Autotrader Group Plc

As usual, I'm joined by our COO, Catherine, and our CFO, Jamie. Before we get to results, I wanted to take a moment to thank our chair, Ed Williams, who will step down following this year's AGM as he approaches the end of his third three-year term as chair. Ed has been exceptional, not just for me personally or for past and present executive teams, but for the board, employees, shareholders, and wider stakeholders as well. He's not one to seek the limelight from it, but he has diligently worked for the good of AutoTrader year in and year out for over a decade now. So thank you, Ed. Following a comprehensive search and selection process led by our senior independent director, we have appointed Matt Davies as non-executive director, chair designate, who will become chair subject to shareholder approval immediately following our AGM in September. Matt is an experienced chair, board member and CEO of both private and public companies, including roles as the CEO of Tesco in the UK, Halfords and Pets at Home. Matt is also chair at Greggs PLC, where he was appointed in August 2022. Now for results. Well, a lot has happened this financial year, much of which feels a distant memory. We've had three prime ministers, four chancellors, an ill-fated growth plan, rising energy prices, broad-based inflation, industrial action, passing of a monarch. But despite all this disruption, the used car market has remained robust, albeit with supply constraints driven by years of limited new car supply. This, combined with strong demand, has meant that most of our customers have continued to experience very positive trading conditions. And these years of constrained new car supply will feed into the used car market for younger vehicles, so whilst demand remains strong, these positive trading conditions are likely to continue for some time. From AutoTrader's perspective, I'm proud of the progress that we've made this year, which is credit to the hard work of the teams right across the business and the partnerships that we're building with customers. With that, we'll start with some highlights from the year. In our core marketplace, we've grown revenue by 9%, operating profit by 10%, and maintained 70 operating profit margins. We have more buyers on AutoTrader, more retailers working with us, and our annual price and package event in both April 2022 and 2023 went well. This, combined with continued upsell of our higher-level packages, saw retailer revenue grow 10% year on year. We're seeing increased engagement with our platform solutions, which is helping to improve the quality and speed of our customers' advertising engines they need to make every day. We've launched and started to scale our deal builder journey for used cars and integrated new car leasing offers into AutoTrader. During this financial year, we had 200 completed deal builder transactions. But as we're scaling up, we've done over that number in just the first two months of this financial year. We have confidence that the software and experiences that we've built are both scalable to thousands of customers and will enable us to maintain our capital light model and operational cost profile. As we did at the half year results, following the acquisition of Autorama, we're now reporting segmented results for Autotrader and Autorama. As mentioned earlier, our core auto trader business grew profits double digit and maintained 70% operating profit margins despite continued investment in new products and wider inflationary pressures. Autorama losses were as expected given challenging new car supply, which we have mitigated to some extent through accelerating integration and a diligent approach to costs. The industry changes we are seeing continue to give us confidence that the online sales channel will be increasingly important to OEMs, and it's a capability we now have in Autorama, having transacted almost 7,000 new cars this financial year. Given the disposal of WebZone and deferration on the Autorama acquisition, we have provided adjusted measures to retain clarity on the underlying performance of our business, which does include the trading performance of Autorama. On this adjusted basis, Group EBITDA grew 7% and EPS 6%. Our teams have also delivered solid operating results. We continue to see more people using AutoTrader, particularly in the second half of the year, which is on top of the very strong growth we saw last year. Retailer numbers held at last year's high levels and ARPA grew 10% year-on-year, driven by price and product, with the stock lever remaining flat. Physical stock on site was up 2%. As mentioned earlier, Autorama delivered 6,895 new vehicles on lease and over 60% of those were cars. Then finally, EFT have grown 21% on an average basis, which is mostly due to the acquisition of Autorama. And finally, our cultural KPIs. We are pleased that 90% of employees are proud to work at AutoTrader, and our Glassdoor rating is 4.5 out of 5. This is a huge credit to the hard work that all our people put into building a culture that's unique, enabling, and fulfilling. We've got plenty of work to do when it comes to diversity. We are making good progress. This year, the percentage of female and ethnically diverse employees, both in total and in leadership positions, increased, and our board continues to be majority female. On carbon emissions, we're aiming to be net zero across our value chain by 2040, and have had our near and long-term targets and plans approved by the Science Based Targets Initiative. For a fair comparison for 2023, we have rebased financial year 2022 as if Autorama was in the group. This is largely the reason for our emissions being down year on year as Autorama had less vehicles pass through its balance sheet in 2023 compared to 2022. I'll now hand over to Jamie to talk through the financials in more detail.

Thanks, Nathan, and good morning, everyone. We'll start with the core auto trader financials. Total auto trader revenue increased by 9% to $473 million. Trade revenue increased by 10%, with the largest component of this being retailer revenue, which also grew by 10%. The year-on-year encouraging results of retailers continuing to see value in advertising on our marketplace and taking additional products. The average number of retailer forecourts advertising on our platform was broadly flat at 13,913, although when accounting for the disposal of WebZone, retailers were up 1% versus prior year. Average revenue per retailer increased by 10% year-on-year, to £2,437, with more details given on the following slide. Also within trade, we've seen an increase in home trade of pay-as-you-go listings, which increased 15%, alongside smaller growth in other trade revenue. Consumer services revenue increased by 4% in the year. Private revenue, which is largely from individual sellers who pay to advertise their vehicle on AutoTrader, increased by 11%, but was partially offset by motor income revenue, which decreased 8%. Instant offer contributed $0.8 million, which is included within private revenue. Finally, revenue from manufacturing agency customers was flat year on year, as new car advertising continued to be impacted by new car supply shortages. Now on to ARPA, live car stock, and retailers. ARPA increased by 10% year-on-year, with the average revenue per retailer generated at £2,437 per month. The chart on the left shows the components that contribute to the movement in ARPA compared to the prior year. As you can see, in 2023, ARPA was driven by both the product and price levers, with the stock lever being flat. We delivered our annual pricing event on 1st April 2022, which included additional products but also a like-for-like price increase. The price lever contributed £90 to total ARPA, equating to an effective increase of just over 4%. Products contributed £137 of ARPA growth. Of this growth, broadly half was due to retailers purchasing more of our prominent products, which included our high-yielding Enhanced Super and Ultra packages, where penetration increased to 33%, Our market extension product, allowing retailers to sell outside of their local area, with 7% of retailer stock on the product on March 2023. And finally, there was also some contribution from our pay-per-click product, where retailers can boost visibility of their stock in our search listings through pay-per-click campaigns. The other half of the product lever was made up from our AutoTrader Connect retail essentials product, included in our annual pricing events, and also some smaller contributions from auto convert finance and data products. Turning then to stock, it's important to note that the stock lever is not driven by livestock, but by the number of paid retailer stock units. You'll see on the right hand chart that the number of live cars advertised on AutoTrader increased by 2% year on year. As usual, we strip out the impact of new cars and provide underlying used car livestock the darker of the two lines, which increased by 3% on average across the year. Much of this increase came from a higher volume of private leverage, which has no impact on retailer revenue and therefore no impact on the stock lever, which was flat in the year. On to costs and operating profit for auto traders' core business. Total auto trade across increased by 8%, Within that, people costs increased by 6%. The increase in people costs was driven by an increase in average number of full-time equivalent employees to 900 NICs and an increase in underlying salary costs. Marketing spend increased by 9% in the year. Other costs increased by 15%. This increase was primarily due to higher costs associated with completing the buy-in of our legacy defined benefit pension scheme return of travel, and higher office and people-related costs. Depreciation and amortization decreased by 7%. As a reminder, levels of capex and depreciation are not a reflection of low levels of investment in our business. In addition to our investment in cloud-based services, We have over 350 people in products and technology who are continuously improving our platforms and developing new products for consumers and retailers, the costs for which are taken in full through our income statement in people costs. AutoTrader operating profit increased by 10% to $332.9 million, and operating profit margins remained flat at . Our share of profit generated by dealer auction, the group's joint venture, decreased 14% to 2.5 million in the year due to lower levels of auction activity as a result of supply constraints. Having covered the auto trader part of the business, we'll now move to the Autorama business. The acquisition completed on the 22nd of June 2022, and so the results represent just over nine months of trading. Autorama revenue was $27.2 million, with vehicle and accessory sales contributing $16 million, and commission and ancillary revenue contributing $11.2 million. The Autorama business delivered circa 700 vehicles, which were temporarily taken on balance sheet in the reported period, which represented just over 10% of total vehicles delivered. The cost of these vehicles is taken through cost of goods sold, with the corresponding revenue in vehicle and accessory sales. Total deliveries amounted to 6,895 units, which comprised of over 4,000 cars, over 2,000 vans, and less than 500 pickups. Average commission and ancillary revenue per unit delivered was £1,624. On the cost side, we saw people costs of 10.5 million from the 209 FTEs employed on average since acquisition. The contribution to the group's average number of FTEs in the year was 164. The remaining costs of marketing, other costs, and DNA totaled $12.2 million. The Autorama operating segment made a loss of $11.2 million, which is in line with the guidance given in November. Work on the integration of Autorama is progressing, and we're very focused on significantly reducing the current annualized operating losses in 2024. With auto trader operating profit increasing by 10% from $32.9 million, Autorama losses of $11.2 million, and group central costs which relate to the deferred consideration of Autorama and the amortization of acquired intangibles of $44.1 million, group operating profit declined by 9% to $277.6 million, and group operating profit margin was 55%. We continue to deliver strong cash flows consistently over time. and it's worth emphasizing the strong cash signature of our business leaves us well-placed to return surplus cash to shareholders. Cash generated from operations is $327.4 million for the year. The statutory income statement outlines areas beyond our revenue and operating costs. Net finance costs increased to $3.1 million due to the increased utilization of our revolving credit facility. We recently amended this facility, reducing our commitment to $200 million and extending it until February 2028. Our profit before tax was $293.6 million, 2% lower than 2022, with the decrease being better than operating profit, predominantly due to the $19.1 million profit on disposal from the sale of WebZone. The group tax charge of $59.7 million represents an effective tax rate of 20%. This was marginally higher than the average standard rate due to the Autorama deferred consideration charge being non-deductible. Basic EPS decreased by 2%, which was slightly better than the profit after tax, with less shares in issue following our share buyback program. And finally, the directors are recommending a final dividend of 5.6 pence per share, giving total dividends for the year of 8.4 pence per share. Moving now to net bank debt and capital allocation. Year end, the group had drawn 60 million of its syndicated revolving credit facility and held cash of 16.6 million, resulting in net bank debt of 43.4 million. During the year, a total of 25.3 million shares were purchased for a consideration of 147.3 million at an average price of 582 pence. A further 77.7 million was paid in dividends giving a total of $225 million of cash out to shareholders. The group's long-term capital allocation policy remains unchanged, continuing to invest in the business, enabling it to grow, while returning around one-third of net income to shareholders in the form of dividends. Following these activities, any surplus cash will be used to continue our share buyback program and steadily reduce growth indebtedness. It's the Board's long-term intention that the group will return to a net cash position. To conclude the financials, I'll now hand over to Catherine to talk through the market dynamics and progress against our strategic priorities.

Thank you, Jamie, and good morning, everyone. Moving on to slide 16 and looking at new car and light commercial vehicle registrations in the UK back to financial year 2016. On the chart we have highlighted for the five years prior to the pandemic, we saw on average a new car and LCV market of 2.8 million registrations each year. However, since the pandemic, the new vehicle market has been impacted by well-documented supply chain challenges. These challenges continued into financial year 2023, where the new car and LCV market remained 29% behind the pre-pandemic five-year average. This means that in the past three years, we have missed out on around 2.5 million new car registrations that we would have expected to happen. This impacts our new car stock product and our Autorama business, but also the flow of cars into the used car market. While levels of supply remain constrained, the availability of stock is improving very gradually. New car registrations in Q4 of our financial year saw 18% growth year on year. There are two other dynamics worth calling the new car vehicle market. The first is that we see manufacturers bringing more electric cars to market ahead of the 2030 deadline. In the financial year, 16.5% of new car registrations were battery electric, up three percentage points year on year. This will start to flow into the used car market over the coming years. We have also seen two new manufacturers enter the UK market in the last year, BYD and Aura, focusing light on new electric vehicles. This provides consumers with even more choice. The second dynamic is manufacturers changing their distribution models and operating under an agency agreement for new cars. Rather, risks and rewards of retailing substantially remain with the manufacturer rather than being passed on to the retailer. The retailer continues to act as a distributor and self-support agent in the transaction, but does not control the price or advertising of the call. We are working closely with brands who are moving to an agency model. We are either already working with them today or will be live with them soon, retailing new cars on Autotrader. We continue to invest in our partnerships with manufacturers, and we believe these changes overall present more opportunities than risks to our business. Moving on then to think about used car transactions, the UK car park and the fleet of transactions. Starting first with used car transactions. Used car transactions were 8% below 2022 levels at £6.9 million for financial year 2023. As we have shown on the chart, this was around 1 million transactions below the pre-pandemic five-year average. This year, we saw differences in the two halves. as many of you will have seen in our monthly market intelligence reports. In the first half, demand on auto trades down compared with H1 2022, and the DVLA reported used car transactions back 15% year on year. This was lasting a very strong comparative period in the summer of 2021, when the UK exited lockdown and we saw record months for used car transactions in the UK. By contrast, in the second half of financial year 2023, we continue to see demand metrics improve year on year. And although supply tightened, used car transactions in the second half were actually up marginally year on year. On the right-hand side of the slide, we have shown two metrics, the car park and the transaction rates. We only have this data available for the calendar year 2022. By the car park, we are referring to the total number of cars on UK roads. You will see that this number grew slightly in 2022, with new car transactions marginally ahead of the scrappage rate. The second number on the chart on the right-hand side is the transaction rate. This shows how regularly each car changes hands in the UK and is calculated by taking the combined new and used car transactions volume in the year and dividing it into the car park. Prior to the pandemic, we saw the transaction rate sit consistently between three and three and a half years. However, since the pandemic, driven by the lack of supply, seen this number rise to between 3.8 and 4.2 years. As new car supply gradually returns, we expect the frequency of transactions will speed up again. On to slide 18, and used car pricing. We continue to publish a monthly price index of cars advertised by retailers on AutoTrader, the results of which are shown in this chart. The dark blue line on the chart shows the average of a used vehicle advertised since April 2014. The lighter blue bar charts show the like-for-like year-on-year price movements and are therefore not impacted by mix adjustments. You can see on the chart that average used car prices rose to around £17,500, a 12% like-for-like pricing growth over the full year. The lighter blue bar chart illustrates the monthly data. For the first nine months, we saw the growth rate rises slow, but it has picked up again in the last quarter as demand has outstripped supply, a trend we continue to see into financial year 2024. One of the key metrics we monitor for retailers is days to sell. The quicker a retailer can sell their used cars, the more profitable they will usually be. Over the whole year, we saw retailers turn their cars two days quicker than pre-pandemic norms. We exceed resilient used car pricing through financial year 2024 and good days to sell performance for retailers. Let's move on to consider progress against the strategic goals we talked to at the Investor Day last summer. As Nathan mentioned at the start, during 2023, we have made good progress against each of our three strategic priorities. Our core classified marketplace to grow as evidenced by site visits, retailer numbers, and adoption of products and services. We executed a successful product and pricing event with the launch of our first AutoTrader Connect module, Retail Essentials, in April 2022. This enabled retailers to use AutoTrader taxonomy, our market-leading underlying vehicle reference database, to create accurate adverts in their existing systems, with real-time stock updates between retailers and AutoTrader to drive better operational efficiency and an improved consumer experience. Retailers continue to take up more of our prominence products despite a buoyant market backdrop. This gives us some confidence that we can continue to grow uptake of prominence even in a robust market. On the Newcastle side, the number of retailers on our Newcastle stock products grew by over 100 retailers despite the loss of retailers that have moved to agency. This sets us up well into financial year 2024 as we expect to see new car stock gradually return. Our data and platform is increasingly important for our retailers and partners, and we have seen strong adoption of our data and technology services from industry technology providers, retailers, and manufacturers. As we did last financial year, we have embedded a new AutoTrader Connect module into this, which I will talk to shortly. We are also making progress in bringing more of the car buying journey online, both with the growth of DealBuilder and the work we are doing to integrate Autorama. We'll cover a few brief highlights on both shortly. Over the year, consumer engagement has remained strong. We have maintained our position as the UK's largest and most engaged automotive marketplace for new and used cars. with our share of total minutes among our main competitor set as measured by ComScore remaining strong at over 75%. We were seven times larger than our nearest competitor. Over the year, we saw cross-platform visits increase 1% year-on-year. However, it's important to appreciate the differences in performance in the two halves. You'll recall that at our half-year results, our audience was back 10%, and yet we have finished the full year up 1%. This is due to a very strong second half, with record-breaking consumer engagement in January and then again in March, with included in the appendix a slide which shows our year-on-year audience performance by month. Both visits and minutes were up significantly versus pre-pandemic levels, up 24% and 16% respectively versus 2020. The chart on the right-hand side shows shows the total minutes spent across an expanded set of retailers and manufacturers. It shows that we continue to have a significant lead in terms of both volume and engagement against both our closest competitors and all other marketplace participants. Our traditional competitors have not changed significantly over the past few years, and we have not seen new entrants or players exiting the market. We continue to be significantly larger than those retailers who are large enough to appear in all manufacturer websites combined. Moving on to consider electric vehicles, a growing and increasingly important part of our core marketplace. We are focused on extending our lead wherever we can as the industry migrates and car buyers switch to electric vehicles. On the supply side, you can see that the share of electric new car registrations is growing, albeit slowly. The share of used car transactions is accelerating, but from a very low base. We offer consumers the widest choice of electric cars, with over double that offered by our nearest competitors. We have continued to see growth in demand for electric vehicles. You can see on the third chart the growth in the share of engagement with zero to five-year-old used electric cars. In 2019, just one in 100 advert views were for electric cars. Now it is one in. This is a good signal of the level of consumer interest in making the switch. We continue to invest in content to ensure we are the number one destination for car buyers interested in purchasing an electric vehicle. There are still a number of barriers for buyers looking to make the switch, and we have an important role to play in breaking these down. We are focused on informing consumers about electric vehicles through our social media channels and are working to raise through our monthly electric vehicle giveaway, which has achieved over 3.6 million entries this year. We have also improved electric vehicle charging information to help give consumers simpler, more consistent information to make informed decisions. We are working closely with a wide range of stakeholders to share our data on electric vehicles. This includes retailers, manufacturers, funders, the energy and charging sector and government to ensure they have the data they need to make informed decisions on what is still a relatively nascent industry. Many of you will have seen our Road to 2030 report, which we issue three times a year, and if you haven't, we've included a link to it and other market reports in the appendix. This is becoming the go-to source of information on progress, barriers and a call to action for the industry and the government on what still needs to be done to support the transition. We will continue to play an active role in driving change for the industry and shaping an electric future for car buyers. We continue to invest in the technology, data, and product platform which supports our core marketplace. As part of the April 2022 event, we launched AutoTrader Connect Retail Essentials, which enables real-time stock management and makes our vehicle taxonomy available to retailers through our own portal or our platform via APIs. We've also used Retail Essentials to ensure that imagery and video content is always up to date. At the end of March 2023, we had integrations with over 90 partners. As part of our April 2023 pricing event, we launched the second module of AutoTrader Connect, Valuations. This makes our live retail specification-adjusted valuations available for retailers. This data is unique to AutoTrader, based on the over half a million observations we see each day across our platforms daily. and our algorithms, which capture and learn from these observations and share the latest live market data back to retailers and buyers through our price flags on AutoTrader. For retailers, there are multiple benefits to pricing to live retail market data. Surfacing this data enables retailers to optimize, improve speed of sales, and drive performance in their businesses. For car buyers, it also provides a consistent, central, and importantly, a transparent view of pricing, which is an important step to support buyers to complete more of the buying journey online. This data can be accessed either through Portal or our API platform, enabling third parties and retailers to directly integrate valuations into the systems they use to manage their businesses. These modules are an important part of how we are enabling retailers to use our platform to power their businesses, which strengthens our marketplace and is a key enabler for digital retailing. Moving then to talk to the outer ring of our strategy, digital retailing. Our approach to digital retailing is to be car first. and to enable tailors, including manufacturers and leasing companies, to sell their vehicles online. With this goal in mind, we will initially offer two digital retailing consumer journeys on AutoTrader, a used car deal-builder journey and an online retailing journey for consumers to lease a new car. Let's take them in turn. Firstly, our deal-builder product shown on the slide. DealBuilder uses AutoTrader technology to enable car buyers to do their car buying journey online, including valuing their past exchange, applying for finance and reserving the car. Importantly, all of these interactions can easily be carried out either online, over the phone or in person at the dealership. Currently, these tools are available in our AutoTrader retailer portal. but over time they will be made available via APIs as part of our platform strategy, enabling these transactions to be picked up through the existing sales systems and processes. In summer 2022, we started a deal-builder trial with a handful of retailers, and we've been encouraged by how the trial has performed to date. Towards the end of the year, we started to gradually scale the number of customers on the product and so by the end of the financial year, there were over 50 retailers live. We saw over 200 deals submitted in the year and have delivered over that number in the first two of this financial year. We are encouraged by the percentage of deals that have converted into a sale and the positive feedback from both buyers and retailers. We're seeing strong buyer engagement out of retail hours seven days a week, which supports the case that this should build sales capacity for our retailer partners. We will continue to scale the number of retailers on DealBuilder and iterate the product during this financial year, with the goal to monitor some retailers by the end of financial year 2024. Secondly, let's briefly consider our new vehicle leasing journey. As we've talked about before, there are significant structural changes impacting the new vehicle market in the UK. These changes present us with an opportunity to play a more significant role in the new vehicle market and were part of the strategic rationale behind the acquisition of Autorama, which completed during the financial year. During the latter part of 2023, we began to work to integrate Autorama and successfully tested driving traffic into the Autorama journey. In the past few weeks, we have completed the work to enable the full checkout of a leasing deal on Autotrader. By bringing our brand, the scale of our platform, and continued product improvements throughout financial year 2024, we are confident that new car leasing sales will grow, whilst also delivering efficiencies in consumer acquisition costs. I'll hand back now to Nathan to summarise the outlook for 2024.

Thank you, Catherine. Now for the outlook. We have a healthy core business with a good runway for growth, which we continue to prioritise and focus on. In parallel, we're strengthening that core by increasing engagement with our platform solutions and growing the number of retailers using our digital retailing capabilities in deal builder and new car leasing. For this reason, we have confidence in the year and years ahead. This financial year we expect another good year of growth in trade revenues with similar ARPA growth to FY23, once again driven by price and product. We expect a slight decline in retailer numbers which is mainly due to the disposal of our business. The smaller areas of the auto trader business are expected to be flat to low single digit growth year on year. We are, as Jamie said, looking to significantly reduce Autorama losses through leveraging the Autotrader brand and platform to transact more new cars on lease deals and to limit costs. Group central costs, which solely relate to the Autorama acquisition, will fall from £44.1 million to £18 million. These changes, combined with maintaining core Autotrader margins at 70%, mean group margins will increase year on year. Finally, our capital policy remains unchanged. So that concludes the presentation. We'll now move to Q&A with analysts in the room. As I always say, could we please try and keep the questions down just to make sure we can get around to everyone. Jamie will coordinate.

Yes, we start with Giles and work on the front and then work our way back.

I don't think it's on. There it is. Good morning. It's Charles Small from Jefferies. First question is on digital retailing and deal builder. It would be interesting to know, of the 200 cars that went into deal builder in the last financial year, how far did they get through the process before being handed back to the forecourt? And secondly, on monetization, you've been quite coy, for want of a better word, around how you're going to monetize deal builder. But if you had monetized DealBuilder in the way you're thinking about monetizing DealBuilder, what would the incremental revenue from those 200 cars have been? And second question, sticking with digital retailing but turning to C2B marketplaces, obviously. a very popular topic at the moment. We've spoken about today, or you've spoken today, about some of the constraints that dealers have on guests through the traditional channels. So CTV marketplaces seem to be increasingly relevant, and Motorway is out there with Motorway Pay now, which is addressing some of the scalability issues. So it looks like they're here to stay. I guess one for you, Nathan, what's your latest thinking on the role auto trade can play there?

Do you want to take the first one?

Yeah, I can take the first one. To share around, Catherine can even take the third one. So on those 200 transactions and the 200 we talked about that have happened in the first two months of this year, those transactions have been completed. Now, completed from a deal builder perspective means ultimately that they've paid a reservation fee for the car. It doesn't mean you've necessarily done a part exchange quote and finance quote. So I'd say the majority of them, the reservation is the key aspect. but many of them will go through parts of the other processes. So we're seeing quite a lot of people will get to the point of checking their eligibility for finance, finding that it's all right, but then wanting to go and see the car before they go to the reef. That's why the bill has been so complex is because we've designed it so that actually the consumer can be provided that we get to that end point of reservation. And that's kind of the flag to us that a sales kind of, highly likely, then we're okay if the rest of it doesn't necessarily go all the way through because that can then be picked up by the retailer in our systems and completed on the forecourt. So all of those transactions have been through that. It's fair to say the work that we haven't necessarily done yet is there's a much higher number that have gone into DealBuilder and haven't necessarily got to that completion point which is quite normal in these processes but we think there's still quite a bit that we can do given the complexity of the car buying journey and the propensity that we see or the desire people have to do more more of that online but we're pretty happy actually i think with um with how conversions kind of looking and how it's being picked up in dealerships

Yeah, I'd like to say that. So I think, you know, we obviously tried to lay it out a little bit at the investor day that we gave in September. I think, and I don't think there's anything significantly changed from what we've learned from then to now. You know, the belief is that a charging model is likely to be more transactional than subscription. So a charge based on a deal being complete, which Nathan said is, is what the 200 number is. We talked about an average yield equivalent to what we get on advertising subscriptions, say, to 120. So, you know, just to manage expectations, you're only looking at sort of 20 grand from those 200 sort of early days. But that's still how to think about it. I think that's still the kind of quantum. Obviously, we're going to learn more through the next six months, as Catherine said in the presentation. The target is still, it's unlikely to be big bang all customers, but some of these customers that we're bringing on at this stage look to monetize in the last quarter of this financial year.

On C2B, at a very big picture level, the thing that we care about the most is that those cars or vehicles end up staying in our ecosystem, that they end up back on retailers' forecourts. And that's very much what those models are facilitating. The market backdrop, you're right, Giles, has been very favourable and it has had a very constrained supply environment, which means sourcing has been a top priority for dealers and we've had a backdrop of for consumers where car valuations have been going up and so awareness of the value of their car has definitely is heightened so they are more likely to be shopping around for the different ways to to sell so consumers i think the different options you can part exchange a car with a retailer you can sell it to a buying service you can go to one of the c2b models or you can sell privately we still continue to very much dominate the top of the funnel for all of those journeys. So our valuations journey on AutoTrader still sees the highest volume of any of those peers. the vast majority of consumers are still coming to Autotrader to validate and check their valuation. We then obviously today offer them a private selling journey. We offer them a route into that part exchange journey with a retailer, and we have a small instant offer proposition. Our priority is continuing to own that valuation space with consumers and to be the authority, the trusted authority on where you value your car. I think that means there's options in the future as to the other roles that we could play in in the ecosystem to then perhaps connect up a bit more the buying of cars for retailers as well. But overall, the cars are ending up back with our retailers. So for now, we're seeing, and retailers I think are seeing it, as a useful source of supply in what is still a very constrained market backdrop.

Just a quick follow-up on the deal-builder question. Just by way of follow-up on the question, I appreciate it's very, very early doors, but are any of those 50 dealers saying they're thinking about reallocating human resources within the dealership as a result of the product?

Probably not. We've just done a big piece of research on this. We've both the deal builder and other retailers. I think so far... The way retailers talk about it is that it's adding an extra salesperson. It's enabling them to do more same resources. So with their physical forecourt footprint and with the sales team they have, they can sell more cars without needing to scale their cost base. first still at the moment, a relatively small sample of the retailers saying, I've embraced these processes and actually it's meant that these people that used to be doing this job are now doing something else or have been able to reallocate resources or even reduce resources. We are hearing that, but it's in the minority of cases. For more, they're talking about the platform for future growth rather than an immediate and direct cost-cutting opportunity today. But I think that reflects the scale of as well at the moment. We're growing and scaling the pilot, but for any individual retailer, it's still the minority of their transactions that are going through that journey. I think as that percentage grows, the efficiency and the operational cost argument probably grows as well.

I think it's Adam Berlin from UBS. I've got a couple of questions. So 10% ARPA growth in FY23 and guidance for similar in FY24 is 10% ARPA growth for new normal. And if you can keep doing that, they're upside to the 70% margins in the core business, if you can deliver that. And the second question is, can you just take us through the product ARPA elements for FY24? I think it's about 6% roughly of the 10. How much of that is the event and how much of that is Google and other products? Thanks.

Yeah, I can take both of those. So I'm not sure 10% in core marketplace ARPA growth is the new normal. We sort of said at IPO that we believed it was possible to do consistently mid to high single digit, and that's what we've delivered on. I think, you know, we've clearly had a couple of very strong or a strong year with an expectation of another one, but I'd still be saying long-term core marketplace ARPA mid to high single digit we did say the investor day that we hate the digital retailing deal builder could be incremental on top of that um but you know i think we would need to find out you know it's not going to be an fy24 we need to see you know how to answer the question how that product develops to have real conviction over that And then the second question, the product lever, is a very similar breakdown to this year. So about half of that we expect to be made from prominence products, which is package upsell, market extension, the pay-per-click product. Much of the other half made up from the event product. And again, some smaller contributions from auto-convert finance data and, you know, we've kind of gave a number in Charles's answer, you know, deal will hopefully have some contribution, but not at a meaningful level.

Hi, it's Will Becker from P&P. Free for me, please. Firstly, you've guided for flat stock upper. Could you help us think about the sort of medium term stock upper outlook? We're now annualizing, or we're three years on from the very weak new car market of COVID. And I imagine, therefore, that the supply constraints are a factor. Is flat stock ARPA a good outcome on a three-year view from here? And what are the implications for general ARPA growth? Can you sort of use the price sleeper a bit harder to compensate for that? Or am I being too pessimistic? Secondly... Within the early experimentation deal builder, could you talk through how car finance is progressing? How are you ensuring the interest of the dealer? Typically, digitally savvy dealers make less on the metal and more on the finances at a point of contention or tension. Any early indications as to how you're monetizing that at this stage, or is it an optionality in the future? um and then just coming back on the operating leverage point of the core auto trader um how should we think that in the kind of longer term do you have the capacity margins further rules is future growth to be reinvested thanks should i go first and third you can take the second um so yeah so flat flat

Flat stock ARPA for this year expectation, I think people track and monitor the livestock listings very closely. Everyone will be aware that it was quite weak coming into the end of the last financial year and was weak in April and May, started some signs of improvement but still down year on year. And you mentioned the kind of historic view. We have been historically much higher volumes of stock. So I think the hope is we started at a weaker level. We hope it will improve through the year, netting off to be flat. But I think the hope, if you think FY25-26, is that it might only be small, but that stock is a small net positive over that time horizon, just on the basis of being a historian and having a belief that it improves at some point. The only sort of caveat is, you know, customers have held these lower inventory volumes for such a long period of time. Is it the new normal? So that's why I'd caveat it. There might only be a small uplift to that stock ARPA. And, you know, we've seen some big swings over the years. I would be cautious about assuming a big tailwind to ARPA. And I don't think we're expecting to kind of offset anything through price. Price is sort of dealt with independently when we're thinking about the event. We're thinking about the value we're putting into packages. We're thinking about the value we've delivered over the 12-month period. So that will continue to be done in isolation from what happens with the other two levers.

Yeah, and the only observation I'd add to that, as you'll remember, at the time of the IPO, we kind of said the mid to high single-digit growth, of which a third would come from stock, a third would come from product, a third would come from price. Well, we're not doing that anymore, and we're still kind of achieving the overall growth rates, just more than obviously. I think we've definitely got a good cadence around product, and we're pretty clear on the products that look good at selling and the products that are a bit harder to push. On finance, I mean... Starting with the last question first, in terms of monetization, as it is at the moment, we're fully focused on the bundled product that is DealBuilder. So it is part exchange, it is finance, and it all finishes with a reservation. thought previously and had standalone trials around finance but when you think of the product of finance in order to work out what you need to finance you need to understand the value of the part exchange and normally put down a deposit which sounds a lot like a reservation so actually finance itself sounds a lot like digital retailing. So I think it falls into the answer that Jamie gave around deal builder more generally. And I would say specifically finances where retailers do make quite a lot of the money. So you are right. I think my dealers won't make much money on the metal margin if you like, and they'll make it all on the finance. But even if you're making money on the metal margin, you're still making a lot on the finance as well. So I would argue that it's a bit of the process that's most complicated. It's a bit of the process people would quite like to do at home and not beholden to one lender in the dealership. It feels like it's a place where we could add a lot of value for consumers and a lot of value as auto trader. And for that reason, I think it will be pretty important when it comes to monetizing deal. But in terms of its attractiveness to retailers, I'd say Most retailers are wanting to sell finance if they're kind of licensed. I think there's an opportunity for us to look at retailers that can't currently operate finance because they're not regulated. although that feels like it's a little bit down the track. For the retailers that are very heavily finance orientated, actually our proposition at the moment isn't quite right. And that's because not only are they dependent on finance, but any of you that have bought a car recently will have been sold gap insurance or at least been propositioned gap insurance warranty. Those value added products are quite important to them as well. So I think those retailers might well come on with finance. but they'll be even more interested if we can help them bundle in or present those other products to consumers as well because the combination of those other two or three products can be as big as finance.

The only thing to say on finance is that obviously we're now with 19 of the retailers, lenders. about 40, 50% coverage, but we are working to get all of the lenders that all of our retailers work with integrated through that auto trader platform capability so that we can offer any retailer combination of lenders that they work with. So it's very much the retailer's finance partner and product that we are promoting through the auto trader journey on our side.

And just on margins, the So group margins will improve because you've got the group central cost diminishing and the losses also diminishing. I think at an auto trader level, the guide is to hold flat at 70%. I think it's fair to say that a lot of the growth that's coming through ARPA does come through a higher margin. But I think with where we are with DealBuilder, with the 50 customers that we put on, we're pleased by the tech generation. scales. I think with only 50, we're still a bit cautious around the sales resource that's required. There's actually a relatively low touchpoint from a consumer's perspective that we're at such low levels. I think we just want to hold that if we need to put more cost in to make that a success, we can do that within 70% margin guide, and we just want to make sure that we're not under-committing on that front before we really know what it looks like at any kind of scale.

Actually, and just coming back on the lock-up, is the way to think about it that supply will make constraints, but demand will normalise, and therefore that's good for inventory levels?

I think we hope, because of the volume of transactions that have been lost over this last three-year period, that demand remains reasonably robust, and it's actually better volumes of new car registrations that then freeze up part exchange, freeze up leasing, ageing leasing inventory that comes into the retail space as much. Thank you, Robert.

Good morning. Ben Shelley here from Credit Suisse. Just two for me. A number of OEMs are already making changes to their sale and distribution models, which include a pivot to an agency model or even online direct-to-consumer models. How do you see this impacting your customer base? And I guess on a related note, are you seeing any signs of consolidation in the new or even used retail space?

So on agency and new cars, so I think it's worth saying firstly that only about 50% to 60%, about half of manufacturers have currently said that they are either moving to or are looking at moving to an agency model. So it's not all manufacturers for all makes models of cars. We're also seeing from the new entrants, particularly from the Chinese new brands, many of them are actually adopting the traditional franchise model. rather than moving to agencies, so a new car market is still going to be characterised by a mix of different retailing models. In terms of what it means for our retailers, firstly I think it means, helpfully perhaps for us, they are undoubtedly going to be more and more focused on their used car businesses. Building those out, we've seen the average franchise retailer extend the average age profile of the car that they're holding during the last few years, and I imagine we'll continue to see that growth. Also seeing for retailers where the manufacturers have moved to agency, they are still playing a very important role. They are still often helping with not paying for the advertising, helping with some of the practicalities of how you get adverts live, they're still very much hand-holding consumers through the journey, very involved in finance. For the brands that have gone live, the retailers are still owning the part exchange journey, for example. So a lot of the product parts of the journey that Nathan was just talking to are all very much still supported by and facilitated by the retailer. So we are seeing agency in terms of balance sheet position of retailers, relative risk. is clearly quite different, but actually the profit opportunity and the role that they are playing still remains important. Second question was then on consolidation. So we're actually still seeing the AM10 and the AM100, which is the top 10 biggest and the top 100 biggest groups in the UK. they continue to have a smaller share of the market today than they did five years ago. So actually, overall, our bigger customers are not getting proportionately bigger. That said, we have seen in the last year or so a number of acquisitions announced. We have seen some consolidation. And I think we do expect, particularly in the franchises, space as more brands move towards agency. Some of them are using that agency move to rationalize networks a bit, to drive consolidation of ownership, not necessarily of retailer locations, actually, but of the ownership structures and models. So I think we expect some net consolidation on the franchise side. When it comes to independent retailers, we continue to see the barriers to entry to that space being as low as ever. And we see new entrants emerging each month, new retailers, and I think we expect much to continue going forward.

Yeah, the only thing I would just very quickly add to that is I think In some ways, making sure those smaller retailers aren't left behind is a big part of our strategy, and there's an economic reason for that because they're a big part of our revenue base as well. But actually, one of the things that could have driven some level of consolidation is if you can get an advantage from a brand perspective, and that conversation's kind of changed, and auto trade is still kind of a leading way to get to those consumers which anyone can access. then there is, well, if this technology becomes easy to be able to sell online, then that could be another driver of consolidation. Actually, we're democratising that as well as part of the digital retailing strategy. And I think the by-product of that is that it's fragmentation and there's a few less barriers to entry, but we would think about it more, making sure the barriers to coming in are actually easy and the barriers to stay in the game for a lot of our customers that have been with us for years aren't kind of put up. Thank you.

I've got two.

The first one is to build on that question on consolidation and to ask if you could remind us a dilution you see on a per car basis if two dealers consolidate. I remember a chart you put up maybe five years ago, I could be wrong on that, but it kind of showed the distribution of cars and there was something like a 50% gap between expensive car and the least expensive car really of quite different types of dealers but help us understand how that distribution has changed and how we might think about the headwind to your revenue if we start to see consolidation yeah i can tell you that i mean i i generally don't think it's changed um

since we put that slide up. You do tend to find that the acquirer tends to, it's not always going to be the rule of thumb, but often tends to take higher level products. It might be slightly larger. So any kind of volume yield that's offset is often taken back by incremental product. So there is some headwind, but I don't think it's It has proven to be considerable at an individual customer level and the customer volumes are coming through at such a low level that we just haven't seen it in the numbers.

It is also worth saying that customers that tend to be consolidating tend to start by being big and they're looking for someone biggish because they want it to make a difference and our rate card is very steep through to 100 cars. but then it's not flat, but, I mean, it's noticeably flatter. So, actually, just the percentage difference between the price points as you get up above 100, 200, 300, 1,000 cars does tend to be much... Well, it's a lot smaller than the difference between, say, 5 to 20 cars, and the risk of consolidation down that end of the rate curve, I think, is very, very, like, impossible to almost make the argument for that, which Catherine Conner spilled out.

That's helpful. I mean, the second one is to... try and pin you down a bit more on fiscal 25, which I appreciate is still some way off. But the language he used at the CMB in September was that you would aspire to be growing double-digit because deal-builder would start to contribute incrementally. I don't think you're walking away from that, but Jamie's language was maybe a bit softer than I might have thought. expected so as it stands today based on what you see for deal builder how confident are you about quarter traders arpa growing double digit in fiscal 25. uh it's good it's a good question i mean i think

I don't think we're walking away from it. I think a lot on the kind of next six months of what we see from DealBuilder. We're really pleased with the progress that we made. We feel like we're moving things forward. There was commentary in the script around we got to a certain point at the end of March, but we've seen things pick up a little bit more in the first two months of this year. So I think that's The kind of mid-to-high single-digit ARPA rates for core marketplace feels achievable. And then DealBuilder will be contributing, in fact, to the fiscal 25 that may see us retain these kind of growth rates. But I think we just want to see what happens over the next six months. And, you know, you've got lots of other things in there. The stock, you know, what will the stock leave us in in 2025? You know, what will the event look like on the 1st of April 2024? There's some unknowns that I think pin us down on that double digit. I think we feel like we've got loads of the component parts that gives us a good chance of getting that. I don't think we feel we need to be pinned to it at this point in time.

We're trying.

Let's get a piece. Hey, it's B from Morgan Stanley. Three from me. So firstly, FTE is on the core platform. So I think you added a decent amount in the second half, especially given the divestment of WebZone. So can you sort of, what are your plans for adding still FTEs in 2024 from the second half levels? That's the first question. And maybe like, where are these people going? Also relates to the margin topic that has been discussed. Then the second question is on Google's vehicle listings. Have you heard anything regarding this, especially maybe from dealers? Are dealers asking questions about this? And any thoughts on this would be helpful. And then the last one is on Autorama. Can you give some kind of sense on to what degree has the Autotrader platform kind of boosted the KPIs that you see on Autorama or Vanorama. So whether you want to talk about traffic or volumes, like what share is now coming actually from the Autotrader platform as opposed to the Vanorama site?

So FTEs, so you're right, we've added... added a number into the auto trader FTE count. We do have, and have had for quite a long period of time, quite a large, I think by the scale of the organization as a whole, graduate and apprenticeship intake, and that's across the board into tech, into operations, into sales, and also the smaller support areas. So I think the bulk of the income has predominantly come through that area, although we're also always recruiting for developers for designers, for engineers across the spectrum, and a little bit more senior sales resource for onboarding deal builder, which is worth pointing out the early careers, because if you look at the average salary, it's maybe not as high as you'd expect because those people are diluting that on an average basis. But that's where the uplifts are coming from predominantly.

On Google and their vehicle listings, so yes, it's launched in the US, Canada, and Australia so far, and the product's supposed to be coming to the UK in 2024, so next year. In terms of Australia and the impact on us, perhaps first, and then talk about our customers, for us, the vast majority of our traffic, more than 90%, still comes directly to us. We don't pay for it, so we don't have a huge dependency on Google as a marketing channel yet. We also see on our platform, and I guess in automotive more generally, the fact that that taxonomy point and the very structured data set that we work with in automotive, typically consumers' search queries are relatively specific and they are looking very clearly for a certain type of make model and often a derivative level. And the ability to contextualize that and serve that up in one shopping position is quite different and difficult to other casks. We've obviously spent a lot of time with our peers in the markets where it has launched, and they haven't seen a particularly big impact either on their marketing mix or on their customers' marketing mix. For them, some of them have tested with substituting out some PPC spend to spend on Google Vehicle Ads. Typically, it's not performing as well yet as the PPC channels. In terms of our customers... We've not had any feedback from customers on it. I don't think either hugely excited or worried about it either way, but I'm sure they will consider it as another part of their marketing mix and potentially look to substitute out some PPC spend for the product. I think the performance of it... I feel is still very much to be proven. We haven't heard big feedback from those other markets that it's transformed how people search for cars or that it's delivering a dramatically different buyer journey from the one that we're seeing today.

Question on Autorama. I think the straight answer to your question is Autotrader today is a very meaningful contributor of traffic to Vanarama customers. their website, but it doesn't represent a majority of the transactions that are happening either there. And the transactions that are happening on AutoTrader aren't kind of the biggest chunk of those that are there. But I think that's more a function of the journey. Where we're heading to is the answer to your question will be all the transactions are driven by AutoTrader. It's just a matter of when. Where we are in terms of is we started with display-like advertising within AutoTrader's core search. So lots of volume, but generally a low converting unit. Then in parallel, we were building a checkout journey, which we've launched within the leasing, if you see the little leasing tab in AutoTrader. So low traffic, but very focused journey. And we've kind of done the technical tick. Yes, we can make that work and we can do an end-to-end transaction. The next obvious step is then, well, how do you put that checkout journey and those listings into the core AutoTrader search, proper experience in with all the customers? and that's when we'd expect to have the volume. So up until now, it's been more of a technical milestone that we've been looking, or technical and customer experience milestone that we've been trying to get over. But the fact that we're a driver, a very large driver of audience into their business with a unit we would consider to be very low converting gives us some encouragement that, yeah, we should be able to get there.

Yeah, thank you. Aaron, anybody?

Thank you. Bridie from Stiefel. Just one question. Following on from the, on Autorama, obviously supply issues are a bit of a headwind at the moment, but I was just wondering if you were able to kind of provide some context, perhaps sort of looking through that on the consumer's appetite in general for the leasing model at the moment, you know, rate rises, price changes and all that sort of stuff. Have you seen any, any shifts? I suppose what I'm getting at is, you know, what do you think it will take to get that business kind of humming?

I mean, I can take that one. Perhaps we can all add. So I think, and there was recently a McKinsey article on this as well, if you want to get an independent point of view. I think leasing is important. putting a lot of those things to one side. You take the interest rate head on. The alternative way people buy most new cars is PCP. So it is, again, influenced by the same factors as lease, which is residual value and interest rates. Leasing tends to be a little more cost effective, and that's because... On a PCP agreement, if you've got positive equity, you get the benefit of it. In a leasing deal, the leasing company gets the benefit of it. So they tend to be better. If you take the most extreme deals that Vanorama do, is that leasing companies and personal leasing particularly, those cars tend to be on terms from the manufacturers. So actually, your monthly payments will tend to be reasonably good. Now, I think where we're heading is that we want to just be able to offer that as a PCP or PCH, difference other than that change in ownership structure at the end. The other point with leasing that I think is going for particularly at this stage of the cycle is it does lend itself quite well to electric vehicles because a lot of consumers still have and from what we've seen in our data and what we've talked about in some of our market reports, they have good reason for this. There is uncertainty around residual values and completely takes that. completely takes that away. Then there's just the broader trend of we do believe, we don't necessarily think cars will move to full subscriptions and you'll change your car based on the weather outside. But we do think there is a good case to say more and more being bundled into a simple monthly payment would reduce the complexity and cognitive load that people tend to face when they're buying a car. And then leasing does that typically with service with insurance. and with the payment. So we would probably structurally, it's probably well positioned, but at the moment it is coming from a smaller place. So it is growing and has been growing over the last number of years, but from a smaller base.

Thank you.

Thanks. It's Kieran Dolly from Libram2 for myself, please. Just from the data that you see, is there any transactional frequency differential between EVs and ICEs? I think going forward in a market where there's a higher proportion of EVs, there's going to be structurally lower transactions. I think you've previously said the transition to deal builders analogous to going from a magazine to a website. I guess in terms of trial thus far. Have you seen anything that would suggest there's unrealized pain points in the user journey that's going to make it easier or more difficult transition relative to magazine to online journey?

I think the EV question. On EVs, I think if we looked at the data set today, we'd see a slightly higher transaction frequency, but that's because they're nearly all new cars. And so most electric vehicles that have been bought so far have either been bought on a PCP deal as a new car or taken out as a lease where there is a natural trigger for a change cycle. So speed of sale today I think will be faster just because of how they've been purchased and funded. I think given it's still a relatively nascent product and given the biggest change so far I think has been the shortening of the product cycle. So we used to see car big like leap forwards in car make models probably once every nine ten years I think with electric vehicles because of the importance of the battery technology those cycles have definitely reduced and the generational shifts that we're seeing in kind of two to three years are huge in terms of battery life a range that you can achieve from that from the product so at the moment as we're still in that kind of early adoption, moving into early majority phase of the product cycle, I think we'll see and continue to see a relatively quick change cycle. I think you have to believe that for the change cycle to be structurally longer for an electric vehicle, that that product, that the experience, that the brands don't do a good job convincing consumers of why the next product is attractive and why you really should want an upgrade or different in-car tech or a different solution. And as yet, we haven't. If anything, I think we've seen probably a bit of the opposite. But it's a space we continue to watch very closely.

And on the kind of change, I mean, I'm feeling that comment of the change of going from magazine to website, going from subscription marketplace to third-actional is a bigger change. I think the thing that we've been pleased with is the software build. We've got fantastic developers, engineers, tech team. That's probably gone as well as we could have hoped. Still the change though is culturally how you go from a big audience or a big customer base down to an individual completing a transaction. We're now getting learnings. We've got brilliant people that are working on it. But that mindset shift and the things you have to opt for is just that little bit different. But we're working through them. It will take time. There's every hope that we're as successful as we were with that kind of first transition that we referenced.

The only thing I would add to that, having been around at the time, is the difference between the print to digital migration is that we kind of put print in one place and said that's the old business and really aggressively grew a digital business, which ultimately kind of beat the print business up along with competitors that were kind of caught up as we grew digital, whereas this is much more complementary. I think when we use, we're very intentionally using words in the outlook like we continue to see a good runway for growth in our core and we see these things as incremental and we will always preserve that core. We may even use these things to make the core stronger in some places which we have been known to do historically. So it's more complementary than it is substitutional. The only other small point I'd make is I joined in 2007, helped make that print-to-digital transition take place, and we finished in 2013. So we're actually, Jamie's timelines on this are far more ambitious than what ours were potentially at the time. Perfect, thanks.

Great, we might have time for one more. Catherine?

Thank you. It's Catherine from Citi. So I've got three more, hopefully quite short. One is, could you remind us what your split is of independent versus franchise within your customer base? The second is on the OEMs and the move to agency. I just wondered if you could give a bit more detail around the conversations you're having with those OEMs in terms of their behaviour around spend and product uptakes. I think you talked about there potentially being maybe incremental spend coming from those given they're going to be taking on more inventory risk. And then finally, quite a broad question, but just wanted to get a bit more on your sort of use of and implementation of AI, especially as you talk about moving from large audiences to more personalized. And if Google is launching its own product, is there sort of longer term risk around how consumers might search for cars or use classified platforms? Let's get your views on that. Thank you.

Yep, tied on to the customer split. So I think we have put it out at various points, and it kind of picked up as the retailer base has grown. It's been reasonably representative across the base. So we've got just over 7,500 independent customers, over 4,000 franchise customers, with a balance made up of non-car retailers. So I'll break it down.

On manufacturers and retailers, agency model. So we do feel as manufacturers increasingly take the risk of those car and sheet and are responsible for pricing them, for advertising them, for distributing them, that we can play a really important role in helping them with that, not just through our advertising products, but through our data, through our platform and some of the technology we were talking about earlier. And we are talking to all of the manufacturers that are either selling directly to consumer or have moved to the agency and it's early days but we're confident that all of them up advertising on our platform in some form in the coming days and weeks in terms of the product proposition if you think about the model that works and should work best for those customers it is a version of our market extension centrally held products, because they're going to be acting as a single retailer, effectively, from one location, and they're going to want national reach for this product. So in terms of the yield, in terms of the opportunity, whilst more concentrated, smaller number of partners than we used to, and we do still think over time, it could be a growing new revenue opportunity for us, but very early days so far.

And on AI, I'm not sure that is a short answer to the question, but I'm going to give it a go. So we invest a lot in data science. We have a very strong data science capability within the organization. That wasn't always the case and it's taken ages to get there, but we own the infrastructure, so the data platform, so you can actually get to the data and it's curated in the right way that you can then apply AI models over the top of it, which we do do. So the way artificial intelligence today shows up in auto-trader is when we talk about things like spec-adjusted valuations, we talk about the pricing algorithms that we give our retailers, We tell them the predicted speed of selling a particular vehicle in their area. You can't do those things on average because the cars are all unique. So we have to use machine learning to do metrics on the retailer side. On the consumer side, we also use it. So actually our search, when you'll see our default search, sort order is relevancy. Cynics might think that we just put that in order based on how they pay us. That's not the case at all. The base setting of that listing to which package is applied is a relevancy algorithm which again is all driven by machine learning and price flags and lots of the tools that we give consumers and retailers are driven by AI. and we've got good at it over time. Also, we don't use a lot of large language models, but we've got a collaboration with the Manchester University where we do do a lot of work around neuro-linguistic programming on which the large language models are made up. So we're in a position to be able to deploy those things if we saw a good use for them. As to the longer term, I guess the opportunity and the risk. On the opportunity side, if you think about what we're trying to do for retailers, we're trying to move a thing from being done manually to being things that are done digitally and in an automated or just auto trader kind of view and a view of digital retailing. Well, AI and generative AI particularly is only a tool that allows you to potentially increase productivity more and more and more. So it feels like it's a great tool that we could bring to bear both for retailers As to the risk, Catherine said a lot of our traffic comes to us already as it is. A lot of that traffic does come through Google. Now, if other search engines get better at using AI for text-based search, I suspect that might just be a different channel that ends up coming to us because ultimately what people are looking for is a card that's available now. for sale, but we would probably start by looking at, well, if we make those improvements in our own search with those open models, then why wouldn't we do that? Because we do have the capability to do it. That's the short answer. Very good. Well, thank you everyone for joining us today. We'll call it there. Look forward to speaking in the future. Thank you.