Ocado Group Plc

Good morning and welcome to the Ocado Q4 2024 analyst call. I will now hand over to Chief Executive Officer Hannah Gibson. Please go ahead.

Good morning all. Thank you for joining Ocado Retail's Q4 results today. I'm Hannah Gibson, CEO of Ocado Retail, and I'm joined by Matt Ankers, our CFO. There's been a lot going on at Ocado Retail in 2024, and we've made great progress on delivering on our perfect execution strategy And as a result, we've seen strong growth, which accelerated as the year progressed. Our proposition is resonating with customers. We've seen more people shopping with us more often as we give them even better service at better value. Let me share some of the key highlights from the Q4 period, which includes the 13 weeks to the 1st of December 2024. Our retail revenue grew by 17.5% to £716 million. On Ocado.com, our volumes grew by 17% year-on-year, and average orders per week grew by 16.9% to 476,000. We hit half a million orders per week at the end of Q4. Looking now to the full year FY24 results, which includes the 52 weeks of 1st December 2024, our retail revenue grew by 13.9% to £2,668,000,000. Volumes, total items on Ocado.com grew by 12.9%, and average orders per week grew by 12.5%. driven by growth in active customer base of 12.1% to 1.1 million customers and frequency increased as customers shop with us more often. Average basket value increased by 1% to £122.09 due to growth in basket size, up 0.3% to 44.3 items and a 0.6% increase in ASP, well below the UK grocery inflation as we continue to invest in price. Given our growth rates, as you'd expect, we delivered our biggest ever Christmas as our customers made the most of the season to indulge in our massive range. And customers continued to reach all their M&S favourites too, from the party food and showstoppers through to the core range, which continued to sell really strongly. And Cantar figures showed Ocado Retail was the fastest growing retailer in the sector for the nine months of 2024. Throughout the year, we've continued to raise the bar on our proposition. Firstly, we've continued to focus on unbeatable choice. including now having our widest ever range of M&S products live on site, and we've done lots of joint launches of their fantastic new ranges too. We've grown our range of small suppliers, often being the first to list new products supported by the launch of Ocado Routes, our new community programme for challenger brands to enable us to be the first for new trends. Secondly, on the unrivalled service, we focus on keeping our promises to customers by delivering orders on time and in full. We improved our already high perfect orders rate by 7 percentage points and continue to ensure 99% of items were delivered exactly as promised. We also added half a day's life to the freshness of our produce. And then thirdly, reassuringly good value. We've made further strides through our carded price promise, a series of big price drops across hundreds of products and increasing our own brand range even more. As a result, we've shifted our value perceptions as customers realise how much we've moved on price with value satisfaction increasing 4.3 percentage points versus the start of the year. Taken all together, these three elements of our proposition have led to our NPS score increasing plus 4.9 percentage points versus last year, and we continue to see we have the highest NPS in the industry. Turning to our operations, our CFC efficiency approved throughout the year, with average units per hour, UPH, rising to 220, up 15% versus last year, with our newest CFC in Leighton reaching 269 UPH, in the year as we further rolled out on-grid robotic PIC. And over the Christmas period, our network exceeded design capacity, demonstrating the further growth potential of our CFCs. This year has seen us make significant progress. And in addition to the revenue growth, EBITDA has also progressed strongly year on year. We're now moving into the next phase of our strategy, and we're evolving it to focus on the following. Firstly, we're clearly going to be continued focus on delivering a leading customer proposition. and we'll continue to be relentlessly focused on unbeatable choice, unrivalled service and reassuring good value. Secondly, we want to deliver smart growth as part of our drive to improve profitability. This includes increasing our customer lifetime value, improving our cost to serve and maximising our network capacity. And then thirdly, to do this, we need to build out our platform for the future to be ready and set up for the next few years of what will be an exciting period for online grocery. Looking to FY25 then, we have confidence that business will continue to grow sales volumes well ahead of the market as we continue to acquire new customers to Ocado. We expect frequency to be stable as we retain the improvements delivered in FY24. And we expect to make further progress on driving operational efficiency and scale leverage, continuing our journey towards the mid-high single-adjusted EBITDA margin in the midterm. And this will be reflected in our EBITDA guidance for FY25 for Ocado retail at the Ocado Group full-year results at the end of February. Whilst we've made lots of progress, there remains a lot of potential ahead. And as ever, I'd just like to end by a big thank you to all the teams at Cardio Retail, Cardio Group, M&S, and our fantastic suppliers as well. Many thanks, and let's go to questions.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question on today's call, please signal by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. Again, that is star 1 for your question today. And up first, we have Manjari Dar from RBC. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my question. I just had two, if I may. The first, I was just wondering how you're thinking about the need for price investment across the next year and whether you plan to continue to invest in pricing. And then secondly, I wondered if you could give any sort of colour on the shape of trading across maybe Q4, and I don't know if you could give something on December as well, and maybe something on the exit rate. Thank you.

Thanks for your question. So in terms of price investment, as I called out, we've materially moved in terms of our value to customers over actually the last couple of years. And I'd say for many of our customers now, we're competitive now. the price versus the mulch, and we believe that has a number of benefits in terms of driving our growth, driving our retention, acquisition, but also supporting frequency and stabilisation of basket size as well. We've made a lot of progress over the last year in particular, but also some in the prior year as well. I think we've made probably the bigger moves now, and I think there's a little bit more to go. but probably not to the same extent that we've done over the last year. So there's a bit more we want to do, but it's also about being smart about how we're offering that price, that value to our consumers as well. As ever, there's always more to do to make sure you're offering promotions for the most effective things to consumers. We are looking to do more in terms of our own brand range as well. We believe there's more to do there, which will support consumers with higher baskets. So as ever, it's about getting that price investment right, balancing it with those areas that are going to support a broader, larger basket consumer as well. Hopefully that gives a bit more colour to that. In terms of the shape of trading, well, if you just think broadly across the year, we've seen each quarter the growth has accelerated. Maybe I should bring a bit more colour to that overall because what we actually saw in Q4 was about two-thirds of our growth came from active base growth and about one-third came from frequency. So consumers shopping with us more often as we were in a better position to offer improved slot availability. but also as some of that, you know, competitiveness on price and our proposition more broadly came through as well. Going in, that was a greater acceleration in terms of frequency contribution to our growth in Q4. As we go into next year, as I just highlighted, what we're expecting is more of that frequency to stabilise rather than be a contribution to additional growth. But we expect that sort of the exit rate of active customers was strong. We see that going into this year as strong, but obviously, As we go through next year, we will be analysing from a higher base. So, whilst the numbers we continue to expect to be a strong contribution in terms of increasing numbers of new active customers, we expect the overall percentages to slide up as we go through that year-on-year comp.

Thank you. And we move on to our next question now, which comes from Luke Harper from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Yeah, good morning and thank you for taking my question. My first one is just following up on the previous one, just around the Christmas trading period. I think usually you provide commentary around a few days around Christmas or the week after Christmas, your year-on-year revenue growth rate, so anything on that regard would be helpful. And then my second question is just on the capacity here because it's clear that your investment into pricing is driving strong customer acquisition and revenue growth, but you have exceeded design capacity over the Christmas period. And if we think about capacity into 2025, could a Cardo retail look to take more capacity from Eris now that Morrison's is reducing capacity there? Or is it possible and theoretically possible that you could reopen that Hatfield site that you're paying about £33 million per year for anything on the design side? on that capacity would be very helpful. Thank you.

So yeah, thanks for your questions, Luke. So firstly on Christmas trading, we haven't released a specific number this year, but I think it's fair to say Christmas is always an area where we continue to see strong demand. We sell out around 80% of our slots by the end of October. So that demand is always there. But obviously what we're doing this year, as we mentioned in the release, where we were making sure that we could maximise the site capacity that we've got this year. But actually, as we go into next year, sort of on your question on capacity, we believe there's more that we can do. So, you know, as ever, we're looking at what is, you know, within those CFCs and those sites, what are the next opportunities to unlock more capacity in each one? And then exactly as you say, there is the opportunity going forward to look at ERIS as an option, but we're in conversations with about that optionality and there's no further news of that at the moment. But as I say, we did exceed design capacity at Christmas. We believe there's even more to go after. There's more changes that we can make in terms of our CSCs to get them to be more productive and get more capacity across them as well.

That's very clear. And theoretically, it's not possible to reopen Hatfield is basically what I would deduce from that.

We're not at the moment got any plans to reopen Hatfield. We'll continue to look at the capacity that's available at the sites we've got and continue on conversations on our end. Thank you. Thanks.

Thank you. And up next, we have William Wood from Bernstein. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking the questions. The first one is just on marketing. Could you give any idea of how much marketing has kind of gone up over the period? Are you having to spend more to acquire these customers? And then the second one, in terms of the customers that you're acquiring, obviously strong active customer growth, what does that base look like? Is it lapsed customers who are coming back or are you targeting different demographics? Who are the customers that you're acquiring effectively?

So in terms of marketing, across the years, we've grown substantially across the year, so say 30.9% revenue growth across the year, growing to 17.5% in the Q4, but actually we improved our marketing efficiency across the year. So our CPA actually was improved year on year, our overall marketing efficiency has improved year on year. So we are being more effective and efficient in terms of how we are driving that activity. And as ever with marketing, it's about making sure we're being continuous optimisation, looking at every channel, shifting a channel mix, getting the messaging right, so just continually sweating the details of how to drive that marketing efficiency. In terms of the customer base, so we're seeing actually a pretty broad way of customers coming to Ocado, which I think is very encouraging. When we look across where we are getting customers from, where the switching is coming from, we're continuing to see that it's across almost all supermarkets, We've continuously across the course of the year, as an example, continued switching from Tesco. And what's also interesting is it's not just offline and online, it's both a mix of online and offline consumers are switching to Ocado and then sticking with us as well. And then from a region perspective, we're seeing growth across multiple different regions as well. So I think what's interesting here is that we are seeing a broader, continuously a broad range of consumers shopping at Ocado. I think that's sort of exciting for the potential that holds going forward as well. and managing to broaden our base whilst overall keeping frequency, or actually driving frequency and keeping markets safe, I think is pretty positive. So we're going to be seeking to continue the momentum with next year.

Excellent. Thank you.

Thank you. And from Barclays, we have Sarah Roberts with our next question. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. Just two for me. So firstly, there were a couple of press reports over the Christmas period that there was a technical issue at one of the CSEs and that caused some issues with orders. Can you give us a sense of the magnitude of this problem and are you able to quantify any impact, if any, if there was on December trading? And has this issue now been resolved? Secondly, the Ongro robotic pick seems successful in contributing to improved efficiencies at Luton over Q4. and you previously spoke about kind of rolling out the OGRP across the network. Can you give an update on how this is progressing and kind of how you're thinking about using that to improve efficiency into the midterm? Thank you.

Thanks for your question, Sarah. So, yeah, the first question on Christmas. So over that Christmas period, we delivered hundreds of thousands of orders across that period, and the vast majority of Cardo customers got a great experience. That said, to me, if any single one is not a good experience, clearly we've not delivered our promises and that's absolutely what we're here to do. So we see that as not acceptable. But in terms of the issues, it was one site, one issue, one day. Although for any of those customers we obviously reached out, absolutely understand the impact it would have had on any of those individuals. But looking at the numbers overall, it was a tiny proportion of the Christmas orders that we had. But as I say, really made sure we focused on those customers, getting in contact with them, and apologising for service overseas. But as I say, Boston Drive customers had a great Ocado Christmas experience. In terms of your second question, in terms of on-grid robotic pick, yeah, absolutely. So as I mentioned, Luton is now, well, actually higher now than 269 UPH. That's where it exited the year. It continues to improve, and that's just for those of you on the call who are not so familiar. That's already about 70% more productive than the Hatfield site that we had, and we closed last year. By the end of the year, we were doing more than 30% on-grid robotic pick through Luton. That number has continued to even grow since then. It's now close to mid-30% numbers. And we are now in the process of ordering more on-grid robotic pick across our sites, and we'll be rolling that out. But it's not necessarily in the next few months, but over the next year to two years, we'll be rolling that out across our border estate. But we haven't released any specifics on exactly when that's going in, but absolutely confident that that can drive much greater efficiency across our CSCs. And our ambition is north of 50%, close to 70% in terms of on-grid aquatic pick opportunities across our estate. And we said previously, we expect our sites to do closer to a 330 UPH versus the 220 that we just announced as the average across the year this year.

Thank you. And as a brief reminder, that is star one for your questions today. And up next, we have Tintin Stormont from Deutsche Numis. Please go ahead.

Morning, guys. Hannah, could you, I think in previous calls, you've distinguished some of the behavior of the more mature customers within Ocado. And could you just describe maybe sort of give more color on mature customers versus the ones that are new online in terms of kind of their buying behavior and in terms of where you see you could really drive that customer lifetime value. Where's the bigger opportunity? And then secondly, on ARIS, is it possible to give any color in terms of the additional capacity it could give you if you did decide to use that capacity?

Thanks for your questions. In terms of the different customers, I think I've given a flavor to the board. I'm not sure if it's specifically for those differences, but maybe just if I think more broadly about ARIS, how we grow and what that looks like. So each year we bring in new cohorts of customers. What we tend to see is that the longer they stick with us, that drives their frequency, that drives their basket size. And so we see whatever new cohort we bring in, there's a sort of journey to get them to maturity. What we've seen over the last couple of years is that we've been improving, I describe it as the value of those customers that have been coming in. So we've been improving our attention to space, which has continued to improve year on year. and we've continued to improve that first quarter value, so that the value of a customer over that first quarter that we have them. And we see that as a sort of positive trajectory going forward. It doesn't have to be that as you grow as an organisation, you have a sort of broader sway of the customers, but that's exactly why we're continuing to invest and have invested in price, continue to invest in our proposition, so that we continue to capture a greater share of wallet from those consumers. But I think pretty similar to the answer I gave earlier to William in terms of where those customers are coming from, As I say, I think we're becoming a broader appeal to a broader swathe of customers. That's probably the biggest favor I'd give on that one. In terms of ERIS, we haven't released any details on either of our kind of group in terms of what that capacity is, what that looks like. And as I say, we're continuing in discussions on that. And as and when there's any further updates, obviously, we will let everyone know.

Great.

Thanks.

Thank you. And as there are currently no further questions in the queue, I would now like to hand the call back over to you, Ms Gibson, for any additional or closing remarks.

Thank you very much for everyone that joined the call today. I look forward to speaking to you all soon. Thank you.

Thank you for joining today's call. Ladies and gentlemen, you may now disconnect.