Investor update

Jul 29, 2026

Summary

A larger-than-planned ~£30m raise will fund Corby and expand logistics capacity, supporting a target to grow annualized sales from near £200m to £300m. Sales were strong in June and July, and management remained confident in £4m PBT despite at least £0.5m in higher delivery costs.

Good afternoon and welcome to the Likewise Group PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time by the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. I would now like to hand you over to Tony Brewer, CEO. Good afternoon, sir. Many thanks, and thanks everybody for joining this presentation this afternoon at a, I guess, relatively short notice. I think key features of this are that, as you know, the business was formed in 2018. We listed on TISE in 2019, acquired Heatseam Factory Flooring in the spring of 2019, followed by the acquisition of Valley Wholesale Carpets at the beginning of 2022, and also the listing on AIM in the autumn of 2021. But I guess notwithstanding all those events, this is probably the most important day in our history, because this really allows us to propel forward and take the business to a completely different level. The picture you can see in front of you is the Corby distribution hub, which we are getting quite close now to exchange and completion on that, and I will explain how that affects our logistics network as we go through the presentation. So why the raise? I think it is fair to say there are lots of opportunities. We have developed a business which is toward GBP 200 million now annualized turnover. We can see opportunities to take the business to GBP 300 million beyond and have the appropriate return on sales at a PBT level, which will also allow us to make further investment in the future and to create a really strong floor covering business in the U.K. So, as I said, one of the key features of this is the acquisition of the freehold distribution hub in Corby. The initial intention was to raise GBP 20 million, and we also have support from NatWest, our principal banker. I think the appetite from the market, and as you have seen from the numbers today, takes us more towards GBP 30 million raise, and that really allows us to develop the business from a very strong foundation. I think I was always taught, many of you will remember Graham Waldron, how he taught me certain business principles. One was to have liquidity and retain the liquidity. Secondly, was to have plenty of banking facility and cash available. And thirdly, it was very importantly to look after the business, because if you look after the business, you ultimately look after all the staff, the shareholders and all stakeholders. So I think a number of lessons learned, and that is why, if asked, why we took more than the original GBP 20 million. In terms of the sales profile, very encouraging start to the year. Positive performance through the spring and into the summer. We all appreciate in the flooring industry that hot weather is not favorable to us, but you can see there in June and July a very good performance on the sales side, and that will give us some operational gearing, certainly to strengthen further into the autumn. In terms of our property infrastructure, currently 13 sites, soon to become 14, six of which are freehold, and of course, Corby will also be freehold. Currently GBP 33 million value with just GBP 5 million of fixed debt. As you will appreciate, that has been developed principally since 2021, when we moved into the Leeds distribution center, and all of that infrastructure has been built in the last 5 years. I guess two key points on that particular slide are the new Leeds center, which we acquired earlier in the year, and again, the freehold of that site. That was primarily to be able to facilitate much better supply chain management of containers coming from the Far East and also from Europe, and then feeding into the Likewise network. Then you will note that picture at the bottom of Newport, where that extension was under construction when that photograph was taken. Now, overlays, you will see a pretty impressive, fully racked out extension. The cutting table started to be assembled on Monday of this week, will be completed next week. So by the middle of August, very much completely operational and becomes the fourth hub for Likewise Floors. In Corby, as you have seen that picture at the start of the presentation, GBP 9 million total consideration, plus an eye-watering GBP 440,000 of stamp duty. To follow with that, GBP 2 million of capital expenditure. I hope to go through a bit more detail on that in a moment. But an important part of the Likewise overall logistics network. You can see from this shot, it is a 12-meter high bay warehouse. Those of you who have visited the Birmingham distribution center, Corby is very similar to that, but actually 2 meters higher, which of course gives us greater cubic capacity. Now you see the layout, and again, those of you familiar with our distribution centers, the cutting table on the left-hand side, able to cut carpet and vinyl and artificial grass up to 5 meters wide. The racking systems and then the palletized racking. Very conventional layout that we are very used to doing. As I said, that is a GBP 2 million fit out in terms of the racking, the cutting table, the forklifts to operate within that distribution hub. I guess this is one of the key slides, to be fair. So, with cutting carpet, we have those large cutting machines, the capital expenditure which goes with those, which is between GBP 350,000 and GBP 450,000. They take up quite a lot of space. They take a team of six people to operate them. Typically what we call a cutting shift, that is those six people, they can do 300 cuts per day. Okay? So if you think then of the sites and the cutting tables in Glasgow, Leeds and Birmingham, each working two shifts, that is 1,800 cuts per day. We do have some capacity there today. Similarly with Valley Wholesale Carpets, we have three large cutting tables in Erith, again working two shifts, 1,800 cuts per day. Again, think about annualized run rate currently of GBP 200 million. That really justifies that with Newport, Corby, and Derby becoming fully operational from the cutting perspective, that we can gear up to more than 50% that we have currently. Again, that translates taking that GBP 200 million sales revenue up to GBP 300 million. Of course, it is not just about cutting carpet, but where you have palletized goods such as laminate, luxury vinyl tile, carpet tiles, adhesives, leveling compounds, it is fairly easy to put extra capacity in with individual trucks and individual operatives at any one time. In terms of that network, I know there is a lot going on on that map, but if you can cast your eye to the orange lines, perhaps the three hubs for Likewise Floors are Birmingham, Leeds and Glasgow, and soon to become with Newport becoming the fourth. As you can see there is a huge amount going on in those. Each of those lines represent overnight movement of trucks. Of course, Birmingham being in the center of country, there is a huge amount of cross docking goes through Birmingham at night. To continue to increase our volumes, we needed to deflect some volume away from Birmingham and hence that distribution center in Corby in the East Midlands. Going forward, the Leeds to Sudbury and the Leeds to Sidcup trunkers will be going through Corby, releasing volume in Birmingham. Of course, alongside that you have got the network within Valley Wholesale Carpets, with Erith being the main center at Derby, distributing into the Midlands and North and Newport and Plymouth also through the Valley network. I think it is again, important slide in that you will see we have invested GBP 12.5 million over the last 5 years in putting that infrastructure together. A lot of that is done through free cash flow, two-thirds effectively and one-third through asset finance. You will see from the right-hand slide that all of the asset finance, with the exception of the new cutting table we put into Leeds during the Christmas new year break, has all been paid down. That gives us every confidence with the projects we have before us. In terms of current trading, I showed you the sales gap, but sales revenue well up, slight improvement in the gross margin, which we recognize we need to do to, again, to continue to be able to invest in the business. You will appreciate running 160 delivery trucks, that the cost of doing that in the last 3 or 4 months has been much higher than it was before the Iran war. That is an extra half a million of cost at least during the course of this year, but we are still confident of achieving that original GBP 4 million PBT. In terms of use of funds, Corby is obviously a specific. We have identified other distribution hubs that could potentially come into the network. There are, I think, a lot of opportunities in the floorcovering market generally to expand our business. Just to give you a couple of examples there, we are aware of this freehold distribution center. We are in the process of negotiating a deal on that, and that could well come in as an existing building, new build that could well come into the network in the coming months and be operational potentially at a similar time to Corby, which will be the beginning of next year. Alongside that, we're aware of a piece of land which again, would fit a nice 60,000 sq ft distribution hub. That piece of land has planning permission. We're in preliminary discussions with the developer with that, and again, that could well come into the network to strengthen the business and take us well beyond that GBP 300 million sales revenue that with the Corby distribution center alongside the development in Newport and Derby, can be achieved. In terms of conclusion, this raise gives us a huge amount of flexibility to build the business of the future with very sound financial foundations. We can increase the operational capacity and subsequent market share. We currently have a GBP 33 million freehold property portfolio. That's inevitably going to increase over the coming months and take advantage of the many opportunities alongside, of course, all of the product sales and marketing initiatives which are going on constantly with our 108 salespeople in the marketplace, visiting our customers, independent retailers and flooring contractors and developing business. I think we're very much on target to achieve that GBP 300 million over the coming years, and there's every opportunity to go further than that. Of course, importantly, the further investment to achieve the right return on sales at a profit before tax level. Many thanks. That's great. Thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the company takes a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via investor dashboard. As you can see, we have received a number of questions about today's presentation. If I may just start off with the first question here, which reads as follows: Do you believe the business has potential to become one of the U.K.'s dominant national flooring distributors? Well, we're probably the best known. I think we probably will become the biggest. I don't like to say dominant because I think we're very conscious of keeping our customers competitively priced in the marketplace, servicing their needs efficiently, and providing a good service to the industry overall. Thank you. The next question that we have here reads: How are manufacturers and suppliers responding to your continued market share gains? I think it is encouraged. I think from the outset, when we started the business in 2018, as I mentioned earlier, acquired Heatseam Factory Flooring in 2019. We have had a huge amount of support from manufacturers in the U.K. and Western Europe, in Turkey, in the Far East. I think they saw an opportunity with the people we had and the plans we had to build a very sound distribution business. Of course, the U.K. internationally is quite a small island, but it is an island. I think it obviously serves well the manufacturers that channel their goods through the distribution network. The suppliers have been fantastically supportive. Perfect. That is great. That is all the questions that we have had come through. Any others we can share with you post today's meeting. So thank you for answering those questions you can. Just before we redirect investors to provide you their feedback, which I know is particularly important for the company. Tony, can I please just ask you for a few closing comments? Sure. I think I said at the outset, this has been a very important day. Obviously, we have gone through a process over the last few weeks of talking to existing investors and shareholders, and we have brought a number of new shareholders onto the register, who are long-term shareholders. It is a very important day in our development, and I think it gives us the financial foundations and on with that, the operational infrastructure to really take the business forward. That's great. Thank you for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close the session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation and good afternoon to you all.