Boohoo Grp Plc Unsp/Adr

Thanks for joining us. I'll keep it as brief as I can. I've got Carol, John and Neil joining. Just look, we've had six months. busy buying brands and warehouses and building teams and infrastructure. So there's lots to do taking our business globally as we move every day. We've built a super platform and we continue to do our thing. I'll hand you over to John.

Thanks Mahmood and good morning everyone. Firstly, I'm going to give an update on the first half, where the group sits today, then an update on strategy as we invest for the future. Before I get into that, I would like to take this opportunity to thank our teams for their incredible work, talent and commitment as we continue to navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic. We're now 18 months into the pandemic and looking back at what we have achieved in that timeframe is nothing short of exceptional. Over the last two years, we have grown 73%. We've increased our customer base by 46%. We've doubled our market share in the UK and US, and we've significantly extended our target addressable market with our acquisitions. Two years ago, our target audience was 16 to 24 year olds. Now, we can dress everybody from 16 through to 50 plus, and the opportunity is huge with half a billion potential customers. That's half a billion potential customers today in our key markets versus 100 million two years ago. And we're investing for the future. Our UKDC network has capacity today to serve as 3 billion pounds of net sales. and current investments will take this in excess of £4 billion within the next two years. This will continue to grow and become more efficient as we reap the benefits from future automation at Sheffield and Daventry. Our supply chain has been significantly strengthened and we are investing heavily to provide a platform for growth. We're committing to invest half a billion pounds over the next five years and create 5,000 jobs, 2,000 of which we've already created so far this year. Moving on to the first half, we had an extraordinary year last year, and I'm delighted that we've continued to grow in the first half of this year. Macro factors have created some short term headwinds that short term headwinds. Demand has been uncertain with lockdowns and fewer events, in particular across June, July and August, with a lack of international holidays and festivals. But at the same time, we've seen return rates have been increasing back to pre-pandemic levels. Our proposition has been hampered in overseas markets due to a lack of air travel. Carriage costs are extremely high. On a like-for-like basis, they have impacted EBITDA by approximately £26 million in the first half versus pre-pandemic levels. Labour cost inflation is also increasing as we head into peak trading. All of these factors are temporary, not structural, and will subside as the pandemic passes. Demand has accelerated in the latter stages of August and into September, and we are very excited about the opportunities in half two and beyond. I wanted to share this slide as we think it's clearly demonstrating not only the structural shift to online that has gone over over the last two years, but where we as a group sit relative to some of the key listed industry players. Firstly, key apparel markets around the globe are still down versus two years ago in the UK, US and Europe. Secondly, on here, there are some incredible businesses within our global competitor set and our growth over the past two years has been ahead of this group of companies. So not only are we emerging from the pandemic in that group of structural winners, we've been the number one performer so far and are delighted with that. Moving on to strategy, there are six areas that we'll run through this morning, covering everything from the global opportunity ahead of us, through to how our technology and infrastructure will act as enablers for us, and importantly, how we can do this in a sustainable and transparent manner. Firstly, the opportunity for the group is huge and we've made great progress over the last two years. Across our key markets of the UK, US and Europe, our power markets remain down versus 2019. The UK, as we understand it, is down 7% versus pre-pandemic levels. The US is down 11% and the rest of Europe down 4%. In each of these markets, consumer demand remains uncertain for all retailers. And for us, our ability to service customer remains challenging due to longer lead times impacting customer proposition and increased costs, which impacts short-term profitability. In quarter two, growth in the US slowed due to the effects of the pandemic. But looking ahead, as travel restrictions ease in November and air travel resumes, we expect delivery times to shorten and our sales growth to improve. Despite these macro issues, compared to the first half two years ago, we've grown 81% in the UK, 126% in the US, and 20% in Europe. In terms of market share, what does that mean? We've doubled our total market share in the UK and likewise doubled our total market share in the US and are delighted to have done this, which gives us great confidence that our brands are resonating with consumers and that as we emerge from the pandemic, we will continue to grow our market share as conditions normalise. In Europe, our market share has increased by over 50% and we know the opportunity there is huge. As life gets back to normal following the pandemic, we are seeing markets react positively and in recent weeks, we have seen a re-acceleration of growth in key markets such as Ireland and France. Two and a half years ago, we had four amazing fashion brands targeting the 16 to 24 year old demographic with an incredible value and fashion proposition. Since then, we've been strategically adding to the portfolio, firstly with Miss Pap, Karen Millen and Coast, then Oasis and Warehouse, and more recently, Dorothy Perkins, Wallace and Burton. We've also now got Debenhams. What does all of this mean? It means as a group, we can dress everybody from our core 16 to 24 demographic right the way through to customers over 50, giving them the latest trends, unrivalled choice and amazing value for money. And for us, the opportunity is huge with an addressable market of half a billion people across the UK, US and Europe, compared to just 100 million in our core 16 to 24 year old demographic. We have acquired a number of brands in recent years with total pre-acquisition revenues of over £2.7 billion, offering brilliant potential to drive sales back up to these figures and beyond as we grow the brands globally. To unlock our global potential, it's great to talk this morning about our re-entry into wholesale. Strategically, this will allow our brands to rebuild awareness where it has been lost, having disappeared from the high street and generate awareness in key markets that will complement our own direct-to-consumer growth. We've launched our partnership with Alshaya that will support our brands in the Middle East and will soon be going live on the fast-growing platform About You in Europe. We also have two major partners in the UK lined up in the coming months, and there are other global opportunities that are being appraised across India, North America and the Far East. Tech is at the heart of what we do. It is the enabler that allows our brands to curate and market their products in the most effective way possible, be it across the front end, digitization of our back office, driving operational efficiencies, and embracing the concept of data as an asset. On the front end, we have one platform which has plugged into it 13 fashion stores and 81 customer-facing websites and apps. This front end is constantly evolving so as to drive the best user experience across our brands. And we're not afraid to be innovative. For example, launching Debenhams on a headless concept, which will cater for greater customization and provide us with more agility. To highlight the capability and the expertise of the teams we have working in this area and the technology that supports this platform, from acquiring a new brand to relaunching, we're looking at around eight to 10 weeks in terms of building a website and launching it on our platform, which is phenomenal speed. For back office functions, we're pulling more and more technology in place to provide a robust infrastructure that is eminently scalable. For example, in buying end-to-end technology, we'll support everything from supplier onboarding and compliance, through to ordering with the order app, supplier management through our hub, and real-time tracking of inventory so we know where in the world our products are, which we think will be a game changer in improving international lead time. In our DCs, we're investing for the future. We're adding capacity and introducing automation to yield major cost savings. Lastly, using data as an asset, we have endless amounts of data and the challenge is always how can we best utilise it. Through 2021, we have been rebuilding our data warehousing and data lake, which is a huge upgrade to our systems with all of our data feeding into one place, which is hugely scalable and, for example, will allow our reporting to be more agile, faster and in real time. The takeaway from this slide is that our global offering continues to scale rapidly, and there are some incredible stats on this page. We have today 13 fashion destinations compared to five two years ago. With these destinations, there are 81 customer-facing websites and apps, which will grow. Choice for our customer is unrivalled. Our offer has quadrupled in the last two years and our customer has more newness than ever before, with almost 1,000 lines launched daily. Our reach continues to grow with 54 million social media followers and 19 million customers from around the world shopping across all our brands and platform. Our group has been founded off test and repeat. It gives us speed, flexibility, and efficiency. For our suppliers, whilst we are committing to small quantities upfront, this is spread across thousands of styles, giving them the volumes they require to operate their businesses. With our inventory, we manage this by utilizing data to analyze demand, and we back winning styles to maximize full price sales. That gives us low inventory, reduces our markdown, and minimizes waste. And we've embedded this into each and every brand, taking lead times in some of our acquisitions from as long as nine months down to a matter of weeks. Today, we're operating from four distribution centers in the UK and are investing significant amounts into additional capacity and automation projects. Currently, our capacity across sites and locations caters for approximately 3 billion pounds of net sales. But this will increase. And by 2023, we'd expect to have capacity of well over 4 billion pounds of net sales as we lay down the foundations for future growth. and will drive cost savings and efficiencies. For example, our £120 million automation project at Sheffield is due to go live in 2022. And this will be a game changer in terms of driving efficiencies and throughput, with it expected to deliver a cash payback in less than five years. This morning, we are also announcing an investment into a distribution center in North America. This will be our first international distribution center. We're very excited about the enormous potential of the US market and the resonance our brands have with our customers there. We'd expect to go live in 2023 with the site bringing us closer to our customer, shortening delivery lead times and enabling future growth in that market. That would then take our global capacity to well over £5 billion across the group by 2023. And moving on to our final strategic focus area, sustainability and transparency. These are the goals we set out for this calendar year with our year-end results back in April. And as you can see, we've made great progress. As you will know, earlier this week, we published our international supplier list and we'll be launching our Leicester manufacturing site by the end of November. Some really strong progress and delivering on the commitments we have made. And in the words of Sir Brian Levison, few, if any, companies undertaking due diligence of their supply chains have gone to the lengths undertaken by Boohoo. Lastly, we're delighted to announce a new concept this morning, with Pretty Little Thing launching a resale marketplace in 2022. This will allow customers to buy it, love it, sell it from any brand, not just our own brands. This, we think, is a game changer, tapping into the structural growth of the resale market and further extending our target addressable market. It will extend the life of garments, breathe life into pre-loved clothing and help to reduce waste. Of course, it's not all about what we're doing within the business. Our positive influence spans much wider. Earlier this year, we commissioned a report into the economic impact the group has on the economy and society as a whole. We're proudly a British business, paying tax in the UK, and since 2009, we've added £2 billion to the UK economy. We're committed to investing over half a billion pounds over the next five years and creating over 5,000 jobs. In half one of this year, we've already created 2,000 of those jobs. So we're well on our way with that piece of work. To summarise, in half one we've continued to deliver growth on top of what was an extraordinary year last year. We've doubled our market share in the UK and the US over the past two years. We've integrated and relaunched four new brands and we've added two new warehouses in the UK. Trading momentum has been improving into the early part of half two, which is really encouraging. We're investing for the future and looking ahead with more brands, stronger infrastructure and a significantly larger addressable market. Thank you. I'll just pass you over to Neil now.

Thanks, John, and good morning, everyone. I'm going to move on to the financial review of the first half. And as I go through, you'll see that we've included two-year comparisons for some additional context. I'm also going to share in this section some insight into customer behaviour and demand patterns, and then talk about guidance and outlook. So onto the income statement. And here it shows that we've delivered 20% growth in H1, compounding the standout performance last year, meaning that we've delivered 73% growth over the two years. Gross margin was 54.6% compared with 55% during the lockdown boost last year. And pleasingly, it was a higher than the gross margin of two years ago. And that highlights the strength of our full price sales performance. Adjusted EBITDA at £85.1 million is up an impressive 40% on two years ago. And that was notwithstanding the challenges posed by the COVID pandemic. We've seen additional costs of around £26 million during the first half of the year related to the pandemic, with extremely high shipping costs for overseas markets, as well as returns rates normalising in the UK. And we've also been investing heavily into all of our brands and our multi-brand platform as we invest for future growth. And I'll talk a little bit more about those pandemic impacts later. Other profit measures such as adjusted EBIT, PBT and EPS continue to see further great progress on a two-year view. I'd also like to highlight on this page the exceptional items. As part of the recent acquisitions, we've incurred £15.8 million of integration and restructuring costs. This is at the top end of our previous guidance and is primarily driven by an extension to our transitional services agreement for the Dorothy Perkins, Burton and Wallace brands, which although costly, allowed the brands acquired to keep trading ahead of moving to our fourth UKDC in Daventry in July. Additionally, we're calling out £4.2 million of warehousing, commissioning and disruption costs. These are split between the automation project at Sheffield, which is impacting operational efficiencies during the course of construction, and also the start-up and moving costs in relation to the third and fourth UK distribution centres. Looking at the results by geographical segment, as John mentioned earlier, we're delighted to have doubled market share over the last two years in our largest markets, the UK and the US. In the UK, we've grown 32% in the half and 81% over the last two years. International revenues continue to grow in the first half of the year, and we've delivered 63% growth across the last two years. Within those international markets, we saw significant gains in market share last year as competition subsided at the onset of the pandemic and we acquired a significant number of new customers. Against that comparative, plus the proposition challenges that we've experienced due to extended shipping timeframes, we're pleased with our performance, particularly in the US, where we grew by 24% in the half and 126% over the last two years. In Europe, our performance was consistent across the first quarter and the second quarter at minus 15%. But as life gets back to normal, we've seen a re-acceleration and a return to growth in key markets such as Ireland and France. Lastly, on revenues, we just wanted to break out a bit of colour on our established brand performance, and by which I mean Boohoo, Boohoo Man, PLT, Nasty Gal and Miss Pat. who've made further progress in the UK and international markets over the last two years, and have delivered 51% over that period, and that was evenly split between UK and international. Onto costs, we've seen a short-term step change in costs as a result of the pandemic and also as a result of our brand investments. There's a few themes that I'd like to draw out here. Firstly, central and admin costs. We're continuing to leverage these cost lines. At the same time, we're investing in our multi-brand platform and our recently acquired brands. Secondly, marketing as a percentage of sales has been elevated in the first half of the year compared with last year. We didn't have to spend much on marketing in the first half of last year, but more strategically, we're investing in our brands and particularly those that we've recently acquired so that we can fully capture the opportunity that they bring to the group. We expect marketing costs to come back down towards the 9% to 10% of sales corridor, but we won't be afraid to continue with high levels of investment in order to unlock the growth curve ahead of us. Lastly, on distribution costs, optically, they're down slightly year on year and only up 90 basis points on the pre-pandemic levels. However, this has been aided by the brand and country mix. On underlying, we've seen significant increases in international carriage rates, which has materially impacted profitability compared to pre-pandemic levels. So going into more detail on costs, we want to draw out today the impact of the pandemic on our cost base, which represents short-term temporary headwinds and something we believe will pass in the course of time as the pandemic eases. Like for like, our costs are up 26 million pounds as a result of the pandemic versus two years ago. And that's equivalent to 270 basis points of EBITDA margin split across three areas that are shown on this slide. Within this, the single largest item in the first half of the year was outbound carriage inflation. That's getting product to and from customers around the world, and that cost is £20 million higher than it would have been two years ago. Heading into the second half of the year, there are three cost headwinds that we want to flag today. Firstly, outbound carriage, which I mentioned on the previous slide, was a £20 million headwind in the first half of the year, and that will reoccur in the second half of the year. Secondly, inbound freight, which is included in our cost of goods sold. This has seen marked increases in recent months in both the ocean freight rate per container and also the air freight rate per kilogram. Both of these are a result of supply chain constraints as businesses focus on intake for peak trading. But this will be more significant than the £3 million impact in the first half of the year. Lastly, in our warehouses, there's well-documented wage inflation due to a tight labour pool. And this is coming through via higher basic rates of pay and additional incentives for colleagues as we gear up for peak. Piecing together all of those impacts of pandemic-related headwinds plus our brand and platform investments, this slide really demonstrates the underlying resilience in our profitability as well as our longer-term opportunity. We're reporting today £85 million of adjusted EBITDA in the first half, despite those pandemic-related £26 million of costs. So if those cost lines had been at similar rates to before the pandemic, EBITDA would have been materially higher at £111 million. In addition, we've invested heavily in our platform and new brands, which have not yet scaled to the same degree as our other brands. And that's worth around £11 million to EBITDA over the medium term based on overhead efficiencies. And lastly, there's a £13 million opportunity from marketing efficiencies for those new brands as they trend down towards the group's 9% to 10% of sales long-term average. So to summarise the last few slides, looking through the cycle of the last two years, we've delivered 40% more EBITDA, while at the same time, we've invested in our multi-brand platform and marketing all of our brands to capture market share. All this whilst facing those significant temporary headwinds and restricted service proposition as a result of the pandemic. So that gives us a lot of optimism to invest for the future. Moving on to cash flow, we've ended the period with £98 million of net cash. That's down £178 million since the last balance sheet date at the end of February. That's driven by three things. Firstly, CapEx. This year is a significant year of investment across our tech platform, our warehouses and automation, as well as in tech and our new offices, with CapEx totalling £172 million in the first half. £72 million of that was for the purchase of our London office in Soho. £50 million related to the automation project in Sheffield, and you'll remember that this is a £125 million project going live next year with a payback of approximately four years. £29 million related to our new UK distribution centres in Wellingborough and Daventry. And the remainder represented investments in the tech stack supporting the multi-brand platform and upgrading our office environments in both Manchester and London. These investments are all about building a scalable platform and infrastructure that can support our long-term growth. Secondly, working capital. We've seen an outflow in the half as we invest in new brands and building inventory for those new brands, but also building inventory levels generally ahead of peak and getting ahead of the global supply chain issues. Thirdly, cash restructuring costs and exceptional costs amounted to approximately £20 million in the half. We ended the period with £98 million of net cash and we've got £198 million of liquidity, giving the group significant headroom. Looking at customer KPIs, we had just under 19 million unique active customers in the 12 months to the end of the period. And that compares to 13 million two years ago. That's an increase of 46% over the course of the pandemic. In the last year, we've seen further improvements in key customer metrics, such as order frequency, which is up 9%. Conversion rates and sales per active customer have also increased, meaning customers are shopping more frequently with the brands and spending more as we capture a greater share of wallet. Over the next couple of slides, I'll talk through a bit about customer behavior and the demand environment that we're currently facing. Most of you will recognize this slide showing our cohorts of customers. It shows net sales by year of acquisition across the 12 months to the end of August. And there's a few aspects in here that point to the impact of COVID on demand last year and the underlying resilience of our customer cohorts. You can see from this chart that our growth is underpinned by really healthy retention of historical cohorts. And you can also see that we saw exceptional growth from new customer acquisition during the earlier stages of the pandemic. The behaviour of the customers is extremely encouraging and we're seeing continued sales growth from the historical cohorts after their second year. So our brands are really built on the strong foundations of a loyal and growing customer base. The next slide shows how volatile customer demand has been through the different phases of lockdown restrictions being eased in the UK. In the chart on the left on this slide, it's quite clear to see how stores reopening in April and the delays to Freedom Day in June, as well as uncertainty in overseas travel and festivals, has really dampened demand at times in the first half. But you can see that there's definitely been a resurgence since just before the actual Freedom Day on the 19th of July. The chart on the right focuses on our established brands in the second quarter who have started to see a meaningful increase in gross demand since the 19th of July. And on a two-year stack, we can see customer behavior has demonstrably changed since Freedom Day on the 19th of July. when they've got more reasons to shop. Within the UK, our rate of growth in sessions over that timeframe has jumped 20 percentage points and gross sales by 15 percentage points, and it's great to see that momentum has continued into September. Moving on to current trading, we're seeing sales growth accelerating into September, where gross sales growth for the first four weeks has accelerated significantly over the rates we saw in the second quarter. Demand has improved through August, principally in the UK, but also in key overseas markets such as Ireland and France, where there's been a re-acceleration and a return to growth. This has again improved in September, where the rates of gross sales growth has increased compared to that achieved in the second quarter of the financial year. So moving on to guidance, we now expect top line growth of between 20% and 25% for the full year, which implies 20% to 30% growth in the second half of the year. The acceleration we've seen in August and September gives us confidence that as we head into peak, we could have a demand tailwind behind us. And that's through the following, ongoing easing of restrictions in different international markets, greater international airline capacity into markets such as the US, and that will improve our service proposition, and events such as Halloween, party season, Christmas, holidays, all of which were cancelled last year. Adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to be between 9% to 9.5%, reflecting the impact of those short-term cost headwinds from the pandemic that we talked through earlier. We continue to invest in our tech platform and we'll start to incur capex from the initial phase of investment in the US distribution centre, meaning that we now expect capital expenditure for the year to be around £275 million. In addition to the first half investment in the £72 million London office, we're making great progress on our programme to build £4.7 billion of net sales capacity by 2023. So with all of those investments in the future, our medium-term guidance remains unchanged for 25% sales growth per annum and a 10% adjusted EBITDA margin as those pandemic-related issues unwind in future years. So in summary, it's been a strong first half and you've seen lots of great progress made over the last two years. And we're in a great position to keep delivering high levels of profitable growth in the future. And so on that note, I'd like to hand over to Carol.

Thank you, Neil. And good morning, everyone. This morning, I'm going to cover off Debenhams and the opportunity we have to grow the business. And then I'm going to cover off our brands and our ever-evolving marketing strategy and how we've reacted to the easing of the COVID restrictions. And lastly, some detail as to how we've evolved our customer database and the significant wider and broader appeal that we have today with our new demographics. So firstly, Debenhams. We relaunched Debenhams brand earlier this year as an online-only department store. And unlike our other brands, the website has been built from scratch with functionality to plug in third-party brands to enable us to have a marketplace. The opportunity for Debenhams is huge. Brand awareness of the brand in the UK stands at 90%. And prior to acquisition, the website had circa 300 million visits a year and was within the top 10 most visited retail websites in the UK. The business generated approximately 400 million of sales online with a net turnover of 1.8 billion. In beauty, it was leading in prestige beauty across makeup, skincare and fragrance. It was number two for beauty and number one for fragrance. With a customer base of 19 million, 6 million of which were beauty shoppers, it also has 1.4 million members of a beauty club loyalty program, which we'll be relaunching later this year. We have a fantastic opportunity ahead as we aim to be the number one online destination for fashion, beauty, and home. And to do this, we will further expand the ranges across fashion, beauty, and home, improve the overall customer experience to drive conversion and launching a brand new app, invest in marketing to drive traffic, and accelerate the growth in the customer numbers. So we acquired, a little bit on Dorothy Perkins Burton and Wallace here, we acquired the brands in February this year. And just we launched them in April. It was quite incredible. We managed to launch three new websites within 11 weeks all with brand new apps. It's testament to the tech and teams and the scalable platform we've put in place. And prior to the acquisition, the brands generated 428 million of revenue and had 2.5 million customers. It's another fantastic opportunity for us to grow our addressable audience. So now I'd like to break out the presentation with a video demonstrating what the brands have looked like in the last six months. Thank you. So I hope that just gives a little flavor of some of the achievements over the last six months and some of the foundations that have been put in place for us while we're investing in the future growth. So on to this next slide. Agility has been key to our ever-changing global landscape of lockdown. And we've been optimizing our marketing channels with the right mix of brand and digital. And all of that's been key. Our collaborations have also evolved in their approach. So, for example, Oasis launched a collaboration with the RHS, and it's focused on botanical prints over the summer months. Karen Millen continues to see success with Lydia Millen collections. And we worked with artist Kate Bickmore on a collection of the most beautiful printed pieces, and I am wearing one today. I always like to wear our products when I can. And we're constantly adapting to the environment around us. And it's been great because we're bringing PR and brand and events back to life. Missed them so much. So it's just so great to be able to have today actually live face-to-face as well. So in the past few months, we've been able to get back to some of that marketing activity that, you know, we're all been famous for. So here in the London showroom, we've been having several brand events each week. Internationally, we've had events at Miami Swim Week, New York Fashion Week. where diversity was the key theme. So with our models, they've been covering off from sizes 2 to 24, mirroring the inclusivity that we offer across sizing across our brands and catering for every woman, every size, every shape. And all these events help to support our growth of our social channels, where we now have 54 million followers across the group. Over the past two years, our customers have grown from 13 million to 19 million as we've grown our brands and expanded our portfolio. Our addressable audience in this timeframe has shot up five-fold, from just under 100 million people to almost half a billion. The acquisition of new brands has positioned us to address everyone from our teenagers to our 50 plus market. And not only are we addressing age and gender, but sizing. So offering petite, tall, and curve across all our brands. We've also launched beauty and homeware. So not only can we dress customers, we can sell beauty to them and homewares to them as well. just giving them all the more reasons to shop with us as a group. So there's lots of upside as we globalize our brands, expanding into new geographies and reaching new customers. Now on this slide, I just wanted to demonstrate the change in inventory. So the agility of our business is one of our key strengths. We've been adapting our brands to ever-changing customer demands. So for example, this summer, you can see we've seen a return to occasion wear. With Coast, it's really been positioned as a brand, as a go-to dress brand for every occasion. And at Burton, we've seen tailoring and formal wear perform really strongly with the return of the wedding season and a return to the office. So as I mentioned, our strength has always been about agility and ability to meet these ever-changing demands. In the last six months, we start the season selling off leisure and casual wear. And today, across the summer months, we've seen a surge in demand on dresses, trading as our number one category, where we have today 28,000 options available across our 13 brands. So finally, to summarise on our results presentation this morning. We have experienced short-term headwinds from the increased freight costs. We've seen a positive start to the new season with demanding trends throughout September. The group has continued to deliver strong growth. It's 73% over two years. We have emerged with the pandemic with brands relaunching four this year alone. We have stronger infrastructure across technology and distribution with our first overseas warehouse announced today. We're driving sustainability across the business. We can now address every customer from 16 to 50 plus across our brands. And as I said earlier, that's half a billion people with a market size around 500 billion. And we continue to invest for the future. Thank you. And I'd like to hand over to questions.

Shall we start with John?

Hi, morning. John Stevens in Appeal Hunt. A couple of questions to get us going. Stick with the Dev's theme, regular question, but just wondering what it looks like at launch, just as you had a look at the appendices. I think you got a bit of detail. But what are we going to see in terms of the marketing? What's going to be on the platform? How ready are you in terms of the build out of product, beauty brands, and what Devlin essentially looks like coming into peak? Second question, just on the USDC. What does that do for your thoughts on supply chain, given the sort of tax regime and what it implies? You know, do we start seeing more product coming out of, say, South America? And final question, just in terms of the guidance, some margin expectations. I guess we're sort of baking in 9%, 9.5% EBITDA margins going forward, or at least I have this morning. I guess, are we saying that when the headwinds leave Boohoo and the rest of the sector next year, we should expect a bit of upside to that number?

Should I take US warehouse first, actually, on that one? So in terms of tax duty, yeah, look, it's obvious US direct imports duties are higher than what you see into the EU. We will naturally look to preferential country treatment. So, for example, central america mexico north africa etc some of those countries so we'll look at the mix within that in terms of getting that balance right while still keeping our test and repeat model there we'll be open for business we're looking at 2023 we're down to a number of potential sites and we'll update everybody on that in the next sort of in the coming weeks and months in terms of Debenhams, maybe I'll leave the brand to you and I'll do the, I think from a functionality we're still building from a tech platform to give you some indication where we are there. I'd say we're about halfway through the journey in terms of capability on the tech platform. In terms of from product, again, we're at the early stages. It was from scratch. New teams taken on board, new ranges taken on board. If I give you an example of beauty, particularly around the prestige beauty, we're probably at about 25% in terms of onboarded at this stage. Within the next couple of weeks, that goes up over 50%. So again, all building as we go forward. And equally, I would say the other in-house product ranges and third-party brands are about at the same stage. So early stages and what we've seen so far, really, really pleased, but clearly a lot to go yet. And really the full benefit of that is going to start coming from 2022 and then...

And then from a branding perspective, we've done the initial repositioning really. It was very important with the store closures to tell our customers or tell the Debenhams old customers that we're still here. So we've been doing some out of home. We've been doing some social. We have launched on TV. We've got new campaigns going in the next week, I think, as well. So really it's about positioning the brand as an online only department store now and that's the initial bit. So that's all going but obviously all of the regular channels and the formulas we've used in the past.

And the third question, which was about guidance and margin expectations. I suppose what we've seen is an actually very strong performance profitability-wise in the first half of the year when you consider that we've got those £26 million of pandemic-related costs that we're carrying. as we um as those effects unwind over the coming years then it gives us a lot of confidence to reiterate our medium-term guidance which is sales growth of 25 and above and the 10 ebitda margin so within that you could really see on that slide we've got the headroom to be able to do those marketing investments of new brands and all the brands actually into new geographies. So we'll have that headroom as those cost impacts unwind to be able to keep that double-digit EBITDA margin and that superior growth rate going. Thank you.

Simon.

It's Simon Owen from Credit Suisse. When talking about wholesale, can you just talk about how going to wholesale partners works with test and repeat and very short production runs? Because presumably they need stock, they need predictability of range and all the things that are not core to your offer at the moment where you're trying to push through a new product as fast as possible. Secondly, can you just talk about your kind of expectations around air freight and shipping freight as to where you expect rates to come back to and when? I mean, there is certainly a school of thought which suggests that air freight rates have been too low for too long and simply aren't going back to historic levels. And how does your model sit if that actually happens? And then can you just talk through the numbers around the U.S. in terms of what you're trading off for higher tariffs and higher OPEX on a site relative to benefits of transport costs?

So if we look at freight rates, first of all, so air freight, where's the big impacts we're seeing there at the moment? It's really around capacity. And as we all know, there's a lot less passenger planes flying around the world at the moment. And usually those passenger planes in the belly are carrying cargo. So with that reduced capacity, obviously drives up price in terms of demand. If you look, for example, the US hasn't been open to European travel for pretty much 18 months now, and obviously with the recent announcement that that opens again from November. So that's going to, again, drive more passengers going to the US, which will make more aircraft available. on those lines, therefore more supply available for us. So we see pieces like that actually beginning to open up, that light at the end of the tunnel, and therefore we see prices beginning to move from that time. Equally, you see Australia from a similar basis. And it's not just about cost, it's about speed. So part of the proposition at the moment is a little bit slower because of lack of numbers of aircraft going over. So if I give you an example, Currently, you know, a standard delivery to the US would take sort of 8 to 10 days and that's pretty much twice what it would have been previously. So from a fashion customer point of view, you know, at the moment, you know, that waiting that 8 to 10 days versus 4 to 5, you know, for some that's a consideration. So that's really great news in terms of where we're coming to in November. In terms of from an ocean freight point of view, really what we're seeing there, you've got to go back to last year. The world was stopped for many industries, not just retail. Therefore, in terms of there wasn't that demand. So what you saw was the freight companies taking capacity off the routes. And what we haven't seen since the world is waking up again and demand, we haven't seen that capacity going back in. So what you've seen is a very profitable time for freight companies in in in that time scale but you know those ships are sitting around the world and they'll come back in in the coming once in the coming months is is is our view and again that will drive more capacity in which will mean the demand will be will be met better um in terms of the the wholesale uh pointer in terms of test and repeat so we operate the wholesale uh separately to the main businesses so the main businesses continues to run on test and repeat And then obviously the wholesale orders as they come in from the different customers through the different brands will then meet those orders on those products. So clearly we have a very good and efficient supply chain still, but we treat them separately. So we're not waiting on a wholesale order before we put down our main order on the brand. Again, really, really excited about that, especially for the brands that we've acquired over the last 12 months or so who were predominantly stores. And obviously, as those stores have disappeared from the high street, that brand awareness now, whether it's the UK, whether it's Europe or whether it's other markets that we're looking into.

Thank you.

I think the third question was around the USDC. At the moment, we're expecting the cost savings that we get from shipping costs within the US distributed to customers will offset more than fully increased import duties that we'll have when we ship items in bulk into the US. And that business case has got better and better as we've gone through the pandemic based on what we expect shipping costs to settle back to after the impacts of the pandemic have passed.

Okay, I should know this, but are you charging sales taxes in the US at the moment? Yeah, we charge sales taxes in all states.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, we've had a number of questions from people on the webcast at the moment. The first question is from Anne Critchlow from Society General. Is the lack of a warehouse in Europe hindering progress in those markets following Brexit? And is a European warehouse something that is under consideration?

I think, you know, we've obviously seen... proposition and lead times since Brexit been slower than what they were prior to Brexit. So in time, will a warehouse in Europe come? Yes, but we see the priority being the US in 2023. So if we look at our sort of long term strategy, we see actually more than one warehouse in the US as well. And equally, we see a warehouse coming down the road in in Europe. But if we look at Europe today in terms of that proposition, actually it's getting much closer to what it was pre-pandemic and equally pre-Brexit. And again, if we look at our trade in Europe, particularly over the last few weeks, some of our key markets like France, we've seen a real acceleration there. So we're not really seeing that. We see the priority really number one being in the US. But I do see in the future a warehouse coming down the road in Europe as well.

So we'll just take one more question from the webcast before we go back into the room from Anne Critchlow. Were sales held back by poor inventory availability and will you have sufficient inventory to meet demand?

No, I wouldn't say sales were held back by poor inventory. I think if you just put yourself into the head of a consumer over the summer, if you look at particularly that sort of June, July and August period, most of us would have gone on a sun holiday in that period. And actually, not many of us did that this year. So that whole wardrobe purchase of kind of beach wear, kind of beach to bar, evening wear and the nice sort of 28, 30 degrees when you're outside was very different to what we would have experienced, for example, at home. So that's the big impact. But then equally, if you think about that 16 to 24 year old profile, we didn't have the number of festivals we didn't have the number of events we had kind of the freedom day even in the uk pushed back um you know if you think of markets like australia freedom day is not for another couple of weeks yet so that's been more the impact rather than reduction in inventory And equally, in terms of inventory going forward, Neil would have talked earlier about those inventory levels at the end of the first half. So we're in a good position. We're all experiencing those issues around the world in terms of sourcing countries and getting it in. But equally, we're doing things that we wouldn't have done previously. So we're chartering aircraft and filling those aircraft ourselves coming out of countries just to guarantee and get that supply in. So at the moment, we're happy. There's some areas we're a little lighter than what we'd like to be, but don't see anything fundamentally affecting us.

Maybe I could just finish on Critchlow's final question. Are the newer brands still expected to contribute circa 5% percentage points to revenue growth this year?

So the newer brands so far have contributed a high single digit number as a percentage for our growth rate. And we're expecting that to be the same in the second half of the year. So high single digit percentage. So they're slightly ahead of where we were guiding before.

That's great. And if we've got any questions from the room. Tony.

Just some background, I think, on marketing. I just wondered if you could give us a sort of rough split of your marketing spend between sort of categories you consider sort of meaningful, but something around brand, influencers, stroke social and SEM. And secondly, in terms of visits to site, can you give us some sort of idea of how much is organic, how much is SEM and how that's likely to trend with the new brands coming on?

So on the split of our marketing spend, it does vary a lot between the brands and different geographies. But overall, we've got a split of about 30% brand, 30% direct response digital advertising, and then 30% around brand awareness and influencers, et cetera. So it's roughly in those areas. The digital, if anything, is becoming a higher proportion of the mix, and paid social with the different social media platforms is always becoming more and more important, as are influencers as well as a channel. And then in terms of organic traffic, Five years ago, that was probably around direct and organic, about 80% of our visitors. As we've invested more and more in digital marketing and social media, that tends to come down a little bit more. So it's below those levels, trended down to over 60% in recent years. I think that's been very much in line with trends in the industry generally.

That's great. If we can just go to another question from the webcast just now. We've got Miriam Adessa from Morgan Stanley. How long will it take you to get back to the $2.7 billion of revenue from your newly acquired brands? And what are the key steps in achieving this? And which brands do you expect to drive this?

I think in terms of time, first of all, it's about, you know, as explained earlier, even with Debenhams and new brands, it's about getting the site's functionality up and running. It's about getting the ranges. So, you know, a good example of that would be if you looked at Karen Millen when we acquired it just over two years ago, it would have had just over 400 styles on the website and available today, that's over 4,000. it's the opportunity of building out the categories, building out the offer to the customer. We see the 2.7 billion as fully achievable over time, but clearly it's about kind of building the website, marketing and branding to the customer, getting the ranges in terms of where they need to be. And the key point on that 2.7 billion is really around pretty much 95% of that was UK based. So again, if you look at the journey on Karen Millen as an example, just over two years ago to now, we're now sort of seeing real interest in the US market in Karen Millen. And equally, we're seeing interest in Australia and a little bit in Europe, particularly in Ireland. So again, just beginning that international drive with that brand. So it's getting it up and running, getting it established. And then obviously in terms of marketing and then going outside of the UK is the journey. But over a number of years is what I would say.

A follow-up question from Miriam. What contribution to revenue do you expect from wholesale?

So this year it's going to be pretty negligible, certainly in a low single digit percentage. But we've got that as an opportunity in the second half of the year. But we're not creating any great expectations around it straight away. But we see it as a big opportunity for the back end of the year and into the next year.

And the final part from Miriam's questions. In Europe, your market share development was not as strong as the UK and the US. Why was this? And what do you think about the customer proposition here?

So I think the opportunity, I would describe it, in Europe is more really to talk about. So our key markets in Europe would really be currently France and Ireland. Clearly, Europe's a lot bigger than those two countries. Germany business, very small Spain, very small Italy, very small Scandi, very small Eastern European. So actually, I would describe the European journey as really just at the beginning, and it's about the opportunity in terms of marketing and getting our brands in there. What we have seen, even in the markets that we're pushing in, like France and Ireland, actually there's a real appetite for the brands there. It's really about expanding on that market opportunity and taking it on.

That's great. If we could just go to another question from the room, if we have one.

Thanks very much. It's Charlie from Exam BMP. Firstly, I just want to go to the obvious question. You've given some encouraging but unscaled charts with respect to the improvement in gross sales trends in September. I just wanted to qualify. Are you now... you know, confident enough to believe that you'll be back in that 20% to 30% range that is implicit in the second half guidance within Q3. And secondly, I just wondered on the topic of acquisitions, you obviously had a huge number of brands in the last six, nine months, but your logistics is obviously all in the UK and you do have challenges outside. So is M&A... on the back burner for now, whilst you digest, is it constrained to the UK until you've actually got logistics to support a brand in foreign markets, or are you looking very actively worldwide still?

So on the demand into Q3, yes, we're very confident that we're on that trajectory. And you could see that although the charts were unscaled, you could see a big increase there in the gross demand as we go through the back end of August and into September. So that gives us a lot of competence. There's a long way to go, of course, but there's definitely been an acceleration. And at the same time, we've seen the returns rates in the UK go up significantly, but that has stabilised going into Q3, but we're seeing that acceleration of gross demand. So that's positive, I think, for the third period, which will be the next time we report is about the four months to the end of December.

I think in terms of European proposition and generally international proposition generally, I think what we are seeing is as the world is beginning to reopen and freight movement, aircraft movement, etc. increases, we see that proposition really coming back to what it was previously. We can see Europe coming back. quicker and clearly for example key market the US you know obviously once November in terms of air passenger travel is allowed again between Europe and the US we see that really expanding in terms of availability of aircraft so you know Europe's very close now to what it was pre-US is still sort of 10 days versus five days previously but again we see that in November improving in terms of you know logistics and long term you know we can pre-covered we can service and grow very well um international markets we've we've we've outlined this morning our first uh distribution center in america in 23 but if we look at our road map in terms of where that takes us we would probably see a european coming after that and then probably a us2 after that as well

Sorry, but the question was also related to your appetite for further M&A versus sort of digesting and getting up and going with bedrooms and so forth.

Yeah, so I think we'll always look at interesting opportunities as they come along. Again, at the moment, in the kind of weeks ahead as we head into peak, that's our kind of real focus now. But we're always looking at interesting opportunities, is what I would say.

Can I just ask a follow-up? We're a year on from the Levitt report. Can you just talk about what's changed in the balance of your sourcing, particularly in, I mean, obviously we've seen all the changes in terms of process, which the Levison letters have updated us on. But in terms of actually where you're sourcing from, has anything changed materially?

I think what you'll see if you've had a look at the global supply list that we issued on Monday of this week, what I would describe it as no surprises really in there in terms of garment making countries. So in Asia, China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Vietnam, Myanmar, Europe in the sort of Italy Turkey in terms of what's coming through there we've said and I've said before in terms of the the kind of natural mix of the UK would go down anyhow because of the type of garment that we make here in the UK and as the brands in terms of the acquisition you know making jeans Jackets, shoes, all of those product categories we couldn't make here. So that will just expand the offshore mix and the UK mix while still important to us, but just as a scale of company now that will come down naturally. We obviously have our factory opening in Leicester at the end of November. so we're really pleased about that and again that will service all of the brands um and that will be up and running by the end of november and again for that kind of fast test and repeat um and obviously again just kind of again supporting the importance of kind of number one uk jobs but equally our model and been able to get goods fast that will really really be important to us then

Okay, maybe if we have another one of the questions from the webcast from Adam Cochran from Deutsche Bank. Do you expect any of the short-term headwinds to carry into FY23?

I think it's difficult to say at this point, but I would expect them to carry on into FY23 in terms of those elevated freight costs as we ship orders to overseas markets. Inbound freight, freight not not sure about that whether that will normalize in time I think on the positive side we're seeing flights open up to the US in November so maybe those headwinds can start reducing now but whether they'll be eliminated by February it's really hard to see I'd like to think that that air capacity is really going to be ramping up quite quickly from November and as John said Freedom Day in Australia, so maybe restrictions will open up there. But it's likely there's going to be some drag left into the next financial year, but hopefully we'll get past the worst of it soon.

And Adam's got a few questions. How many of Desmondham's customers have remained engaged with the brand?

I think we haven't got numbers right now. Debenhams is a huge opportunity but we're just starting with it. We're developing the proposition there and really the big launch for Debenhams is before peak for this year. So there's not really much to say on how many of the Debenhams are engaged. In terms of email lists, it's very engaged. We do see good levels of traffic already, but that's going to increase as we develop the proposition on the Debenhams website.

Thanks, Neil. And last question from Adam Cochrane. Why have the higher outbound freight rates not been passed on to the customer?

I think from a competition point of view, clearly in the different countries that we operate in, that's our first and foremost, that we make sure and ensure that we're still in that competitive space. We see the current freight as short-term, which we keep saying, and therefore what you don't want to do is take any short-term steps from a pricing point of view versus your competitors. That could impact your business in the medium term. So we look at everything. We look at efficiencies in the warehouse, we look at pricing, we look at sourcing, everything that we can do, but obviously we've got to make sure that we keep it in our competitive set.

Maybe we just take one more question from the webcast before we go back to the room. Georges Poulakoutis from Numis. What does the increased capex guidance relate to? Is this pull forward of outer year capex? How much this relates to US warehouse?

So the increase in the CAPEX guidance is around the progress that we're making with the programme that John talked about to achieve £4.7 billion of net sales capacity. So we're making great progress on the automation project in Sheffield and also we've got the UK DCs up and running. so the um additional amount of capex over and above that relates to um a few things uh that um there's a coming into play one is the international as as we're pointing out there so we're going to see the investment in in the first phase of the us dc towards the end of this year now So that could be around £10 million of the £25 million increase in the guidance. And then the other amounts relate to just pulling forward the programme around our tech, so improving our front-end apps and websites for all of the brands, and including that new headless e-commerce platform for Debenhams. and then improving the office environments in Manchester and London as well. So that's what the additional CAPEX guidance is around.

Thanks very much. Do we have any questions from the room just now?

Yeah, Tony, just a quick, it's not a follow-up, it's a separate issue. I'm involved with a sort of small, much, much smaller than you, clothing company. And we've been having a few problems with, a lot of problems, in fact, with supply out of Vietnam and China in the last year. a very short period of time. Just wondered if you're encountering any issues with that and how big you are in terms of your total supply of Vietnam and China.

So I think Vietnam, firstly, is probably the worst affected in Asia in terms of supply chain. We have tiny, I would describe it, very, very low single digits coming out of there. So it's not really an issue for us. But, you know, I know there's been a lot even in the last week about trying to get Vietnam reopened and kind of. factories back working, but it's not an issue for us. In terms of China, we're like most countries in terms of getting it into a port, whether it's a port or an airport, getting it on a ship or an aircraft, getting it over here. It's slower than what it was previously, but we're getting product through. And if I look at China as an example, last week we would have chartered a jumbo to take out our freight and we have another one coming out next week so we're again kind of just working slightly differently to make sure we're getting our product in at the right time and getting that volume moved for us so Vietnam no issue China our issues there but we're working our way around that sorry how much from China so we've probably got about 30% of our capacity coming out of China

I do it. Hi, Andy Wade from Jefferies. Just on the revenue reacceleration that you're going to see or you're expecting to see in the second half, I'm just wondering if you've got any guide as to how we might expect to see that pan out geographically. You know, there's obviously a lot of stuff going on in terms of delivery proposition and annualising store reopenings and events and stuff kicking off again and unlocking and so on. But if you could just give us a bit of a hand and how geographically you might expect that to pan out.

I think geographically the best way to think of it is that we are seeing that strong re-acceleration in the UK and some of the European markets. So I think we're going to see it in the UK initially and Europe initially, but as Europe's going to increase through the period, as different markets go through that pattern. We've seen it in some of our key markets, but it's momentum starting to grow in Europe. And then the US, I think, is going to be around the kind of run up to the holiday season through Halloween. holidays and then through Christmas, as we generally see. And I think we're going to see the demand stimulus in pretty much all markets be quite different to the way it was last year. So this year, all of those events are going to be happening this year whereas they weren't last year. So actually I think it's going to be pretty evenly spread across the geographies. We're going to see improvements across the geographies. But in the order of events I think you're going to see it in the UK first, continue in Europe and then the US as we get through Halloween.

Great. Thanks. And then sort of a big picture one. I mean, obviously, we've seen growth a bit slower through the current period. Would it be fair to say how you you're viewing it? A big picture level is we're obviously up against very big comps last year, a year where you made great progress and there's some disruption going on. But we'll get through that. We'll get through to next year and we'll sort of be back to normal. And you're talking about 25 percent growth rate again. I mean, is that oversimplifying? Is that sort of how you're thinking about it?

No, that's a good summary. I think we're definitely thinking of it like that. The pandemic has dragged on in terms of those transit times for the international business. As soon as those get back into the more normal levels, then we've got a really competitive proposition. And hopefully that's going to be in the second half of this year to a certain extent and going beyond that. So for future years, definitely we've reiterated that medium term guidance of 25% year on year growth and the 10% EBITDA margin. and we're pretty confident that this is short-term, temporary factors around the pandemic and those are going to subside. What the exact timing of that is, nobody knows, I don't think, but hopefully it's sooner rather than later.

Great, thank you. So we can now go to a question from Ben Hunt from Investec. Inventory levels are up significantly, which is primarily from supply chain disruption. How clean is your stock position?

So our stock position is very clean. We exit a season clean. We've got very clear disciplines across all the brands in terms of where we get to. So we're happy with our stock mix in autumn. Clearly, we're coming towards peak. We need those coats, knitwear. boots we need the party dresses in um and that's coming through and and where we need to get them in that they're not moving quick enough like we just talked about was you know we'll take an aircraft and fill it coming out of china so we're we're happy and we're clean um i would say and a follow-up question from ben hunt a gross margin is up significantly in u.s but down in the rest of europe are you keeping your pricing proposition competitive enough in the us

We would say that we are very, very competitive on price in the US, but we're always, every day, every week, exploring that elasticity around that. And it very much depends on what those demand stimuli are. So we'd say yes, but we're always testing that and testing that elasticity.

I've also got a question from Paul Rotherington from HSBC. Is increased competition impacting your performance in Europe and US?

We've had competition around for a long time and we fought competition for a long time over the last number of years. And as we've demonstrated, if you look at the last half year, look at the last two years, we've continued to grow very strongly. So competition is good in our minds. And clearly the big shift that everybody's seen in the last two years is just that structural move more to the online.

So maybe we could go to a final question from the floor.

Morning, guys. Rachel Burkett from Zeus. Just a very quick one. Having seen your really great showroom upstairs, is there any chance you would ever consider opening any kind of physical retail, even just a pop-up or a flagship? No. I thought that might be the answer. It looks great upstairs.

We'll leave that to the competition.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Okay. Thank you, everybody.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.