Next Group Plc Unsp/Adr

Anne Critchlow from Berenberg. I've got two questions, please. The first one is about the store payback targets and extension of that. Have you considered taking into account the benefit of a new store in terms of providing a free pickup and returns point for online customers? And then secondly, on aggregator websites, you say you don't have visibility on the customer numbers there, but what insights do you receive from aggregators to help you make decisions about marketing, for example?

So first of all, on the store benefits to online, we don't account for that. We don't in any way put any benefit in for the online business on stores. And there's actually a good reason for that. And that is that although the store does definitely help the online business, it also hinders it because it's a competitor. And so there's only one store where we've shut and had no other stores anywhere near to pick up the business. And there we actually saw the online business move forward because the two million or so that we lost in the store, some of that went online. So we don't and we shouldn't account for online benefit of of stores. In terms of customer insights into aggregation sites, we don't get very much insight and quite rightly, they don't share that with us and we don't share it with our brands either. So what they do share with us is the returns on the marketing we do on their sites. And on somewhere like Zalando, we'll spend around 2% of our sales on marketing. We still have the same hurdles. We still have to get a return on that money. But we can profitably spend money on aggregation sites, and we do. And the insights we get are not about who's buying it, but the returns we get on the marketing that we spend with them.

Richard Chamberlain from RBC. A couple more related to the Middle East, if that's right. The cost savings you talked about, you've identified since the start of the year, 15 million. How many of those or how much of that do you think might come back if demand is a little bit better or the war ends earlier than you're budgeting for? And the second one, can you give us an idea of how the franchise stores in the Middle East have been holding up or not compared to the online offer there? Has there been any sort of big difference in trends? Thanks.

Yes, two good questions. So first of all, how much the 15 million will come back? I think very little. In all honesty, I think there's a much bigger downside risk to that number than there is an upside risk. So yeah, it could come back. It might be that 7 million of it doesn't materialise. We haven't yet incurred it. but I'm not getting excited about that. I think the downsides are much bigger and they will have to go into cost. In terms of franchise business, I don't want to talk about that because it's not our business, but they have definitely been impacted.

Adam Cochrane from Deutsche Bank. First of all, on the Middle East, just a question in terms of logistically, how is it working? Are you able to fly your product to your warehouse in Dubai?

In terms of the Dubai hub, so the Dubai hub traditionally we would have air freighted out of Dubai to other countries like Saudi Arabia and Oman. At the moment we're going by truck and that's what's increasing the lead times to places like Saudi Arabia, Oman and Kuwait. Intermittently, we have seen that service come back on, and I think things are changing daily. We're hoping to have Airflate back on available for Saudi Arabia soon, but it does depend what happens in the war. So the answer is to Dubai, from the UK, we are shipping by air, and we're getting replenishment in at the moment, albeit at a very high premium. That's a big chunk of that increased operating costs. And then from the Dubai hub territory, we've switched from air to trucks, which is adding two to three days to the lead time in most territories.

The second question, in terms of international, are you progressing with, or how are you progressing with other non-Wobble brands, so third-party brands on your international site? Is that an area that you're still seeing more growth and more opportunity as brands would like to... sell via the next platform?

Yes, we have and actually there is detail on that in the pack. There's one page with brilliant tables on it which does show you that I think the overseas, the growth in third party brands overseas is around 22%. Most of that is driven by what's driving the growth in third party brands anyway, which is a better selection of our key brands. But in some areas, Partner brands have agreed to allow us to put their product on our overseas websites where they hadn't in the past and that's driven some growth as well.

Hello, it's Freddie Wild from Jefferies. So apologies, this is going to be quite a broad question, but it was on a reasonably important topic, or it was important until about three weeks ago. You seem on AI to be talking a lot about cost savings and the ability to run the business more efficiently. I suspect where the debate has been in the market is is more about the risks of disintermediation versus the potential benefits to your consumer proposition. So I'd love to get your sort of thoughts on Outlook on almost the demand side of the AI proposition.

It's a big question. I think the first thing to say is, rightly or wrongly, it's not something that we're overly concerned about at the moment. And I think the disintermediation that we're talking about would be the disintermediation of the website. rather than any other parts. At the moment, unless, you know, and it'd be relatively easy because it's just a fraction of their data centres into beautiful clothing warehouses and ChatGPT would have the infrastructure, but at the moment they don't. So you're really talking about the disintermediation of the shopping bag. and the selection process. And there is an economic and operational problem with that that has yet to be solved. And the economic problem is that if you look at our average order value, net of returns, be around £70. Cost of delivery to the consumer is around £5. That's about 6%. Your virtual shopping bag takes things from five different retailers. Wherever that intermediate website goes, it's got to go to a number of retailers. If it comes to us, then fine, it's just another form of advertising. If it goes to more than one retailer, then let's say you go to four retailers rather than one. you end up with that 6% being multiplied by 4. So the economics, someone somewhere has got to pay for that additional 18% of cost that you'll get from splitting the order across multiple orders. websites. I think the operational problem, which in many ways is more of a challenge and applies specifically to clothing, is how you handle returns. Because if you buy all of your online order goes to John Lewis or to Marks and Spencers or to Next or to very, you know exactly, you can take the whole order back to any one of their shops, scan the items and you're credited instantly in the way in which you paid. For an intermediary to do that, you've got to know where to take the item back to. If it's a Nike trainer, which of the subvendors do I take it back to? How do I return it to them? And then how do they communicate with the intermediary that the intermediary's got to repay me? So there are big customer service issues with it. So at the moment, it doesn't look it feels to me very much like what people were saying about marketplaces versus stocked retailers because the real asset in trading online clothing is the logistics infrastructure and the product not the website So I think that is a direction they're unlikely to go in. And certainly, if you look at the difference in Google approach and ChatGPT approach, Google is still taking the approach of passing the consumer straight through from their AI engine to one or other retailer. So it becomes an enhanced form of advertising. And I think to that extent, it's very exciting. I think basically the better search engines can find what customers are looking for, the more they'll buy, which has got to be good for the industry overall. So it was a long answer to a broad question, but I hope it covers.

Yeah, hi, Jeff Larry at Rothschild & Co. Redburn. You had a great year for customer acquisition in the UK, both credits and cash. There was obviously some competitor disruption, et cetera, sitting behind that, weather, all of those things. But can you talk a little bit about the behavior? Is this gross ads? Is this better retention of existing? What is actually driving that? And what measures do you have to sort of keep them active as some of your competitors normalize, et cetera, around you?

I suppose, look, the reality is, and this comes back to this philosophy that everything's got to make a profit. And I think the risk here is saying the objective is to hold on to those customers, not to make sure that all of our retention programmes are profitable. And the amount we invest in a retention programme makes a good return on the money we invest. So our objective is not to hang on to customers, it's to continue to it. invest profitably in retention, and our retention programmes are performing in line with last year. There's no significant, I can't see any significant difference at this point, although we've yet to annualise the very strong weather last year, which may affect it, and the competitive disruption. So the answer is we don't really know how they will perform. I think the key takeaway for shareholders is that we're not going to throw money at trying to hang on to customers that aren't profitable to keep.

Morning. Warwick O'Kines from BNP Paribas. Two questions about warehouse capacity, please, Simon. Firstly, does the level of utilization that you're sort of running up against reduce the ability for the business to reduce the proportion of products not delivered in full and on time, which is something that you've been bringing down? And secondly, are there any options to reduce the proportion of products that are shipped from the UK out to international that could reduce the amount of capacity that you might need for the UK business?

Yeah, really good questions. In terms of not on time delivered in full statistics, they have. I didn't put it in a slide because I'm superstitious because it only just got better. But basically since Christmas, we have seen that dropping from around 8% to around 6%, which is sort of, I think the lowest we got to was around 5%. So warehouse have made significant progress in terms of reducing the not delivered in full on time rates and we are happy with that for the moment but I'm going to talk about it in six months time if we can hold it because it's only been a few weeks but the signs on that are encouraging. I don't think there's anything I can see in this year's numbers that suggests that we won't be able to hold that but it will depend on the effectiveness with which we fill the new mechanisation and the effectiveness with which we can serve the main forward locations in the warehouse from the off-site reserve warehouses which again we haven't started doing in earnest but obviously the risk there is that you've got something in reserve that you don't have in forward if you don't get it exactly right so I think there is a small risk to that but it's not something that I'm hugely concerned about and I'm pretty sure that we'll see year-on-year improvements certainly that's what we're seeing at the moment in terms of delivery to hub direct we're not doing that to germany and the main reason for that is that actually it's it's very because it's third party it's very expensive so we tried to keep that on six weeks cover we would normally have 12 to 14 weeks cover so at the moment we're not delivering direct to germany but it will be an option if we begin to hit capacity issues I think the other issue with direct delivery is that it's very hard to deliver much more than 20% to 25% of anticipated demand without getting it wrong, because you never quite know what's going to sell in which territory. We are delivering direct to the Middle East, which obviously looks like a brilliant plan, and our first cargo ships set off from the Middle East about, I think, from the Far East four or five weeks ago, and have recently been turned back. from Dubai, so that turned out to be a great plan implemented at exactly the wrong time. But going forward, we would plan to deliver, I think it's around 20%, I'm looking at Richard, about 20% of Middle East requirement direct from manufacturer.

Morning. It's Andrew Hollingsworth from Holland Advisors. Next, historically, it's been very, very good at the whole sort of mentality of sort of try stuff and do more of what works. The cost of coffee is years ago and all the rest of it. And wholly owned brands is obviously working extremely well. And I think in the statement or your presentation, you described it as sort of small business. What you've done up to now is sort of buy I don't want to say the wrong thing, but sort of troubled UK businesses, and you've sort of re-energized them and helped them and all the rest of it. But you've wanted them, I think, in past Q&A to sort of prove their worth in terms of return on capital in the UK alone. We've now got a really powerful sort of wholly owned business internationally. What could this look like three, four, five years from now in terms of could we be buying Spanish brands or French brands or Italian brands, or is it just going to be UK homegrown businesses and see what we can do with it globally.

You know what? Looking even a year ahead is difficult in fashion. Three, four years out is absolutely impossible. Would we buy a French, Italian brand? I don't think at the moment, no, because our business in those territories just isn't anywhere big enough. And Southern Europe generally isn't big enough to warrant the investment. The big advantage we provide for Northern European and UK brands is that we can give instant access to a huge market. Actually, our penetration in Southern Europe is very low. So I think those countries that you mention, and France, although it's sort of in the middle, fashion-wise is quite sudden, I think is unlikely. But I would never say no, because even just access through Zalando to those countries might one day give us enough volume to justify it.

follow-up. So do you think, without mentioning any names, in terms of how you think about this part of the business, that there's still lots of brands that can be added to the portfolio within your sweet spot of the sort of things you want to buy?

Yeah, well... What we're looking for is great brands, preferably with good management or with our ability to provide good management to it. We're looking for things that we can add value to through our customer base and platform and at the right price. And I can't predict the fourth one. So I think there are lots of brands that I would buy for a pound that I wouldn't buy for 100 million. And where the price is in between will drive pretty much what we do, I think.

Thanks. It's Georgina Johanan from JP Morgan. Two from me as well, please. Just first of all, sorry if I missed it, but what actually is the Middle East trading at the moment, like down at the moment, please?

Good spot. You didn't miss it.

And then the second one was just a bit of a broader question on GLP-1s. And if you could share anything that you're seeing in terms of how the sizing mix is changing in the business or not, as the case may be. And also just thinking about it longer term, like any insights where from particular customer cohorts, if they are sort of materially changing the sizes of what they're buying, like is their spend increasing or is it steady? Just really any insights you can share would be great. Thank you.

Yeah, so on the Middle East numbers, the reality is it's very, very hard to read. And the reason it's hard to read is because of the timing of Eid. Because we are still in a period now where last year people were ordering in the run-up to Eid. So Eid was on Sunday this time last year. This year it was last Friday. So if we take the same days post-Eid that we are today, that number is changing every day in terms of growth. In terms of GLP-1s, we have seen some subtle change in mix in sizing on women's wear. But where we've seen the most dramatic change is actually on the very large outsides. That's where you can see a change in terms of reduction in participation. These participations are tiny, but participations on the sort of 22 plus are definitely falling. Oh, Sridhar, sorry. One last one.

I had two. Marketing expenses, you're still talking to plus 25% or more. Are you repurposing some of the Middle East marketing into faster growing Europe or rest of the world? Is something like that an option for you? And the second one, again, international, within the rest of the world, are there a couple of markets that you really are excited about and you see significant potential for them to be meaningful for next, within the rest of the world in international?

OK, so the answer to the second question is yes. The answer to the first question, I think the premise of the question is that we've got a marketing pot. And if it doesn't work in the Middle East, we'll move it somewhere else. And that's just not how we work. We don't have a marketing pot. We have a hurdle rate of £1.50 return. And whichever territories give us more return than that, we will continue to invest money in. And those that don't will reduce. And so the answer to your question is, if I sort of stood back from it, do I think we will still be 25% up on what I've seen so far in marketing? Yes. But I think a lot will depend on the cost of air freight to some of our most expensive territories. Because if the price of air freight goes up, the return on the marketing comes down, which constricts our ability to spend it. But overall, we've brought down our sales by around 2% overseas at the moment. So that's our best guess as the full impact, but who knows. And we've kept the marketing budget where it is. And on that note, we really will finish. Thank you very much.