ProCook Group plc (PROC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon. Welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining us. My name is Lee Tappenden and I'm joined here with Dan Walden, our CFO. We're going to walk you through our FY '24 annual results from ProCook. But before we do that, I think we're going to give a bit of a context setting for everybody online, just a couple of slides of who ProCook is, then I'll go through some highlights from last year. Dan will cover in more detail some of the financials in detail, and then I'll finish off with some thoughts around the strategy for this year and the coming years ahead. So with that, Dan, I'll hand over to yourself.

Thanks, Lee. All right, good morning. Well, actually, good afternoon, everybody. Let's start with a quick introduction about ProCook. So, for those of you who are not familiar with the ProCook story, we are a retailer based in the U.K., offering an extensive range of high-quality, affordable kitchenware to customers throughout the U.K. We're based in Gloucester with around 600 colleagues in the U.K. And we currently have 58 stores, and we also trade through our own website, which is procook.co.uk. In the last 12 months, we served over 100 million active customers on our database, with around about 1.6 million customer transactions in the year. We've got a broad product range spanning everything you need for the kitchen, including tableware, cookware, knives, accessories and electrical items, many of which are award-winning, and our customers constantly give us strong feedback about the quality of these products. We have a significant growth opportunity in the U.K. The market is fragmented. Our market share remains very low, and we have brand awareness opportunity to scale our business in the years ahead. What makes ProCook special? So we have a unique specialist proposition, which Lee is going to talk about in a few moments' time. So I won't go into too much detail, but we have incredibly strong service levels, both in-store and online. We've received over 110,000 5-star reviews on Trustpilot, so we are excellent rated on Trustpilot. Our price advantage through our direct-sourced model allows us to offer pricing to customers, which is typically around 30% cheaper than a comparable product to the same quality from another brand. Our own brand product means that we source them ourselves direct from manufacturers where we design and then import the products without any middlemen that allows us to offer outstanding quality and gives us strong margins. We have a strong focus on sustainability. We're a B Corp and we believe in being a force for good and have a passionate team. We're certified as a great place to work 3 years in a row. A bit of background. ProCook was founded 28 years ago as a mail order business, originally in 1996. Our first store opened in 1999 in Mansfield and we're still there today. Our website launched in 2005 and we acquired a business called Steamer Trading, which also offered kitchenware throughout the U.K. in 2019, which added more national scale and retail footprint. We completed an IPO on the London Stock Exchange in 2021. And this year, this last year, we've welcomed Lee as our new CEO and we've developed a fresh vision and strategy for the years ahead. Also this year, in the last few months, we've expanded into electrical product ranges to complement our existing kitchenware offer. I'll hand back to Lee now.

Thanks, Dan. So, just as a quick introduction, I joined the business back in September of last year, and I thought it would be useful to give a summary of my first impressions over those few months before we get into the highlights from last year's business performance. So, I think, we have a really unique proposition at ProCook. As Dan mentioned earlier, we're 100% our own private brand, our own brand products, direct-sourced, which enables us to give very good value to our customers whilst maintaining strong margins. So very unique proposition. I've been incredibly impressed by the quality of our products consistently across all ranges. So maintaining that quality is incredibly important to us. I'll come back to the third point in a second. I spend a lot of time in our stores over the last few months and I believe we have a very strong, consistent level of customer service. It's something we're going to focus on even more going forward, but it really is a point of difference to a lot of other retailers that are more generalists. And I think over the last 2 or 3 years, the business has invested very wisely for the future in terms of infrastructure, primarily building a dedicated warehouse that services our whole business. Previously, we're in multiple buildings, so we have an opportunity to drive great efficiencies from that warehouse. The third point on there, which I'll touch on is that -- a challenge for us, is that we have very low brand awareness, less than 10% of customers in the U.K. unprompted know who ProCook is and only about 36% prompted. So there's an opportunity for us to get our brands more commonly known across the whole of the U.K. Some highlights from last year. We relaunched our website back in mid-September of last year. Fair to say we had some teething problems at the time. Over the coming weeks, we've managed to resolve those now and we're continually in sort of a continuous improvement of our website experience. But we've overcome those initial challenges back in September, October of last year. We did open 2 new stores last year, one in Trafford Centre and one in Watford, and we expanded the other store in Cheshire Oaks and has given us real confidence of how we can look at new store openings going forward. As Dan mentioned, we've expanded our product range into electricals. Phase 1 was last October with kettles and toasters and then in March this year another 12 products were added to our assortment. I'll talk later on about threat Phases 3 and 4 which are coming later this year. We did take the chance back in November of last year to reset our value proposition across a couple of major categories we play in, which would be cookware and tableware, reset our value proposition and we were rewarded with some very significant unit increases from that point onwards. So really important for us to make sure we stand behind our unbeatable value. We transitioned out of multiple sites from a distribution point of view to a single site, as I mentioned, and we've all relocated to our new Store Support Centre in Gloucester. Finally, from a strategic highlight, our leadership team is now fully formed. Over the last few months, we appointed a new e-commerce director, Marta Navas, in October. In May of this year, Claire Tait joined us as our Marketing Director and literally as of last week Laurie Haughton has joined us as our Commercial Director. So the leadership team at ProCook is now fully formed. In terms of some performance highlights, we continue to drive market share gains. This is in the last year has been driven primarily from our retail stores. And we've seen, as many of you may have read this morning, improving sales momentum through Q3, Q4 last year and even further more recently up until Q1 of this year which ended as recently as this past Sunday and Dan will go through some details in a second. We delivered strong margin recovery which was in line with our expectations and in line with what we shared previously. Our gross margin improved by 420 basis points year-on-year, which is unraveling some of the heightened freight costs that came out of post-COVID. We committed to working very focused on our cost and expense discipline and we have landed a GBP 3 million improvement which we shared at the start of last year. All of that being said meant that ProCook got back to profitability for the year, delivering profit before tax of plus GBP 1 million. And obviously that's then flowed through in terms of further cash generation, which I'm now going to hand over to Dan, who's going to talk a bit more detail around the financials.

Thanks, Lee. So you can see from this chart at the beginning on the left-hand side, you can see the significant year-on-year performance during the COVID period and then in Q1 FY '23 we saw the impacts of the Ukraine -- the Russian war in Ukraine and the following impact on consumer demand, discretionary spending in a high inflation environment, which clearly was significant and impacted our business performance. That said, we've retained the vast majority of sales that we have generated up to and before COVID and that followed 5 years of significant compound annual growth of around 30% for the 5 years preceding. Our performance has gradually improved over the last 5 quarters. You can see Q4 stepping up to Q1, to Q2 to Q3 and Q4 ending in positive territory. And as Lee said, for the year as a whole we delivered 1.7% growth, excluding the Amazon EU channels, which we exited at the end of last year, last financial year, so 2023, in order to focus on the core U.K. market. Retail has driven our growth in the last few months and in fact throughout the whole of last year with plus 2.8% like-for-like growth, and 8.7% growth when you add in the effects of the new stores that we opened in 2023 and 2024, and also the net effect of the 3 smaller garden center closures that took place in March last year as we decided to exit those stores. They were very small and not very profitable, so it seemed sensible for us to come out of those at the right time at the end of a lease break. I'll just touch on website performance, excuse me. Our website was disrupted last year by platform migration. We launched a new platform during summer last year and we had quite a significant impact on our ability to attract new customers onto the website through both search channels and our SEO channels, so paid search and SEO. We worked hard to resolve those after transitioning fully in mid-September, and by Black Friday we were largely on track with Google Shopping and we were recovering well for SEO channels and we've since gone on to deliver stronger performance, with conversions stepping up year-on-year. In terms of the income statement as a whole, Lee mentioned that we've returned to profit in 2024, with gross profit improving as we expected it to, and we've maintained strong cost discipline. In terms of gross margins, we're at 65.7% in FY '24, up 420 basis points, and this was driven primarily by the shipping impact, but also careful control of promotional marketing activity and therefore discounting. We've reined that back in, especially as we implemented the price cuts in November '23, with a more of a focus on everyday low price. Our operating costs increased by GBP 1.4 million year-on-year to GBP 39 million. There's a number of cost headwinds within this. Obviously there's the new and existing stores, or new stores in particular, that added cost into our cost base. We had quite a significant impact on payroll inflation, we've got 600 colleagues. We support the real living wage here in the U.K. We're proud to do that and we believe that everybody should have a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. So that's something we're committed to. And then as a result, our overall pay inflation was over 8% last year. We've also got the new Store Support Centre, which is larger and provides capacity for up to 5 -- 3 to 5x growth in the years ahead. And that is larger than the 2 previous sites that we occupied. So it added some extra operating costs. In terms of the website, whilst volumes declined, the impact of the disruption meant that we had to spend more to attract customers onto our website year-on-year. Those 2 effects, volume and increased marketing spend, broadly offset each other last year. We invested in some above the line marketing activity with a campaign with celebrity chef Matt Tebbutt, and that costs around GBP 600,000. Fortunately, the actions that we took around cost improvements in logistics within our cost base, our head count and our stores allowed us to mitigate some of these cost pressures. The last point at the bottom of this slide is around non-underlying items. So in 2023 we had a significant non-underlying impact related to share based payments, but also impairment charges in relation to the 2 pre-existing distribution centers that we exited, but also a GBP 4.4 million charge on our retail stores. We've taken no further impairments this year. We're happy with our retail estate, which is profitable and cash generative. And also the remaining GBP 0.3 million impact reflects the net disposal of those 2 previous leases and some SLT senior leadership team restructuring costs. Touching on free cash flow, we've had a good, disciplined year again around cash management, making sure that we invest carefully and we manage our working capital effectively. You can see the green bar in the middle of the chart, which shows a GBP 3.6 million net benefit from net working capital. And that's largely the result of reduction in inventory down to below GBP 10 million as we've optimized our stockpile, cleared through over stocks and managed our intake very carefully. Additionally, we've extended supplier terms with a number of key suppliers as we progress through the year. The second item I'll draw your attention to is in relation to CapEx. We've had a very disciplined approach to this in the last year, focusing on just 2 new store openings in Trafford Centre and in Watford, plus also a relocation of one of our top stores which gives it more space in the Cheshire Oaks outlet center. Overall free cash flow of GBP 2 million, which has helped us reduce our net debt from GBP 2.8 million down to GBP 0.7 million at the end of the financial year. I'll briefly touch on Q1 before handing back to Lee. We've delivered continued trading momentum during the last quarter with positive like-for-likes in both retail and e-commerce channels. Total growth increased by 5.6% and like-for-like was up 3.5% with 2.4% in retail, continuing the trend from last year and an acceleration of performance in e-commerce at 5.5% year-on-year. We continue to outperform the market and the opening of Bracknell new store, our first new store of FY '25 during April is helping us to accelerate growth.

Thanks, Dan. So let's move and shift gears to think about the future. One of my reflections on joining ProCook was that we have a great passion and great depth of knowledge around production, but equally we need to get and drive a more customer centricity in the organization. So we've refreshed our customer promise and it's a very simple slide to articulate what ProCook is all about. Our purpose is bringing joy to everyday cooking. And in doing that, we're going to have an unwavering focus on quality. As I said, we're very proud of our quality and we're not going to lose that credential. At the same time, we need to stay true to the original business model, which was unbeatable value of plus 30% below comparable products. We will double down even further on distinguishing ourselves through great customer service in store and a great customer experience online, which we're building on from the improvements made at the tail end of last year. And then finally, as Dan touched on, we want to be a responsible retailer. We are B Corp certified. We pay the real living wage to all of our colleagues and we just want to be a force for good and do the right thing as we drive our business forward. So we feel we're at a bit of an inflection point to drive growth. We've got momentum in the business going through over the last 3 quarters. We believe there's an opportunity to increase and expand our retail store footprint in the U.K. We have a great product offer at the moment, but more strength in a couple of key categories. So there's opportunity to improve our product offer, including seasonal and expansion of electricals we touched on earlier. The customer experience will be a real focus going forward and how do we address what is still quite a low brand awareness across the country? Supply chain is a focus for us going forward. It's a transformational project to drive efficiencies in our business and we're now able to take a different look at that with the single warehouse operation we have. So our plan for the future, 3 key numbers here for the medium term. One is to get to 100 stores in the U.K., driving GBP 100 million in sales revenue and operating a profit margin of 10%. We have 4 key strategic priorities that I'm just going to walk through briefly now to enable us to get to those numbers in the next coming medium term. Firstly, our store network. Currently at 58 stores today. And today, customers, we only cover 35% of the U.K. population within a 30-minute drive time to our stores. So there's a real challenge there, basically having enough stores in the U.K. to service and drive that awareness. We are committed to get to that 100 stores in the medium term and we have a plan for 10 store openings in the coming year with approximately 5 to 10 stores per year thereafter. We have a very good disciplined financial model around payback criteria of less than 2 years. And as we open up stores, we will continue to think about how we improve incrementally the look, feel and inspiration within our stores. As I said, our product offer is strong today, specifically in knives and cookware. We have quite good authority in both of those categories. And I mentioned that Laurie has joined us as Commercial Director only as of last week, and there's some work to be done around improving our clarity of assortment, pricing hierarchy. In addition, we will continue to drive expansion around categories where we under trade, such as tableware. We will look to increase our assortment online with extended choice. But also just to touch again on electricals, the picture you can see here is of a pizza oven that's due to launch in July, a multifunctional unit. It covers baking, air fry and pizza oven and multiple other functions as well. So we've got a whole wave coming in July of new products. And then towards the end of the year, we have a new series of very exciting coffee products coming as well. So a lot of expansion around newness. The final piece I would mention is our foray into seasonal has been quite low up until this point and we will launch a Christmas assortment for the first time this year and you'll see us going into summer next year with much more assortment and change specifically for the season. Customer experience is critical for us in our stores and we believe we've got a unique proposition today compared to a lot of other retailers. We look to double down on the customer experience online and there's a great deal of work going on now to improve navigation, the checkout experience, the onboarding of new customers. So a lot of ongoing continuous improvement online, which is really encouraging. And in stores, we've implemented new regional training managers with a real focus on improving our customer experience. And about 8 weeks ago, we launched a net promoter score program, so we can literally translate and measure customer experience every day in every store across the country and make sure that we understand exactly what customers are saying about their experience in our stores. Brand awareness is a major challenge for us, but also an opportunity. As we open up these 10 new stores that will naturally increase brand awareness. We get a great halo effect on e-commerce in those postal codes around the new store openings. That's an upside for us. We're also looking at additional marketplace channels where we can sell products. And a great deal of focus and progress has been made over the last couple of months around how do we think differently around social digital marketing. So you'll see a lot more coming from us, whether it be on Instagram, Facebook or TikTok, of how we talk to our customers. In our stores and online, I think our personality is something we're going to really see differently going forward. That'd be driven by a lot of the seasonal piece I talked about, but trying to add some warmth, color and inspiration to our stores going forward as well. In terms of driving efficiencies, supply chain transformation is a key work stream and we're looking at this slightly differently than before. We're looking at it end-to-end, all the way from stores through to warehouse. And rather than dealing in averages, we're looking to make sure that every store is treated appropriately. We have different sized stores, different volumes, different backroom capacities and so on. So a more tailored store delivery schedule with the goal of increasing availability in our stores whilst also reducing inventory. This will be a great win for us in terms of driving efficiencies in stores. We don't want our colleagues doing non-value add tasks when they could be actually engaging with customers. I said earlier about the great investment in the past in infrastructure. One area we've not necessarily focused on integrating in the past was technology and how it can help drive our business. This is a relatively low cost approach. This example here on the image is just a handheld terminal that will be going into all of our stores to help them manage their inventory in a more efficient way, more accurately and save them a great deal of time in the process. We'll also be looking at ways to improve our warehouse management system to make sure that we're actually getting the most efficient approach to the supply chain we can possibly deliver. An area I'm committed to and passionate about is making sure that ProCook is seen as a great place to work. In terms of training, one of the areas we're looking at in the field is driving regional training managers out in each of the 3 regions we have. I think it's critical that all our colleagues are fully trained on both customer service, but also product knowledge, which is critical to set us apart from a competition. And we've recently just launched some leadership development programs in the Store Support Centre for our mid-management teams as well. Finally, an area that ProCook have been outstanding in the past and we've continued to focus on, is being a force for good around sustainability and working within our local communities. We have a clear 8-point plan to reduce our carbon emissions to get to net zero by 2040. And a big part of that is working with a reduced number of suppliers who have a real clear sustainability agenda. Locally, we engage with a couple of charities, but a new charity for us this year is FoodCycle, which is national with the goal of reducing food waste and working locally within communities across the country. Handing back to Dan now a couple of financial summaries and I'll close this off at the end.

So we're just looking here at how the initiatives ladder up to our overall targets, just recapping 100 stores, GBP 100 million revenue and 10% operating profit margin over the medium term. We can see here, there's GBP 63 million on the left hand side of GBP 62.6 million that we've delivered this year in terms of sales. Adding 10 stores next year and 5 to 10 over the years ahead will allow us to increase our retail revenue by GBP 15 million to GBP 25 million over the medium term. We will drive like-for-like growth too, by improving our product offer, enhancing service in both channels and focusing on brand awareness and building the number of customers who visit our website and come to our stores. Additionally, the improvements in supply chain will contribute GBP 1 million to GBP 2 million, we expect through improved availability and therefore better conversion for customers. So that's how we see the journey sort of panning out over the medium term. If I focus more closely in on this current year briefly. So FY '25, we plan to open 10 new stores. We've got one already opened in Bracknell. We've got 4 more that are legally committed and 5 more progressing through legals at this stage. We expect low single-digit like-for-like revenue growth, primarily driven by e-commerce, which suffered the disruption last year. Our gross margin of 65.7% last year, we expect to remain pretty similar year-on-year. I know there's a question about Red Sea, which we'll touch on shortly, but we notwithstanding the pressures within the Red Sea, we are currently in a reasonably strong position. We've ordered stock earlier and we are reasonably confident that we can maintain similar gross profit margins. Channel costs inevitably will grow with volume. So as we add more stores and also as we deliver more volume, more sales through our website, we will see those costs increase. Over time we expect to leverage our fixed cost base as we progress through the medium term, allowing us to improve our operating profit margins. Non-underlying costs in the year ahead, we expect to be related to share-based payments, a bit of a legacy effect from the IPO. So this -- anniversary in November this year and that will be the end of those IPO share-based payments. So GBP 0.5 million expected this financial year. And just to recap for those who are wondering about our sales performance, we typically deliver around 40% of our full year sales within the first half, 60% coming in the second half, and quite a strong weighting of performance to that golden quarter during November and December, early January in particular. From a cash flow perspective, our working capital having brought down stock to a clean position, we will now need to reinvest in inventory as we scale our business upwards. We expect around GBP 1 million investment this year. From a CapEx perspective, as we open 10 new stores, we expect each new store to cost in the region of GBP 300,000 each. We typically open a new store in about 4 to 5 weeks and so we are able to generate a strong payback within the first 2 years. We do not expect any cash tax payments in FY '25. Indeed, we've got a deferred tax asset sat on the balance sheet that we expect will be partially utilized in the year ahead. And as we invest for growth with new store openings in particular this financial year, we do not currently anticipate any dividend payments in the FY '25 financial year.

Thanks, Dan. So just to summarize, before we go to -- we've got a couple of questions already. We'll take those after this. So we had seen great momentum coming out of last year. We believe the business has stabilized somewhat and we've returned to profitability last year, which is a great position to be in. I think we have much more clarity now around the strategic opportunities ahead of us. You'll see us move to becoming much more of a customer centric, performance driven business, enable us to drive that strong product offering we have and have a unique proposition compared to other retailers in a space that really nobody else is owning. I see us getting into an accelerated, profitable sales growth to get to those key 3 numbers that we've talked about a couple of times, which would be 100 stores in the U.K. driving GBP 100 million revenue at 10% operating profit margin in the medium term.

So we've got a few questions to come up. Maybe I'll take the first one, Dan, take the next one. So we've got a question here. I'll read them out, so everyone can understand what's been asked. The question comes from Boone K. Thank you, Boone. The question is, can you provide some commentary on the recent Red Sea shipping disruptions and the general shipping costs increases and the impact to ProCook in H1 so far? So, yes, I think the whole industry is experiencing some disruption. We certainly have seen some delays to our shipments. We have proactively got ahead of some of the key seasonal buys for the November, December period to protect that really important sales drive in 2 months. Are we seeing disruption in terms of cost? Yes, there has been inflation and I think we've done a very good job initially through the contract we have to minimize that effect and this is really a moving target at the moment. But we believe we've done all of the proactive planning that we could have done over the last 6 to 8 weeks to offset that. But this is very much a weekly discussion that's moving as we progress through the summer, and no one has really line of sight to when this will end, but we're managing it carefully.

I'll pick up this next question from Andrew M. Thank you, Andrew. What were the key considerations when selecting locations for the new stores, Trafford Centre and Watford, and the upsize relocation in Cheshire Oaks? And how have these new and relocated stores performed since their openings? Well, let's start with the new stores. So, Trafford Centre and Watford. Trafford Centre is one of the UK's largest and most popular regional shopping malls generates or it benefits from 35 million customers visiting the center each year with around 180 from memory stores within that center. It's a leisure destination. Customers go there and spend a good proportion of a day shopping, eating, there's bowling, there's cinemas and all sorts of activities, so it's the kind of destination where we do really well. We've picked a store that's in a great location on the ground floor, the busiest footfall part of the mall, where we can have a benefit from a high degree of passing footfall. The store is performing really well already, and it's early days because we've got no real presence around the Manchester area, but it's already meeting our -- actually exceeding our targets. We've already increased the targets for Trafford Centre store in the 6 months since it's opened. So we're really pleased with that one. Watford store is in the atria Centre in Central Watford. It's a key shopping district within the M25, a relatively affluent population, and it has lots of passing trade. There's a good mix of tenants within the center and customers passing through from train stations, [ strength ] stations to offices and so on. So again, great location to raise brand awareness. The store is performing really well so far. We're working hard to drive up local awareness and drive footfall in that area, which is a big focus for us. But again, we're happy with its performance in the early days. Cheshire Oaks is a store that we've been in for many years. It's an outlet center over to -- just to the west of Cheshire, Chester, I should say. It's incredibly popular. It's the UK's second outlet center after Bicester village, and we've been there for many years. I think this is our third, perhaps fourth location. The store we had before was 1,800 square foot. It was one of our top 5 stores. We've extended that now to 2,600 square foot. And that store, with a proportionate increase in space, is driving exactly the same proportionate increase in revenue in the early days, and we're still driving forwards on that and we think we'll do better. It's got a double frontage side return, so it's got great presence and visibility. And the team who run the store, [ generally ] the team who run the store do a fantastic job of serving customers, many of whom have known us for many years. So we're really pleased. It's now actually become our number one store in the country and continues to go from strength to strength.

Great. Thanks, Dan. I'll take the next one. This is from Gary B. How has the market reception been to the new small kitchen electrical range? And how have these products performed in terms of sales and customer feedback? So this is a really important category for us. It's incremental, it's a lot of newness. Customer reaction has been great to the point at which we are on some items chasing inventory to come in because they sold through better than we expected, which is a great situation to be in. They currently are about 5% of our total sales straight out of the gate. So in line with or slightly ahead of our expectations. And what I would say in terms of both the quality and value, if you look at some of the independent media and PR coverage, we've got great response from the likes of Good Housekeeping, BBC Good Food, which have given us rave reviews on multiple items that we've launched. And we're really excited about what's going to come for the balance of this year in Phase 3 and Phase 4.

Okay, I'll pick up another question from Boone, actually. Thank you, Boone. Can you provide guidance on the distribution of the 10 new expected store openings quarter by quarter? I can't give it precisely because at this stage the access dates and the opening dates are a little fluid. As I say, we've opened one. I expect we'll open a couple more in quarter 2 over summer. Hopefully, we'll get a few more open before peak. So let's say another 3 to 4 open before our peak trading period and then the balance will be in the final quarter of the year. So I expect reasonably well distributed throughout the financial year.

Okay. We've got 2 questions now from Tim J. I'll take the first one. Tim is asking, what do you expect for the online growth going forward? So as Dan suggested and got through the numbers last year, there was some challenging numbers last year, primarily driven by the movement and migration to the new sites. So we're lapping some softer numbers online. We would expect the current performance in Q1 to continue in positive like-for-like territory. And if anything, slightly accelerate as we lap some of those numbers for the balance of the year. So we're optimistic. I think the team are doing a great job of improving some of the challenges that came out of last summer. So we're optimistic going forward for our e-comm team and the results they're going to deliver.