Whitbread plc

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining the Whitbread full year 2025 preliminary results live Q&A conference call. My name is Sammy, and I'll be coordinating your call today. During the presentation, you can register a question by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two on your telephone keypad. I will now hand over to your host, Dominic Poole, Chief Executive to begin. Please go ahead, Dominic.

Thank you, Sammy. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining myself and Hemant Patel, our Group CFO for our full year results call. Hopefully you've been able to go through our release and have a chance to listen to our results presentation this morning. Before we open up the call for Q&A, I thought I'd pull out just a few key points. Starting with our full year 2025 results, as you all know from the published data, market demand has been slightly softer in the UK. However, with the benefit of new room growth and our strong commercial program, our accommodation sales were flat year on year and we outperformed the mid-scale and economy market. Food and beverage revenues declined in line with our previous guidance due to our accelerating growth plan as we optimize our offer and exit a number of branded restaurant sites, unlocking 3,500 high-returning extension rooms. Having delivered £75 million of efficiency savings during the year, which was ahead of our previous guidance, together with the removal of lower returning restaurants, we were able to reduce our UK cost base by 1% despite the presence of ongoing inflation. And in Germany, we're making excellent progress. Our estate and brand are continuing to mature, and we delivered a strong trading performance that was well ahead of the market, and we reduced our loss before tax significantly. Turning to current trading, UK demand during the first seven weeks of the year remained behind last year, and the timing of Easter meant that the weekly FTR data has been somewhat volatile, as we always see at this time of year. Despite this, our commercial initiatives meant that we extended our outperformance versus the market on both accommodation sales and growth progress. Whilst the UK macroeconomic outlook remains uncertain, we're confident in our commercial plans, Our forward-booked revenue position is ahead of last year, and we have strong bookings into the summer months. Food and beverage is performing as expected, and we continue to make great progress on our accelerating growth plan. And in Germany, our strong performance is continuing with double-digit red-part growth, and this will be another breakthrough year for us, as we expect to deliver a £5 million to £10 million profit in the full year 2026. Now, just briefly turning to our idea plan. Back in October last year, we announced our plan that will deliver a step change in our performance. Since then, we've been executing at pace, and we're really pleased with the progress we've made to date. Even with conservative assumptions for market growth and inflation, we remain on track to deliver incremental profits of £300 million and more than £2 billion per shareholder return through share buybacks and dividends by full year 30. Our plan is fully funded through a combination of strong operating cash flow, and as we've announced today, through the recycling of at least £1 billion of our more mature property assets into high-returning projects. As a sign of our confidence on the back of our progress, we are accelerating the delivery of returns due under the plan, and today have announced a further £250 million share buyback that we will complete over the next 12 months. Now, we've got a lot of people on the call today, and due to our meeting schedule that we've got planned for the rest of the day, we've only got 45 minutes. So before we move into Q&A, in the interest of time, please could I ask you to keep to a maximum of two questions each? We'd appreciate that. Thank you. Now, with that summary, I'll hand back to Sammy to host the Q&A. Thank you.

Thank you, Dominic. To ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. If you change your mind... Please press star followed by two. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure your device is unmuted locally. Our first question comes from Jamie Rolo from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead.