The Foschini Group Limited (TFG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to TFG's FY '24 Annual Results Presentation. Today, we'll be covering an overview of what we've achieved both financially and from a strategy execution perspective. A review of our financial performance presented by our new Chief Financial Officer, Ralph Buddle, segmental performance reviews of our various businesses, together with an update on our strategic priorities and our outlook for the year ahead. We'll then take a 5-minute comfort break followed by a Q&A session. Starting with our overview for the year. The past year has been pretty brutal for the retail sector, both globally and domestically. All of our businesses were negatively impacted by the highest interest rates in the past 15 years, heavily indebted consumers, a soaring cost of living crisis and shipping delays and rate increases. These global conditions created an almost perfect storm for retail. In South Africa, specifically, our customers and our operations were severely impacted by load shedding and the consequent increase in unemployment. Fortunately, we were well positioned to react to and in many cases, preempt the worst of these challenges. We invested in price across all of our brands to support and retain our customer base. We also increased the scale and investment behind our value brands, both in South Africa and in Australia. We further increased our local quick response manufacturing, which helped us to mitigate the worst of the shipping and port delays. Our continued investment in backup power for our stores, DCs and critical infrastructure allowed us to operate with less load shedding disruption than otherwise would have been the case. We also continued to prioritize creating more than 2,300 jobs and workplace opportunities in Africa and the knowledge that we trade in an economy facing very high levels of unemployment. Aside from these more operational challenges, we also saw what may well be one of the biggest global seismic shifts in fashion and lifestyle retail with the recent emergence of the Chinese international pure players, most notably for now, Shein and Temu, together with the long anticipated launch of Amazon retail into South Africa. Fortunately, we've used the past couple of years to invest in a number of key strategic parts of our business to ensure that we can continue to compete and grow successfully despite the arrival, and I'll pick up on this in more detail during the presentation. We've also been working together with other leading clothing retailers in South Africa to ensure that these pure-play imports attract similar duties to the products that we import into the country and we've been very pleased by the recent response of SARS and Customs to help level the playing fields and expect far more stringent and effective enforcement from July onwards. Against this backdrop, I was very pleased that we were able to continue our customer growth momentum, continue to grow market share, achieve positive operating leverage and move our operating margin in the right direction. At a group level, we achieved an 8.9% increase in turnover, underpinned by really strong performance in South Africa. We recovered all of the gross margin we sacrificed in the first half of the year as we cleared excess inventories. And this, together with very disciplined cost control, allowed us to grow our group EBIT by 9.9% and increase our headline earnings per share to ZAR 9.707, which was some way ahead of what was expected. This allowed us to increase our final dividend by 33% and our full year dividend by 9.3% in line with our earnings growth to ZAR 3.50 per share. Pleasingly, we also substantially deleveraged our balance sheet, reducing our group net debt by more than 30% from ZAR 7.1 billion at the beginning of the period to ZAR 4.9 billion. Now this was very much a year of 2 halves. The first half of the year was all about the clearance of excess inventories, whilst the second half was much more about a deliberate and disciplined focus on growing full-price sales and driving gross margins. During the second half, we grew turnover by more muted 5.4%. But with the gross margin accretion and very disciplined cost control, we grew operating profits by 18.4% which was accompanied by a further reduction in inventory levels. At our interim results presentation, when we were facing a very uncertain second half environment, I made a commitment to consolidation for the balance of this year, which included sweating our recent investments and our balance sheet metrics. I'm very grateful for how quickly everybody in the business got behind these initiatives. And as a result of this collective effort, we significantly overachieved every one of these targets. We undertook to contain group CapEx spend to no more than 4% of turnover. We ended at 3.6%, while still investing meaningfully where we needed to. We undertook to reduce group inventory from ZAR 13.1 billion to no more than ZAR 12.3 billion, we came in at ZAR 11.6 billion. We undertook to reduce net debt from ZAR 7.1 billion to no more than ZAR 6.4 billion, we closed at ZAR 4.9 billion. Finally, we undertook to reduce our net debt-to-EBITDA from 1.2x to no more than 1x, and we ended at a very comfortable 0.76x. Despite both the tough trading environment and how tightly we managed the balance sheet, we still managed to produce a number of financial trading records and metrics. For TFG Africa, we produced record revenue of ZAR 43.1 billion, a record gross profit and a record EBIT of ZAR 4.2 billion. For TFG London, thanks to the currency hedge provided by geographic diversification, we produced record ZAR revenue of ZAR 7.6 billion as well as record gross margins on the back of higher direct-to-consumer sales, a record gross profit and record EBIT. For TFG Australia, which still had the toughest post-COVID base to trade against, we achieved record ZAR revenue but gave some of this up due to a combination of gross margins that were lower than the prior year peak and inflation impacted operating costs. Interestingly, despite all the various moving parts and the vagaries of exchange rates, our 2 international businesses contributed 28% of our group revenue and 29% of our group profits more and less in line with where they've been over the last couple of years, which is not unhelpful when you trade predominantly in a relatively volatile environment. In a low to no growth market, which is what South Africa has been for most of the last decade, it is all about market share. And we continue to outtrade the rest of the market and make further market share gains across all of our key categories, both through our organic business as well as through our recent strategic acquisitions. In the general apparel category, men's, women, kids and babies apparel, we continue to grow ahead of the rest of the RLC participants as highlighted by the purple line for pretty much the entire year other than in November, where we consciously chose not to participate fully in Black Friday, but to rather drive margin. In terms of our key categories, we grew our underweight share of the womenswear market from 11.6% to 12.1%. We grew our menswear market share from 26.1% to 27%. Our branded sneaker business grew to 36.6%. Following the rapid rollout of the Tapestry brands, which we acquired in the previous year, we grew our market share in homewares and furniture from 20.8% to 27.6%. Unfortunately, we aren't able to get reliable market share data for our jewelry category. However, we do estimate that between our 431 American Swiss, Sterns and Galaxy stores, we've at least a 60% market share, and we almost certainly grew ahead of what was actually a shrinking market during this year. Given the significance of these key categories and the different dynamics that affect each of them, I thought it would be useful to share more about the size, relative growth rates and some of the key dynamics influencing each of them. Our total TFG Africa revenue was ZAR 39.2 billion, up 10.4% on the prior year. Our Sports division grew by 14%, partly buoyed by the rollout of our new sneaker factory chain, where we've seen a gap in our overall sports offering. The demand for these big international brands remains very robust in South Africa despite higher product inflation. Our Menswear division grew by 8.7%, often already high market share, and we see the male consumer in South Africa continue to gravitate towards those brands with the highest brand equity in the market. Think G-Star, Fabiani, Markham and Relay. Our newly formed Value division grew a bit more slowly than other categories by 3.1% largely as a result of the closure of 33 Jet stores where we chose not to renew the leases. We thought we've done a relatively good rental deal when we acquired Jet. However, we still managed to improve these deals for almost all of our Jet stores when we renewed them this time around. I don't regret the 30 that we closed. We'll go back and find better locations, more appropriate boxes and better deals in the locations that we want to be in, whilst we invest further in some much-needed store revamps across their fleet and continue to improve their gross margins. As a reminder, pre-Jet and RFO, we were massively underweight in value with only Exact and our stable at the time. Our Womenswear division grew by a pleasing 8.9% in what has become an increasingly competitive category. But even more importantly, managed to achieve this top line growth whilst further improving their gross margins as they continue to exploit the advantages of our quick response manufacturing. Finally, our Specialty division, consisting of jewelry, homewares and furniture, grew by a pretty incredible 18%, very much against the trend in these categories, which are particularly sensitive to higher interest rates. And this was mainly on the back of the successful rollout of the Tapestry stores. Standing back from the trading results and the financial highlights for the year, which will be covered in more detail during the rest of this presentation, we also continue to make significant progress in delivering on our group BOLTS strategy, build out, optimize, leverage, transform and sustain. In terms of building out our store network, we added 272 new stores, 212 in Africa and 94 in London and Australia. And as you can see, we chose to allocate our capital, mainly into sports, menswear, Tapestry and value stores. We also don't just open more stores. We continued our very deliberate focus on optimizing the space we already have. And in doing so, continue to drive up by Africa trading densities, which you can see have improved markedly over the past 4 years and which improved by a further 10% in the current year. Yes, we optimized 100 stores in our Africa fleet through a combination of enlargements, revamped, relocations and space reductions. These efforts yielded a 10% growth in sales across this cohort and a 25% growth in net profit and this remains a key focus area for us going forward. We're also not afraid to close underperforming stores. And in the past year, we closed 106 stores in South Africa, which typically happens when the dynamics of trading nodes change or if we simply cannot reach acceptable terms with landlords. We also continue to build out our brand portfolio. We rapidly expanded our sneaker factory business to scale. We launched a trial of a new big and tall brand in Australia called AXL and CO. We scaled the Tapestry business and arguably, most excitingly, we entered into a franchise agreement to bring JD Sports to South Africa. JD Sports is unquestionably the leading sports lifestyle retailer in the world. For anyone who isn't familiar with them, they operate in 38 countries, produce more than GBP 10 billion in annual turnover and have a market capitalization in excess of GBP 6.7 billion. I'm extremely proud that JD Sports chose to partner with TFG in South Africa because of our unrivaled ecosystem as well as the relationships that we've built with them over a number of years. We plan to open a number of flagship stores over the next 6 months and have had pretty much every major landlord in South Africa approach us wanting us to bring JD Sports to the super regional and premium malls in the country. JD Sports will bring ranges of exclusive branded product to South Africa. This will further strengthen our relationship with the key global brands and it completes our unique sports and street offering in South Africa. As I mentioned, we also continued building out our recently acquired Tapestry brands, and they've continued to deliver exceptional performance in what is currently a very difficult market segment. Tapestry's turnover grew by 11.7%, gross profit by 13.6% and operating profit by 9.1% at a time when most homewares and furniture profits are going backwards. Building on the inherent strength of the individual brands, we opened 23 new Tapestry stores, grew the TFG credit contribution to 7.5% of their sales and started to expose them to our TFG rewards base. In terms of optimizing the O in BOLTS, we continue to make improvements in our supply chain and in particular, in our TFG-owned quick response Factories. We further scaled our units to 17.6 million units for the current year and remain well on track to reach at least 31 million units by FY '29 as we continue to realize significant upside through lower lead times and improved sales margins. Our owned TFG quick response units contribute just under 21% to our total South African units with a further 59% coming from other local suppliers and only 20.8% of our apparel units are imported from outside of SADC at this point. We're also now quickly expanding our localized quick response manufacturing in our homeware and furniture categories as well, especially in areas such as linen and sofas via our recently acquired Tapestry factories. This has allowed us to reduce our at-home sofa prices by an average of 15% at a time when customers are incredibly price-sensitive whilst at the same time improving gross margins by more than 6% and reducing inventory days by 64 days. In terms of leveraging our assets, we've continued to grow our TFG Rewards base in quite a remarkable fashion from 26.4 million South Africans to 37.6 million in 2024. That represents more than half of the South African population. 80% of our turnover now comes from TFG Rewards customers, and they swipe a card 5.5 times every second that we trade. 100% of our rewards marketing is now personalized, and this is getting more sophisticated by the month. Our average rewards basket size is 68% higher than our nonrewards customers. And as an aside, it was great to see the TFG Rewards program recently win both the Best Use of Technology and Loyalty Redefined Awards at the International Loyalty Awards against some of the biggest and best loyalty programs in the world. In terms of the T for transforming our BOLTS framework, I'm incredibly proud of how we've been able to grow Bash from what was an exciting idea into South Africa's leading online fashion and lifestyle brand within just 12 months of launch. Bash continues to dominate local web and app traffic. And to date, we've had more than 3.5 million app downloads. As you would expect with this sort of explosive growth, we've seen any number of incredible online and customer stats since the launch, but there are 4 that I'd like to call out today. Firstly, we've seen a 45% increase in first-time online shoppers, demonstrating how quickly online shopping is now evolving in South Africa. Secondly, 64% of our first-time shoppers were completely new. They've never shopped with us before, meaning that we're attracting new customers and not cannibalizing. Thirdly, we've achieved a 63% increase in full price online sales this year, which was very different to the majority of pure plays who rely on heavy discounting, which is an important differentiator when you want online to be profitable. And fourthly, we've seen an 83% increase in multi-brand orders since we replaced myTFGworld with Bash, highlighting the power of choice and the unrivaled range that TFG offers. Importantly, in a world that now expects at least same-day delivery and gratification, thanks in large part to our friends down the road at Shoprite. We rebranded the little last mile delivery company, Quench that we acquired 2 years ago into Bash delivery. This has allowed us to move from 0 TFG fulfilled orders to 8% during the past year, and we aim to scale this to approximately 25% of our online orders for the year ahead. This gives us significant advantages in terms of speed of delivery, customer experience and a not insubstantial 45% reduction in fulfillment cost per order. Now the net result of the rapid scaling of the Bash business, lower per order fulfillment costs, and the ongoing reduction of online marketing and overhead costs means that we're now well ahead of our original 3-year breakeven plan with Bash having either broken even or made a profit in 3 of the last 6 months. Given the Shein, Temu and Amazon onslaught, this couldn't have happened at a bit of time. Sustainability and ESG have many components. And whilst we're heavily invested in all of these elements, the S or Social element has particular relevance in a country like South Africa and is something that we've a real commitment to. I'm extremely proud to be able to share with everybody today, both internally and externally, that TFG has just achieved a Level 2 BEE rating placing us well ahead of all other major listed retailers whose scores range from Level 4 at best, all the way down to level 7, and you can see the different sectors that they sit in. This speaks to an objective measure of the massive contribution that TFG continues to make towards South Africa as a whole and all the people that we employ or deal with. That concludes my overview, and our new CFO, Ralph Buddle, will now take us through the financial results for the year.

Thank you, Anthony. Well, as you've heard from Anthony, the group performed well given very difficult trading conditions with inflation and interest rates remaining stubbornly high, but in the consumer under considerable pressure across all the territories in which we trade. And in South Africa, we face and continue to face the additional challenges of load shedding and port delays. As a result, our focus throughout the year has been on inventory and margin management, most notably here in South Africa with the first half's lower-margin clearance activity gave way to significant margin recovery in H2. We've also kept costs under tight control in all territories despite significant inflationary pressures. You'll note that finance costs are higher this year. That's a result of both higher average interest rates and the annualization effect of the Tapestry acquisition in the early part of last year. And that very determined focus on inventory management, a conservative approach to credit approval on new customer accounts and a significant reduction in capital expenditure all contributed to strong cash generation and therefore, a significantly strengthened balance sheet with a net debt ZAR 2.2 billion lower. We then reduced our dividend cover from 3 to 2.7x, and that means a 33% increase in the final dividend. So if we look at first at the group highlights and with the gross profit margin level on last year. That's some recovery with the group's gross profit margin at the half year stage, 210 basis points lower than it had been a year earlier in September 2022. Given that strong second half recovery, full year EBITDA grew 10.9%, with the group's EBIT margin increasing 10 basis points to 10.6%. HEPS growth because of the higher interest charge and a slightly higher effective tax rate finished level on last year at ZAR 9.707 per share. Again, a significant improvement in H2 given the run rate at the half year was 15.3% down on the prior year. Return on capital employed is at 14.6%, that's broadly in line with last year. And our key gearing ratio, net debt-to-EBITDA has improved significantly to 0.76x and that's well below last year's level of 1.2x. And the total dividend for the year is 9.4% higher in aggregate because of the slightly reduced cover ratio. If we now look at the group's performance on a segmental basis, firstly, turnover. With TFG Africa, we can see how the clearance activity drove sales growth in the first half, the 17.3% is 11.9%, If you exclude Tapestry that wasn't fully in the base. The second half has been tough, especially in Q4 with that 5.1% growth mostly coming from new stores. But -- and it's a big but, it's been a full margin. You can see the impacts of full price trading in the bottom graph for Africa, with gross profit still up 10.8% in the second half off a much improved inventory position. Then looking at our international businesses, it's important to note that both London and Australia are coming off very high COVID-19 recovery basis. In London, while the top line remained under pressure, they did manage growth in the second half in local currency. And Australia's top line contraction of that tough base narrowed a little. Again, when you look at it in the context of gross profit, you can see that both businesses have continued to protect margins. Then looking at EBIT, as we've indicated, inflation continues to put significant pressure on trading expenses. But across the group, our teams have worked tirelessly to protect the bottom line. I'm going to unpack the Africa performance shortly, but you can see significant operating leverage. That's partly the result of the strong performance from our Credit division with yields up and bad debts down but it's equally the result of excellent like-for-like store and general expense control. The challenge for London and Australia has been the same, even with the most vigilant cost control. In fact, trading expenses are lower than last year for Australia and grew just 2.2% in London. The pressure on the top line has meant operating leverage has been negative. Having said that, it's important to keep in mind that both segments continue to produce healthy record or near-record profits even in local currency despite the extremely challenging macros and contribute 1/3 of group profit before tax. On to the group balance sheet. And the highlight is that it's a far stronger balance sheet this year. Inventories have ended the year 11.6% lower. And in Africa, whilst the debtors book is 7.5% higher, the provision for bad debts is 1.3 percentage points lower, indicating the health of the book as Jane will show. Capital expenditure is ZAR 1.1 billion lower as we focused on fewer new stores, more on that later when I cover Africa. As I mentioned in the highlights, our work on inventory management and the lower capital spend generated ZAR 2.2 billion in cash, that's significantly improving our net debt-to-EBITDA ratio. Looking more closely at cash, you can see from the graph at the bottom of the page, how last year was all about investment with net debt increasing ZAR 6 billion. The graph at the top shows how this year has been one of consolidation. With cash generated from operations, almost ZAR 5 billion higher than last year, an investment spend, which last year included the Tapestry acquisition, ZAR 3 billion lower. As I mentioned, whilst we've reduced our dividend cover slightly, our cover at 2.75x demonstrates our firm commitment to investing in growth in both our existing businesses and brands as well as in pursuing other opportunities that add to our powerful customer, logistics, manufacturing and tech platform and we continue to work tirelessly to realize the significant benefits from the investments we've made in those areas. So on to TFG Africa. To recap, the load shedding experienced this time and last year left us with a significant amount of inventory to clear in the first half, and that flatted top line, but impacted margins. It was undoubtedly the right thing to do, though, setting us up really well for the second half with margins coming back incredibly strongly, 160 basis points higher than in the first half and with the full year gross margin even ending up slightly higher than last year. And importantly, we finished this year with a really clean stock position. And that, together with our local manufacturing and quick response capability protected us to some extent from both the port delays and the deteriorating trading conditions in the fourth quarter. Those conditions unfortunately haven't improved into the new financial year, where things remain incredibly tough. But at least this week, it's finally got very cold and very wet. So a significant improvement in EBIT, up 25% and a meaningful improvement in EBIT margin from 9.6% to 10.8%. And this slide shows how well the TFG Africa business has traded through a remarkable number of years. That seen the COVID-19 pandemic and macro conditions that have booked consumers under significant pressure. The business in South Africa has generated significant growth in revenues, gross profit and EBIT while investing in future growth in both existing and new product and customer segments, both organically and through the strategic investments of Jet and Tapestry. It's a testament to the resilience of not only our people to navigate through tough times, but to the diversified nature and robust platform that is the TFG Africa business model. Looking closer at trading expenses for Africa, as you can see, expenses have continued to fall as a percentage of sales with total expenses growing at a rate below sales, even though the impact of the annualization of last year's 337 new stores, depreciation and occupancy costs were higher as a result of those non-comp stores as well as the non-comp impact of the Tapestry and sneaker factory stores and the costs relating to the new Riverfields' DC, the benefits of which will only be realized next year and in the years to come. Like-for-like store expenses, though, were really well controlled and grew only 2.3%, well below inflation. Capital expenditure for Africa is ZAR 700 million lower with the reduced number of new stores this year. But with fewer openings, we've been working hard to rightsize the existing store portfolio with the full gamut of enlargements, revamps, relocations, reductions and closures. And this is what has led to the increase in trading densities as, Anthony, indicated earlier. We've also now largely completed spend on our new Riverfields' Distribution Center in Johannesburg. The new DC is a key enabler of both our new demand-led supply chain and our omnichannel strategies. I mentioned earlier how group inventories had reduced significantly. Well, for Africa, that's 11.8%. We finished the year with ZAR 900 million less stock from last year, down 7.7% on a like-for-like store basis. And despite investing almost ZAR 1 billion in new store inventory, including ZAR 700 million in Tapestry stock alone. And speaking of Tapestry, I'd like to end with this slide showing how well the newest members of the TFG family are doing. Firstly, Tapestry, despite a particularly difficult homeware environment has increased turnover and EBIT by 11.7% and 9.1%, respectively, as we continue to invest in store openings across the portfolio, and the Jet story continues. As Anthony mentioned, we're rightsizing and refreshing the store portfolio. We're confident that this business will generate significant growth and earnings above the ZAR 500 million already being earned for the TFG Africa -- for TFG Africa in the years ahead. And with that, over to Jane to take you through the TFG Africa Credit segment.

Thanks, Ralph, and it's great to have you on board as our new CFO. So how is the world of credit? Well, there is still huge demand for our store card, and we saw nearly 4 million customers apply for credit during the course of this last year. And this is without the biannual new account drives that we used to run in the past. Now given the good health of our credit book and the continued resilience of our customers, we've been cautiously been increasing our accept rates during this last financial year. Nothing too drastic. We had accept rates at 17% for H2 of the previous financial year, and it increased slightly during the first half to 17.4% and now to 18% in the second half. Our expectations are to take this up to circa 20% during this current financial year. Credit turnover is increasing, although conservatively, and it's up 2.8%, which is intentionally below our cash turnover growth. Our credit contribution stands at 25.4%. Growth in the account base is roughly flat and stands at 2.8 million customers. Whilst our customers are paying better than our expectations, these payments are still lower as a percentage of balance compared to last year, which means our gross book has grown 5.8%. So how are they performing? Well, at the end of this financial year, more customers are in a better buying position than they were at the end of last year. 81% of our customers are able to shop and this improved buying position is also reflected in better overdue ratios. I often get asked, well, why do our customers pay us so well when other organizations are reporting such tough times. Obviously, keeping conservative accept rates helps improve the quality of the book, but we've also successfully run a number of collections initiatives to improve our payments. For example, during the course of last year, we ran payment campaigns offering food vouchers, which we saw being hugely successful during hard lockdown in COVID, and we also launched our collection spot, [ Tenge ], which really seems to resonate with a certain segment of our customers instead of the traditional call center communications. On our interim results, I explained that our write-off growth in the second half of this year would decrease year-on-year, and it has. Our write-off growth is down to 15% from 35% in the first half of the year. We expect our write-off growth to continue to improve during this financial year. Improved buying position, overdue values and write-offs does mean you would expect to see this improvement in your provision ratio. And you do, it's down to 18.7% compared to our year-end position of 20%. Given we're slowly increasing our accept rates, our new accounts are typically higher risk, you would expect to see the provision ratio increase slightly during this financial year. So how is the EBIT? Well, the total EBIT for the Credit division at the financial year at ZAR 718 million is one of the highest EBITs we've ever recorded. This is due to a combination of being in a higher interest rate cycle and conservative accept rates controlling the quality of the book. As a result, our income growth of 21% exceeds our net bad debt growth of only 3%. Net bad debt is made up of write-offs, recoveries and provision movements, which are shown on the graph. Costs are well contained at 4%. And this is due to a number of initiatives such as our going green campaign, where we've proactively converted customers from printed statements to digital. But the EBIT of ZAR 718 million is a high EBIT and it does depend on what happens with the interest rates during the course of this year. Given we're further increasing our accept rates, which will increase the provision ratio, I wouldn't expect the EBIT to stay at this high level, all things being equal. However, remember, given credit is run as an enabler for the group, the aim is to drive turnover whilst optimizing group profits. And also just to add, as part of our financial services road map, we've embarked on the TFG TymeBank venture, which is well underway. Whilst it's too early to report on results, it does mean that in the future, the Financial Services division won't be as impacted due to changes in interest rates, and it diversifies our EBIT beyond the traditional store card. Thank you, and over to London.

Thanks very much, Jane. And hello from London, where Matt and I are ready to take you through our results for the year to March 2024. And with market conditions, which continue to be challenging for us, overall, we feel comfortable with the outcome and particularly taken together with the progress that we've made on the balance sheet side. So I'm going to hand you over to Matt.

Thank you, Justin, and good morning, everybody. I'm pleased to take you through the full year results for TFG London. We knew fiscal year '24 would be a challenging one with a backdrop of high inflation and high borrowing costs impacting the U.K. consumer. Despite those headwinds, the result for TFG London was a positive one. Key takeaways as follows: Sales for the period were 4% back on the year, however, not unexpected when we normalize for the pent-up demand post-COVID in last year's numbers and also the net store closures we realized as we continue to optimize our store portfolio. Like-for-like sales were against a record year last year. This year, like-for-like growth in our own channels was minus 1% and online, particularly strong, up plus 2%, driven by an increase in both average order value and conversion. We also increased the number of active customers shopping our brands in the last 12 months by 7%. Moving on to the next slide. The transformation in our business model over the last few years continues to bear fruit. While sales have reduced versus fiscal year '20, it has been a targeted replacement of noncore channels that has resulted in a higher quality core business. The benefit of increasing our own channel mix and the control we then have around customer, marketing and execution, helping drive an increase in profitability. Gross margin delivery this year was also strong at 3.5 percentage points above prior year. Both those factors have better positioned the business to absorb the impacts of challenging market conditions, and I'm very pleased we maintained our EBIT ratio in line with the record year delivered last year despite the softness in sales and the inflationary headwinds. As always, a big thank you to the TFG London team for all your efforts during the year to deliver a solid result. It does mark the second highest operating profit in TFG London's history. Looking now at the balance sheet. We also made great progress in further strengthening our position. We refinanced the capital structure in March with a new 3-year facility, increasing the facility size by 50% and bringing a new lender into our debt syndicate. A very strong result in the current market. We also successfully reduced our inventory balance following the excess buildup in stock at the end of fiscal year '23. Inventory is now at more normalized levels with around 75% of stock less than 6 months old, and the balance sheet remaining well provided. I'll now hand over to Justin to take us through the outlook.

Super. Thanks, Matt. So looking ahead, the outlook is -- remains uncertain. And we expect margin pressure to continue through elements like the Red Sea delays and through minimum wage increases, looking further down the profit and loss account. We're, however, confident that consumer confidence will come back. And with forecasted interest rates looking to drop in Q2 and Q3 this year, we see calmer inflation rates really driving that. Our focus continues to be on consumer acquisition and retention through our multichannel business model. And we've got really exciting plans to develop our U.S.A. business with a number of new stores in the pipeline, one of which opened at the end of last week. And further to that, we continue to assess the market opportunities that a weaker market in the U.K. presents to us and the opportunities to add new business into our TFG London platform. As always, a huge thank you to our resilient and talented team without who obviously these results are impossible. And finally, I'll hand over to Dean and Troy. Thank you.

Thanks Justin and Matt, and hello everyone. It's great to be back. Before I hand over to Troy for the financials, I've a brief recap. For those of you, who did hear our last update you might have the impression that Australia has performed poorly. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The recap is as follows: Last financial year in '22, '23, the Australian business had an one-off result. Australia emerged from COVID restrictions and we experienced an abnormal increase in retial demand. We referred to this as the post-COVID boom and the results for the Australian business was 5 years of growth in a single year. so 12 months ago, we said that our goal for the current financial year was to deliver our best-ever result excluding that '23 post-COVID boom. And we're pleased to say that this has been achieved. Now I'll hand over to Troy for the financials.

Thank you, Dean. Good morning, all. I'll provide a brief overview of the financial results for the year, followed by some commentary around performance and inventory management. Looking at revenue, it was down versus the prior year as expected. And the result was minus 5.7%, it was stronger than management had forecast. In terms of gross margin percent, we did very well to manage it, considering we needed to clear some excess opening stock. However, management of expenses was a highlight. To keep trading expenses below the prior year in an inflationary environment was an excellent result, and I'd like to thank the management team for their hard work and discipline. Our EBIT margin of 11.8% is above historical performance, and we're very happy with the full year EBIT result of $90.3 million. In terms of performance for the year, as just highlighted by Dean, we were able to deliver growth in FY '22 and achieved our second highest result ever. So it was a strong performance up against a one-off post-COVID boom year. FY '24 trade was significantly ahead of pre-COVID levels with comparative store sales growth up almost 30% versus 4 years ago. This is greater than a 6% like-for-like compound annual growth rate. And as highlighted at the half year, when the year commenced, we were seeing the impact of higher interest rates on discretionary spend, and we were prepared for the slowdown. Customers were still shopping, but looking for value and making the most of major sale events. We remain competitive in the market. So despite the subdued retail conditions, we traded successfully. In terms of inventory, at the half year, we spoke of actively reducing our opening balance as the market slowed at the end of FY '23. During the year, we successfully traded through stock, and we've ended in a very good position, both in terms of total balance and in mix. Inventory quality remains strong. Over 85% is current season and over 40% of that is core, which is product not linked specifically to a season. Overall, we remain very happy with the inventory balance and the level of provisioning. Back to you, Dean, for the outlook.

Thanks, Troy. As everyone is aware, the world economy has been challenging. And Australia is no exception. Household savings are down, consumer confidence is low, cost of living pressures remain with inflation persistently high. And whilst Australia is not technically in a recession, the growth rate is very low. 6 months ago, we were optimistic that the economy would have bottomed out by now. Unfortunately, this is not the case. And it feels as though it will be tougher for longer. However, there are some positives in the outlook. Firstly, from a business perspective, we've completed the trial of our new brand, AXL and CO, which if you recall, was a value menswear, big and tall brand. Based on the trial of 3 physical stores and e-commerce, we're now moving forward with this brand and looking for new store growth. This provides us with another opportunity for growth and complement our existing whole of business strategy, which simply put is to optimize our store network and enhance our digital capabilities. Secondly, from an economic perspective, this also highlights despite the doom and gloom, employment is reasonable. Unemployment remains low, which with our younger customer has always been a positive indicator for our business. The budget was favorable. This year, the government budget provided some tax relief and targeted support. Effective 1 July, all Australians will receive at least some benefit to assist in cost of living pressures. And finally, our brands remain competitively positioned. All of our brands are in the value or mid-market segments, which generally speaking, is well placed to compete in tougher markets. So in summary, whilst we expect the market will remain tougher for longer, we're well prepared and positioned to trade in this environment. And finally, I just want to thank Troy and the management team for their commitment over the last 12 months. The team certainly has ensured that we maximize the opportunities available in an otherwise extremely challenging market and we delivered an absolutely exceptional profit result. Thanks, Matt, and thanks to the team and back over to Anthony.

A really big thank you to Ralph, Jane, Justin, Matt, Dean and Troy for your presentations and for giving us all a valuable insight into the various parts of our business. I'll now touch briefly on what you can expect from strategy execution for the year ahead and our outlook for trade for the balance of the year. TFG has invested purposefully and significantly in building a unique retail ecosystem in South Africa. We've invested nearly ZAR 10 billion into our business over the past 2 years alone, and most of this investment is now completed as we look forward to extracting increasing value from these investments. We've an unrivaled fleet of brands and stores. We own by far the largest quick response clothing manufacturer in South Africa. We've more than doubled our home and value businesses. All of this is supported by our comprehensive TFG Rewards program and our conservatively managed, but important credit offerings. The most recent of our strategic investments to complete our retail ecosystem, creating a demand-led supply chain and scaling our Bash and omnichannel capabilities have largely completed their investment phases and are now moving into implementation. We've recently completed the build of our Phambili, mega-DC and Riverfields within budget and slightly ahead of schedule. And we're currently in the process of moving each of our apparel brands into the DC one at a time to minimize the risks inherent in operating such a large and sophisticated DC. We expect the new holdback capabilities to add at least an extra 1% in gross margin and to improve our in-store availability to a minimum of 95%. We're going to be consolidating our 13 DCs down to 7. And as of from September, we'll start our fine-pick operation in the DC to allow for a far more efficient and cost-effective centralized in-house online fulfillment. Our most recent trials support the achievement of these targets, but product availability already having moved from 85% to 92% and the resultant lost sales having reduced from 9% to 4%. TFG's vision is to create the most remarkable omnichannel experiences for our customers. And as Bash evolves from perfecting pure online e-commerce, we're in the process of achieving this vision. Having already placed the power and convenience of the Bash app in the hands of 3.5 million of our customers, we're about to place the power of the Bash store app into the hands of our 35,000 staff members in Africa. Let's take a look at where Bash is going. [Presentation]

I'm really looking forward to us taking this remarkable omnichannel experience to our customers. At a more granular level, we've clearly defined and carefully measured strategies for each of our individual brands and categories. This slide gives just a sense of a few of the more exciting things that we'll be pursuing across our different categories. For example, in Menswear, we'll be driving up the adoption of our quick response supply chain. In Womenswear, we'll continue to drive higher margins through quick response and build out our private label beauty business. In Sports, we'll be developing our JD Sports offering and expanding our larger footprint Totalsports stores in the super regional malls. In Value, we'll be revamping a number of our high-priority Jet stores and further consolidating our value supply base. In Specialty, we'll continue to roll out Tapestry stores and increase the verticalization of our furniture and sofa manufacturing. As always, there is a lot on the go TFG, but we've great teams and great people to deliver what we want to achieve. In terms of trading post the year-end, I think not surprising given the overall macro environment, and in particular, the half for longer interest rates as well as the recent elections in South Africa, trading has remained tough and is likely to do so for a while. For TFG Africa, our current sales are up against the period during which we were aggressively liquidating load shedding inventories until the end of August last year. Our current minus 2% sales growth for the first 2 months in Africa plays against last year's 13.7% promotionally led growth. However, as one would expect, our sales margin through till, which excludes any IFRS adjustments, continues to trend up strongly at 45.2% versus last year's 43.6%. Given the current environment, we naturally continue to hold expenses very tight. For both TFG London and TFG Australia, the half post-COVID bubble has reduced significantly, but it hasn't fully bottomed out as yet. And their consumers continue to face high interest rates and costs of living. However, gross selling margins in both geographies have continued to hold up well above last year's levels, which offers some mitigation for the softer sales. In summary, we expect trading conditions to remain constrained for a while, but look forward to them hopefully easing during the course of the year. In the meantime, we continue to manage the business carefully, and we'll continue to execute our group strategy. Thank you for the time today. We'll now break for 5 minutes and then come back for the Q&A. [Break]

Hi, everybody. Welcome back. I'm glad to see we've got quite a lot of questions. And between myself and the team, we'll do our best to answer them for you. The first question reads Amazon is nowhere. I'll come back to that. We also have Shein and recently Temu how much of a threat are these competitors to your business? And in South Africa what is TFG's strategy to be competitive given the low cost of production in Asia as an example? Look, I think we've been -- largely as a result of our international businesses, we've been acutely aware of the Chinese pure players expanding globally. I think Shein is probably the one on top of everybody's mind. If you followed their news recently, they're looking at ZAR 1 trillion plus IPO potentially in London. We certainly haven't underestimated them. We spent the last couple of years preparing for their arrival. I think if you look at the Shein operating model, it applies to Temu as well in South Africa, you're generally looking at about a 2-week delay from the time that you order a product until it comes into the country. Up until now, there has been a Customs practice around de minimis transactions, typically under ZAR 500,000 orders attracting a far lower import duty than any other retailer would pay for similar imported products from the rest of the world, which gave them a massive cost advantage. I think from a TFG perspective, we've built around making sure that we can fulfill customers' needs and once pretty much closer and close to a same-day basis, with our last mile delivery, we're going to be targeting a significant proportion of our total e-com fulfillment on a same-day basis going forward, dramatically different to having to delay that gratification for 10, 12, 14 days. Secondly, if you look at the vast majority of what Shein and Temu import, it's largely unbranded. South Africa, like many emerging markets, has a very high affinity towards brands. That's really important in the South African consumers minds and preference. That's something that they can't really compete with. And then I think probably the most important piece does come down to that de minimis regulation that's been in place. TFG, together with the other leading retailers in South Africa has been working very closely with SARS and Customs over the last 6 months to ensure that we're -- or that we do operate with level playing fields. There's been significantly better enforcement from SARS and Customs over the last couple of months. I think if you look at the commitments that we've received from SARS and Customs from the 1st of July, those parcels, that's below ZAR 500,000 that we're attracting a minimal duty will now be taxed at exactly the same rates, 45% plus VAT that we'd pay or any other retailer would pay on product they brought in. So again, we don't underestimate them. They're big global players, but we built, I think, a fairly significant moat in South Africa. That's also further supplemented by quick response manufacturing. One of the big advantages they've got is they've harnessed the Chinese factory output. They can respond very quickly. From a South African point of view, our quick response manufacturing puts us in a position where we can actually respond faster than any other local retailer, which also helps. And then just finally, I did say I'd come back to Amazon. I think the comment around Amazon is probably a little bit unfair. They did probably rush to launch in South Africa. Now, I know the initial offering wasn't great. However, if you look at Amazon globally, they undoubtedly know what they're doing. Interestingly, we actually traded the clothing space against Amazon pretty much from the time we acquired RAG in Australia. They'd entered the Australian market at exactly the same time we completed that transaction. So we've had 6 or 7 years of competing in the market pretty much head-to-head with them. We've tried listing our products on Amazon in Australia. We've subsequently taken them off. And I guess, you can read what you want into that, but the short version is they haven't hurt our business there at all and I suspect it will be relatively similar in South Africa. The next question, I like this one. Congratulations on the good results. Thank you. It's clear that your margins are up nicely from your inventory management initiatives, given the warmer weather to date, how is TFG positioned to deal with this inventory situation and markdown potential on its winter stock? Great question. I mean, I really get uncomfortable whenever I hear anybody blaming the weather in retail kind of sounds like you're in pharma, but the reality is genuinely, we've had virtually no winter in South Africa and frankly, in Australia as well until essentially a week ago. Having said that, we really don't have severe winters and either Australia or in South Africa, we plan our winter product and our heavy winter product write-down. We've been deemphasizing it kind of year-on-year probably for the last 5 or 6 years. We didn't go on early sale or promotion. We kind of assumed winter would come eventually. It has now, winter product sales over the last week have flown in South Africa, a similar response in South Africa-- in Australia as the cold weather hit. And I don't foresee at this point any winter overhang. I think we'll be pretty much all cleared by the time winter ends. The next question is how are you gaining share in the womenswear market when industry players or RLC members are suffering from the impact of Shein and Temu, especially in womenswear? Again a great question. If you go back to Shein, Shein's biggest target market is young female. They've moved into other sectors or segments, but young female is definitely their sweet spot. It's actually a very small part of our business. If you look at TFG Africa, essentially, that's the FIX. That's kind of less than 5% of our turnover. Again, it comes back to really that ability to respond quickly to fashion trends, that quick response manufacturing that we talk about so often. Nobody else has got that degree of reactivity in South Africa. It makes us much more relevant to our customer base, particularly a younger customer who is looking at what's available on Instagram or on Shein. And I think we -- yes, we continue to grow quite nicely in that space. It's not all about top line. I made the comment in the earlier presentation about margin. We've also seen significantly better margins, particularly in womenswear, and that's because we're taking less fashion risk with that quick response manufacturing. The next question was I'll repeat it because it ties into one of the previous ones. We're hearing that at the end of the May -- end of May and into June, sales have picked up in South Africa as winter set in. Absolutely right, but covered in the previous question. Interesting question online. Are you able to make online deliveries into time ship safely? Or is the growth coming more from affluent areas where security might be less of an issue? Funny, it's a really good question. We had a lot of questions from government, if I go back to COVID times around where we were delivering and it was very much around equity and does everybody have access or equal access to online shopping in South Africa. We pulled some great stats at that time, showing just in Cape Town, the number of deliveries -- online deliveries into Khayelitsha versus the Atlantic Seaboard and that scattered diagram was pretty much identical. And since then, if anything, it's probably increased more and more outside your more affluent areas, where we've had security issues in certain areas, what we found is if you've got delivery drivers who come from those communities, they generally understand the environment better. And fortunately, we've actually had very few incidents. But I don't think -- to answer the question more broadly, I don't think online shopping is going to be the preserve of the more affluent. And this is becoming more and more in every person, I think in South Africa as it has globally. The next question was around the de minimis customs rules. I've already answered that, but there's one more specific one here. What is the average price gap between the RedBat range and Shein products? How would this gap change if full customs were levied on these products? We've done a lot of analysis across different brands. I think with level playing fields on a branded -- hard brand equity product like RedBat, we'd probably be 10% to 12% above Shein, I'd imagine. And that's actually no problem. Redbat is the most popular youth brand in South Africa after Nike and Adi, potentially actually above Adi. And you can definitely charge higher prices where there's high brand equity. If you took a look at one of our own brands like the FIX, which I referenced previously, that's less of a big brand in South Africa. The prices -- our prices would be cheaper, and I think providing the customs duties are enforced pretty much at parity. And the next question is, what will differentiate JD Sports from your current sports offering? Will there be an overlap? And how do you think of cannibalization? It's a much easier question to answer. If you've seen a JD Sports store on any of your travels overseas, I made reference to the fact JD Sports is hands down the leading sports and lifestyle, and I emphasize the term lifestyle retailer in the world, a lot of street fashion, street culture. So within our stable, probably a lot closer to Sportscene and to Totalsports. Having said that, because of their size and just how important they're in the global market, they've got a unique relationship with the big global brands. If you think Nike, Adi, Puma, et cetera. Roughly 1/3 of the Nike, for example, that you'll find in a JD Sports store is exclusive. And they've actually got little tags on their shoes and the tag reads JD exclusive. They get Nike to make SMUs, special makeup units for them that are totally unique to JD and essentially designed by JD. We're going to be bringing a lot of that product into South Africa. Will there be some cannibalization? I'm sure there will absolutely be some. We've more than planned for that in all of our viabilities. And I think importantly, where we've, for example, a Sportscene and a JD Sports in the same shopping mall, we're being very conscious that we don't place the 2 next to each other and that we spread them out so that you do get a different customer coming in. Ralph, I think I'm going to pass this one to you. Inventory is down very nicely year-on-year, though your provision is up as a percentage. What's driving that?

Thanks, Anthony. Yes, so the provision is broadly flat. We're talking 20 basis points on 11%. So -- and I think we're quite comfortable with that position going into a period where we've had a late winter as well as the fact that the economy is pretty tough at the moment. So a comfortable position to be in.

Yes. Perfect, right answer. And then Ralph, I'll give you another one. Can you comment on ROCE? And where do you think ROCE will get to in the medium term?

Yes. So I think contextually, we've gone through a period of a tough macro over a number of years. I think there's also -- if you include the number with goodwill in, we bought businesses where the benefits tend to have a lag effect. So directionally, though, we've got a lot of work to do, both on the numerator where we're looking to take the benefits from all the investments we've been driving ahead of the curve, whether that's Bash or Riverfields, or in Jet the work we've done on Jet. And on the numerator -- on the denominator, we continue to hold that tight as well. So we believe, I think, to give a number in the medium term, we're talking about a high -- the high teens number would be a good number to work on in the 3 periods.

Yes. I think that's right, Ralph. I think, guys, the key message is we've made massive investments over the last couple of years. And I think if you just looked at even these 6 months results, a lot of that is, frankly, as a result of those prior investments. Question on Bash. Bash has been doing very well as we track the active app users and number of downloads. How does this translate into sales growth? Great question. Bash's sales growth for the year was actually up 44% off a really quite elevated base on last year. It's growing well ahead of the rest of the South African online market. It's becoming pretty significant. I think we always said that when Amazon arrived in South Africa and again, with a bit of foresight around Temu and Shein and others coming, all of these collectively were going to drive digital adoption. South Africa has been behind the rest of the world. But if you think about it today, between 60:60 for your groceries, between Bash for your clothing and everything else, between the pure plays, pretty much everybody is now online shopping one way or the other. And I'd expect that to be quite a big tailwind for Bash going forward. Question, when do you think trading improves in Australia and the U.K.? And when does the base ease up? I think you got to separate the U.K. and Australia, both came off hard basis, but in our U.K. business, we've -- it was referenced by Justin and Matt in their part of the presentation. We've been very consciously looking for more direct-to-consumer sales, direct channels to the consumer. We've been deemphasizing department store sales, department stores have continued to struggle globally, but particularly in the U.K. That's given us a very nice gross margin advantage, and we continue to really push that model. Having said that, where Australia and the U.K. are absolutely similar. And as a matter of fact, it's pretty much global. The consumer is probably more or less at the trough in terms of where they've been from an interest rate point of view and a cost of living perspective. I think globally, everybody expected rates to come off a bit quicker than they've. Inflation has been sticky. But I think global consensus is that you're starting to see rates being eased in Europe and Canada. It's likely that the second half of the year starts to become a bit easier. Australia doesn't have the department store element that I've just spoken about. So I think, again, the answer for Australia is going to be very much around the macro interest rates and cost of living. Africa margin, is the second half margin sustainable into FY '25? I'm sure much of the answer depends on full price sales, our inventory levels well managed in the event of soft demand. Ralph, you've kind of answered most of it, but this one kind of pulls, I guess, income statement and balance sheet together, if you just want to give a...

Yes. So I think we'd like to think that the margin is sustainable, all things being equal. As you said, it's all the things I mentioned before. We've to see how the macro looks and -- but that would -- we'd hope to make sure that we could sustain the performance we've seen in the second half through into 2025.

Okay. And there's another question that has just come and that kind of goes to the same -- almost the same point, but it's a little bit more specific. How do you see operating margins progress in TFG Africa specifically?

So again, in terms of kind of a medium-term view, I think 14% is a number that we've always talked to. It's in our thinking, it's in our business plan. So 14% is really the medium-term target we're setting ourselves as an operating profit margin.

Right. Another different question this time. Do you believe you've held your market share or gained market share post year-end trading? I guess it's 2 months very difficult to know. We haven't seen any real day to come out over that period. Nobody else has published results. But I think the market has been relatively subdued for everybody. The things that continue to drive our results more than anything are, frankly, the brand equity behind each of our brands. None of that's diminished. I'd imagine that there's been little change since year-end. Next question, what is the store growth or closure outlook for TFG London, for example, the future -- the concessions in the U.K.? I think I've partly answered that already. When we bought Phase Eight originally, we were -- about 70% revenue came through third-party channels. That's currently sitting at about 40% for TFG London. The intention is to still derisk that further. We certainly don't want it to go away, but comfortable level is probably below 30%. So there's still some work to be done in terms of more direct-to-consumer, less department stores. Acquisitions, surprised it took that long for that one to come up, which areas, regions potential size? Look, I think we've built up platform businesses in each one of our territories, Africa, the U.K. and Australia, centralized back offices and head offices. All of our operations are multi-brand. And every one of them will benefit from adding more store EBITDA on to what should be a relatively fixed head office cost base. We continue to evaluate opportunities across all 3 geographies. They're not mutually exclusive. The chances are they'd probably be self-funded in each territory just given the relative size of each of the businesses. And we probably wouldn't need to group fund unless we found something of a significantly larger scale. That said, we've been very cautious around M&A activity over the last year or so. People were generally coming off those high COVID basis, exactly the same as our U.K. and Australian operations. Multiples, we elevated. Turnover and profits were elevated to expectations. Around price, we elevated. Those have all started to come off quite sharply as the world's got tougher, so more likely to be doing something going forward than we were over the last 6 to 12 months. Ralph, what is the CapEx forecast for the year ahead?

So I think this year, a little bit more than this year, as you would expect because this year was a normalized base. So we're talking probably 1.7 in Africa and just over ZAR 2 billion, ZAR 2.2 billion, perhaps ZAR 2.2 billion, ZAR 2.3 billion for the group.

Perfect. Thank you. I guess this is the reverse of that question. Can you comment more on the outlook for closures in TFG Africa over the next 2 years? And elaborate on my comment around the changing dynamics of the market for new stores? As I said, we only closed stores really as a last resort. The benefit of having 24, 25 brands in South Africa, in particular, is that if a particular brand has lost relevance in a particular shopping node, we can often substitute one of our other more applicable brands and we do that all the time, kind of almost regardless of what the lease is, when you've got 25 brands, landlords are generally happy to have at least some of our stable and pretty much any location. So we really only close when a location has become kind of unplayable. That generally happens, if there's a safety issue. There are certain areas in South Africa that have almost become no-go areas over the last couple of years. They're limited in number, but there are certain areas where shoppers don't feel safe going anymore. I think a much greater emphasis is not on closing stores, it's really on space optimization that I touched on. We're finding, I think, particularly as online starts to kick, as we've got more one stock stores if we fulfill from, we generally don't need as bigger boxes as we had in the past. That's a general statement that obviously doesn't apply in all instances, but it allows us to use existing space more effectively to cut in other brands, which, again, I gave that example of the 10% uplift on the 100 stores, we've played with over the past year and a 25% profit uplift. That optimization piece is really important, and we want to continue to drive up densities. The next question is, will Tapestry be launching on Bash or will they continue on their own separate sites? They'll be joining Bash. We've just had so many other, I guess, low-hanging fruit to deal with in the meantime on Bash that -- and on Tapestry. I mean, the Tapestry story over the last year has been phenomenal. It's really been around the introduction of credit and the rollout of their stores. The next leg up for them will be transferring on to Bash. Jane, there is a question for you. You thought you were going to get away easily. What should we think about the debtors book growth into the new financial year given sticky interest growth?

Yes. So we've assumed that interest rates are going to decrease during the course of this financial year, but we've also increased the accept rates. So the way we're thinking about the debtors book growth right now is we're assuming it's going to be low single-digit growth and probably around about that 3%, 4% is how we're thinking it's going to be in this financial year.

Perfect, Jane. Thank you. Then there's a question around what is the pipeline for new store rollouts look like over the next 3 years? The pipeline, I don't think has really changed. We previously spoke about 700 potential new stores. I think we got that number up to 1,000. Of the 1,000, we've opened roughly 200. So there's -- in broad terms, probably a pipeline of between 700 and 1,000 stores. The rate at which we'll choose to open those stores, I think it's kind of harder to you to call that at the moment. I think we do want to see rates come down, consumers to be a little bit in a better position than they've been over the last 12 months before we roll aggressively. I think we're still going to be fairly considered in terms of our store opening over the next 12 months. And then the final question, any plans to do share buybacks? This is something that we do consider all the time. We debate this at a Board level and at a Finance Committee level. I think there generally is an order of priority. We've got so many both organic and inorganic opportunities that deliver very significant returns that those are generally the #1 priority in terms of capital allocation. Ralph gave a high-level overview of Tapestry and Jet. And you can see from those just how successful they've been. Having said that, when the share price is down, it's share buybacks, certainly do occupy attention. But it's really -- it's always a balancing act really between own opportunities, buybacks then ultimately, dividends. The dividend piece, you can pay a special dividend or upper dividend. The reality is the current shareholder benefits once and that money is gone. So I think philosophically, share buybacks have probably got a higher priority than kind of hiking a dividend, but if they really do come up against internal opportunities. Thanks again to Jane and to Ralph for answering the questions and presenting, to our entire team and to everybody who dialed in for the call today. I was glad that we managed to get through the main part of the presentation under an hour and all the best for the rest of the day and the weekend. Thank you.