TheWorks.co.uk plc

Good afternoon and welcome to the works.co.uk plc fy26 results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and they can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll and I would now like to hand you over to CEO Gavin Peck. Good afternoon to you.

Good afternoon. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Rosie and I look forward to updating you on the great strategic progress that we've made in the last 12 months and the step change that that has delivered in our financial performance and the momentum that we've taken forward into FY27. We'll have plenty of time at the end to answer questions. Just before I get into the results just wanted to spend a few minutes recapping the background to The Works which I appreciate some would have heard before but I think it's important context to the story. So The Works was originally established as a high street presence 45 years ago initially as a discount book chain called Remainders Limited selling clearance books and over the next 45 years we've evolved into the proposition that we've got today which is a value retailer focused on selling for key product categories being books, arts and crafts, stationery and toys and games. And we have been bringing that proposition together under affordable screen free activities for the whole family for the last 18 months. And really, it's all about connecting people with feel good ways to spend their time away from screens, something that we call time well spent, and I'll come to talk about later, usually relevant when concerns arising around too much screen time, particularly amongst children. As well as a fantastic proposition, we've got a great culture. We're regularly ranked one of the best places to work in the UK, recently placed in the Sunday Times Best Places to Work Very Big Organization category. And our colleagues are on with delivering against our new five-year strategy that we launched in January 2025, which gives us a great opportunity to transform our brand, our operations, and our financial performance. We're already delivering great results just through the first year. and really delivery of this will bring to life one of the UK's best kept retail secrets. Our proposition is delivered through our profitable and growing store portfolio. That is the lifeblood of our business. We have over 500 stores across a range of formats in the UK and Ireland, playing an important role in the local communities, be it as the local bookshop, stationers, pocket money store or providing art and craft essentials. The store estate is profitable with over 98% of stores generating a contribution and that's supported by consistent like for like sales growth ahead of the wider market. It's flexible in terms of having around about one and a half years to the next break or expiry point on leases, which means we can be agile and move, reduce rents or leave where the pitch changes. we've got an opportunity for a further 100 additional stores over the medium term we've got a net 60 to add in the current strategy we added five last year we'll add a net 10 this year and we're still seeing strong payback of less than two years on new store openings and our stores are now our sole trading channel. We closed our transactional website in March this year and that followed a thorough review by the board which took into consideration that sales online were less than 10% of the whole business. It was an unprofitable channel and it experienced fulfillment challenges with two different third-party providers in the last two peak trading periods which had negatively impacted our financials and customer experience. having made the decision we've now got huge benefits as a business we have simplified the business we can now all focus our time money and energy on our stores and the website now becomes a shop window to our Brandon stores we've got encouraging early signs only four months into it but it's definitely been a contributor to the improved like for likes in recent months has been the footfall benefit from customers who would have shopped online now shopping in stores and that online website now acting as a shop window to the brand and driving further footfall to stores as well. As a side point to this and reflecting this change, we plan to change our corporate name and drop the .co.uk to move from the works.co.uk plc to the works plc at the upcoming AGM. So moving on to the results update. In summary, FY26 was a pivotal year here at the Works. We're seizing the opportunity to transform our brand operations and financial performance, made really strong progress in the first full year delivering on our transformational elevating the work strategy. We've strengthened the screen-free proposition. We've grown our store estates and improved operational execution and efficiency. That's delivering improved customer experience and improved profitability. That's translated into significant financial performance improvements, delivered like-for-like sales of 3.3%, which is well ahead of the non-food retail market and reflects the increased relevance and strength of our proposition. Pre-IFRS 6 dealership EBITDA increased 47% to 14 million, which puts us well on track for our FY30 target of EBITDA of at least 22.5 million. We saw strong momentum at the end of Q4 with like-for-likes of plus 5.3 and that's continued into the start of FY27 where like-for-likes sales in the first 11 weeks are plus 8.8% on top of a strong comp of plus 7%. And that really underpins the confidence in our recently upgraded FY27 market expectations for pre-IFRS 16 adjusted EBITDA of 15 million. so overall really proud of what we have achieved and delivered in the last 12 months but it is only year one of a five-year plan we've got lots more exciting opportunities ahead of us I'll talk more about that later but for now I will hand over to Rosie to talk through the financials thanks Gavin and hi everybody I'll start by taking you through the highlights and then we'll get into the detail

So as Gavin's mentioned, following the closure of the transactional website in the year, we're going to be recognizing the performance of the website as discontinued throughout these results. So unless you see stated otherwise, these are on a continuing basis. We delivered revenue of 260 million, reflecting those strong likes of 3.3%, which significantly outperform the market. Overall revenue grew 3.1% and this reflected a 0.2% sales headwind from the timing of store openings and closures. However, FY27 will see a positive sales impact from the net store portfolio activity. Our continued focus on sustainable product margins has seen a significant margin growth of 240 basis points to 62% in the year. and we delivered against our 2 million cost reduction programme that we set at the start of the financial year. These combined have resulted in the year-on-year profit growth of 47% with a pre-IFRS 16 adjusted EBITDA of 14 million. Adjusted profit before tax grew 44% to $7.2 million. And on a statutory basis, profit before tax was down $2.7 million to $6.8 million. And this reflected the prior year impairment reversal, which resulted in a net credit to adjusting items of $4.5 million in FY25. This compares to the $0.5 million charge this year. which reflects 0.3 million of store impairment and 0.2 million of exceptional system transformation costs as we commenced our systems transformation program that Gavin's going to talk about later. Net cash was marginally down year on year reflecting a net cash inflow from continuing operations offset by the discontinued operations cash outflow. So let's take a look at the impact on the financials of discontinued operations. Due to the proactive action that we took during the year, we were able to minimize the impact of the operational challenges at our third party fulfillment center. However, it still resulted in a 4.8 million loss before tax from discontinued operations. This included 2.5 million operating loss as a result of the significantly inflated third party fulfillment costs on a lower revenue basis. And we also had 2.3 million of adjusting items reflecting 0.8 million of H1 transition costs to the new provider and 1.5 million of exceptional closure costs, including owner's contracts and redundancies. Given the issues we face, the channel's relatively small revenue contribution and the fact that it continues to be loss making, the transactional website is no longer sustainable. But as Gavin's mentioned, now gives us the chance to fully focus on our profitable store estate. So let's get back to understanding the great store performance. Full year like-for-like growth of 3.3% compares to the British Retail Consortium's non-food like-for-like decline of 0.1%. So we've performed really, really well in a tough retail environment. We've increased focus on year-round appeal, resulting in strong like-for-like performance outside of peak. Thank you very much. Our outperformance reflects the growth in the existing stores resulting from the great progress against our strategic initiatives, including strengthening our brand marketing to support our unique screen-free proposition. Gavin will talk more about that shortly. So let's look at product margin. We achieved this significant product margin growth of 240 basis points from a combination of better buying with stronger supplier negotiations and improved control of product mix. We continue to focus on managing markdown and targeted selective price increases at the start of the year. FX and container freight rates supported margin improvement, with the hedged FX rate of 128 versus 126 in the prior period. And average container rates in FY26 were $2,200 per container, half those that we saw in FY25, resulting in a 90 basis points improvement in margin. We've made really great progress in growing product margin over the last two years, and we now believe we're operating at a sustainable margin rate. Going forward, we don't expect to see the same level of step change and improvement in margin. However, we continue to actively manage the balance of supplier negotiations, product mix, customer demand and markdowns to protect margin and to mitigate against any headwinds that we face. So moving on to our profit bridge. With pre-IFR16 adjusted EBITDA increasing from 9.5 million to 14 million, the largest driver was increased product margin, which contributed 11 million of incremental profit through a combination of sales growth and that stronger product margin rate. Importantly, these gains more than offset the 6 million headwind from national minimum living wage and the increase in the higher national insurance costs. we delivered against our 2 million cost reduction program and continue to invest in the business including that strategic investment in brand marketing which now has a clearer focus on amplifying our time well spent message our product margin growth demonstrates the increasing resilience and scalability of our model we're not simply benefiting from sales growth we're improving the quality of earnings through better product margins disciplined cost management and targeted investment, creating a stronger foundation for our future growth. So turning to look at our balance sheet. During FY26, continuing operations generated 4.3 million cash, more than double the prior year. This reflects the combination of that increased profitability, improved product margins and that disciplined cost focus mindset, along with disciplined working capital management. Importantly, cash generation enabled us to fund 5.9 million of capital investment across new stores, refits, our distribution centre and the technology transformation programme. We finished the year with 3.6 million of net cash and have successfully refinanced our banking facility, securing a new 20 million RCF through to November 2029. This provides a significant liquidity and flexibility to support seasonal working capital requirements and future strategic opportunities. So as we look ahead, we formalized our capital allocation framework. We'll continue to balance investment and growth, maintaining financial resilience and supporting those future shareholder distributions. So as we enter FY27 with an increasingly cash-generative business, a strong balance sheet and financial capacity to continue investing in the next phase of growth of our strategy. So let's take a look at our transformational profit growth. FY26 represents another significant step forward in the transformation of the works. The 47% year-on-year increase to pre-RFS16 adjusted EBITDA of 14 million reflects a doubling of the EBITDA we would recognise in FY24 of 6 million. The improvement has been driven by stronger product margins, disciplined cost management and continued strategic progress against the business. And importantly, we view FY26 as a milestone and not a destination. So looking ahead, we expect further progress with pre-R16 adjusted EBITDA increasing to 15 million. And beyond FY27, our five-year plan outlines a clear path to further value, with EBITDA growing to approximately 22.5 million by FY30, representing 137% growth versus FY25. This growth is supported by targeted investment in our strategic initiatives whilst maintaining disciplined capital allocation. Improving this profit is expected to be accompanied by strong cash generation and a robust balance sheet. This gives us the flexibility to invest for growth while continuing to create value for shareholders, which will support future shareholder distributions. So thank you everybody for listening. I'll now hand you over to Gavin.

Thank you Rosie. So I'll now talk through the strategic progress we made in FY26 and our plans for the year ahead. Just to start the foundation of our strategy and business is our unique brand positioning that you see on this slide and this really carves out our niche and the reason to exist and thrive as the works for generations to come. Our purpose remains unchanged is to inspire reading, learning, creativity and play and that's all about really we believe in the benefits of these activities and it's more than just selling great value products in our categories. Our mission, as I said earlier, is to be the favourite destination for affordable screen-free activities for the whole family. There's three key parts to that. Favourite destination, we want to be a retailer of choice for key moments. Affordability is key in terms of not just being great value but also offering low prices that make our products accessible. And for the whole family, we have something for the kids and for the grown-ups. As I also said our positioning is about connecting people with feel-good ways to spend their time away from screens and we call that time well spent. So that's reading a book on holiday, crafting with the kids on a rainy day or playing a family board game on a Saturday night, all time well spent courtesy of The Works. and there's three things that we want to be famous for. The first is great value, customers to be wowed by prices and the value for money that we offer. Our average transaction value in stores is less than 10 pounds and customers can get three to four items in their basket for that. 95% of what we sell is priced under 10 pounds and 75% is priced under five pounds. So really making our products accessible. Fantastic Ranges is all about newness and to surprise and delight customers when they visit. And on top of that, having core items for things like art, craft and stationery. And Screen Free Activities is focused on supporting with thousands of ideas for activities to spend time away from screens. So say in the last 18, 24 months, we've really put Screen Free Activities at the heart of the business and brand and just wanted to explain briefly why. Importantly, we're not anti-tech. We know that tech and screens are an important part of modern life, but we also know that there's a growing concern regarding the impact of too much screen use, particularly amongst children. We see that from the government guidelines regarding screen time directions for under fives and the planned social media ban for under 16s. We also do our own research, and for example, that shows that 40% of parents are actively looking to reduce screen time for their children, but need practical activities and alternatives to help them do so. And as a parent of two young girls, I can attest to that. And our positioning really leans into this. We are there to provide alternatives, screen-free ways to connect. And the campaigns that I'll talk through shortly have been really bringing this to light. So as I mentioned, we've got our Elevating the Works strategy, a five-year transformational strategy, which really brings to life that mission and will transform our brand operations and financials. It's built on three pillars. The first one is growing our brand fame. We have a loyal customer base that loves us, but we want more people to understand us and what we offer. Improving customer convenience is all about making shopping at the Works even more enjoyable and convenient. and being a lean and efficient operator is about being able to maintain the great value for money we offer our customers and deliver profitable sales growth but by we need to do that we need to be more efficient and keep our costs low so there's a huge opportunity importantly we've got a really clear plan we're on with delivering against it and we're seeing the financial benefits from it and really excited about what delivery of it can do for our brand and all our stakeholders. And from a financial perspective, as Rosie says, by FY30, we'll be delivering a step change in EBITDA to an excess of £22.5 million. So just taking each driver in turn. Growing our brand fame, we started some brand tracking with YouGov nearly a year ago, and that's giving us insight that we've not had before about perceptions of the brand. That's a monthly report that we get. and we can see from that that we have reasonable awareness as a brand so 75 percent of people are able to say they've heard of the works but that compares to the competitors at 82 percent so we're reasonably well known but we know that we we can become better known That then drops to a consideration of who would you purchase from at 23% of customers say yes to the works and 26% say for our competitors. Then in terms of real purchase intent, in terms of who are you most likely to buy from, that's at 2.3% for us at the works versus 6.5% at the competitor set. So there's a huge opportunity for us to one, not just get more people aware of the brand, but also what does the brand stand for? get more people to discover us come into the store and try us and then confident that they will come back and keep shopping with us we're making really good progress on sharpening up that proposition around screen free and as i say it's resonating really well we've been doing much sharper brand campaigns and bringing to life that time well spent message we've seen really good cut through and engagement i'll talk about the find your story campaign we've been running shortly but FY26 was very much a test and trial and we now go into FY27 with more confidence to invest. we've increased the product newness really from spring 2025 we started to increase the frequency of new products landing in our store and that's had a particularly strong reaction in kids pocket money where kids are coming in with their pocket money and seeing something new each time and trending items but also in categories like art which are more stable in terms of their offering but again looking at bringing newness and innovation to those categories we've also been looking at how as Rosie said how we drive all year round relevance and growing outside of peak The campaigns that we've been doing are helping with that and also how we drive ancillary seasons such as Easter, back to school and Halloween that are growing. We've also been bringing in extended ranges. So Blocktech, which is the value alternative to Lego, we tried that in our biggest stores. It worked well. We've then rolled that out into nearly the whole estate. And similarly with our six for five party bag fillers range, tried that into larger stores. Again, rolled it out into more stores across the estate. and we're doing more of that in FY27. We've got continuing to increase the level of newness and extended range trials. Alongside that, we've been looking to improve the customer experience within the works. It's a huge differentiator for us versus the likes of the general merchandise discounters. We launched a customer experience program in FY26, which really explained what we wanted a good job to look like and those badges handed out to recognize performance within line with that. We're reinforcing that with custom experience training, our FAME custom experience training that's been rolled out to all store colleagues over the coming months and underpinning that by an ongoing mystery shopper program to reinforce expectations. The Find Your Story campaign is a great example of how we're now thinking about and executing our brand campaigns. This launched in spring 2026 in support of the National Year of Reading and in partnership with the National Literacy Trust and it ran as our main campaign in April and is running in the background throughout 2026. It really encourages children to follow their interests and discover books that excite and engage them and we know from National Literacy Trust research that reading boosts children's confidence, well-being and empathy and that's something we feel passionately about at the works and there's some worrying statistics in that less than one in three children enjoy reading in their free time and almost half say they only read because schools say they have to and we want to change that. So we've been doing that through our Find Your Story campaign which we've been bringing to life through a national bus tour which is going to about a dozen locations across the UK. You can see the pictures there focused on the disadvantaged communities where literacy levels are low. Every child that attends the bus gets a free book. We've had authors come in to do reading sessions to the children. You can see Rob Biddulph the author there on a picture and then other creativity and engagement events such as character meets. So I was pictured with Zog in Matlock recently and also Paddington Bear in Wythenshawe. Alongside that we're bringing it to life across PR and social media through much more storytelling getting the softer benefits of reading across and some lifestyle imagery and then in store we are highlighting our affordable and great value books for example our 10 for 10 picture flats. Alongside all of that we've also pledged we've got a read pledge for the National Year of Reading which pledges to raise £150,000 for the National Literature Trust and donate 250,000 books to children. This compares to previous approaches where we would have had a kids campaign and we typically have just put a poster in the window saying 10 kids books for 10 pounds we'd have sent out an email saying that and we'd have done some social posts along that lines we're seeing huge success much much greater levels of engagement in our content much further reach and from a commercial perspective kids books have moved from a category that's been in decline the last two years to double digit growth in 2026 to date The second pillar is improving customer convenience, so that's all about wanting shopping at the works to be more enjoyable and convenient and we're making good progress. We've grown the store estate in FY26 and we will do again in FY27, I'll talk about that shortly. We've also improved the stock distribution and product availability, particularly in our platinum stores. there are top 50 stores where we have been providing greater breadth of range and depth of stock and that's been driving strong like flights in excess of the company average at the other end of the scale we've got our compact stores which are typically our smaller lower turnover stores where we've been reducing the stock holding to reduce the slow turning stock and we've been successful in doing that without negatively impacting sales One of the most exciting opportunities we've got ahead of us is the opportunity to make better use of space in our stores. We're starting to use demographics and sales data to inform space decisions in stores. That started with university towns and introducing extended ranges of art and stationary products. We've also been making changes within categories where we can see different sales densities. So for example, in kids books, increasing the range of activity books and reducing what's known as our best sellers category and putting that just into the relevant sections. As I mentioned, we've also been taking extended ranges in our bigger shops, trialing those and then rolling those out into the estate based on sales density analysis. The challenge we've got at the minute is very manual. We're using Excel, outdated systems, manual workarounds with a colleague that we recruited 18 months ago. But to get after the huge opportunity that's ahead of us, we need a systematic solution. And we're developing that this year. And that will start to inform our space and ranging decisions and buys from FY28. So the really encouraging thing is that the trials that we've been doing manually show the size of the prize. And when we get to that in FY28, we know the opportunities there. And in the meantime, we'll continue to do what we can manually through the current ways of working. I mentioned up front the strength of our store estate and the opportunity for 100 more stores say we want a net 60 by FY30 we opened a net 5 last year and we've got a plan to open a net 10 this year they're still seeing really strong payback of less than two years but the portfolio activity is much broader than just opening new stores so we've closed loss making stores and or where landlords have been unrealistic on rent we've closed 24 stores in the last two years and that's helping keep that estate fresh and profitable We have also relocated seven stores in the last two years where we've managed to secure a better pitch and or a better rent deal and opening a net 10 stores in the year ahead will mean probably opening a gross 25 stores, closing 15 and of that five will probably be relocations. We're still seeing opportunities across a range of formats whether it's retail parks, towns, or City Centres and some of the fallout from other competitors and retailers. We don't like to see that, we'd much rather have thriving high streets with more competition but where they are closing that is giving us a good availability of new sites. As Rosie touched on, we're making good progress about making the business leaner, more efficient and more simple. And that's really important to say that we can offer great value for money to our customers and deliver sustainable profit margins. The big benefit here was of closing the transactional website in the year and the fact that had on our profitability. Rosie has also mentioned the step change in our product margin and the 2 million cost savings that we did in FY26. We've got more planned for FY27, further margin growth and driving cost efficiencies, one through the store labour model. We have a £55 million spend there. We're looking at how can we use that spend more efficiently to help improve both colleague and customer experience. And we started on our systems transformation roadmap, as Rosie mentioned earlier. So this is hugely exciting for us as a business. The objective of it is to replace our legacy and outdated systems which have significant manual workarounds with a new ERP system with a suite of best-in-class solutions. It will involve spending six million pounds of exceptional spend over the next four years, but that would create a more resilient, scalable and efficient operating platform that will fundamentally transform our ways of working and make us much more efficient as a business and introduce new capabilities as well as future proof in our business. We're aware that this is a huge amount of change and we're therefore following best practice to ensure successful delivery. We've set up a separate project team. We're bringing in place strong governance. We're looking at third party assurance and we'll select top class, top tier partners to work alongside us with the implementation. The way we've structured the program is we've started with the areas that give us the biggest commercial value add up front, which means we can get the commercial benefits, which then help to support the investment in the sort of more core underlying systems. So we started that in FY26 with a new financial planning tool. And as we move into FY27, we're looking at a new ranging tool, store grading and space optimization software. In FY27 we'll also select our new ERP vendor and our partners to help implement that and that will then lead us to deliver on our core finance, HR and stock systems in FY28 and FY29. Alongside this systems investment, we're also investing in CapEx to upgrade the store connectivity, replacing our outdated current method of connection and introducing and upgrading new tills that we've successfully piloted in the last 12 months. And we're on with rolling out now and that rollout will continue into FY28. We've got lots to do, but it's hugely transformational for the capabilities of the business and our efficient ways of working and really will transform those ways of working. And it helps underpin everything that we're looking to achieve as part of elevating the work strategy. So in summary, FY26 was a pivotal year for us. We've delivered strong progress in the first full year of delivering on our transformation, elevating the work strategy. We're building a brand with a unique positioning around affordable screen-free activities for the whole family. We've refocused our store trading model with the closure of the transactional website. We've seen a significant improvement in our financial performance off the back of that. We've taken really strong momentum into FY27 with like-for-likes of plus 8.8% for the first 11 weeks. And whilst the macroeconomic environment remains uncertain and we've still got our peak trading periods of back to school and then the golden quarter still to come, we're confident of achieving our recently upgraded pre-IFRS adjusted EBITDA target of 15 million pounds for FY27 and that puts us on in a great position to be in line with our EBITDA target of 22.5 million EBITDA in FY30. So I'm really proud of the progress we've made in the last 12 months there's lots of opportunities still ahead of us and I'm excited about what that will do for the Works as a business and for all its stakeholders in the years ahead. So thank you for listening and at that point we will take questions.

Fantastic Gavin, Rosie, thank you very much indeed for your presentation. I will now turn on your cameras for the Q&A. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions using the Q&A tab situated on the top right corner of your screen. While the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I would like to remind you the recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides in the published Q&A can be accessed by our investor dashboard. I'm Gavin. Rosie, we have received a number of questions from investors and I wanted to start off the Q&A session with the first one here which reads as follows. I understand you held a supplier conference recently. What criteria did you apply to selecting attendees and what were the benefits of this conference?

Okay, I'll take this one. Thank you. Yes, so we recently we hold an annual supplier conference and we generally approach the attendees through spend value and the potential future spend value with those suppliers. So we covered 60% of the value through a UK and Far East supplier conference. that covered about 36 different suppliers with a virtual supply conference for those in the Far East. And now the real benefit of this was bringing together those key suppliers who we really recognize that we've got a strong partnership with and want to build that partnership for the future so that we can continue to collaborate with them and bring the best Proposition for our customers at great value and really focusing on bringing innovation to those customers. So it was a real success and something that we look to do every year because we really build on those key supplier partnerships.

Thank you, Rosie. Next one up here is now that you are no longer transacting on the website, what actions have you taken to ensure all items carried by the works are listed on the website so as to act as the online catalogue?

Yep, I'll answer that one. So we will continue to refine this, but as a starting point, we've taken a rule that any product that's in at least 100 shops will appear on the website. What we don't want to do is put lots of products on there that aren't available in the majority of our stores. And we'll keep that under review and keep evolving it in time as we look to really develop the website as a proper brand Thank you for joining us.

Thank you, Gavin. And two questions here from an investor. Is there scope to increase product gross margin above 62% in 26-27? And can you quantify any further cost savings from annualization of last year's measures or new initiatives that will help to offset general cost inflation in 26-27?

Okay, I think that sounds very much like a question for me. So yeah, as I mentioned in the product margin slide, you know, we have made really great progress, but we believe we're now at quite a sustainable margin rate. So we don't expect to see the same level of improvement. We are expecting and sort of like targeting a small marginal improvement in margin rates in FY27. But we really want to focus on making sure that we can continue to ensure that those negotiations with suppliers are giving our customers the best value products. Managing that product mix and that stock markdown and then really protecting margin against any potential headwinds that we face. And then what we're really doing to sort of like step change that profitability as well is we've got another cost reduction program for FY27. So we'll look to save a further two and a half million pounds against our cost base in the year that we've just started.

Fantastic, thank you. Another one here asks, the work has made a great progress on sales and profitability and the stores are clearly at the heart of the strategy. Could you tell us how many of the 508 stores have been refurbished into the current brand format? What proportion of the state still requires investment and what your medium term plans are for refreshing the existing store state? Quite a few there.

Yeah, I'll break it down So yeah, the real change to the interior of the store and actual shop fit itself hasn't changed significantly. It's more how we put that together and the level of stock that we put into it. What has changed is the branding above the door. and we've now got the new branding in around about 100 stores so still a significant portion of the estate that's on the old branding but again it's very much cosmetic we don't see a strong return on investment from doing that so at the minute we are very much focused on investing where we see a stronger return as we've outlined in our capital allocation framework around new store systems and other areas but as we're coming up to rent deals and renewals with landlords we are seeing if we can get a capital contribution towards either a new signage or a light touch refit and importantly where we've got very old stores that are in need of a refit just because the fit's starting to look tired and we've got that down to about 30 stores and we would hope to address the vast majority of those in the next two to three years.

Thank you. And moving on to CapEx, with net new store openings increasing from 5 to 10 and new store CapEx having been £2.3 million in FY26, should we expect that figure to rise further, allowing for lower warehouse spend in the year ahead say circa 0.2 million pounds versus 0.7 million pounds as the mezzanine investment drops out. Is it fair to model FY27 capex in the 7.5 million to 8 million pounds range?

yeah so i'll take that one um yes that is a very well asked question and concluded almost in itself um we are looking to spend around eight million pounds of capex investment this year which will include um opening sort of like a net uh 25 new stores which will result in about 10 a net 10 new stores and then including as gavin's mentioned investing in the existing store estate where we can where we believe we'll get the right returns as well and then I think just at the end of that question there's a mention of the IT transformation spend so within FY27 we'll be spending and investing in the new store in new tills across the store estate and store connectivity so that's included in the eight million range that we're We've set out to achieve. And then as Gavin's mentioned, the approximately 6 million investment in our systems transformation program is specifically with reference to our ERP program and the new system capability from best in class solutions, which we'll see be an exceptional cost across the next four years.

Thank you very much, Rosie. And one regarding statutory profit swings. Is it fair to say that the big year-on-year swings in statutory profit are almost entirely driven by the non-cash IFRS 16 store, right-of-use impairment reversals and charges, which being non-cash are more of an accounting figure than a meaningful indicator of the underlying business performance? Is that a correct read?

Yes, so thank you. Again, another very well articulated question. And indeed, probably somebody who's as a bigger fan of IFRS 16 as we are. And yes, the swings are purely down to non-cash IFRS 16 impairments and reversals of impairments that we've seen over the last few years. And unfortunately, yes, it does swing that underlying number. And therefore, that's why we tend to explain everything on an adjusted basis. so that it gives a real feel for what that true underlying performance of the business is.

Thank you and moving on. The web performance was poor in FY24 and FY25 but this was impacted by poor third-party execution. Did your evaluation look prior to these poor years?

Yeah so I'll take that one Rose if you want and so the I think the history of the website was pre-Covid on a standalone basis it was a loss making channel and during Covid when all 500 of our shops were closed it did very well and made a profit but then coming back out of Covid as sales normalised at a more normal level we went back to the trend of pre-Covid times we saw that on an underlying basis the website was loss making and the real reason for that is we were selling a lot of High volume, low average selling price items, which means that it's just a lot of work for not a lot of margin coming out of it. That was then made worse by the challenges in FY25, FY26. But yeah, when we looked at it and with the risks involved with moving to another third party supplier, the history of being outside of covid you know loss making just about got it to break even in one year and the best thing we could do is remove the transactional nature focus our time effort on our stores as well as our investment and it was it's the distraction factor as much as anything that for a channel that was less than 10 percent of sales at times last year was taking up 30 40 50 percent of people's time and I think we can see now in the first 11 weeks of this year and the back end of last year when since we've closed the website you know the strong like for likes have definitely in part helped by that website closure.

Thank you. Next one here is you mentioned the benefit of lower contained rates in 25-26 what is the likely P&L impact of higher rates in 26-27?

I'll take that one. I think it's referencing container rates. So yes, we have seen slightly higher freight costs in the market, particularly because of the disruption in the Middle East. But we've managed, you know, we're not seeing any material impact on our P&L this year so far. So managing to contain that within the budgeted rates that we had, albeit that we're certainly seeing them slightly adverse year on year.

Thank you very much. Another question from an investor is, will there be any more exceptional charges in the current financial year?

Thank you, I will take this one as well. Yes, so we are expecting to see sort of about 1.3 million of exceptional costs in FY27 in relation to that systems transformation program, particularly, you know, for the costs that we can't capitalize because it's a SaaS product. And then ongoing that we will continue to see a similar rate over the four years to hit that sort of approximate 6 million investment that Gavin's talked about.

Thank you, Rosie. One on payroll here. Payroll costs increased by over 10% to £55.3 million. Is this just due to increases in the national minimum wage and NI, or are there any other factors behind the increase?

So yes, unfortunately, you know, as I mentioned up front, we were hit with a 6 million headwind from the national minimum living wage impact and that hike in national insurance up to 15% in April 2025. So we saw the full impact of that in FY26, which reflects the 10% increase in store payroll. We have been trying to mitigate that, obviously, through actions taken in terms of managing the store labor model. And as Gavin said, we've got more to do. so that we can focus on the customer experience and then really focusing on how we can mitigate that through the other cost lines as we've mentioned in that margin bridge earlier.

Thank you very much. A question here reads ERP implementations often overrun on time and budget. What measures are you taking to de-risk the project?

I'll give you a break Rosie and handle this and you can chip in if I miss anything again. Yeah so we are very mindful of that. It's got a from a non-exec perspective as well huge huge oversight in this area but as I mentioned in the presentation we're looking at we've got strong team internally you know the business well we're supplementing that with knowledge of transformation projects like this we've put a strong governance framework internally where Rosie and other members of the Ops Board are very close to the whole program and we will be getting third-party assurance from a big consultancy firm who do these regularly to oversee what we're doing what the partners that will get to implement the system are doing which should give us that additional assurance so Yeah, they are not without risk, but we're doing all we can in terms of best practice to mitigate that risk.

Thank you. Next question here is you say that in the first 11 weeks of FY27, like for like was plus 8.8%. Can you confirm that the gross margins have not reduced in FY27?

yeah I think that's a straightforward one yeah I think you know obviously the only risk that you might have seen externally to our gross margins would be those freight rates and we're managing those within we haven't seen a material impact so yes there's not really been a change from that perspective

Perfect, thank you. There's three questions in the next one, so I'll just read the first one here. First one reads, delivered 450 basis points of product margin improvements in two years. Can you give some indication of which of the buckets provides the greatest opportunity going forward?

um yeah i think for us as we've mentioned sort of like really focusing on product margin sustainability um it's all around making sure that we can manage and negotiate the best cost prices but working with our suppliers on project product engineering to sort of like support them with the cost inflation that they also see and making sure that therefore the real opportunity is that we can grow our um own brand products and sales in those areas because they create a higher margin so that we can really invest in the lower margin you know licensed product products that a lot of people have heard about that would drive footfall into stores to make sure that we can really balance that product mix so I'd say it's more of a footfall driver in managing the proposition as an opportunity rather than significant um percentage growth rate in that product margin

and the second question was how are competitors reacting to what you're doing?

Yeah I think we've got quite a diverse range of competitors, we've got what we would call the full price specialists which is the likes of Hobbycraft and Art and Craft, Ryman, T.G. Jones in stationery, Smith's Toys and Entertainer in toys and games and and, you know, Waterstones and TG Jones in books. And from that perspective, you know, we see those specialists just continue to focus on their ranges. We see the word screen-free being dropped in in certain places within some of those competitors. But for us, you know, there's nothing we see within that competitor set that unduly concerns us, but we keep a close eye on it and monitor it carefully. at the other end we've got sort of the GM discounters that the B&Ms their own bargains the range of Poundland you know they continue to offer fantastic value across their whole propositions they're probably as cheap if not in some places cheaper than us and so we we remain mindful of that our differentiation there is we have got specialist knowledge and specialist categories and we've got great customer experience in our stores which I do believe differentiates us from but we do keep an eye on pricing and make sure that we are offering our customers great value but yeah overall we're not seeing a specific reaction against us but we do keep very close to what the competition are doing.

Thank you and the last question here on store openings are the new products leading to new stores reaching maturity quicker than previously?

I wouldn't say so I think the stores have always matured fairly quickly and we typically in a sort of town high street shopping centre we tend to reach maturity pretty much in Thank you very much. Thank you. really from a maturity perspective it's more about the retail park stores but that's less about the products in them but more about the nature of those shopping parks, the frequency of visits and the time it takes to build awareness.

That's great and we've got one final question at the moment here. You described the six million pound system spent as exceptional, does this mean it will be treated as an adjusting item and so stripped out of the underlying P&L numbers?

yes that's correct so our referencing to exceptional is sort of the old school referencing yes they will be stripped out and treated as adjusting items.

That's great Gavin, Rosie you have addressed all those questions for investors today so thank you very much indeed but Gavin before I redirect investors to provide you with their feedback which one is particularly important to yourself and the company could I please just ask you for a few closing comments.

yeah sure i just want to say first of all thank you very much for joining and for your interest in us um i said we're really proud of what we've delivered in what was a pivotal year in fy 26 but that was year one of a five-year plan and there's still so much more opportunity ahead of us we're really excited we've got a really meaningful purpose and mission and a really huge opportunity to transform our business in terms of We look forward to delivering on that in the years ahead and that will generate significant shareholder value and returns.

Fantastic. Gavin, Rosie, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback, which will help the company better understand your views and expectations. On behalf of the management team, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation and good afternoon to you all.