Currys plc (CURY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to Staples Corner, and welcome to Currys. I'd say it is such a pleasure to be able to do this in person today. I'm sure we've all come to know and love Zoom over the past 18 months, but it's nice to mix it up, isn't it? There's an analogy in there somewhere about the superiority of omnichannel retail ever online only, but I won't labor the point. So today, we've got a lot in store for you, if you'll forgive the pun. And I'm going to kick off, and I'm going to start with this, 3 years ago, we set out to transform this business into something sustainably a lot more valuable for all stakeholders. And we started with some strategic clarity, with a sense of purpose and some strategic clarity that we're here to help everyone enjoy amazing technology. And that's because for many people, for many customers, the stuff that this store is full of amazing technology is exciting, but it's confusing and it's expensive, and they need help. They need help choosing the right technology. They need help affording it, and they need help throughout its life to get the most out of it. And we, as Currys, can help them with all of that by building on our strengths as the #1 specialist bricks-and-mortar retailer, adding online, adding services to become the #1 omnichannel retailer and services provider. The benefit of that, it's a customers as we're more valuable to them. We get our share of that extra value, and we're giving them fewer and fewer reasons to shop anywhere else. And 3 years on, this is a better business now. Firstly, because of that strategic clarity and because that strategy, that strategic clarity is provided by a much stronger management team. And you're going to hear from a few of them today, including Erik Sonsterud, who came to Currys, came to this business as CFO of Elkjøp before stepping up to CEO. And with his background in automotive retail, is well versed in building the stickier and more valuable customer relationships that we want here. Mark Allsop as COO, runs our technology and our channels. And if you want to build a digital-first omnichannel customer experience, then it's a good idea to put the channels under a digital-first guy. And Mark, with his experience at Merlin of successfully putting together physical and digital experiences certainly fits that bill. Ed Connolly, a top-drawer Chief Commercial Officer, with 20-plus years of experience at Tesco and John Lewis in this category and others, was lead here and has the rare bandwidth to run both product and services here. Bruce Marsh, who came across here from Tesco, where he was Dave Lewis' right-hand man on the transformation of Tesco U.K. as CFO there, my top pick CFO, and who's had 30 years to develop the grip that I wanted at my side. And then you've got people like Paula Coughlan, who had a great career at McDonald's where she was responsible for getting on for 1.5 million colleagues, but she wanted to come here and she wanted to lead the people agenda, which is so central to everything that we're doing here and is showing such great progress, not least thanks to her Lindsay Haselhurst, who came here from with the background of Wincanton and Kingfisher to run and to transform our supply chain and service operations. Another top pick talent who, as well as doing that has the rewarding and grinding role of inching out continual improvements in the customer experience, and she takes the cross-functional lead on that with the results that you will see later today. And there's more. And there's people like Nigel Paterson, who allows me to sleep at night with his attentiveness to all stripes of risk and Assad Malic, who's well known to you all. So I mean, I've been very fortunate in my career to work with a number of exceptional management teams, and this is by some distance, the strongest. And the strongest team with strategic clarity and getting the whole organization aligned behind that strategy as well. The vision that we're here to help everyone enjoy amazing technology, flowing down into a big 3 priorities that drive everything that we do here from plans to objectives and very simple big 3 priorities really that we want colleagues who know what they're doing and who want to be here, engaged colleagues, who know their stuff. That makes for happier customers, making it easy to shop for our customers and in turn, building customers for life. And today, we're going to zoom in on 2 important aspects of that, becoming a truly omnichannel retailer and becoming a services provider as well as a retailer. Next, 3 years on, we are now a significantly simpler and more focused business. No more day dreams here about cracking the U.S. market or becoming a software developer. We're focused on our core. We've taken some difficult decisions, notably the closure of 600 stores. And we've thrown ourselves in each market behind 1 brand and increasingly 1 business. So a simpler and more focused business, with the hardest yards of our transformation now behind us, the third way in which this is now a better business. In many ways, the international business, to which we're going to give greater prominence today is further ahead than the U.K. in its transformation. But in the U.K., we've now put some big legacy issues behind us. Carphone as promised, is now integrated, as you see walking around the store here, is integrated into Currys. We're on track for breakeven during this financial year. The cost is out, the cash is in, and we've launched the new offer, which we don't need to be a big success in order to keep our promises, but we certainly intended to be. Likewise, the pandemic has been more than successfully navigated. It's left us stronger as we've managed to more than double the size of the online business in U.K. Electrical at the same time as stabilized gross margins. And now standing here today, 3/4 of our transformation is done in the sense of 3/4 of the 5-year transformation spend is -- will have been spent by the end of this financial year. So while we have certainly not seen the full benefits yet of all of that spend, we are past the point of maximum execution risk. Fourth, we believe that ours is sustainable progress, sustainable in the sense of happier colleagues making for happier customers. And in a business like ours, it is very difficult for the experience of the customer to exceed that of your colleagues. And I tell you that we have happier colleagues you can judge for yourself. And I'd encourage you to chat as you spend some time here today. And of course, we have a great deal more work to do. But as you see here on the left-hand side, we do have significantly more happier colleagues. We're getting up to world-class levels on colleague engagement. And I could spend all day talking about everything that we're doing to make that so from purpose and values to culture, to learning and development to inclusion and diversity, well-being, giving colleagues better tools, reward, recognition. As I said, I could bang on about that all day. What I'd encourage you to do is to buttonhole Paula or any of us, for that matter, if you want to know more. This is absolutely central because happier colleagues makes full happier customers. And as you see, we have significantly happier customers. And that's evidenced by they're telling us they're happier in a big jump in NPS in the U.K. and happy or not in the Nordics. They're showing us they're happier. They're giving us their money -- with -- and that's evidenced by the market share gains and the continued growth in the business, and they have a reason to be happier, as you will hear, with the much improved retail basics with us serving them how they want to be served through omnichannel and increasingly helping them do more than choose a product, helping them afford it and enjoy it for life. So happier colleagues making for happier customers. And of course, the sustainability itself as a reason to believe in the sustainability of our progress. And one thing I would say about ESG. This isn't some tiresome obligation or peripheral [ tact-on ] thing here. This is an opportunity for us. In the sense that everybody cares more now about environmental sustainability, not least our customers, and we have some big advantages here. Being #1 in repair, in recycling, in warranty and insurance, we're very well equipped to promise -- to keep the promise of giving our customers technology longer life, just as we're well equipped to help them choose new technology that's making greener choices. But meanwhile, that's for customers, we're also getting our own house in order, and we're on the path to net-zero by 2040 with electric vehicles by 2030. You'll hear much more about this from Assad a little later. What I would say as well is that I say it's not pasted on that profit and purpose go hand in hand here. And we really believe that, that in helping everyone enjoy amazing technology. If we did nothing else than fulfill our commercial strategy, we've been improving millions of lives, but we can amplify that commercial strategy, and we do with things like extending access to technology to the young through digital access for all to the old through Age UK and a bunch of other stuff that you'll hear more about later. So reasons to believe in the sustainability of our progress, happier colleagues making for happier customers and sustainability itself, being central to what we're about here. Central to our success. And of course, that success has to come through financially as well. And the fifth way in which this is a much better business now than it was 3 years ago is the financials are in much, much better shape. We are performing better. We're steadily growing. We have now stabilized gross margins. We have taken costs out of the business, and there is much more to come on the profitability front. Equally, now we're set to normalize CapEx and exceptionals, we can be confident in generating significantly higher sustainable cash flows. As you will hear, that will translate into sustainably higher shareholder returns as well. And all of this on the back of a much stronger balance sheet, having taken GBP 1 billion of net indebtedness out of the business over the past couple of years. Finally, the sixth way in which this is a better business is there's a lot more to come. And you'll hear today from Mark and from Ed about the progress that we are making in omnichannel and customers for life and how that -- the full benefits of that have yet to flow through. And in omnichannel serving customers how they want to be served and in customers for life, making stickier and more valuable customer relationships in this business. So 6 reasons then to believe that this is a significantly better business now, but it's all very well for me to say that. It's all very well meet of assert that we have the winning business model and strategy. But don't just take my word for it. [Presentation]

Warm words then, but they're warm words backed up concretely by the fact that we get more support from the suppliers than anybody else support you'll be able to see for yourselves as you go around the store today. And that supports because they see us for who we are, which is the growing #1 in a bigger market best able to take advantage of that market because of our winning business model and the strategy to make the most of that. So let's get into how we're making the most of that and how we're making more and more of it, starting with that market. Now I think we've all seen in our own lives over the past 18 months, many people's eyes open to everything that technology can do for them. Whether it's staying connected with loved ones, whether it's working from home, whether it's keeping their families fed, clean, healthy, fit and entertained. People's eyes have opened to everything that technology can do. Arguably, tech is playing a more essential role in millions of lives now than it ever has done before. And what's certainly true is customers are spending more on it, 15% to 20% more than pre-pandemic. Very important to note that while we expect a bunch of this growth to stick, this market growth to stick. We are not counting on it. So our plans are prudent and do not assume this is going to take place. But we do expect it too. And we do expect some of that growth at least to stick. And the reason for that is multifold. First of all, some trends aren't going away. 48% of white collar workers in the U.K. are set to continue working hybrid. Gaming is a bigger market than movies and music combined now, a bigger slice of the consumer's home entertainment dollar is going to stay in the home. We expect customers to replace their technology faster now, and that happens with greater usage, and it also happens with greater awareness of what new tech can do. Nobody is expecting a return to the old 7-year laptop replacement cycle. And of course, we have a larger installed base now, which comes from having sold more products. And that gives more products and customers to go back to for add-on sales of products and services. So we expect, but do not count on a bigger market than pre-pandemic. The other driver of that market. You've seen some of the representatives up on the screen a moment ago. These big technology hardware manufacturers are some of the world's biggest spenders. In fact, of the 10 largest R&D spenders in any sector in the world, 7, are our suppliers. They believe in this structurally larger market, and they are investing heavily behind it. And that investment fuels new product development, which in turn, fuels market growth. So they believe it. Now in that bigger market, we, of course, are the growing market leader. And we've maintained that in -- we've maintained healthy levels of growth in the Nordics. And in the U.K., we've compensated for closed stores last year with 6 points of market share gain online. We are not just growing and #1, but we're healthily diversified, whichever way you cut it. We have limited concentration risk in this business, and we have the winning business model, the omnichannel specialist model, which wins in every major market worldwide. Now it's important to note that some of the companies on this slide have done a better job than others, but making lots of money out of their market leadership. And we're going to come on to how we are on the path to doing so. For now, I would just see this picture is just 1 reason to believe in the resilience of our top line. And it's not just that we've got an omnichannel model, we are building on it. And you've seen that in the rapid growth of our online business. Yes, more customers are shopping online, but we're winning online. You can see that here today in everything that we're doing to get behind the advantages of stores and face-to-face advice and demo. And we're starting to bring them together in some really interesting ways. You'll hear more about this and see it for yourselves. So you'll hear more about it from Mark in a moment. But the benefits that we can provide that a monoline cannot as far as the customer is concerned, we're never out of stock because we can sell from the full online range even in a store. People are more impatient, well, you can get hold of your tech fastest through us, order online, collect in the store. And the face-to-face expert advice that people like from stores, you can have that online too now, thanks to our 24/7 video shopping service, ShopLive. So we're delivering on omnichannel. By the way, it's not just we're delivering omnichannel for customers. We are also delivering it for ourselves. -- and that's evidenced in the stabilized gross margins that we're calling out today, gross margins that we intend to keep stable. We owe that to leveling up. And for those of you who -- for whom this [ Borisism ] will be less to your taste than others. I apologize, but it's a phrase that's got some currency internally, and it's here to stay. And that's simply leveling up profitability between channels, making -- bringing our online channel up to the level of store profitability and we're going to talk about how we're doing that, notably in selling more credit and other services online and some supply chain efficiencies. Finally, we're building customers for life. We're moving beyond being a transactional business into having millions of customers that we know very well and who we are more valuable to and can get a share of that ourselves. And as you'll hear from Ed a little later, we have a lot of customers here arguably all we need. We have many more of them than we used to. We're able to talk to them much more than we have been able to before, and we are doing so to increasingly valuable effect, visible in areas like club and our rapid growth in CRM-driven sales. We also can measure loyalty now, and we're going to reveal a measure to you today a LTR, it's called likelihood to return, which you're going to hear a lot more about in the months and years to come. A very simple, very intuitive and a very useful way to measure and manage to a customer's likelihood to come back. And the good news is we're doing lots of things that we can demonstrate are driving increased customer loyalty. Notably, but not only credit and services. So it's important that we're making the progress that we're making that you're going to hear about today on credit and services. It's important because they matter. Credit, for example, drives much happier customers, more valuable customers who spend more and are more prone to pay for other services and who come back much more reliably, 70% more reliably, in fact, the 70% higher likelihood to return. But it's not just about credit, other services, too. The customer demand is there. We're best place to fulfill that demand, we can do so profitably, and we're well underway. You'll hear more about this in a bit. So what's the summary from all of this? First of all, we believe that we're not counting on the fact that our market is bigger. Second, we're best placed to take advantage of that. with being a genuinely international business that's everywhere, the growing #1 with a winning omnichannel business model and with valuable services. Third, we are doing more and more to take advantage of that position, with a clear strategy, a strong management team, making sustainable progress. Fourth, the hardest yard, as I say, say, the hardest yards of our transformation are now behind us. And we've dealt with some legacy issues. We've navigated through the pandemic pretty well and in fact, leaves us in a stronger position and here we are. Fifth, all of this is coming through in cash, important point. And we are confident in that GBP 250 million of sustainable free cash flow by FY '24 that you'll hear about. And finally, while we've done a lot of the hard yards, the full benefits have yet to appear. And I mentioned cash. And of course, these benefits do have to appear in the financials. And you'll hear from Bruce a little later that there is a strong reason to believe that we will continue our track record of steady growth, whichever angle you look at it from, whether it's who we sell to, what we sell, how or where there's more growth in the tank here. Second, we can believe in the 4% EBIT margin target that we're on track towards. We have already stabilized gross margins and a significant further cost to come out of the business, GBP 300 million from a modernized supply chain and service operations from rationalized IT, from more productive stores and from simplified central costs. All of this, when you add it to normalized CapEx and normalized exceptionals gives us confidence in that GBP 250 million number and gives us confidence to promise the extra shareholder return that we're unveiling today. So that's all to come. What we're going to do next is get into some deep dives on how we're going to make this cash. We're going to talk about how we sell omnichannel. Mark is going to do that. We're going to talk about customers for life. And Ed's going to come up to do that. But before -- And first of all, I'd like you to please welcome to the stage Erik Sonsterud and his very able Nordics Commercial Officer, Andreas Westergaard, who are going to talk about perhaps a relatively rare thing in U.K. retail, a large and very successful international business. Erik, over to you guys.

Good morning, everyone. We are really glad to be here to actually here in London to be able to talk about Elkjøp. Elkjøp is a big and successful part of our group. We are sharing the same great vision. We help everyone enjoy amazing technology, and we benefit from many great group synergies especially within best practice sharing as we also are following the same group strategy. We are all about helping our customers all the way into a more circular economy, and we are going to build customers for life. And with more than 400 stores across the whole Nordics, over 10,000 colleagues, we can help our customers with a tech wherever the customer lives in their local languages. That is a proposition that no one else can match in the whole Nordics. And we have a very strong management team -- with a strong and experienced management team with a fine balance between newly recruits with new competencies, by myself, like Alex said, coming in from the outside and colleague actually being [indiscernible] for whole career, moving up from being a salesperson in the store to becoming a managing director in the countries. That is a really strong combination we have in our retail management team. Elkjøp is the growing market leader and a clear preferred brand in all our markets. We have a market share of more than 25% -- more than [ 26% ] overall Nordics. And this is a highly attractive market to be in. It's 25 million people with high-level standard of livings and early adopters of technology. But being here now, it's important to emphasize that the Nordics is 4 different countries, 4 different languages, 4 different currencies and 4 different cultures. But Elkjøp has a very strong central brand concept, led out of Oslo, which is in Norway, by the way. And -- but localized and executed locally in each of the countries. And that has seemed to be and proven to be a very strong winning formula. As Alex mentioned, we also in the Nordics, have a highly diversified business. And for us, this is particularly important because we are mainly meeting national competitors and/or niche players in the various categories. So having this balance is a very good foundation for competing across all markets. And we have done some successfully. We have a really strong track record of revenue growth. Actually, we have been growing every year since we were founded in 1962, every year. I'm here seen from the last 20 years, 10% average annual growth in a quite mature market that is really strong. And at the foundation and the genes of Elkjøp is all about innovation. We have proven that since we introduced the concept of well-known brands at lowest price to being early adopters of the mobile phone business, leading the way into the online revolution and now into the emerging market of smart home, which will be so crucial for our industry in the future. So we are going to continue to launch new innovation that is benefiting our customers and helping us continue this growth in the future. We are already the clear market leader in all our markets, by far, the biggest market share in Norway, which is our home market. But with big potentials in all the other markets to move towards that level. We are also the clear leader in all the other markets, quite long distance down to #2, but big potential, especially in Sweden, which has the double size of the population as the other countries. And you can see, we are already more than 3x bigger than the next competitors. And they are the biggest online bigger than anyone on the pure players. But still, there are opportunities here because 50% of the market are really fragmented by small and niche players in the categories, as I said. And that for us as an omnichannel player. We have huge opportunities still to continue this journey on gaining market share. A strong market position is all about being relevant for the customer. And we are working really hard every day to be become the only 1 you need within electronics. Andreas, over to you.

Thank you very much. So I remember a few years ago, I had a meeting with HS Kim, the guy from Samsung that you saw on the screen. And I said to him, we were negotiating. I said, remember, we only represent 25 million people. And he leaned across the table and said, yes, but you have the buying power that surpasses more than 100 million Italians. So there's something good about the Nordic market as well. So I'm going to talk to you through a few slides. First, I'm going to talk to you about range. And as we said initially, [indiscernible] to become the destination in our market unless you're relevant for the customer. And as the shopping journey has shifted from a store first to online first experience, it's been very important for us to increase the range. So we've done that gradually. And a few years ago, we had around 60,000 products viable. We now have surpassed 100,000 viable products in our range. And we're going to continue to grow that range as well. And the way we do it is that we are looking into what our customers is actually searching for on our site. And then we're gradually building to keep that focus and that facet of relevance in everything we do. So this is a good thing. And if you want to -- it's basically not about the number. This is a very important point because you can sometimes get caught up about how many SKUs do you have. The most important thing is actually what the number does to your business because you can actually -- if you have 10,000 products, you can easily do it manually. But if you do have 100,000 products across 4 markets, you can't do it manually. You have to automate your processes. So price management, range management, most of the auto management, onboarding, offboarding, all these things, they need to be automated. And we've done it, and we have a very good and robust setup to manage and to scale this also going forward. Because if you want to win, you basically need to have what the customer is searching for and we're going to offer them that, and we're not going to get beaten on price. Another very important point is that this also requires a very good and active sourcing strategy because you don't want to lose sight of your inventory management. And what we are doing is that we are combining marketplace, third-party distribution in -- on top of our own locations like central warehouses, hubs and store availability, and we are funneling that into 1 customer experience. So internally, we call it the omnisource. So the customer doesn't really care where the product is kept in stock. The only relevant thing is when do I actually get it? And is it in stock and when do I get it? And this, we have done seamlessly. So we have this capability also to expand the range without jeopardizing the stock turn and the cash. And I think if there's any group in the world who would appreciate that, I hope this is the group. I believe so. Good. Then next on to the services. And as Alex said in his introductions, our customers find electronics very, very exciting, very high interest product, but sometimes expensive and sometimes confusing. So what we see is that this is a megatrend. Services attached to products is a megatrend. So we built the business on recommending the best products from the best brands at the lowest price. And today, this is not enough. Today, our industry is always about the perfect combination between a hardware product, a software product and a service. And we are well positioned to grow in this area because we have been advising the Nordic customer for so many years. And this is one of the areas where it really plays to our strength to have knowledgeable staff, a vast network of stores, who is already operational, and we know the customer. So it's very good for us that this is happening. Good. And finally, this is where it's getting really, really interesting, our loyalty club. So we have been gradually building our loyalty club since 2016. And we now have more than 6.3 million customers who have actively opted in, and that's the equivalent of half of all the Nordic households. So it's a great number. And it's quite easy to attract customers into the loyalty club, and it's quite easy to keep them there by giving them some good and tangible benefits. But the true magic is basically when you can combine what you know about the customer with a targeted information channel. So you can market very specifically to the customers based on what they want and what they need. And this is where we don't need to rely on third-party players to tell us anything about our customers. We know who they are, we know where they live. We know what they have, and we know what they want. So with combining all these elements into a great marketing message, very specifically targeted to that customer, that's when it's getting really, really interesting. And doing that across channels, it's what we define as omnichannel. And that's over to you again, Erik.

Thank you, Andreas. Yes. Also, the Nordic consumer license shop omnichannel. Mark will tell us more about our offerings in there. And we also know that most customers started joining online and with more than 369 million website visitors last year. We were actually the most visited web shop across any industry in the Nordics. That gives us a really strong foundation. But also more than 60 million visitors in other stores. We are already truly living the omnichannel. Our online business is growing fast, 39% over the last 3, 4 years. Click & Collect is growing deposits by 47%. So by utilizing our store colleagues in online, this market is going to a lot more about through ShopLive, helping the customers in the store when they come and pick up their goods at the Click & Collect, utilizing obviously the sales store staff to sell the whole online range and never being out of stock. That is a really strong proposition that we're going to build on further. We're already up quite successful on. And we are already well invested in our infrastructure. We have a very centralized logistics system with a central warehouse, very modern [indiscernible] distributing the goods to all our stores and also for our home deliveries. And with more than 70 hubs and more than 400 stores across the whole Nordics, we can deliver faster than anyone else in the Nordics. We also have continuously been developing our stores. Hopefully, we'll be in Oslo next time, and you can see the store for yourself in the Nordics. They are for inspirational and to be exciting, as you will see here as well. But lastly, and mostly important, we have invested a lot in our IT platform over the last years. We have done a huge IT transformation, changing the whole front-end system for our store colleagues and now over introducing the webshop for all other customers, fully integrated into omnichannel platform. We have next-generation retail and we are really now in the forefront in the omnichannel technology in the world actually. And that is giving us the opportunity to really accelerate our omnichannel offering to our customers going forward. But at the heart of the omnichannel business is our colleagues. And that is why we are investing more than NOK 100 billion every year to build the competence into our colleagues and to become trusted advisers for our customers. Actually, we -- our colleagues completed 223,000 e-learnings last year. That's an impressive number. And that is absolutely necessary for us to know more than our customers for our products. This also pays off. Last year, we were also awarded the employer of the year in Sweden. So that's good to have with us. We know happy colleagues, make happy customers, and it is also good for business, as you will see. Because we are really happy about our performance, we had a really strong performance over the last years. We have grown our -- also for the last 5 years, growing our top line by an average 10% again, in a very mature market, but growing the EBIT even further by 14% and improving our EBIT margin every year, setting record results. We have done so by gaining market share every year and bringing more happy customers. And we are really happy and also very proud about this performance. But we are never satisfied. Of course, we're going to continue this journey, and we have so many opportunities to continue to do that. Right, Andreas?

Yes. So I think we have -- we touch a few of the points already. So I'm just going to quickly summarize. I mean, omnichannel represents a huge opportunity for us by making it much easier for people to shop I think that's a core guidance around all the omnichannel work that we do. Continuing to build on that range expansion, but we have to do it wisely and we have to do it with relevance. Because if you don't do it cautiously and you do it with intelligence, you're going to water out your own concept. So you have to keep your eyes on this. And it's not about the number for us. It's about how scalable is the business once you pass that threshold. Then continuing to work on the combination between hardware, software and services, utilizing that megatrend and using our knowledgeable staff to make it much better for them to buy with us. And actually, now we see that customers are coming to our stores because we offer services. A few years ago, the services was kind of the older tea, but now it's becoming a reason by itself for people to come and buy with us, shop products with us. And lastly but not least, B2B. We haven't talked much about B2B, but that is a tremendous opportunity for us. The SME market in the Nordics is the same size as the B2C market. And we're just scratching the surface of this potential. So a massive opportunity, again, where we can utilize what we have already now in terms of infrastructure, store staff and the capabilities to really take a big part of this segment going forward, and we are going to. So great opportunities.

Thank you, Andreas. So hopefully, you have announced some more insight into Nordics, and we can welcome you back here next time. And then we will give the word to Mark to give you into a deep dive into the omnichannel, what we actually are doing. Thank you.

Thank you, Erik. Thank you, Andreas. So good morning, and welcome to our fantastic Staples Corner Store. We're very excited to have you here. I'm Mark Allsop, Chief Operating Officer. And I'm here to talk to you about how we make it easy to shop for our customers, however, whenever and wherever they choose to shop with us. And the key way we do that is through omnichannel, bringing the best of both online and stores together to give our customers a better experience than they would ever get to a single stand-alone channel. And that's what makes us uniquely Currys, the ability to bring both online and stores together for our customers. And as Alex said, omnichannel is the proven winning model. But the good news is it's not just Alex that's telling us that. Our customers are also supporting that with over 60% of our customers wanting to shop in both stores and online, a truly omnichannel shopping experience. And omnichannel gives us a huge amount of flexibility. It allows us to amend when kind of customer demands change based on the environment or customer behavior. For example, it was our omnichannel strength that allowed us to power through the pandemic, being able to flex to online when we had to close our stores, being able to support millions of customers when they were forced to work and stay at home. The pandemic also allowed us to innovate quickly, has allowed us to bring the best of omnichannel to our customers. Whether that was our new shopping platform, ShopLive or whether it's through our contactless order and collect. We delivered all of those initiatives in a matter of weeks. And as our stores have reopened, we've been there to welcome our customers back with fantastic demos and thousands of expert colleagues ready to help our customers, thousands of expert colleagues that only Currys can provide, a uniquely Currys' element. So omnichannel starts with a strong online business. And the good news is that we're already winning online. We are twice as big as our rivals. We've doubled the size of our online business in the last year, and we are growing faster than the competition. And as you heard from Erik and Andreas, the same picture is true in the Nordics, where we have all of the largest online platforms in all 4 markets. And we've been delivering this growth by focusing on just good retail basics we now have a larger range. In the last 2 years, we've more than doubled the amount of SKUs that we have. And the good news is there's even more headroom. As Erik has just shown us, we have 100,000 SKUs in the Nordics. So there's more to go after. We are bang on the money in terms of price. We are committed to our price commitment of you won't find it cheaper, whether that's in the U.K., in Ireland or the Nordics. But what gets us most excited is our focus on customer experience, making sure that we remove customer pain points that we improve the end-to-end customer journey. And the good news is our customers are noticing. We're seeing record CSAT scores following improvements that we've done to our delivery and our collection services. We're also improving gross margin performance, both online and in-store, by leveling up, which essentially means taking the best practice and the best learnings from across our organization and applying it to our organization, whether that's best practice from our colleagues, best practice across all channels or indeed best practice across our group-wide organization. The key point being is we're making it easier for our customers to understand either online or in store, the benefits of things like credit, understanding how they can upgrade to the tech that they truly want. The same is true with Care & Repair, where we've taken the best learnings from Nordics about how do we best communicate the benefits of Care & Repair online so that our customers are more willing to protect the tech that they're buying from us. And there is yet more to come. We are well on our journey to becoming a best-in-class digital-first omnichannel retailer. We are able to meet customer demands, provide personized end-to-end journeys powered by robust technology enabled by customer data. So we're delivering a digital-first omnichannel feature, starting with a brand new website powered by a new commerce engine. We're also delivering a colleague hub and an easy-to-use customer app. We've already started, as you can see, by introducing a cleaner and more intuitive design for currys.co.uk just ahead of peak training. And then we'll launch our new scalable superfast commerce platform early in the new year, which will allow growth in margin improvements through upselling, through cross-selling to the ability to bundle, delivering personalized recommendations to our customers, all whilst driving an intuitive adoption of credit and services. So exciting times ahead. Well, as I said at the start, we are an omnichannel business, and we love our stores and the thousands of colleagues that work in them. And it's our colleagues who are the beating at heart of this organization. They're the ones that add the magic ingredient to every customer interaction. So that's why we're investing in both our stores and our colleagues. It's a time when others are perhaps walking away, especially as the sales mix normalizes to a 50-50 split between online and stores. We've already moved to a single brand to make it easier for our customers to understand who we are. And then now we're looking at ways to create more theater, more experience in our stores, make our stores the home of the demo. And you'll hopefully see that as you walk around our stores a little later, essentially allowing our customers to see, touch and play with amazing technology. And then also making it easier for our customers to understand our products and our solutions by talking tech with tech experts. And I encourage you to talk to all of our colleagues, who are brilliant tech experts. And all of this, of course, means that we have happier customers, resulting in record NPS scores across our store network. We're investing in our colleagues, too. We're working hard to motivate and excite them. We're building skills for life through our new life-setting framework, essentially being proud to sell, finding the right products, the right solutions tailored specifically to a customer's requirement. It's good for the customers. It's good for us. It drives higher sales, higher gross margin. We're also giving our colleagues the right tools and a focus on providing the right data, to allow them to give our customers an amazing experience, better help our customers. We're in that through something we call store mode, which allows colleagues to access the full range of products, whether that's online or in store. But also our aiming to bring all of the colleague tools and all of the colleagues data together so that we can better support our customer need. We're also improving pay and reward ensuring that our colleagues are rewarded the most when our customers are the happiest. And of course, our colleagues are also shareholders in our business. And as a result, we're seeing big employee satisfaction improvement, which is translating, of course, to happier customers. So we're going to keep on investing in our stores and our colleagues. We'll provide more tools, more and more data and more and more training, focusing on improving productivity and utilizing downtime so that we get more and more time in front of our customers being able to serve and support them. We're also making sure we have the right number of stores. We now have about 300 stores across the U.K., all under a single brand of Currys. Everything that a customer wants, all under a single roof, fantastic technology, fantastic products, brilliant solutions, the ability to do a repair, a return, a recycle, all supported by thousands of expert colleagues. But we're not sentimental about stores. We've demonstrated, as Alex said at the start, that we can take tough decisions on stores if we need to. But the fact is, is that our stores are in good health. About 97% of our stores are now profitable. Well, of course, work really hard to make sure that all of our stores are profitable, but we now have reduced rents and more flexible lease terms so that we have the ability to respond quickly if we need to. So we're winning online, and we're winning in stores, with bring in the best of both together best of online and best of stores together, which creates a truly omnichannel experience. An omnichannel gives us 3 big benefits that will drive both growth and gross margin. First of all, we'll never be out of stock, followed by immediacy, the need to get my products right now and then our ability to provide 24/7 expert help and advice. So never out of stock. Using store mode, our colleagues now have access to the full and bigger range of products, whether it's stocked in-store or not, meaning that we'll have the right product for the right customer somewhere in our network, essentially being much better at keeping our customer promises. It also means that we can optimize our stockholding across our stores, therefore, providing more space for experience and for demo and then, of course, driving further efficiencies into our supply chain. It stores and online working together that also allows our customers to get their products right now. We've made really good foundational changes as a result of order and collect, including contactless order and collect, which allows a customer to get their technology delivered to the boot of their car, all within 30 minutes of placing the order. And in the U.K., as of today, we've also launched our trial with Uber, to test super fast delivery across 15 London stores. Imagine being able to get the product from the store, to the customer's door all within 30 minutes at a price of GBP 5. Exciting times ahead. And if that's not enough, our customers are also responding really positively to our new ShopLive solution. It means that they can speak to an expert store colleague and get expert help and advice, all from the comfort of their own sofa. So when compared to unassisted online, customers are more likely to buy. They spend more money, they're twice as likely to protect their product, and they are far more satisfied as a result. We like ShopLive because it means that more customers get to speak to our expert colleagues. But it also improves our colleague and our store utilization and allows us to drive productivity. So for example, a colleague here in Staples Corner, can 1 moment be serving a customer on the shop floor, the next moment will be hopping on to ShopLive and supporting a customer in Aberdeen by a laptop through ShopLive, obviously, with credit and [indiscernible] attached to it as well. So it's great for our customers. It's great for our colleagues, and it's great for our business. So we're going to keep on investing in our ShopLive platform, meaning more and more colleagues being able to transact on behalf of our customers and also being able to co-create baskets with our customers. We're also extending the platform out to something called RepairLive, which will enable customers to get real-time fixes for their laptops, or book a repair or even arrange a return all via video call. So we love omnichannel. We're already winning online. We're big, but we are not resting. We've got a new website, a new commerce engine with the ability to upsell, cross-sell, bundle sell provide specific tailored recommendations to our customers, increasing sales, increasing margin. We believe in our stores, which are profitable and ever more flexible. The home of the demo with thousands of expert colleagues ready to support and provide our customers a great experience. So omnichannel brings the best of both of those elements together, the best of online and the best of stores, whether that's through ShopLive, through Order and Collect through Uber trials, through RepairLive or through Store Mode. And as I said, there is so much more yet to come. So all with the aim of making it easier for our customers to shop, however, whenever and wherever they choose to shop with us. Thank you. I'm now handing over to Ed.

Thank you, Mark . So good morning, everyone. I'm going to talk to you about customers for life. And this is all about how we are building those stickier and more valuable customers that Alex alluded to earlier on. And it's really also about our evolution as a business and how we are evolving from a business, which was about selling boxes repeatedly to strangers focused predominantly on in-year numbers to one that builds and maintains deep and durable customer relationships over many years. I'm going to do this in 2 primary ways. Firstly, using rich data to personalize customer shopping journeys, customer engagement in ways we've never been able to before. And this is using much richer data than we've ever had access to before. And secondly, it's about developing our services proposition. And this is because we know that these are the 2 levers that we need to pull to create more customer loyalty. And it's these levers, which will build upon our core strategy and creates that stickiness of customers and will make them more valuable to us over a longer period of time. And that's what customers for life is really all about. And it's also all about opportunity, opportunity in the services market, but opportunity, of course, in the product market, too. Now first, in that product market, and this is a large market indeed now GBP 23 billion in the U.K. And the real opportunity is that, of course, you know that we are the market leader. And 80% of this market's customers will of U.K. households. That means that we have -- they've shopped with Currys, we served them, we've helped them over the last 3 years. But -- and here's a really exciting thing. We only capture about 1 in the 3 -- average 3 purchases that they make in the market today. And so this is our opportunity really. This is our headroom. And this is one of the most exciting things through all of this work because it means that what we've got access to many of the customers that we realistically need already, though, of course, all newcomers are equally welcome. But we don't need a hugely expensive acquisition drive here. It's our task now to use the tools that are at our hand to do 2 things: increase the share of our customers' wallets and also to increase the size of those wallets. And we'll do that through better CRM and from credit and by accessing more of the services market. So all well and good, you might say, but what business is not trying to use big data to increase loyalty at this moment. But it's no easy task to build a customer book, which makes this really interesting. And our great advantage here, as Alex showed us is that we already have a very large installed customer base and a growing customer base it is 2. The pandemic year, of course has boosted as you can see, it is an enduringly bigger customer base that we have. So 2 key stats. We now have a third more active shoppers than we had just 4 years back, and these are a much more engaged set of customers, too. And as you can see from the bottom bar chart, we can talk to 3x as many as we could just 2 years ago. And that number of customers is now just tantalizing, they are whisker below GBP 10 million. So very big book indeed. And you know what, on this topic, we're effectively on an exponential curve. We're getting more and more data into the top of the funnel, and we're getting smarter and smarter about what we do with that data. And you can see this coming through on our comms conversion metric. And of course, this is translating through into the sales line already. As you can see, our CRM attributable sales have grown by 170% year-to-date. So what are we really going to do with all of this data and this new capability? Well, we heard from Eric and Andreas about the tremendous success of the customer club in the Nordics and the benefits to customers, but the benefits to this part of our business too to both frequency and to our margins. And having this in another part of our group has actually really, really helped us to design, to build and to launch just last month, our own free club, and we've called this Currys Perks. And we've really modeled this on the very best of the Nordics model, the Nordics Club. So the things you can expect to see in perks are exclusive discounts, monthly surprises, VIP shopping events and partner benefits, so we can really use each other in this way to find out what works well and to emulate it in our other markets. And it's only 1 month in, so really very early days indeed, but it's showing great promise already. We've got 1/3 of U.K. households already enrolled in this program. We have great vendor support. So Apple were with us for launch. And of course, a brand of that power of that magnitude will really encourage the rest of our supply base to get on board with this. And very early signals, though they may be, customer sentiment is really positive here already on things like frequency, average transaction value and other engagement measures. These are all the signals that we would want at this stage of the program's evolution. So expect to hear much more from Currys Perks over the coming months. But really Perks is just the beginning. And we have much more to do to harmonize our large customer datasets and many more powerful data groups of really engaged customers are yet to be synthesized into our master database. And this will continue to fuel this dynamic that we have for the next 18 months or so as we bring all of those data sets on stream. I'm going to do 3 key things with all of this data, continue to personalize all experiences for as many customers as we possibly can. And second, this is all about learning for us. We've got to treat this as gold dust, this insight is so powerful for us. And we can really continue to shape our propositions with this gold dust with this insight that comes back from customers to refine our propositions right across the board, really understand what our customers value, what they want from us, and we'll continue to shape and refine our propositions as a result of all of this insight. And then we're going to use this services customer data in combination with a wider dataset. And this is really important because it keeps the dialogue going with customers for longer. And this is really important in a sector, which is relatively infrequently shopped like ours. It keeps us top of mind, it keeps us relevant throughout the year. So this is a key advantage to us. And all of this, of course, is geared around maximizing customer loyalty. And to help us in our aim of driving increased customer loyalty, Alex tee this one up for us. We've developed this measure LTR likelihood to return really simple measures that we can use right across the organization and very simply put how likely is a customer or a set of customers to come back to us in the next 12 months. So something we can use right across the businesses that enables us to track all of our activity in this space, gauge what's working, gauge what isn't working so well. And that's going to help us when we think about where we want to put our emphasis as we develop our capability in this space. And already, this is kicking out some really interesting and really valuable insights. Well, firstly, it's actually helped us to validate our core strategy because it shows that customers who shop across channels are over 1/4 more likely to return than those who just shop the 1 channel. And that customers who shop in multiple categories in any given year are 20% more likely to come back to us than customers who've only shopped in the 1 category. And for us to capture a second basket of any category for our customers within the year produces an incremental LTR of over 50%. And all of this, of course, is totally consistent with our strategy and totally consistent with all of the investments that we've made, whether that's across the new online platforms that Mark was talking about earlier on, whether it's about those investments in our colleagues and in colleagues training, whether it's about expanding our ranges or entering new markets or whether it's about the investments that we've made in our CRM capability. All of these things have been designed to help customers to shop omnichannel, to encourage customers to consider us for other categories. And all of it has been designed with the aim of improving frequency too. And as if all that wasn't exciting enough, what this analysis has done for us is shine a light on the power of our services business to improve loyalty as well. Now in and of themselves, these are significant drivers of profits upside for us. But the additional benefits to loyalty are now clear. As you can see from the bar chart, paid for services drives an incremental 20% LTR likelihood to return, and its repeat credit spend that really gets LTR pinging, repeat credit customers being over 70% more likely to come back to us than those who are not using credits. And I'm going to come on to our plans to drive these 2 areas harder in just a moment. But just at a headline level, look, all points are ticking north on these things. I mean, on credit, in particular, higher incremental sales, and we can attribute 30% of credit sales to be truly incremental. Credit customers spend more because they're able to reach up to a higher standard of tech. And so therefore, our average transaction value comes across in both channels with a clear significant improvement. And credit customers also rate us more highly than non-credit customers. So we can see that come through from our NPS scores. And finally, credit customers are 20% more likely to take out one of our paid services than non-credit customers. So you can see how these things really interconnect. And as for paid for services, what we're big already in this area, 8.5 million active service customers in the U.K. alone and 30% of our product sales are attached to a service already. So lots of headroom here for sure, but we are building on strength, strength across all 4 stages of our customer journey within services. In terms of helping customers afford amazing tech, as mentioned, we have an installed base now of 1.5 million customers today and 11% sales penetration and growing fast. In terms of getting customers started, well, we help many millions of customers with deliveries, installations, collections of old tech. And we have a booming business in product set up too. Given your tech longer life, obviously, of real significance and real relevance at this moment in time, we, of course, offer our own airtime to over 1 million installed customers on our ID platform and a very engaged bunch of customers they are too and a base which continues to grow. And then crucially, we know customers enjoy their tech even more if they have disposed of their old unit responsibly. And as we are the clear leaders in this market, we recycle over 100 million tonnes of electrical waste every year. We know this can be a really significant source of competitive advantage in the coming period of time. I'm going to come back to this in just a moment. But the overall message is, look, we're big, and we're growing here, but there remains significant headroom to go further faster. So let's have a look at credit first. So again, momentum here is really strong. We have 50% more active accounts than we had just 3 years back. And we're driving up the credit penetration of our sales up to our targets in FY '24, of basically doubling it from our base line in FY '19, and we're looking at ways that we can indeed go further than that. What we've done is to bring in some world-class talent into this area of our business as well. And you will meet David Buxton later on who we've brought in, into our business. And what David and the team have done is set out a new growth strategy for us with 4 very clear pillars. And the first one is about innovation, innovating in our proposition. And this is ideas like flexible pricing, getting us away from our fixed price today of 24.9% APR, which doesn't appeal to everyone. And Pay in 3, which is in our business already in MVP status, but the reaction from customers has been really, really positive and has huge potential for us. So those early signals are extremely strong. Second and consistent with the rest of this story is about tapping in to repeat spend through using CRM. Now this is really important to us and a really clearly delineated opportunity here. You can see from this ring in the bottom left-hand corner, we have GBP 5 billion of pre-approved credit sat on our customers' accounts today, and only 12% of that is being utilized. So we see this as a huge opportunity, a huge pool of revenue that we can tap into. And we know that better CRM is the key to unlocking that door. Third is about improving our credit platforms. So maximizing conversion, improving customer outcome. And this is about giving a customer just a better journey, a slicker journey, a more digitized journey than the one that we have today. And then fourthly, we are going to introduce a second lender in New Day. And this is all about improving acceptance rates from today's level, being able to write more credit and support more customers with credit across the base. So look, in summary, we're hugely important to customers here in credit already. You can see that we have a really successful business already, but you can see how it's about to get massively more successful over the coming months. And I think a similar picture emerges, actually in pay for services. So a large market in its own right, roughly GBP 2.5 billion, and where margins can be more attractive than they are on the product side. And customers consistently demonstrate their appetite for these paid for services. They value them. They need them a few steps to sort of back this up, 25 million customers have bought a service in the market in just the last 3 years. 44% of customers pay for premium delivery, even though they would get it for free if they just waited a little bit longer. Almost 1/4 of customers have multiple product protection with a care service on the tech in their home. And in computing, which is a core generator of services, almost half of customers who we polled would be willing to pay for a set of service. And so I think the exciting thing here, again, is that we have headroom. So we are actually underweight in this market when you compare it to our share of the product market. So exciting room to grow. And this is what we're doing about it. So again, we've recruited fresh, world-class leadership in this space, and you'll meet Dean Kramer presently on the store tours. And Dean and the team have established our strategy for growth in 2 key areas. First is about building a bigger and better value range of services. Now you might call this fixing the basics. It's about filling the gaps that we have still in our offer today and introducing some new insight-led innovation into the range, which we actually haven't done for some little while. It's about zoning in on a more transparent and a more competitive pricing model, and there's some little significance that we can place on that. And all of this is with the goal of increasing their wallet -- the size of that wallet that we talked about earlier on. And the second is thinking about an easier customer journey. So putting all of our services available in all channels across a seamless customer journey. And that's not the case today. So we have significant upside there too. And that's going to include things like CRM within services, so a tailored post-purchase and renewals set of communications. And then it's about building a suite of services that can be purchased with products or stand-alone. And at present, we are not playing into around 1/7th of that GBP 2.5 billion market because we don't offer stand-alone services, and that's something we're going to fix. And all of that is upside from today. And we're also zoned in this area, getting it right for customers first time, again, because this is a key determinant of LTR in this space, and it moves us towards the lifetime relationship model that we're seeking and away from that more transactional one-off mentality. So when we think about how we're going to win our fair share and go beyond in this area, these are the ways in which we are going to do it. And there's one more thing I wanted to touch on in this space, and that's those services allow that reach into enabling customers to make more sustainable choices. So really tapping into the zeitgeist. And for us, this is all about our repairs and our recycling capability. And because of the expertise and because of the facilities that we have built up over a number of years, we can do this on a scale that nobody else can. Not without massive investment anyway. And therefore, we see this as a really clear and a potentially very significant competitive advantage. And you'll start to see this come through in our propositions, in our communications clearly and clearly, as we develop this over the course of the next 12 months. And you may already be seeing it in actual fact as we've launched our new Go Greener campaign, which points customers towards a more eco-friendly product, but it also encourages customers to recycle their old products at the same time. And it's this capability that competitors just can't match that gives this business a real opportunity to show leadership in the market on this really important topic and Assad will come back to talk about this in more detail a little later on. So by way of summary, customers for life builds on the stronger foundations that you've heard about in our strategy of happier colleagues making for happier customers or better retail basics, whether that's across range availability, pricing or an easy customer journey and of helping customers to shop how they want to shop, omnichannel, developing online, developing stores with total commitment to offer the best of both worlds to every single customer. And everything that I presented on customers for life, it builds on top of this, and it helps customers to access, and it's going to help access more of the services market. It's going to help us to access a bigger share of bigger wallets across a longer period of time. And it's all about us talking to that large and that growing number of customers that we know increasingly well. It's all about us developing more credit options and a wider range of services and all this fueled by a step change in our CRM capability. And it's these things that will create those stickier, those more valuable customers, customers that are better engaged with us than ever before. And with whom we've got more reasons for ongoing dialogue. Customers who have fewer reasons to look elsewhere, and therefore, customers that will become our customers for life. Okay. Thank you for your attention. We now have a brief video to help to bring this to life. Thank you. [Presentation]

Good morning, everyone. I'll just wait for you to take your seats. We're obviously running slightly over. Come on, Nick. I hope you've all had a chance to walk around the live stations and get a feel for actually some of the elements that Mark and Ed have been talking about, we're in terms of really bringing some of those investments we're making in terms of some of the customer-facing initiatives to life. And I know a lot of you have had a lot of fun with the gaming zone. But I want to bring it back in this session and just really start with the vision. Because our vision has a powerful purpose at its heart. And there are many businesses that are working to define, refine or better articulate their purpose. And we've all seen and talked about today in this store, the power of technology to improve people's lives. But how we make money as a powerful societal benefit baked in. And it's a huge opportunity for us, as Alex said. And that's why today, you've heard across our business and in-store, talk about new service offerings that Ed was talking about that will help more customers care about the planet as well as their pocket. The Currys being a leader, not just in recycling, but also reusing that unwanted technology to help everyone enjoy amazing technology. From Mark that our estate isn't just right sized, but we're also investing in it, too, such as all of these energy-efficient LED lighting that you can see in this store. Yes, it helps control costs, but it's also good for the environment. And lastly, how we're learning from each other as a diverse group. And we're delivering across a wide range of environmental and social issues with the right governance. And I want to start with what we've already achieved because we're really proud of what we've done, and there are just some of the highlights. So whether it's helping customers reduce their environmental impact, with 104,000 tonnes of e-waste collected for reuse and recycling, whether it's taking action to reduce our own environmental impact, all working in communities where we've donated GBP 1 million to the learning foundation to help eradicate digital poverty. We're proud of what we've achieved, but there's much, much more to come. Earlier, we heard Ed talk about the competitive advantage that we have when it comes to creating customers for life and helping them make more sustainable choices. We're making it even easier for our customers to reduce their impact on the environment, to care about the planet as well as their pockets. They don't have to compromise through our propositions, such as Go Greener. That helps customers to make informed choices about their purchases, helps them save energy, reduce waste and save water. But we're doing much, much more than this. Choosing the right tech is just the start. We're also leading the way in giving technology longer life through repair, reuse and recycling. And this isn't just us capitalizing on a new fab. Let me tell you, it's something we've been working on for decades. We've been collecting over half of all e-waste from U.K. retailers since 2008. We've been offering repairs, and some of you will remember this going back to the 1980s. We're now doing over GBP 2 million a year. That's a scale that none of our competitors can match. And we're operating the largest electrical repairs facility in Europe. But we're also making progress on reducing our own environmental impact from being the U.K.'s #1 retail recycle of electrical goods to committing to net-zero emissions by 2040, and we smashed previous targets. We've reduced operating emissions and those comprise Scope 1 and Scope 2, which are the direct ones that we generate by 80% since 2014, '15. And we're already delivering a 4% reduction last year against our new target to reduce Scope 1 and 2 operating emissions by 50% by 2030. So this continues the long-term trend of actually reducing our operational emissions. It's not something new, something that's embedded in our model. But there's a lot more to come. And crucially, our net-zero ambition focuses not just on the remaining operational emissions, but more importantly, on the indirect ones, the Scope 3 ones. These account for the vast majority of our total emissions, the largest element of which is in the use of sold products. But we can't do this alone. And working with our suppliers is resulting in some fantastic outcomes. And you would have seen the video showing all of the support that we get from our biggest partners. 46% of revenue in the Nordics is from supplies within EcoVadis rating, one of the leading providers of business sustainability ratings, which helps us measure supplier performance across a wide range of metrics and identify further improvements. And you can go on to the Elkjøp website and get a feel for how EcoVadis works for customers as well. We've taken out 3 million individual pieces of plastic packaging, a topic that our customers and we know our colleagues also care about deeply. But it's our amazing colleagues, our capable and committed colleagues that you've heard everyone talk about, which are key to helping not just customers, but everyone enjoy amazing technology, including those who might otherwise be excluded from the benefits that technology brings. So our primary focus is on eradicating digital property across all the regions we operate in, using our expertise, our scale, our reach, we believe a collective effort can make sure everyone can enjoy equal access to the benefits that technology brings. And actually, again, we started this in 2016 with the Elkjøp Foundation, which was set up to fight digital exclusion in the Nordics. And we followed it up last year as we were one of the 3 founding members of the Digital Poverty Alliance, we want to eradicate digital property once and for all in the U.K. by 2030. So we're operating this across all of the regions, and our approach is tailored to meet the needs of each specific region. For example, in the U.K., where we have an aging population, we're working specifically with Age UK to target older persons to help them access digital tech. And our capable and committed colleagues are our biggest advantage. We're one team with one shared passion, and hopefully that's come through as you've walked around and talked to our colleagues, and that's technology. And as you've heard and seen today, the expert face-to-face help is at the heart of why customers shop with us across all of our regions. And every voice has a space at our table. The well-being of our colleagues continues to be a core priority, too, across all the regions. And as part of the investments that we've made, that's included investment in training and accreditation for 765 Mental Health First Aiders and Mental Health Champions. In Greece, our Stay Together initiative was designed to share tips for boosting morale. And in the Nordics, the team has provided thousands of colleagues with weekly online mental health training. And because we've taken steps for all of our colleagues to be shareholders in our business, they're truly invested in our future. But like you said, don't just take our word for it. We're being rated favorably too. So looking at the FTSE4Good, we've had a repeated inclusion in the FTSE4Good U.K. index. We've got a score of 3.7. So that's above the specialty retailer subsector. We've received a rating of B for our CDP in terms of climate change questionnaire, and we're awaiting a new result on that in the next couple of months. And Sustainalytics, we're rated as low-risk with a score of 13.3, which actually puts us in the top 5% of their global universe in terms of ESG rating. So good progress, but more to come. And we're not standing still, and there is much more to come. So to make the most of our global scale and expertise, we're going to be focusing on 3 areas where we can make the most impact, creating social impact by eradicating the digital divide, moving to circular business models that improve the use of resources, so making it even easier for customers to make informed choices about purchases, as you've heard from Ed today. And a great example of that has been repair life. Taking climate action and achieving net-zero emissions by 2040, 10 years ahead of the current government target of 2050 for all of the above that we've talked about as well as our EV100 commitment to get to full use of alternative electric vehicles by 2030 and a material reduction in gas use across our sites in the U.K. These are 3 distinct areas. These are interconnected issues that are actually deep within our business model in terms of how we make money, focused on sourcing responsibly, being an employer of choice and good governance. And as a result, we've linked reward to progress on all of our ESG goals, ESG metrics, including colleague engagement, customer satisfaction, make up 40% of our annual bonus scorecard. And this year, we introduced 2 new environmental metrics, e-waste collection for recycling and reuse and reduction in emissions, showing customers we're really serious about what we're doing, and knowing that this inspires more super engaged colleagues. So in summary, we're making strong progress. But in delivering our commercial results that you've seen today, we're also delivering meaningful societal impact and environmental change. They all go hand-in-hand. So with that, I'll hand over to Bruce for the financial profile.

Hi. Good morning, everybody. My name is Bruce Marsh. I'm the new CFO within the business. It's a pleasure to meet you. My job today is to translate the narrative that you've heard so far in terms of what it means for our financial numbers. But before I do that, I'd just like to spend a few moments focusing on the trading statement that we issued this morning. As you all have seen, and you'll see on the slide, the headline metric that we're using to judge our performance is year-on-2-year like-for-like. And we think that's the fairest way to judge performance given the store closures that took place last year. In terms of headlines, as you will have seen, our group 2-year like-for-like was 15%. Within that, U.K. 11%; and international 19%. But in terms of, I guess, just drawing out one of the key points are Currys' Electrical 2-year like-for-like was 21%, Elkjøp 19% and Kotsovolos also 19%. So very, very strong growth. We're also highlighting this morning that our average cash during the first half of the year has been strong and up on last year at an average of GBP 280 million. And we're also giving guidance on a full year basis that our capital expenditure will be roughly GBP 170 million, which is lower than we've said previously. And similarly, our exceptional cash cost will be around GBP 70 million. And the final point is that we expect our year-end cash to be around GBP 100 million. So let's now focus more on the medium term. As I say, I want to put into context what you've heard from the executive team in terms of how we're planning on driving the business forward. And what that means for our financial projections and our balance sheet. And in terms of driving cash flow, we're focused on 5 key levers for sustainable cash flow. Steady revenue growth, which allows us to drive the top line, stable gross margins and also reductions within operating costs, which will allow us to get to our target of 4% EBIT margins. And then from a cash flow perspective, controlled capital expenditure and controlled cash exceptionals. By FY '24, our ambition is to get to a sustainable free cash flow of GBP 250 million. Now how do we get there? You can see from the graph that the biggest single element of that is going to be from driving U.K. profitability. Our international business is already super strong. And the focus here is about driving steps forward. And then the final component, as I've said, is about controllable CapEx and controllable exceptionals. So starting off with steady revenue growth. As you've seen through the presentations, particularly the slides that Eric shared, we have already got a very clear demonstrable track record of growing our top line, slightly different access, but over the last 10 years, our Nordic business have grown sales by a 9% compound annual growth rate. Our U.K. business, not quite as successful, but nevertheless, very, very healthy, 3% compound annual growth rate over the course of the last 10 years. And even when our stores were closed last year in FY '21, we still were able to generate significant growth. As we look ahead, as you've heard, we've got a very wide portfolio of initiatives that will allow us to continue to deliver steady growth. And we're grouping them into 4 headings. What we sell, who we sell to, how we sell it and also where we sell it? Let me step through each one of these and remind you what you've heard. So first of all, in terms of what we sell, amazing technology is now even more important in customers' lives as we come through the pandemic. And we expect the market to remain bigger. And we're perfectly positioned to take advantage of that. But as Alex said, we're not relying on it. So our financial plans assume that the market does return to pre-pandemic levels. We're also expecting to see an exciting range of new products. And I think you've seen some of them in the store today. And we will stock those, and we will stock a series of new ranges. And again, those will help us grow our top line. And it's not just about products. You've heard through the sessions that we're growing the range of services that we have within the business. And our new credit offer will allow us to make those products and services available to even more customers. In terms of who we sell to, we're already in a very strong position. As you've seen, we've got lots of customers. We know them well, and we're making them more loyal. And as we look to the future, we want to continue to drive all of those elements. We've got a plan to increase our customer base. You saw that over the last 3 years, we've grown by 3 million more customers in the U.K. and Eric reflected on B2B, a growth engine within Nordic, something that isn't in our plan in the U.K., but absolutely could be. We also want to increase the number of customers we can talk to. Over the last 3 years in the U.K., we've grown that by GBP 6 million and in the Nordic by GBP 5 million. And through the investments that we've made in the customer club in Nordic and Currys Perks, we will continue to grow that base. And also through the work we're doing with data, so we've got a single view of the customer, we can really drive value through CRM. And finally, we'll provide an easier and richer shopping experience, both through our stores and online, and easier will mean, we can sell more and richer will mean, we can increase our average transaction value and drive add-ons. In terms of how we sell, obviously, the hygiene factor is being trusted on price with our clear price promise. And that protects us against new entrants who might be trying to operate a price play. We're very strong already. But at the heart of our opportunity is a true omnichannel proposition. And you heard all about that from Mark. Clearly, our stores remain our core competitive advantage with our locations and our wonderful colleagues. But in addition to that, we've seen that when our stores were closed, we can still grow our business through online. But the key is our omnichannel offer, our ability to bring the best of both stores and online together. And we know that over 60% of our customers want to shop that way. The final component is the single brand. And again, you've heard about the work we've been doing across now all of our markets to have one single brand. And that means we get credit for everything we do. It means we can leverage every pound of marketing spend, and we can drive our brand preference. And finally, we benefit from market diversity. By having such successful businesses across different geographies, it means we're not reliant on one market, and we're protected against shock. So when you bring that all together, the what, the who, the how and the where -- if you've got some real reasons to believe that there's an absolute minimum, we should be able to deliver steady sales growth. So moving on to profitability. Our goal in the U.K. and across the group is to deliver continued growth in EBIT. And that will come through in 2 ways: stabilizing our gross margin and operating cost reductions. So let me drill into both of those. In terms of gross margins, as you can see on the left-hand side, over the last 4 years, we've seen declines within our gross margin. The key news, though, is that we really understand why. Clearly, growing online share was a component of it. Some of the legacy mobile issues, particularly some of the onerous network contracts and volume targets that we had impacted our margin over time. And also the closure of, for example, our travel business that did operate with higher margins has caused some of our margins to dilute. But as we look ahead, we're very confident that our margins will be stable. And indeed, during the first half of this year, our margins are already stable. Looking ahead, why do we believe they will stay stable or grow? Well, we think that channel mix will stabilize within the U.K., but even if it doesn't, we're still perfectly positioned to be able to grow our margin. Our new website, as you've seen, allows us to offer services, credit, up-sell, cross-sell and bundles. Our wonderful colleagues in-store are trained through life skills to be able to sell products and services in store, but also through omnichannel, through order and collect and ShopLive, they're perfectly positioned to be able to help our customers make better choices. Our credit offer and particularly our new strategic credit offer will put products into the hands of more customers through broader access to credit. And finally, our services with a much broader range of services, again, we will have something for everybody. But driving margin isn't just around the top line elements. It's also going to come through managing our cost base. And some of the great work that Lindsay and the supply chain team are doing across supply chain, service operations and our customer contact centers will really help us stabilize and grow our margin. So in terms of cost, clearly, one of the key elements of driving and progressing our EBIT will come through reducing costs. And over the course of the last 3 years, we've seen our cost base reduced by around GBP 300 million. Now a big chunk of that has come through the closure of the Carphone Warehouse stores. But what you don't see on the chart is the fact that the cost saving work has also allowed us to offset inflation. As we look ahead, our plan is to take a further GBP 300 million out. And we will do that by modernizing our supply chain and our service operations, by making our stores more productive and efficient, by rationalizing our IT systems, simplifying our central costs, and underpinning it all will be significant savings within our procurement space. It's critical we do this, not just so that we can drive our EBIT, but also that we can offset inflationary headwinds. And as we put our plans together, we can see that as a business we're likely to face into circa GBP 200 million of inflation over the next 3 years. So it's critical we're able to offset that. So returning to stable margins. As I've said, efficiency is critical across our supply chain, service operations and customer contact centers. So let me walk you through each of those. Starting with supply chain. The focus is to streamline our processes to innovate and automate and also to partner with leading companies in this space. Our supply chain team have partnered with a company called GXO, who are experts in warehouse operations. They brought world-class, best-in-class cost efficiency. And as we've moved 1,500 colleagues across to GXO, so we're able to improve customer service and reduce our cost. We're also investing in systems. We've recently gone live with new warehouse management systems within our supply chain. Next, we're putting in new order management systems. That will give us much better end-to-end visibility of stock, which will allow us to better manage working capital. It will allow us to drive efficiency and also drive a flexibility within our operation. We're also working on, for example, a new route planning system that will allow us to take a lot of manual effort out of the business and drive the productivity of our delivery drivers. In terms of our service operations, we've got the U.K.'s biggest service provider. We handle over 4 million returns and 2 million repairs every year. And that, of course, is a massive competitive advantage. Historically, the challenge with it have been old and unsupported systems. But again, the team are working hard to transform both our repair and return part of the organization and systems. We're looking to consolidate 13 different systems across the group into a single service platform. That will give us real-time field repair scheduling. It will allow us to have a new returns self-service portal, so we can make better commercial decisions. And you will have seen our repair life proposition that's recently gone live to emulate the success of ShopLive and putting our engineers virtually into customers' homes. And moving on to customer contact centers. We've got substantial assets. We handle over 11 million calls with customers every year. The focus, and I guess, the challenge is how do we do that so that we're delivering better service to our customers, but at a lower cost. And we're doing that through investments in both colleagues and technology. We're optimizing our contact management so that we can encourage customers to move from voice to self-service and digital. We are looking to consolidate our outsourced activity into a single partner, Webhelp, and we're right-shoring activities so we can operate at the lowest possible cost, all while leveraging our expert U.K. colleagues. So when you bring all that together, all of the components I described in terms of supporting margin, along with the cost work that's underway across supply chain, service operations and our customer contact centers, you can see why we feel confident that as the very least, our margins should be stable. Moving on to reducing operating costs. As I described to you, there's lots of areas for opportunity. And one place to go looking immediately is within our stores. We've got the opportunity to reconfigure our operating model, and there are 2 core elements to this. The first is to remove non value-added services that today take place within the store. And the second is to develop the skills of our team so that they are able to support customers. So even the people who are working in the back office of our stores when required, can come out and support customers. And both of those will allow us to redeploy millions of hours to be customer-facing within our store. And you can see our target is a 30% increase. A significant component of our cost-out work is within our IT infrastructure. And this work is well underway. We're accelerating the decommissioning of our legacy IT estate. And over the next 3 years, we'll consolidate 60% of our IT networks. The key thing that we're doing is moving away from 2 largely independent sets of systems that manage Dixons and Carphone Warehouse and creating one integrated business. We're decommissioning redundant applications, and we're simplifying our IT landscape. And that will allow us to run at lower cost. Finally, a rich opportunity is within our central costs. We've already reduced our central costs since -- over the last 3 years by about 15%. But as we move to one brand and a simpler business, so that opportunity can grow. We're going to leverage offshore locations and already a significant proportion of our colleagues are already working in offshore locations. Secondly, we will look to automate and improve our processes and through the business, improve efficiency. I'm pulling all that cost work together, it isn't just about reducing what we do. It's also about changing the way that we buy through procurement. We're on plan to deliver around GBP 25 million of procurement savings this year. And over the next 3 years, we have a vision of GBP 100 million worth of savings. And we'll do that through retendering contracts, rationalizing the tail of our suppliers and centralizing our procurement. So I've talked a lot about the U.K. And because, to be frank, that's where a lot of our heavy lifting is required. Our international business is already very strong. And as you've heard, what is required there is growth and continuous improvements. Across our international business, we expect gross margins to decline slightly due to the impact of shift online, where the Nordic business is slightly behind where we are in the U.K. But at the same time, we'll offset that through operational leverage as the Nordic business and our Greek business grows, we won't be investing the same level of cost growth. Turning focus briefly on to cash flow and capital expenditure, in particular. As you've heard, we're a long way through our transformation journey. By the end of this year, 75% of the way through. And over the course of the last 2 years with a bit of a blip during the pandemic year, saw the peak investment in CapEx. But as we look ahead, our plan is to reduce CapEx to 1.5% of turnover, a more normalized level. And finally, we've spent a high level of cash flow that has gone through the exceptional line over recent years. Our plan is by FY '24 to reduce and indeed plan to have almost 0 exceptionals through the business by the end of our plan. So I've stepped through the components of the plan. Within the U.K., it's a focus on steady growth, stable margin and reducing costs. Within international, it's about continued strong performance. And from a cash perspective, it's about normalizing the level of CapEx and exceptionals. So with that strong plan, it allows us to consider both the shape of our balance sheet and our capital allocation policy going forward. So let me step you through that. As you've already heard from Alex, we've already done an awful lot of great work. And over the last 3 years, we put the business in much better shape, where we've seen total indebtedness fall from GBP 2.5 billion to GBP 1.5 billion. Looking forward, we will manage down the pension deficit as we continue to contribute. And our lease liabilities will also reduce as we continue to shorten our lease periods and reduce our rental expense. We've created a very flexible balance sheet. We've moved from net debt to net cash, and we've done that through the material unwind of our network debtor and the 1-year cessation of our dividend. But looking ahead, our view is that both our average cash position and our year-end cash position will begin to normalize, although, of course, there will still be movements during the year. And of course, we've still got our GBP 550 million revolving credit facility, and we're in a place that we're comfortably within our covenants. Going forward, we aim to maintain a prudent balance sheet, considering both net debt and also total indebtedness levels. Why? Well, first of all, of course, we want to make sure we've got flexibility. Should there be any changes in circumstance or indeed opportunity. And secondly, we want to make sure that we've got the economic strength to react to any downturn. But we're going to manage total indebtedness as well as net debt. And we'll do that by managing fixed charge cover above 1.5x. We're already in that space and reducing our total indebtedness leverage to below 2.5x. Year-end of FY '21, we were just above that. But as we continue to tackle our pension deficits and our IFRS 16 lease liability, so we will come in line and continue to manage to those metrics. So within the context of those targets, we want to work with clear allocation priorities. We're going to maintain a prudent balance sheet, paying our agreed pension contributions. But beyond that, we've got the following priorities: the first is that we will continue to invest in the business. We will continue to invest in new transformation as opportunities come along, but within a constraint that they must be returning within an acceptable period, and our headline benchmark is 24 months. Secondly, we will pay and grow our dividend. You're all aware that we've got a 3p dividend at the moment, and our policy will be to grow that dividend by above inflation. But finally, any surplus capital that is available after those 2 tranches will be returned to our shareholders and to our pension scheme. So let me hand over to Alex to wrap up.

Thanks, Bruce. So what that means, as you will have seen today, in terms of shareholder return is the announcement of the GBP 75 million buyback over the next 12 months, which we'll get cracking on as soon as we're out from underneath the current close period. When you add that to the GBP 35 million, we expect to pay in dividend, that makes a total shareholder return of GBP 110 million over the next 12 months, which at current market value is circa 7.5x market cap. So that's what we're pleased to do. Before we move to Q&A, I just want to hammer home some of the key messages that I hope you've all taken from today, that we expect our larger market to stay bigger, but we're not counting on it. In that bigger market, we're very well placed, as we should be, given we're a truly international business and everywhere, the growing market leader with the winning omnichannel model and valuable services. And indeed, we are making more and more of that privileged position that we occupy with a clear strategy, a strong management team working in a much better business than we were in a few years ago and as that strategy visibly working in a way that we can be confident will deliver some sustainable results. The heaviest lifting and the lifting with the highest cost and execution risk is behind us. And so clearly, much hard work remains ahead. And clearly, we have yet to see the full benefits of all of that investment, as I say, the period of biggest risk in cost is behind us. And all of this is showing up in the cash with the full benefits still to come. And as you've just heard from Bruce, what's still to come financially is lots of reasons to believe in continuing our track record of steady growth. We've done it for 10 years, whichever angle you look at future growth through, who we sell to, what we sell, how and where, there are growth opportunities, whichever way you cut it. There's a reason to believe in that 4% gross margin target in that we've already stabilized our gross margins. And you heard today about our plans to sell more credit and services and our plans to achieve significant deficiencies in the supply chain, both of which will serve to at least stabilize gross margins. Plus, you've been given some detail on the GBP 300 million of sustainable cost reduction that we can see coming out of the business from supply chain, service operations, IT, stores and central costs. So you add all of that up to normalizing, not stinting but normalizing levels of CapEx and normalizing, hopefully, very minimal levels of exceptionals. I hope you can see why we're confident in that GBP 250 million of sustainable cash flow that we see as our prize by FY '24 at the latest, and all of which obviously will allow us to continue with those capital allocation policies, including, we hope, and expect very strong shareholder returns.