ProCook Group plc (PROC.L) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to the ProCook Group plc investor presentation. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Lee Tappenden, CEO. Good morning, sir.

Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us this morning. I'm joined by Dan Walden, our CFO at ProCook. Today, we're happy to share with you our half year results for FY '26. For today, a quick agenda. I will cover the highlights of our first half. Dan will give more detail and color on the financials for that period. I will touch on a strategy update around 3 key initiatives, just a follow-on from what we would have shared with you previously if you've joined us. And then Dan will wrap up with the current trading outlook for the last 8 weeks up until this recent Sunday, December 7. So the first half of this year is probably important to start with the fact that summer 2024, we set out a very clear medium-term strategy to open 100 stores in the U.K. to deliver GBP 100 million sales revenue and a 10% operating profit margin. I'm very pleased to say that we are making great progress towards those goals and the financial highlights basically illustrate that and reinforce the progress that we've been making. In the first half of '26, we had a record sales performance of GBP 34.1 million, which is up just shy of 21% year-on-year and very importantly, about 8.1% like-for-like. So a strong sales performance. That outperformance to the market has meant a strong market share gain of up to 16%. So we're very pleased with the fact in quite a challenging market, we're gaining market share. Clearly, we're doing that through the like-for-like, but also complemented by the ongoing expansion of our new store program, and we opened up 6 new stores in the first half of the year, including one, which is our new format in Birmingham Bullring. We've been very focused on driving discipline around cost spend. We are investing in the new stores, which has some costs associated with it, which Dan will cover. And we're also investing in paid media quite aggressively over the last few months, which I will talk about in more detail. But we've managed to control our expenses centrally to real discipline around how we're growing costs. Our margins, our gross margin has improved as we predicted and forecast up about 130 basis points year-on-year, and Dan will cover that in more detail. So we're very pleased to be making progress against the strategic objectives, and that's playing out into an improved financial position. And with that, I'll now hand over to Dan, who will give you more detail on the financials.

Okay. Thank you, and good morning, everybody. We're pleased, as Lee says, to be reporting a strong financial progress driven by our excellent growth across all revenue metrics. When combined with improved gross margins that we've delivered, we've reported a 22.8% increase in gross profit year-on-year. EBITDA and EBITDA margins have also improved again and as has the first half operating losses, which have reduced year-on-year. Net debt remained stable after a period of heightened investment for growth. Looking at the first half revenue performance, we've delivered a record H1 GBP 34.1 million, up 20.6% with 8.1% like-for-like growth, which accelerated through the half to 12.2% like-for-like during quarter 2. This is driven primarily by volume, 16% with some price increases and improved promotional discipline year-on-year. It represents 8 consecutive quarters now of total revenue growth, 9 quarters consecutively of retail like-for-like growth and 6 consecutive quarters of e-commerce like-for-like growth. So both channels are performing well for us. Retail was 21.8% year-on-year with a like-for-like across the half of 3.6%, accelerating to 6.2% in quarter 2, and the remainder of the growth coming from the new stores shown on this page under the non-like-for-like retail bucket there that you see in the middle of the chart. E-commerce was 18.4% up year-on-year with a like-for-like of 15.7%, again accelerating in the second quarter to 23.2% like-for-like. And we continue to grow Amazon Marketplace sales since the relaunch in H1 last year and are now 4x greater during the first half. As anticipated, our gross margins have also increased and are up 130 basis points, driven by pricing optimization and promotional discipline, cost price reductions, including foreign exchange and then partly offset by marine freight costs, which are a legacy from last year's stock intake and retail fulfillment costs as we have a larger store portfolio. Our operating loss of GBP 1.5 million in the first half was in line with our expectations. It improved year-on-year by GBP 0.3 million on an underlying basis and GBP 0.6 million on a reported basis. We've absorbed the GBP 0.6 million dilutive impact of new stores, which opened post peak FY '25. So in other words, after Christmas last year throughout the seasonally less profitable part of the year as well as the GBP 0.6 million impact of real living wage pay inflation and national insurance tax increases, which came into effect in April this year. Our e-commerce channel profitability has improved significantly over the last 12 months. And in the first half of this year reached 28.1%, up from 18.8% last year with all of the volume-related costs, which increased as we grew sales being offset by improved marketing and logistics efficiency. Our retail operating profitability was flat year-on-year on a like-for-like store basis despite the cost pressures that I've just mentioned around the real living wage and national insurance items in particular. However, adding in the short-term dilutive impact of new stores before they progress towards maturity, our total retail operating profitability dropped from 11.9% to 6.7% this year, again, as expected. As we grow our top line, we will benefit from improved leverage of our central cost base. And this again has been the case in the first half of this year with these costs as a percentage of sales reducing by 220 basis points year-on-year. This chart shows a very similar profile, but it reflects EBITDA, which has improved year-on-year from GBP 1 million to underlying -- so GBP 1 million underlying last year up to GBP 2.3 million this year, an increase of 129.2%. The uplift is larger than the increase in operating profits because the impact of the new and maturing stores that we talked about instead of being dilutive as they are for operating profits, they're actually additive from an EBITDA perspective by GBP 0.3 million. So a swing of GBP 1 million better from an EBITDA perspective. As we discussed at our year-end results in June, the performance of new stores will build over time as they mature and the accounting impacts of preopening costs and the rent-free incentives normalize from year 3 onwards. As a reminder, in year [ 0 ], i.e., before they open, we have preopening costs associated with recruitment and colleague training as well as occupancy costs over the 3- to 6-month period before the store actually begins trading. In year 1, we typically expect EBITDA to step up towards 60% to 70% of mature levels with the seasonality of trade taken into account depending on when they open. It then moves up to mature over years 2 and 3 onwards. However, operating profit, as you can see by the dark blue bar on the screen, takes longer to build. And in year 1 only represents around 25% of EBITDA before reaching around 85% year 3 onwards. And this effect presents a similar compounding future operating profit growth opportunity given the recent addition of 22 new stores whilst leaving our current operating profit partially diluted. So to summarize, we've delivered excellent revenue in H1, significant growth outperforming a subdued market. We've improved gross margins as expected. We've reduced H1 operating losses, and we've grown EBITDA. Our new stores will mature and the short-term dilutive impact on operating profits in H1 this year will begin to reverse over time. Our finance costs have been higher in H1 this year as a result of movements in foreign exchange as the dollar weakened with the benefit in gross margin percent. However, we're confident that we remain appropriately hedged. The overall effect on loss before tax for the first half is that it's stable year-on-year at GBP 2.9 million on an underlying basis. Whilst we are improving H1 profitability through trading and growth, we still have a way to go. H2 remains our critical trading period as we make all of our profits and generate all of our cash in the second half of the year. Touching on cash. We finished the first half with net debt flat year-on-year at GBP 4.1 million, leaving available liquidity in cash and facilities of GBP 11.9 million. Our free cash outflow was GBP 1.6 million higher this year compared to last year with the improved profitability that we generated, offset by higher investment in net working capital, CapEx, lease payments and interest costs. Now when we look at the cash investment of the new stores that we've opened in H1 FY '26, we can determine that GBP 1.8 million of that year-on-year increase is entirely related to new stores. And so you can see that the increase in free cash flow -- free cash outflow this year is primarily or in fact entirely driven by the additional cash investment we're making year-on-year to support our performance and progress in the years ahead. At this point, I'll hand back to Lee.

Thank you, Dan. I'm now going to walk through an update on 3 of our strategic initiatives. Many of you that have joined us before will recognize this. It's just a simple illustrative summary of our strategic plan. For those of you who are not familiar with ProCook, very quickly, ProCook is quite unique in the fact that we have 100% our own brand product. We direct source the product. We only sell ProCook on our own website and our stores with a limited offering on Amazon. So basically, the direct sourcing model enables us to control end-to-end costs and create significant value to the customer. So quite a unique model. Today, I'm going to cover an update on 3 areas: firstly, our store estate plans; secondly, our focus on improving customer service, both in stores and online; and then thirdly, our focus on increased investment in social and paid media. Go to the next slide to talk about our store estate. So clearly, we're trying to drive strong like-for-like sales growth. We're complementing that with our new store expansion plan. That helps give us improved store coverage across the country as well as simultaneously increasing our brand awareness. So since the launch of our strategy in summer 2024, we've actually opened 22 new stores and closed 4 stores that we did not believe were optimum for the future. In the first half of this year, we opened 6 new stores and then subsequently opened 4 new stores at the start of H2 over the last few weeks. These stores are in a blend of high-traffic regional shopping malls and a mixture of affluent high street locations where ProCook stores equally do well. The full year mature annual sales of the new stores this year are forecasted to be GBP 8 million and the additional center visitors or eyeballs, if you like, on the ProCook brand are about GBP 160 million, so in some very, very good locations. We're still targeting an average payback of around 2 years with an investment cost of GBP 250,000 to GBP 300,000 per store. So very consistent with what we've talked about before. Importantly, we're well underway with developing our pipeline for new stores for 2027 as well. I'd now like to talk about our new store format. The last store we opened in H1 in Birmingham Bullring was our new store format. Subsequently, the 4 stores opened in this half have also delivered the same new design package. We had 3 objectives in the new format. One was to improve the environment, make it more premium, softer, warmer, more contemporary. From an experience point of view, categories [indiscernible] in some of the fixturing was much more low profile, improving sight lines, given the ability for customers to browse more easily and equally interact with our colleagues when they needed to. Thirdly, an efficiency objective to have more products on the shop floor for customers to pick up and go, coupled with improvements in the backroom areas that resulted in -- have resulted in supply chain efficiencies that we're continuing to work through in these new stores. Here are a couple of visuals on 2 specific areas where we have focused our attentions on engagement with the customer, engagement with the products, talking about the features and benefits. Clearly, knives is always an assisted sale. But with the environment that you can see here, it's a far different look and feel to our existing stores. Materials used solid oak finish and [indiscernible] fiber birch for the shelving creating this lovely contemporary look. And we're seeing dramatic increases in sales intensity or densities in these 2 categories as customers enjoy interacting with colleagues, for example, with the coffee machine here, you can actually use the machine, it's all powered ready to go. Customers have given us very good positive comments on the new store environment, some existing customers, but also some new customers to ProCook as a brand. So we're very encouraged by the customer feedback, and we'll be using that to make any small minor tweaks as we go forward. So in summary, the new store format, we feel is a significant step forward in terms of customer experience. It does give an enhancing look and feel to the brand with a slightly more premium touch. And the inspiration we're trying to create around cooking and recipes and food rather than just buying functional products, we feel we've done a good job in moving that forward. The first 5 new format stores have encouraging results and customers have given us very positive feedback. We have some minor tweaks to make, but they are very minor, and we're very confident of this go-forward model. Just to be 100% clear on the payback and the improvements, we are planning to retrofit this design package into 2 to 3 existing stores. This will give us a pre and post opportunity to look at sales performance as well as customer reaction. In addition, we have some much older stores where we have the ability to retrofit and reuse fixtures in some of our very old stores in a very cost-effective manner. Next, shifting to customer service. Three key areas I want to talk about. One is our time and investment in our stores; secondly, on e-comm; and thirdly, how we're improving the customer experience to our customer service team. So starting with retail. We've had a very increased and renewed focus around service, and we've actually launched a new training program at the start of September around service and selling, where every store manager was taken through a full day refresher on service and selling. That program was then disseminated across all of the store colleagues out in the field. We've invested a lot of time and energy and hours in training around product knowledge. It's critical for us as a product expert and specialist that we have unprecedented knowledge amongst our colleagues. In Q2, not the whole of the first half, but in Q2, we saw an uptick in ATV in like-for-like stores of 1.5% and our conversion up 3.1%. We really believe we're starting to see the benefits of this investment of service and training paying off. Next, we introduced a new bonus incentive program for our stores, not just our store managers, but for all of our colleagues in our stores, reducing or taking away the cap on incentives, basically driving a much more service and selling mindset to increase sales across stores across the country. And we had a very healthy number of stores achieved bonus in Q2 of this year. We've got a much more surgical focus on KPIs. We've got 5 focused KPIs in the business in retail, driving average transaction value, conversion this time of year gift card sales, e-mail capture and payroll management. So very focused on driving clear accountability. In e-commerce, we're trying to, through continuous improvement, reduce any friction to customers. We've added product recommendations at basket, which is significantly increasing our ATV, reducing our cart abandonment. We've also introduced a new hub called the pantry with very useful tips, recipes and how-to guides for customers, giving again the inspiration around cooking. And as I said earlier, ATV on e-comm for the half was up 11% year-on-year. We're also seeing a big uptick on e-comm e-gift cards, which was something we really didn't play in last year, this time of year. Customer service, often overlooked, but it is a very important way to round out the brand experience. We have invested in more resources through this peak period, given the sort of challenges we faced last year as we went through Black Friday and Christmas. As a result, we've actually had a significant increase in calls answered and a dramatic reduction in customer service wait time. I'm also very pleased to share that our customer service team won a national award for Customer Service Team of the Year through people in retail, a very good job from that team. Moving to growing brand awareness and customer engagement, 3 key buckets. First, I've talked about the new store opening program and how that's exposing our brand to more customers. I'll talk now about social media and the effects and efforts we're putting in place to invest more heavily here. And then finally, I'll talk about the e-mail capture rate in our stores, where we've actually increased the total contactable e-mail database by 20% year-on-year to drive much better engagement in stores. We've made quite a significant investment in paid social marketing. As a result, we're seeing attributed revenue up over 150% in the first half of this year, whilst at the same time, reducing our cost of acquisition by 38%. This is a very tailored and surgical investment, and we're extending into test now into more channels as well. We continue to see our organic search improve in terms of both followers and engagement rate. In terms of content strategy, we've actually recruited and onboarded a new internal team that will create more content that has more personality and turn to it that we haven't had in the past. And it's fair to say that we're early days of that at the moment. We started to see content come through in November, but the team is now formed and they're moving at real pace. All of that has resulted in some very significant tick up in both customers acquired and active customers, as you can see from this historical trend going back over 5 years comparing the first half of each of those years. So we're in a very healthy position with both customers and active customers. With that, I'll hand back to Dan now to talk about the most recent trading period over the last 8 weeks.

Right. Thank you, Lee. So yes, we've had a fantastic trading performance during the first 8 weeks of the second half in what has been a slow market here in the U.K. with the impact of the November budget very much front of mind and hanging over consumers until the end of November. Our early Christmas and Black Friday campaigns have been expanded again this year and planned for meticulously by all of our teams across lots of different functions this year to ensure that they land really successfully. They've resonated really well with our expanded customer base. Therefore, recent trading performance has accelerated again, and we've delivered a very strong first 8 weeks of the third quarter, which incorporates that early part of Christmas trading and the Black Friday event. During these 8 weeks, our total revenue has grown by 28.4% with like-for-like revenue increasing again to 18.2%, up from 12.2% during quarter 2. Retail like-for-like of 9.8%, again, has accelerated and adding in the new stores takes that performance up to 26.9% and 4 new stores were opened before Black Friday as planned, as Lee mentioned. E-commerce like-for-like of 29%, again, steps on from Q2 reflects significant growth in traffic from that paid social activity this year and continued average order value increases. The Amazon revenues added -- Amazon revenue growth has added another 160 basis points year-on-year. During the last 8 weeks or so, we have continued to invest in new customer acquisition within the confines of our cost per acquisition targets and also in our seasonal promotional campaign to make the most of the inherent demand in the market at this time of year and to support longer-term growth through new customer acquisition. The performance, therefore, in the year-to-date, including the last 8 weeks detailed in this -- on this page, reinforces our confidence that we will deliver a strong full year performance and in line with market expectations.

Great. Thank you, Dan. So I'll just do a quick summary and leave us a few minutes for questions. So we're very confident, increasingly confident of delivering our medium-term ambition of 100 U.K. stores, GBP 100 million revenue and 10% operating profit. I think the H1 results are again encouraging, but also the acceleration over the last 8 weeks gives us more confidence. We're pleased to see record active customers, new customers. The seasonal product range we haven't really talked about today, which we will more so in our next update has resonated well with customers and our new stores continue to deliver well and land very effectively out of the gate. The improved margins that Dan talked about were anticipated and forecasted, which also gives us more confidence going into the future. So with that, I will close and open up to any questions. We have some questions on the screen here, which Dan can go through, and we'll share the questions with you before we obviously answer them.

Okay. Right. Thank you. The first question we have is, will the changes to business rates announced in the budget have any impact on the company? I can see there's 2 very similar questions actually. So I'll just touch on that first. We've done an early assessment, as you'd expect, of the impact of the budget announcements. I think the first thing to note is that it's significantly watered down from the original proposals that were released some time ago. Our assessment at this stage is that there is no material impact for our business at this point in time. Whilst there are -- there is a discount for smaller units, which we would typically utilize at lower ratable values. Unfortunately, the ratable value increases are such that, that discount is largely wiped out. So no material change for ProCook as a result of the rate announcement is the gist of it at this stage. The second question, perhaps a good one for you, Lee. With the like-for-like acceleration, what do you see as specifically driving this? What's changed in our business? And how sustainable do you see this trend?

Yes, great question. I think it's a combination of many, many factors. I'll start with retail, first of all. It's certainly there's no silver bullet on the improvement in retail. I think we have improved product availability. We're more focused on the right KPIs in our business. We've recruited some great new store managers as part of the new store opening program and the refresher on training through service and selling model that we've launched, all of those combine to give us the improvements in like-for-like. So I think there's still more work to do in all of those areas, but it is encouraging. In e-commerce, I think, we've obviously improved the website on an ongoing basis, as I talked about. But the investment in paid media, which has really stepped up over the last 3 to 4 months is creating a huge increase in number of site visits. So that's clearly helping combined with the ATV increase we've seen. So a lot of factors, as always with retail, there's no single thing. And it's about being really focused and driving discipline on execution going forward.

Thanks, Lee. Right. We have a question here about Amazon. So what share of sales do you anticipate Amazon reaching? And what's the strategy to manage any channel conflict with direct to consumer and the margin impact?

Yes. I mean we still maintain Amazon as a limited curated assortment, and we do not plan to change that. It's limited and curated for a reason. We want it to be a profitable channel. We also want it to be such that if you want certain products, whether it's our electricals or our more premium offers, you need to come to either a ProCook store or our own website. So we see it as a great opportunity to get the ProCook brand in front of more people and in more people's homes, and it's working well for us. So we're going to continue exactly the way we are approaching it, and we do not plan to deviate from that.

The next question is related to -- there's a couple related to new stores. So perhaps I'll cover those off in one go. The first is how much capital is required to expand to 100 new stores. And then there's a question about what do you expect the eventual total store footfall to be. So if I cover the first one, capital required to get to another 100 stores. Well, we're at 75 today. So assuming we go and do another 25 stores at up to GBP 300,000 each, then we're looking at another, what, GBP 7 million, GBP 8 million of investment in order to reach that goal. So that's the first point. That does depend on the store size and the complexity of work required to fit out the store. In terms of the eventual total store footprint, well, I think when we started the strategy, we were around about high 50s in terms of store numbers, 57 or so. And we said we felt we could get to 100 in the medium term. And that's our current goal. What we don't want to do and what we certainly do not see is us becoming in the hundreds of stores across the U.K. We know currently, there are opportunities to gap fill and to reduce drive times for customers to be able to actually get to our stores, but we don't see a position where we'll be on every high street across the U.K. So I think we will remain a store location where customers come to visit and our frequency of visit does not warrant every high street location. So 100 is the current target, and we'll keep that under review. Right. There's a question that...

Probably got time just one more. I'm just thinking...

Yes. I think we can pick up, let's just pick up the last one here, which is how is the changing and evolving tariff landscape impacting ProCook and does this -- what risks and opportunities does this present in '26?

Yes. We're not seeing any short-term or medium-term impact of the changing landscape on tariffs. I mean, clearly, a lot of our product -- vast majority of our product comes from the Far East, but we don't see any impact in terms of our cost price or relationships with our suppliers. So it's been quiet on that front, and we are actually focusing on really developing deeper and better partnerships with fewer suppliers in that region, which is playing well for us. And I think it's a strategy we had a year ago, and we continue with that going forward. Thank you. I think that's the last question we have time for. So thank you very much for all your questions and interest, and thank you for being on the call today.

Lee, Dan, thank you for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close this session as shall now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of ProCook Group plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning.