Cake Box Holdings Plc (CBOX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Cake Box Holdings Plc Full Year Results Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. And I would now like to hand you over to the management team of Cake Box Holdings Plc. Sukh, Michael, good afternoon.

Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you, everybody, for coming on to this forum. Today, we'll be reviewing Cake Box's performance for the full year 2025. I'm joined by Michael Botha, our CFO. Full year 2025 has been a remarkable year for Cake Box, marked by strong sales, profitability and strategic advancements. Let me first give you a brief overview of our performance. Overall, we're very pleased to report another year of growth as sales accelerated through H2. This momentum is proof that our strategy is delivering according to our plan. On the operational front, we have been focusing on driving operational efficiency. Thanks to our strategic investments, we have stabilized our cost base, allowing us to reap the benefits of operational gearing and positioning ourselves for future growth. We're also excited about our expanding footprint. Our rollout program continues. Mike and I will talk more about this as we go through the presentation. Digital transformation has been a key feature for us with substantial online sales growth driven by more efficient marketing and customer engagement strategies. Our digital growth is setting us for continued success in a rapidly evolving market. If we go to the next slide, here's a summary of the operations, which I will discuss over the next few slides. Next slide. So Expanding Store Estate -- strategic -- these are transformation we've done. Also, we made advance in strengthen our customer engagement. We expanded our customer database significantly and successfully launched a loyalty program, which has enhanced retention and provided greater customer value. Additionally, our recent strategic acquisition of Ambala Foods Limited has been a success. The seamless integration of this business has not only strengthened our product portfolio, but has also accelerated our growth opportunities. Now we go to our next slide, the operational highlights came with summary of the operations.

Thank you very much, Sukh. So next, I'll just take you through the financial performance for the year, and then we can move on to the strategic performance of the group. So just a quick run through of the financial highlights before we go in depth -- in more depth on each one. Our group revenue, so this is our sales to our franchisees as well as sales from Ambala corporate stores for the 9 days of trading we have post completion increased 13% year-on-year and Ambala contributed GBP 800,000 to that performance. Our franchise sales, so this is our sales -- Cake Box sales to the customers was up 9.5% in the year. The like-for-like performance of those franchise stores increased by 3% over the year. In terms of new store openings, we opened up 26 new stores versus 20 the prior year. From a profitability point of view, our gross profit grew 12.6% despite a marginal decrease in our margins of 30 basis points, which reflected strong price control during the year. Our underlying EBITDA was up 17.1% and underlying profit up 19.8%. This allowed us to increase our final dividend by 11.5% to 6.8p per share from 6.1p the prior year. So if we just look at each one of those a little bit more depth. So the franchise sales, this is the Cake Box sales to its customers was up at GBP 86.3 million for the year from GBP 78.8 million, which was 9.5% up. Our sales, so this is our group sales to our franchisees and including the GBP 800,000 from Ambala sales post completion hit GBP 42.8 million versus GBP 37.8 million in the prior year. Our underlying EBITDA was up at GBP 8.7 million versus GBP 7.4 million in the prior year, up 17.1%. And our underlying profit after tax was GBP 5.3 million, which was 19.8% up on GBP 4.4 million. In terms of our dividend per share, so the dividend per share for the full year was 10.2p versus 9p the previous year, which is 13.3% up. And our underlying EPS was 13.18p versus 11.04p. Again, that was up 19.4%. If we then just look a bit closer at the sales performance. So the total franchise sales of Cake Box up 9.5%. If we strip out the Ambala 800,000 from our group sales, that meant that Cake Box sales were up 10.8%, which was higher than the total franchise sales. And that's due to the fact that we opened up 6 more stores in the prior year and where we actually build the stores and then reinvoice and recharge the franchisees for the store openings. The 800,000 for Ambala was about 3x higher per week that they normally do, but this is because it was the last week of Ramadan and the Eid celebrations were on the weekend of the financial period end. So this is just again just a bit breaking our sales out a bit further, the franchise sales were from existing stores, which is mature stores, which are up 3% in the year. And the new stores that opened up in the prior year generated GBP 5.3 million of franchise sales and the new stores, the 26 new stores that opened during the year generated GBP 2.2 million of sales. If we look a little closer at the like-for-like sales performance, it breaks down in half 1 was 2% and we can see the momentum gaining in half 2, where it was almost double at 3.9% with an average of 3% for the full year. Also, we can see the momentum gaining in quarter 4, where we were actually at 6.7%, and that has carried forward into the new year. If we look a bit further at online franchise sales performance, this was up at GBP 19.1 million, which was 19% growth year-on-year. And we can see at half 1, it was at 22.9% on average of our franchise store sales in half 2, that went up to 24.1%. So for the whole year, it averaged at 23.5%, and we're now seeing that 25% and above. We just look a bit closer at the underlying EBITDA analysis. So just stripping out Cake Box and Ambala separately. So Cake Box, our gross profit up at 10.9%. We can see overhead, excluding the marketing expenses, rose 5.2%, which was under our wage inflation, where we increased salaries and wages for our staff at 6%. Marketing expenses increased, but the marketing expenses are co-funded by the franchisees. So the revenue is sitting in the revenue line, whereas the expenses in the administrative costs. So there's just a mismatching of revenue and expenses. Adding back the depreciation and amortization gets us to an underlying EBITDA of GBP 8.64 million for the year, which was 15.8% up for the Cake Box business, while the EBITDA was just shy of GBP 100,000 for the 9 days of trading, which meant that our group EBITDA was up at GBP 8.73 million, 17.1% up on the year. If we then flow through from underlying EBITDA down to profit after tax. We can see -- we then start off with underlying EBIT of GBP 8.64 million. We take off the depreciation and amortization of just shy of GBP 1.4 million. Net finance costs of GBP 0.28 million, which is just over GBP 100,000 up on the prior year. And then taxation of GBP 1.73 million for the year, it gives us underlying profit after tax of GBP 5.26 million, which is 19% up year-on-year for the Cake Box business. And then we add Ambala profit after tax of GBP 40,000, which gets us to GBP 5.3 million of underlying profit after tax for the whole group, which is up 19.8% for the year. If we then just go forward and look at the cash flow and the net debt position of the business, we started off with an opening net cash of GBP 7.3 million. We generated free cash flow of GBP 7 million, which is GBP 8.6 million of EBITDA less tax payments. We then had CapEx for the Cake Box business of GBP 3 million, which is broken down of GBP 1.1 million for our new Bradford warehouse, which was the purchase of the land and the start of the construction of the new warehouse. We have then the 2 transactions for the purchase of the Ambala subsidiary. 1 was the purchase of the industrial freehold, which was GBP 6 million plus the stamp duty. The actual acquisition of the business of Ambala, which was just shy of GBP 16 million and then the professional fees relating to that acquisition of GBP 1.2 million. This was partly funded by the issue of 4 million new shares at GBP 1.80, which generated GBP 7.2 million of inflow. We paid out GBP 3.8 million of dividends, which ended us with a closing net debt of just over GBP 9 million, which was 1.03x EBITDA for the year. If we look at the Ambala acquisition, just how the numbers for the acquisition, this comprised of GBP 16 million for the shares of the Ambala business and GBP 6 million for the actual industrial freehold premises. How the deal was financed. We entered into a new GBP 15.2 million loan term facility with our corporate bankers, which is broken down into 2 tranches, one tranche of GBP11.2 million payable over 7 years and second tranche of GBP 4 million payable over 10 years. Both tranches bear an interest margin of 2.75% above SONIA. And then the GBP 7.2 million generated from the oversubscribed share issue. Just in terms of our capital allocation policy. So in terms of the current business, we can see the investment in terms of the new distribution center and investment in terms of our infrastructure, new website, EPOS and our depots as well. Our dividend for the year was GBP 3.8 million, which is 13.1% increase on the prior year in terms of what we physically paid. Investment in new growth opportunities where we completed the acquisition of Ambala Foods Limited on the 21st of March. And then any surplus cash has been placed on short-term deposits with our corporate bankers. Let me hand you back to Sukh to go through the strategic and operational update.

Michael, thank you very much for that. Over the next few slides, I'll be elaborating on our operating performance, speaking about expansion of our store estate, how we are increasing customer base through an omnichannel, digital first approach. I will also speak about online successes as well as growing our customer database. Finally, I'll give you a brief update on progress with the integration of Ambala before speaking back to the outlook. So if we go to Slide 19. Over the period, we successfully opened 26 new stores, bringing the total number of Cake Box stores to 251 as of 30th of March 2025. This achievement highlights our commitment to growing our brand and reaching more customers. To streamline and strengthen our new store openings, we've implemented a robust process that involves external consultants to help us identify key future areas for expansion. Alongside this, we are conducting detailed analysis to pinpoint the site location within these identified regions, ensuring that every new store is positioned for success. We're also committed to supporting our franchisees throughout this journey. Cake Box offers financial support where needed to help new stores get up and running smoothly. Additionally, we made significant acquisition by purchasing 19 Ambala Stores, which includes 3 franchise stores. These -- with these initiatives, we're well positioned for sustained growth and continued success. On this slide, our investment in online awareness and customer acquisition is driving impressive results, especially in click and collect sales. The cost-effective and highly integrated marketing approach is contributing significantly in boosting both online and offline. If you look at the pie chart on the left, you would note that online channels now contribute 23.5% of our sales and make up an incredible 40.4% of our overall growth. Offline channels [Technical Difficulty] dominate, contributing 76.5% of sales and complementing our online efforts excellently. Key improvements include bringing our online customer acquisition processes such as pay-per-click campaigns in-house. This has enabled us to optimize strategy efficiency, this has already resulted in gaining 250,000 new customers online through highly effective campaigns. We've also achieved a remarkable 19% sales growth by refining our investment strategy to deliver stronger returns on investment. Our strategic focus on brand awareness through social media has been pivotal, reaching 13.9 million people within a 7-kilometer radius of our stores, perfectly aligned with driving footfall into our retail locations. Furthermore, tapping into our customer loyalty has been a major focus. In June 2024, we launched the Cake Club, our loyalty program, which already boasts 105,000 subscribers, an exciting milestone that highlights the growing engagement with the brand. This proactive approach to capture more customer opportunities online and integrating it seamlessly with our offline strategies positions us for sustained growth in the years ahead. On the next slide, let me talk to you a little bit about the growth of our online sales. As I said, these have increased by an impressive 19%. This growth build on the strong performance we achieved in 2024 and continues to gain momentum. During FY 2025, we successfully launched new targeted marketing initiatives that are driving customer engagement and boost our online reach. Additionally, the implementation of our new CRM system has been a game changer, enabling us to better understand and serve our customers with personalized communication and offers. These developments highlight the ongoing success of our online strategy and reinforce the significant role digital innovation plays in driving growth for Cake Box. We've made significant progress in growing our customer database over the past year, from April '24 to March 2025, e-mail subscriptions have grown by 100%, bringing the total number of database subscriptions to 768,000. Our SMS subscriptions have also been seen remarkable growth, increasing by 78% to reach 348,000. These achievements have been driven by effective new customer acquisition strategies and the success of our loyalty program. Cake Club, which has already boast 105,000 members. This growth reflects the increasing engagement with our brand and highlights the success of our initiatives in building long-term customer relationships. We are highly-rated on Trustpilot with over 40,000 reviews, it's written as 4.5 out of 5 stars. New product development. Turning to the advancements we've made in new product development over the past year. We've been focusing on enhancing our range of cake designs and flavors, while also introducing innovative offerings through strategic partnerships and seasonal collections. Most notably, we partnered exclusively Nutella U.K. to develop a teller range as part of the 60th birthdays celebration during the 60 years of Swire collection. This collaboration reflects our commitment to creating unique high-quality products that resonate with our customers. Beyond partnerships, we've maintained a strong focus on seasonal innovation. For Halloween, we launched a fun and festive range, including pumpkin cases, spooky Frankenstein designs and cup cakes. During Christmas, traditionally one of our busiest times of the year, we developed a festive collection designed to delight customers during the holiday season. And for Easter, we introduced a vegan carrot cake catering to our growing base of vegan customers. In addition to seasonal offerings, we've elevated our design by introducing vintage-inspired styles and combined the strategic details of contemporary flare. We've also expanded our photo cake selection by developing licensed business [indiscernible] chocolate, which have been proving very popular among the kids and adults alike. These initiatives reflect our dedication to continuous innovation and ensuring we offer something fresh, exciting and memorable for every occasion and customer preference. Slide 25 shows the strategic growth opportunity for Ambala Foods. Over the next 2 slides, I'll speak about our strategic growth opportunity with Ambala Foods. This prestigious U.K.-based brand established in 1965 is widely recognized in the Asian community with an incredible range of traditional confectionery known as Mithai and savory products. Mithai holds strong cultural religious and social importance within the Asian community, which provides a significant opportunity for expansion and professionalism. Currently, Ambala Foods operates with 182 employees across 22 stores, 19 of which are company-owned free franchise. The majority of the sales are still generated with seasonality linked to religious holidays in April, March, October, November. [indiscernible] box of sweet we said, that you said are the highest revenue-generating product, accounting for 11% of strong revenue. This acquisition and strategic focus on Ambala Foods represents a fantastic opportunity to unlock further growth, modernize the operations and enhance the reach of this delivered brand, while staying true to its cultural heritage. We are pleased with the progress we're making with the integration of Ambala Foods. This is a key initiative for us, and we're moving forward steadily across multiple work streams to ensure a smooth and efficient transition. On operational side, we've completed analysis of Ambala's warehouse and production capabilities, identifying opportunities for automation and production efficiencies. To support these improvements, new production equipment has already been ordered. Regards to staffing and people, we defined a new structure and identified key roles to support the integrated business. Recruitment for this division is now underway. Compensation and benefits have also been reviewed to ensure alignment with our broader organizational standards. Our technology, we have conducted comprehensive assessments across EPOS, the website, ERP systems and security infrastructure. And based on these assessments, we identified upgraded needs and related upgrade work has already commenced. We are confident these initiatives will unlock significant opportunities for Ambala Foods, while setting the foundation for future growth and success. I want to comment on the community and ESG commitment, and we're proud to report that 100% of our home suppliers have completed an order in the past 2 years, ensuring we'd uphold the highest standards across our supply chain. By 30th of March 2025, an impressive 90.4% of our franchisees achieved a food hygiene rating of 4 or above out of 5, showcasing our commitment to quality and safety. As I said previously, our people are at the heart of everything we do. 90% of colleagues will recommend Cake Box as a great place to work, a testament to our supportive and thriving workplace culture. Also, sustainability is a key to our operations. We're proud to say that 100% of the electricity we use is sourced from renewable energy, and we continue to maintain the highest health and safety standards. Our Coventry depot achieved AA British retail consultant rating with an A rating for Bradford and we retained our AA rating for Enfield. I'm very proud of the work our franchisees do in our community. They are actively giving back to their communities. Their work ranges from sponsoring new football and cricket team to donating cakes at the place they worship and schools and any people, who have requested a donation. At Cake Box, we dedicated to making positive impact for our customers, colleagues, communities and the planet. Turning to the outlook. Turning to outlook. We started the new fiscal year on a strong note. We've seen positive trading momentum with total franchise sales up an impressive 14.2% since 30th of March 2025 compared to the same period last year. Also, our like-for-like sales have increased by 6.5%. This solid growth signals momentum in our business. To capitalize on this positive trend, we are continuing our expansion plans. We're targeting 25 new store openings this year. This will be not just about numbers, it's about strategically increasing our market reach to meet rising consumer demand. Another critical focus for us this year will be the continuing integration of Ambala. We believe this acquisition allows us to leverage significant synergies and unlock, identified growth opportunities that will further enhance our competitive position. Engaging and retaining our customers is at the forefront of our strategy. We are continuing to roll out targeted marketing initiatives alongside growing our loyalty program. These efforts are designed to deepen customer relationships and drive long-term loyalty. In addition, we are advancing our digital transformation. Our focus is to continue to build on the successes of our multichannel proposition that enhances the customer experience, while capturing additional sales opportunities. Then definitely additional capabilities essential for thriving today's market. Finally, despite the challenging consumer environment we face, Cake Box is well positioned to deliver strong performance. We are confident in our strategy and our team's ability to deliver further growth in the year ahead. Thank you for listening, and we will be answering any questions that you have. Please continue to send them in.

[Operator Instructions] Michael, as you can see, we have received a number of pre-submitted questions as well as live questions. And if I may now hand back to you and kindly ask you to read out the questions where appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you both at the end.

Yes. Thank you for that. Nick, he asks, with the 19 directly owned Ambala stores, is there any plans to turn these into franchise-owned stores? Yes, we are planning to do that, but it will be over the next 12 to 24 months. What we plan to do is open more stores and what will happen in a particular area, there will be more stores opening up and that particular owned store, their sales will go down, and that will be sold to the franchisees open stores in that area. [Technical Difficulty] Your choice of acquisition. Ambala seems to suggest your primary audience is a South Asian. Will this how you would like to value yourself in other markets? When the Ambala acquisition came up, this was out the blue. And if you see wherever we have a birthday party, we will always give a sweet box to our guests. Wherever we have a wedding cake, we'll always give out sweet to -- with the cards, invitation cards to our guests. And so this was a natural acquisition. Our customers buy from both brands. So why not exploit their loyalties and get them to buy more of both items for every occasion.

[indiscernible] asked which other geographic markets are you targeting? And can you share the progress status on that fund? So we -- like Cake Box, we are expanding to many Asian markets. And as you know, so most of them for current, everybody enjoys. So there will be a select amount of products available in those stores eventually. But for now, we want to concentrate on the heartland. We haven't got a store in Scotland. We haven't got a store in Derby or Sheffield. We haven't got a store in Cardiff. So we will be opening up in all those locations as well.

So just having a look at your 2 questions. What will be the next steps regarding the bar and stores? We are looking to move them on into the franchise market over the next sort of 2 years. And how are the kiosks performing? The kiosks that we've got are still performing well. It's not a focus of us to go through kiosks unless we -- if the kiosk does come up, that makes sense to us, but more it must make profitable sense to our franchisees, then we will open, but it's not one of our core pillars in our strategy. This should be again, what were the core reasons for rejecting the Cheesecake Shops offer? Would you be open to considering better valuation? It was -- they came in with a very low board offer. The Board rightly decided that actually the business and looking at the future is valued at more than what their offer was. And open question, we'll consider any offer that comes in whether we would have to place that in front of shareholders. So again, what's the vision of management over the next 5 years? So if you want to take that one? So what's the vision of management over the next 5 years?

Again, we continue to expand our store estate by at least 25 stores a year. And with Ambala, we want to expand that by at least 10 stores a year. And we continue to be the #1 in the market, and we want to consolidate that position. And with Ambala, we want to do the same, consolidate them as the #1 sweets and savories manufacturer and retailer in the country. And so we've got a lot of plans coming up and watch the space.

Next question, does your online sales number include the sales on Uber Eats delivery? Yes, they do. So we'll look into and talk to our franchisees about the kiosks. I mean the kiosks have certain opening hours, and they should be adhering to those. Sorry, we've got a question here. Does Cake Box plan to implement royalty-based franchise agreements similar to those used by Domino's in the future? No, we don't. Our model is slightly different than Domino's. We have -- we started off with the royalty-based franchise system, when we first started. But then what we decided to do is actually that is all excuse the pun baked into the sponge. So we do have the royalty, but it's in the sponge. And that's just from a franchisee point of view, they can physically see what they're buying. They can see their invoice, see the stock coming in, and we prefer to actually do it that way.

During the interview in asset management, pox one of the most impressive companies I come across in my 10 years of investment experience. The interview is really like the company. Where do you see Cake Box in 10 years? Would it be too optimistic to suggest the company could reach a GBP 1 billion market capitalization with the next 5 to 10 years?

We'd love that to be. No, we don't see it reaching that, but we do hope that it will reach a much higher valuation than we are now. We're going to keep on delivering on our long-term strategy, and that should definitely pay dividends, so to speak, for shareholders, not just in dividends, but also in share appreciation. If I just look at more questions on Javy, I couldn't find the online fee segment. This is now all included in the Spanish. We've decided that instead of -- from an administrative point of view as well, instead of sending out 5, 6 invoices to franchisees, we've amalgamated them all into the Spanish price. And again, it's simpler for ourselves and for the franchisees.

We have a few questions on the Paris store. The Paris store is open now and it's trading quite briskly. We're waiting for our website to be translated into French, so we can start taking online orders there. And once we've done that, we have a formal opening and a huge marketing push. But we want a soft opening because we had to get over the supply issue since [indiscernible], it's been a lot more difficult to export to France. But we've overcome all that now. And you can see in the next few months that we will be marketing and pushing the -- our French store a lot more.

Okay. A couple of questions here. Just to all new Ambala stores will be franchised. That is how we will be building the brand through franchising. Just trying to quite a few questions coming there. Debt reduction, we'll be looking. So we're just over 1x EBITDA in terms of net debt at the moment. We see that coming down and being actually going to below 0.5 within the next 3 years. So our focus in terms of our net debt will be to reduce that over the coming years. EBITDA margin for Ambala, that was for the 9 days. There's some accounting that we had to put through for those first 9 days in terms of stock valuations that doesn't really play to the true margin of Ambala. But shareholders will see that come through in the full year results of the current year. Just the next one, what level of profit is the management targeting over the next 5 years? So all these are jumping around now. There's too many coming in, which will result in reducing revenue growth rates. We actually see that our revenue growth rate will increase with new stores that are opening because the revenue will be growing by our mature store state increasing as well as new stores. And we see that this will give us more operational gearing, which will, therefore, further improve our EBITDA percentages. Integration of Ambala, the higher synergies will be mainly around production and production costs where we can increase production with the same production staff because we will be using some automation as well. So we will see some significant benefits coming through from production. We've talked about the French store -- talked about the French store. Near-term expansion to Continental Europe. We will wait and see how -- again, this is about the French store. It's a test pilot store. We'll wait and see how we progress before we consider any further expansion.

I've got a question here that you asked how to give feedback on any new stores. We've got the Trustpilot. But if you do want to give it in particular, just e-mail to [email protected] or customer services and everything feedback is read by us.

Just from Robert B. will all stores have both brands? No, all stores won't have both brands because in certain towns, we will deem that you should have a full blown Ambala store. In other towns due to demographics, we might only have a limited range in the current Cake Box store.

Do you plan to do the brand refreshing on Ambala? Yes, we do. As you can see in my shirt, that's the new logo and we should have all the shops rebranded within the next 2 months?

Does management commit to maintaining or growing dividend per share each year? Our aim is to grow the dividend every year. We also do aim to increase the dividend cover, where the dividend cover is at the moment at 1.2. We'd like to move that up to 1.5 over the next 3 years, but at the same time, still increasing the dividend. So the store count, we're looking at locations. We believe we can have up to 100 locations for Ambala over the next 5 years. That will be in opening up new stores, hybrid stores with Cake Box selling within Cake Box as well.

And do you see that cannibalizing sales for Cake Box? No, we don't. We think it will be the other way around. We'll get to a higher basket especially in what we call hybrid stores, where it will be 2 stores next door to each other or maybe through a common door and where the customer can shop for both brands in one store. They have a distinct identities, one the right, one the left. I think we're at the end of the questions.

Great. If I may just jump back in there. Sukh and Michael, thank you for addressing all those questions for investors today. And of course, the company can review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. But before I redirect investors to provide you with their feedback, which is particularly important to the company. Sukh, could I please ask you for a few closing comments?

Great. Thank you very much for listening on. It's an exciting year and will be an exciting next year, especially with Ambala coming on board. And we hope to see you on this platform at the interims in November.

Fantastic. Sukh and Michael, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the Board can better understand your views and expectations. This only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Cake Box Holdings Plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.