3/27/2026

speaker
Anne Critchlow
Analyst, Berenberg

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?

speaker
Simon Wolfson
Chief Executive Officer

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.

speaker
Richard Chamberlain
Analyst, RBC

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.

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