Welcome to The Pebble Group Full Year 2022 results webinar. All attendees are in listen-only mode, and questions will be answered at the end of the presentation. You can type in your question by clicking on the Q&A button at any point. This webinar is being recorded. I now hand over to Chris Lee, CEO, and Claire Thomson, CFO. Chris, over to you.
Tamzin, thank you. Hi, everybody. Thank you very much for your time today. Welcome. This is The Pebble Group's full year results for 2022. Gonna give you a sense of, you know, what's behind us in terms of our results, but also our strategy, what's in front of us in terms of direction and outlook. So my name's Chris. I'm the Chief Exec of The Pebble Group and very proud to lead the team and do that. I've been with the business for over 20 years in various roles and sort of ownership structures. But, you know, kind of say really proud to lead the business. Been here a while and, you know, supported by Claire, our CFO.
Yeah. Hi, I'm Claire. Introduce me there. Thank you. Yes, I'm Claire, the CFO. Like, you know, like Chris says, I'm very proud to be part of this team, and I've been here for 15 years, so it's a big part of my life.
Okay. We're gonna trot you through about 20 minutes of a presentation and very happy to take some questions at the end. Just to kind of a bit of background regarding the industry we're in. We're in the industry of promotional products, and it's a really big industry. You know, around about $50 billion worth of promotional products are sold throughout the globe on an annual basis. Why promotional products use? Well, very proudly got my branded issue and water bottle here. That's because, you know, people like to, in businesses of all sizes, all sectors and all geographies, want to engage with their people, their stakeholders, and make an emotional connection with them through the use of product.
That has led, you know, over, kind of, you know, say all sectors and all geographies, to businesses, you know, proudly putting their, brand on a, on a product that they want to engage and kind of take forward, with their stakeholders. Yeah, in terms of using them well and doing it properly, you know, I think, you know, kind of put, four things in there for you to recognize. First of all, you know, don't spend money on promotional products unless it's gonna be a great product, that kind of represents your brand properly and kind of your user or the end audience is kind of very proud to take away and remember and reuse time and time again.
You know, spend the money on something else if it's not about great products that's reused and somebody wants to keep and is useful for them. Then kind of moving around that chart, it's really important it aligns with your brand values. You know, we're sat in the offices here at Berenberg, our broker, and, you know, they're kind of a big user of promotional merchandise. It's very important if they kind of stand for a quality business at kind of the top of their industry, then actually the product bearing their brand should be exactly the same. Great product aligns your brand values as an organization. Absolutely, if that's at the front end, what's at the back end?
It's really important, you know, what materials is that product made of and where does that product come from? That combination of those four things makes a product a very good one, and then kind of what do you get out of that, you get sort of stakeholder engagement, brand loyalty and experience, the kind of things that, why promotional products are used. In terms of what does that give us as an industry and where does Pebble Group sit in, I talked about that $50 billion of products are sold on the overall market. Pebble Group has two businesses and kind of that we represent as Pebble. That is a Facilisgroup. So Facilisgroup is a platform, a SaaS platform based in North America.
The sales that goes through that technology is about $1.4 billion. The U.S. market or North American market is around about $25 billion. We see through our technology, you know, on a day-to-day basis, $1.4 billion or 6% of the U.S. industry is going through our technology. We see, you know, the supplier that's from, what products that is, what company that's from and what company and what brand that's going to. Just great visibility of the industry through that technology. Our products business Brand Addition is where my heritage is and really proud to be part of that business.
That's 0.1 billion, so GBP 117 million this year went through that business in terms of product sales, and that's just some of the largest and best-known companies in the world, which we supply them on a global basis. In terms of highlights for full year 2022, again, another year of growth for business. You know, a record year in terms of revenue and 16% overall. Cash generation is very important. We have no debt in the business at the year-end. GBP 15 million of cash, and that cash comes from two really cash generative businesses in Brand Addition and Facilisgroup.
As we learn an awful lot from speaking to our investors, our advisors and what we've been able to do now. We feel as though we're in a position that we manage our cash really well. We're investing some back for growth. Also I think to show, you know, our confidence and to all investors is to say, you know, we're happy to kind of put a dividend in there as well. You know, it's not gonna change anybody's lives in the short term, but it's a big statement that says, you know, we believe we're a business that kind of give a return on an annual basis to our shareholders, and that should be a growing number going forward.
Splitting that growth into our two businesses, Facilisgroup, 31% revenue growth in GBP. That's a little bit less because in dollars, which is the base of the business, because we had some sort of exchange tailwind, which is, you know, we still welcome. You can see that $1.4 billion of GMV going through the system, a real kind of insight into the industry. Brand Addition, excellent performance of 15% revenue growth coming through. You know, that win, grow, retain and repeat that strategy for those large corporates.
You know, what our business has done amazingly well is through very difficult circumstances, is manage that business in a very narrow bandwidth around 30 points over the long term and had a great result in 2022 as well. I think Claire's gonna kind of walk us through some of the numbers.
Okay. Thank you. Just sharing with you on a page the direction of travel for the business. There's this, you know, this is all our key indicators and all moving forwards, which is, it's obviously nice to be able to share. You know, that growing revenue translating into growing EBITDA. Also us moving operating profit forward, which we'll come on to talk about it in a little bit, but we have been investing in our ambition for Facilis, then starting to take some of the amortization on those products. It's nice to see that operating profit's moving forward as well. That translates into, you know, basic EPS is going up. As Chris said, we've got two highly cash generative businesses and our cash is growing.
This slide is hopefully quite helpful for you in understanding the different dynamics of the two businesses. We've got the pie on the left-hand side is the revenue within the group. We've got our products business, Brand Addition, and that's the dark blue slice of the pie, and that's the lion's share of revenue. Our platform business, Facilis, where we've got SaaS revenues, is a much smaller slice of the revenue chart. When you move across to the right-hand side, you can see that though the impacted EBITDA margins that we generate at Facilisgroup mean that we're kind of roughly split 50/50 in terms of EBITDA across both businesses in the group. This is our P&L there for the record.
We've said already, you know, our revenue growth was 16%, EBITDA growth was 17%, and you know, that's coming through growing the number of customers in our business, both at Brand Addition and at Facilis. And also again, we've alluded to it, but you know, Brand Addition has been really successful this year in maintaining its margins in what's been a, you know, a difficult climate. When we talk to investors and people who are interested in our business, we always point to that 30% gross profit margin in Brand Addition, and the team have been really successful in achieving that this year. Below EBITDA, I've just alluded to the incremental DNA that's coming through from our investment into new products at Facilis, and you can see our chart has moved forward this year.
We've also got share-based payments. This is the first time that we've had real LTIPs up and running, so we're at now our run rate is in the level that we'd expect going forward. Cash flow. Dead simple, nice and clean. You know we kind of we've got the incremental EBITDA, like working capital. Brand Addition is a products business, and it does require working capital to support those sales as it grows. That's, you know, a proportionate level of investment with the increases in volumes, but there is some investment in working capital there, and you can see that on the cash flow statement.
Our CapEx is the other kind of interesting piece of this statement, which is linked to our strategic ambition to scale to this group, and we'll go into that in a little bit more detail as we move through the presentation. Balance sheet. When you look at our group balance sheet, it's really all about Brand Addition. The working capital that Facilis is a, you know, there's barely any working capital in there. It's highly cash generative and working capital light model. Our working capital is Brand Addition. Brand Addition is working with some of the best-known brands in the world. If we talk to our customers at Brand Addition, then you will recognize names. Names sit behind the assets on our balance sheet. We hold stock. That's stock that's underwritten by our clients.
If there's a brand change or a contract termination, then our customers buy that stock back from us, so we don't carry any risk with our inventory. Same with receivables. You know, those of you who've listened to me before on these presentations, you always say, "If we invoice correctly, then we get paid." Whilst our working capital grows with growth in Brand Addition, it's, you know, it's very high quality working capital that translates into cash. Increasingly getting used, getting asked the question, how are we gonna, you know, use our, the cash that we, that we generate in the business? I've introduced this slide for the first time, this year.
Just kind of running down, the left-hand side, 1 to 5, and you know, that's very deliberately ordered to say this is how we see our priorities. Kind of number 1, it's nice to have some cash on the balance sheet, and I think the level of cash that we had at this year-end of GBP 50 million, it feels like a, you know, a reasonable number for us to be, you know, for us to be holding. That feels like a sensible position for the group. Touched on it a couple of times already. We need some cash to invest in working capital, but that will be proportionate to the level of growth in sales and, you know, the teams are very disciplined around maintaining metrics around working capital, but there will be a little bit there.
CapEx, I'll come onto in a minute in a little bit more detail, but we are investing to deliver our strategic ambition for Facilisgroup. Number four, we've implemented a dividend policy that for the first time, our dividend payment this time, and it's our intention that, you know, that payment will be progressively increased as we move towards the position we set out at IPO, where we said that we'd look to pay 30% of profit after tax. I think, again, as Chris has said, it's really important to us to signal, you know, our confidence in the business to demonstrate our ability to manage cash, and, you know, we're very used to doing that. Starting on the journey of making a dividend payment, hopefully gives that signal to everybody else.
Then, you know, there are other things that we can look at to do with our cash after that, but these are our objectives. What I'm trying to show on the right-hand side is, you know, how we are investing in Facilisgroup in particular at the moment and how, and the, and split the CapEx expenditure that's going on. Conscious that we're at the peak of that investment now, wanted to also signal very clearly that that is investment that's associated, you know, with a strategic ambition and looking to get us to the GBP 50 million ARR expectation in the next two to three years at Facilisgroup that we've talked about over the last few years.
Also kind of signaling that we don't expect this current level of CapEx investment to be an ongoing number and as we get to that scaled revenue, then that will come down to a much lower maintenance level.
Okay, thanks Claire. If that's all the group numbers, I'll now dive into each of our businesses. Well, in fact I'll talk through Facilisgroup and Claire will run through Brand Addition, and then we'll kind of come to some kind of closing statements. But Facilisgroup's a wonderful business. It's based in North America, and it's a platform that's used by entrepreneurial distributors in the North American promotional products market. That market overall is about sort of $25 billion in terms of product sales. Facilisgroup puts a, you know, a technology platform above that industry to help them manage the order workflow and the efficiencies between the supplier, the distributor, and the end brand.
All our historic numbers based to date, from 2022 back are based on Syncore, that order workflow system. Syncore says that we've got 217 partners, they're businesses, and those businesses averaging size about seven and a half million dollars of sales. Can be between $2 million and sort of $15 million, even up to $30 million in size. Our partners use our technology to kind of help them grow, help them efficient, and help have great visibility over their organizations. The activity going through Syncore, which turns into our revenues, looking back are, you know, 200 partners using 100 referred suppliers and that's about sort of 1 million orders producing $1.4 billion of visibility of sales in the industry. That's about 6%.
You know, that's kind of a lot of understanding of the industry we have through that number. If Syncore, you know, helps that efficiency at the back end, then we, for the first time, that investment that Claire's been talking about, yeah, we've put a product at the front end, an e-commerce platform, that helps our customers sell to their customers. That is literally an e-commerce platform. They might host, you know, just one of these stores, but they host most many for their customers in order to help them kind of get more exclusivity between themselves and their end customer and actually kind of help them sell on a regular basis.
Commercio links back into Syncore, it really sort of helps that sort of again, that efficiency process, and helping our clients, you know, work efficiently and well, it gives them more time in selling. Also Commercio can be a standalone product and really increases our addressable market to the really long tail of promotional products businesses that are in North America. You know, in terms of, you know, these numbers are, you know, I think are really impressive and outstanding. It's a testament to the team that we're able to produce this. That first row is about our financial performance on a five-year basis.
You can see even through COVID, you know, kind of very well, in fact on a 20% CAGR basis over that, on revenues over that, over that four-year period. Think of it all really as recurring revenue. You know, it's probably about 95% of recurring revenue that comes through, which we have really good visibility over. That revenue translates at really high proportions into EBITDA. It's 54% in 2022. It's been around, you know, as sort of 50% up to 60% in the period that we're showing here on this slide. Basically 20% CAGR growth of annual recurring revenues, and then sort of on top of that, 50% plus in terms of EBITDA.
You know, that's a very powerful business. Again, not carrying any working capital. What we want to do is definitely set a strategy to grow that business, and if we can kind of get it, you know, you see it's doubled in the last four years. If we can get to do that more of the same, you know, it becomes a very powerful organization. How is that sort of revenue and EBITDA achieved? The second row is really these are the measures that help grow Syncore revenues. Growing the number of partners. At the end of the year, at 31st, we have 217 partners implemented, and that eight is saying there's eight more contracted lists, but yet to actually be implemented before the year end.
Again, growing partner numbers, you know, makes this a stronger business. This is our flagship product in Syncore. They are quality businesses that are in that 225. What we'd like to do is grow that, you know, again, but also kind of recognizing that the strength of the model is in the quality of those partners and those businesses that we interact with. Of the 225, we think there's a total market of probably 1,600 for this particular type of product, Syncore. There's some sort of addressable market information in the back of this pack for anybody who'd like to delve a little bit deeper.
Those partners as they grow, they're growing individually, but they're also growing in terms of number, and that kind of flicks straight onto the GMV. That goes to that $1.4 billion of revenues that we're now seeing. That's, you know, a huge spend in this market that we can have an influence of where the purchases go for that spend. That's where we work very closely with a quality group of preferred suppliers, where we're trying to, you know, help those preferred suppliers and our partners interact together to get great pricing, great service, and kind of grow together and support each of those organizations. Those three charts moving in the right direction kind of are, you know, therefore results in the revenue going in the right direction.
You know, again, trying to sort of share information, allow investors and, you know, people to make informed decisions about the business. You can see our market opportunity we think is really large. That GBP 25 billion of total revenue, in terms of... That's generated by over 20,000 different businesses. Right now through Syncore, we're kind of focusing on sort of about 1,600 of those businesses. Really in the market, can we deliver technology to the, to the wider piece, which actually grows our, obviously grows our addressable market and can help us get to our aspirations of GBP 50 million of ARR. Our business has been successful.
If we index back in terms of the GMV and where that's gone, through COVID, the industry has now sort of popped above where it was in 2019. A business with Facilis, and that's again, the strength of our partners, if you're selling 100 in 2018 and now selling 135 in 2022, that's really nice growth. With the market share we've taken as well, that 100 has actually doubled and Facilis kind of now our market share, which is on the right-hand side of, just about 6%. Some really nice SaaS metrics underneath there.
Our subscription technology, our technology subscriptions had a sort of NRR of 110%, meaning without growing customer numbers, we kind of have grown the revenues on technology by 10%. Customer numbers is a 96% retention, which is again, very good and kind of, you know, sort of very important so that we learn, we get better from feedback from our partners and kind of have that NPS of 47% which, you know, kind of as a positive score that kind of relates back into that 96. Some really kind of nice metrics of what the actual business is performing as. Where's our strategy going? Claire talks about the investment and use of capital.
We are, you know, very much kind of a strategy that we all believe in, you know, kind of ourselves at The Pebble Group, the team at Facilisgroup are very committed to. You know, we're kind of rightly very proud of wonderful business. At the first of January 2022, we had one product and a very powerful one, that flagship product, Commercio, and that one industry. Through investing in that kind of, you know, what we believe the market eats and would take from us, investing in Commercio, which is our e-commerce product, that allows us to increase our addressable market, you know, to the 20,000 different businesses in here.
Also taking a kind of a very different view of what we do with Syncore is a flagship product for a really growing and strong kind of organizations in North America. There's a long tail of much smaller business, individual entrepreneurs, that we believe we can kind of build some technology and offer to them. We're calling that Orders. We make a phone call to a distributor. Of those 20,000, we would like to say so we have some technology that we can help your business become more efficient and grow. Whether that be the flagship product of Syncore, the e-commerce product of Commercio, or the Orders product to the kind of smaller entrepreneur in the North American product market.
This is how we're trying to increase our addressable markets and increase the number of customers that we can actually interact with. That's that investment that's going in. I think if this takes us towards that 50 million of ARR, then the investment that Claire's been talking about, kind of in the CapEx slide, becomes extremely good value. One thing's for sure, we're spending the money. Now, what we've got to prove to everybody is that we can kind of, you know, get up the curve towards that 50 million. We always kind of set out how to summarize Facilis. Well, it's kind of three goals. You know, keep Syncore growing with a high quality of U.S. business in North America.
Kind of establishing Commercio is now a paid-for product in the market, establishing that as a market leader, in the promotional product sector in e-commerce, then successfully bringing Orders out by the end of the year, as our third product. It's the sort of snowballing and the acceleration of those three products, say, which we hope keeps our growth going in a very positive direction. Claire's gonna put it through Brand Addition.
Just going back briefly to the business model and the industry model that we talked about a couple of slides back on Facilis. We've got the, you know, the brand on the right-hand side who create the demand for the product, suppliers on the left, who are generally category specific, and that creates a need for the distributor in the middle. That's what Brand Addition is, a very large distributor that's working solely under contract with some of the best-known brands in the world over a period of time and providing those complex services that are listed there in the middle. Kind of sharing here our five-year results summary for Brand Addition. Again, you know, we kind of shared the KPIs on Facilis.
You know, Brand Addition is a, you know, also a mature and very powerful business. You can see, you know, like in 2020, like many products businesses, Brand Addition was affected by COVID, the demand for our products did slow down. You can also see that there's that kind of very quick immediate V in recovery in 2021 and 2022. The team have moved that on again and grown that business again. You know, kind of across that period of time, we've been able to maintain our gross profit margins at 30%, which is, I think I've already said today, that's where we generally point people and what the team managed to achieve. Throughout that period, been, you know, very profitable and cash generative.
I think, you know, I've talked about on the previous slide, I was working with some of the best-known brands in the world, the two pie charts at the bottom are showing, you know, the sectors that we're working in. We're in beauty, FMCG, technology, transport, engineering. There's a really nice spread across some amazing brands, across all sectors and across all geographies. Right, you know, the right-hand corner is showing the results for the year, which were, you know, very impressive. 15% revenue growth at 30% margins and about 10% EBITDA return. Here again, just trying to give you a, you know, a bit more of a feel for the opportunity, addressable market for Brand Addition.
You know, we've done a piece of work that looking at where we can, where we can take this business. Looking at kind of businesses across geographies, sectors, by number of people and come up with, you know, there's a short list of 800 companies that we think, you know, would really benefit from working with Brand Addition and taking our services. What, and what happens when we contract with these people is, you know, we've got great longevity of relationships. That's average 10 years in our top 20, and that includes some that have been with us for 2. You can see there's a real range in the length of relationship, but that there's a real longevity to that relationship.
Again, like a really positive experience when they're working with Brand Addition, that we get some really good feedback and high NPS scores. This chart's kind of just trying to bring together like, look, questions that we always get on Brand Addition and really like share its performance and the strength of the business model and the quality of the team there. You know, so we always get what happens if there's inflation or what happens if supply chain or what happens if there's a recession. So we, you know, so we've listed at the end of 19, and you can see along the bottom of that picture in the middle. Pretty much everything that could be thrown at Brand Addition has been.
It, you know, as I'm saying, down the left-hand side, I've got amazing experienced team there. We've got working with the best-known brands in the world on a long-term basis. We've got a global proposition that, you know, our clients want to engage with. They want us to look after them across Europe, Asia, North America, we're doing that from offices of substance. We're leading on ESG and tech in Brand Addition. When we get in these customers, then they're staying with us. You know, what have we managed to achieve since IPO, when all these things have been happening? You know, we've grown our revenues 20%. We've done that at a consistent 30% profit margin. We've added GBP 70 million of new business.
Wrapping up for what's our focus for 2023 with Brand Addition? Well, you know, it's a contracted business, we wanna hold on to those clients. They're very precious to us. Kind of win, grow, retain, repeat is the mantra. Let's keep all of our clients that we're working with, let's hold on to them. Like, you know, successfully win some new contracts. You know, as I've said, leading through our ESG credentials, technology and creativity, make sure that we hang on to those margins and keep working at that 30 points that we've managed to achieve over the historic period.
Well, just touching on ESG then we'll kind of, take you through the outlook and go to some questions. ESG, we kind of put out our second, ESG report, which can be found on our website. Kind of a lot of detail goes into that, a lot of hard work goes into that and, you know, kind of make it seem, you know, a day-to-day part of our business as something that's been important from the start. It's kind of not something that we've had to sort of work hard to kind of, you know, sort of starting I don't feel as we started from the ground. You know, I feel as though, you know, certainly through Brand Addition works from the best known brands in the world.
You know, where a product comes from, what sustainability stories behind it, has been a kind of a big part of Brand Addition selling proposition for a long time. That neatly now fits ESG, but actually it's kind of been something that business has been doing forever. Doing it properly and making it our own tone of voice and kind of, you know, being brave enough to say, actually, this is kind of important to our business. This bit doesn't touch our business, so let's not kind of, actually, let's leave that bit alone. You know, I think has been very important.
Doing this properly, you know, doing so over the long term, you know, I've got no doubts, you know, makes us a better business and gives us great guidance for how we should be running it. There's some detail here of kind of, you know, under the different ESG sections. But I say the best way to kind of understand our commitments and our sort of, and our kind of how we involve this in our day-to-day business is to kind of go through our report on accounts, go through our ESG reports, and kind of, you know, always happy to receive feedback on there.
We have people who walk across the threshold of the door in the business every day, and ESG is kind of what they're thinking about and what they're kind of making sure is implemented correctly into our organization. And really sort of proudly on the right-hand side there, you can see that, our business was nominated and actually won, an, one of the AIM awards, for the sort of, best corporate governance on AIM. You know, I think, that is a wide group of people who kind of, who sort of put us forward for that and then vote on that. That was a really proud moment in terms of the business being recognized for the initiatives that it's actually doing.
In terms of, you know, how the business has started, I think, you know, we have two super organizations in Facilis and Brand Addition in terms of the culture in the organizations, the differentiated strategies and the addressable markets they can actually grow into. You know, it's up to us year after year after year to kind of keep proving that and moving our financial, you know, financial direction forward and our strategy forward.
In terms of the start of 2023, you know, it's very much in line with our expectations and, as I say, when I, you know, sit here in 6 months time or in 1 year's time, you know, we very much will be consistent to the strategies that we've taken up and hope we're further up on the curves on each of those strategies. I think that's, you know, everything from us. We're really happy to take questions now.
Chris, thank you very much indeed. To ask your question, click on the Q&A button and type your question in. The first question is, you commented that the current CapEx won't be ongoing. What can we expect CapEx to normalize at going forward?
Tried to share that on that slide 12. There's a level of CapEx in Brand Addition. You can see that's been roughly around the GBP 2 million mark, over the last few years, and I'd expect that to be there. What we're pointing to for Facilisgroup is GBP 3 million. That's for that'll be at the GBP 50 million scale of revenue, and we'll be supporting three products as opposed to the one that we've had historically. Thank you.
Great. Thank you very much indeed. You've talked about Facilis having a 96% retention. Why do partners leave?
The main reason we've had in the past, I think it's twofold really. One is, you know, they're, these are great businesses that have probably been established for a long time, and there'll be sort of at some point, the owners and partners of those businesses perhaps want to realize some of the value they created and might sell their organization. That's probably the main reason that happens. When that does happen, we'd like to keep them in the family and for them to sell their business to one of our other partners, and even that actually is part of our attrition. We don't kinda say that as a, we're keeping an existing customer.
That happens and that we call that attrition or if they're acquired by someone outside of Facilis, then obviously that is as well. That's the main reason. You know, occasionally we bring in a partner that perhaps it might not fit, they might be quite small, they might not be buying enough from the preferred supplier network, and so it might not exactly suit them. But, you know, a 96% customer acquisition rate I think is really strong. We kind of will work and continue to work very hard at keeping that. An acquisition and perhaps something not small is probably two main reasons.
Tremendous. Thank you very much. The U.K. and U.S. interest rates have gone up again today. Does this concern you?
I think we always need to kind of be aware of the wider, you know, economic environment. As Claire showed on Brand Addition, there's been a lot thrown at Brand Addition, but, you know, kind of the group generally, Facilis is very much included in that as well, over the three years that we've been listed. I think, if... You know, I am an investor, you know, in Pebble, but if I'm thinking about an investment in Pebble, I go, "Well, actually, I'm worried about something that happens in three months' time and what might happen." If I'm a three-month investor, I kind of probably might be slightly concerned about interest rates or recession or what might happen.
I think if I'm a kind of one-year, two-year, three-year investor in the business, then I think the strategy we have on Facilis, the way that Brand Addition kind of continues to retain and grow and kind of, you know, it's, it's disruption is kind of, you know, the example Claire showed you there, where, you know, kind of customers stay with us. The business kind of continues to grow with new customers. If I take that sort of one-year, two-year view, you know, then I am an investor, and I'm obviously a buyer.
Thank you very much. A related question which you may feel you've already answered. Are marketing budgets holding up during these increasingly challenging global economic conditions?
As I say, we've been through quite a lot and, you know, it's kind of, you know, I suppose when we show that Brand Addition to next year, we might just kind of show it a little bit further, but we still expect our, you know, our guidance in the market and that's, we have some of that publicly available now through Edison and on our website. The guidance in the market, we're comfortable with where we sit today. Brand Addition is well spread in terms of sectors, like Claire said. That spread of sectors, I think helps us in terms of kind of weather some of those storms, as does the geographic side.
I think, you know, our line was in the outlook, marketing budget in terms of our expectation, you know, the 2023 has started within that management expectation.
Tremendous. Thank you very much. What's the strategy for accessing the market at Facilis? How do you market the products, and will the approach differ between the three offers?
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Certainly, you know, for the first time, I think what's really exciting is that if we have an engagement with any distributor in the promotional product sector in North America, we will have a product that would be of use to them. You know, now any conversation we have, there is something that would kind of help their business become more efficient, help their business sell. Obviously sort of the products are quite different because they're towards different markets. Syncore, you know, is asking a business account all the way and put something else in new. That is, you know, more sophisticated sell in some terms, in terms of, you know, kind of taking away the processes and procedures you have now and putting new ones in.
That might have a little longer life cycle. Also in terms of, you know, making sure, you know, we're experts in their business, you know, from the promotional products market of Brand Addition and Pebble Group. We understand their pain points, and helping them demonstrate how our technology gets over those pain points is a big part of getting people across the line on C-Core. There's a bit more of a volume sell going on on Orders and on Commercio. The teams work very closely together, but they are separate teams. If we try and, you know, we're expecting to sell a Commercio product, we might end up selling C-Core, or we might end up selling Orders. I think kind of there is a slightly different sell.
You know, our investment into that sales and marketing will be very important in making sure we're successful in. You know, that kind of. In some month, yeah, it will be. Customer does commercial. I'd say that's the same question again. Through dot com, view the product, trial it and pay for it with us.
Very much. Are you seeing any chain promotion being used by customers more or less sophisticated than that? Does it affect margins?
I've been here for 20 something years, and the product quality has improved. You know, kind of it's, I would say, much more retail quality. People do want you to keep that product and reuse again and again and again. That is the idea behind promotional products. I think that product quality towards retail, definitely. I think increasingly, certainly for the customers that Brand Addition are interacting with, you know, the sustainability story, does it fit with their values around ESG? I think that's, you know, definitely a train that's left the station, and leading in that area will support Brand Addition growth. In terms of margins, certainly again, I kind of focus on the Brand Addition, which is the business selling product.
We always point people to 30% on a blended basis. Obviously that has a bandwidth around it. Overall, 30% is what we think is the right number. That is our customers willing to pay a margin that values the services we bring, but also kind of willing to sort of retain us and gives us amount of profit as well that we believe is reasonable for the work that we do. I don't think it does change the margin. You know, we will always point as Brand Addition to a 30% gross profit margin.
Thank you very much. Are supply chain issues still affecting the business or have they largely been overcome?
It's hard to say if we've just become immune to everything being thrown at us actually, because, you know, Brexit was a big disruption and continues to be much more, you know, inefficient than, you know, in terms of moving product than it ever was. Followed by that was freight capacity, freight rate increase, supply chain challenges out of China and then inflation and even currency. I think we kind of I'm not sure that becomes the new normal, but we kind of, Claire talked about the quality of the team, the depth of relationship with customers and suppliers and, you know, I think it allows us to deal with whatever gets thrown at us.
You know, it has been, you know, a fairly tough ride, but the quality of both Facilis and Brand Addition, if you look on the top and the way the business has continued to develop, you know, I think is a reflection of, you know, the people there, hard work and, you know, kind of the position of the organization.
Thank you. How do you handle currency fluctuations?
There's kind of two points that really impact the group. We've got the translational in regard businesses in the U.S., Brand Addition U.S. and Facilis. We get the translational impact there that's down at, you know, profit, operating profit level. But that is part of the, you know, part of the group's numbers. Then in Brand Addition, if we are buying product directly in the Far East, where we're purchasing that in $, then we hedge that spot at the point that the order is placed, so it protects our margins. Same if we are invoicing in EUR out of the U.K. company, then again, we'll hedge that forward and protect our margins for when we know we're collecting that cash.
Thank you very much. Can you tell us a little bit about the OTCQX listing and will it help with liquidity?
Yeah. So it's not a listing listed on AIM, it's actually, it's a trading platform. Our intention there was to just help our employees, partners, suppliers, you know, people interested in our business, help them, give them an opportunity to buy our shares. It's literally, it's a trading platform, you know, it will be as easy to buy shares if you are a US-based investor as it is for the UK team.
Does that mean it's going to be a dual listing?
No, no. It's not a dual listing. We are only listed on AIM. OTCQX is just a platform that will help people buy the shares that I've listed on AIM.
Tremendous. Thank you very much. That's the end of questions. Chris, do you have any closing remarks?
Yeah, I think as always, it's a great opportunity for me to say thank you to the team. Our results have kind of, you know, I think have moved forward again. That doesn't happen by accident, you know, it's some talented people, you know, working on, you know, really kind of clear strategies and working extremely hard. The combination of those things is kind of what brings our results out. It's thank you to them. You know, thank you for your time, for your interest in The Pebble Group and, you know, we will, you know, keep our strategy consistent. We'll be ambitious for the business and, we'll do this all again in six months' time.
Tremendous. Many thanks indeed, Chris and Claire. To everyone listening, you'll now be taken to a webpage to give some anonymous feedback on today's presentation. If you can't complete it now, you'll receive a follow-up email. We and the company would be really grateful if you could take a few minutes to complete. Many thanks for joining. This is the end of the webinar.