Currys plc (CURY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Yellowstone Advisory Webinar with Curry's plc. We're delighted to have with us today Dan Homan, Director of Investor Relations; Carlo Fabiano, Head of Investor Relations; and Joe Saunders, Investor Relations Manager. While we're waiting for everyone to arrive, there's a poll on your screen and could really appreciate it if you could just respond to that. It looks like at the moment, we've got predominantly a group of non-holders roughly sort of 6,327. The format today is a presentation from Dan which we'll ask about 30 minutes, and then we're going to head over to Q&A. You're all currently on listen-only mode. But if you do like to ask a question, please type it into the box at the bottom of your screen, and we're going to try and take as many questions as we can at the end of the presentation. I think that's about all of the admin for now. So I'm now actually delighted to be able to hand over to Dan Homan, Director of Investor Relations, to start today's presentation.

Thanks, Alex, and good afternoon all. Thank you for taking the time to look at Currys this afternoon. Just before I start a quick introduction to myself, I'm Director of IR here at Currys. I've been with the business for 5 years. Prior to that, I was a sell-side analyst at Citi covering the European retail sector for a decade. I'm joined here today by my colleagues, Carla Fabiano, who recently joined Currys from Johnson Matthey; and Joe Saunders, who has been at Currys for a couple of decades, most of the time in stores, but I'm pleased to say has been a valuable part of the IR team for the last 15 months. So what I want to talk to you about today and what I hope you'll hear is that we're a leading omnichannel retailer. We've got a strategy that is working, and we've got a robust balance sheet. Between these things, we think there's an attractive opportunity for shareholder rewards to grow over time. I'll start by just introducing into the business. We are the #1 omnichannel retailer of technology in all of our markets. That's the U.K., Ireland and right across the Nordics. Our market share well above 20% in the U.K. and above 25% in the Nordics. Until a couple of weeks ago, this math would have also contained Greece, but we've just completed the disposal of Greece and that's a business that was worth 7% of our sales that we've sold for consideration worth 25% of today's market cap, which we think is a very attractive outcome. Our business has a highly diversified revenue base, whether that's by product or by channel or even as I'll talk to you later, by services. And we do it at a scale that really is unmatched by our competitors in our markets. We take the U.K. as an example, our online business is double the size of AO and online is less than half of growing business. So considerably bigger than the nearest listed rival. In the Nordics, we are the clear #1 in every market, but importantly, the #2 player is different in each of those markets. And therefore, overall in the Nordics, we've got far greater scale than the #2 player. As a company, we have a simple vision, and that's that we help everyone enjoy amazing technology. And we have that vision, first of all, because technology is playing an ever more important and prevalent part in people's lives. Well that's helping people get connected, be productive, be fit, clean and healthy and to be entertained, there's numerous and increasing reasons to have a large amount of technology products in your home. And we're following a fairly straightforward strategy. We look to build capable and committed colleagues and easy to shop experience, delivering customers for life. If we do all of those, we're confident that we will grow profits. To touch on all of those in a bit more detail, first of all, on colleagues. It's very difficult in a business such as ours for the customer experience to exceed the colleague experience. You can't have a good face-to-face interaction as a customer with a poor colleague. And therefore, we've unashamedly spent a lot of time and effort and money investing in our colleagues. That's right from the tools, training, well-being in leadership and most transparently the reward that those colleagues get. The reward for that is world-class colleague engagement schools, and we're pleased to say that, as measured by Glint, our U.K. business is now firmly in the top 5% of businesses that they measure globally, and our Nordics business having taken a blip last year is bouncing back strongly and seeing colleague engagement scores approaching that of the U.K. The second part of the strategy is about being easy to shop. Now easy to shop, first of all, is about being omnichannel. I think probably the debate is now settled about whether omnichannel is the right model moving forward. But just to reiterate, in all of the developed markets across the world, the leading player in tech retail is an omnichannel retailer. And that's market shares that have been preserved despite the long and well-understood growth of online-only retail over the last couple of decades. Equally, you can look at our own sales. If you look at the split of our customer purchases, around 1/3 new stores, only around 1/3 use online only and 1/3 are using a combination of both, well there's a lot that's ordering in store for delivery to home or ordering online and picking up in store, having omnichannel is the best way to access the largest revenue pool. The other section of easy to shop is about what we call the retail fundamentals. This is about range, availability, price, getting it right for the customers first time and delivering the solutions that customers want. I think it's very easy to overlook these when looking at retail, but without getting these right, no strategy, no matter how developed it is, is going to succeed without getting these fundamentals right, and we spend a lot of time focusing on these. One of the big areas of success we've had in the last year is further improving our ability to bundle sale products and other services alongside the main product in our stores. And if you've been to our stores recently, I hope you'll see the improved efforts we've put into this. The final part of the strategy is about Customers for Life. And the starting point for Customers for Life is to understand that our biggest opportunity is to grow the share of wallet with existing customers. We have roughly 80% of U.K. households shopping with us, but we only get 30% share of wallet. We're not that interested in gaining new customers. We are very interested in gaining a larger share of wallet from those existing customers. That's clearly the cheapest route to market. We're doing this in a couple of ways. First of all, it starts with data, and you probably haven't heard from a consumer-facing company in the last couple of years that hasn't mentioned data as being an important part of the strategy as it is for us. And there's a few parts to that data strategy. First of all, it's about making sure the data is collected, processed, secured properly and in line with that regulations. And then it's about utilizing the data to make our own business more efficient. And we're getting that data from a number of sources. We can talk about the customer club across the Nordics and our Currys perks in the U.K., where we've got 8 million and 11 million customers, respectively. And we see with these customers that they're happier, they spend more frequently. They spend more and they've got higher adoption of services, but there's more we can go after here. And if I look at the U.K. specifically, as well as the 10 million, 11 million Perks customers, we've got another 9 million customers on Care and Repair, 2 million customers on credit, 1.6 million customers on ID. These are all valuable sources of customer data that we can increasingly utilize to provide better experiences for our customers and better outcomes for us. The second part of Customers for Life is around our services and perhaps if I was to say what was most overlooked about the Currys' business, it's the services that we provide. We are not just a company that shifts boxes, we provide services that help customers enjoy the technology right through the life cycle. Whether that's at the start of the journey, providing credit to help customers afford technology that while it is amazing, is often very expensive. And our U.K. credit adoption is now above 20% and above 10% in the Nordics. That's about helping customers get the product started, whether that's delivery on what are often fairly complex technical 2-man, 2-person deliveries often involving installation and qualified installation on things like gas. We also help give the tech a longer life. First of all, through protecting that tech through our extended warranty and Care and Repair plans, but also through repair in the tech that sits outside of those plans and through if we can't do those things recycling the tech at the end of its life cycle. And finally, we help customers get the most out of their tech predominantly through connectivity on mobile phones, which remain the most important piece of tech in anyone's household. To touch on these, I will touch on these in a little more detail in a second, but it's probably important to emphasize, we do services for a couple of reasons. Clearly, they're valued by our customers, but they offer us an in-year uplift on profits, and they're also a source of long-term recurring revenue. If you look at credit or Care and Repair or connectivity, these are all multiyear agreements with customers, which clearly a lot more long lasting than simply shifting a box from our stores. So just touching on each of them in turn. Credit, it's important to understand that we are only the broker for credit. We don't have any credit risk on our balance sheet. And in the U.K., it's provided by BNPP, Europe's largest consumer credit provider. In the Nordics, it's provided by Santander and [indiscernible]. The reason we do credit is because it drives good customer metrics. We see the customers are happier. They spend more on our services and they're more likely to return. Next, on Care and Repair. Care and Repair is our extended warranty and having dipped during COVID, we've seen a very strong recovery in our Care and Repair adoption. And in fact, in the first half of this year, we saw record Care and Repair adoption. The reason we see very good adoption of Care and Repair is because we are offering an extended warranty that we think is asking the customers to pay for what they want and not asking them to pay for what they don't want. A very good example of this on major domestic appliances. Our extended warranty doesn't include accidental damage because we see very few instances of people accidentally damaging a white good. It's possible, but it's hard work. What they do want is the guarantee that these goods when they're broken, they'll get either repaired or a replacement within 7 days. And that's what we offer that no one else does. So we get good uptake on these services because they offer what customers want. And the reason we're able to offer what customers want is because we carry out the fulfillment of these services ourselves. It's probably one of the little known facts about Currys that we run in Europe, the largest tech repair center in Newark. It's a great facility, 0.5 million square foot of space, 1,000 expert colleagues, all of which are highly engaged with an average tenure of almost a decade. They're opened 363 days a year, processing 3 million products a year across all of our major categories and for over 40 major brands. There's a lot of great content on our website about Newark, and I'd encourage you to go and look at it. And if any of you want to visit, please do let us know. We're always very happy to arrange that. Finally, going back to services. It's worth talking about connectivity. And for those of you with the memory of a few years, you'll know that mobile for a while was a big problem for this business. It was highly unprofitable. And it's taken a lot of course corrective action. We've got to end unprofitable contracts. We've got to close unprofitable stores. And then sign some renewed and profitable contracts with Vodafone and 3. We're now pleased to say that mobile is profitable and is gaining market share. One of the major reasons it's gaining market share is ID Mobile. ID Mobile is our own MVNO similar to Tesco Mobile or Lebara and it's an MVNO that's backed by 3. We have seen year-to-date almost 30% growth in ID Mobile. And what you will see from some broker notes is that valuations for MVNO start at around GBP 200 per subscriber. So clearly, we are growing a valuable asset as part of our business here. I worked well on this slide, but it is just worth saying that as ID grows, it does act as a drag on in-year profits and cash flow. But clearly, we think this is worth it for the long-term payback that we get and that valuable recurring revenue that's generated from it. So I talked about capable and committed colleagues, easy to shop and customers for life. This all goes into growing profits. And none of it would be worthwhile if we didn't grow profits. And we're growing profits in a couple of ways. First of all, through gross margin, we are not chasing less profitable sales. We are focusing on improved marketing and promotional efficiency, pricing discipline and making sure that we're getting a return on all of the products and services that we're selling. And what's helpful in that is that we are doing a better job of selling the full solutions that I've talked about under easy to shop. We're seeing a higher adoption rate of services. We have been better able to monetize the improved experiences that we're delivering for customers, and we're also reducing our costs. Across gross margin and operating costs, we had a target of saving GBP 300 million over 3 years. At the end of H1 this year, we reported that we'd achieved over GBP 240 million of that, and we're on track to achieve the GBP 300 million by the end of this year. So what that has resulted in is that U.K., we've seen gross margins bounce back strongly and adjusted EBIT is continuing to climb having bottomed out in 2020. This is probably the right time to talk about the Nordics. And the Nordics, many of you will know, having delivered more than 10 years of extremely solid top line growth and profit growth and cash flow growth had a very difficult and challenging year last year. That challenge and that massive drop in profit that we saw last year was really driven by 3 factors: First of all, we had some aggressive competition in the market that have been fueled by capital raising during COVID. Second of all, the market became overstocked, particularly, there's a lot of the stock that was bound for Ukraine and Russia was trying to find another home. And then finally, to create the perfect storm for retail, we saw a very weak consumer environment. We reacted to this, a new leadership team was installed, headed up by [ Frederic Tenison ] who's a veteran of the business, having worked his way up from a store manager and held many roles across the business, including COO for the group and CEO for Norway, which is our largest single country in the Nordics. He's brought with him clarity, grip and energy. And we've seen a turnaround in fortunes of the Nordics so far this year. Our colleague engagement has rebounded, our customer satisfaction has improved. And much like the U.K., we've taken a number of steps to improve the gross margin and to reduce costs with a target of taking GBP 25 million out of cost for this financial year. The result of all of those actions is that for the first half of the year, we saw a big rebound in our gross margin in the Nordics back to the level almost of where it was 2 years ago. But we have still seen sales decline as the consumer demand and environment remains weak. Now consumer confidence in those regions is starting to recover. And if it continues to recover, that will bode well for our return to historic levels of profitability, but we are confident that we can return to historic levels of profitability even in a weak consumer demand environment. Before I touch on financials, I thought it was just worth spending 2 minutes on sustainability because it's something we're extremely proud of at Currys. We've got 3 sustainability priorities, which is to achieve net zero by 2040, to eradicate digital poverty, and to improve circular business models. To save you some time in looking at all these in detail, you can just look at the external rankings, and we're very pleased that we're ranked very highly by the external rating agencies including being ranked as fifth in the Financial Times Climate Leaders ranking for 2023. That was the -- we were the #2 placed European retailer behind Intertek. And hot off the press, MSCI have just upgraded our rating from BBB to A. We're able to do this because we take our sustainability priorities extremely seriously. 40% of the bonus scorecard is aligned to our ESG goals, so colleague engagement, customer satisfaction, e-waste and emissions reduction. But more importantly, it's because of the capabilities that we have, I talked about our repair center in Newark. And we often talk as a community about recycling being the best option and the more recycling, we can do the better. We, in fact, think it's the step of last resort. When we look at our products, our #1 priority is to try to repair the products and get them back to customers. If we can't repair them and get them back to customers, we'll refurbish and resell those products, keeping them in use. If we can't do that, we'll try to repurpose parts from the product. And it's only if all of these avenues are exhausted that we look to recycle those products. By keeping the products whole and in the value chain for longer, it's a better outcome for all of our key stakeholders, our customers, us and the environment. So finally, I'll just touch on financials. I'll start with the balance sheet. And I think this is important because I'm not sure it's fully realized that as a business, we've now almost eliminated our net debt. When I joined the business 5 years ago, we had over GBP 800 million of debt and debt-like liabilities. Due to paydown of that debt and paydown of those pension liabilities over the last few years, we are looking at finishing this year with a net cash position and a pension liability somewhere below GBP 200 million. So if you look at that, that's a GBP 700 million improvement in our debt over the last 5 years, and if you couple that with the fact that our market cap is down by GBP 900 million over the same time frame, what was an enterprise value of GBP 2.5 billion is now an enterprise value of GBP 800 million. So a 2/3 drop in our enterprise value over the last 5 years despite profits only being down around 1/3. One of the reasons we often get excited for that big drop in valuation is the pension liability, and it is true. We won't hide it that we've got scheduled contributions of GBP 327 million to our pension deficit after this year. But it's important to realize that those contributions will cease when that deficit reaches 0. So we don't keep paying those if the deficit reaches 0. Now it's based on the actuarial deficit, which is a few tens of millions higher than the IAS 19 deficit that's shown. But hopefully, this chart illustrates that we are getting close to the end of what has been a fairly radical paydown of pension over the last few years. Turning to our margins. We've got a fairly simple margin target, which is that we want to achieve at least 3% EBIT margins. Now we don't think these are heroic ambitions. They're not heroic by our own history. In the U.K. we're over 3% last year, and Consensus expects us to be very close to 3% this year. And in the Nordics, we were over 3% or much all of the last decade until last financial year. And we do believe we can go back to those 3% margins. So they're not heroic by our own historic standards, and they're not heroic when you look at the international peers. Best Buy on a like-for-like accounting basis is over 5%, showing that we've got clear headroom to achieve our goals. If we can achieve those 5% -- those 3% EBIT margins, and we can keep our capital expenditure and exceptionals below 1.5% of sales, which is our ambition, we should be delivering GBP 150 million of sustainable free cash flow. But over the medium term, less and less of that will go to our pension payment. And therefore, there's a possibility and the reward of growing shareholder returns, which we think looks quite attractive relative to the GBP 800 million enterprise value of the business today. Just to talk about current events. Our guidance for the year is for our adjusted PBT to be at least GBP 105 million. That excludes any contribution from Greece, which will be stripped out of our adjusted results for the year ending on Saturday. And that's also at the top end of the guidance that we've previously given. So in summary, hopefully, what you've heard is that we are the clear #1 retailer of tech products and services across all of our markets. We've got a strategy that is delivering results. Capable and committed colleagues that are highly engaged and easy-to-shop experience provided by our omnichannel model alongside the continued focus on retail fundamentals, and we are building Customers for Life to growing data and providing services that build in-year profit and recurring revenue. With a strong balance sheet and margin ambitions that don't look heroic by historic or peer standards, we should deliver healthy shareholder returns over the medium term. With that, I'd like to end it and hand over to your questions.

Dan, thank you very much for that presentation. It's clearly been quite in a busy time for [indiscernible] you've had a strong start on that. We are now going to take a -- please type it into the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen, and we'll try and take as many questions as we can. So I'm going to ask the first question, which we have here, which is, did the Board of Currys engage with the 2 prospective purchases? And why do you think that no offers were forthcoming. Was it just a disagreement on price or something else?

Yes. Look, we received offers from only one, which was Elliott. Those offers were unanimously rejected by the Board as we thought they significantly undervalued the company. And indeed, the highest offer of 67p, it's not much of a premium to where the shares are trading today at 62p. That decision to unanimously reject those offers were strongly supported by all of our major shareholders. So there wasn't an ongoing conversation. It was a swift rejection.

Okay. Question here on the sort of geographic sort of participation that you have. Can you talk about the plans for different countries where you operate and which ones are core to the group going forward? And will there be any more disposals?

Yes. So as I mentioned, we've recently disposed of our group business, a business that was 7% of our sales, and we disposed of it for what's worth 25% of today's market cap, so a good result. We are, therefore, focusing on our large markets of the U.K. and Ireland and across the Nordics. But we're not emotionally attached to any part of the business. So what we're interested in doing is driving the right shareholder value and the right shareholder returns. And therefore, if we received an offer for any part of those business that we felt was attractive relative to the value that we can extract from those businesses, we'd consider it very strongly. Having said that, there's no active process ongoing to dispose of any part of our business at the moment. And our focus is entirely on delivering what we said we will do in the U.K. and Nordics, which is continuing the good U.K. momentum that we've got and turning around the Nordics business after the challenging year it had last year.

Okay. Question here on this old capital structure. What's the appropriate level of net cash stroke debt from the business? And what's the policy if you end up with surplus capital?

Yes. So we're going to finish the year following the disposal of Cutoff loss in a net cash position. And we've said in the short term, the intention is for those proceeds to strengthen the balance sheet. I didn't go through it in the presentation, but we have, and you can see it in various presentations, a very clear capital allocation framework, which is to maintain a prudent balance sheet. And then once we've done that, to pay the required pension contributions; second, to invest to grow the business; third, to paint and grow an ordinary dividend; and then fourth, any surplus capital available to be returned to shareholders. Now the definition of a prudent balance sheet is always going to be debatable, but the feedback we get from all of our large shareholders is that there's no reason for a retailer, particularly one that is inherently low margin and slightly cyclical as ours is to sit on a net debt position. And so it's very likely that we will hold a small net cash position going forward. And then we will give further updates on what we intend to do around resuming shareholder returns at our full year results at the end of June.

Okay. So a related question to that is, why don't you -- or could you explore removing or selling the pension liability to another professional adviser? Is that an option that you might consider?

Yes. So as well as my role in IR, I have the pleasure of looking after the group's pension scheme as well. And we are looking at various options for what to do with that pension liability. Clearly selling it off to various asset managers and insurance funds is potential, but it's generally quite expensive. And some of the regulation and the direction of travel actually companies are better off keeping pensions on our balance sheet and looking forward to utilizing trap surplus in a few years' time. Look, this is an ongoing process, and it's getting focus from the business. But at the moment, I think what you should all sort of model and expect from us is that we'll be paying the required pension contributions for the next few years until that deficit reaches 0.

Okay. And just as a reminder to people, if you want to ask a question, please type it into the Q&A box, and we'll try and get through as many of those as we can. Got a question here on margins. Long-term margin targets of 3% seem low. Is that in line with electrical retailers or better than average?

Yes. So I described in the presentation, the 3% margin target is being not heroic, and we certainly want to be clear that the target is at least 3% margins. And once we get there, there will be ambition to build past it, but that's our first staging post. Now if you look at it in context of international electrical peers. I'm talking about people like Best Buy, J.B. Hi-Fi, CECONOMY Fnac, 3% is generally slightly below what a lot of them are achieving. It's above CECONOMY, but the rest were all slightly better than 3%. So those precedents do better than 3% there. And as I showed, those precedents do better than 3% even versus our own recent history. So 3% margin to take the challenge is low, but we think that even achieving that 3% providing we remain disciplined on the rest of the use of cash will provide a healthy free cash flow and an attractive return for shareholders.

Got a question here on the repair and maintenance contracts. And the question is the repair and maintenance contracts are synonymous with being very profitable to the company issuing them. What percentage of your EBIT is provided by the 14 million contracts that you currently have?

Yes. So we don't disclose the percentage of EBIT that comes from those contracts. But yes, they are more profitable at a margin level than sort of selling a product directly most of the time. However, what I'd say is they are very highly valued by customers. And as I described in the presentation, what we are trying to do with our extended warranty contracts is to make sure that the customers are getting good value relative to both what they want and what competitors are offering. And we work very hard to ensure that when we're selling these contracts to customers, we are selling them only in the best interest of customers.

Okay. A question here on competition. Who is your toughest competitor? And what is the threat to your business from online operators? Are you worried that an online competitor from China might enter the market?

Yes. A few questions there. So in terms of the biggest competitors, it's different by country, and I'll start on the U.K. So in the U.K., Amazon is quite clearly our biggest competitor. They probably have a similar portion of the tech market to us. But we've been competing against Amazon for a couple of decades. Now, the reason we compete well against Amazon is that they tend to focus on small ticket, small box, one person deliveries. We tend to focus on high-ticket, larger box, 2-person deliveries. And therefore, while we're playing in the same tech market, we're playing a very different ends of it. And the overlap in the middle is reasonably small. As well as Amazon, the other large players in the U.K. would be Argos and AO. And again, these are companies that we've competed against for a long time and have shown very successfully that we can compete against them. In the Nordics, the picture is a little different. In that, there's a different competitor set in each different country in the Nordics. The largest single competitor is a company called Power, that have a model that looks very similar to ours. It's an omnichannel retailer, predominantly in the Nordics. But they have entered the other markets and entered Sweden last year when they picked up the stores that Ceconomy sold to them about 30 stores there. Power, a competitor, that keeps us very honest. But other than during COVID, haven't made a lot of money and the private [indiscernible] may, at some point, run out of patients. That's not what we're counting on. We are counting on Power and the rest of our Nordics competitors remaining there's very strong healthy competitors for a number of years. And as a group, I'd emphasize we are healthily paranoid about competition the whole time. Then you talked within there about Chinese competitors. So we don't have a big Chinese entrant onto the market at the moment. But you could argue that Temu is certainly at the low tech, low ticket end starting to encroach on our territory. I mean, similar to Amazon, Temu, a very much small box, small ticket, gimmicky kind of product rather than our specialism, which is higher ticket, higher service requirements, more advice needed and branded product. And so Temu if you look at they're offering, there is no branded product in there, and customers come to us and for their large tech do want branded product. That's because these brands invest the money in R&D to make their products very good. 7 of the top 10 R&D spenders in the world are suppliers to us. And consumers trust the brands. All of them, whether it's Samsung, Apple, LG, invest a lot of money in getting consumers to trust their brand and that takes a long time. So because we're a reseller of the brands rather than a brand ourselves, there's probably less threat or less immediate threat of Chinese entrants than perhaps we've seen on maybe the clothing space, for example. But again, that's not to say we are not very paranoid about this and looking at it every single day to make sure that we're creating as defensive as much as possible.

Okay. As another question has come in on competition. You might have answered some of it, but I'll read it out. You think there are some aspects just to cover which is, can you elaborate on your comments about the increased competition you've experienced in the Nordics? Who are the key players? What do they do? How much market share have they achieved on what is the situation today? And how have things changed?

Yes. So in terms of that increased competition, it really came about as a result of COVID. There were a number of competitors that raised capital during COVID. Power made money for the first time in 20 years and decided to reinvest that straight back into growth. You had Komplett, which IPO-ed in Norway and then merged with NetOnNet and then you had various other companies raise either small amounts of equity or debt capital. These companies all publicly in many cases, stated growth ambitions sort of at the back end of COVID. And what we saw is that because of the excess of stock that was floating around in the market, a lot of them then bought quite a lot of stock and went after growth strategies. Now, electrical retail generally works on a negative working capital cycle. And what we saw through the autumn of '22 is aggressive growth strategies from these competitors quickly turned into distressed strategies as they realized that they had to clear stock to preserve balance sheets. That meant, it was a very difficult trading environment. And then the compounding factor was that the consumer environment became weaker. Over the following 18 months, we've seen a rationalization of that competitive dynamic from a number of these competitors and perhaps most notably, Komplett, which IPO-ed on growth ambitions at a Capital Markets Day a few weeks ago, where they are now talking about single-digit growth over the next few years and targeting margin upside. We have also seen the stock position of the market normalize. So both in terms of the competitive environment and the stock position, inventory position in the market, we're seeing normalization. However, as the charts have displayed -- showed, the consumer environment is still looking perhaps not as strong as we hoped. And therefore, it remains a difficult environment to trade in. But as highlighted a month ago when we reported current trading, we are seeing positive like-for-like trends in the Nordics in recent times. So against those pretty weak trading periods of a year ago, we are now seeing positive trends.

Okay. Next question. Why the dedication to growing wallet spend and not growing your clientele this crucial bearing in mind younger shoppers have only ever lived in a tech-savvy digital age?

Yes. So first of all, we are -- it's not black and white. There's areas of gray hair, but the focus for us and the big opportunity is to grow share of wallet with our existing customers. Now clearly, we always want to add to that number of existing customers at the bottom. But what I want to be clear on is we're not targeting a whole new customer segments. There's no expensive growth strategy here. Having covered retail for a decade, there's plenty of stories of companies that spend a lot of money trying to go after new segments of customers, whether that's new demographic segments or whole new geographic markets. That's not what we're about. We're about driving better revenue and better profitability from a customer base that we know is aware of us. And that's the cheapest way and the best way to generate new revenue.

Okay. In terms of your shareholder register, what's the split between institutional shareholders and retail shareholders?

It's almost entirely institutional. We've got one notable private investor, which is David Ross, one of the [indiscernible] Warehouse, owns 4.5% of share capital. But other than that, the vast majority of the holding is institutional and retail holding is reasonably low in Currys.

Okay. Hopefully, events like this will start to change that.

I would hope so. If anyone's got any advice for how to improve retail shareholding, I'd love to hear it in the feedback.

Fantastic. We'll ask about the fee, but will come at the end. Back on the Nordics, why do you think the Nordic consumer confidence is low? Is it anything to do with Russia? Apologies, I'm not an expert in this area.

Yes. So Nordic Consumer is similar to what we've seen across Europe over the last 24 months. We've seen increasing inflation, GDP headwinds and therefore, consumer confidence for. I think a couple of factors maybe differentiate the Nordic consumer from perhaps the U.K., which is one, a lot of the Nordics, particularly Sweden and Norway, almost all of their mortgages are on variable rates. So when the bank changes the base rates, they've got between 2 and 4 weeks before their mortgage rate goes up. So it has a pretty instant impact. There's no cushioning as we've seen in the U.K. from a large use of fixed mortgage rates. And I think the second thing is, unlike a lot of Western Europe, the Nordic consumer isn't used to downturns. In the U.K., there's a consumer crisis every couple of years. We're used to it. And the consumers, I think, to a large degree, shrug it off. In the Nordics, it really was unprecedented as sort being 20 years of uninterrupted prosperity and then suddenly inflation, interest rate headwinds, I think caused the consumers to get very cautious, very quickly.

Okay. Very clear. Are there any differences in online, offline omnichannel mix in the different categories, SDA versus its MDA versus TVs?

Yes, it's -- there are differences, and it's not material by category. The bigger trend is the larger an item is and the more expensive an item is, the more likely it is to be bought in-store and the more likely it is to attach services, whether that's credit, delivery, installation, protection services. So I wouldn't think about it so much by product category, but more by size and price drives the sort of online and stores mix.

Okay. A couple of questions here on product. They're very similar. So I think I'm just going to ask one, which is, are there any new exciting products coming through in the AI space or mobile or TVs or anything?

Yes. Good. Glad you asked. So look, our plans for our financial ambitions are based on us being very prudent on our expectations for the market. But if you did want to build a bull case for sales for Currys, it will probably look something like this, which is; one, there's potential consumer recovery coming. I know there's different views out there, but there's -- that would be a part of the bull case that the consumer recovers in all of our markets. Two, as we are now anniversarying 4 years from the start of COVID, we might see a start of the product replacement for the products that were bought during that COVID boom. Generally, product replacement cycle starts at 4 years. So again, it's something we're not counting on because it's generally a bit longer, but it's a possible argument for a bull case. Three, there are a couple of sporting events this summer, so the European championships and the Olympics, where generally, we see an uplift in the TV market during those periods. And it's the first major football championships held in sort of a friendly time zone for 4 years. And then four is AI. Now AI is the buzzword. I don't think there's probably a presentation in the capital markets arena that doesn't contain AI at the moment. And AI for our company, clearly, we're exploring ways to use it to reduce costs as everyone else is. But where we're perhaps differentiated is there could be a genuine product upswing based on AI. Some of you may have seen or even used Microsoft CoPilot, but Microsoft has talked about the biggest change to a keyboard in 30 years with the launch of the copilot button. The hardware that supports that will start to be released over the next year across manufacturers. And while probably 2024 is the early -- year of early adopters. This technology will start, we think, to become mainstream from 2025 onwards, which could provide a healthy boost to our revenue but again, it's one we're not counting on, we're being prudent.

A lot of potential boost to performance that, Dan, thanks for mentioning them all. We've got 2 last questions, and I think we've got time to cover them both. So have them. First one is what stopping brand is going direct to consumer and do shoppers typically consumed by brand or by budget?

Yes. Good question. So what's stopping brands going directly to consumer? In many ways, not a lot and some do and some notable brands do go directly to consumer, Apple, probably the most notable. But clearly, I think you look -- you may have noticed [indiscernible] there's quite a lot of direct-to-consumer. So in many ways, brands came directly to consumer. What stops them is normally the retail. Retail as much as it's simple on paper is a game of infinite complexity in detail in the [indiscernible]. And doing retail well can be very expensive. And therefore, a lot of the brands when they invest in going directly to the consumer realize that and haven't pursued it as a path. It is a trend we are very aware of much. So I said we're healthily paranoid about the growth of many of the competitors and that angle. Direct-to-consumer from the brands is another angle that we're healthily paranoid about. The one thing to say is we have very strong relationships with all of our brands. We are the largest omnichannel retailer of tech in our markets, which makes us one of the largest customers for some of these brands across the globe. And therefore, we have very strong relationships with them. We work with them. We partner with them right across the product life cycle, right from development of the product to talking about launch ideas, to marketing the product together, to selling the product together. So it's a very collaborative way of working with the brand.

Okay. And the last question. It's actually 2 questions in there, and a complement. So firstly, we'll give the components. Dan, you're doing a great job. Thank you. And the 2 questions are in which market is the consumer weaker? Is it the Nordics or the U.K ?

Good question. I'm probably going to have to duck that one because I think there's quite a few things to weigh up. I think relative to recent times, the Nordics consumer is certainly weaker. But then clearly, the Nordics consumer does remain one of the fundamentally healthiest, wealthiest consumers in the world. So I think I'm skirting around the issue slightly, but I'm not going to give a direct answer on that.

That's okay. You've answered everything else, you'll also skip one. And the last question is a tricky one, I think, it's on the pensions. Are the pension cash outflows fixed or do they depend on the level of interest rates? And what's the sort of sensitivity to change in interest rates?

So the pension cash outflows that I talked about, the GBP 327 million that are scheduled after this financial year ends are fixed. Now they are based on an actuarial estimate of the deficit that has various assumptions for interest rate so on and then has various levels of safety and prudence within it. Now, our pension deficit is largely hedged which meant that when we saw the rise in bond yields 18 months ago, we didn't get a massive benefit on our pension liability. We saw some, but not a massive benefit as other companies did. But it also means if interest rates do full, then we shouldn't see a massive downside either. The important bit is that actuarial deficit, yes. I mean it gets updated every year, but the big triennial update happens every 3 years. The next one is in March 2025. That will be our next opportunity to address whether the scheduled contributions are the right level. But clearly, as I said before, if the actuarial deficit reaches 0, then those contributions cease.

Dan, thank you very much. Well, that brings us to the end of this webinar with Currys plc today. Thank you to Dan and the team for putting that presentation together and answering all the questions. And apologies, we only had one, we didn't have time to answer, but I'm afraid we've run out of time. And look, thanks everyone for attending. And just as a reminder, as you exit today's webinar, there's a short survey that we ask you to complete, and it will be really appreciated if you could just spend a few moments on completing that. So, look, thanks to everyone for attending. And look, we hope to see you all soon. Thank you now.

Thank you very much, Alex.