marketplace. The big competitors are acting rationally. I think with regard to the smaller local competitors who sometimes are the ones that lead to a bit of overheating in the competitive environment or certainly have done historically. I think we've seen some of them either depart the travel sector or certainly not reopen units or participate in tenders. So again, at the margin, I wouldn't overplay this. I think that's certainly made the overall competitive environment a tiny bit easier. I should stress that's probably time bound with this sort of rapid recovery. I think we'll probably see a more normal environment resume in due course. And the final point was about the drop through. And you're talking about first half versus second half. And are we being cautious in essentially saying we're back in line with our 25 to 30 percent guideline? I mean, the point I should just stress is that, you know, The first half and second half do not behave in exactly the same fashion. We always see lower margin in the first half, higher margin in the second half, which is to do with the seasonality of the business. So if you looked back at 2019, you'd have seen the EBITDA margin went from 9% in the first half to 14% in the second half. And to some degree, that's reflected in the profit conversion. So if you do the maths, you would see that, you know, based on the current trajectory, you know, it's quite reasonable to assume that from 22% in the first half, we could still see... something in the region of 25 to 30 percent for the for the full year therefore an implied higher drop through in the second half and also final point remember that because of the low sales in the first half we did get government support which certainly you know clearly has all fallen away now with the volume recovery we're seeing so I hope that goes some way to tackle the question Ali over here

Thanks. Good morning. It's Harry Gowers from J.P. Morgan. First one, obviously a nice kicker to have the financial capacity upgraded. So any thoughts on that, where that could be deployed by region, organic, inorganic? And the second one just on North America. So, I mean, how did a growth outlook or how did the opportunity stack up, do you think, versus quite a high rate of growth that we had before COVID?

Thanks. Let me try and tackle both of those. So, I mean, and if I join up a little bit with Ali's question. So, you know, there is a series of these themes that, how do I put it, they fall into the category of nice problems to have, right? So, you know, I'd love for us to be sitting here and, you know, early december talking you know validating that the guidance was cautious right that would be great if we were if we were able to do that and similarly actually if i look at the you know the consequence of the strong cash performance in the first half and the pace of the recovery of EBITDA means that we do have stronger financial headroom in our balance sheet than we probably expected to have in the early part of this financial year. Now, the reason that Jonathan took you through the capital allocation framework that we have against that is that we will over time transition to thinking about it in that way. What are the organic opportunities that deliver good returns for us with the traditional SSP discipline around returns? What combination of infill M&A like Calmar would create value that would sit alongside that. And then what does that mean for how we use our balance sheet in terms of getting our leverage into the right place between one and a half and two times? And what does that mean for mechanism and level and timing of returns back to shareholders? And we're going to work through all of that, but we'd much rather be in a position where, in effect, we've got an extra close to 50 to 100 million of more headspace than we thought we were going to have a few months ago. So that's the main message to take from that, not a kind of signal that we're going to change strategy in terms of how we use that capital. Sorry, Harry, you had a second question. North America. Yeah, North America. I think you would be correct, Harry, to take from both the quantitative and pipeline overview that Jonathan shared and the impressions that I shared, it would be a reasonable interpretation to recognise the enthusiasm that we have for and the role that we anticipate that growth in America will play in the overall value creation story for SSP going forward. That's fair. And the reasons for that play to a lot of opportunity in the current strategy, which is doing more in airports, a relatively low market share that we have in North America, both in the market overall and in some instances in airports where we're already operating, and a very high regard that we have both for the operational and commercial and business development capability of our team there. And a lot of confidence that we have in the economic model that we have in America, that as we grow, we can deliver good returns. So the and, you know, one of the I guess, you know, I flagged right at the beginning this part of my impressions would be informed both by being new, but also by being somewhat objective. And if I just join it up with Tim's earlier question, you know, the notwithstanding the heritage and history of SSP, air and North America will play a significantly bigger part in the future growth of our business than rail and the UK. And you can even see that specifically in the pipeline that Jonathan shared earlier, right, which is got a very important business in the UK. And we've got, you know, we're doing a lot of work on it, but you're not seeing the same level of outlets or growth in revenue in the UK that you're seeing in many of these other developed markets.

It's probably just worth adding that in many of the mature markets we're in, we have a relatively strong position. Whereas in North America, we're still only a third of the size or less of the major competitor. And again, we've shared this data in the past. We're still only present in less than 30 of the top 80 airports. So there's plenty of further growth opportunities for us. Yeah.

And I think we would all feel pretty psyched by the quality of the team that we have there too, which, in fairness, you've invested behind a lot over the last number of years.

Again, I think the pace of growth over the last decade is a testament to the strength of our team there. Ah, James.

James Rowland-Clark from Barclays. You've got 80% of units open today. Could you help us give an idea of when you might have 100% open? I realise China and Hong Kong are unknowns, but perhaps some colour on other regions where you haven't reopened units. And to Tim's question earlier, is that a reflection of the structural issues in rail or air in other regions? And then secondly, just on your post-COVID consumer, Patrick, you talked about having a different proposition for the post-COVID consumer. Could you just elaborate a little bit on what that looks like? And also in those locations you have established that you've changed things, what's the performance like there? Thank you.

Okay, so in terms of your question about the openings and where we're heading, I mean, we would hope that if this trajectory continues, we will be sort of substantively open by the end of the year in most of our major markets. So I think in round terms, that would probably see us sort of certainly north of 90% of all our units opened. The unknown is, as you say, what's happening in those parts of the world where we don't at this moment see a strong recovery. Worth saying that places like China are only about 2% or so of the business pre-COVID. So, you know, not a huge issue for us, you know, overall, but nevertheless, quite a lot of units there that are currently shut, as you'd expect. um so i think that's the unknown um and there will be a small number of units which frankly we will take um the opportunity presented by covid never to reopen so as inevitably you know within a business of this scale there are you know handfuls of units which were probably poorly performing units pre-covered and won't ever reopen so that you know there will be a tale of those albeit i stress not huge numbers probably in sort of low tens rather than more than that.

So, James, I could probably natter on for quite a while about the post-COVID consumer, so I'll try and be a bit disciplined in my response to you. But I'll just touch on four themes that I think are, you know, we're running hard with across the business. So the first is, by the way, we've touched on all of them in the different ways in the presentation. So the greater role of leisure is one feature of the SSP customer right now. And so that is accompanied by a pretty significant increase in the dwell time that those consumers have, particularly in airports. So that is leading to a very strong focus on getting bars and casual dining formats really working, where people have a bit more time with their travel. And that's very much reflected in the group investment committee proposals that come to Miles, Jonathan and I with our team around a real focus on casual dining concepts and bar concepts and the right both concept but also local partner and kind of local consumer activation. So that's one theme. Second, which doesn't go to the food or concept directly, but which is a massive change, is the consumer preference for digital. And that, again, is relevant in all formats. You'll see it in fast food outlets. You see it in coffee shops. You're seeing it in very innovative ways in convenience stores with some of the Amazon-type technology. People have been able to pick up product without actually ever going even to a self-scanning till. And you're seeing it in bars and casual dining restaurants in the order-a-table technology. So we're rolling that out hard. We have a pretty gifted technology leadership team that we're really investing behind. And some of that we're doing ourselves and some of it we're doing in partnership with some of our bigger brand partners. Third is on the food itself. I think we would feel, if we were to be collectively self-critical, that there are parts of our business where we need to improve the quality of the food proposition at the price points that we're charging. I don't think that's pervasive across the overall group, but there are pockets where we need to do that. And we're already doing it. I don't want to jump in and claim any massive lurch or... or intervention in that area. But I think as a group executive team, we feel there is some rebalancing that's necessary in terms of really hitting the food quality at the price points that we're charging. And then the last thing is that we've got some concept or proprietary brand developments that we think hit well with the post-COVID consumer. And some of those are in casual dining. But probably the most obvious one that any of the people here might bump into is the soul and grain coffee shop and food range that we've that we've just launched in on it's one of our own brands that we've launched in Victoria Station so and again that's playing to you know consumers desire for sustainability it's a very tailored range in terms of health and it's a nice premium and authentic range in terms of coffee and I'd encourage anyone to try it if they if they haven't already been there

I think we are pretty much out of time now, so perhaps just one more question if there is any. Just check if there's anything online or check if there's one more from the room, but we are pretty much out of time, I'm afraid. Okay, I think we'll... Perfect.

Why don't we... We've just gone to Hancock. Listen, thank you for joining us in person this morning, and to everyone who's joined online or is going to listen online, thank you for listening through the presentation. I'm delighted to be an SSP, delighted to be working with Jonathan, and hopefully we've given a nice sense for what's going on in the business in the hour we've had with you this morning. So look forward to catching up soon. Bye-bye. Great. Thank you very much indeed for joining us.