Domino's Pizza Group plc (DOM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everybody. Thanks for your time this morning. I'm Andrew Rennie, CEO of DPG, and reporting our half 1 results for 2024. Appreciate you coming here today. First of all, I'd like to start off. Let's move on to the first slide. I'll give an overview of where we're at today just very briefly. Then I'll pass on to Edward for the financial detail. Then we'll come back to more of a strategic update, operational update, and then we'll go for Q&A. Thanks very much, Will. Okay. So where are we at? The good news. The good news is that we've got some really good, positive momentum since about the middle of May, transitioning all the way through to up till today, which is fantastic. Did the euros play a part in that? Yes, but we started that before the euros, and we've continued that since the euros. Was the euros good for us? Yes, it was. Was it massively incremental? No. And the reason why is that -- because people will save up, so when a game, like the Sunday night, people hold back a little bit on a Saturday night and a Friday night to save up for that big pizza night. So it's a huge night on the Sunday, but lower on the Friday and Saturday. So some people said, was the euros not good for you? No, it was very good for us, but it doesn't have massive incrementality because people just move their purchasing habits around. The good news was our franchisees absolutely nailed it with the service we were delivering, particularly on those big days and those big games, 24 minutes, 25-minute average delivery times. To give you some context, a lot of our competition were over double that and sometimes worse. So really proud of what the team have achieved. So the momentum is going really well. Delivery. Delivery is up for the first time in 10 quarters, so delivery order count growth. And I think that's the thing about these results, is it's very much a core growth strategy. It isn't just about pricing, putting our pricing up. It's real customer growth. So we feel really pleased about that. EBITDA is up and EPS is up as well. All right? So we're also proud of that. Would we like them to be up more? Yes, sure, we would. But we did flag at the full year results that the first half was going to be the tougher half, probably ended up a bit tougher than we expected, particularly Q1, hence why we're adjusting some numbers today. The good news, though, the core of this business is our franchisees, the franchisee health of our business. This business is 40 years old next year, approaching 1,400 stores next year. We're really proud about that. And our franchisee profitability, even after they rolled over the large, biggest-ever minimum living wage increases, is up 6% on last year. Now, why is that important? That's important because, when they're strong, they drive customer growth. They're passing on this growth to customers, opening more stores. And therefore, that leads to our top line growth. So really happy with where that is, in a healthy position. As we said, we flagged last -- earlier this year that we were going to recycle capital, sell down the corporate stores that had no strategic benefit anymore after we tidied up that or stayed and rearranged some things in London. We passed those stores into the hands of 5 sort of medium-sized franchisees that are London-based who are able to drive those stores and integrate them into their own system. So that's now completed, so we're very happy with that. We're also very confident with our cash flow. This is -- as you all know, this is a very cash-generative business, very capital-light. So therefore, we've announced a GBP 20 million buyback, again, recycling their customers. When we don't have a need for it, we pass it back to our shareholders. And I think we're approaching GBP 0.5 billion passed back to our shareholders in the last 3 years, so we're very proud of that as well. So moving into the second half, I'll pass it on to Edward, what we have done is that, from a strategic point of view, we've been able to pass on more of the food savings to our franchisees who are internally [indiscernible] passing on those to our customers and their customers, which is driving this growth, which is what we're rolling into into the second half. So that why -- that's why it gives us great confidence why the second half feels so good, not to mention the fact that the lapse of our like-for-likes in the second half are much easier compared to the first half. I mean, in that first quarter, we were lapping basically 11% like-for-like from last year, so feeling really confident about that. The team are working very hard. I'll speak more about the detail in the operations in a second, but I feel like we've really set up the core and the health of the business in a good place to take advantage of not only the second half but also the next 3, 4, 5 years, heading towards our 2,000-store target. It feels like we're really on track for that. So with that, I'll pass over to our CFO, Edward Jamieson. Thanks, Edward.

Thank you, Andrew, and good morning, everybody. I'm going to present the 2024 half year financial results and update you on our outlook and guidance for the year. So the first half of this year saw 35.1 million orders with like-for-like sales down 0.5% against strong comparatives in the prior year. These strong comparatives have now eased as we head into the second half of the year. Underlying EBITDA was up 0.4% and free cash flow was lower year-on-year, driven by a working capital outflow, which is mostly expected to reverse in H2. Our underlying earnings per share was up 3.2%, and we've increased the interim dividend by 6.1%. Finally, as a con- as a result of the confidence in our process and our future prospects, we've announced a new GBP 20 million share buyback program effective immediately. Let me now go through our performance in more detail. Let me start with system sales and order counts in more detail. Starting on the left-hand side, we've split out the impact of sales and orders between collection and delivery. System sales grew 0.2% in the half with growth in collections more than offsetting a decrease in delivery sales. Overall, total orders in H1 were down 0.9% on last year with the continued growth in collection orders not enough to offset the decline in delivery orders in the half. Pleasingly, orders and, importantly, delivery orders were back in growth in Q2. Let me turn to the next slide to give more color on this. So in contrast to the slow start to the year, our recent trading momentum has been good with a growth in orders in -- with a growth in total orders in Q2. This started from the middle of May and has continued through June and July. July total orders were up 5.8%. We benefited from the men's Euro Football Tournament, but it's important to note that momentum picked up well ahead of the tournament. Importantly, delivery orders were back in growth in Q2, and this follows 10 consecutive quarters of decline and it shows that the strategic decisions that we have made are working. This was a result of a continued focus on outstanding customer service as well as improved value in the channel. As we head into H2, we're confident that our strong Q2 performance will continue. Our strategic initiatives continue to gain traction, and our comps are progressively easier. Andrew will cover these in more detail shortly. We have a number of levers to sustain our momentum. Our revenue was GBP 326.8 million, a 1.8% decrease on H1 last year. This is primarily driven by a 7.7% decrease in our supply chain revenue. As anticipated, we saw food cost deflation in the period. In line with our model to support our franchisees, we passed these lower food costs on to them. Corporate Stores revenue was up GBP 9.8 million, driven by the acquisition of Shorecal, which completed in April. EBITDA margin as a percentage of system sales was stable at 9%. Now, once again, our supply chain operation delivered an outstanding performance with accuracy and availability stats of 99.9% in the half, and I'd like to express my appreciation to all our very dedicated supply chain colleagues. Our EBITDA from the supply chain in the half was GBP 64.6 million, down 3.1% compared to the prior half year. This was primarily driven by the pass-through of lower food costs, offset by efficiencies, which we continue to drive in our operation. Net overheads increased GBP 1 million as we lapped a GBP 2.3 million benefit from the sale of a freehold property in the prior half year. Technology Platform costs were GBP 3.5 million, GBP 1.8 million lower than the prior half year. We're dual-running the new e-commerce platform with the legacy system, and the cutover to the new platform we complete this year. The deployment of the ERP will now run until next year as we'll pause the rollout towards the end of this year during our peak trading season. The acquisition of Shorecal completed earlier than originally anticipated and required less investments in the first half than we previously expected. The business has performed well, contributing GBP 2.1 million to our H1 performance. The net impact of these movements was a 0,4% increase in underlying EBITDA to GBP 69 million. Let me briefly walk you through the movement in EBITDA. The prior year benefited by GBP 2.3 million from the one-off sale of a freehold property. Lower order volumes and the pass-through of food cost deflation reduced our underlying trading performance by GBP 1.3 million. As I outlined on the previous slide, technology platform costs were GBP 1.8 million lower, and Shorecal contributed GBP 2.1 million in the half. Excluding the freehold property sale in the prior year, underlying EBITDA was up 3.9%. Moving to the income statement, finance costs were GBP 1.2 million higher, driven by higher levels of debt in the period, and I'll walk through the movement in net debt shortly. Taxation was GBP 1.3 million higher than the prior half as we had a full 6 months with the U.K. corporation tax rate at 25% as well as an increased tax charge related to transfer pricing between our U.K. and Irish subsidiaries. This resulted in a 2.3% reduction in underlying profit after tax in the period with underlying EPS up 3.2%, the difference being driven by share buybacks. So trading from operations produced EBITDA of GBP 69 million, and let me walk you through how this flows through to free cash flow. We had a working capital outflow of GBP 10.7 million compared to an inflow of GBP 10.2 million in the prior year. This is mostly expected to reverse in the second half of this year. The first half movement was primarily driven by decreases in overall accruals and accrued income of GBP 8.3 million. So the capital allocation framework, we first introduced this in March 2021. We update the market every 6 months. We have an asset-light business, which is highly cash generative. We have this framework to explain how we think about allocating capital effectively. We want to retain a sensible level of leverage, which we believe to be around 1.5x to 2.5x. And working within these parameters, we'll allocate cash in a disciplined way. Firstly, we continue to invest in the core business to drive long-term sustainable growth. To that end, we invested GBP 7.1 million in capital expenditure in the half. Secondly, we'll maintain a sustainable and progressive dividend. We'll pay an interim dividend of 3.5p, up 6.1%. And thirdly, we invest in additional growth opportunities. In the first half of the year, we invested GBP 48.7 million in the Shorecal acquisition, GBP 11.4 million in the DP Poland stake and received a cash inflow of GBP 17.3 million from a number of the corporate stores we sold in the first half. Finally, we've announced a new GBP 20 million buyback program today. We're confident that our business model will continue to deliver meaningful free cash flow growth over the medium to long term. So just to cover the London corporate store disposal, so in May, we announced that we're in an advanced stage of the disposal of our London corporate store estate, and this is consistent with our strategy of recycling capital. So we've now sold all 30 corporate stores to 5 different [indiscernible] groups for a total consideration of GBP 35.1 million. And the rest of the detail is on the slide. Moving on to net debt, so we started the year with GBP 232.8 million net debt and leverage of 1.77x, and we've continued to invest in the business and return cash to shareholders during the half. This has resulted in net debt of GBP 285.4 million at the 30th of June, giving leverage at the end of the period of 2.16x, which is towards the middle of our target range of 1.5 to 2.5x. We've also raised an additional GBP 100 million of U.S. private placement notes. These carry an interest rate of 5.97% and are due in 2034. This starts to spread out our debt maturity profile and supports a reduced utilization of the RCF facility, which is a higher interest rate. Our priority will always be to invest in the core business, and there's no change to our CapEx guidance of circa GBP 20 million for this year as we continue to invest more in our system to drive sustainable and profitable growth. In the first half of this year, our CapEx was focused on expanding the capacity of our supply chain center in Ireland, and this investment will allow us to move from the ability to serve 90 stores to in excess of 130 stores. Having completed the development of our new e-commerce platform, we're in the last stages of the cutover to the new platform, which will enhance customer experience. So moving to outlook and guidance, so today, we're moving FY '24 underlying EBITDA guidance towards the lower end of current market expectations, and this includes the contribution from Shorecal. Aside from Shorecal, there are 2 primary reasons to this, firstly, the tough start to H1, which we've already told you about, and this makes up the majority of the change guidance. The remainder is due to a greater level of pass-through of food costs in H2 than we originally planned for. And this also includes some strategic support to our franchise partners as we continue to deliver value offers for customers, underpin the strength of the system and drive long-term growth. Andrew will touch on this, but momentum is building, the strategic initiatives are gaining traction, and we see a real opportunity in the market to grow the system in our business. Our full technical guidance is laid out below. Thank you. And let me now pass you back to Andrew.

Thanks, Edward. Let's come together on Page 19. Well, so what are the key points here? The thing for me is about the core of the business. The core of the business has to be a solid place for growth. And as I said before, the core and the backbone of our business is our franchisee health, which is extremely good, and we continue to focus on that to drive that forward, making them more efficient, because they pass that on to customers, and we will benefit from that. As an example of that, when you look at the average delivery times of 24.1, in fact, the second half of the year is probably closer to 23 minutes. That's world-class. If you look around the world, there's not many companies doing that sort of delivery times. On-time deliveries means deliveries under 30 minutes as we class [ it as late ] as soon as it goes over 30 minutes. App customers up 17%. We really are migrating a lot of our customers to the app. Why is that positive? One is they spend more on the app. Two is we have a lot more pure data, and we can have a better communication with them. And that leads into loyalty, which I'll speak more about in a second. Store openings slightly behind last year at this point. However, the second half was much slower last year. But when you actually look at the detail, we've actually opened 4 in these last 4 weeks, whereas, last year, we opened one in the same period. So we already opened up to 26 stores open this year, and we have 38 more either in construction or in planning. That puts us up into the 60s. We're still targeting 70. What varies there is that you can move your planning or your utilities connection by 12 weeks, 16 weeks very easily. So we're still targeting 70, but sometimes the electricity doesn't get connected or gas doesn't get connected until the last minute and that -- you can lose a few stores out of that. But we still feel comfortable we can get there. The most important thing is we look into the pipeline into next year and the hunger for more stores is quite incredible. If we go onto the next slide now, our outlook hasn't changed. I probably feel more confident than ever that the 2,000 store target will be achieved. We'll be 1,400 stores next year. And there's not too many businesses in this country that are over that sort of size. More importantly for me, it's not just the number of stores, it's the quality of stores. And as we'll see in a second, we'll talk about those, is the quality of the openings have been unbelievable. So I still feel very confident about our plan here, and we'll talk more about that in a few seconds. And of course, these things lead to EPS growth, right, which is obviously our main focus for shareholders. Moving on to the next slide, Will, I think something worth noting here is that some of you may not realize, but DPG is 40 years old in this country next year, 40 years old. And if you look across the growth curve, it's consistently and sustainable growth over those 40 years. This is a reflection of what's happened in the last 12 months with our competition. We continue to grow. We continue to grow that moat around our business. We've barely closed a store in 40 years. We've relocated some because the building or the landlord issues or something or other, but we continue to grow because we believe in long-term sustainable growth. It's not just about trying to wack as many stores in the ground and get the store numbers up. It's about long-term, successful growth. And our franchisees play a massive part in that. So I really want to thank them for that because this is the -- this is why we will get to 2,000 stores, because we've been doing it for 40 years. We're really good at it, and we make sure that we do it methodically well. Next, we'll go over to the next slide, core business, really important. Franchisee profitability leads to DT- DPG profitability because when they're making more money, they're opening more stores, they're driving better value for their customer. When we drive better value for our -- for money for our customers, that leads to order count growth because, when they get better value from us, they come back to us more often. And value isn't just price. Value is also the service, the quality of the products. And we're continually told by our customers they love our products. We're always working on them to try and make them better. But it's not just about delivering a pizza. It's about delivering high-quality food, hot, consistently well. And we do that better than anyone in this country. I firmly believe that. And what happens with digital is when you have exceptional digital, and our whole back end has been rebuilt, the whole infrastructure is all now crossing over literally live as we speak to the new world. We now have an infrastructure and an app system that allows us to get high-quality data, which allows us to do things like Loyalty, which we couldn't have done before. Loyalty actually starts tomorrow with 630,000 of our customers. We've been in some tests, getting some data. We now go live. Once we get that learning out of the first 6 months, we'll then go to the next stage, which will be a rollout next year. But we feel very excited about that. We're learning a lot from the U.S. The U.S. has done an exceptional job on Loyalty. So we're getting lots of learnings from those guys before we jump [ in ] ourselves. And the last point is convenience. Convenience to consumers is not only access through IT and digital. It's proximity to me. So as we build more stores, as we go to the villages out into the -- in the countryside, we get closer to our customers. That creates more convenience for them, which they really appreciate. So that's the long-term growth. Moving on to the next slide, franchisee profitability and margin growth, you know it's up 16%, which we're very proud of, but we'll keep focusing on that. That does -- that never stops. And why? Because that leads to the growth. As an example about where we are with our franchise, it is extremely engaged and aligned at the moment. We had our national conference just about 8 weeks ago. We had 1,500 Dominoids around the U.K. and Ireland at that rally. Since then, our delivery times have gone to another level, as I said before, more. We've got franchisees like in the SK Group achieving over 200-odd stores of 21 minutes, 21.5 minutes across a whole week, right? We're talking about hundreds of thousands of deliveries they are nailing that on. And that's because the engagement and the alignment with the franchisees is quite incredible. The ADT, so the average delivery times, which is actually GPS tracked, it's actually data statistically correct, is at record lows. So we're very, very happy about that. And next year, as we turn 40, we've already had enough feedback from our franchisee partners, et cetera, that we have to have a space big enough for 2,500 people because they're so engaged with the brand and where we're going. They want to be part of it. So we're very, very happy about that. And just remember, too, is that on the [indiscernible] '24 profitability, that was after franchisees rolled over the largest ever national living wage increase, which was a double-digit increase. So they've rolled over that and they're still more profitable. So I'm very proud of that. Next slide, one of the leading indicators to future order count growth for deliveries is delivery times, believe it or not. It's actually statistically about 1 minute shaved off has a big impact. It takes time. Our customers order on average once every quarter. It takes a few quarters for you to see this momentum come through. But this, to me, is why I sleep well at night, knowing these numbers. We are able to make sure that -- it's not only the fact that I get my pizza there faster. It's the fact that the product is so much better, so much hotter and tastier is why they come back and repurchase. So we're very proud of those numbers. Next slide, value for money, we continue to focus on value, right? It's all about our customers' continued value. I said price is one part of it. Delivery service is another. We've also got our GBP 4 lunch. I just want to clarify, lunch is a long-term strategy. Lunch is a small part of our business, right? We're talking sort of 10%, 15% of our business. And we're not throwing massive amounts of our marketing at it. We're slowly just dribbling that out. That's a 2-, 3-, 4-year strategy, but it's very important from a value perception point of view because, when you can get a GBP 4 wrap or pizza under 600 calories, under 400 calories, it really resonates with consumers. And those consumers then become nighttime customers. But 8, 10, 12, Monday to Thursday, 50% off, collection [indiscernible], all these things just lead to value, why we're seeing consumer growth. And because franchisees are in a good place, they can pass these on to our customers. We also, with pa- part of our surveys that we do regularly every year, our last survey, which was only done a month ago, is that the consumers said that we are now the best value for money scores since 2020. So in the last 4 years, they're saying, at the moment, we are the best value they've seen in the last 4 years. Next slide, Will, innovation, this, to me, is also an important part of our strategy. We're continually innovating, bringing fresh ideas to our consumers, making it, refreshing it. The cookies are one example. The reps are another. We never stop that. We're always focused every single day. We have a large team focused on innovation, making not only the current products tastier and better for you, but bringing some new products to market as well. So that also helps underpin our growth. Next slide. Why is this so important? This data is so rich, and we've got a team now of data analysts that are giving us insights in the business that we've never had before, insights that we're getting this last 3 or 4 months that has helped with part of that momentum growth. So we're continually focused on how we can lift these numbers. We've had exceptional growth over the last couple of years. It won't stop. I think we'll certainly breach that 10 million customer base very soon. But the data we get from this is very, very rich. It helps us make drives, decisions for growth in the business. Next slide. This is what it's all about with the loyalty to drive frequency. The U.S. has been able to drive frequency with their Loyalty. We believe the same. We've been testing it, and we've finally got to the point now where we launch it tomorrow. We feel very good about it. We want to get all the learning before we go and spend too much money and go too far. But certainly, at the moment, it feels good. And yes, the team have done a sensational job with getting Loyalty to where it is. Next slide, convenience, as I said, we're targeting at 70 stores. What I'm really happy about is the quality of openings. Well, we're opening a lot of it in our new territory, stores with only 11,000 addresses. To give you a reminder, the average store in the U.K. has 21,000 addresses, the average. These guys are opening up at 11,000 and doing above national average sales. It's quite incredible. A store that opened last night that we expected to do about 4,000 did over 6,000 in a small area, quite incredible. So franchisees really are engaged in opening those stores. We're getting closer to our customers when we do these things. They're loving it. So we feel very good about the pipeline and about our growth. As I said, we've opened 26, [ 22 ] to June 30, another 4 these last 4 weeks, which was against one last year. We got 38 in construction or planning. So that puts us very close up to a target of 70. Just coming over to Just Eat and Uber, these 2 complement each other. They're very complementary. They're very incremental to our business. We are able to track where these customers come from, were they our customers before or not, et cetera. So they complement each other. Uber stronger in London, Just East stronger outside of London. So it's not a test anymore. It's permanent. It's a nice little add-on to our business. It's not massive in some other parts of the world. It's a massive part of the business because our platform is so strong. It's smaller as a percentage, but incremental nevertheless. Moving on, additional growth opportunities, so nothing has changed here from the last time I updated you. We're very cash generative. We want to take that cash and either give it back to shareholders or grow the business and ideally do both. We're very focused on the core. That is our #1 focus, as you've seen with Shorecal, et cetera, recycling the capital out of London. We're very disciplined. We're not rushing out to do anything crazy. We do -- take a very disciplined approach, as per the low-risk option we've taken with going international with Poland, et cetera, got really clear guardrails. We remain capital-light. So we'll give that money back or we'll buy something. We're still focused on those things. We've got a few things out there that we're looking at, but nothing to report at this stage. So those strategies have not changed one little bit. We stay on track for that. We go on to the next slide, Shorecal, we said we wanted to focus on the core. We bought Shorcal to help unlock the growth in Ireland. It's doing what we expected. It's on track strategically. We think -- and when you see the fact that it's got 85,000 per -- population per store in the U.K. versus our 53,000 in the U.K., there's room for growth over there. And this is what this is helping to unlock. It's early days, but so far, we're very happy with our acquisition. Corporate stores in London sold, that's done. Poland, nothing has changed there. We've still got that option in place, and we sit back and watch and assess that in a very clear guardrails and disciplined way. Moving on to sustainability, we've looked first -- published our first sustainability report in 2024, very important to us and our customers and our team members. Our 5 pillars are customers, people, environment, sourcing and community. So they all work together to make sure that we're being more sustainable. We have a nutrition policy. We're continually focused on nutrition as well. As I said, we've got some products under 400 calories, under 600 calories. We actually have some products probably coming out soon that are even lower than that. So we're making sure that our customers have choice. Our first -- what else have we got? We also began executing on our first carbon reduction glide path. So the team have done a great job with that. So all these things are very important to our consumers, and we make sure that we're doing them because they're the right thing to do and we'll continue to do those things as well. So in summary, just coming on to the last slide, so as Edward said, our strategic execution driving -- is driving improved trading conditions. Drowing -- driving delivery orders, they're up, right? And that hasn't been happening for the last 10 quarters. It's very customer-focused. Our franchisees, I think, have been more focused on the customer than they have been for a very long time, hence why we're seeing such better delivery times, et cetera. We're really focused on the core in the U.K. and Ireland, all right? And Ireland is an important part of our growth strategy. We think there's so much growth left over there. So we're really excited about what's happening over there. And I think the most important thing is that word at the bottom there, sustainable long-term growth. We're not just here to sort of push things up for a quarter or 6 months. We're here for the long term. We've been around almost 40 years, and we want to be around for another 40 years. So this is about long-term, sustainable growth for franchisees, for our franchise partners, for ourselves and for the shareholders. And we continue to focus on being a capital-light business that has the growth ambitions. So with that, I think I'll open up to Q&A. There's a roving microphone here. So if you would like to ask questions, please pass it around. We've got Doug at the front here, maybe [ Sharon ] straight off the bat, get started. Thanks, Doug.

Douglas Jack at Peel Hunt. Three quick questions, if that's all right. Can you just talk about the outlook on food and energy costs at the moment and any sort of hedging that's in place on that? In particular, and the second one, would be any impact on changes in the cheese price, because, obviously, you're all susceptible to what happens with that? And the last question is just opportunities to improve efficiency within the supply chain centers, what you've got planned at the moment.

Yes, good question, Doug. So first of all, this year, we seem quite flat on pricing. We see a lot of the rebating from the high inflation during the Ukraine war start. So that's definitely [ rebased ]. That's why we've been able to pass it back to the franchisees and why they're running good food costs at the moment. So this year is fairly benign. As we move into '25, it's always hard to tell this far out. At this stage, it seems generally okay, but some things -- cheese maybe vary slightly at this stage, but it moves by month to month, so we don't want to call it too soon. We don't put hedging in place, but we forward buy. So we forward buy things like wheat, et cetera, that makes sense. So we feel very good about certain things that we can forward buy, very stable. Now, my objective for my team is to say let's keep pricing as stable as possible as long out as possible. We don't want any shocks to franchisees, ourselves or our customers, more importantly. So we feel very good about that. Energy pricing has come down as well, so we see that as being very stable. Again, we don't know what the future holds with -- the world is ever-changing at the moment. But everything we see this year, '24 is stable and '25, at this stage, no shocks at this stage. So time will tell. Your point about investment in the commentary is, yes, we actually have some very good projects underway right now to create more [ automization ] in the commissaries. Small investments have great ROIs. As Edward had said, we've only spent GBP 7.1 million in CapEx this first half. We're budgeting for GBP 20 million. We may not spend it all, but a good chunk of that goes to automating in our commissaries. We think we can get more efficiency from the commissaries by automating, and we actually brought in a specialist to help us with that. So that's well underway. Did I cover all your questions there, Doug? Thanks very much. Wayne?

Just a couple of questions from me. Firstly, on pricing and competition clearly, you highlighted that some competition is falling away within the pizza market. But if we can just have a look maybe at McDonald's obviously also coming under pressure from a sales perspective, but noticed recently that they're investing quite heavily in price, so 4 burgers, 4 fries, GBP 18, that's quite cheap. So do you guys need to respond to that, or just a view on pricing within the marketplace? And then also, can you give us a little bit more color on lunch and how that's been performing from a volume perspective? Or is it just really just gaining momentum over a very long period of time?

Yes, sure. Thanks for the good questions. So first of all, we really do run our own race, right? We really believe that we're the owners of our own destiny when it comes to our consumer growth. And I think you're seeing that right now -- is that what we've done has driven the growth. There's been nothing to do with the macro environment per se. Yes, the consumer was tough definitely in the first quarter, et cetera, and we chose not to do marketing, and that certainly had an impact on us. But we are very much focused about the delivery experience. When you think about the frequency we have compared to McDonald's, it's very different. Right? Our consumers are buying once a quarter. So it really is a luxury type purchase in some ways. And we make sure that that event is very special to customers. We think we can lift that frequency because with -- we don't expect too much of a lift to get a decent improvement in our customer base. Particularly, we're going to say we've got [ 13 ] million customers. So value is omnipresent. So we're always trying to offer value to customers. And what we say to everyone is that value isn't just price. It's also the service. I could serve you a cheaper product but deliver it in an hour and it's cold. It's not very good value. So it's also about the price and the balance with that service as well. I mean something -- when you do the math, for example, a large pizza, right, which is a large slice of pizza individually, 8 large slices, they're equipment of GBP 1.50, an incredible value, right? People don't tend to think of it that way, but that's what they are. So we already provide very good value. When you actually do a side-by-side analysis on how you can feed a family of 4 people, et cetera, we come across this very good value. For us, it's being consistent with that message and consistent with the delivery service. Now to your other point -- and also the Collection service as well, because Collection can offer GBP 7.99 Collection Perfection. That's also a great value for those who want to collect. On your point about lunch, it's a long-term strategy, all right? The weeks that we're driving lunch, we see good incremental growth, really good incremental growth. But because it's a small percentage of a very big number, you don't necessarily see that in our numbers here. To me, it's more about what it will be at in 2 years' time, 3 years' time, 4 years' time. And what it does, it actually creates more efficiency for our franchisees. Even a couple of hundred pounds a day additional actually helps our labor numbers. It helps them to be more profitable. So that feeds into what we're seeing here today as well. Again, it also has a great perception for the consumer. When you're talking about GBP 4 lunch, a lot of people go, GBP 4 of Domino's, that's quite rare, isn't it? But it starts to change perception that you actually can get very good value at Domino's. So we're not throwing the kitchen sink at it because it is a small part of our business. We're just tempering away there, slowly adding to it over a long period of time. This is a long-term strategy. But so far, everything we've seen, it's working very well.

I'm sorry, just one last one, on marketing, what phasing should we expect in the second half? And any big promotional activities that you've got planned?

Yes, I wouldn't say anything out of the norm. We've tried to space it out over the last 6 to 9 months of the year. We're putting it -- we're [ near to camp ], right? So we're putting obviously some behind this Loyalty test as well, but that's very targeted to those customers we've got. So we're certainly putting some towards here, some towards the new innovation in the back half of the year. Obviously, we have -- our Christmas period is the biggest sales period of the year, so we also make sure we save the money for our Christmas period as well. So we try to space it out. Olympics don't typically add anything to our sales. It's interesting. It never -- in any country I've worked in, it never really adds to sales. So we haven't -- not really spending during the Olympics at the moment. It's not really worthwhile. But we get fishing with the fisher body. The -- this consistent message is really important to us, 8, 10, 12 Monday to Friday -- sorry, Monday to Thursday. It's a strong message and we just keep doing it because that is really good value when you think about it. So we're really focused on staying really consistent with that message in the core. Richard? Sorry. Sorry.

Richard Stuber from Deutsche Numis, please. Three questions, if you don't mind. The first one is we're coming to I think the 3-year moment of understanding that was announced in 2021. Where are we now? And should we expect a new one before the end of this year? The second question is in terms of the Loyalty [ 12 ]. I saw the slide. It looked like it was like buy 5 large pizzas, get 1 free. That would suggest maybe you only get 1 free pizza after a year's worth of ordering. I know, in the U.S., it was slightly tweaked in terms of points and you can redeem earlier on. Any more sort of color in terms of whether you're looking at that or whether it's a simple buy X, get Y free? And the final question is on DP Poland. You talk about call option. Is any more details in terms of when and how much that will be to exercise?

Sure. I'll start with the last one first. There's no more detail on the Polish call option, just that it's in place. So we're not going to give any more detail on that at this stage. It just remains as it was. On the Loyalty, we've taken all the learnings from the U.S., the good and the bad and the ugly, et cetera, and put that into our model. It's 5 orders, not necessarily 5 large pizzas, so 5 orders. And that's -- this is part of our testing right now. So we'll get a lot more data from our customers. Is that the right way? And it may very well end up being tweaked for the bigger rollout, Richard. That's exactly why this is in test phase. But our initial testing says that this is what consumers want. Remember, 4 is an average, right? So some customers are more than that. Some are less than that. So if we can pull the ones that are slightly below that up a little bit and the ones that are higher even higher again, that's fantastic. So a heavier user would get a lot of benefit out of this, but even a midsized user as well. But this is exactly why we're testing it. And your first question was around [indiscernible] our MOU. So look, we're in really good discussions with the franchisees. As I said before, we've got good alignment. I feel like we're in a really good place. The other good thing is that the MOU is -- 80%, 90% of it is actually really in good shape. It's actually a lot of it we can keep. We don't need to rebuild the castle, if you like, to remake the wheel. So we're in good discussions, and I think we'll have something definitely before the end of the year. Yes, I feel very confident about that. The franchisees have been great to deal with, so I've got no reason to not think that we'll have something sorted out later on this year.

Hi, Ross from RBC. Two questions, please, the first on Loyalty. Can you give any color on what good penetration of the client base looks like, just either from the U.S. or from other things you've looked at? And second of all, just on the rollout, you've talked about the good performance of the virgin stores with 11,000 addresses. Is there a bit of a tweak in strategy then in terms of the rollout to looking further at 10s, 9s, 8s? And I guess my question is, ultimately, does it increase the size of the playing field for you given that strong performance?

Yes, sure. Thanks, Ross. So first of all, part of our strategy, that 2,000 stores, is -- those small villages are inside of that. We actually have stores opening up well less than 11,000 addresses, some at 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 addresses. So that's already been successful. So we haven't gone after them before. It's becoming more of a focus now because they are so successful. And more importantly, franchisees are going, wow, the ROI and these stores that have just opened with 10,000 or 11,000 addresses is fantastic. I'm prepared now to do a 7,000 address rollout as well. So that is working very well for us. Just as an example, in other countries like Australia, the U.S., they have stores in 2,000, 3,000 address counts that do very, very well. And your other question was about the ro- the penetration. So it's a really interesting one, right, because every country has different levels of penetration in their market. So our -- believe it or not, we're more penetrated on a branded pizza base than the U.S. is, right? We have a lot more. So it's also hard to draw a line with what will our consumers do because we're more penetrated here than they are. What I can say is that I've seen examples of where frequency has gone up 1 or 1.5x from what it was before. But then you need to assess that as well and what customers are measuring that against as well. So data can sometimes be a bit distorted. If we could get a -- even half a lift, that would be huge, right, 0.5 point or 50 basis points, if you like, lift in Loyalty. I think, in some consumers, it will be higher, some will be lower, et cetera. Until we've got the data, I can't really speak with authority about that. I'd like to think that, by this time next year, I've got a bit more data, I can say, "Hey, this is what we're seeing, it's quite exciting." But I think, no matter how you cut it, people have been screaming out for a while. It was really important we did it really effectively. I've seen too many around the world where they've done it, cost a lot of money and really didn't get the flow-through into bottom line for both franchisees and ourselves. So we have to be really careful, but we've kept it really simple. We have a couple of stages to it. You've already seen one stage. There's a couple of other stages, but we feel very positive about it. And we haven't jumped at it too quickly. We've put a lot of thought into it. So it's being well constructed and kept really simple for the consumer, which is also very important. Any more questions? No? All right. With that, first of all, I'd like to thank everyone for their time today. I hope you can see that we're really focused on driving the core business. I feel more confident about our 2,000 store target than ever before. I feel like we're really doing the right thing by our customers. I feel like the franchisees are in a really good place and hence why they're looking after their customers so well. Yes, we've taken a short-term hit for that, but I think the short-term hit is for the long-term gain, in fact the medium and long-term gain. So we're building a bigger, stronger business here. We've got growth ambitions. I can assure you of that. And we keep churning out cash, and we're prepared to give back to our shareholders with that GBP 20 million buyback. So it shows our confidence. I want to thank Edward, Will and the whole team that have done a great job here today. And I look forward to talking to you all very soon. Thank you very much.