Angling Direct PLC ($ANG)

Good morning, and welcome to the Angling Direct plc Investor presentation. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll, which I kindly ask you to submit your responses to. I'd now like to hand over to the executive management team. Steve, good morning.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the January 2026 Angling Direct Results Meet. We've had another fantastic year for the business, record numbers in terms of both revenue growth and profit, and I'm looking forward to taking you through that detail today. We put together a highlights page. This sort of covers 3 key themes for the business in the 12 months to January '26, sort of characterized by customer engagement. You can see there on the slide, we've got a number of customer metrics that we're increasingly focused on, be that the volume of our digital output and the number of customers who are consuming that content, the way we're structurally looking at the business in terms of driving an omnichannel customer strategy for those who engage with us both physically and digitally being our most valuable and engaged customer base and/or the way we're sort of attempting to drive that through our MyAD proposition where, again, you'll see on the screen there, some pretty impressive growth numbers in terms of the way we're looking to sort of scale Europe's biggest [indiscernible]. Set that against a backdrop where 24 months ago, Sam and I set out the vision to sort of further consolidate the U.K. angling market, I mean, a substantial category where we felt there was the capability for us to take share at an increasingly speedy rate. We've done that in the 12 months. So the top left-hand [ tile ] there, U.K. like-for-like growth touching on 12%, we think stand out in a retail category. And put that against not just revenue growth, the earnings growth that Sam will talk about later on, we're delivering CAGRs of just shy of 20% now in terms of that EBITDA journey. That number now starts with a GBP 5 million number. And indeed, we've built some numbers out there in the market that show further progression for that to come this year. The third element to the sort of highlights is the strategy of development alongside those 2 themes I've just mentioned. From a European perspective, we've always said that we believe Europe presents the opportunity for the business to further scale in material markets in the longer term after we consolidate the U.K. market. In the last 24 months, we've now reduced those European losses by over 50%, whilst retaining the optionality for that market as we see sort of some modestly encouraging signs around the green shoots in the European landscape. Put all that together in the bottom right-hand side is only 24 months on from when we last published a set of ambitions for the business. We've upgraded those ambitions again, I'll cover those in more detail when we come to the end of the presentation. How are we tracking against those current strategic objectives that we set out in May '24? I'll briefly touch on each of those as we go down the page. So a U.K. business with a flight path of GBP 100 million was our ambition back in May '24. We've essentially achieved that this year, GBP 99.2 million, as you'll see on the slide, underpinned by that like-for-like growth. The component of the business now, what originally was about doing new space and consolidating the market through new space, increasingly, our sort of existing substantial customer base is now playing an increased role in that journey towards that GBP 100 million. The U.K. business on a flight path to GBP 6 million adjusted EBITDA. Again, as I mentioned, CAGR just short of 20% on that. And we're actually over-indexing the way we're growing the profits relative to the revenue journey we've been on. We're seeing the return for the investments we've made, which I'll touch on shortly below, really starting to come through the P&L account and more to come from those. The GBP 5.3 million number was a result of 2 upgrades that we put into the market last year. And indeed, we've got a number out in the market for FY '27, just a [ shade ] over GBP 6 million sort of underlying that ambition to get to that GBP 6 million number, which we'll achieve within 3 years if we deliver that market number. Obviously, one of the key sort of strategic components of how we do that is our MyAD Fishing Club, 600,000 members, 47% growth. It's impressive stats on its own. I think the way we're using that data and we're using and engaging with that customer base is increasingly impressive and important. One of the stats we've included on the page there is we do look at who are our omnichannel customers, 310 basis points improvement in terms of the percentage of our customer base who engage with us both physically and digitally. Those customers are well worth over GBP 500 each, and we continue to sort of focus in on how we access our customers greater share of their Angling wallet. In terms of Europe, developing a sustainable European business, as I said, we've reduced the losses by half and at the same time, still maintaining that optionality in Europe, where we see there is a longer-term opportunity for the business. We continue to be sort of innovative in the way we're approaching the market. Historically, I'd have talked about how we've used now a third-party logistics operation. And this year, again, we've looked at how we've ranged the business in a more fulsome way by using a just-in-time stock operation where we're working with our supply partners, reducing the working capital strain of the business as we look to sort of balance the losses against the capital deployed in the European journey. Deploying our surplus liquidity to grow the business beyond the medium-term objectives. We set that out again 24 months ago. FY '26 was our biggest ever investment 12 months. A core component of that was our digital shelf edge labeling investment, just over GBP 2 million, 4-year payback on that, where we just look at what we could absolutely measure, a lot more to come from that investment. And again, we see that as a fundamental component of how we're going to scale the business and grow the profits into '27 and beyond. We've continued to run our buyback program as out there stated in the market. I'll talk a little bit later on about how we see that evolving. And whilst we see the share price performance remains a little bit sticky, that buyback program, where appropriate is good value for shareholders. Angling retail's largest responsible employer, we continue to focus in on all of the things that contribute to the market, so being seen as part of the Angling ecosystem. This year, we launched the AD Win website, which not only is a different way to engage in our customer base, but it's also enabled us to have a very formulaic way of demonstrating how we put value back into the sort of the fishing ecosystem with 5% of all of the contributions to that website being placed back into activities that are going to support the benefits of Angling. In terms of the business review, I'll just go through some of the detail on the page we've set out to help sort of folks understand what we've been focusing on and what we've been driving into the business. On the left-hand side there, U.K. customer, I talked about that omnichannel customer being of increasing importance to us. As I said, over 20% of our customers now are omnichannel customers. Those customers have a frequency of around 8x. We've increased that from 7.5x this year. We're increasingly focused on how our store-only customers who tend to be our less frequent and less engaged customer base, how can we talk to them in a different way? How can we target them in a different way, such as we drive up the value from that customer base. An increasing -- a large slice of our store-only customers only visit our stores once a year, and we see that as a huge opportunity for us to scale the like-for-like sales in that ever-increasing store portfolio. We're using the MyAD data to talk to our customers in an increasingly personalized way, mainly from sort of digital flows in terms of identifying characteristics of customer sets within our data using our customer insights platform that we established during the year. And again, we're seeing that as a component of how we are taking substantial share in the digital market, but also growing that omnichannel customer base that I just previously referenced. The bottom bullet, Shop the Range, that is a digital technology that we've put into all of our stores that enable our customers to access our full digital range, which is about 3x as large as the average store range, both to their house next day or to the store free of charge. We took about GBP 1.6 million through that technology this year. That's really helping us push the omnichannel journey, get folks more comfortable with the digital engagement with us and push them sort of increasingly to be more frequent and spend more with us as their retailer of preference. In the middle block, our store strategy, we continue the pace of our rollout of stores, another 6 new sites in the year, GBP 2.5 million invested. We're increasingly focused on delivering those 4-year paybacks from those store investments. And we continue to refine the way we look at how we're driving into various catchments. Our traditional model of GBP 1 million store as we build out the U.K., we look increasingly at smaller catchments where we need to be more agile in terms of the way we range, resource and plan to execute those stores. As I touched on a moment ago, digital shelf edge labeling, the biggest investment this organization has ever made in one piece of technology. That has been a success in terms of implementation. We're fully operational with that technology across all of our store estate, and we're confident in delivering the 4-year payback and looking for ways to enhance that further. Of that sort of 4-year payback around GBP 350,000 a year was colleague time saving. And indeed, we've challenged ourselves to reinvest some of that back into the business this year as we look at how we engage with our customer base in the stores, particularly around those customers who only visit us once, which we see as a real opportunity for the business. Over on the right-hand side, U.K. Digital, the theme of increased personalization, enhancing the customer repeat percentage. As I said, we are seeing some real sort of demonstrable progress in the way that we are engaging with that customer base. We think 20% growth is a standout in the digital market in terms of how we're engaging and trading with that customer base. And that's been supported by the third bullet down. We think we've got an innovative way of looking at our paid search traffic. We have kept our return on advertising flat in a year where most retailers would have been talking about 15% to 20% increase in cost of clicks. And we've grown the digital business 20% whilst achieving that sort of that flat landscape on ROCE, which again, we think is an impressive achievement. Back to the theme of technology in the second bullet. Somebody -- some folks who have been with us on the journey would remember we spent GBP 1 million on an automated packing machine in our U.K. fulfillment center last year. And again, we've lent into that, refined some of the technology around that investment. And we're sort of yielding over GBP 0.25 million in underlying benefit in terms of reduced colleague costs, reduced packaging paper ink against what we've historically seen in the distribution center. Finally down the bottom there AD Win, which I talked about in terms of how we're doing our reengagement from a community perspective. One of the great pieces about that is it's another string to our bow in terms of the way we engage with our customer base. And indeed, our overlap between MyAD and AD Win is only about 50% right now. So it's another customer cohort that gives us some insight in terms of who else can we target, how else can we talk to them differently to engage them in our AD proposition. Europe, we, as a management team and a Board believe having a longer-term growth opportunity is important to the business. We have done a cracking job of quickly accelerating the consolidation in the U.K. market. We do see the European market displaying very much the signs and the characteristics of that, that was observed in the U.K. market pre-COVID. And therefore, we continue with the strategy of retaining our optionality as market conditions become more favorable, whilst at the same time, making sure the appropriate amount of risk capital only is allocated to that option. Scaling the business through the just-in-time operation, reducing working capital constraints while still offering the customer greater choice, reducing the losses by over 50% within 2 years, we think is, again, sticking to the strategy we set out 24 months ago and very much one we can continue to drive in next year and beyond. Commercially, some key successes for the business. Our own brand journey continues with pace. That's become an increasingly important component of our gross margin success. I'll let Sam talk about that a little bit more within the financials. 130 basis points, again, the second year, the team has delivered over 100 basis points improvement in the gross margin. That is fundamentally important to the business in terms of the cost pressures we've seen from national insurance and living wage. We needed some strings to our bow to be able to outcompete those cost pressures, and we've certainly done that through leveraging the gross margin over 100 basis points in each of the previous 2 years. Working capital remains a focus. For the first time, we started to talk about return on capital employed externally about this business. We do see the stockpile is our key COG in our return on capital employed calculation. We've grown the COGS. We've grown the sales of this business, whilst at the same time keeping our underlying investment in working capital broadly neutral, slightly positive last year, which again, we think is a testament to the way that we are increasingly engaging with the supply chain around optimum ranges, optimum stocking and how we look to drive the range to a more sort of home and focused offer. And then lastly, on the right-hand side there, communities and sustainability. The AD Community Fund is now an increasingly important COG of the way we see how we engage with the market. But that doesn't sort of trump everything we've been previously doing around our lime recycling credentials, 3.5 million meters last year. That was 85% of all line that was actually recycled in the U.K. came through the AD operation. And again, we're still standing behind the Angling Trust water quality monitoring network, supporting the Angling Trust in terms of for free disseminating its water quality test kit, be that to existing sponsors or to those who want to get on the journey with the Angling Trust and start to collect that data and furnish that back to the Angling Trust, such that it gives them a more powerful resource in terms of challenging the various water bodies. Finally, from a governance perspective, we continue to reshape the Board. Neil Williams joined us as a non-exec during the year and our founder, Martyn Page, moved to a lifetime President role, retaining his passion and his knowledge for the business, whilst at the same time, contemporizing the skills that we've got around the Board team. And at that point, I'll hand over to Sam for the financials.

Thanks, Steve. Good morning, everybody. So just starting with a few financial headlines on the slide there. And we'll get into more of the detail behind these over the next few slides. But you can see here the progress we've made in FY '26, continuing to build on the FY '25 momentum in terms of growing the revenues, continuing to build profitability and continue to invest the cash in the delivery of the medium-term objectives whilst also returning excess liquidity to shareholders through the application of our published capital allocation policy. So if we just move on to the next slide, we'll get a bit more in the detail behind some of these stats you can see on the screen there. So starting with revenue in the U.K. U.K. total like-for-like revenue growth, as Steve said, of 11.9% to GBP 93.6 million. So that reflects the strong growth across both stores and online. U.K. total like-for-like continues to be the key metric. We look at from a sales perspective for the U.K. business, and that reflects the increasingly joined up omnichannel proposition from both a customer perspective with us now leveraging that MyAD data and the insights platform and also as we increasingly leverage the wider cost base and stockpile across both the stores and online channels. So in terms of the channel components of that 11.9%, store like-for-like growth was at 5.8% year-on-year to GBP 50.8 million, and [ footfall ] was the key driver of that growth. And online, we saw 20% growth year-on-year to GBP 42.8 million, and that's really underpinned by session growth. So [indiscernible] then results in overall U.K. growth of 14.8% to GBP 99.2 million, which, as Steve said, that substantially means we've now delivered our GBP 100 million U.K. revenue target in 2 years of first publishing that. And also shows that 80% of that revenue growth in the U.K. year-on-year is from the underlying business. So it does continue to be that U.K. like-for-like sales growth that's really fueling the overall U.K. sales and earnings growth. Moving to Europe. Overall revenues reduced 4.7% to GBP 4.7 million. The store revenues continue to scale with revenues now at circa GBP 0.5 million, and that's still on the softer side, what we see against the typical U.K. maturity curve for a store, but that is to be expected given we don't have the same brand recognition of physical retail and critical mass in the Netherlands yet. And we're still not seeing the expected levels of capital items in the store basket, which is holding back the sales line, but is driving a better-than-expected gross margin because we're seeing, therefore, a higher consumable mix with the store then breaking even in FY '26. In Europe, online revenues reduced 9.9% year-on-year to GBP 4.1, with the key target territories of Germany and the Netherlands reduced by 9% and 9.1%, respectively. And that really reflects our continued focus on delivering increasingly profitable sales when we search out those sales with unit economics that really support that year-on-year loss reductions we'll come on to on the next slide so that we can continue to monitor and evaluate the market dynamics and retain optionality over that significant growth opportunity that Europe represents for us. So moving on to the gross profit down on the bottom right-hand side and starting in the U.K. As Steve said, we've seen 130 basis point improvement year-on-year, which really continues that momentum we saw last year where we were 140 basis points in FY '25 versus FY '24 after only being plus 10 basis points in FY '24 versus FY '23. The key components of the 130 basis points are, firstly, 70 basis points through improved supply rebate structures where we're seeing sort of a broader range of suppliers engaging with us. And that sort of then goes hand-in-hand with the gross profit growth in terms of more pound-like spend against those rebate structures driving the gross profit. 80 basis points through optimizing third-party supplier mix, the classic example there being a sort of brand A lower GP percentage item being replaced by -- in the range by brand B higher-margin GP percentage items. So it's all those day in, day out ranging decisions in aggregate really utilizing and leveraging the data we now have at our fingertips. 40 basis points through the own brand progression, which Steve touched on with gross profit growth year-on-year of 53% and now -- that now representing a gross profit penetration in the U.K. of just over 14%. And 10 basis points through service revenue, which is both commercial marketing. So for example, sponsor of gondola range in store, spot ad on the website, but then also our in-store services such as real spooling, [ polar ] elastication as we rolled out in FY '26 real servicing. So that's up the ladder 200 basis points and then coming down the snake through 40 basis points on additional MyAD promotional activity to ensure we still got compelling offers to help drive customer frequency and to make sure we're still acquiring that valuable customer data through compelling offers and 30 basis points through increased shrinkage against what continues to be a very, very challenging landscape. Moving on to Europe. So the gross margin in the store is in line with expectation based on that category mix I touched on before. Whereas in the digital business, the critical measure isn't the gross profit, but remains to be the contribution ratio, which is the gross profit then less the direct fulfillment cost of the order, so pre- overheads as the European business continues to operate on a negative contribution ratio. However, in FY '26, that contribution ratio has improved 100 basis points year-on-year, and that's a cocktail of the gross margin moving forward 270 basis points, driven by that focus on increasingly profitable sales. And with the variable cost only eroding that by 170 basis points, netting to the 100 basis points progression on the contribution ratio with the primary driver of that higher variable cost being the paid search, which continues to be a challenging landscape in Europe. Moving then to adjusted EBITDA. I get this to work. There we go. And again, starting in the U.K. on that top left-hand side. So you can see there the adjusted U.K. EBITDA grew by 25.5% year-on-year to GBP 5.3 million, delivering that critical over-index we've spoken about before against the sales growth of 14.8% to improve the adjusted EBITDA margin by 40 basis points to 5.3%. So we entered FY '26 knowing that the cost headwinds we faced that Steve touched on, particularly around the above inflation national living wage and the employers' NI changes to both the rate and the threshold, we have about circa 100 basis point impact on the adjusted EBITDA margin. So we start -- we finished FY '25 at 4.9%. So if we'd have stood still, we would have been facing to deliver in FY '26 at 3.9%. So our internal target was to try and soak up those 100 basis points of cost headwinds and hold the EBITDA margin flat at 4.9%. But because of that strong gross margin progression at 130 and another additional 10 basis points of cost base efficiencies that allowed us to offset that and then also grow the adjusted EBITDA margin by 40 basis points. And then moving to Europe, just down in the bottom right-hand corner, as I've already mentioned, the Utrecht store breakeven in the year, which is obviously an important milestone. But the online business remains the key challenge in terms of continuing to progress the year-on-year loss reduction. And really, the critical contribution ratio we've touched on that really is what's driving this alongside then really carefully continuing to deploy the cost base really carefully over there. And again, we've seen some further reduction in the overhead year-on-year, primarily driven by the 3PL agreement we rolled out in Q4 in FY '25. So overall, in Europe, that results in a further improvement in the adjusted EBITDA losses of 43.5% to about GBP 0.5 million, which is now down 60% or GBP 0.7 million versus the GBP 1.2 million loss we saw in the first year in FY '23. And importantly, that then means that the adjusted EBITDA loss as a percentage of the U.K. adjusted EBITDA has improved by over 1,000 basis points year-on-year to 9.1% versus the 33% we saw back in FY '23. And then finally, just moving to cash and return on capital and starting with our group cash flow bridge on the top left there. And we'll just put out some of the key highlights we've not really touched on. So working capital, you can show there on the screen a GBP 0.6 million outflow. That also includes a GBP 1 million of stock investment in the FY '26 new space. So really, there's an underlying net cash inflow in the year of GBP 0.4 million. So just to give you a flavor of what's making up that underlying GBP 0.4 million inflow. So stock is GBP 1.1 million higher at the end of the year, but that's offset by payables being GBP 1 million higher. So the underlying working capital deployed in stock is broadly neutral year-on-year. But in terms of that GBP 1.1 million higher stock, it is worth noting that at the end of January, we've got an even more concentrated stockpile. So 84% of our stock is now ranged in every location across the business versus about 76% at the end of FY '25. And also the availability in the stockpile at the end of the year was up 270 basis points year-on-year. So an increasingly quality stockpile behind that working capital block. So then that leaves a residual GBP 1.2 million inflow. And really, the key standouts there are the positive impact of stronger trading in terms of the VAT timing on cash flows and the timing upside on accruals in terms of the accruals versus payable timing. Moving to interest and parking to one side just the IFRS 16 charge element of that interest. The underlying interest income in the year is GBP 0.3 million, which is lower year-on-year, but does reflect both the lower cash levels and the softer interest rate environment. But when we look at the effective interest rate versus prevailing Bank of England rate, we're still at the same sort of effective interest rate. So we're still maximizing that opportunity where we can. Moving to CapEx. As Steve touched on, it's a record year of CapEx for the business. The 3 standouts being the GBP 2.1 million on the digital shelf edge labeling, GBP 1.5 million on the 6 new stores in FY '26 and then another couple of hundred thousand pounds in terms of scale and web fulfillment where we linked the automated pick and pack capability and added more pick locations to help enable that online growth where we saw that 20% growth in the year. And then finally, just on buybacks there, you can see we've deployed GBP 1.1 million in the year, which leaves us GBP 1.7 million returned since the buyback at the end of January 2016. And as at closed yesterday, that leaves us at GBP 2 million return through the buyback out of GBP 4 million, so we have another GBP 2 million remaining. The table on the top right there then just pulls out adjusted free cash flow. And what we're trying to do here is just demonstrate the underlying cash flow generation in the business is really improving. And you can see there, if we back out the GBP 1 million of new stock -- sorry, new space stock in FY '26, that GBP 3.8 million of investment CapEx, I just explained in the bridge and the GBP 1.1 million deployed in the buyback, then you can see that adjusted free cash flow has improved by GBP 3.5 billion to GBP 4.8 million in the year, really reflecting that underlying cash flow really starting to build now. And then finally, just moving to the chart at the bottom, and we're reducing -- or introduced group adjusted ROCE to align within the stated target and the upgraded medium-term objectives, which we'll come on to shortly. And we're presenting that as adjusted EBIT, so the EBIT less the IFRS 2 and IFRS 16 impacts in the same way as we present adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of reported net assets less cash. As you can see that we've made significant progress in the year with a 370 basis points improvement year-on-year to 8.9% as we're delivering on both sides of the equation in terms of delivering that EBIT growth, which will be built over FY '25 and FY '26. And in terms of then the net assets less cash growth under-indexing versus both the sales and earnings growth, reflecting that adjusted free cash flow dynamic in the table. And with that, I'll hand back to Steve.

Thanks, Sam. I'll talk a little bit about where we're at now in terms of our FY '27 performance and our plans for the rest of the year. And I'll go on to talk about how we've now upgraded those medium-term forecasts 24 months on from when we first stated those. So obviously, we're [ at ] January year-end. February is not a huge opportunity month for us. But you can see on the slide there that we started very strongly with the U.K. again up in low double-digit growth. Following the start of the Middle East conflict, as many of you might have seen a bit of pressure in terms of consumer spend. We've certainly seen that come through more laterally in our April numbers. But again, we're still delivering growth in the business, not as strong as we've seen in February, but still meaningful growth in terms of that customer acquisition and scale in the U.K. From a cost perspective, we've seen modest amounts of incremental costs, largely through fuel surcharges from our carrier partners in terms of our digital business and our customer delivery network. And we've sought savings elsewhere in the business to offset those, looking at, in particular, discretionary spend. As the war persists, we'll keep those under close review. We've got other levers we could look at in terms of where we go on our free delivery threshold, do we need to augment that again? How do we view that? Where can we see the carriers sort of looking at their fuel surcharges for the rest of the year. We'll keep that under close review. Notwithstanding all of that, we're still of the view that we've got a GBP 6 million EBITDA number out in the market for the U.K. business, and we've got a modest loss again for Europe in terms of our ambitions for FY '27. We've not observed anything to date that undermines those ambitions. And indeed, that's given us the confidence to go out and restate those ambitions against that backdrop alongside our incredibly strong liquidity and balance sheet position. So what are those upgraded ambitions? So in the table here, we sort of set out where we were 24 months ago and now where we're looking to sort of drive towards in the medium term, medium term, 3 to 5 years. GBP 125 million for the U.K. business in terms of revenue ambition. Clearly, that's going to have a component of new store space still to come. As I said earlier, those new stores sort of of perhaps moderate in terms of their importance of that growth. We see accessing our existing customer base now, the data and the tools we've got to increasingly personalize to our customers is a key component of driving those U.K. like-for-like sales up against that target of GBP 125 million. How do we look at the earnings attached to that? Clearly, we have had a sustained period of cost headwinds. We have seen that abate a little bit. And hence, our view is if we can have manageable cost inflation coming through the business, put that up against the investments in technology, in particular, we've made alongside an increasing focus on those customer like-for-like numbers, we think it's a realistic ambition to grow the adjusted earnings by 33% over the medium term. Third one down, obviously, a core component of that is how else we build out MyAD. That as a proposition continues to strengthen. We've got a lot more ideas about how we can add and supplement to that proposition. Over 0.25 million people have looked at our MyAD Rewards page, for instance, that's becoming an increasingly sought after component of what we've got, and there's things aligned to that we can build on in the future. Europe, as we've said, material growth component for this business in the longer term. We've sort of honed our language there to make it clear that the Netherlands and the Germany are the first sort of stages of the European growth. And increasingly, we are focusing only on those 2 territories and that we'll fund any profitable expansion from the cash that we've got on the balance sheet to give folks comfort that we are very much focusing on generating our own capital to drive our growth ambitions. Sam just talked about how we're looking at our ROCE targets now. We see that as an increasingly sort of attractive component of our investor proposition. We have got clear targets in our mind, clear plans, how we're going to access that what I call the denominator of the ROCE calculation through reviewing our inventory files. And we think setting out a target ambition of 15%, just under 100% growth in the medium term from where we are today is a realistic ambition for this business. Finally, we will keep trying to make a positive impact being seen as part of the Angling ecosystem rather than someone who's just taken from it. We'll keep on with the work with the water quality and the AD community fund will form an increasingly important component of how we're feeding back into the market. With that, that [indiscernible] our formal presentation.

Perfect. Thank you both for you presentation this morning. [Operator Instructions] For your reference, recording of today's presentation will be available on Investor Meet company platform, shortly after the meeting has ended. But now guys as you see, there are number of question which have been submitted. Could I please ask you to read out the questions and give your responses where appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end.

Okay. I'll start, and then I'll let Sam take as we go. So question one, given the share price performance, our share buybacks, the best use of company cash. I think we first put out our buyback program in December '24. We've been going at it sort of 18 months now. We are of the view the current share price is good value for a shareholder if we are in a buyback. Clearly, folks may have looked at our investor website. We have had a couple of institutional and large shareholder sellers. Clearly, that puts pressure on the price, given the sort of the liquidity of our -- the traditional liquidity of our stock. We'll keep reviewing when it's best to use our firepower in terms of buying that stock because we do believe on a long-term basis right now, the share price and our ability to buy at that level is very good value for the shareholders. Clearly, we've signed posted where we're going to be on cash. Sam talked about our cash generation. That continues to be strong. We've got a clear capital allocation policy externally stated. We will continue to review that and make sure we think the buyback is an appropriate component of that capital allocation policy. I linked very much to the second question, how near are you to paying out a dividend? I think as you'd imagine, we continually pressure test that in terms of does that help us to enhance the share register? Are there those out there who would materially buy into our sort of equity story if the small dividend was a component of that. Right now, we're not finding sort of compelling evidence that a small dividend would materially change the way folks view our business and the valuation that's being applied to the share price. Notwithstanding that, we have committed externally, we will review that at least annually. So it does form an important component of that capital allocation story. Third question, what characteristics make a new store location? Sam just figure that one. What make a new store location successful for Angling Direct? And are you seeing any changes in customer behavior across new regions? So we use a number of external data points in terms of how we cite our stores. I sort of call it the KFC secret recipe. So I'm not going to give you all of the data points we use in terms of how we cite a store. What I would say is post code specificity is becoming increasingly important to that as we sort of fill out the U.K. Just because we see a blank spot in the U.K. doesn't automatically mean we put a store there. There are a number of metrics we need to sort of join up and make sure that they fit within our statistical model that we run. Our model is pretty robust. When we back test on that, we've got over a 90% statistical significance in our ability to sort of use those data points for the store to prove out its economics. We have only -- we only have one store which is loss-making, which we've given notice on that store. And so we think there's significant amount of evidence that we've got the right data points in terms of how we cite those stores. Are we seeing anything new in the customer base in newer locations? Interesting, what we can see now as we take more of the digital market is we get more of a joined-up customer base from day 1, which helps us with that omnichannel progression. That stat I talked about, 310 basis point improvement in our omnichannel percentage of our customers. That is increasingly important that they're over -- worth over GBP 500 each. If we can have a digital customer, we can then join up with a physical customer that increasingly helps us drive that frequency and share of wallet journey. Have you seen any measure -- next question. Have you seen any measurable difference in spending behavior between MyAD and non-MyAD members? It's difficult to answer the non-MyAD members holistically because obviously, in the store where they're not a MyAD member, it's very difficult for us to track by -- impossible for us to track which it is -- which individually is who's spending us but isn't a MyAD member. As I said, what we can see is the MyAD omnichannel customer is more engaged than any other customer we've got. The MyAD store-only customer as a frequency of just over 3. We think there's opportunity to scale that. What we can see digitally is our MyAD customer versus a non-MyAD customer digitally, the MyAD customer is materially more engaged than the non-MyAD customer. Hence, the wider thing we're going to do in terms of the MyAD proposition. What else can we add to that proposition to sort of form part of the why wouldn't I join concept, which we believe has been so successful in terms of driving those numbers of customers into that proposition. Next one, medium term could be anywhere from 3 to 7 years. Should we infer from the lack of specific commitment for the medium-term objectives, this will be delivered towards the end of this sort of time range? This business has never put any targets out until May '24. And when we went out with May '24, we said the medium term. And when we talked about the medium term, we were referencing a period of 3 to 5 years. We have largely delivered both the revenue and the EBITDA targets within 24 to 36 months. We're not signing up for 24, 36 months again on that. But we still see 3 to 5 years as a very realistic window in terms of what we believe is the medium term for this business. Next one, you've remained disciplined in Europe while still growing strongly. What milestones would indicate the model is ready to accelerate further internationally? Great question. So there's 2 challenges in the European market, which again was somewhat was characterized in the U.K. market pre-COVID is that the retail price for premium brands is being traded as a tool by some of the retailers as loss leaders, and that isn't a sustainable model. So we very much look at gross margin percentages by basket and by cohort, and we track each of the markets that we are attracted to Germany and Netherlands and compare those to the U.K. and how the U.K. journey went on those. And notwithstanding, we don't believe we need to be at the U.K. levels in terms of those gross margin ambitions. We're clear where the bite point on those gross margin ambitions may well be as that market will undoubtedly shake out some of the weaker competition and give someone who's got a proposition the management team and the capital to go at those opportunities quite quickly. The other aspect is the paid advertising landscape digitally. What we are observing in Europe is a reasonably rational market in that the more somebody pays for a cost per click, the less impression share they get, which tells you that people are overbidding and actually very few are, if any, can win because the more you pay, the less you get. We see very much in the U.K., our impression share is substantial. And actually, we're able to very clearly see a correlation between what you bid improved or doesn't mean what you get. We need to see those European lines behaving in a much more rational fashion as some of that competition gets shaken out linked to the gross margin point where again, it won't be at the same level as the U.K. undoubtly, it will be a little bit higher if you go on the journey, but we're clear on where the bite point might need to be on that paid landscape. [ Marcus ], Europe has been disappointing again. At what point would you consider closing this to stem the losses further investment on the turnaround? I think back to the point, clearly, the U.K. category at some point will have a ceiling. That isn't GBP 125 million. That's not the number we've put out. But for a very small loss now as a component of the overall U.K. EBITDA, when it was GBP 1 million, it was a substantial component of the U.K. EBITDA. This year, it's a very -- forecast to be a very small EBITDA loss, set that against a north of GBP 6 million U.K. EBITDA number. We think it's an appropriate balance of risk capital to retain the option, we're taking the lossing out, taking the losses away, closing down the European operation, yes, it could have a modest impact in terms of that sort of earnings per share ratio, but we don't believe fundamentally rerates the stock and if anything, challenges a longer-term growth trajectory for the business. You wanted the next question?

Yes. So next question is what measures are being taken to reduce shrinkage? So probably a few different factors here just to talk about. So first one I'd say is avoiding the double [ whammy ] of shrinkage and then lost sales. So the worst thing that can happen is have something stolen and then not identify that shrinkage quickly such that we replace it and then miss out on the sales, you end up with a double whammy impact. So over the last year, we sort of doubled down on what I'd call our weekly and monthly and daily routines in store to make sure we identify that -- any shrinkage as quickly as we can to make sure that we don't miss out on that lost sale. Secondly, we've sort of also been working on some defensive merchandising solutions. So whether that be sort of [ twizle pegs ], take cart to till type options. But again, that's just that balance between the risk on the sales line of then not having the product to hand for a customer who wants to purchase it and balancing that against additional [ colleague ] costs because obviously if you're [indiscernible] a peg and it's got to [indiscernible] a peg on that does also take more time. So again, it's just a balancing act that we sort of focus on specific SKUs and specific locations where we see the shrinkage most prevalent. Alongside that, it's really then about sharing best practice internally. So we've got a lot of experienced store managers who do a great job sort of managing shrinking their stores and it's kind of helping other store managers in the estate to sort of learn how -- learn from their experience and good practice on how to then do that. And also, there is no getting around the fact that actually we are seeing a lot more sort of, I'll call it, organized theft in store where we have sort of groups of people targeting stores, targeting specific product lines and moving around different stores. And so we're much more focused now on sharing that as quickly as we can internally to then make sure we're identifying those people when they come in stores and involving the police where appropriate as well. So a mix of all of those things, but it remains front and center in our minds.

Next one, how do you view priorities for the rest of the cash balance, store expansion versus buyback? I think what we'd say on that is the capital allocation policy that we've published, if you like, the Board has bucketed up various chunks against those various capital allocation headings. We don't see those 2 as mutually exclusive. There's a case to keep a buyback running where we think it represents good value, and that won't [ stymy ] our ability to roll out our store expansion plans that we've got in the U.K. Back in February, had we deployed the full buyback, we were forecasting to have around GBP 6 million on the balance sheet. Clearly, we ended up just shy of GBP 11 million. GBP 2 million of that was because we didn't spend the buyback. The rest came from sort of strong work on the working capital profile of the business that Sam and the team have been focused on. We think that gives us further optionality in terms of how we look at those capital allocation headings. And indeed, some very small-scale U.K. M&A remains a realistic prospect for the group, particularly in terms of how we think about our own brand proposition. Next one. Clearly, Europe is a big issue. You must be sure it will come good. I think what I'd say in response to that is, as I said, Europe's losses when they were GBP 1 million, clearly, that was a big issue for this business. As we start to moderate those down to very low GBP 100,000, it's an appropriate and transparent sort of allocation of what we call risk capital against the size of the opportunity. To the extent that sort of balance between opportunity versus risk capital deployed does move materially against us. We've structured the European business such that we're clear where the various breakpoints are either in our contracts or in our leases such that we're not disproportionately betting capital against the value of the option for this business. Next one, please. Can you discuss the FY -- outlook for FY '27? You usually provide P&L guidance, but this seems to be excluded. Please can I confirm your guided '27 EBITDA? And can you confirm the expected revenue? Do you want to...

Yes. So the current guidance in the market for '27 in terms of the adjusted EBITDA is GBP 5.7 million or GBP 5.5 million, GBP 5.7 million. And that is on a group revenue of about GBP 109 million, I think, is what's in the market, give or take. And there's a similar question in terms of providing some guidance for free cash flow in FY '27. So depending on -- if you assume the full buyback gets deployed in the balance of FY '27, I think the -- broadly, the closing cash at the end of this year is broadly flat with last year, so around about the GBP 1 million mark. Yes. So this one, I won't read the full question because it's quite a long one, but it's talking about how can we improve our stock inventory hold to help improve ROCE. So there's 2 key components to the stock element of improving the ROCE to get up to that 15% target. The first one is what we call trade packs. So of our 17,000 core U.K. SKUs, about 60% of them come in what we call a trade pack. So for example, where we might want to hold 2 or something, but they come in 10. So therefore, we've got to hold 8 more than we actually won. Now that can be a pretty painful number, particularly in the winter when we're selling less of those and we're holding more tied up cash in those trade packs. So that's kind of the first one we're sort of really focusing in on at the moment. And then the other one is availability where our top 1,000 SKUs drive about 55% of the sales. So if we can improve the availability on those SKUs, what we can do is sort of remove some other SKUs out of the range where we've had to put them into sort of backfill where we've had bad availability in the past. So we're attacking that through sort of more engagement with the suppliers, particularly around forward orders to really drive those 2 metrics up in terms of that, lower holding trade packs and better availability. If we can crack those 2 things, that will get us really pumping towards that 15%.

Next one. Please can you discuss AD Win and how the economics of this business line works. So AD Win is a competition-based website in terms of whether that be spot wins or longer scale competitions. You buy a ticket. It's a piece of technology that -- external piece of technology in terms of how winners are selected, et cetera, et cetera. We took about GBP 400,000 through that website last year. It was about 8 million tickets sold. And then of those 8 million tickets, we contribute a fixed percentage to the AD Community Fund. about just over GBP 20,000 went into the AD Community Fund. Net of that contribution, the GBP 400,000 made a positive EBITDA contribution to the business, modest. But again, with a largely fixed cost base, that's got the ability to scale into something more interesting over the medium term. Next one, I've been a shareholder for almost 10 years and despite strong revenue and EBITDA performance over the last decade, shares have consistently underperformed the [indiscernible] market. Please can management indicate how they look to address this issue and change their approach? Have they considered changing brokers look to change investor communication? [indiscernible] more capital allocation [indiscernible].

Proven track record of generating shareholder value.

I think the answer on that is, yes, actually only over the last 5 years of this business shown any progression. And undoubtedly, when you go back to 2017 and look at the float price, the float price was somewhat challenging against the economic potential of this business. So where we were starting to see some progression in the share price, that has undoubtedly this year been held back by some sort of larger institutional selling. And that -- as we know, the liquidity of this business has always been relatively thin. If you take that away and then look at some of the engagement we have done with the retail community, Investor Chronicle being a standout. When we talk to the retail community, we do see underlying improvement in the price. We continue to review what we're going to do with the wider investment community and at what time we're going to do that against the backdrop of what we know about some of our larger holders and their sort of activity in the stock. In terms of the broker, the Board remains sort of believes it's got the appropriate skills in the broker that we're using. History would tell us that changing the broker back in 2020 was the right thing to do against the broker listed the business. That is not always the answer to this. Consumer is a challenging landscape right now. And we believe the publication of those medium-term targets, indeed, how we're looking at the capital allocation policy and continue to do that, publish that for the first time in December '24 will ultimately drive shareholder value for all shareholders. And on that note, that concludes the time we've got for questions, and I'll hand back to Mark.

Brilliant. Thank you both for answering those questions this morning. Before we ask investors to share their feedback, which I know is important to you, Steve, if I could just ask you for a few closing comments to wrap up with, that would be great.

Thanks, everyone, for joining. We as a team believe these were standout results in the retail sector. We believe we've put the investments in place and got the team in place to take this business further. And I'd encourage you to look at the news, refreshed medium-term targets and have a think about how compelling they are and what a great opportunity this is in terms of this business taking more share in the category as well.

Perfect. Thank you both once again. Ladies and gentlemen, could I ask that you don't close the session just yet as you'll now be automatically redirected to a page to give your feedback, which helps the company better understand your views and expectations. On behalf of the management team, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. I wish you all a good morning.