Hi, good morning, everyone. I'll keep it brief as usual. Joining me, Carol, Neil, and John. It's tough out there, but we're dealing with it. We're managing the business, managing the costs. The opportunity is still global, the opportunity is still massive. We're in control of more or less everything internal. It's external factors change. In COVID, they were changing daily. Now, they change weekly. We deal with it. We're still very happy with where we are, and we move forward. Over to John. Take it easy. Thanks.
Thanks, Mahmud. Good morning, everyone. I'm gonna give you an update this morning on our group and performance in the first half, some of the headwinds facing the sector over the last six months, and how we are navigating these headwinds while also investing selectively in key strategic enablers. In the current environment, what we're seeing are transient inflationary headwinds from the pandemic and macroeconomic backdrop, combining with dampened customer demand, which creating a tough operating environment for the fashion e-commerce sector. During this phase, our focus remains on optimizing operational performance and improving profitability through efficiencies and cost savings. We also continue to invest selectively where we see clear opportunities to ensure we are well-placed for growth into the future, so that the group can rebound strongly as headwinds ease. Macro factors continue to create headwinds for the business.
On this slide, we've highlighted how these have trended over the past six months. Our international delivery proposition is largely unchanged, particularly in key markets such as the U.S., where it is still taking 8-10 days to deliver a parcel versus 3-5 days previously. We have, however, seen some small improvements, for example, in Australia, where delivery times are returning to pre-pandemic levels, and we have seen some improvements in demand. This gives us confidence in our other international geographies that as the delivery proposition improves, top-line momentum will return, especially in the U.S. when we open our new distribution center.
Freight costs remain elevated, and while we haven't seen any material improvement over the last six months, there are signs of improvements in the rate, which gives us confidence that while we expect these costs to remain elevated in the near term, over the medium term, we expect them to trend downwards more normalized levels. As has been well publicized for all industries, inflationary cost pressures have built throughout the period, and this is set to continue in the second half, given the upwards pressure on energy prices alone, for example. FX pressures are building as well, particularly within sourcing markets, given recent sterling weakness, particularly against the dollar. Return rates remain elevated when compared to pre-pandemic levels, but have been broadly flat through Q1 and Q2, and we haven't seen a negative impact on performance since the introduction of charging for returns.
As expected, the annualization of these higher rates has had an impact in the first half of the year on net demand, but is expected to be more comparable in the second half. Finally, demand and consumer sentiment have softened as consumers themselves face increased cost pressures and uncertainty. In the first half, we reported GBP 882 million of revenue, down 10% year-over-year, impacted by the headwinds we've just discussed, but up 56% over the last three years. In the UK, we've seen significant market share gains over the last three years, coupled with a very strong growth in the UK, outperforming both the online and total market. Our international revenues are up 35% over three years, notwithstanding the negative impact that extended delays to delivery times have had.
We have 19 million active customers, which has increased by 6 million people over the last three years. As Carol will touch on later, a large part of these shop with multiple brands, driving greater share of wallet as part of our multi-brand strategy. We clearly have a lot of opportunity with a target addressable market of almost 500 million people across key markets in the U.K., U.S., and Europe. Since the start of the pandemic, there has been a clear structural shift to online. From this chart, we can clearly see that the online players have seen industry-leading growth over the past three years. Emerging from the pandemic, we're in the group of structural winners and stand out as one of the leaders in terms of growth. As a group, we want to lead the fashion e-commerce market.
We've made great progress on this in the last few years, significantly extending our reach with 65 million followers across our social media channels. With our global offering focused on offering our customers choice and accessibility. In turn, we have converted this following into 19 million unique active customers across all of our brands. As a result of our multi-brand strategy, we have a huge target addressable market of almost half a billion people across key markets. That was just 100 million a few years ago. With our acquisitions opening up multiple opportunities for growth, and we have barely scratched the surface yet. In our view, the potential opportunity for the group is significant, and we view our performance in the UK, our largest market, as the clearest sign that we can successfully capitalize on this on a global scale.
This is evidenced most clearly in the UK, where we have materially grown our market share online from 5.6% to 8.4%. Where we see that the right price, product, and proposition has really resonated with customers across all age groups and demographics. There are several macro factors affecting both demand and costs, which we have discussed on previous slides. Here, I want to focus on the action we are taking on the factors within our control to improve performance, and we have a clear plan in place to achieve this. Firstly, within our supply chain, we have a diverse sourcing base across the UK, Europe, North Africa, and the Far East. The embedded relationships we have with our suppliers give us the flexibility to move sourcing closer to home markets and away from areas facing delays and higher costs, such as China.
Year on year, we've increased our nearshore sourcing mix by 10 percentage points. This improves lead times, increases flexibility, and helps reduce exposure to volatile inbound freight costs, which is vital against an uncertain consumer backdrop. We are also managing our inventory better, tightening our stock holding to give greater flexibility to react to changes in demand. We have seen a significant reduction in inventory units in the first half, with approximately 15% fewer units at the end of August versus the end of February. We're also focused on cost management and not planning for high levels of growth near term. We are working hard to operate with a tight control on overheads while ensuring investments can support the brands and key projects that will enable future growth as conditions normalize in the future.
We're extremely confident in the longer-term outlook for the group and continue to invest selectively to capture future growth opportunities and drive self-help measures to improve profitability. Through automation, we are increasing efficiencies and will be driving material cost savings across our distribution network. We continue to add wholesale partnerships, including Very in the period, with these now spanning the U.K., Europe, and the Middle East, with many more planned. We're in the process of opening a U.S. distribution center, driving a step change in our delivery proposition, and enabling us to offer next-day delivery to key U.S. markets. We continue to build up our digital department store, Debenhams, with a focus on signing new third-party brands and building out the best choice for our customers.
In our Sheffield site, we will have invested GBP 125 million to build a state-of-the-art facility, which will lead to greater efficiencies and increased capacity going forward. The first phase has successfully gone live this month, with the second phase early next year adding more capacity and throughput capabilities. We're delighted that this state-of-the-art facility will drive best-in-class efficiencies with a five-fold increase in pick rate anticipated, driving savings as we progress through the rest of the year and towards our targeted five-year payback on the project. In mid 2023, we expect the first phase of our U.S. distribution center to go live. The site is over 1 million sq ft, and all of the U.S. and North American market will be serviced from here.
We already have a significant business in the U.S. with strong sales, customer numbers, and a huge following across our social media channels. The DC's opening will transform proposition, allowing for next-day delivery across key states with 95% of the U.S. covered within three days compared to 10 days we currently face. This is a real game changer for us, giving a service in a key market that is comparable to leading industry players and ensures our product, price, and proposition can be as strong as possible. We have a large wholesale footprint internationally, and one of our focus areas is expanding these partnerships, allowing us to enter new markets and increase brand awareness within those markets, while also offering a new route to market for the group's brands.
In turn, our wholesale partners get access to our short lead time model and our diverse and established range of suppliers. With our sales portal allowing them to select from the same ranges that our teams are buying and benefit from our short lead time model. We have partnerships with Alshaya in the Middle East, About You in Europe, and Very in the UK, and are working on partnership opportunities across new geographies to continue to expand this offering. Moving on to Debenhams, our digital department store. Firstly, a look at the marketplace model more generally, which offers us another opportunity to take share of wallet. What we see is that marketplaces offer consumers around 50x the choice and deliver around 2x the rate of growth of pure-play offerings while accounting for around 60% of online revenues.
This is clearly a great opportunity and a huge and rapidly growing market to tap into. Putting that into context for Debenhams, our philosophy is about more partners, more brands, and more products. By refining and speeding up the onboarding process and investing in the back-end technology to enable us to do that, we are able to rapidly onboard new partners to increase the choice available to customers and drive growth. We are creating a platform to showcase brands to our ever-growing community of customers and working closely with partners to ensure their needs are at the forefront of the service we are offering. We're really pleased with the progress made to date on Debenhams and remain on track to replicate its historic online sales over the medium term and remain excited about the opportunity it has through its high margin, capital light, stockless model.
The key to the success of Debenhams will be in creating value for our partners who can leverage off Debenhams' 98% brand awareness. What we have seen to date is that for our own brands, 80% of customers transacting through Debenhams are purchasing from our brands for the first time and also for those customers, we are seeing a 35% increase in spend. For our brands, the customer shopping via Debenhams are complementary, and this is driving a material increase in spend per customer. Coupling these stats with the very high recognition of Debenhams means we are well-positioned to create value for our brand partners on the Debenhams platform. We have recently launched PLT MarketPlace, a resale platform, further extending our target addressable market and working towards improving sustainability across the fashion cycle.
The site allows the resale of any brand, and for PLT shoppers, they will be able to link their accounts and resell PLT product in a streamlined way. It's a great opportunity to enter a rapidly growing market and also increase the lifespan of garments. We already have over 100,000 people signed up and downloaded the app in the first few weeks, and we've reached number two in the App Store for downloads. To summarize, our focus for the near term remains on optimizing performance and improving profitability. Looking ahead, we will continue to invest selectively where we see clear opportunities for future growth. These include wholesale, automation, our international distribution network, and Debenhams, our digital department store.
While we recognize the challenging trading environment that we face today, our confidence in the group's prospects are unchanged, and we remain very confident in the long-term outlook as we continue to offer customers unrivaled choice, inclusive ranges, and great value pricing, giving them even more reasons to shop with you. Thank you, and I'll now hand you over to Neil Catto.
Thank you, John. Good morning, everybody. I'm now going to move on to the financial review of the first half. As we go through, I'm also going to share some insight into our customer engagement KPIs, as well as the impacts of cost headwinds on regional profitability and why we believe we can improve that profitability in the future. Finally, I'm going to take a look at guidance and the outlook for the rest of the year. Let's start with the income statement. Sales declined 10%, impacted by higher levels of returns compared with abnormally low levels last year. We saw continued softness internationally as a result of a challenged service proposition, and we also saw softening consumer demand in the UK in the second quarter as a result of the cost of living challenges that consumers are facing.
Performance was softer in the U.K. towards the end of the period in August, in line with what we've seen elsewhere in the industry. Nonetheless, we've delivered 56% growth in sales over the past three years, meaning we've consolidated our already significant market share and we've extended our total addressable market as we've acquired new brands over the last few years. Gross margin was 52.5%, down 210 basis points year-on-year, and that was a really resilient performance given the effects of annualizing significant input cost headwinds, and it was a step up from what we achieved in the second half of the previous financial year.
We're optimistic that those cost headwinds I've just mentioned will ease in the future, and we're already starting to see some reductions in freight rates, although they still remain significantly elevated comared with pre-pandemic levels. Adjusted EBITDA was GBP 35.5 million as operating costs have been significantly impacted by rising inflation as well as the continued elevation of international shipping costs. Within adjusting items, you'll see that we incurred GBP 2.3 million of exceptional costs in relation to the automation project in Sheffield. That's just gone live with the balance of those adjusting items made up by share-based payments and amortization of acquired intangibles. We have a really strong liquidity position with GBP 315 million of cash at the period end and negligible net debt.
That stood at GBP 10 million at the half year following years of significant levels of investment in capital expenditure, including approximately GBP 100 million in the last 18 months that we've spent on freehold assets, and those are unencumbered. Looking at the results by geographical segment, we've included 3-year comparatives to demonstrate the tremendous growth that we've seen over that longer term period. Despite the current macro landscape, in the UK, gross demand remained healthier, plus 12% year-on-year, but sales declined 4% in the first half as a result of returns rates being up significantly on the prior year levels and ahead of pre-pandemic levels. Over the last three years, we've made huge progress in the UK market and gained significant market share.
Sales have increased 73% over the three-year period, and that's well ahead of the overall clothing market and also well ahead of the online segment of the market. In the U.S., sales decreased 29% year on year. Again, over three years, we've seen a 60% rise. Our U.S. performance has been hampered by the change to our delivery proposition, but with the distribution center due to go live in mid-2023, we fully believe that the overall quality of our U.S. product offering will return the segment to growth, enabling us to capture the huge long-term opportunity ahead. With the challenges that we've experienced due to extended shipping times, we've seen lower levels of growth on the three-year comparison across Europe and the rest of the world regions. Those segments are now benefiting from establishing wholesale partnerships.
You can see that from a more stable performance in the first half. We've seen some recent improvements in Australia as delivery times have shortened, and that gives us a lot of cause for optimism about the future of our international business. Looking at our customer engagement KPIs, we had over 19.1 million unique active customers in the 12 months to the end of August 2022. That's a significantly larger active customer base compared to three years ago. It's actually 47% higher in terms of the absolute number of active customers. Over the last year, we've seen further improvements in the key customer metrics, meaning our customers are still spending more with our brands, and we're continuing to capture a greater share of wallet. We've also recently introduced a charge for returns across some of our brands and territories.
To date, we've not seen a negative impact of this on our engagement KPIs, with performance consistent for the brands that have introduced the charge compared with those that haven't. Most of you should recognize this slide showing our cohorts of customers by vintage and levels of revenue retention. At a group level, we can see that the exceptional customer acquisition achieved in the early stages of the pandemic in FY 20 has yielded some churn of customers in the last 12 months, with revenue retention at 73%, down slightly from 78% last year. Group revenue retention continues to be adversely affected by those international service challenges that I've just mentioned.
As service levels improve, that gives us an opportunity to drive material improvements in this metric in the future as we look to replicate in the overseas markets, the strong retention rates that we're seeing in the UK. Those are shown on the chart on the right-hand side of this slide. In the UK, our cohorts really illustrate the strength of our business model when we're able to deliver across price, product, and all aspects of the customer proposition. Our UK cohorts have delivered revenue retention of 91%. However, we've seen some softening here as a result of high returns rates, which are ahead of pre-pandemic levels, and the more recent reduction in consumer confidence that the market's currently experiencing.
Onto operating costs, and this slide shows that our total overheads decreased 3% year-on-year, with a GBP 22 million decrease in marketing spend through targeted efficiencies driving an improvement as a percentage of net sales. Distribution costs have dropped GBP 11 million due to lower volumes. These are offset by investments into brand acquisitions to support the group's long-term growth ambitions, as well as those cost pressures due to macroeconomic conditions in areas such as wages and salaries, insurance costs, business rates, and energy costs, which together have seen other admin costs increase 14% year-on-year. Looking ahead, we're planning for lower operating costs in the second half of the year, and that reflects the following.
Firstly, our major automation project in Sheffield, that will drive major distribution efficiencies with that targeted five-year payback of the GBP 125 million investment. The automation is now live, and volumes handled by it are going to ramp up in the coming weeks and months. We remain focused on continuing the marketing efficiency gains seen in the first half of the year and also reducing our fixed cost base to better leverage those central costs and exit the year with a leaner cost base. Going into more detail on costs, we've drawn out the full impact of external pressures on our contribution margin for our value fashion brands over the last three years and looked at this both in the UK and for the international business as well. In this analysis, we're defining contribution margin as gross profit margin, less carriage costs, and warehouse operating costs.
From this, we can see over the last three years, the contribution margin has declined by 7 percentage points. That's been driven in three areas, and we believe these pressures can be alleviated both through self-help in the short term as well as when headwinds ease in the medium term. Firstly, on gross margin, we've seen persistent inbound cost pressures impact all regions. We do expect these headwinds to ease in time. Today, we're starting to see some reductions in freight rates, although they still remain significantly elevated, but that gives us some cause for optimism.
In addition, we're live with a new customs warehousing solution which offers a duty saving for some of the brands going into the second half of the year. Secondly, elevated carriage costs have had a significant adverse impact on international distribution costs, as seen on the right-hand side of the graphic here. The U.S. distribution center opening next year offers a huge opportunity to alleviate that impact. Finally, elevated returns rates and labor and energy cost inflation have added additional distribution costs. The investment in automation, the GBP 125 million Sheffield project, will drive material reductions in future reporting periods. That you can see while contribution margin has been impacted globally by external factors, internally driven developments as well as the easing of those pressures, offers clear upside and gives us confidence that margins will rebuild over time.
Looking at cash flow, we ended the half with GBP 10 million of net debt compared to GBP 1 million net cash at the end of February. Free cash flow totaled GBP 2.7 million, following GBP 38.7 million of capital expenditure on the platform and infrastructure. At the end of the half, we're in a really strong position with significant liquidity and GBP 315 million of cash in the bank, with a new GBP 325 million revolving credit facility. That gives us significant financial headroom and flexibility, and supports our selective investment program for long-term growth. Moving on to guidance.
As a result of the impact that the macroeconomic and consumer backdrop has had on the group's revenues in the first half, if these conditions continue, our expectation is for a similar rate of revenue declines to persist over the remainder of the financial year. However, the agility of our business model means that we'll be able to take advantage if factors impacting performance reduce, in particular around customer sentiment and those international delivery time frames. At the EBITDA level, increases in inflation driven costs, as well as the resultant operational deleverage from lower sales, mean that the adjusted EBITDA margins are likely to be in the region of 3% to 5%, and that compares to the previously guided range of 4% to 7%. Other financial guidance is outlined on this slide for completeness and is largely unchanged.
Quickly to sum up, we have a robust financial and operating model. Right now, we're focused on improving profitability and financial performance through self-help in the delivery of key projects, achieving cost efficiencies and hopefully the easing of those macroeconomic headwinds. With that, I'll now hand over to Carol. Thank you.
Thank you, Neil, and good morning, everyone. This morning I'm going to cover off our brands, so you can see some of our recent activity. I'm gonna look at our ever-evolving approach to marketing with a spotlight on our most recent big name collaboration and the sustainability conversation we've been having. Finally, our customers, the styles they love, the price points for all demographics. Let's start with a video highlighting what our 14 boohoo group and our now 14 destinations have been up to the last six months.
I won't when you give me shock waves.
We are delighted to have partnered with Kourtney Kardashian Barker for the two exclusive collections over a 12-month period. This is more about more than just putting a celebrity face to a boohoo collection. It's a start of an upfront and very frank conversation with our customers on the whole topic of shopping more sustainably for the future. As a value fashion brand, we feel very well positioned to have a large reach with our customers. If you combine this with Kourtney's huge reach of circa 200 million followers, we've started to change the conversation from the misconceptions that value brands cannot address sustainable practices within their business. Our initial findings were our customers were confused what sustainability and fashion meant to them.
Overall, the view was only expensive brands can be sustainable, and that part of this special project is to address some of these misconceptions. We've started to open up the conversation with our customers and made a six-part documentary series. We've highlighted our journey across all our social channels, which will be featuring experts from the industry, talking very frankly about the whole fashion industry. Hope for Justice and Global Fashion Exchange are two to name just a few. The first collection launched at New York Fashion Week. You saw a little bit of that in the video, I hope. It's made up of 46 unique pieces, priced between GBP 6 and GBP 75. As part of this collection, we've included vintage pre-loved pieces, and this is the first time for the boohoo brand to actually sell vintage on the website.
We've used recycled materials and recycled packaging throughout the range. Shopping sustainably has sat at the very heart of the design process, with many of the garments that are featured within the collection have multiple ways to wear them. For example, there's a long puffer coat. It has a zip in the middle. It zips off into a short puffer jacket. Then there's a dress that can be restyled as a top and arms removed and bottoms removed and so on. The whole point is really putting design into the collection that garments can be worn many times, kept in your wardrobe for many years to come. Certainly been one of the fastest moving collections, and many, many of the pieces were sold out within 48 hours.
That's just, you know, Kourtney's reach of her talking about the collection, actually, how that really got that moving. Of course, we've received some criticism for teaming up with Kourtney and the accusations of greenwashing. But we've been very, very comfortable to face into these. We truly believe we're taking the right steps in the right direction with our customer, alongside our customer on this journey. Overall, the response from our customers on social channels has been overwhelmingly positive, as well as it has been with the external partners that we consulted with. I said earlier, with over 200 million followers, her reach is almost unmatched. Affordable fashion is the biggest driver in the sector, at around 85% of fashion sales. Through this collaboration, we hope to start to generate progress for the industry that we work in.
John has also talked about the PrettyLittleThing resale website, and that's encouraging customers to resell and reuse their garments to further their lifetime. This is part of our strategy where we think more broadly about what the fashion industry might look like for us in the future, and we're really proud to be part of this conversation with Kourtney and, more broadly, the sustainability conversation with our customers. Moving on to the next slide. We have a huge target addressable audience of around 500 million people, and we're proud to be making fashion accessible, not only in terms of price, but also in terms of sizing. We have our inclusive ranges across all our brands, which are really well received by our customers and enable them to access the latest styles, trends, whether that be in petite, tall or plus sizes.
Having multiple brands targeted at each age group at different price points has allowed us to generate significant traction for each brand, which allows us to take greater share of wallets through our multi-brand strategy. Across the group, we now have 19 million unique shoppers, and of these, 4.2 million of them shop across multiple brands. In turn, these shoppers generate three times more spend than a single brand shopper, proving that each brand has its own defined identity. As a group, we benefit from significantly increased levels of spend. Collaborations are part and parcel of Boohoo's DNA, and we love working with all the big brand names around the globe and across our brands. Just recently, iconic, I'm sure you all remember Liz Hurley from back in the day and that dress she wore, but we've launched a coat range with her.
Here you'll see it just priced at GBP 355. At Dorothy Perkins, we unveiled a collection with Kimberley Walsh just this week, and you'll see it priced at GBP 99. At our value price point, we have the puffer coat I mentioned earlier, from the Kourtney collection, just at GBP 25. It sold out instantly. Obviously, a great price point. It gave our customers the opportunity to shop by price and sustainably. The broad range really emphasizes our ability to cater to all price points and styles, and we have an incredible collection of coats for this season across our portfolio. Just onto our focus areas. John has covered off the economic environment, so I'm going to talk about what we're doing to ensure we address these needs for our customers.
We're reinforcing value across our brands and adapting the focus of marketing to highlight the value to each of our customers.
We're looking at price and accessibility for customers, ensuring we're offering the best price and making sure the latest trends are accessible to all. Just to add some color. In our value brands, 80% of new products this season will be priced at GBP 25 and under. We're also emphasizing our value credentials at a time when our customers are feeling the pressure, which we believe is the right thing to do. We're adapting the product mix to meet ever-changing demands and a challenging time for our customers, focused on offering the right product, the right price, and allowing us to react to an ever-changing environment. Just to summarize this morning, the wider environment remains challenging. Uncertainty around customer demand is out there.
We're adapting our business in light of this, and in the near term, are focusing on improving our operational performance, optimizing our supply chain, tightening our stock management, and bringing our overheads down. We remain confident in the future prospects for the business, which is why we're also selectively investing where we see clear opportunities for future growth. Thank you, and now I'll take back to the team for questions.
Hi, morning. John Stevenson at Peel Hunt. You've seen a, I suppose, a relatively sharp drop-off in UK activity over summer. Can you give some more color on the exit rate and how that's progressing into autumn? Second question, just on the group contribution margins. Like, you know, given the movement in sea freight, US warehouse, your automation projects, are you confident that the contribution margin will start to improve again next year? And then finally, can you just quote what the wholesale mix is at the moment?
Hi, John. Thank you. I suppose, on the UK exit rate, we've seen it being fairly similar trading conditions in September to August. We've seen glimpses of improvements, but it's been quite a strange period into September as well. Actually more recently, I think the most interesting part is gonna be the payday week this week. 'Cause it's been hard to get much of a read on September. Last few days look better than they did earlier in the month, but we had the bank holiday and so on. A strange month. Contribution margins, like we said in the presentation, we expect those to come back as the market conditions generally normalize. We're starting to see that.
We're starting to see things get back to more normality in terms of delivery times to Australia, for example, that we called out. Therefore, as that happens, I think supply and demand factors are gonna normalize. It's gonna take time, but prices are gonna come down as well, costs are gonna improve. We're seeing it on the inbound side as well, which is in our cost of sales line, that we've just started to see shipping costs come down, but they're still way above pre-pandemic levels. They're heading in the right direction, which is a major step forward from where we were 12 months ago. The wholesale mix is still very small. It's going to plan, and we're actually developing the wholesale business.
It's generating EBITDA, but it's still less than 5% of sales.
Brilliant. Just on the contribution margin point, I mean, I guess you've got enough visibility on your initiatives and what's happening on freight to give you confidence in direction of travel for next year.
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. It's difficult to see that visibility next year, are the costs gonna come down straight away? You know, it's heading in the right direction, as we said, so we're starting to get visibility, whereas we've had none so far.
Yeah. If you look at raw materials, if it's similar on raw materials, they've kinda hit the spike, they're coming back down. If you take cotton as an example, it's still 84% more expensive than two years ago. Yeah, while they're going in the right direction, they're still very elevated versus where they were previously.
Thank you.
Morning, all. Michael Benedict from Berenberg. I have three as well, please. Firstly, could you remind us of the economics of the PLT marketplace, how you're monetizing that? Secondly, are you able to quantify the improvement you've seen in Australia as your lead times have normalized in terms of sales momentum? And then lastly, just in terms of the US DC, how much disruption do you think is likely or indeed possible when that DC comes live, please? Thanks.
In terms of, I'll take the US DC first of all. In terms of disruption, you know, we currently today we run four warehouses. We've just gone live in automation in Sheffield, and we've automated Burnley. You know, we're quite good at getting DCs up and running. Obviously, you've got to put stock in that DC. We'll start with one of the smaller brands from a risk point of view, just to make sure everything is working. We've got a good plan in place and all set to go live in early summer next year, I would say. And we'll continue to monitor that. I'm not seeing disruption really in terms of what happens there.
Obviously, trading in products and we start to see a little bit more in terms of trend of what U.S. customers prefer versus Europe and how we trade into that. A good plan there and I'm confident in terms of how we improve that. On the Australia improvement, we have been seeing that, and that's really what we've seen is that lead times, delivery proposition has sort of got back to around 4-ish days, sort of what it was like pre-pandemic. Costs haven't reduced, so the costs are still hugely elevated. That's without us actually telling the customer about that. We've seen automatically that trend going in the right direction.
We'll start marketing as we go forward and get more confidence around that supply route being consistent on those delivery times. We'll begin to push that as we go forward. In terms of economics and PLT
At the moment, we're providing that facility for people to sell products on the marketplace for free. Going forward, it will be like a Depop type of a economic model. At the moment, we're just happy to see customers using it, and they can sell product, get the money in the bank and spend it on PLT or the rest of the group websites. We're concentrating on building that facility up, and it's not cannibalizing the rest of the business. I think quite the opposite. It's enabling people to get cash from their old items and spend them on new items. It looks promising so far, but very early days.
To get 100,000 signups, I think in the first few weeks, I think is really promising in terms of the future of that site.
Hi. Simon Irwin from Credit Suisse here. Few things. Firstly, can you just talk a little bit about kind of nearshoring, your supply chain, what percentage we're at now? What kind of inflation are you seeing in nearshore inflation? I mean, how much of that is kind of semi-dollarized anyway through raw materials, et cetera? Secondly, can you just talk a little bit more about the net sales retention outside of the UK? I mean, it looks as though it's well under 50%, so what does that do to your customer acquisition costs and the profitability outside of the UK generally? Thirdly, just can you talk a little bit about the RCF, how much of that's drawn down at the moment and what the covenants are?
If I take the nearshoring, I'll take that one. We've roughly got about 60% at the minute across all of the brands in that category currently. We've said kind of in our presentations we wanna remain very flexible and very agile. If you look at China at the moment, China is back to its lead times that it was pre-peak last year but still is a very expensive freight charge. Actually, China is as quick now as what it was 12, 15 months ago. It's a moving feast, I would say, and we'll just remain flexible. Really it's all about agility, keeping the stock low and being able to chase into it. Roughly 60% is nearshoring. The good thing with the nearshoring is that it's all truck.
Whether it's North Africa, whether it's Turkey, et cetera, it's all coming by truck, so you don't have that expensive sea freight or air freight. Yeah, we'll continue to be adaptable, you know, because kinda Asian markets can be just as quick as the nearshoring when everything is working efficiently.
What kind of cost pressure are you seeing in nearshore sourcing?
I think, look, everybody is facing the same. Energy is applicable to every country, as an example. You know, everybody is facing energy, everybody's facing labor, as an example. Everybody is facing fuel. You know, I don't think anywhere in the world you are, nobody's kind of out of the kind of inflationary pressure. That's something just we continue to evolve on. You know, where can we buy yarn in bulk? Where can we buy fabric in bulk? How can we actually make our efficiencies and our margins and our costs as best as possible?
Thanks.
On net sales retention outside of the U.K., obviously you can tell from the difference between the U.K. cohorts and the international and the group cohorts, that the international retention is nothing like the levels that we've seen overall, which is 73%, and we've seen 90% in the U.K. Yeah, you're in the right ballpark there. That's everything that we have been talking about, the challenging service proposition. That can change quite quickly, and we're starting to see that in Australia. We're starting to see that in some European markets. Actually, we're starting to see that clear correlation between the delivery times and that starting to pick up. That's where we've got that optimism there.
Particularly the way we haven't seen that, we've seen the deterioration is in the U.S. At the same time, we saw quite good levels of behavior early on in the pandemic in the U.S., and then it's just we're still 60% above where we were three years ago when that happened. Once we've got the fast service to the U.S., which it looks like it's gonna be when we've got the warehouse mid next year, then we'll start to see those cohorts come through very strongly. We'll also start to see the new customer acquisition come through very strongly as well, where we can do the marketing and acquire new customers in a huge market.
Whereas at the moment, we can't acquire those customers 'cause people don't want to wait the 8-10 days that we quote.
Then the RCF, that's fully drawn, as you can see at the moment. Where we've been is we want the most flexibility in our, to give us the most agility around our working capital, our CapEx and, with the projects that we've got going on. Now, what we've, yeah, you'll notice from the financials is that our working capital position has improved quite markedly in the first half compared to the second half of last year. Again, that gives us optimism. Whether we can optimize the position on the RCF later in the year, I think that looks like it makes sense to try and save some interest costs. At the moment, we want maximum flexibility in what's a difficult time.
Actually, now we're seeing, with global supply chains getting back to more normal levels, things speeding up, we're able to get more visibility of demand, and we can manage our inventory much better. The working capital has become a negative cycle again, which is really promising. That enables us to still make the investments that we want selectively in expanding the US business, investing in Sheffield. At the same time, we've not got that drag from working capital that we saw last year.
Thank you very much.
Hi, Charlie.
Thank you. It's Charlie Muir-Sands from BNP Paribas Exane. Three questions for me, please. Firstly, you mentioned new WMS will allow you to save on duty. I wondered if you could sort of share what that figure would be, you estimate on an annualized basis. Secondly, when you open the US, I appreciate obviously it's gonna be a phased ramp up, but how should we be thinking about contribution margins changing? I guess obviously you're gonna save significantly on the delivery costs not flying across Atlantic, but will there be import duty costs? Will the warehouse be as efficient? You know, how are those things gonna sort of net out versus the service model today?
Thirdly, just on Debenhams, you obviously talked about aiming to ramp up the range as best as possible, as quickly as possible. Could you just call out what are some of the most pleasing new signings you've had in terms of third-party brands you've brought on board in the last six months? Thank you.
You wanna take the Debenhams one, and then I'll take the other one.
Yeah. The phase one of Debenhams was really to get all of the brands that were in Debenhams onto the website. We pretty much have all of that now outside one or two on prestige beauty that we're still working with. In terms of new brands, a good example of onboarding in the last 120 days, we've onboarded 150 brands onto Debenhams. Some of those are well-known UK high street footwear retailers, as an example. Really, the opportunity is about the thousands of brands that we can onboard onto Debenhams. We still have work to do on the tech, on the platform, in terms of the customer journey, et cetera.
Everything we've seen so far, on Debenhams, and we gave some of the stats in my presentation in terms of what we've just seen on the boohoo brands in terms of what it's done for us, is very pleasing. We've said again, in the medium term, we do remain confident of getting back what was the previous Debenhams online sales, you know, which was a pretty decent level or whatever. Lots more to do, but everything definitely going in the right direction. Clearly, the higher the brand you want to attract, the more work that's involved in that. Some of them are, you know, 150 brands in 120 days, and some of them actually you talk to now, but actually it might take 18 months before we get them on board. All of those conversations happening at the moment.
On the new custom solution, what that means is we know exactly where a product has been bought and exactly where it's been sold to, and then we can optimize the end-to-end duty payments on that, and it's the new system's interfaced with HMRC, et cetera. That's all that is. The savings are actually quite significant. You know, hundreds of thousands of pounds every month, and sometimes, you know, high hundreds of thousands of pounds. But that's all I'd say about what it does for us, but it's a good thing to do. Well, it's one of those efficiency savings, one of many that we're implementing every day in the business.
On the contribution margin as we open the U.S. distribution center, while we're gonna have some one-off costs, and we're guiding for those as exceptional items, the overall contribution margin should be similar in the U.S. as we go through. We've mentioned this before, where we can see a lower gross profit margin and, but that, we also get lower distribution costs as a percentage of sales because of the faster, the cheaper services where we've got a more efficient end-to-end logistics solution for the U.S. customers. The contribution margin we're expecting to be similar. You do get the efficiency will build over time, but that's taken care of. We'll talk about the dual running costs, et cetera.
Overall, the costs are gonna be beneficial at the contribution after warehousing costs. We think it's borderline, but we've got to also get all the brands up and running that have a significant U.S. presence there to get to that point. Overall, on contribution margin after warehousing costs, even though labor costs are higher there and we won't have an automation, whereas, so if you're taking PLT out of Sheffield, which has now got the highest level of automation to the U.S., there'll be a lack of efficiency there, but that's made up for from the end-to-end logistics costs savings, even though you've still got a lower gross profit margin 'cause the import duties could be 10% to 15% higher on the cost prices.
Thanks. It's Anne Critchlow from SocGen. I've got three questions, please. First of all, on inventory, in GBP millions terms, what was the increase or decrease year-on-year? Secondly, you talk about selective investment for CapEx. Just wondering if you've deselected any projects or had to prioritize. Finally, if you could talk about recently, you know, which brands might have been more defensive in current trading and which might be struggling more. Thank you.
Inventories, what you can see in the balance sheet is that we had lower levels of inventory at the half year where it was GBP 270 million compared with the year end, which was GBP 280 million. It was higher levels in absolute terms than at the previous half year end. What we've got there going on is we've got a faster cycle in there, and the working capital cycle that you've seen has improved. Actually all of the brands have improved their stock covers over the last nine months. We've been putting a big effort on that despite the fact that sales have been challenged, should we say, and they were lower than expected in the second quarter. We're in a leaner position.
We've talked previously about the stock cover at December into January, after last peak with high levels of returns, et cetera, which you don't see necessarily in there. We were talking about that as being up to 12 weeks of cover. While you don't see it necessarily in the balance sheet number at the end of the period there, we've got 'cause we've got things like inventory in transit there. We've got lower levels of cover and brands are able to be more agile as we go through. That's down now at, for the group at around about eight weeks. That difference is what we're seeing on the working capital side coming through. That was the inventory question.
On which brands, I'd say the theme we've seen is that, you know, whether it's Karen Millen at the top end or the young fashion brands, every consumer has been squeezed. Nobody's got an exception on inflation at the moment is probably the best way to describe that one. Then in terms of selective investments, yeah, absolutely. Look, we're looking at, you know, everything. Neil and I -
That's right.
Daily, weekly. We look at every spend and even the ones that we do select then in terms of getting the best efficiency and the best value out of those. You know, we know it's a tough trading environment. How long it's gonna last, I don't think anybody really knows. In that period, we wanna really look after our costs and protect our cash. That's really key to us.
We're in a great position from a balance sheet point of view that we can make those investments in the U.S. DC. Next year we would anticipate being a lower level of CapEx for next year. I think where we've been, we've built a great flexible distribution network, and now we wanna leverage that as much as possible. We'll have the international distribution network with the U.S. DC. We won't press the button on the automation in the U.S. until we see that we're able to see the significant gains that we're expecting on sales there. While previously we may have thought that we'd be starting the U.S. automation next year, it could be the year after. Hopefully by that point we're starting to see the real gains in the U.S. market.
A lower level of CapEx next year as we just complete the manual operation in the U.S., the Sheffield will be up and running, and then we're in a good position in terms of capacity in the distribution network.
Good morning. Rebecca McClellan, Santander. I've got three questions as well, please. If 50% of your sourcing is nearshored, what is the dollar influence in your COGS space, and how are you going to tackle the sterling deflation or the dollar inflation in your future sort of sourcing costs? My second question is, you mentioned about morphing the product mix according to consumer demand. What shifts are you seeing in the product mix as demand has weakened? My third question, please, is about the promotional environment. If demand is slackening, what are you seeing in promotions and how are you intending on sort of what's your promotional strategy over the next couple of quarters?
In terms of sourcing, I would say on the dollar impact, you know, even what's made in Europe, a lot of the fabric would come from Asia, which is dollar-dominated. And most Asia sourced is in U.S. dollars. Again, it's another inflationary pressure. What we've got to look at, you know, where we can get fabrics that are from Europe, 'cause obviously that's much better for us. You know, we've got 60% pretty much of our sourcing now, let's call it, in Europe. Obviously that allows us quite a flexible model in terms of trying to get as much fabric and yarn that we can possibly get from Europe. In terms of where it is a dollar, and we need that fabric.
If you look at shoes, for example, you know, they're pretty much all coming out of China, and that's mostly in dollars. That's us playing with our volume. Again, trying to get the brands focused as one group in terms of our capacity and our bulk purchasing. Every brand will buy something different, but actually if we can be strong with a supplier. And then looking at everything from, you know, container load. You know, is it 100% full before it gets on that ship? We don't wanna ship any fresh air. We're looking at lots of ways that we can kind of minimize the impact of the dollar. But, you know, ultimately it's a huge currency around the world and lots of trade gets done on it.
It's lots done, more work to do on that one, I would say. In terms of the product mix shifts, we've talked before about that big dress and occasion, the pent-up demand, kind of weddings, 21sts, day at the races over the summer. That kind of naturally tails down at the end of summer into winter as people trade into jackets and trade into knitwear and boots, et cetera. Then generally it comes back for party season when sort of dresses take up again. We'll just need to wait and see because that's such a big impact on return rates.
Equally I think, you know, there's still a bit going on in the background of, you know, people are returning to the office and, you know, what it's like to dress in office wear again, having not been in that maybe for a while. I'm sure equally on returns there is, you know, I've spent GBP 20 or I've spent GBP 40 on that dress and am I absolutely confident about that dress and I absolutely do need it. I'm sure there's a little bit of that playing in as well. I think trend-wise it's following the seasonal at this point. I think the big tail will be when you come to party season, 'cause that's the next real kind of up on the kind of going out and dress mix again.
In terms of commercial environment, you know, we're staying very lean. You know, Carol talked about pricing and how yeah.
Obviously, environment, we're playing our marketing strategy very close to the season. We're not deploying spend, we're deploying spend week to week. Instead of spending so much on marketing and customer acquisition, we're gonna be mining the customers we've got and talking to them about price. If you are coming into the new season, and I mentioned coats there, do you need a new coat? Well, can we tempt you to buy a new coat because it's a great price point. You know, the bulk of our sales are still sitting in the value end of the proposition.
It's really about mining those customers and getting them to shop with us and being the best price in the market for your coat, for your boots, for your new dress, whatever you're gonna buy this season because, you know, there's fear out there. I think we know that right across the sector of rising costs, right, mortgage costs, bills, electricity costs, so on and so forth. They are being really, really careful how they spend their money, and we just need to do our job from a marketing perspective to make sure that they, when they have got that GBP 50 a month to spend, that they try and spend it with one of our brands.
We're very agile on stock and, you know, I'm not sure competitor-wise how agile others are and, you know, it's especially with long lead time. We'll just keep watching. We watch it daily and look at that. Key entry, you know, price point is the key. It's key.
Hi. Good morning. Miriam Josiah from Morgan Stanley. Just a few questions on returns. I think you mentioned that you're not seeing any difference in consumer behavior. Is there any reason why you wouldn't introduce it across other brands? Is that something that's already baked into your guidance? I guess given returns, you know, being elevated now for close to a year, how are you thinking about this being more of a sort of permanent change, a structural change? If so, will paid returns be more of a permanent feature as well? Secondly, just on your marketing spend, you sort of touched on it already, but how should we sort of think about that for the second half?
Also, specifically for the newer brands, because you've talked about the investment into Debenhams as well. how are you thinking about deploying investment for some of those newer brands?
I think on the returns charge for other brands, for all of the brands, the return where we have returns charges and it does vary different brands, different markets. It's part of the overall proposition. You could charge for returns on a brand that doesn't currently, but you'd want to offer the customer something as well as part of the overall proposition. What we've seen is that I think customers are quite happy with the transparency of paying for returns. Could it be a longer term thing? It could be, but it's so early days for us, yet. I suppose overall, the experience that we have in different markets has been that customers can appreciate that transparency.
On marketing spend, we're thinking, what we've said is we're gonna continue to drive the efficiency on the marketing spend in the second half of the year. As a percentage of sales, think of it in a similar range to what we've seen so far in the first half. But if we get even more efficiency, could go down a bit, and that's the higher end of the guidance. If we get less efficiency, if things get more tricky, that's more towards the lower end of the guidance range.
Yeah. Tony Shiret from Panmure Gordon. A couple more questions on marketing. Could you give us some sort of more description about the mix of your marketing, you know, between various categories, year on year sort of performance above the line influencers, anything else you might like to categorize, and whether you're seeing changes in productivity of those marketing sort of categories? The second question is also related to marketing. I see your AOV is up 26% and your orders are down 10%. Are you actively trying to encourage customers to trade up through your marketing? Because obviously there are some advantages to that from the point of view of your P&L, I would have thought.
On the mix of the spend, it's fairly similar year on year, but we've just got we've been able to get more efficient. We've spoken previously about it's been a tricky market for marketing where returns have got lower. They're starting to improve a little bit as we've kind of navigated an uncertain environment and we're trying to refine and use the learnings that we've seen over a period when the learnings have been difficult. We're always doing that with our marketing spend, but it's heading in the right direction. Obviously, we want to be able to invest in the right areas. We've kept the brand spend going is what I would say compared to others in the market.
I think we've still been able to get better returns from that. We've seen what Carol was talking about with the Kourtney campaign.
Yeah. I mean, all brands are at different stages of brand and digital mix. It's very hard to average it. I mean, we have an average, obviously, in the P&L, but you know boohoo, which you would expect to have a lower brand spend because it's quite an established brand, just this season, because we've done the Kourtney's, got a high brand mix, and that will change again. It's an ever-changing monthly mix on each brand. We're not saying 50-50. You've got newer brands, unlike Debenhams, which is gonna need a lot of brand spend to reestablish Debenhams going forward in the mix. That will have an increase in brand spend as well. It's very hard to average that because they're all at different stages, and there's 14 destinations now.
On the AOV, the AOV, as you say, is up 26%, orders are down 10%, but units per basket are kind of flat a little bit, so the average selling price is up. Are we encouraging people to trade up? We're not. I mean, you'd actually think that people would be trading down, but the average selling price is higher. Now, there's inflationary pressures in the market generally, and I think the market average selling prices are up 10%-15% year-on-year, but it's difficult to see what that was. We saw a big cost inflation on the input costs in the second half of last year.
I think what we're seeing is not unusual, but we've seen people buy higher price points but send more back in, on the returns. If you look at the engagement KPIs, people have been shopping at higher price points, and it's more woven products on the dresses mix, and that goes hand in hand with the higher returns rate. That's why we've been seeing that growth in gross sales but not in net sales.
Okay, we've had a few questions from the webcast. First question is from Eleanor Danny from Shore Capital. First reactions to the new sustainable collection in collaboration with Kourtney Kardashian Barker.
Shall I answer that one?
Yeah, sure.
Well, it's incredible. You know, it went on to kind of like one week's cover in a couple of days. We're just trying our best now to trade back into it. We have got a second collection planned. We're hoping to do equally as well, but early stages with that kind of reach and putting that big face behind something. We've done it before, it worked for us before, and it's worked for us again. We are hoping that that will help the U.S. going forward. I think that was part of the strategy. You know, we know we've got the D.C. coming on board, 2023.
This is just the brand marketing and effort of really getting the boohoo brand working again strongly in the U.S. where it's, you know, it's worked in terms of not just sell-through of garments but in terms of brand awareness there as well.
Wonderful. Thank you for that, Carol. Ben Hunt from Investec. With freight rates where they are today, how much of the FY 2022 GBP 60 million freight cost headwind would you expect to reverse in time?
That's a difficult question in time. I mean, we've said that they're heading in the right direction, but it's early days. You'd want them to reverse, but obviously, we've got macro factors there with energy costs being higher in the world generally, that are causing issues that we don't know where that's gonna be. Now, things will adjust in the market. The market for clothing is gonna adjust. The prices have gone up a little bit for the first time in years. those things will adjust, and we would expect everything end to end to fully adjust over time. when and whether how much is on freight rates, how much is on prices that we're able to charge, we don't know.
One thing to note as well, though, that while inbound freight rates, and we all talk about container rates coming down, and that's well documented. You know, a big mix of our freight costs is actually outbound, and there's no change there. You know, we send a lot of our parcels in the belly of passenger planes. If you go back, and the transatlantic route is an example, versus 2019, you're still double digits down volume of aircraft versus 2019. But also demand on air freight's gone up about 20%, so there's no movement really there at the moment. We're coming up to, if you think of the U.S., we're coming up to almost 12 months since kind of Europeans were allowed to travel back into the U.S.
Thank you. Follow-up question from Ben Hunt from Investec. If demand continues to worsen, what might be the effect on working capital? And what opportunities do you have to improve working capital in such an environment?
The working capital, I think the big takeaway from these results is that it's actually got to a neutral position in the first half of the year. Whereas it was a big use of cash for us last year, it's now not. That's been good. We've been able to finance our CapEx without dipping into debt too much. That's a really good sign, and that's happened as global supply chains have got faster again, getting back to more normality. They're still not there yet. We used to see good levels of negative working capital, and hopefully, we'll get that, improve that in the future. What that means is if we see declines, then working capital doesn't get sucked out of the business.
Likewise, if we see an acceleration in growth, we're not seeing a massive inflow from it. It's, in a way, quite good to be in that neutral position. That's where we are. If we see further declines in sales, it's not gonna suck working capital out of the business where it is in a fairly neutral position. What we do have to do, though, is make sure that we're still lean and agile on the stock position, so that we don't end up with a worse working capital position 'cause we've got too much stock for the level of sales, which is where we had been a little bit last year as well, but with also slow supply chains generally, which were all part and parcel of the same issues.
Things are getting better, and the working capital's in a much better place. We're in quite a good position on that, in that respect.
Our next question is for Georgina Johanan from JP Morgan. Can you comment on EBITDA margin for next year? Also depreciation implications as automation launches, et cetera. Would you expect a step up in the charge into FY 2024?
On the EBITDA margin for next year, we're not giving guidance. We're only just halfway through this year, and there's a massive period of uncertainty at the moment and going ahead. What you've seen come through very clearly in the presentation today, hopefully, is that we're working on building that EBITDA margin. We also want to get back to that position of growing the business, and we've got the USDC going live. I think more, let's give more guidance as we go.
In reality, we're happy to be still making a profit, and the working capital is in a place where it is, and now we can build on those other two things, getting the growth back in the business and improving profitability through efficiency going forward. That's what I'd say on EBITDA margin for next year. On depreciation will go up because we've got the Sheffield automation live for the whole of next year, whereas it's only live for half of this year. There'd be some of that, but if you think of the GBP 125 million investment in Sheffield over 15 years, for example, that would be where you're looking at the big change on depreciation next year.
You'd also have some depreciation on the USDC next year that we haven't got this year as well. But we'll see those cash savings come through from automation in Sheffield, and we'll hopefully see that resurgence in the US business as well. We'll start to leverage that depreciation in the future years.
Thank you. We have our final question from Matthew McEachran from Singer Capital Markets. Has the macro-struck consumer deterioration altered your development plans at Debenhams at all? How much is the EBITDA pathway you envisaged at the start of the year altering?
I didn't hear the second one, but I did Debenhams, so I'll answer that one.
Yeah.
No, it's not slowing down our investment in Debenhams. I mean, we highlighted in the presentation across both Neil and I, in terms of the selective investments that were going ahead, and you'll see that Debenhams is ranked up there with the USDC. Again, we see a massive opportunity in Debenhams, and we're not holding back anything to make sure we achieve that.
Superb. Well, we've got no further questions at the moment. John, I'd like to hand back to you for closing remarks.
Yep. Quick from me. Hopefully everybody has seen this morning, look, it's a tough environment out there in terms of trade, but we're taking all the necessary steps that you would expect us to take. We've been very agile on our stock and we'll be even more agile as we go into the key Christmas trading period. We're protecting our cash, and we wanna keep a strong balance sheet. Thanks everybody for coming this morning, and we'll see you all again soon. Thank you.