Whitbread plc

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to today's Whitbread Full Year 26 Interim Results Call. My name is Seb, and I'll be the operator for your call today. If you'd like to ask a question during the Q&A session, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, please press star 2. I'll now hand the floor to Dominic Poole, Chief Executive, to begin the call. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Seb. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining myself and Hemant Patel, our group CFO for our half-year results call. Hopefully, you've all been through our release and you've had a chance to listen to our results presentation this morning. Before we open up the call for Q&A, I thought I'd just pull out a few key points. Let's start with our first half results. As you probably all know from the published data, the UK market returned to growth in the second quarter. As a result, UK accommodation sales were in line with last year for the first half, And with the benefit of our commercial program, we continue to outperform the mid-scale and economy market on both accommodation sales and REFPA. Now, food and beverage performed in line with our guidance, and we continue to make great progress on our accelerating growth plan to transform our offer at around 200 of our lower-returning branded restaurants and unlock 3,500 higher-returning extension rooms. We've done really well with our cost savings, delivering £43 million and a half, helping to partially mitigate cost inflation that ran slightly ahead of our previous expectations. As a result, UK EBITDA was down just 3% and we're increasing our full year guidance to £65 to £70 million cost efficiencies for this year. In Germany, we delivered a positive revenue performance that was ahead of the market, despite softer than expected market demand in the second quarter, and we significantly reduced our adjusted loss before tax. We continue to make great strategic progress, with a recent agreement to acquire 1,500 rooms in key locations, taking us closer to becoming the number one hotel brand. Turning to current trading, first in the UK, the positive trading momentum has continued during the first six weeks, with both total accommodation sales and rev par up 3%, and our forward-booked position remains ahead of last year. In Germany, after a softer start to September, the market has returned to growth in more recent weeks, and we remain on course to reach profitability this year. Now turning to the five-year plan, it was this time last year that we announced a five-year plan. As summarized in our presentation this morning, we are executing at pace and we remain on track to deliver a step change in our performance and return £2 billion to shareholders by full year 30. In the first half, we completed a number of sale and leasebacks and with a positive updated valuation of our property, we are confident in recycling at least £1 billion worth of property. This will be reinvested into high-returning projects like our Accelerating Growth Plan and further network expansion in the UK and Germany. With significant cash flow, we can deliver a step change in profitability and deliver £2 billion for shareholders through both dividends and share buybacks. Now, we do have a lot of people on the call today. So before we move into Q&A, in the interest of time, could I please ask you to keep to a maximum of two questions each? With that summary, I'll now hand back to Seb to host the Q&A. Thank you.

Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Our first question is from Jamie Rollo at Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Good morning, everyone. First question, I know you don't like talking about RevPAR or obviously guiding, but just on this positive RevPAR inflection we've seen in the UK, do you think it's all events or do you think the underlying market has actually improved? And how are you thinking about RevPAR as we enter a more sort of corporate-driven period? And the second question... on Germany, so very confident comments in the pre-recorded presentation on the five-year plan. Obviously, though, you've trimmed your guidance this year. I'm just wondering what REF PAR growth you need in the second half to get to that zero to five million pounds. It looks like a pretty material pickup is needed from the sort of plus 3% REF PAR in the last six weeks. Thank you.

Thanks, Jamie. So let's talk about the current trading situation. I mean, you're right, in the summer there were events, the market benefited a little bit from the warm weather, but the underlying market was positive. So when you strip out those impacts, the underlying market was positive. And I think the key thing is that trading momentum for the market overall has continued into the current trading period. As I've just said, we're at 3% rev par growth for the past six weeks. So the underlying market actually, you know, when we had this call in, I think it was June, we talked a lot about would there be a rev par inflection. We said we felt there would be. It was obviously always really hard to say precisely when. But What we're seeing now in the underlying market is positive, and I think there are good reasons for that. So the structural underpins for the UK hotel market are really supportive. Supply remains constrained. There is still this meta trend of independent closing, and that gives us a great opportunity. So their structural underpins help support the market. And I think the normalisation post-COVID, we're now entering a slightly different era, And I think you can see that in the underlying trading performance, which has been positive. Now, of course, when there are events, we do benefit. But generally, there is an ongoing calendar of events in the UK. Last year, it was Taylor Swift. This year, it's Oasis. Next year, it's going to be Take That and some other concerts. So broadly, I think we're feeling good about the positive momentum in the UK market. and remember the underpin of our kind of consistency of our brand and the guest proposition. I think in Germany, and I'll pass over to Hemant for the kind of second half for Germany, but overall, again, as you said, as you heard in the presentation, we feel really good about the momentum that we're building in Germany. If you look at our turn in performance over the last two and a half years, it's actually been substantial. We're creating a business of scale. The product is resonating extremely well with guests. Our financial performance is getting materially better. We're on track to hit profitability this year. And we're on track to hit that £70 million PBT by full year 30. So we're building a business of scale. We're confident of building a business that is going to drive strong returns and strong profitability. And we think there's a really good value opportunity for Whitbread in Germany.

Thanks, Dominic. Hi, Jeremy. Yeah, so, I mean, yeah, clearly the second half of the year for Germany would need to see a strong pickup in terms of red bar for us to get to our target of profitability. We feel very comfortable with that. In the first half of the year, particularly in Q2, we saw a very strong events program last year, and we've annualized against that, and the German market has went negative over that quarter. We've outperformed the market. In Q1, our red part growth was double digit. We can see, you know, that through the last couple of years, we've seen significant double digit growth in red part growth. So it's quite feasible for us to achieve that in the second half of the year. Most importantly, we've got a very strong forward position, the event density going forward. through October and the next few months is much stronger than it was at this time last year. So we're seeing a reverse of what we saw in Q2 this year. So we feel very comfortable with our ability to get to the right levels of REF PAR to get us to profitability this year. Thanks, Jamie. Thank you very much.

Our next question is from Estelle Weingrod at J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning, and thanks for taking my question. The first one on the costing session, When they happen to be higher than what you expected, can you just specify what cost must specifically trigger this revised guidance? Is it F&B, utilities? I don't know. Also, how should we think about the incremental 5 to 10 million of cost efficiencies? Like, what are they? And just to confirm, are they incremental to your five-year plan or brought forward? And just another one on room openings. So 94 new UK rooms in H1, of course, more closures because of the DIGP. Is that in line with the phasing you expected, and are you still comfortable with the target for this year? Thank you.

Thanks, Christelle. So let me take the first kind of part of that, and then I'll also hand over to Hemant. I mean, I think I can say this more comfortably than Hemant, but... Hemant and the team have done a phenomenal job of building a super strong efficiency plan for our business. That is one of the underpins of the five-year plan. Remember, we've got accelerating growth plan, the UK network expansion, the very strong commercial program that we've got, which is helping drive our performance, and then the improvement in performance in Germany. But an important underpinning is also our efficiency plan. We're a value-based business. It's really important that we continually challenge ourselves to do things better and smarter to drive those efficiencies. And we got well ahead of this. And as we've seen in the UK market inflation, thank goodness we got well ahead of it. We outlined a plan last year to get to £250 million worth of efficiencies over the next five years. And we're really comfortable with our position where we are on that. And that's one of the reasons why we could up our efficiency guidance for this year. So I guess if I step back from it, I'd say I think this business is doing a really good job of delivering on all the elements within our control. And I think we're showing that as a business, We are very, very good at dealing with the various headwinds that come through. And the efficiency program, I think, is a really good example of that. In terms of room openings, I mean, the summary is, yes, we're on track and on course to hit our target room openings. We're on track to open between 500 and 700 of new rooms within the Accelerating Growth Program. Remember, we are really confident about that these rooms are going to be high returning. They're extension rooms in hotels where we know there is strong demand. Extension rooms are often our higher returning hotel rooms because it's a really efficient way to add growth. And we've also got a really strong pipeline of new hotels that we'll be opening over the next few years, again, which we're really confident are going to be strong returning hotels. And our accelerating growth plan is bang on track with where we'd want it to be at this stage. So, again, we feel really comfortable with the progress that we're making. Okay.

Yeah, just to build on the cost of inflation and efficiency points that Don made. Yeah, I mean, clearly we are seeing cost of inflation this year. We're guided to net inflation of 2% to 3%. We're still within that range, probably the middle of that range rather than the lower end of that range. once we take account of the slightly higher inflation that we've seen this year. Inflation, you know, has been driven this year by, you know, a lot of things impact our labor base, so national living wage, the national insurance change, obviously, that we had at the beginning of the year, and food and beverage inflation. And it's food and beverage inflation in particular that has been higher I think the industry was expecting, you'll have seen all of the headlines on how food and beverage inflation has been ticking upwards over the last few months. So we can see the impact of that. In response to that, we've obviously upped our efficiency plan to partially offset it. We were guiding 60 million pounds efficiencies this year. We're now saying between 65 and 70 million pounds. That's part of the £250 million that we're guiding to for this year and, you know, a total of five years, including this year going forward. We've got a good history of being able to continue to drive efficiencies. We're a big business, a multi-site business with a large operation. As inflation comes into the business, it drives new ideas, new technologies, new ways of working that will allow us to take further costs out going forward. Whether it's to accelerate efficiencies, whether it's to increase the size and scope of the initiatives we have at the moment, or it's to come up with new ideas, I'm very confident we're going to be able to continue to innovate and drive efficiencies going forward.

Thanks, Estelle. Thank you.

Our next question is from Richard Clark at Bernstein Society General Group. Please go ahead.

Hey, Richard. Thanks very much for taking my question. Hi there. So it looks like in your messaging today that you're separating the increase in lease costs from your cost inflation guidance. Obviously, in your five-year plan, there is no bridge line item for the, I guess, $55 to $60 million of higher lease costs related to the billion of property recycling, nor one related to the lower cash interest costs. Is there headroom in the other line items that means you can offset that higher lease cost across the five-year plan? And then second question, I guess the property valuation looks pretty healthy, but the yield at 5.5% to 6%, why is that higher than the 5.3% you've realized so far? And what would you expect to pay? on that billion of property disposals, would you do sale and leasebacks at 6% yields or are you being selective and we'll do ones more like that 5% to 5.3% level?

Thanks, Richard. I think I'll hand over to Hemant to pick those two points up.

Yeah, so thanks, Richard. Yeah, so on the lease interest costs. So just to remind you that these are not cash items. The accounting for leases is under IFRS 16 and it basically simulates a capital purchase and depreciation of the interest based on having a capital purchase. This is how that works. I'm sure you know that. So these are cash items. The reality is we have accelerated the level of leasebacks that we're making, that we're doing. We said we're going to do a billion pounds of leasebacks over the five years of the plan. This year, we're going to have between 250 and 300 million pounds of property disposals, most of which will be leasebacks. So we're getting ahead of that program because we can see some good value out there and there's pent-up demand for our assets. So in terms of how it fits into the five-year plan, when we set the five-year plan, we took account of the P&L impact of our lease, of our leases, so comfortable that it's all included within the overall cost inflation. So, you know, there'll be a bit of phasing here. There's been a bit of an accounting change, which changes some of the phasing, but it's relatively minor in terms of what it means over the long term. And a reminder, obviously, that EBITDA is not a cash item. And then in terms of the valuation of the property, yeah, so we've done a property valuation. First time we've done one since 2018. It's increased the range of valuation by about half a billion pounds versus the previous valuation, 5.5 and 6.4 billion pounds. The net initial yield ranges at 5.5% to 6.5%. This is done by an independent valuation partner, Newmark. The range has obviously gone out since the 2018 valuation. I mean, clearly, interest rates have gone up significantly over that period, something like 400 bps at that time. You know, this is showing about 100 bps of range, of increase in terms of the net initial yield. which shows, I think, the strength of our covenant overall. Clearly, this is a careful valuation that assumes an asset by asset valuation. The reality is we have been able to achieve better than this valuation in terms of our recent transactions. Those transactions aren't just high quality London assets. There's a range of different assets within those transactions. So would I be hopeful to be able to, you know, side by side, as we do certainly SPACs, would we be hopeful that we'd be able to get to better yields in this? Clearly, we're going to negotiate hard and try and get the best possible yields that we can. Your question about whether we would transact an asset at 6%, it very much depends on the asset. You know, the range is there to illustrate the fact that actually we have a large range of different properties from London assets, big prime located London assets to regional assets that might be the edge of a small town in somewhere in the UK. So, you know, the range of yields you'd expect, there's quite a wide range. It very much depends on the asset. It depends on the demand for that particular asset in the market at the time. The most important thing is we'll make sure we do that carefully to get the best possible return for shareholders to be able to recycle that capital and put it back into high returning assets in the future.

Yeah. Thank you, Richard.

Our next question is from Jared Castle at UBS.

Please go ahead. Hello. Good morning, everyone. Just given we're on the... Hello. Can you hear me? Hi. Hi, Jared. Hi. Just given we're on the valuation, I was wondering, you know, it is obviously materially higher than the previous valuation. And I would imagine some properties, you know, came out higher than you expected them to be. Probably some came out a bit lower. But do you think it gives you scope to recycle even more than you've actually communicated under your, you know, the next five years? So is there more scope to sell some of these properties, to recycle the capital? And, you know, have you got any numbers behind that potentially? And then just looking ahead, you know, to the budget, I know there's not much you can say, but obviously there's proposals on the labour side which – include increasing the powers of unions, increasing the rights of employees on day one, and then obviously we'll also get a minimum wage increase. But in particular, on what is currently proposed in the labour changes, I'd be interested to get your thoughts on what that might mean for your business. Thanks.

Yeah, thanks, Gerard. I think on the property valuation point, we said we would look to recycle at least £1 billion over the life of the plan. Those words are chosen pretty carefully. I think, as you say, that the overall valuation is encouraging. I think it supports the strategy that we've got very well. And, you know, we laid out what that kind of recycling capital strategy looked like in the presentation. You know, as hotels get mature, it gives us an opportunity to capture development profits, do a sale and lease back. As Hemant just said, invest that money. For example, we'll do it at a 5% cap rate and then invest it in something like an accelerating growth plan where we're confident we're going to get very strong returns. That is a really good way we think of both driving shareholder value over the course of this plan. but also demonstrating the strength of our covenant and the property underpin that we've got. So this kind of concept of active recycling we think has been well received but also an important part of investing in high returning growth over the next few years. And you're right, the property evaluation has been supportive and positive I think to that strategy. In terms of the cost increases, as you say, no one in the UK knows what's going to happen in the budget at the end of November. We've been very clear with the government that as a business that has a strong position in the UK and is growing, it's important that we're able to profitably invest in our business for growth. And obviously, the hospitality industry got hit pretty hard in the budget. I mean, what I would say is I would absolutely back us as a business to continue to be agile and pivot if we get cost increases into our business. And over time, we will mitigate those cost increases. Anything that, for example, hinders our ability for labour flexibility, of course, that's not helpful in the short term. On the other hand, we're a very good employer already. A lot of the cost increases the government is talking about, like getting rid of zero-hours contracts, for example, we already don't have those things. We do pay above minimum wage already. So we're a good employer. But we're also very agile. It's why we're doing things like investing in robot hoovers, for example. It's why we've just transformed our supply chain. So the efficiency plan is not a simple cost-cutting plan. It's actually a genuine kind of re-engineering and re-plumbing of the business behind the scenes to make us more efficient. And I would always back Whitbread's ability to be able to mitigate these cost increases over time. and over the course of the plan. I think that's an important part of the messages, I think, from the leadership team we've got here at WIPRED. Thanks, Eric. Thanks, Howard.

Our next question is from Tim Barrett at Deutsche Neumis. Please go ahead.

Hi, both of you. Hi, Tim. My two things. Hi there. Firstly, starting on or carrying on on costs, obviously you don't know the living wage and business rates from April. But can you talk about the things you do know about for next year and how you're positioned on utilities, food and beverage, cleaning, that kind of thing? And then the second one, I may have missed this in all the text, but what you've bought in Germany, the 1,500 rooms, have you said what you've paid for that, what the assets are trading as currently, and therefore how much you might have to spend in rebrands? Thank you.

Yeah. Yeah, thanks, Tim. I think, I mean, from a cost point of view, as you say, there will be some announcements in the budget, and no one knows what those announcements are going to be. If I step back and look at what we're doing with the business, I think we're doing all the right things to mitigate the cost increases that are likely to be seen across the business. So, for example, let's look at food and beverage. The move that we're doing on accelerating growth plan is a really strong move to mean that we are less exposed moving forward to this kind of food and beverage cost inflation because we are increasingly focusing on our own hotel guests which means actually we have fewer people. coming in for dinners, for example, but actually a much more profitable model because of that. A better guest experience overall and a much more profitable model. So I think it reinforces why that strategy was absolutely the right strategy for us to do. Similarly with labor costs, there's been a lot of catch up in minimum wage actually over the past few years, which we've all seen, but we're also ahead of the curve in terms of driving labor efficiency. We're making really good progress on things like labor scheduling. I've already talked about automation. We're doing things like we'll be rolling out check in on the app for example which ends up saving labor in some of our hotels because it means that actually guests can go direct to the room so we are working very hard behind the scenes to continue to evolve our product and proposition so that we remain at the forefront of what guests want but also delivering it in a really efficient cost efficient way and remember Supply is going to remain constrained in the UK hotel market over the next five years, but also scale has got advantages. Our ability to invest in state-of-the-art revenue management systems, state-of-the-art labor scheduling systems, state-of-the-art automation means that we widen our advantage versus the independents. another smaller hotel chain. So ironically, a slightly difficult environment does strengthen our position further in this business over the next five years. It's up to us to make sure we take advantage of that, but that's exactly what our five-year plan is doing.

Have you got much hedging in place? What's the hedging in place on utilities and F&Bs?

Yeah, so we don't guide yet. We haven't guided on cost plans because obviously the largest part of our cost base, we don't know what the inflation is going to be because it is about minimum wage. It is about other whatever changes might come in the budget. We don't know. So, yeah, yes, we've got good hedging on utilities going forward. So, yeah, we will hedge for next year. You'll have read that there are other non-commodity costs in potential inflation coming in, which, you know, we haven't got the details on things like the and the the transmission network charges. We will guide when we get to our quarterly results in January, we'll guide with a bit more detail in terms of what we think is going to happen going forward. But I'll refer back to Dominic's point that actually, you know, we've got a strong efficiency plan and we're flexible and, you know, nimble enough to be able to manage, you know, whatever comes our way. Obviously, it's, you know, not a complete surprise. And then to your second point, just on the German acquisition, we aren't giving any more detail at this stage. We can't do that. We can't talk about the other party, the hotels, or any price paid. We will do so when we're able to do that. We're not opening these sites until next year. So there is time before that application. We'll let you know exactly what the invitations are.

But, Tim, we're really confident. We're really confident this is an excellent acquisition for us. I mean, it's eight bullseye sites for our city center locations. You saw in the presentation, we're really confident about knowing which sites will work and which sites won't work. City center locations of hotels of reasonable scale work really well for us. We've also got smarter and smarter about how we do conversions. We spend a bit less money than when we first went into Germany on doing those conversions. That means we can be confident on the financial returns that we get. And we've got a distribution platform and a brand platform now that we can plug those new hotels into. And so we can say with confidence that those hotels are going to drive strong returns for this business and are in ideal locations for us as we continue to grow the business.

Okay, thank you.

Next question is from Alexander Brignall from Rothschild & Co. at Redburn. Please go ahead.

That sounded very formal, Alexander.

I know, sorry, my colleagues out there, but it is very formal. I might start going with that from now on. It's quite nice. My mother would be happy. A couple of questions. Firstly, just on the property valuation, Have any of the disposals, I know you use a lot of transaction values within the yields, and it seems like you've been very prudent on the yield, so a lot of this will be captured in that, but have any of the disposals that have gone into that been to actually exit the hotel rather than keeping you on as a tenant? I guess that kind of comes into the lease dynamic, because obviously the exit value that you get is subject to the lease that you then commit to, so if there's any way you've realized an outside value for the property that someone else is willing to pay for it rather than someone willing to pay for you to remain the lessee, that would be hugely helpful. And then I know that you don't really look at the sort of balance sheet capitalized value of leases, but by the end of the year, that number, net debt to EBITDA, is going to be almost five times as reported. So I just kind of wonder whether that is – the right level to be for buying back stock, especially given, you know, the obvious sensitivity to pricing, which is very hard to have much confidence over. Thank you.

Yeah, sorry. Just to understand your question, Alex, I think what you're asking about is how, you know, the property valuation and how the methodology of it effectively. It is done on the basis that we are the tenant, so it's a serve and lease back property. site by site individually taking effectively taking the possibility of each individual site turning that into a rental value and then applying the local yield based on the characteristics of that site the location of that site the size and location of that site based on whatever historical data there might be of our transactions and other hotel transactions, either locally or across that region or across that market. So it's done in as much detail as can be done and with as much rigor that we can do that. Your second point, sorry, just in terms of the leasehold, a capitalization of our sites. I mean, actually, the way, obviously, you'll know that we use Fitch as a ratings agency. We use their calculation in terms of the resale impact of our, at least our leverage impact. That's actually based on the cash rents, which is a more sensible way, if you think about doing that and applying a sensible rate. capitalization factor on those cash rents. So that's how that works. So sorry, I'm probably not answering your question, actually. Let me just keep repeating your question, make sure I understood it.

Yeah, I guess the property question is, you're obviously a spectacularly well-run hotel business and can afford to pay higher leases and probably can derive a higher property valuation than anybody else can for the properties that you have. So I guess my question is, within any of the trans disposals that you've made of hotels, have there been ones where you have fully exited the hotel, you have ceased to operate there and you have achieved, you know, got a property valuation that can give you a sort of outside value of your property rather than just the capitalization of the rent that you're willing to pay because you make an awful lot of money.

Yeah.

That's really the question.

Yeah. Okay. Let me, let me ask that a bit better. So yeah. So, I mean, we, um, Most of our disposals are saving these SPACs. We do exit some sites. These tend to be sites though that are under trading sites. They tend to be small sites where we can migrate trade away from that site into other sites we might have in the catchment or we might be building extensions, for instance, or building new rooms with new hotels. So it's probably – they're not typical sites and they're relatively low profit – relatively low profit, still generally making EBITDA, but relatively low profit. a relatively low value, small undersized site. So they're not typical and they aren't necessarily a good indication of what might happen if we were to sell either of our trading, you know, best trading sites. Okay, that's really good. Okay, thank you.

Thanks, Alex. Alexander.

Thank you.

Our next question is from Muneeba Kayani from Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Thank you. A lot of my questions have been answered, but I wanted to ask around the UK market and your outperformance compared to that. With the market, like you said, you think it's kind of underlying improving. How are you thinking about your outperformance into the second half of this year? Thank you.

Oh, thanks. Yeah, I mean, you know, we don't, As you know, we don't guide on how RevPAR is going to look in the future because, of course, that's something that's hard to predict. What we do talk about is what we're seeing right now. And as you've seen in the current trading, the current trading is positive and the underlying market is growing. And I think that's really helped by the structural underpins, the low capacity growth in the market, overall the reduction of the independence. And then within that, we're really well placed. And I think we're really well placed for a few key reasons. We've got a super strong brand. The customers know what they're going to get, and they really enjoy the guest proposition. You can see that through our guest scores. We've got a really, really clear and ambitious commercial plan. I think we're executing really well behind that. And that's made up of a number of things. It's made up of things like optimizing our revenue management system, a bit like I was talking earlier. We're a scale business. We're taking advantage of that scale by having state-of-the-art revenue management systems. We're progressing rapidly on things like our digital progress. We are quite unusual in the UK market in the sense that we have pretty much all of the data from our customers and we're using that data. We're using that data to drive frequency and we're using that data to aid retention of our customers. Our commercial plan is really strong and it's supported by a very strong brand and a very, very strong and consistent guest proposition, which our people work very hard day in, day out to deliver. And that helps our outperformance versus the market. As I said earlier, it ebbs and flows, the outperformance versus the market. The key thing, I think, is that we've got a really strong rev par premium versus our competitive set. And in fact, that rev par premium has widened. And we feel confident that we'll be able to continue having a rev par premium versus our competitors for all the reasons that I've just said. super clear plan, executing well, and really focused on delivery of it. So we feel confident to be able to continue to drive that Red Park premium. And as a reminder, what we're seeing in current trading is positive. We don't guide on the future, but what we're seeing in current trading is positive, and I think that's helping support our business.

Thank you. That's clear. Can I ask a follow-up question on the Germany acquisition? You said you don't want to disclose the details right now. When can we expect to get more details around that?

Yeah, I mean, we'll be able to talk about it certainly as we enter next year. So, the timing, we might be able to talk about it at our quarterly results, but it will very much depend on some factors I can't really kind of get into in terms of, you know, in terms of the deal. As soon as we can talk to you about it, we will do.

Thank you.

And again, again, again, we, you know, we are, we're really positive about the acquisition. bullseye locations for us. We've got a really clear plan of what works for us from a growth perspective in Germany. The scale is really helping us drive this performance, move to profitability this year and then on track rating 70 million PBT by the end of the plan, by full year 30. And this acquisition overall will be really supportive of that growing strategic position in Germany, which is a good and strong hotel market. And we're building a position of real scale and strength in that market. Thank you. I think we've got one more, we want to have one more question.

So our last question is from Jafar Mastari at BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. I'll ask two, but if you only have time for one, that's fine. Thank you. Just on inflation, could you help us time the point in the year where food in particular started to make you change your views? Because as of May, you were still thinking about bottom end of the 223, I'm just quite keen to understand if we're two and a half for the year, is it bottom end for a good six months and then H2 is going to be top end? Yeah, that'd be helpful. And then just secondly on the property valuation, let me know if I'm focusing on numbers are rounded too much, but how important is long-lead hold within that portfolio because you continue to value freehold and long-lead hold. But just look at freehold. Obviously, it's fair that the overall valuation increases. You've invested a lot. But per freehold room, it doesn't look like the valuation per room is down at all. It could actually be up a touch. And I know it has been more London development, for example. But, you know, is that fair?

Right, Shafi, I'll take that. Hi. On inflation, you've probably seen the analysis and the headlines. Food and beverage inflation has been ticking up over the last three to four months. We're obviously predicting what it might be for the full year. In some instances, we know because we have contracts, other instances, it'll be commodity linked and some of the prices will float. It's our best guess for the full year at this stage that everything nets off. at this two you know between this two and three percent and I talked about the midpoint so about two and a half percent yeah the phasing yeah a bit generally built in you know we're making some assumptions based on you know commodity by commodity so it's not easy to say exactly you know what that will look like but I think you could if you really want to assume some phase and you can assume it's fairly flat based across the year in terms of the property evaluation yeah clearly I mean the long he sold is part of it these are effectively Exactly, as I say, these are effectively the de facto freehold sites is the way we'd consider them because they have got very long leases with an understood leasehold component to those. The impact, the actual valuation in terms of per freehold room. I mean, the way I think about this is there's a few moving parts to the valuation overall. Since the last time we did the valuation, we've sold off, we've sold something like 400 million pounds of freehold and long lease house property since then. Most of which obviously, you know, a lot of it is coming into our leaseholder state. We have disposal sites as well. We've added sites as, you know, some freehold as well, particularly some good quality London freehold sites, although a lot of those are still in construction at this stage. And then we've also seen significantly higher profitability per room coming through over that time period as our, you know, margins improved from pre-COVID. And then the final thing I'll say from that is what has happened to property yields, obviously driven by gilt rates in particular. I think I mentioned earlier on Gilrates have moved up something like 400 bits over that time period. The yield rate yields here, the yield range we're quoting has come something like 100 bits or so in that range. Taking that into account, obviously, all of that, you know, you get to derive the actual valuation on a side-by-side, careful sale and lease-back basis. Where that leaves the valuation, you know, it's a point in time. The reality is if we think that gilt rates are going to be coming down, interest rates come down over the next few years, it is likely that valuation, you know, will go up over that time period as you expect. I think the other point to note is that we have been achieving probably better than this range, you know, historically. So it feels like there's some upward pressure on valuations. Anyway, you can see that evidence kind of coming through. So over the last kind of like year or so, we've had some very strong You've seen some in the presentation as well. We've given some examples. They aren't necessarily fully typical, but, you know, I feel confident that this is a sensible valuation, probably at the prudent end of things, and I'm happy, you know, with the valuation going forward.

Thanks, Jafar.

Thank you.

Thank you. Okay, so I think I'll thank you. Just a few words for me to close the call. I mean, you know, we've got a super clear plan. We're executing well. We've got a return to market growth in the U.K., Our vertical integrated model, brand strength, and market-leading guest proposition, we're delivering positive life-like sales momentum, and we're maintaining our position as a market leader. In Germany, our growing estate, the increasing maturity of that estate, and the increasing maturity of the brand, means we are on track to reach profitability this year and deliver £70 million of PBT by full year 30. Whilst we're encouraged by our current trading performance, we remain focused on the things we can control. We're executing our five-year plan at pace. That five-year plan is focused on driving sales, increasing margins, and delivering attractive financial returns, and we feel very confident in our ability to do that. Thank you for listening, and do come back to the IR team. You know where we all are, should you have any further questions. Thank you.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you all very much for joining, and you may now disconnect.