Deliveroo plc (ROO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. Welcome to our half year results presentation for ‘24. I'm Will Shu, Founder and CEO, Deliveroo, and I'm joined by Scilla Grimble, our CFO. I'm going to start with a brief overview of the half before diving into some of the strategic and operational progress we've made in the first half that give us continued confidence in our medium-term targets. Then Scilla is going to take you through the financials. She will touch on capital allocation and then update you on guidance for the rest of the year. And after that, we'll move into Q&A. So, let's get started with some key takeaways from the first half. We are really happy with the first half. And typically, I start these presentations by focusing in on the inputs right away. But I want to take a few moments to focus on a few key outputs because we hit 2 very important milestones this half. First, we delivered positive net profit. This is after exceptionals and share-based payment charges. And secondly, we generated positive free cash flow, again, after exceptionals and also before interest income. So, this is a big deal for the company. And as we've always said, adjusted EBITDA is an important metric, but it's not true profitability. So, I'm personally really happy to see that this business can generate real profit and cash flow. We've also shown that we can both improve profitability and grow top line with orders returning to year-on-year growth and seeing encouraging GTV growth momentum in the UKI and across the majority of our international markets. Now this growth momentum has been driven by continued execution on our strategy with these further enhancements to our CVP that we talk about a lot, and I'll go into details about those shortly. We are reiterating our GTV growth guidance of 5% to 9% in constant currency. And on an adjusted EBITDA basis, we expect to be on the upper half of the GBP 110 million to GBP 130 million range consistent with current consensus expectations. And then finally, reflecting the financial progress we've made and the confidence in our outlook, we are today announcing a further return of structurally surplus capital of GBP 150 million through an on-market share buyback program. Now on to the business update. Okay. I just wanted to -- I think we've put this slide up before at the CME. I think it's an important one because it encapsulates what we're trying to do here. So, this is our strategic framework. And you also have, at the bottom, you've got our medium-term targets as well. So, on GTV, we remain confident we can accelerate growth in the mid-teens in the medium term. And on profitability, we continue to make good progress with a target of 4% plus adjusted EBITDA margin in '26. And we're going to do this whilst maintaining an efficient capital structure. Now we have multiple drivers across our 3 strategic pillars. You can see them on the chart there. And we're making progress on all of these. And so, we're going to deep dive into a few specific areas today. All right. We're going to start with price value. Price value has always been a key pillar in the CVP, but its importance has increased dramatically over the last 24 months. Bottom line is that things got too expensive for people over the last 2 years. And we've talked about this before. We've talked about this a lot. It's by far the biggest barrier to growth over the last few years, and it's a huge opportunity going forward. Now if you look at Europe and the U.K., food inflation is tracking much closer to wage inflation. And we do view this as a leading indicator for an improving consumer backdrop moving forward. So, in this context, we've done a lot of work to reinforce value, both using indirect and direct levers. So let me just explain what those are again. So, what do we mean by indirect levers? These are things such as our commercial architecture and value program. So, these address markups on merchants, they address service levels. And I'm really pleased to say in the first half, thousands of restaurants have reduced markups, and we have helped consumers find more competitively priced restaurants through in-app merchandising. We've delivered millions of pounds of savings to consumers. So, there are some encouraging early signs, but the indirect levers is a long-term initiative for the company and a very important one. And at the same time, we've started to see some stabilization in the consumer outlook. We're going to get into that later in the slide in this presentation. We've seen frequency and retention headwinds starting to ease. So, we've taken the proactive opportunity to invest in pricing through one of our direct levers, targeted promotions to capitalize on this by reinforcing value perception, effectively to get ahead of the curve. And as we've said this before, we've created the headroom to do this through the delivery efficiencies we've achieved. Now we don't expect this level of investment to continue in the long term for a few reasons. One, we are working on improving our promotional efficiency by enhancing our capabilities even more, so we can be more targeted and more sophisticated in how we run promotions. And I think just as importantly, as consumer confidence and affordability further improve, we would expect some of the need for such investment to drop away as we've been reinforcing price value ahead of that. And therefore, we would expect higher category growth as well. Now one thing we're going to do regardless of the environment is to invest in another one of our direct levers. This is our Plus loyalty program, which is a very, very critical part of our CVP. So, let's talk about that now. All right. So, we first launched Lever Plus back in '17, and it was a very straightforward plan. We had one tier, which I guess we now call Plus Gold. This is where you could get free delivery on every order in exchange for a monthly subscription fee. And over the next 5 or 6 years, we rolled out plus in most of our markets. We added a second tier called Plus Silver. We launched a number of global partnerships. We introduced further benefits for consumers. Plus, it’s great for consumers. Quite simply, they can save more, the more they transact. But it's also great for us plus customers spend 3x more than non-Plus customers. Their retention is stronger, plus accounts for 40% of our global order volume. And we've committed to being a plus first business by ‘26, which means the majority of orders will come from Plus customers. But in order to do that, we really wanted to take what was essentially a simple free delivery subscription program. We think about it as -- I guess, consumers think about it as price arbitrage and turn it into a true loyalty program that has emotional resonance. And we've taken the first steps towards achieving this in the first half with the biggest innovations to Plus since inception. So, these are very, very large-scale initiatives that we've recently launched. So, Plus Gold, we revamped this in May. And so, the headline benefit is that you get 10% credit back on eligible orders over 30 pounds, which dramatically changes the program because we're now rewarding consumers for their spend with us. It's not just free delivery. And it's not just, oh, you get GBP 3 pounds off your next order, you can collect these credits over time. You can stack them up in your new virtual wallet, and then you could spend them at once. And so, this is a really big deal for consumers. And it's not just about rewarding people for just transacting more. We are improving service as well. So, we've introduced a new on-time promise where any order over 15 minutes late will receive GBP 5 pounds credit back. And again, this happens very rarely, but it's an opportunity to really build trust to the consumer. And it's another way to add value for subscribers. And then on a silver quickly. Now silver hasn't been the main focus of the enhancements in this round, but it is our largest tier. We've made tweaks to this product. And primarily, we've been reducing the minimum order value for free delivery from 25 to 15 pounds. And this removes some of the friction of having to hit a higher threshold to qualify for free delivery, which in turn unlocks more meal occasions. So, think about something like breakfast or lunch or maybe a different household type, maybe you're ordering by yourself. That makes it much more palatable. And these are the things that drive frequency. And then Diamond. Diamond is a brand-new tier we just launched in May in the U.K. It's an invite-only proposition, and it's designed with our top customers in mind. And really, what we wanted to do here was we wanted to provide our top customers with a really special experience that emotionally resonates both through service, through price and selection. The details are on the page here. But really, what you get is this, you get top merchants not available to others. You always get your order faster; you get dedicated customer service agents and your money back if something goes wrong. It's really, really great. And it costs $19.99 a month. It's early, but the traction is higher than internal expectations. It's something we're really excited about. So, what we've done is we've put a summary slide in the appendix of the 3 programs. It shows the 3-tier side-by-side with pricing and benefits, and I think what we're trying to do here is to say, hey, if there's a suitable tier -- we think there's a suitable tier for any type of customer. And this really wide-ranging set of options for consumers is going to help us towards our target of becoming a plus first business by ‘26. Okay. So now let's move on to a quick look at our newest vertical, starting with grocery. We've continued to make excellent progress in grocery. We have strong double-digit growth throughout H1, and this growth was broad-based across all markets. We've seen grocery reach 14% of group GTV. And I think primarily progress has been driven by the improved consumer experience that we've talked about. We've obviously added more merchants. And importantly, there's more awareness at this point as well. But there's a long way to go on all 3 of these. So, on the consumer experience side, we've continued to ship improvements to our picking app. Now this is an app that merchants used to pick and pack. And now over 80% of grocery orders are delivered through our own proprietary picking app. And this helps to reduce order inaccuracy, it helps with projections. It helps with cancellations. It's a very big deal for our merchant partners. And obviously, our consumers because there's less that goes row. On selection, there's a couple of new things. So first, we've expanded coverage of existing partners such as Morrisons Daily and co-op in the U.K. We've added a bunch of new specialist grocers internationally. And then secondly, we've expanded the number of partners offering up to 10,000 SKUs. These larger ranges are the key to growing basket size. They increase conversion and they improve the customer experience overall. And so, what we've seen is a higher penetration of midsized grocery baskets. That's kind of 30-to-60-pound range. And the growth of these baskets is higher than any other sized grocery basket in H1. And then on awareness, I talked about this as being an opportunity. We're still early. About 70% of our customers have yet to try grocery and half of our users have never seen a grocery menu in the app. And when you see that it's 14% of our business, it's very clear that this represents a big opportunity. What we've also done is we've extended the top-up ordering functionality to all of our markets. So, when you're in the app and you've checked out and you've got a restaurant order coming to you, there's an opportunity to top up your basket with a grocery item. And this is a really great way of driving awareness and driving new users to the category. And so, the number of new to grocery consumers ordering through this function has doubled in H1 '24 versus '23. Okay. So, we're going to move on to retail now. Okay. So retail, it's still very early days for retail. We launched this big, big new category in the end of November last year in the U.K. and the UAE, and we continue to scale. So, at this stage, our priorities are driving awareness and expanding selection in priority categories. These are things such as DIY, such as health and beauty, such as pet food, a bunch of different categories up there. And in terms of selections, we've recently announced a new partnership with B&Q and the perfume shop in the U.K. We've expanded the number of sites with existing partners such as Screwfix. In the UAE, we've added big brands such as Holland & Barrett and Toys "R" Us and a few local independents as well. I think the focus for us right now is driving a strong pipeline of retailers. And that's really what the team is focused on, and they've done a great job doing that. And it comes to awareness, this is still very low, but that's not surprising. It's early. And it's also going to be driven by further partner signings. And we have begun addressing this through marketing, in particular around seasonal moments and through the use of targeted communications to consumers who have browsed or searched through a particular category. So, for example, if we see people searching for pet food, we will send them pet-related options in CRM. So, we have very strong conviction in the long-term opportunity in the space. We're very excited about it, and we're pleased with the job the team has done so far. All right. So, let's put all the pieces together here. We have previously talked about the 4 mathematical building blocks of how you grow GTV. That's just simple math. You see it there on the left. And we talked about how the slowdown we've experienced in GTV growth over the last 2 years is really driven by 2 of these. So that's retention and frequency and specifically in retention, a higher lapse of existing customers than what we've seen before. Now so we're going to hone in on these 2 on this page, and we look at cohort data. So, let's start with frequency. So, if you look on the chart here, you'll see average order frequency increased very consistently across each cohort. Basically, you're growing that at over a 10% CAGR for quite a period of time. And then about 2 years ago, we saw a partial reversal to that. I think quite simply, that's really cost living pressures primarily, and then there's some COVID unwind as well. And then what you saw is that those headwinds started to bottom out in mid- ‘23 or so. And you can see that in the chart. And so, what you're seeing here is that you're seeing an improved continued improvement in frequency in the second quarter of '24, you're seeing average monthly order frequency increasing across every cohort there. These are the historical cohorts. Now this averages to about 3% year-on-year growth from the 15 to 22 cohorts. So, we're not back to this historical level of 10% plus, which, by the way, was also before COVID. But it is back to growth. It is a better year-on-year trend. And so, we are encouraged about that. So now let's look at retention. We talked about at the CME about how the higher rate of lapses in '22 and '23, were starting to ease. And this trend has continued with the rate of lapses significantly improving. If you just look at the chart up there, things got worse as the cost-of-living crisis got worse. That's pretty clear. But the trend has been improving now, and you can see that through the upward sloping line. I'm happy about trends in both frequency and retention. It's obviously not where we want to be long term, but encouragingly, the trend is definitely improving. It's also important to say that these frequency and retention improvements, they don't just happen. They are the result of our own direct action. So that's better value for money, that's plus, that's operational improvements, expanding use cases, all the stuff we do day to day that we're really excited about. And at the same time, as we talked about the fact that the food inflation, wage inflation gap has narrowed considerably, we think, is a leading indicator for a better consumer environment. So, these trends, I think, bode well for future growth. And so, we still need to add a healthy number of new customers. We still are focused on increasing GTV per order, not just through food inflation, obviously, but through grocery mix, through upselling. And so, all of these 4 factors together give us continued confidence in our building blocks to our medium-term targets. So, with that, let me hand over to Scilla, she'll go into the financials in detail.

Thanks, Will, and good morning, everyone. As Will said, we've hit some important financial milestones in the first half, delivering a statutory net profit and positive free cash flow. And we've done this by making good progress across a range of performance drivers. GTV grew 6% in constant currency, and it's pleasing to see our initiatives bearing fruit with orders returning to growth in the half, good GTV growth in the U.K. and a marked improvement in international GTV growth. Revenue growth continued to lag GTV growth, up 2% in constant currency as investments we chose to make in our CVP impacted take rate as we flagged at premiums. We were able to invest in these initiatives because we've continued to drive efficiencies in the delivery network. Putting all these pieces together, gross margin was stable year-on-year at 10.4% and gross profit was up 5%. Adjusted EBITDA was GBP 62 million, with EBITDA margin expanding 60 basis points year-on-year to 1.7%. As I've already mentioned, we reached a significant milestone in delivering positive free cash flow that was GBP 3 million in the half, pre-exceptionals, that cash flow was GBP 46 million. We ended the period with a strong net cash position of GBP 662 million, and I'll come on to talk about capital allocation later. Moving into more detail then and starting with our top line metrics. GTV grew 6% in constant currency with similar growth across Q1 and Q2. As we expected, that's an improving trend from last year, mainly driven by the ongoing improvements we've been making to our CVP that Will talked you through. Groceries continue to be a strong contributor to overall group growth while our work on price integrity and service is resonating with the consumer. Encouragingly, orders returned to growth in both Q1 and Q2, driven in part by the improvements in cohort behavior Will just outlined. GTV per order continues to be the bigger driver of GTV growth, up 5% in constant currency, driven mainly by the continued impact of food inflation. In the UKI, we continued to perform well, but it's international that has driven the improvement at a group level, returning to growth in the half of 5%. France has been the key driver of this improvement, returning to GTV growth in Q2 after a challenging 18 months or so. In the other larger markets, Italy and the UAE continue to be strong contributors to growth with Hong Kong performance lagging. Now to revenue and gross profit. The overall dynamic here is about ensuring we strike the right balance between building our competitive advantage and driving profitable growth. We've made further progress on levers such as advertising and delivery efficiency, which have enabled us to make some investments into the CVP, while still holding gross margin constant, as I've said, and growing gross profit by 5% year-on-year, broadly in line with our GTV growth. On ads, we continue to scale the business. It was 1.2% of GTV in Q2, up from 1% in Q4 last year, driven in part by an increase in the number of merchants placing an ad on our platform but also by our own inventory development. And I'll come on to the delivery efficiencies we've delivered very shortly. Offsetting the ads impact was the decision to invest into pricing through targeted promotions that reinforce price perception and support ongoing demand, as Will mentioned. We've also begun to invest further in plus and have seen higher penetration of grocery and pickup in the overall mix. While these are dilutive to revenue take rate, they drive growth in absolute revenue and gross profit. Moving on to delivery, and you'll remember, Camilla took you through delivery efficiencies at our Capital Markets event, but I wanted to update on a couple of areas where we've made strong progress in the half. As you can see on the left-hand side of the slide, since the first half of '22, we've consistently managed to reduce cost of goods sold as a percentage of GTV, something we've actually done over a much longer period than shown in the chart. At the Capital Markets event, we talked about smarter stacking. And one element of that was the rollout of multi-pickup stacking. Until last year, stacked orders were always picked up from the same merchant, but advancements in our tech mean we're now able to pick up orders from different merchants without degrading the consumer or rider experience. And that's unlocked some big efficiencies. Adding multi pickup stacking has enabled us to increase stacked orders by 60% compared to the first half last year. We've also talked about reducing rider wait time at merchants before, and we've seen a 5% reduction year-on-year. And in an industry where seconds really matter, this is material. We've done this through collecting more data points and by collecting live data from our merchants rather than relying on estimates. That's been enabled by a number of new features, some of which we also showcased at the CME. So, you'll remember, for example, an order-ready button to let partners control their prep times, a ride a check-in function to regulate rider arrivals and rider receipt scanning to reduce mix ups. Now on to marketing and neighbor heads. I said last year, operating leverage historically has been less of a contributor to our EBITDA margin improvement than gross margin. These cost lines continue to represent a sizable opportunity for us as we move towards our 2026 adjusted EBITDA margin target. With that in mind, we've already begun efficiency programs to improve marketing efficiency and effectiveness to increase head count productivity and to improve other cost efficiencies. The benefits of this work are starting to feed into the numbers with marketing and overheads down 2% year-on-year and down 60 basis points as a percentage of GTV. Marketing was broadly flat year-on-year, contributing 10 basis points of the overall marketing and neighbor heads as a percentage of GTV improvement. We've continued to make efficiencies here with improvements to our targeted campaigns and performance marketing optimization signals. Overheads were down 2% year-on-year, within which total people expenses fell 2% as we benefited from lower average head count, partially offset by wage inflation. We also saw a 3% decrease in non-people expenses, mainly due to efficiencies in our IT expenses as we continue to review and optimize the software we use within the business. So, progress across a range of drivers in the first half. We also made our previously flagged investment into scaling and driving awareness of retail. As a reminder, we said we expected to invest low-teens million in 2024, slightly more weighted towards the second half. Taking a step back then, we've consistently driven down marketing and overheads as a percentage of GTV since the first half of '22. And as we continue to improve our tooling and automation, there's more opportunity for us here. Putting all those components together then, we delivered adjusted EBITDA of GBP 62 million, a year-on-year improvement of 57%. The combination of a stable gross profit margin and operating efficiencies in marketing and overheads meant adjusted EBITDA margin expansion of 60 basis points to 1.7% of GTV. So overall, good progress on profitability. Looking now at our net cash bridge. Spend on capital items of GBP 22 million was down from GBP 25 million last year due to slightly lower CapEx. We have a GBP 17.6 million inflow from working capital due to seasonality. Lease payments and interest amounted to GBP 9 million for the half, in line with last year, and I expect the same for the second half. At the prelims, I fly in that we had GBP 58 million of current provisions and that settlement of these will be first half weighted. So, the GBP 43 million outflow for exceptionals relates to the settlement of some of that. So, putting all that together, we generated GBP 3 million of free cash flow for the half, excluding exceptional items, free cash flow was GBP 46 million compared with an outflow of GBP 9 million in the first half last year. Outside of our definition of free cash flow, cash interest income was GBP 13 million, broadly in line with the prior year despite a considerably lower cash balance after the GBP 250 million tender offer in the second half of last year. And of course, that's due to higher interest rates year-on-year. Finally, we also did the GBP 30 million EBT purchase of shares in the first half, buying 22.6 million shares that will be used in the future to satisfy employee share-based compensation awards. At the end of the half, the EBT held 62.5 million shares. Moving on to look at our capital position. And you'll remember that this time last year, we set out our framework for this. Investing for future growth remains our priority. We'll continue to make sure we have sufficient capital for our operational and strategic needs in order to build and maintain a durable competitive advantage. We also need to make sure we have appropriate headroom to deal with unforeseen events and any potential crystallization of liabilities, including our legal provisions as at the half year date of GBP 73 million and contingent liabilities. Anything above and beyond that is considered structurally surplus capital, i.e., cash which we think is not required in any reasonable scenario. And we've demonstrated our capital efficiency by returning that structurally surplus capital, returning GBP 300 million in 2023 through a combination of the tender offer and a GBP 50 million on market buyback. So that's the framework and how we've applied it so far. And remember that in addition to our commitment to purchase shares through the EBT to offset any potential dilution from the exercise of employee awards, and we've completed 2 programs here in the last 2 years. I've always said that we'll continue to keep our capital structure under review as we make further progress on profitability and cash generation and as the competitive consumer and regulatory backdrop becomes clearer. Reflecting the financial progress, we've continued to make and are confident in the outlook, we're today announcing a further return of GBP 150 million. That will be executed by way of an on-market share buyback program, which we expect to complete within the next 12 months. This return will leave the group with a robust and defendable pro forma cash position of about GBP 500 million as at the interim state. Rounding things off then with guidance for the rest of the year. We're reiterating our 5% to 9% constant currency GTV growth range. And on adjusted EBITDA, we now expect to land the full year in the upper half of the previous GBP 110 million to GBP 130 million range consistent with current consensus expectations. And whilst we don't guide precisely our free cash flow, having reached positive free cash flow in the first half, we expect to continue that momentum in the second half and beyond. So, in summary, a good first half, important financial milestones were reached delivering positive statutory net profit and free cash flow. We had good top line performance across both segments. Our further enhancements to our CVP will help drive growth for the longer term, and we're returning a further GBP 150 million to shareholders and remain confident in our guidance for the year. And with that, we'll open the line for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Jo Barnet-Lamb from UBS.

So firstly, we've seen slightly lower take rates, which is in part driven by your price transparency work. How should we be thinking about take rates going forward? Is this work now embedded into this lower take rate so it sort of can stabilize from here? Or is the work ongoing and as such, we should see further downward pressure? And then second question, international year-on-year obviously slowed, I think, a percentage point in Q2 versus Q1. You draw out improvements in France and ongoing strength in UAE and Italy. There is obviously some sort of one-off factors in the quarter, I believe. Can you sort of talk through that somewhat. Basically, despite a slight year-on-year slowdown, is underlying momentum continuing to build within international.

Just on your take rate question, and I'm fixed in particular on this year, as you know, we don't kind of give a whole lot of guidance beyond that. But let me start there. As we've said and as Will just described, we think the right thing to have done at this point is to have invested into the CVP. We see some indicators in terms of improving consumer behavior, the reduction in those headwinds as Will described. But we're not calling it yet. We're not calling that there's a kind of dramatic change. And therefore, we think that the right thing to do will be to continue to make those investments into CBP into the second half. So, I think that's a sort of color for that. You'll remember, and you've heard me describe that when we look at gross margin, what we've been able to do is to continue to drive delivery efficiencies that effectively, if you like, released some efficiencies to invest into the CVP, we're really happy with the progress that we've made in the first half. But as you've heard us describe on a few occasions now, we continue to think that there's more opportunity within that line. So that's really in relation to kind of take rate just on the noise, if you like, on the shape of the international Q2 versus Q1, it's exactly as you were kind of alluding to. So, if you look at everything kind of on an underlying basis, see very similar trends in Q2 to what we saw in Q1. You have heard it from us in the release and in the call this morning. So, the improvement year-on-year in terms of growth was really driven by France, as I described, where we're continuing to see improvement in the market there, continued strength in the UAE and continued strength in international with a bit of softness, again, as we've called out in relation to Hong Kong. Q2 versus Q1, and they say the edge is just a bit of noise in relation to some timing of holidays and a bit of a tougher comp in Hong Kong, in particular last year.

So, on the first question, it's fair to assume that there's going to be further incremental investment in CVP in 2H. So, take rate could be under further sequential pressure? Is that the right way to read…

Sorry, Jo, that wasn't what I was intending to say that. All I'm saying is that we will continue to make the investments in the way that we have in the first half.

We will now take our next question from William Woods from Bernstein.

Obviously, thank you very much for giving the details on the customer frequency and the cohorts there. I wondered if you're seeing any appetite from new customers at all coming back over the last couple of months? And then the second one is just to kind of build on the question on the gross profit margin. Could you see further improvement in the gross profit margin in the second half? Or do you think the rest of that will be reinvested.

Just on the consumer question. I guess what I would say is this, obviously, we saw that positive inflection in frequency, we've seen improvements in retention. On the new user side, those 2 things, I would say, also apply to new users. So, we're not seeing anything dramatically sort of different yet. But overall, I think the sort of headwinds at least feel like they are definitely lesser than before. And Scilla, do you want to take the gross profit one?

Yes, nothing material that I thought. Nothing at all significant that I'll call out in terms of the shape of margin on gross margin on H2, Will.

We will now move to our next question from Silvia Cuneo from Deutsche Bank.

My first question is on the GTV growth outlook. You have confirmed the guidance for GTV growth in constant currency to be in the range of 5% to 9%. And following the H1 on 6%, I wanted to ask if you could please comment about potential drivers of acceleration in the second half? And to what extent you need macro to improve to get to the higher end of that? Then the second question is on the target within Plus. First, if you could comment about the progress in set of orders coming from Plus towards the target that you mentioned and the CME? And also, since the introduction of the new plus. Just curious to hear if you have any thoughts on the trends in terms of where the customers typically start on silver move upwards or whether you have other users doing straight one of the updated programs?

So, let me start with the Plus question. Scilla, maybe you can take the second half GTV question. So, on Plus, the share of orders, as we said, is approximately 40% of our order volume, and we're looking to increase that. Just as a reminder, the new Plus tier, Plus Diamond was launched early May. The revamped gold was launched early May. So, we're 3 months in. So, it's a bit early. I think the thing that I can say about Diamond is it has exceeded our early expectations in terms of the amount of people that are around post the free trial, which I think is really encouraging. But outside of that, it's a bit early to kind of draw any conclusions, but that is a big deal. And with gold, I would say it's even earlier. But so far, without sharing too much, we're definitely encouraged about what we see internally.

And then just coming on the GTV question. So yes, we've reiterated our guidance of the 5% to 9%. We're seeing consensus more or less in the middle of that range. So clearly implying some improvement as you're describing in the second half. I hope we've included that sort of since [indiscernible], we've expected some of that shape to be that structure between H2 and H1 partly as we are continuing to see some of the things that Will described in terms of cohort behavior, but also as some of our initiatives land more into the second half, in particular, some of the points on plus that Will just described.

I guess just on Plus maybe a few other points. My team told me not to promote Plus on this call, but I'm going to do it anyway because I do think it's such a great customer proposition. So that Plus Gold proposition where you can earn 10% of your order and accumulate those points over time and then use them at once or as you wish, we do think is a big deal. We think it definitely drives consumer behavior in a significantly different way than what we've structured in the past. And then on Diamond, it is just a great program. You do get your food faster. You have access to merchants you otherwise wouldn't, you have a special customer hotline. And so, there's just a lot of things that we're thinking about over the long term to really drive loyalty, to drive up retention to increase frequency and look forward to sharing that with you guys in a few quarters when we know more. So, what I would say is it's early. The early signs are definitely positive. We look forward to sharing more when the time is right though, on Plus.

We will now move to our next question from Andrew Ross from Barclays.

My first question is about potential inclusion into the main FTSE 250 Index with the FDA listing reforms now behind us. Are you guys planning to apply to the commercial company segment, if you are, can you give us a sense of timing and the process behind that? That's the first question. And the second question is about the level of heads in the business, which came down in the first half. Just give us a bit more color in terms of where those savings came from. And as you think out to your ‘26 margin targets, how should we think about level of heads in the business in those couple of years as for opportunities or perhaps keep coming down?

Andrew, I think they're probably both for me. So yes, exactly as you've kind of described there have been effectively the reforms in relation to the listing regime. And effectively, we are now currently sitting in the sort of transitional category. As you anticipate we're engaging with advisers on this. The process kind of does take a bit of time. And so, you're sort of effectively subject to FCA approvals and so on. So, we're working with the advisers. We're continuing to work through the process. And I think as we previously described, it would be our ambition effectively to move up into the appropriate listing category. Then the second question was then just in relation to kind of the level of heads. I think as you've sort of heard us describe, I suppose in 2 parts, you'll remember that this time sort of earlier than the first half of last year, effectively, we did a sort of restructuring program at that point of the year. And so that was the kind of one-off exercise. What we've also looked to do is to continue to optimize our use of contractors within the business effectively to reduce that. But as I described at the CME, one of the potential opportunities in relation to operating leverage was continuing to improve effectively our tooling for our internal teams in the business and then not described at that point in time when we make investments into some of those areas. We'll be able to get more efficiencies into head count. I think the point to go you can see it's a little bit between the sort of group versus the U.K. is in some of that restructuring and some of the efficiencies during the course of last year. We particularly reduced duplication effectively between the London-based teams and some of those were [indiscernible] teams and some of them were UK teams. So pleased with the progress we've made and some opportunity ahead.

We will now move to our next question from Luke Holbrook from Morgan Stanley.

My first question is just on the past subscription. You outlined at your Strategy Day last year that you could see a 30% uplift from gold members over the course of a 12-month period. I'm just wondering how the latest changes in your subscription may alter that? And my second question is just on the intensity that you've seen in Hong Kong. Can you outline a little bit how that said through the first half of the year? Have we seen promotional intensity continuing to pick up? Or has it subsided somewhat.

I'll take both of these questions. Yes, so what we called out at the CME in terms of the increase in, I don't remember if exactly we said order volume or frequency. But regardless, I would say the changes that we are driving in Plus Gold, we would absolutely expect an increase in frequency, just given how that program is structured and also an increase in retention, that's how we would think about it. So that overall consumer engagement should increase now. It's been 3 months. So, I'm not going to sort of draw any conclusions by what we've seen in 3 months. But we do have a large-scale holdout group as we always run on this type of stuff. So, we'll learn a lot more about sort of the true incrementality probably over the next few quarters. I think the early data is good, but it's just a little hard to sort of conclude about. And then I would say in Hong Kong. I don't think there's any question that the competitive intensity is higher since Kita joined in the market's gone from 2 to 3 players. I think our team has done a really great job, but it is just more competitive. And so, what you've seen is increased discount intensity, you've seen more promiscuous behavior from consumers in that market. And this competition is something that we have. Every one of our markets is competitive. So, it's something we know how to deal with pretty well, and the team has done a great job. But no question, it's more competitive than it was a year ago.

Our next question comes from Marcus Diebel from JPMorgan.

Maybe also following up on the competition, next to Hong Kong. Could you maybe talk also a little bit about UAE because also we see some developments here, some new launches as well, some old countries. If you could give us some comments on the competitive environment and more importantly, how you aim to reply to the current developments?

Marcus, I have not seen anything unusual in the UAE. You've had a few players launch over the last 3 years. Our business continues to grow very strongly. And from a profitability standpoint, we talked about that out of 2 years ago, and that's continuing to trend really well. Our launch of retail in the UAE and our increased grocery business has been a really big positive for the consumer there. So, I can't call out anything sort of negative on the competitive side of the UAE, I'd say, it's gone very well.

And so basically no bolstering or anything is what you plan, no additional action here, by the sounds of it?

I'm not going to really speak for my team. What I can tell you is we don't see anything worth calling out in terms of the UAE other than it's going very well.

We will now take our next question from Sean Kealy from Liberum.

My first one is on the UKI Obviously, we've had a marginal decline in MAX and order frequency is trending well. What I'm trying to get at is if we think about maybe like-for-like growth, you stayed in positive order growth in the quarter. Is there an impact from ongoing rollout into other parts of the country that's helping to avoid that? And if not, how should we think about the balance between Max and order frequency going forward? Is it sort of the case that if we start to get that MAX growth back, we should maybe look at that order frequency ticking down slightly as new customers order slightly less. How should we think about the balance of that for the second half? And then secondly, if I could just touch on France. Obviously, just you have announced intention to exit. They're pretty small there. And anything you'd call out in terms of how you'd expect the competitive environment there to benefit you?

Sean, I just want to make sure I fully understand the question on the UKI in terms of MAX and frequency. They are not inversely correlated at all. I don't think there's a really significant change sort of from a year ago in terms of MAX. What I would say is frequency, as you can see, is turning positive. We're seeing those positive -- we're seeing less headwinds on the retention side. So, I think that bodes well for what's going on in the future. But no, I wouldn't say that there's -- those things are not inversely correlated. And then in terms of France, yes, I saw the news. We would expect no change in our business or market share dynamics from that exit.

We will now take our last question today from Christopher Johnen from HSBC.

Two serious ones and one not so serious. So first, if you could run down like last time we spoke on your free cash flow bridge, some of the main drivers. Maybe there is a bit of an update on CapEx leases, exceptional, a bit of color there would be great. Then I'm curious on the EUR 150 million. Any sort of color on why you ended up with that exact amount? Maybe some color here would be great. And then I'm curious on the naming of diamonds, you have silver, you have gold. Why wasn't it named platinum?

I'll start with the 2 serious ones, Chris, and then I'll give the phone one over to all. So firstly, on the kind of free cash flow bridge. So, as you saw in the first half, CapEx capital of GBP 22 million and anticipated a touch higher in the second half, but nothing significantly different. Leases of 9 outflow for the first half to expect a similar number for the second half. As we called out at the beginning of the year with prelims in terms of working capital in the half was basically both last year-end and the interim period end or on a Sunday. So, no kind of day difference, but so the working capital inflow was basically, as I think as I highlighted, due to the shape and seasonality, we do get some benefits in the second half because the year-end is on a Tuesday, which is a very particularly favorable day for our kind of working capital cycle. So, I think I called that out at prelims, but just to remind everybody there. In relation to exceptionals, you saw the outflow of GBP 43 million for the first half. We have got, as at the interim state current provisions of GBP 63 million. So that's basically effectively an assumption that they will outflow within the next 12 months, i.e., the period through to kind of June next year, slightly difficult as you understand to call out the exact timing of those, but you can make a kind of broad assumption, I think, in relation to how much of that would phase into the second half versus the first of next year. I think that's probably all, just for completeness then just on cash flow. So clearly, GBP 13 million of interest income in the first half of this year, given both rates and given the rates, I would expect that to nudge down a bit during the course of the second half. Then just on the GBP 150 million and the return. Really, this is a consistent application of the framework that we described at interims last year and as I ran through just in the effectively the prepared comments earlier. So, it's sort of utilizing that framework. So, remember, investing for growth first and making sure that we've got enough capital effectively for strategic and operational needs. They're making sure in the second bucket that we have enough headroom for seen and unforeseen events. And then any balance above that, we return as structurally surplus. I guess I just sort of bring you back to the words that are in the RNS and which I used in the prepared remarks that we regularly review that as we make progress on profitability, cash generation and as the competitive consumer and regulatory backdrop becomes clearer. What's kind of, if you like, drive it in terms of the timing now has been the progress that we've made on profitability and cash generation, the pieces we called out on consumer in Will’s slides earlier and our kind of positive view on outlook going forward. So, nothing beyond that, that I can add on the $150 million. And then over to Will for the fun question.

So, I employed the help of chat GPT on this one. I think at the core, Diamond is an invite-only program, and so therefore, diamonds are associated with exclusivity and desirability, whereas platinum although still high value and excludes it is more associated with durability. So that would be my answer, but it's not something that comes out of my head. Thank you for the question.

With this, I'd like to hand the call back over to Will for any closing remarks. Over to you, sir.

Thank you. I just wanted to thank our team for a great H1. And in particular, I wanted to thank David Hancock, he's our Head of Investor Relations. I think many of you have spent time with him. This is unfortunately his last call with us before he leads Investor Relations at Nestle. So, we're very sad that he's leaving, but very thankful for the time he spent here. So, thank you, David, very much. And good luck in your new role.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation, ladies and gentlemen. You may now disconnect.