Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Lords Group Trading PLC full-year results investor presentation. Questions are encouraged; they can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that's just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just 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 we'll publish our responses where it's appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet Company platform. Before we begin, we would just like to submit the following poll, and if you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. I would now like to hand you over to CEO Shanker Patel. Shanker, good morning, sir.
Good morning. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today for our 2025 full-year results presentation. 2025 is a year where we continue our strategic progress with increased diversification of our business and increasing our operational leverage. The agenda will be: I will set out the highlights, Stuart, my colleague, CFO, will go through the financial review, and then we have a business review which I will go through alongside two colleagues who joined me today. To my left are Dean Murray, CEO of CMO, and Matthew Webber, who is the COO of our Plumbing & Heating Division, and they'll give an update on their respective businesses. I'll conclude with an outlook followed by Q&A. We wanted to reaffirm our investment case, and that is split across six major aspects.
One is the fact that in our investment case, we believe we're a differentiated investment opportunity. That's because we're uniquely placed in a large, addressable market that has significant opportunities for us, in particular, to grow organically or through acquisition. Many of our larger competitors are unable to do both. That's why we believe it is uniquely placed in the marketplace for us. We also have a resilient core market. That is the RMI-driven demand that's supported by structural housing need in the U.K., either for new homes or for the refurbishment of the existing housing stock in the U.K., which is continuously in need of updating. We also have structural growth drivers, particularly in renewables, where there is a major push through government policy to invest in renewables. We have an opportunity of improving our margin mix through differentiated and greater products.
In terms of digital, we've established our digital platform via CMO, which allows us to accelerate our national scale and drive data-driven growth. All of this leads our business to have greater operating leverage embedded within it, from that I mean an incremental revenue will drive disproportionate profitability and profitability growth. Finally, our balance sheet is robust, it's much stronger after action that we took in 2025, which we will explain, and giving us the capability to invest and capitalize in this current environment. Highlights of 2025. We've demonstrated resilience performance in a tough market, and we've demonstrated financial progress. The positives for us are a record revenue of GBP 482 million, up 8.3% year-on-year overall, with a like-to-like growth of 0.7%, and that's despite subdued end markets.
In particular, merchanting revenue is up 3.1% on a like-to-like basis, which reflects our market share gains along with a disciplined approach to pricing. Another key positive for us in 2025 is the improvement that we managed to create in our Plumbing & Heating Division in margins by 60 basis points, and that was driven primarily by product mix decision as well as strong margin management by the senior leadership team. In our Plumbing & Heating Division, our renewable revenues are up 57%, which increases the margin quality of that division. Overall, 2025 resulted in an adjusted EBITDA of GBP 21 million, alongside a net debt reduction of 59% to GBP 30.4 million, which therefore results in a significantly strengthened balance sheet as we progress into 2026. We made strategic progress and strengthened our platform. We are now well-positioned for the market recovery when it works.
We acquired CMO in June 2025, and that materially accelerates our digital capability alongside our national reach. A record three new branch openings in 2025, expanding our national network. A decision to take action on structural costs in our P&H division following a strategic review that streamlines that business. Again, I reiterate that we increase our operating leverage as volumes come. I'm going to hand over to Stuart, who will run through the financial review.
Thank you, Shanker. Good morning, everyone. If I can just turn to the financial summary for 2025. As you can see, we delivered revenue growth of 8.3% to a record level of GBP 472.8 million despite being in a subdued market. As Shanker mentioned, we've got like-to-like growth of 0.7%, and that was supplemented by new branches and acquisitions in the year, and I'll talk through a little bit more about that in the next slide. Our gross profit was up by 9.2% to GBP 93.0 million, and our gross margin was pretty stable, slightly ticked up on last year at 19.7% compared to 19.5%. Through the last three years where it's been quite a challenging external environment, we've been demonstrating a good gross margin between the 19.5%-20% range, which emphasizes our pricing discipline and how we managed to control our sales mix .
Adjusted EBITDA slightly lower at GBP 21.0 million, which reflects our deliberate investment in organic opportunities and acquisitions and also our proactive management of external cost inflation. Adjusted operating profit was GBP 1.2 million lower at GBP 9.2 million, and that's partly because of the increased employment costs through employers' national insurance, which the whole of the U.K. business has faced in the year, higher national minimum wages, and partly our branch investment that we touched on a few seconds ago. Net debt was GBP 19 million lower at GBP 13.4 million, and that was underpinned by our sale and leaseback activity in April 2025, but also strong working capital management as we worked through the second half of the year. We've scaled our dividend in line with our earnings per share to GBP 0.452 per share.
We're pleased to be saying that we'll be paying about GBP 900,000 of cash in respective full year 2025 in dividends to our shareholders. If I now turn to that revenue bridge I mentioned, this takes us from 2024's number of GBP 436.7 million to 2025's GBP 472.8 million. You can see that like-to-like growth of 0.7% added GBP 2.1 million. The acquisitions we've done, half-year effectively from CMO, which joined in June 2025, and the effective full year of Ultimate Renewables, which joined the group in October 2024, those two added GBP 26.3 million to our revenue. The new branches we opened in the Merchanting division added GBP 7.7 million, which bridges our turnover for the year. Worth talking about our operating expenses. As I mentioned, we tightly controlled our costs despite ongoing external inflation.
You can see our bridge there from GBP 64.6 million in 2024 to our 2025 number of GBP 73.4 million of underlying OpEx. CMO and the new branches added about GBP 7 million. That was the bulk of it as we invested in those two areas for future growth. Our employers' national insurance and national minimum wage increases added GBP 0.7 million to our costs, that led to inflated supplier costs as our suppliers sought to recover those increased employment costs for their own purposes. Our like-to-like increase was GBP 1.1 million, which we're quite pleased to practically manage that through cost efficiencies, tight cost control, limiting our like-to-like interest to 1.7% in the year. You can see there our FTE headcount, full-time employee headcount, was 4% lower at the end of December 2025 compared to 2024.
Whilst maintaining the key front-end staff who interface with our customers and provide the excellent customer service, we're keen to protect and make sure we protect those colleagues whilst keeping a tight control on our costs. If I now turn to the divisional analysis, our Merchanting division, which was very resilient in trading terms, and as I've said, we've invested for the future growth in this division as well. Revenue was up 6% overall. Like-to-like, as we've mentioned, was 3.1%, which strips out those new branches. That indicates that we've made market share gains in 2025.
Our gross profit increased by 3.1%, but if you look at our gross margin, that was under pressure in the year and 70 basis points, 1.7% lower, as the market was particularly competitive and some of our competitors were seeking market share gains as we were trying to maintain or improve our market. Overheads increased by national insurance, as I've mentioned, and inflation and the new branch openings. You can see in that graph on the right-hand side a EUR 1.3 million increase in overheads and EUR 200,000 in relation to new branches. If you look at our revenue benefits, that added EUR 1.3 million to our EBITDA, but that was offset effectively by the decline in margin. The movement really between the profitability year-on-year is lower property gains of EUR 0.4 million and those overhead challenges we've had in terms of inflation.
It reflects we've got good capacity ahead of the market recovery. Obviously, there's cost inflation we've had to deal with and try to be more efficient, but we're in a great position going forward as we see those new branches maturing. We expect incremental sales to deliver a higher EBITDA conversion. We're well-positioned to benefit from a recovery in the RMI sector overall. If I turn now to Plumbing & Heating, which delivered an increase in EBITDA of 6.3%. You can see here, despite revenue being flat and the U.K. boiler market being fairly flat, we've protected our market position and maintained our market share. Our gross margin has increased by 60 basis points from 12.5% to 13.1%, and that reflects a deliberate shift to value over volume. You can see the benefit of that in our chart there.
If you take out the acquisition impact on revenue, our revenue impact on profit was - 1, but that was more than compensated for by our profit, our increased gross margin. Then we've made a small but very positive contribution on the overheads, which are 1.5% lower on a like-to-like basis despite those industry-wide inflationary pressures that I mentioned. That combination gave us a half-a-million increase or a 6.3% increase in our adjusted EBITDA. Strategically, as we've mentioned, we had a good year in renewables, and that helps our gross margin as well. Renewables were up 57%. We've mentioned in the last couple of years an investment in the systems, whether it's ERP or, as we talk about a bit later, some of our other systems we've implemented, and they're beginning to improve our operational efficiency, which you can see from the numbers in FY 2025.
I then turn to our newest and third division, digital, which is effectively CMO. CMO was acquired in June 2025, you can see that provides a national scalable digital platform. You can see from the graph in the bottom right-hand side there, when CMO joined the Lords Group in June, like-to-like sales were roughly 40%, 45% down on previous year. That gap has gradually declined and improved from a sales perspective as we've gone through each month. You can see when we get to the last part of the year, we'd reduce that deficit down to below 5%. A really encouraging trend of month on month and week on week sales improvement. Full year revenue, you can see GBP 25.8 million, the business was EBITDA positive in the second half of 2025, which is good.
Part of that was benefiting from at least GBP 1 million of annualized cost savings that the team at CMO took out of the business as they joined the Lords Group. This gives us a really good medium-term opportunity in terms of increased digital penetration. That will help our margin quality. It's a working capital positive business for us and helps our operating leverage. If I turn now to the cash flow, as we've touched on already, a big reduction in net debt of GBP 19 million to GBP 13.4 million. You can see the bridge there on the slide. Operating cash, which is adjusted EBITDA, working capital, lease rentals, and CapEx stroke interest, etc., was an impressive GBP 12 million or a pleasing GBP 12 million. We got a net GBP 11.4 million from the sale. Lease back happened in April 2025.
We've spent about GBP 4.4 million on dividends and M&A. The bulk of the M&A bar there being obviously acquisition of CMO for GBP 1.8 million and some deferred consideration. Operating cash conversion was a staggering 317%. That's the benefit of the sale and lease back and the strong operating cash flow compared to 71% last year. We have got some adjusting items before tax of about GBP 8 million that you'll see in Appendix 3 in the slide pack. They are mainly non-cash branch impairments. The port stress is all non-cash of GBP 7.5 million and a small amount of cash from restructuring programs taken through the year of half a million pounds. If I look at the balance sheet and the refinancing, we've substantially strengthened our balance sheet and liquidity in the year. That's the main result of the net debt reduction.
As I say, it came down from GBP 32 million to GBP 13.4 million. Net debt, as you can see, to operating capital employed, which is essentially your tangible fixed assets and working capital, has improved from 61.1% to 39.4%. Our net debt compared to our net assets has improved from 68.1% to 31.9%. The sale and lease back has improved our flexibility whilst we retained operational control of those assets. You may have seen we announced a refinancing on the 2nd of April 2026 where we've secured GBP 65 million of new facilities with three-year commitments with two one-year options. They're underpinned by a strong receivables base going forward. We think this is a better fix, a better alignment with our business model to have a greater invoice financing line of GBP 45 million compared to GBP 25 million before. A slightly lower revolving credit facility of GBP 20 million.
That gives us liquidity headroom to invest through the cycle, whether it's organic growth or M&A. You can see GBP 65 million of facilities compared to a GBP 30.5 million net debt gives us plenty of headroom. Thank you, Patel. Pass back to you for the review.
Thank you. I will run through our business review, starting with the reiteration that our strategy is consistent and we are continuing to be positioned for growth. We have a strategy that is a combination of margin accretive organic growth and selective M&A. In terms of organic growth, we demonstrated that in 2025 by opening three new branches, delivering GBP 8 million of additional revenue. In terms of selective M&A, we acquired CMO in June 2025. What you can see in the four icons below are the strategic elements of our business, new branch openings, product range expansion, digital expansion, and acquisitions.
We will go through our three divisions. I'll present merging and then my two colleagues will present their divisional strategies. In terms of merging, we had new branch openings, as I mentioned. One of them was in George Lines, our civils and landscaping division, which had revenues in 2025 of GBP 39 million. We opened its fifth branch in Aylesford near Maidstone in a 1.5-acre site. It's a large well-concreted site. To give you an idea, revenues of GBP 39 million in 2025, when we acquired this business, revenues were just under GBP 12 million back in 2016. We have a strategy where we take acquisitions and we grow them by adding organic branches, more branches to them, or by enhancing those businesses.
The next one is an acquisition we made in 2022, A.W. Lumb, which is part of our distribution and dry lining division, with revenues in 2025 of a record of GBP 51 million. After 40 years, it opened its newest branch, which is a third branch in Mansfield, a two-and-a-half-acre site that sits ideally between its locations of Tamworth, a three-and-a-half-acre site, and Dewsbury, which is just under five acres. An excellent addition to that network. Under the larger Lords Builders Merchants and Advance Roofing division, which covers our general merchanting and specialist roofing site, revenues reached GBP 97 million. Again, we've created a unique model of dual branding sites. We dual branded a site in Bicester, which opened in April 2025.
It's a smaller one-acre site, but what's unique about this was a site that was operated as a builders' merchant by another family for many, many years, which unfortunately closed, but we took that over and resurrected it. That's a big part of our merchanting organic growth, taking over good locations in decent sites that need investment. We repeated the same in Bury St Edmunds by opening a second site in Suffolk for us in March 2026. That's a much larger two-acre site that, again, houses Advance Roofing as well as a Lords Builders Merchant. That was a former builders' merchant for over 40 years and unfortunately closed. We went in and took a lease, a favorable lease of that premises, and look forward to now re-establishing that locality under Lords Builders Merchants and Advance Roofing.
All of this comes with continued investment in our existing branch network of a total of GBP 2.4 million, with fit-outs being GBP 800,000. We're continuously ensuring that we invest in what we call our 3 P's: we invest in our people, we invest in our plan, and we invest in our premises. We've done all of this despite inflationary headwinds by ensuring we have tight cost control. National minimum wage added GBP 400,000 to our cost base. However, through strong action taken by the team, we've restructured the central team in Merchanting to save GBP 800,000 annually. What we've been doing in terms of our strategy is, as I said, selectively developing the geography of the business. In the last 15 months, four new branches have been opened. That's a record for our business. We continue to see more opportunities in taking over sites at reasonable cost.
We've been continuously enhancing our product and service offering. The dual-branded sites are unique to Lords, where we're offering specialist products alongside the general merchanting range. We continue to ensure that our branch has autonomy, which facilitates localized product ranges as well as superior customer service. Overall, in merchanting, the priorities will be to continuously maintain cost control and increase efficiency, thereby positioning the division for market upturn. We want to drive gross margin increases through supply support and competitive pricing. We continue to look out for selective M&A of specialist brands or geographies that aren't supplementary to our existing geographies. I'm going to hand over to our COO of Plumbing & Heating, Matthew Webber, to go through an update on his division.
Yes, good morning, everyone. Thank you, Shanker.
The first aspect which happened roughly a year ago was the really decisive action to improve our gross margin. We did manage to increase that by 60 basis points in the year to 13.1%. Some really strong actions taken in a really tough market, but it'll be fairly transformative for the business, which is something we've clearly continued on with this year. The U.K. boiler market being flat at 1.35 million units was disappointing, even more so when you think that the norm used to be around 1.6 million units a year. In that context, we did well still to, despite our strong margin decisions to maintain our market share there about sort of 10%. As mentioned, we strategically chose to improve the product mix at the expense of volume.
Really going after the more profitable categories, namely plumbing and some other heating categories outside of boilers. In terms of digitalization of the division, a couple big moves within the year. Firstly, a customer portal for our APP customers, which has made their life significantly easier in terms of being able to check prices and live stock information, etc., and indeed place orders. I'm pleased to say that we're now up to between 10%-15% on a normal month of all of our orders going through the portal, and that increases that pace. The second element that we managed to implement in 2025 was the addition of Podfather, so the electronic proof of delivery, which was established across the whole wholesale distribution business. It's fantastic from our perspective. From the customer's perspective, it simplifies everything and digitalizes everything.
Really good news there, well executed by the teams. Finally, just to reiterate, I guess, the revenue increase within renewables, and namely Ultimate Renewables as well as sales through APP. As per the normal approach in Lords Group, we are investing in the 3 P's. In this sense, we've relocated to a significantly larger site. We actually had the official opening of that recently with circa 200 customers in attendance, which is fantastic to see. We've also taken the opportunity to upgrade what was Ultimate Renewables' ERP system in line with the system we use across the rest of the division, which, of course, like with all these things, was not straightforward. We're now feeling the benefits of that having gone through the initial pain, which is fantastic for the business.
Then more laterally, I joined the business at the start of September 2025, started a strategic review with the senior team. There are various aspects that came out of that. That's come to fruition in six core projects. I'm going to hone in on sort of one of them right now, which is where we wanted to maximize our efficiency of the wholesale business model. Post-strategic review and following consultation, we've proceeded with our plans to reduce from what was seven distribution centers within APP to four. You can see on this lovely map here, what we end up with is two super DCs, namely in Erith for the south and Tamworth for the north. Then each of those has a satellite branch working in tandem as well to cover the geography.
We think that this delivers much stronger customer service and stock availability than we previously had. Of course, it has the upside of reducing our cost to serve, allowing us to be more competitive as well and increase margins. Within the mix of that, sadly, the three sites that needed to go from the network were Park Royal, Dagenham, and Portsmouth. All three of those had Mr. Central Heating trade counters attached. In two of those, we are going to move sites, so Park Royal and Dagenham, very strong footfall areas for us. We're reinvesting in new sites there. Portsmouth, however, we've decided to close. Part of a bigger sort of drive of our trade counter business as well in a slightly different format. The key here is sort of driving non-boiler products.
In other words, more profitable areas and also the higher margin Mr. Central Heating brand. Overall, as I mentioned, the cost to serve does reduce. There are sort of net annualized savings of EUR 1.4 million. We may overachieve on that too. It's been a huge amount of work from the team, but much needed and enables us to now keep on with growth. This point, I'll hand over to Dean Murray, the CEO of CMO.
Thank you, Matt. Good morning, everyone. For those of you not aware who CMO is, CMO is the U.K.'s largest online-only retailer of building materials with a digital model that's been developed over the last 15 years. We joined the group back in June of 2025 after a period of supply chain challenges caused by restricted supplier credit.
Since joining the group in the second half of last year, it was all about a rapid turnaround after those challenges. The key progresses in that period are we effectively, on the 6th of June, when we joined the group, really had no supply base at that point because of what had happened within those challenges. Fortunately, historically, our supply base has a large overlap with Lords. Lords are able to help us restore that supply base from effectively zero to by the end of the second half, over 95% of those suppliers were back servicing the company. One of the effects as well of those challenges was that our refund rate pre-delivery was to about 21%. Over 20% of our orders, we were having to refund to the customers.
During that second half period, with suppliers coming back on board and that support, we managed to reduce that back to historical norms of around 5%. We also, I think, as Stuart already touched on earlier, implemented a rationalization program and an efficiency program that resulted in excess of GBP 1 million of cost savings versus the cost base pre-acquisition. I think as you saw on the graph earlier as well, during the second half, we rebuilt sales like for like from minus 40.3% when we joined the group to close to zero by the end of the second half period on a strong growth trajectory. Again, we recovered those repeat rates back to 63% of our sales coming from repeat customers in the second half of last year.
All of that together meant that we recovered our Trustpilot ratings, all of them to excellent or good. I suppose more importantly as well, we restored the business back to profitability. As we focus more into the strategy going forward and in particular this coming year, this year is about how we grow the business and also, importantly, what we can bring to the group and how we can extend customer access beyond the branch footprint. In excess of 70% of customers in this market, the building materials market, start their purchase journey online. They may go on to buy from a physical location ultimately, but they start that journey and that research online. CMO has national reach to those people. We have over 10 million customer visits to our sites, our nine sites, during the course of a year.
In excess of 150,000 of those finally make a purchase with us ultimately. Within that, 30,000 of those orders are delivered to within 5 mi of an existing Lords branch. That high proportion of those customers are not existing Lords customers. We have a massive opportunity to extend that penetration of customer base within the overall Lords Group. We've got a number of projects underway now to deliver that. Effectively, we can be a very significant customer acquisition engine. The key to this is how we use technology, both within CMO, but also within group customer data and group exercises to drive new and repeat customers across the group. It's also a two-way benefit. I mean, very quickly, we've been able to launch 15,000 new products to our customers that are Lords Group products that we don't currently give access to.
All of this ultimately is about creating strategic value. It positions the group now to benefit from structural shift to online purchasing. I think it creates a unique hybrid model within this market, combining both local service and national digital scale. It provides the platform for future digital expansion and category growth for the group.
Thank you, Matthew and Dean. I will finish off with our outlook for 2026. We have clear priorities for 2026. Those are to drive like-for-like sales growth in merchanting. Merchanting is a town-by-town business. We know that in each of our towns, we have an opportunity to continue to grow our local businesses in those towns. We will continue to enhance the P&H margins through mix and efficiency. We are taking some dramatic action in terms of efficiency.
We look forward to seeing that come through, take the benefit of those efficiencies with the rationalization of our depots. CMO is a great addition to our business, and we'll concentrate on scaling CMO alongside embedding its digital capability across the group. All the while, we'll continue to maintain discipline, capital allocation, cost control, price discipline, and working capital efficiency. In terms of the outlook and the medium-term potential, the outlook is that our market conditions remain subdued due to geopolitical and government actions. That is resulting in continued macro uncertainty alongside inflationary pressures and interest rate dynamics that are not favorable, but we were expecting them to be so. That said, we believe we're materially better positioned than we have been in the past. That's because we've strengthened our balance sheet. We've expanded our digital capability.
At the time of our IPO, we said our aim was to have 25% of our revenues from digital means. We're well on our way to achieving that. This is our fifth year of being a listed business. We're proud that we've managed to go a long way towards achieving our stated objectives. We're accelerating our renewables growth, if you've heard from Matt, in terms of what we're doing with Ultimate Renewables. We've rationalized our cost base, which is something that you've seen us demonstrate in our numbers. Overall, before I close out and take questions, I'd like to state that as a business, as volumes recover, this group expects to benefit from strategically increased operating leverage. That will come through incremental revenue, which in itself will drive a disproportionate increase in our profitability over the medium term. Thank you very much.
You can move over to Q&A.
Perfect, guys. If I may just jump back in there.
Thank you very much indeed for your presentation this morning. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab that's situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the company take a few moments to review those questions that have been submitted already, I'd just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can all be accessed via your investor dashboards. Guys, we have received a number of questions throughout your presentation this morning. Thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions.
If I may just hand back to you to read out those questions and give your responses where it's appropriate to do so. If I pick up from you at the end, that'd be great. Thank you.
Okay, we have a number of questions. Thank you very much. Stuart, do you mind doing the honors and running through those?
Certainly. James H just asked, have you plans to open any more sites this year? Noticed you opened one in March. Could you let your investors know by RNSing these? I think we did, actually, on various merchants.
I think we put out as a news item, but necessarily may not be an RNS item. Do check our website. We will be publishing more news on our corporate website just as it for information, rather than necessarily it being an RNS due to the fact that I think RNSs are a bit more tightly controlled. Your point is taken. We will make sure that we let investors know of all the good things that we're doing in our business. Followed up by a question saying, will I buy some more shares in the future? I've always bought lots of shares. We bought some shares towards the end of last year. We will continue myself as an individual and as our family to back our business.
Okay. Next question is, the share price is really struggling right now. What can we expect in terms of the current year trading, in terms of net profits and share price earnings?
I think, to be fair, the share price is disappointing for all of us at the moment. I think there's a challenge that the market's not particularly enough with construction at the moment. There's a lot of negative updates from the large construction companies, the house builders, and so on. We're more in the RMI markets, obviously. Obviously, our share price is disappointing. We can't talk too much about why our profits are going to be our earnings this year because that would be a forecast. As we said in the presentation, we're doing the right things, we feel, in terms of new branches. We're doing the right things in terms of our M&A strategy, where we're very pragmatic but very cautious in terms of what we invest in. Also, we're doing the right things in terms of the business.
We're trying to make ourselves more efficient in terms of tight cost control, doing things more efficiently in terms of systems and IT. We're doing all the things that we can control in our opinion. Question from Hadley S. How do you decide where to make new branch openings? How quickly do they become cash flow positive? Are any established sites cash flow negative?
Lots of questions. How do we decide to make new branch openings is very much around expanding our geographical footprint on a strategic basis. We have been a business that predominantly come out of London and the home counties. We then strategically expand that network. Network expansion is a result of us having a list of towns where we would like to be, alongside knowing where there are opportunities. If you take Bicester is very close to our Aylesbury site and complements the Aylesbury site alongside our Beaconsfield. It gives us a natural extension in the Oxfordshire area. If you look at Bury St Edmunds, we already had a site in Sudbury. Bury St Edmunds is about 15 miles away from Sudbury. Now those two create it's a starting point of creating a network in East Anglia and so on and so forth.
In terms of the cash flow positive, our break-even point and then contribution would be anywhere between 18 and 24 months, depending on the cost structure of that site. To answer your question, are there sites that are cash flow negative? There will always be sites where, for a variety of reasons, the performance has been impacted. Lately, what we are seeing more of is either rent increases or a combination of rent and rate increases. When we have an opportunity to exit those sites or to renegotiate, we naturally take that opportunity to do so to make sure that the impact is limited to our overall results.
Thank you.
The next question.
The next question from Hadley S. as well is, revenue growth is not leading to profit with another statutory loss reported. At what revenue level do you start to generate statutory profits? I think the answer to that one is more in line with there's a difference between our adjusted results and our statutory numbers, largely due to impairments of our branch network. This is a consequence of IFRS 16, where a lot of businesses, particularly in the retail sector or the customer-face sector, are suffering from the way the accounting profession has moved over the last 10 years. We've taken branch impairments of about GBP 2.7 million in 2025. Our larger competitor, Travis Perkins, took branch impairments of GBP 64 million. It's an issue across the sector, really. In terms of what revenue level do we start to generate statutory profits?
We've said for quite some time that we think volumes are more than 20% down from where they were in May 2019. 20% of our current revenue is nearly GBP 100 million. You can see how much our underlying has come off based on volumes. We think there's a huge amount of operational leverage, as we said in the presentation, once that RMI market starts to improve and once those volumes start to return. Michael J asks that there's a disparity between the market capitalization and the net assets. Why does the market seem to dislike the numbers? This is a 50% discount to net assets. I'm hoping to see recovery, but comments welcome.
I can't speak for the market. The only thing I can say is when you look at the peer group, the peer group is marked down equally. If you were the CEO of some of our peer group competitors or businesses, they would equally be disappointed with where their share price is trading against their either net asset value or their embedded valuation. We believe it is a market sentiment aspect. Stuart has clearly mentioned that. We also believe, in particular in our case, the fact that there is a majority control may have something to do with how the market sees it. Our job is to see through the near-term or the short-term. We didn't list our business for short-term gain. We listed our business because it is a long-term investment.
It is, of course, linked to the U.K. economy and to the housing sector and the U.K. economy, which in the long run will always come through, or medium to long run will always come through. I don't think any of us have anticipated the level of geopolitical impact that it has had on the U.K., and in particular in our sector. We do expect a recovery in due course.
The next question is there potential for further acquisitions and expansion plans, anything planned for Scotland or Wales?
There's always potential for further acquisitions. We are inundated with opportunities on a constant basis. At the moment, a lot of these opportunities are because the market is tough, and those businesses are finding it very tough. What we've decided to do is to be extremely selective in doing so. Because right now, whilst the market is tough and we expect there to be a recovery, we wouldn't be forgiven for overpaying. In an uncertain market, it's also difficult, as you can see from our share price, to find what is the real true value of a business. That doesn't stop us from evaluating multiple opportunities on a daily basis. In terms of Wales and Scotland, these are geographies that are strong. I'd say Wales is very well served.
Scotland, there is possibly an opportunity for us, but we haven't really exhausted in terms of geographical expansion, in Merchanting in particular, the adjacencies to where we currently trade. Now, that said, we do have representation in our Plumbing & Heating business in Scotland. We had traditionally only one outlet in Glasgow, and we opened another one in Edinburgh. When the time is right, we'd certainly look to expand in Scotland, for sure. It's definitely an area on our radar.
Okay. It's just a follow-up question. I think Hadley's saying we can ask him why we can't give profit guidance. I think if I can refer you to our broker's reports, certainly you'll see their forecasts for the next two or three years. Our house brokers are Berenberg, Cavendish, and Stifel will also cover us as well. They've put out notes this morning that you may want to be referred to. James has asked, are we looking to reduce net debt more this year from GBP 13.4 million? Not particularly. I think we've probably surprised ourselves by how well it went in the last quarter of last year. We're obviously looking to get the right balance between leverage and investing for the future in terms of organic growth initiatives and future M&A. We'll be looking to keep our leverage in the right sort of ballpark.
We're obviously very reasonably conservative and quite pragmatic about making sure the debt's well controlled and not giving any rise to any risk.
I think the last comment was, CMO was a great acquisition. You must be excited what this will bring to the company. Yeah, we are. We are very excited. We're really pleased that we had the opportunity to take over CMO and have those wonderful colleagues join our group. To your point, yes, we are looking forward to a great year. It is going to be challenging, but we've seen through a number of challenging years. There's no reason why we can't get through and continue to grow in 2026.
Perfect, guys. If I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much indeed for being so generous with your time and then addressing all of those questions that came in from investors this morning. Of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended. Shanker, perhaps before really now just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and to the company. If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, that'd be great.
Thank you again for joining us today. As we said, 2025, we demonstrated resilience in our performance. In 2026, we have a clear focus on where our priorities are, and we look forward to being able to deliver on our commitments. Thank you.
Perfect, Shanker. That's great. Thank you all once again for updating investors this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order the management team can really better understand your views and expectations? This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Lords Group Trading PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. Good afternoon to you all.