Wickes Group plc

Good morning, and thank you for taking the time to join us today. And I'd also like to welcome everyone who is watching via the webcast. I'm here with our CFO, Mark George, and we're delighted to share with you our first-half results for 2025. We'll spend the next 20 minutes or so taking you through the performance of the business, broader market trends, and highlighting the great progress we are making on executing our strategic plans. I'm pleased to report that both our retail and our design installation business has had a strong first half. Our retail business has continued its volume-led sales recovery trajectory, resulting in record market share. And the self-help actions we took last year and earlier this year to transform our design and installation business are resulting increased project volumes, a return to like-for-like sales growth and driving market outperformance. This sales growth plus our productivity plans are driving operational leverage. A 5.6% increase in group revenue combined with our productivity savings, which has helped to offset inflation, has resulted in a 17% increase in adjusted profit before tax of £27.3 million. We continue to pursue growth through targeted investment. When it comes to our store estate, in the first half, we opened one of the five to seven new stores planned for the year and refitted a further four stores with more refits to come in the second half. And this year, we have stepped up our investment in tech to underpin and advance our growth and productivity plans. And Mark and I will share more on this later. And of course, we continue to invest in product innovation with new ranges in retail and some great stylish kitchen and bathroom ranges that are proving very popular with customers. We are delivering attractive returns to shareholders and have announced today an interim dividend of 3.6p, whilst the 20 million share buyback that we announced in March is ongoing. Before I hand over to Mark, I'm pleased to say that we remain comfortable with market expectations and our overall output for adjusted PBT remains unchanged. And finally, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all of my colleagues for their incredible work in delivering these results and providing great customer service. I'll now hand over to Mark to take you through the numbers in a little more detail.

Thank you David and good morning everyone. So as David mentioned, we've had a strong first half with good growth in sales and profits. On this page, we have some of the headlines. So revenue for the half was £848 million, up 5.6% versus H1 2024. Within that, retail was up 6.8% and design and installation delivered sales up 2.1%. We've had strong profit flow through, with gross margin up 79 basis points and a 17% increase in PBT to £27.3 million. We continue to operate with a strong balance sheet, ending the half with £158 million of cash. This performance and strong balance sheet have enabled us to continue delivering good returns to shareholders. As David mentioned, we're announcing this morning an interim dividend of 3.6 pence per share, and we continue to buy shares back in our 20 million buyback programme. We'll break out more detail in the next few slides, but here we have a summary of our P&L. As I mentioned, we grew sales in both retail and design and installation, in total increasing revenue by 45 million versus the first half last year. Gross margin rate increased by 79 basis points as a result of volume growth, category mix and lower consumer credit costs in our D&I business, which when combined with the sales growth resulted in the pound's gross profit increasing 7.9% year on year. Operating costs increased by 7%. A good productivity programme enabled us to mitigate some but not all of the significant cost headwinds that are facing us, in particular the increase in national living wage and national insurance. More on this in a moment. Overall, this enabled us to deliver a 14% increase in operating profit and a 16.7% increase in adjusted PBT, demonstrating the healthy operational leverage of the business when in growth. So let's look at the P&L drivers in more detail, starting with sales. In the retail side of the business, we continue to deliver really well, most clearly demonstrated in our market share position, which continue to strengthen. And David will touch on this more a little later. Within retail, we saw good, positive, like-for-like growth driven by both TradePro and DIY. The number of active TradePro members increased to 615,000 and TradePro sales grew by 10%. DIY sales were in mid-single-digit growth. As you can see from the table on the right, this growth in retail like-for-like has once again been driven by volume with negligible inflation in the business. In design and installation, our sales performance has continued to improve. The order book has been growing consistently since Q4 2024. And with the usual time lag, we are now delivering that revenue, with Q2 being the first quarter of delivered sales growth since Q2 2023. For the first half as a whole, like-for-like growth in design and installation was minus 1%, with total revenue growing 2.1%, supported by new store openings and Solarfast, which only went like-for-like in June. The profit bridge on this slide helps highlight the key drivers of the 17% growth in PBT. The strong performance in retail margin came from an increase in both sales and margin rate. In design and installation, the progression into delivered sales growth in Q2 meant there was a small increase in gross profit in the half, and clearly the trend for D&I is positive and encouraging for the rest of the year. On costs, we've shown here the impact that the strong volume growth has had on our cost base, with around £7 million of volume-related costs increased. We can then see the impact of inflation, £8.7 million in the half, which is quite a bit higher than on the same chart last year, which showed about £5.5 million of inflation in the first half, reflecting the increasing pressures of national living wage and national insurance coming in the business. Our productivity programme delivered £5.5 million of savings, slightly higher than H1 last year, which is encouraging, but clearly, as the chart shows, not enough to completely offset the cost inflation. We continue to invest in our business, and investment initiatives that hit the P&L resulted in 5.4 million of incremental costs year on year. In addition to costs relating to new stores and refits, we've also increased the investment in technology. This IT investment is set to increase further in the second half, and David will talk more about this in a moment. Turning to cash. We are a strongly cash generative business and even in a challenging economic environment, we can generate cash to reinvest in the business, pay a healthy dividend and buy back shares. We ended the half with 158 million of cash. Now, as you'll recall, we have seasonality in our working capital cycle in which we have a significant improvement in working capital in the first half of the year, which then unwinds in the second half. Now, the working capital position will normalise in the second half of this year in the usual way, but it will leave us with an average cash position across the year well ahead of our December low point. The strong cash flow from our growing profit and our healthy balance sheet gives us flexibility to invest further in growth initiatives as well as to accelerate the returns to shareholders. On growth, our CapEx plan, which is predominantly invested in new stores and refits, was £9.5 million in the first half and will be between £30 and £35 million for the year as a whole, with the programme clearly back-weighted to the second half. In H1, we returned £25 million to shareholders in the form of dividends and buybacks, and we also spent £11.9 million buying shares for our employee share scheme. So overall, a very healthy cash position. I'll end with some comments on outlook and guidance. So far in Q3, trading has been in line with our expectations with all three parts of the business, trade pro, DIY and design and installation remaining in growth. We expect costs to increase in the second half, with the full effect of the increase in national living wage and national insurance, which only came in in April, plus the back-end waiting of our new store opening programme. We'll also be stepping up our investment in technology. For the year as a whole, we'll be spending around £10 million more on SAS projects, with the cost going through the P&L, than we did in 2024. Despite these increases in operating costs, our strong trading performance means that we remain comfortable with consensus expectations for PBT for the year. Now, there's also some technical guidance provided on the slide there. I won't read it out, but it remains unchanged from what we gave at the beginning of the year. So to summarise our position at the half-year point, the business continues to deliver really well with all three parts of the business delivering good sales growth. Despite significant cost inflation, we're delivering good operational leverage from that strong sales performance, with PBT growing significantly faster than sales. And this is enabling us to continue investing in the business and at the same time deliver good returns to shareholders. With that, I'll hand back to David.

Thank you, Mark. Now, of course, it wouldn't be a Wix presentation if I didn't share with you this slide, our growth lever framework. Our sustained market outperformance is a clear demonstration that our uniquely balanced business model and strategic growth levers continue to deliver results and achieve our very simple purpose, which is to help the nation feel house proud. I'll take a few minutes to share how we are investing in these growth levers to continue to win in this market. But before I do that, I thought it would be helpful to look at some of the current consumer trends we are witnessing as we put our strategy into action. As you are aware, we keep a close eye on trends through our monthly Mood of the Nation survey. Our local trade customers tell us they continue to be busy with healthy pipelines of work and one in four of them telling us that they're booked up for a year in advance. For customers in the market for a new kitchen or bathroom, we are seeing that planned spend remains stable, although still below historical norms. It's worth noting that as people have been holding off buying a new kitchen or bathroom, they are getting older and simply more worn, so inevitably there is a backlog of volume building up. And turning to DIY, people still want to improve their homes and continue to prioritise DIY projects in the home and garden. And as ever, speed and convenience is important to them. In our most recent survey, 60% of them are saying faster deliveries and that they are happy to pay for more for the same day service. We are particularly pleased that sales growth is volume-led, and this is all down to more customers coming through our doors or shopping online. In our retail business, the TrayPro engine is truly motoring ahead, with sales up 10% and active membership, as Mark said, growing to 615,000. We are driving up DIY customer numbers through purposely broadening our appeal, attracting new customers by innovating in strategic categories and engaging communication. Our Proud as a Peacock advertising campaign is working very well for us. And in case you haven't seen it yet, here's one of our latest TV ads.

From the big transformations to the small home improvements. Feel as proud as a peacock with Wix.

Now, we know that customers value choice, convenience, and speed, and with our digitally-led, service-enabled business model, it allows us to provide all of this quite seamlessly. We are achieving incredibly strong customer satisfaction scores, particularly in click and collect and home delivery, arguably those service touch points where the customer judges us most critically. We are continuously innovating in this space. In the first half, we have further enhanced our proposition to offer customers greater choice and even faster, more convenient service through a number of new initiatives. We have repositioned our assisted selling offer under the new name Wix Extra, which offers customers who are shopping in store easy access to our extended range online. We've launched a new 15-minute click and collect service, halving the time they can now order online and pick up from their nearby store. As we pick it quicker, customers are collecting it quicker, so we know they value it and it works. And I'm delighted to share with you an exciting industry leading service that we're launching called Wix Rapid. In a nutshell, it means that customers will be able to receive a same day home delivery of products weighing up to 800 kilos in under three hours. No one in the market is offering this. With a specialist partner on board, we can now deliver to your door or site within three hours, seven days a week. There are over 10,000 SKUs available and a delivery cost from just £9. As you can imagine, for a local trader, this is a game changer, giving them the ability to make bulk orders at speed so they can just get the job done. We've launched this in the last two weeks following a very successful customer trial. The result of all of the above, a clear strategy of proven growth levers executed brilliantly is delivering record levels of market share. As you can see from this chart, particularly impressive growth in the past year as more customers choose to shop with Wix. Now, turning now to our design and installation side of the business, we are very pleased at the transformational actions we took as we exited last year and into this are bearing real fruit and translating into growth in ordered and delivered sales. A quick reminder of what those actions were. In response to customer feedback, we simplified the customer journey and now present a unified Wix Kitting offering with our bespoke and lifestyle ranges presented together across all marketing assets, brochures, the website, advertising and promotions. We also simplified the start of the customer journey by developing new tech that puts the customer in control of that all-important first design consultant meeting. Customers can now book either online or in store directly into an individual design consultant's diary by store nationwide. And we've increased the availability of our design consultants, making it easier for customers to find a time that truly suits them to start the imagining of a new kitchen or bathroom. Think open table for design consultants. Our field service management tool provides a technical solution for scheduling installers to make the overall experience as seamless as possible. We've launched a number of strategic initiatives for 25 and are innovating across all levels of spend and choice. At the more value-led end, we've added eight new colourways to our lifestyle kitchens, whilst at the higher end we'll be launching paint-to-order in October and have introduced branded kitchen appliances like Smeg. And all of this will be available to customers via a fabulous new design software programme that will be rolling out in the second half and will transform the way a customer can visualise and design their dream kitchen and bathroom. And in our solar business, leads now generated through Wix channels account for more than 80% of the total Wix solar installations. thought i'd take this opportunity just to show you how great our kitchens and bathrooms look it's all about innovating with color and style and here are a couple of great examples from the more traditional style bathroom on the left to our more contemporary styles which reflect customer preference for pastel colors and that trend for pastel colors is also reflected in our kitchen designs as you can see here with this ohio lifestyle kitchen in pink You'll be able to see these and more kitchens and bathrooms and hear all about our exciting plans for our design installations business at our Capital Markets event on the 14th of October in our Staines store. So get that in the diary. Now, given the vital role that tech plays to underpin the initiatives I've spoken about so far, I wanted to highlight some of the key investments we are making, along with the benefits they bring. So back in 2021, when we demerged the business, we said we were going to put increasing investment into our tech platforms and services. We knew we had to address the legacy systems that needed upgrading, and we also had a clear vision to improve the customer experience through tech and digital advancements. In line with our plan, we are increasing our investment in this area and building a compelling track record of both enhancing the customer experience and improving productivity and efficiency through our tech investment. I've already talked about the ongoing drivers of growth listed here on this slide, so I don't propose to go over these again. But I will tell you about some of the strategic tech initiatives coming down the track in the coming months and years. The new design software tool will be a game changer for our D&I customers when we launch it for the winter sale. It will transform the customer journey by unlocking new capabilities to provide seamless inspiration and design experience. And it will also deliver cost-saving benefits, helping reduce any potential errors that can sometimes occur between measurement and installation. In the second half of 2026, we will roll out our new till systems and store inventory management into a unified commerce platform, thereby giving customers a more seamless shopping experience and our store teams the ability to truly digitise the store operation. And last but not least, we'll be implementing a new order management system to simplify our ordering and fulfilment capabilities and improve customer order accuracy. That's going to happen in two phases, the first taking place in the first half of 26, followed up by the second in 2027. So as you can see, there is a solid plan of investment and activity going into advancing our technological capabilities this year. Turning now to investment in our store estate. In the first half, we have refitted or refreshed four stores and now 82% of the estate is in the new format. We opened one new store at Leedsmoor Allerton, a former home-based store, and since the period end we've opened new stores in a further two home-based locations, Bury St Edmunds and Dunfermline in Scotland. Our property plans for the second half are on track with a total of 10 to 15 refits and five to seven new stores for the year, which does include those four home-based stores. And to give you an idea of what an ex-Homebase store transformed into a brand new Wix store looks like, here's a short video. Now, as you will know, our built-to-last responsible business strategy is incredibly important to us and embedded deeply within our business. In the first half, we had a number of highlights, including being ranked as the UK's number one retailer in the Financial Times Europe's Best Employers Survey. Our community programme continues to support local charities and community groups up and down the country, with over 1,200 projects benefiting from Freewick's products and volunteer support already this year. We have a new charity partner, CALM, which is a suicide prevention charity, and we're committed to raising £2 million for them over the next two years. We're already well on our way to hitting that target. And in our homes pillar, which is focused on helping customers use less energy and reduce their carbon footprint, we have now trained 100 of our design consultants to be able to offer Wix solar in-store and in the home. This is proving popular in a market where customers particularly value face-to-face advice and it's a unique differentiator for us as no other national retailer or solar installation business is offering this service. So to conclude, we've had a strong first half, growing sales, profits and delivering record market share in what continues to be a challenging market, really demonstrating the customer appeal and distinctiveness of our business model. And whilst we are at record levels of market share, there is still so much more to go for. We are still just 6% of the 27 billion UK home improvement market, so we see tremendous headroom for growth. And that's not including the potential opportunity in the emerging and fast-growing home energy solutions market. Our strong cash flow means we're able to invest in our proven growth levers to deliver further growth and market outperformance, and most critically, to continue to deliver attractive returns to shareholders through our dividend and share buyback programme. Thank you for listening. Mark and I are now very happy to take any questions you have.

Morning, everyone. Kate Howard from Investec. Two for me. First on to design and installation. What have you seen in terms of leads over the last couple of months? So is there any change in sort of conversion from the design consultation to ordering? And then the second question is on the step up in IT of 10 million through the P&L. Should we expect any other sort of step ups going forward or is that now sort of in the base?

Okay. And Kate, in response to the design installation question, as I sort of like touched on there, I mean, some of the benefits of the investment in tech, particularly giving the customer the ability on their terms to access the design consultant really swiftly and seamlessly is really helping continue to grow Leeds. So we are still seeing leads in growth in our business. And as those leads come into the journey, likewise, we're seeing conversion in growth as well. So, you know, the underpin for our design installation business is we are growing this business through volume, which is great to see. And the volume is there because we've got more customers coming in and we're converting more of them.

Yeah, and on IT, just taking us back to where we were a couple of years ago when we did our capital allocation update and we talked about the IT and the move to SaaS accounting and everything. We did talk at that point about increasing our overall spend on CapEx and SaaS and IT from around 15 million a year to 25 million a year. And we're close to that level now. Most of that is coming through in SAS and therefore hitting the P&L. There will be another increase next year, probably low single digit millions next year. And then it will feel like we're at the sort of run rate. But what this isn't is a spike in investment that then is going to go down again. This is. about getting to the right level of investment that we need for a business of our size that is digitally led. And as we've seen, a lot of the initiatives that we've been investing in are at the heart of what some of our success has been, and we see that as the future as well.

Great. Thanks so much. Thank you, Kate.

Shane Carberry from Goodbody. Just two from me. Just to follow up on that design and installation question, can you give us a bit of a sense of, you know, you've moved into the kind of lower-priced kitchen market as well. Just how much has that got to do with the, you know, pretty encouraging like-for-likes in Q2 and design and installation? And then secondly, if you could just give us an update now on kind of SolarFast, how the integration has gone and kind of just over a year on, how you think it's performing versus expectations?

I'll do the first, you do the second. So as I just touched on there, Shane, in the presentation, we're continuing to innovate across the offer in terms of design installation in good, better and best. But lifestyle and bespoke being how we sort of like cluster those. Lifestyle is in growth, which is great to see. But interestingly, it's a faster growing bespoke business that is really helping drive the performance of our overall design installation business. So We're delighted to see that the bigger ticket and the higher average order value projects are in greater volume growth.

Yeah, and on solar, very pleased with the progress on solar. When we bought the business, what attracted to us was the very strong customer focus, operational execution of doing brilliant projects and looking after customers really well. From a sales perspective, they relied on a lot of third-party dealers and salespeople to bring in their sales. What we have been doing is building on the great operational execution, but then adding Wix as the key product. sales channel which is going to be much stronger for us and much more differentiated in the long term so what we've not seen is a growth in total sales what we're seeing is a switch away from the sales that were generated in third parties now to Wix being the real engine and as David mentioned we've trained 100 of our design consultants to be able to sell. And this is a real differentiator because in the market, typically at the moment, the journey is very digital. You may speak to somebody on the phone. The opportunity to go in and talk to someone in person, either in the store or indeed have the design consultant come to your home and talk to you about solar is a real differentiator for us. And that's only just happened, so we're expecting that to really build over the coming months.

Yeah, I think it's fair to say we're organising a proposition that will compete for the future. So it's not about the last five months. It's about building a business of scale for five years out is how we think about this.

Hi, David Hughes from Shore Capital. A couple from me, please. Firstly, in terms of categories, you talked about kind of expanding into or building in categories where you perhaps underserved. Are there any key ones that you're looking at where you think there's a big opportunity to grow Wix's share? And then secondly, on the store rollout programme, Not necessarily a specific number, but do you have a kind of a rough idea of how much more white space there is for you? How much more kind of store rollout you think you can get after before you feel like you're at the right level of Wix penetration? Thanks.

Yes, I take both of those, Mark. If I start with your last question and work back to categories. So in terms of the property opportunity, I mean, we've always said, look, we're around about 230-odd stores at the moment. We can see a pathway to somewhere between 250,000 and 260 in terms of a network build, with a broad cadence of sort of like at the moment of around about four to five a year. But they will be in much larger towns or conurbations where we feel we're underrepresented, where we can build more of a network in those larger populous areas. That isn't to say in time, though, that there isn't more opportunity for the business as we get beyond that. So I think our phase one thinking, David, at the moment is let's have a market in around that 250, 260, And as we move through, there may be more opportunity. But we're definitely underrepresented in the UK. We have national coverage, but there's ample white space for our business. I think in the categories, it's really about some of the innovation we're putting into decorating. It's like the innovation in the product lines we're putting into gardening. and so forth. I always cite, and we're doing more of this as well, we're quite a generalist as a retailer. So we serve, particularly for our trade customer, our most strategically valuable customer, we serve the general one man in a van. The opportunity for further category innovation is definitely having greater presence in the specialist area. You know, how do we attract more specialist plumbers, you know, more specialist electricians? So that's sort of like the glide path that we remain on. And we're doing some good stuff in that area, but there's definitely more to go. But really doubling down and innovating and appealing to a much broader audience, as you can see through the communication there. I mean, we're growing our DIY audience really, really quite successfully at the moment. And that is coming through younger shoppers, female shoppers consistently in recent years. And we continue on that focus and strategy.

Hi, morning. It's Ben from Deutsche Bank. I just wanted to ask about the gross margin drivers in the first half. Out of that 80 bps uplift, can you talk about the uplift from the retail sales that you've had, but also the category mix and credit as well?

Yeah, I'm not going to break the 80 into exact numbers, but those are the three we mentioned. They all contributed part of that 80 bps increase. Just to explain a little bit more, on the design installation side, there are two of the elements. Consumer credit, which is something we subsidise for our customers. The cost of that has come down for two reasons. One is interest rates are coming down. So if we're offering interest free credit, clearly that cost comes down to us a little bit. Plus, we've tweaked our offer a little bit. We on the category mix with of the sales growth we've had in design installation, it's been stronger in kitchens than in bathrooms and kitchens tends to be slightly higher margin. And then on the retail side, it's really about volume-driven growth, and that gives us good momentum, the ability to really drive good deals with suppliers, get support from them because they really want to back the winners and the retailers that are giving them growth. So it's less about category mix on the retail side and more about volume benefits.

Matthew's got a question at the front here, Anna. Thanks.

Yeah, Matthew Cochran from Singers. It's actually a follow-up on the gross margin point as well. I mean, it's been a while since I recall such a decent-sized margin uplift in the business. You've been through the moving parts. If we strip out the mix effect, do you think those levers, the other two levers, you've got further runway on that? Yeah.

I think the year as a whole would be less of an increase than the 79 pips that we had in the first half, partly because we annualized some of the effects that we talked about. So this is not a sort of a change in strategy of trying to push up margin. The other thing that's really important to say is our price position remains very good. We don't have any inflation in the business. This is not a gross margin as a result of us increasing prices. Inflation has been nought point something, either plus or minus, every month of the year. And so this is about really trading volume hard, getting the best deals that we can, a little bit of category mix and the consumer credit. So please be reassured that the number one priority for us is to be absolutely in the right place on price.

Great, thanks. The second question just on trade. I mean, you gave a really good investor event, I think probably about maybe a year ago. I can't remember the exact date. And there were quite a few levers in there in terms of targeting certain groups, increasing average spend, actually retaining or reactivating some lost trade customers. Do you want to talk within the 10%, do you want to talk a little bit more about which parts of that strategy are really yielding some benefits and whether or not, you know, you would see the momentum from some of those initiatives that you talked about as, you know, potentially increasing from here?

Yeah. So all aspects of that are in play, Matthew, and all aspects are working to greater or lesser degrees just because of the size of the pools you're fitting sort of thing in terms of a pool of Those have lapsed versus those you need to reactivate. The primary driver, though, which is really important just to focus on, it is penetration of new customers. It is growth of new customers. So this business is underpinned by more people coming over the door into Wix. As I always say, what we don't see in Wix, and we do track this, we don't see customers trading down within Wix. We see customers trading in for the great value we provide. And the cornerstone of that in the first instance is more than half a century with traders building the brilliant brand that is Wix. It's still nearly two-thirds of our sales. So value and service and things like rapid and 15-minute click and collect and all of that good stuff are just together continuing to prove very sticky in terms of attracting customers to the business. But everything is in play without dissecting it any further, I think. The interesting thing, though, on AOV, what do we see is at the moment, average order value, so the average basket for a trade customer, it remains quite stable. So, penetration is critical to drive that volume growth and that is where we're winning. in this marketplace. They're still quite thoughtful and considered around the amount they're spending, as any one of us would be as we're shopping, whether we're shopping groceries or any other sort of light services, we're thoughtful and a bit more considered.

Great, thanks. The final question, just in terms of current headlines in the press, the Employee Rights Bill is obviously getting a lot of attention at the moment. I mean, you're a good employer. And the number one, according to the FT. Number one, indeed, yes. Just the avoidance of doubt. Well-reminded. And I think from previous conversations we've had, you weren't expecting much in the way of incremental cost pressures as a result of the bill. But can you just remind us exactly if that's the case and why you think that's the case? That would be very helpful.

Yeah, I think the main reason is because we're ahead of the curve on a lot of these things anyway, whether that's sort of flexible working or any of the other initiatives. I think we have always looked at what is the right thing to do for our colleagues. We measure colleague engagement frequently and we really have a focus on it. And so actually we're quite ahead on these things. There was nothing really new in terms of bringing in either new initiatives or costs for us.

I think we are one of the few retailers nationally that offers flexible working for our store leadership teams. So you can work a four-day week as a store manager.

Morning. Sam Cullen from Pillan. I've got a few also. A couple, I guess, reminders. On the kitchen ranges, can you remind us how many you offer and the cadence of the refresh cycle? I mean, pointing out you've refreshed the ranges this year. And then the second one on the kind of catch-up, the one in four of your tradesmen that have an order book over 12 months, where would that have sat? say in 2019 pre-COVID, then during the peak of the trading boom during immediately after COVID? And is that a normalised level, one in four, or is 40% more normalised?

Yeah. I'll take both those actually, Martin. So, from a kitchen range point of view or, you know, as you know in our business, curation of offer is quite critical. So, when we think about our broader retail business, I will get to the question, Sam, fear not. It's around 9,000 SKUs versus a market that could be anywhere between 30,000 and 40,000 SKUs in a physical location. So, it's a highly curated range. We take the same approach with our kitchens and bathrooms business. So broadly in our kitchens business, you're probably looking at around about 35 or so range options. I'm really excited, though, really excited as what paint-to-order can do to very flexibly expand that, by the way, because we can then offer you access to so many more colours in a bespoke way. So that's just another way of providing almost extension of choice in a really simple, agile way. way out there in the marketplace. But it does follow our philosophy of curation. In terms of innovation, typically in any one year within those ranges, you're probably changing three to five. So again, in terms of range counts, it's probably going to be somewhere around 10%. The great thing is we get this right. And when you're going to make change in a business like ours and you're going to sort of like rip out showrooms and replace them with new products, it needs to be right. And they always overperform in terms of their contribution to sales. So we're really thoughtful about the curation in the first instance. We're super thoughtful around the innovation as we bring it into the marketplace because we need to be disciplined with that investment in terms of making that change. And it works really well. So we get a multiple uplift in terms of their sort of like range change count to sales performance within the business. So innovation works well. Now, part of your question I simply can't answer on the Mood of the Nation monthly reporting because we didn't start it in 2019. It's something we started slightly later than that. But what I can say is it does remain very stable. That one in four around 12 months for our TradePro customers remains pretty stable and has done. It oscillates a little. It might be 27 percent are saying this. It might be 24. But it tends to sort of like converge around about one in four. And that's been stable for a number of years now.

And important to add to that that we're not expecting that to go to 40, 50, 60, because a lot of the tradespeople that we have as customers don't want long pipelines. They're operating on their own. They enjoy working two, three months ahead. Some of them are what we call business builders that are planning ahead. They're thinking about taking on new people on their team, and they want to. And that's why we always quote the people with three months or more and the people with 12 months or more, just different types of businesses.

thanks um the the last one was on market share you're at six percent now if you get to 250 stores and i think you've talked about a goal of 10 million revenue per store is that where we should be thinking on a five seven year view getting sort of 10 at that market at the 27 billion gosh i will have a view on that but i'm going to be guided by my cfo because you know what's going to happen don't you sam i'm going to get very ambitious you'll say three and he'll say so

Would you like to take that one, Mark?

I think very happy to give a number. The date will be more for further discussion. But absolutely, we see the opportunity of two and a half billion across 250 stores. As David says, we're also looking at how do we expand beyond that 250, 260 stores. We absolutely see the opportunity to do on average 10 million a store. We have some stores, of course, that are already doing that. The headroom for growth in each of trade, DIY and design and installation is substantial. So it's very realistic to do that. The stores, of course, are the nucleus. around where we base the sales but a lot of the sales growth will be in online and the initiatives around faster click and collect rapid delivery that's opening up new either actual customers or customers share of wallet you know so those emergency purchases if you're a tradesperson on site and you need it now now we can do that with rapid whereas perhaps before they might have done something else so I think the opportunities are there. The strategy is there. We've got the funds to invest in the tech that we need. And so the plans are pretty well laid out.

And related to that, I guess that's where you're going in terms of specialist categories, that if you do go deeper into plumbing or electrical, that won't be cannibalising store space. It'll be...

virtual online I mean next day delivery it's far easier as we do when we're testing new categories you put them into the Wix extra range in the first instance and to see see what works and then we will think about how we bring them into the fiscal estate thereafter and that's exactly what we do that's how we that's how we model it and work it but I mean your start point in that question is look this is a big market 27 28 billion we're 1.6 billion six share there's just so much more headroom for growth in this market

Good morning there. Just a couple of technical ones and maybe a more general one. On the working capital, obviously there's a seasonal inflow in H1, but year-on-year it's up quite nicely too. Is there any reason to believe that the year-on-year uplift will unwind in the second half? I mean, the stock looks in a fairly good position. And then secondly, you know, obviously the headwinds got a little bit more intense in terms of the cost in the second half of inflation and the tech investment seems more H2 weighted. Productivity gains were obviously, you know, a little bit below the inflation, but... I guess the question is, what might you have up your sleeve to meet this second half profit? I think you've got to be flat in order to make the guidance as you've suggested today or reiterated today. Just any thoughts on those two points? Yeah.

So first of all, I'm working capital. Part of a big chunk of the year-on-year uplift in that normal seasonal swing is the growth in the order book in design and installation. And we will be getting through that and delivering quite a lot of that in the second half. So that will normalise. at least most of it, if not all of it. And then the trading in terms of the stock position, also as we get into more sort of normal levels of trading, I would expect the retail side of working capital to normalize. I think it would be reasonable to expect that to normalize to a large degree. The cost headwinds coming in in H2, they are stepping up. Our productivity plan will also add again. And if you think about that profit bridge, for the half year we just showed you and what that might look like at full year, I think that gap between the cost inflation bucket, which is a negative, obviously, and the mitigation through productivity will be similar in terms – it will be bigger, of course, but it will be similar in proportion that we won't quite offset all of the cost inflation. But we're doing a really good job on that. And then the The strong sales growth is obviously – we're able to capitalise on most of that growth and overcome most of the operating cost increases with productivity. So it's – we're very happy with consensus despite all of that. And also the increase in tech investment that we talked about. So we said that in the year 25 it will be about 10 million more than in 2024. that will be slightly back half-weighted as well. So with all of those things considered, there's quite a lot to come on the cost side, but we're comfortable that the performance of the top line is going to be strong enough to carry it.

You're probably not going to do this, but if you could spell out, is there a minimum kind of top-level growth you need in order to bridge that?

There probably is in your model, yeah. So you can back-solve for that. But we're comfortable. We said that Q3 has started in line with our expectations. So we're comfortable with how we're trading at the moment.

And the shape of that starting Q3 is what we've seen in the first half, which is this is volume-driven. There's no inflation in this. It's volume-driven. And we'll continue to benefit from the leverage of that.

Okay, and then finally, just a more general question. I mean, that market share step up year on year looks obviously very impressive, and we kind of know the answer to it, but if you could just spell out where you think you're getting it and who's the fall guys and anything you can elaborate on, that would be useful.

It's, I mean, the trend in terms of where it's coming from remains reasonably stable, as we've discussed and answered this question before, which is broadly across all aspects of the market, whether it's through other retailers or the more trade-centric markets. sort of like merchants in operations, particularly when you think of our TradePro growth in particular. We don't over or under steal from anyone. There's no over or under trades in terms of how we're switching those customers. It's quite a simple diagonal slice in the market. It is a question that we do ask because the benefit of bringing in so many, you know, is you can talk to a decent slug of customers and work out, well, if you're shopping with me now, where are you shopping less? That's a standard question that we ask. So we've got a good insight on where that switching is coming from. But it's just across the market at large, basically. And as I said, it's a large market. Always an opportunity. Great. Thanks.

Hi, Grace Gilbert from Jefferies. Just one question for me. This is around click and collect, 15 minutes. Is that across all the stores in the estate now?

It is indeed, Grace, yes.

Amazing.

Yes, our colleagues are working very hard. And as I said in my presentation, what's really interesting is you innovate on the things that the customers are seeking. So as we pick it quicker, the customers are actually picking it up even quicker as well. So there's a lovely correlation there. I mean, that's why we know that the... The proposition is of value. But the difference there is 15 minutes. We could be moving, in some instances, tons of plasterboard in under 15 minutes and getting onto the back of a wagon. So it's not like we're picking small things up from a remote, you know, a close location. We're having to move some big stuff to deliver on that promise. And we are delivering on it spectacularly. Our colleagues are doing an amazing job. And the customer satisfaction and feedback has been brilliant as well. So we're delighted.

Perfect. That answered my other question as well. Great.

Customers like it. Was that your other question? Thank you, Grace. Any more questions? Anything online, team?

There are no webcast questions at the moment. I'll hand back for some closing remarks.

Super. Well, I'll finish where I started. It's with a thank you. Thank you for coming along today. And I know it's been a little awkward to get into the City Day. So we really, we greatly appreciate it. And also thank you for those listening on the webcast. Hopefully you've got a sense this morning that we are really pleased with these results. It's been a super first half of the business. We remain very, very confident in our strategy that it will continue to deliver outperformance and growth for the business. I can't re-emphasise enough that we are a six-share player in a large market. We almost ignore what happens at a market level. innovate and provide the greatest value on the things the customers value most. You will grow your business and that is where our strategy is centred and we will continue to grow this business. It is a great business. It's got tremendous potential and Mike and I look forward to coming back and sharing further progress at the year end. Thank you very much for listening.