Morning, everybody. Warm welcome to our H1 and 2023 results presentation. My name is Steve Ashmore. I'm joined by Paul Quested.
Good morning, everybody.
Phil will help with the technology side, sitting to my left. So usual format we'll run through, so why don't we just sprint straight to the highlights, please, Phil? There we go. Thank you very much. So it's an interesting update today with a little bit to unpick. So we're gonna start with the half one results as delivered. Solid performance. We've got revenue 6% up, and that's contained within that. You've got our Services business improving, growing 14%, and our Rental business growing 2%. What that meant was you got a slight mix change in profit effect. But by and large, if you strip out the strategic investments made, our EBITDA, EBITA are pretty much in line with prior year, which, considering everything that's happened over the year, we're pretty pleased with.
What also is notable is high returns have been maintained. We got return on capital employed at 20%. Paul will go through that in a bit more detail. That, coupled with the strong balance sheet, our net debt leverage was at 1x. Means the board we're very pleased to propose an increase on the interim dividend of 6%. So all in all, a decent set of numbers. And further to that, while delivering those numbers, we continued to implement further our game plan, our strategy. I will talk about this in a bit more detail later on in the day, but we wanna cover there is the strategic initiatives where we continue to see some really encouraging results we're really pleased with. I'll also talk about the move to the low-cost builders merchant model.
I'll show you the reason why we decided to close a further 16 of our branches and move to the merchants. It's going really well. The final piece I wanted to update in this section that we've been delivering is our 2040 ESG agenda, sorry. And noting that our 2040 Net Zero action plan has been validated by the SBTi, and we've also achieved ISO 27001, which is easy for me to say, which is cybersecurity. So while we're delivering the numbers, we've moved on at a pace with the strategic actions and plans that we had. So that's the good part of the update. The not-so-good part is the markets that we face into. I think the point that we've got on the slide there, a mixed picture, is certainly what we're seeing.
Definitely, there's still strong demand in the larger civil infrastructure, big projects. They can't carry on motoring forward. But what we've seen, especially, second half onwards, is a softening in certain buyer segments, namely anything to do with housing, RMI and fit out, and that's particularly affected sort of the medium, the smaller, customer base. It's creating that sort of, challenging short-term environment. So how does that affect us? That's within the outlook. So what we have seen, July, August, September trading. Half two, well, we've seen Services continue to grow at 14%. We're pretty sure that the work we're doing in the strategy, creating the platform for, our customers to access a broader products, also accessing broader customer segments are allowing that to grow at 14%, i.e., accessing the markets that are growing.
But Rental decline, yes, was affected by a very damp summer, but it's more than that. What we've seen, particularly during September, is quite a lot of volatility week on week. So, to offset that, we saw this coming, so we've taken some actions cost-wise. They're gonna total GBP 6 million. We're pretty confident we're gonna deliver those. But the further decision we've taken is that we are gonna press ahead with our investment behind the strategic plans. That means OpEx of GBP 6.5 million this year and CapEx of GBP 6 million. The reason is we do see markets as being temporary. They will come back. We will, but we do wanna be in full flow when the markets are back and have implemented our strategy.
So we don't wanna pause it and see what happens. So we're taking that decision, we're gonna make that happen. What does that mean? We are putting a range for the outturn and EBITA between GBP 23 million-GBP 30 million. I know that is quite a range, but just to give you an idea why we set the range as that, if you looked in September, week-on-week, one of the weeks, we were positive as far as Rental growth was concerned. If you roll that out to the year-end, we're near the GBP 30 million end, and then another couple of weeks, we've been negative. And if you work that through, we're probably nearer the 25 and worse. So we've put a range out there because we wanna establish a range that we are going to hit and deliver and move on from.
So the final thing I just wanted to note, Paul will say this again later. In terms of the lower end of that range, GBP 23 million, it still represents, I'm pretty sure I'm saying this, Paul, a PBT, one of our... well, the second-best performances we've been a listed business. So just to put some context around that. However, in summary, a decent first half, we continue to deliver the strategy. We have seen some market softening. There's a bit of volatility in that. We've taken cost actions to make sure that we deliver within the range, and that's our target now.
Thank you. Thanks, Steve. Good morning again, everybody. Just before we go into the financials, a small amount of housekeeping. As you know, last summer, we legally restructured our business around new segments, being HSS ProService, Operations, and Ireland. As such, the comparisons for the same period last year are not available. To aid year-on-year performance understanding, we're presenting the old segments, Rental and Services, so that you can then see the underlying trends, as well as providing pro forma comparators for our new segments. So this is a transition year on reporting. So that's just a little bit of housekeeping first. So if I move on to the financial summary. As Steve said, a solid first half to the financial year, with continued growth, particularly the double-digit growth from our capital light Services business.
As always, I will cover off some of the financial metrics you see on this slide in more detail on subsequent slides, but just honing in on some of the specifics. And Steve already said, we've continued to invest in our transformational marketplace strategy, and in the first half of the year, there was GBP 2.2 million spent on overheads, our operating expenditure, and that was mainly in areas such as central sales and also other investments in the infrastructure to drive forward our strategy. And also, we spent GBP 2.4 million on developing our marketplace technology. So that's all in those numbers. Now, for comparability purposes, because obviously, the investment in overheads is for future growth, we stripped out what is the performance excluding that investment, because at the moment, we're not... The returns build on that as we go forward.
What you can see is that excluding this investment, underlying EBITDA and EBITA margins are broadly in line with last year and have shown a pretty good solid performance. Our adjusted profit before tax remains strong, and we'll come back to the full year in a moment, but if we look at the six months back, for context, that is the second highest in the group's history for an H1 performance, and that's despite strategic investment we just highlighted and the well-documented rising interest rates. All of this continues to be underpinned by a robust and healthy balance sheet. Moving on to our segments, and I'm gonna focus on the historic segments first. So Rental, just as a reminder, that's the assets owned by the group and the revenue generated from them and any including both direct hire and ancillary revenue.
We saw steady growth, 2% from our Rental segment, and some of the areas to pull out, our Builders Merchant model continues to perform. We've increased it from 54 this time last year to 67, and now in England and Wales, our Builders Merchants represent around about 20% of all contracts raised, and our same stores growth of 23%, which, a very strong performance on the back of double digit previously. And Steve will cover off later, Builders Merchants in more detail, including our plans going forward. We've continued to invest in the fleet. Investment in the first half of last year at GBP 19 million, it was the same as the previous half year.
But we've used, as always, our insight capability to invest where there's demand, and that's enabled us to drive returns, which we'll come onto later, but maintain utilization at high levels, so 56% consistent with last year. So that's on a higher, a larger fleet. And taking these all together, HSS Operations that supports the Rental segment, has delivered increased operational efficiency. And through that efficiency, we've been able to expand our contribution margins on Rental by 1.4 percentage points. So, steady growth, improving contribution margins. If we move on to Services, and as a reminder, Services is the income generated from third-party hire fleets, so our rehire business and other product verticals, including training. And this is a copy and paste from prior years, so excellent double-digit growth.
Customers continue to value our one-stop shop, and pleasingly, we've continued to deliver that growth and maintained our contribution margins. Substantial growth and maintaining margins at the same time. Within this area, our data-driven central sales team, which we've been investing in, has seen impressive growth on the targeted set of customers they've been working on, 25%, and we'll talk later on, it's now about time to scale up the number of customers that that team focus on. Our partner network, that supports our Services segment, has increased by a further 10% and is now standing at above 900 third parties that we work with across our Services segment. Our Training vertical, which we'll come on to, later on, is on track for another record profit year and delivering 18% growth at the moment. It's really going from strength to strength.
So looking at our new segments, as a reminder about these segments, we have ProService, which is our U.K. capital light, tech-led marketplace. That's a bit of a mouthful. Touch on it later on, but fundamentally focused on customer acquisition and inquiry conversion. We've then got Operations, which is our asset-owning U.K. businesses, which focus on fulfillment, service, and safety, and that includes our traditional heartland of small tools, but also our power generation business. Then taking Ireland, that is our sales and operations in the Republic of Ireland. And finally, in Central, that's where we eliminate intragroup revenue transactions, but it's also our central overheads that supports the group as a whole, two of whom are sat presenting to you today in Steve and I....
Going through each of those areas, I've covered a lot off in the performance so far, but ProService, good, strong growth, really enabled by the Services segment and has maintained the margins as we've grown through that area. The absolute profit obviously impacted with the strategic investment, where all of the overhead investment has gone into the ProService team from a strategy perspective. Operations, again, solid Rental growth, good operational efficiencies, which have offset inflationary pressures, particularly around fuel, which has been in that area. And we've continued to invest and drive high utilization. Ultimately, though, that has resulted in increased depreciation. If we look at the investment profile through last year and into the first half of this.
Our Irish business, good, strong performance, continued growth, lots of very big pipeline of large projects, which has been the case for a while, and therefore, we have invested targeted fleet investment to take advantage of that opportunity in the Republic of Ireland. As we go forward, we will have, continue to have pro forma numbers for the year end, but then we will flip over to this as we build up the actual profile so that this will become our basis for reporting our segments in the future. The group continues to have a strong balance sheet with our net debt on a non-IFRS 16 basis of GBP 55 million and leverage at one.
We have material liquidity headroom within our facilities to continue to base in terms of cash and our undrawn down bank facilities, which will enable us to support the continued ongoing strategic investment. So they are very, very healthy and robust balance sheet. That's enabled our continued investment. I've already talked about the fleet investment, broadly flat year-on-year. In terms of technology, with the strategic focus that we've got to really drive our marketplace, we've increased that from around about GBP 3 million last year to over GBP 4 million this, and expect the full year tech investment to be around about GBP 6 million. In terms of giving you a picture as we go forward, because there is a, an increased level this year, we expect our ongoing run rate to be around GBP 3 million- GBP 4 million on our tech investment as we go forward from 2024 onwards.
And the full year guidance now, based on looking at where we invest behind demand and our tech profile, is for CapEx to be between GBP 30 million- GBP 35 million. That's slightly lower than the guidance we gave in April, where the top end of that guidance was at GBP 38 million. And it's a combination of this tech investment, which is enabling our Services growth and our insight, which is enabling us to be really targeted with our fleet investment, which has ensured that we maintain good, strong industry-leading return on capital employed. So reported at 20%, there are two areas that are bringing that down.
One is the strategic investment, because, and the second one is, with the increased profitability of the group, our deferred tax asset has increased, which you could argue isn't really capital employed to drive the group, and the performance forward. If we strip those out, our return on capital is around 23%, which is more consistent with last year. Either way, 20% is in the right range for us and is market leading. If I now move on to the current trading, Steve's touched on this, but I'll go through. We have seen a slowdown in growth at the start of the second half of the year, and you can see in the top chart that from 6% in the first half, July and August were at 2%, and September is increased to 4%.
But you can see the Q3 numbers, 2% over the quarter, which is effectively 12 weeks out of a 13-week quarter. So it's a pretty good proxy for where it's going to finish. Within that, the Rental segment has been particularly challenged. It's been effectively facing into a couple of main areas. One, we've seen a seasonal underperformance, and that's effectively been driven by what we can all see is an insipid summer that we've experienced, where effectively air conditioning and cooling just has not been the market for them. The second area, we talked about already, is demand softness across certain segments, including RMI and fit out.
Now, the one area that we have seen, you can see from the top line, is there has been a notable volatility in Rental, particularly through September, because seasonal's had a big impact in July and August, where that has fluctuated quite a lot, and that's led to the range that we've announced today. But in response to the Rental performance, we have taken targeted action to minimize costs, expected to deliver GBP 6 million in the second half of the year, and the vast majority supporting that GBP 6 million has already been implemented and therefore is secured. There are one or two areas which are a small amount of it, that we're in the final stages of implementing. If I move on to Services, a very strong performance in Services just continues to grow, and we've been double digits throughout the quarter.
And this is fundamentally our offering, enabling access to different and growing markets without the need for the balance sheet investment. And also our strategic initiatives as we expose our wider and broader proposition to more customers through the sales teams, through our self-serve, through our technology, we're gaining share of wallet, building on a very strong Rental base within those customers. So that's, giving us share of wallet gains, and those two together, with the continued double-digit growth, has reinforced our confidence in terms of the investment as we go forward. And therefore, our plan of GBP 6.5 million strategic OpEx and GBP 6 million CapEx remains intact.
And we'll talk a little bit later on about where we are investing that. So you can see from the earliest positive signs on the strategy of why we believe in that this investment should continue and drive forward. And while there has been that volatility, which has made forecasting a little bit more challenging, giving a slightly wider range, taking all of this into account, the broader market forecast, the current performance, particularly the mix between Rental and Services and the investment for future growth, we now expect our adjusted EBITA for the full year to be between GBP 23 million and GBP 30 million. And this will, at the low end of the range, Steve's already said it, but I will restate it.
This, at the low end of the range, and despite higher interest rates, would be the second highest profit before tax in the group's listed history. So we have a profitable business with a really strong, robust balance sheet and an exciting strategy, which is seeing positivity that we're investing in for the future growth.
Thank you, Paul. And on that basis, we've spoken about the strategy a little bit, so I wanted to give you a few slides on an update as regards to that. So if you step on for me, Phil. Just as a reminder, top right, what is our strategy all about? It's about creating this marketplace. On the left, you got customers, buyers, on the right, you've got suppliers, sellers.
The customer places an order, either through self-serve, through one of our team, or through a digital channel, other digital channel, that gets serviced to a supplier who offers the solution, customer accepts, and it all begins. So we're in play on this one, and as I spoke to you last time, we've got some initiatives based around self-serve, central serve, central sales, et cetera. I'm gonna give you an update on those. The second one I'm gonna talk about, which supports that, our people channel, is the merchant strategy. I think you'll understand at the end of it why we're gonna move there. It has just been a very positive experience all the way up for us. And the final thing I wanna highlight, we've shone a light at the full year numbers on our Training business.
It just continues, and I think Paul's highlighted the numbers to power on. I just wanna give you a further update on that and show why we're excited about servicing that on the platform, either later this year or early into next year. But the other main message on this slide is that we now have, well, I say now, the last week of October, we will have our full team in place. So Data Officer has joined. We've got the CTO, CPO will be joining and will be in our business by the last week of October. So we will be able to hand on heart, say we've got the full team in place, powering behind our plans. But to give you a flavor, first of all, and number one, the strategic initiatives, just flick over for us, Phil.
We split it up like this: so you got self-serve, central, and I'll give you an update on materials, equipment sales. So on the self-serve, self-serve, first of all, the full year update, I talked about nine buyers onboarded, and I spoke about the revenue that we'd seen prior and post-onboarding of being lifted by some early 40%. Well, now we've got, 67 onboarded, and what we've seen, again, before they came on the platform and post, now, a growth in revenue of some 50%. Now, that might not always endure forever, but at the moment, it's just giving us very strong indications that we've got something quite special here that we can, continue to roll out. Just as a reminder, we thought about our targets would be, 90 buyers onboarded by year-end, and so we're well online for that.
So that's to aside. We've also onboarded self-serve, our largest customer, which we're exclusive with all products. So whether we're gonna get massive increases in revenue is to be seen. But we've got them on board, and what it's showing is the robustness of the self-serve as a platform, actually. But finally, the one that draws my eyes every time is if you look at digital and self-serve, the number of contracts we're now raising through those channels represents 28% of total. I always spoke before, or Paul and myself, did of a target of 30% digital and self-service digital. We're now pretty much there, so we're now looking at how do we move that on, and our next target is 40% of all contracts raised through those channels.
So self-serve, it really is stepping on positively. Okay, this is the thin end of the wedge in terms of potential, but what we've got on there is working pretty good. Central sales in the middle. Simple. We've got a 100 team focused at our Manchester headquarters. These teams are now managing or making 30,000 outbound calls per month. And what we've seen as a result of that is the accounts they're handling, if you compare it again on a like-for-like basis, growing some 25%, H1 2022 to H1 2023. So again, to say we're really pleased with that performance is a bit of an understatement, but it's just showing you why we see encouraging results in these, in these initiatives. And finally, materials and equipment sales. Equipment sales is mainly what we surface through Toolb ank in this instance.
I spoke last time of, oh, wow, we've nearly done GBP 100,000 in the month. Last month, we did GBP 250,000 through those two channels. We're very excited about this. We, we don't think this is gonna, you know, be, I don't know, be massive at the end of the day, because what it is, is a complement to our customers. When they hire something, they need some materials, they'll buy it in that moment. But so far, it's proving very, very good. So the comment at the bottom there, investing to scale. So what we aim to do is surface more verticals on the platform. So we, we talked about fuel before, building materials is on there.
We plan to do training by the end of the year, but it's by the end of the year or early next year. But that'll be then the platform pretty much populated. And then we're doing a lot of investments around user experience, etc. So when we look at the initiatives, we're really pleased with what we're seeing so far. So if you step beyond, Phil, next slide. This is the merchants. If I just focused on the top left at the moment, from 2021-2022, we saw an 18% growth. I remember saying at the time, we don't think this will endure, you know, it'll settle back down a little bit, but there you go. From 2022-2023, we've seen 23% growth. Why?
Because it's just a natural base, a natural customer base for hire and Builders Merchants. The two are very, very, very a very similar base. But not only have we seen this 23% growth, the economics that sit behind it and support it are just really, really attractive. So, you know, if you imagine we had all these fixed sites before, they have fixed leases, costs, building repairs, etc., etc. Paul was not a happy man in those days. Well, now we've been able to take those out. We've got a much more, let's call it, a variable cost base now. Our team members are working within a larger team, so it's better from that side, and we're accessing that customer base, so it's a real win-win. Not only that, we bring work to our partners.
There's 19 Builders Merchants now that we partner with, and we've really got a quite a good reciprocal model in place. If you top right, you can see the progression. We've announced we're moving 16 branches. That's communicated. All our colleagues are in play. We were talking to retention of all. I think we've lost one purely due to the fact that they couldn't make the travel. Everybody else is engaged. We've opened the first two, and by the end of November, we'll have rolled out to actually 20. So the difference between us closing 16 and opening 20 is we just got an opportunity to open in four new locations. But that's gonna deliver us annualized GBP 1 million cost saving, which is excellent. So, we move on at a pace.
We wanted to press ahead with this because it gives us a saving, but also puts us in the right place. And Paul insisted I make a note on the bottom that there's exceptional costs of between GBP 2.1 and GBP 2.4, which majority are non-cash, but asset impairment related. Thank you, Paul. So if you step on to slide three. So Training, I shone a light on this last time. Just a reminder, we said 16% growth they're achieving so far in the first quarter, I think it was. They're now at 18%. If you look at the chart, again, blue, self-delivered, yellow, delivered by a third-party channel. So what we've seen in our sales teams now are able to consolidate large accounts. So what do I mean? They-- I hate to use the phrase, but it's a one-stop shop.
They come to us, whatever their training requirements are, we now, by and large, can service. And you can see that, the reason for that, on the right-hand side. So as I said, the network has expanded by some 48%. We've got 750 unique courses available, and consequently, we've seen that revenue lift by 23%. But most interesting in stats is the bottom left bullet point. Nearly 50%, 48% of training courses are now booked online. Again, another step on that digital journey. But that business is on track for a record profit year, hence, we just pulled it out as we did last time.
Again, either later this year, probably first quarter next year, we will surface that on the ProService, because what Training has with the yellow bit is almost a marketplace, and when it sits within ProService, it'll be within a marketplace. So we are really quite excited about servicing this on the platform. So those are the update on the initiatives. If you just step forward, Phil, just wanted to summarize the balance. Paul touched on a few of these bits, but in one slide, where are we with operations and ESG? Operations-wise, we step forward. Our mission is that efficiency and that service provision. So we've got in play the digital service portal. We're now looking at it seems a bit mundane, barcoding, but it's a little bit more than that.
But in simple terms, we're looking for accuracy in terms of asset tracking, beyond physically counting it every, at every step of the way. So that's in play, will be delivered and rolled out in 2024, and the rest we've spoken about before. And finally, in ESG terms, we are pleased that we've had our plan validated by the Science Based Targets initiative. You know, what we're saying is we're gonna get Net Zero 2040. We've given the details of that, and an independent body has verified that. So, moving on. Also, we've achieved the ISO 27001 cybersecurity accreditation, pretty essential with where we're going, that we achieved that milestone delivered in May.
Also, we put our, you know, next edition of the, our impact report out there online, for access. Now, what are we focusing on in this area? Well, lots of things, in terms of health and safety, which is one of the most important things. We've had two RIDDOR year to date, which is one more than we had in all last year. The reality is, both those incidents were avoidable. And so it's about us driving that message of really getting that ownership, of the working space over to ourselves and our teams. But more than that, we're gonna be driving about, well, reporting. Sorry, before that, reporting customer carbon reporting, this is a requirement more and more as asked by our customers. We're able to do that, and actually, our technology facilitates that.
But more training around our colleagues, mental health awareness, et cetera. So, by and large, summary on target with our plans. So finally, bringing it all together, we've got a quick summary, which goes like this: First off, good returns, solid, decent performance. We continue to invest in the future, and we are very pleased with what we're seeing, encouraging early results. We do have our full team in place, and we are investing to scale that for the future. Yes, we are seeing a challenging market. It's kind of a split personality market where you've got the large infrastructure projects moving ahead, whereas the rest is suffering and showing softness. But we do believe our marketplace model just gives us access to those broader sectors, and hence, you can see that in that double-digit Services growth.
But, we're confident in what we're doing. We believe firmly that these markets are temporary, and they will come back. We're delivering well on strategic initiatives, so again, finally, we think we're well-positioned for when that market recovers. So with that, I will close this presentation and open it up for questions, operator.
Thank you. So if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Please ensure your line is unmuted locally, as I will call you directly, take your name, and then introduce you to the call. So once again, that's star one if you would like to ask a question. And we do have a couple of questions in the queue, so please stand by whilst I take the first caller's name. Thank you very much for standing by. The first question, it comes from the line of David McCann from Numis. Please go ahead.
Morning, morning, everyone. Can I ask three questions, please? Maybe I'll do them one by one just to make it easier. Firstly, you're not the first Rental provider to sort of flag the softer market conditions out there. I just wonder if you can just touch on how the competitive landscape is evolving to sort of weaker demand and what you're seeing from sort of a pricing perspective. That's the first question.
Yeah. Morning, David. So we've, as I articulated, we've... What we've seen from a customer perspective, first of all, is it's almost a split personality in the market. You've got one side, which is rumbling along quite nicely around the infrastructure stuff, you know, the big projects, that you can see we're gaining some access to the Services growth. And the other side, which is quite softening, especially in the sort of middle market, if you like, the regionals and the smaller contractors. And so, you know, when we looked at September, we see quite a variety week on week in terms of performance. So are we seeing... Well, actually, that's it. That's what we're seeing across that piece.
In terms of pricing and, you know, the overall competitive market, it, you know, we are in renewal phase on a couple of big projects. We're holding our pricing, David. We put our price increases in early in the year, and we see those enduring. What we're not gonna do ourselves is get a race to the bottom, really.
Understood. Thanks. And then the second question, sort of tying into the decision to sort of maintain the strategic OpEx in the business, can you just sort of touch on how you thought about that decision and, you know, how easy it is to flex that if you needed to?
Yeah, no, good, good, good question because that was, you can imagine, being a live debate. But how do we think about this? When we started down this journey, we wanted to create the ProService platform. And we believe in the platform. Clearly, we do because we're investing behind it. But when we started the initiatives, we've seen good progress, good delivery. I know it's at the small end of the wedge in terms of the total numbers, but we've seen solid numbers that keep coming through. And when you see this, David, it gives you the confidence that actually, we've got something that is really, really quite special and good, and it's our opportunity to develop that is now.
If we stepped off that, this is our decision-making process now, you know, wound out some costs, but I'd say, Paul, pretty much all those costs are reasonably spent. We maybe GBP 2 million?
Yeah. So I think, David, we identified and discussed that we thought there could be, if we were to switch everything off for Q4, GBP 1.5 million- GBP 2 million.
Consequently, you know, that was the balance. Do we do that, or do we power on? And in fairness, with the board's help, it was a pretty easy decision that we wanted to deliver our strategy because we're absolutely sure, you know, markets are temporary, that they will come back.
... and we just need to be in the best shape, strategy delivered, you know, to take advantage of that. So that was the decision process, and that's, that's how we got there.
Thanks.
I think to your question, David, is how easy would it be able to rein back? We could all -- we can always rein back. We just don't believe that's the right thing to do.
Yeah, better said. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay, makes sense. Thanks, thanks very, very much for that. And then the final question, just on the sort of the balance sheet. I mean, obviously, the leverage is in a phenomenally stronger position than it, than it has been historically to today, and you can see that sort of reflected in the, in the dividend. You said, I think in the slide, a sort of medium-term target of 1.5x-2 x. Can you just touch on, appreciate it might not be the focus today, but over the medium term, you know, where you consider sort of capital allocation priorities in terms of moving towards that 1.5x-2 x target? Thanks.
Yeah. Well, first of all, I think we're probably the IFRS 16 from coming in there because our target on a non-IFRS 16 basis is 1x-1.5x. But as you probably right, David, the IFRS 16 adds about 0.5x onto that mix. In terms of our capital allocation, it. We've got in this order, we've said the first thing is to invest behind the strategy. The second one is to re-implement or to implement a progressive dividend policy. And then after that, we said we would have a look with the strength of the balance sheet at other ways to create shareholder value. So the first one is we're investing in technology.
We believe now this is the third time that we've announced a dividend, each time showing progression, which, as you know from our listed history, I think we only ever did one dividend, and that was it. So we, we believe the policy's back in, and we're progressing, as we've shown, with a 6% increase. I, I think we will then keep looking at further beyond that, what else we would do from capital allocation. But now is not really the time to be looking at it, given we, we wanna keep the strategy going forward, and we also need to make sure that we are coming out of these market conditions before we hastily rush to anything else.
Understood. Thanks very much for your time.
Thank you.
Thanks, David.
The next question, it comes from the line of Robin Speakman from Shore Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Good morning, gentlemen. And my question is about the actual platform that you've constructed here. Clearly, it's been developing well, and the customer additions and the supplier additions are noted. I just would like a little bit further color, please, just on, just on the churn rates that you're seeing across both customers and suppliers. Are there any sort of trends there that we should be aware of? Granted, you know, your platform's not yet mature. Thank you.
Hi, Robin. So Paul here. I'll take the question there. So, at our year-end, we shared some statistics, which admittedly we haven't updated for the half year, but we've not seen any noticeable trend from that. At the year-end, what we said is that the churn of customers by value, because sometimes you will have small customers that we drove a change by move, changing our model away from branches to the Builders Merchants, and there was a kind of transition there. So by value, our churn rate was below 6%, and we said at the time that most of that was strategically driven as we move kind of realigned our network structure. We haven't seen any noticeable change at all in the churn rate.
In fact, it will be improved from that position because obviously, strategically, we've got a stable base with our Builders Merchant network now. In terms of our supplier churn, it was less than 1%, and on the supplier churn on the platform and through as a party to us, that 1% was only because not because anybody had elected out of working with us, it's where we chose not to work with people because we have strict KPIs, and we measure against that. And if the supplier don't have the appropriate accreditations, don't meet the standards we would expect, and there will be kind of a three strikes and out, we will stop trading. And so that's more by us having high standards on there. So both areas, very low churn rates and rationale for them.
Great. That's, that's understood. Thank you.
Yeah.
The next question, that comes from the line of Mark Howson from Dowgate Capital. Please go ahead.
Good morning, gentlemen. A few questions, if I may. The first one is on the GBP 6 million cost savings. Is there gonna be an exceptional charge, sort of pound to pound in the second half for that, or is that, is that not the case?
No, that's the of the GBP 6 million, the only element where there will be an exceptional cost, which you highlighted, is the GBP 1 million that's associated, annualized with the network change, which is about GBP 0.25 million in the last quarter, and that's got the impairment charges of GBP 2 million-GBP 2.5 million. So that's a non-cash piece there. Everything else, no, if we look at them, they're a combination of actions already taken, discretionary spend, flexing, our cost base. We've always been driving to have more, flexibility in our cost base, so we've flexed it linked into the Rental performance, so there won't be any exceptional costs associated with them. That would just flow straight through to the, the bottom line.
The only one will be on the branch changes, and as I said, the vast majority of that is non-cash.
Okay. And secondly, what's the impact of today on full year working capital?
So if we look at the working capital is a key big focus for us. As we go forward, the impact on the profits of the mix change, because obviously, we have higher contributions in our Rental Segment versus Services. So as that mix changes, that flows through to profit and flows through into the cash flow. But other than that, we're not expecting to see any other material changes in from other than the profit flow down into cash, we're not expecting any other material working capital changes.
Okay. And any impact, any, are you seeing any rise in bad debts at the moment, or customers being able to meet their payments?
I'll break this into two, if I may. The first one is a holistic level, and if you were to look at Creditsafe reports and et cetera, the number of construction companies going into administration or liquidation has been at the highest level for some time.
Yeah.
The highest level ever, if you look at August month, where 44 companies went into administration/liquidation. So we are cognizant it is happening out there. But we have really tight controls in terms of how we manage credit and how we manage debt. So if we look from our side, and the level of write-offs is probably at a similar level to last year, it's not materially different. But we're not complacent, so we're very focused on it, and we are carrying a higher bad debt provision. So whilst it doesn't help us, from a working capital and cash generation perspective, from a profit perspective, we are carrying a higher provision at the moment. Which, to be honest, we put in place during COVID, then Ukraine conflict, then where we are now with cost of living challenges.
We've been having a heightened level of bad debt provisioning for some time now because there's been a lot of macro shock waves.
Mm.
But we're not seeing, in terms of the write-offs, any material change at the moment following that based on our controls and procedures.
Just finally from me, in terms of the Rental side and your ambition on net zero, what are you doing in terms of your fleet mix to get there? You know, sort of less diesel and, you know, or whatever, you know, so biofuels, or can you just talk about what you're actually doing with regards to that?
Well, just one thing on that one is one of the byproducts that we designed in on the ProService platform is when we offer a product to be able to offer an alternative, and the ultimate aim is then to offer you know the carbon saving as a result of that. So instead of a petrol Wacker plate, you know, there's electric one, you know, choices like that. So what we're moving to is being able to offer our you know customer base the choice as to what they want to do. And so that's a more, you know, if you dial into the platform, you'll get the option. As far as our Rental fleet, we're always looking through.
We don't wanna be a sort of a leader on some of the technologies, so if I'm brutally honest, because some will work and some will not. But we are very much buying our fleet now with that in mind, and then, you know, when we can get, we've just taken on a whole range of breakers, et cetera, et cetera, which were all electronic, electronic-
Electric.
Electric, yeah. Where did that come from? Electric as an alternative. So we're always, we've got a team, we meet monthly, and we go through the alternatives and load those through. And then there's a second thing on that one. What we're actually doing and pursuing now as part of our plans is we call it upstream with our suppliers. So how are these products made, what is the true carbon footprint, et cetera? So we can improve that, demonstrate that to our customer base. So, I think effective choices can be made.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
We currently have no questions in the queue, so as a reminder, please press star one if you'd like to ask a question. We have no further questions in the queue, so I'll now turn the call back over to your hosts for some closing remarks.
Well, thank you very much all for attending, those of you that have endured through the full piece. But I think the key messages that we wanna lay in there were in the summary, which is, you know, a decent first half. Really pleased with our strategy, how it's rolling out. We have got this sort of polarized market at the moment, which has given us quite a lot of variability in performance, hence the output that we said and the outlook, sorry, that we said around EBITA. But we have a high level of confidence in the strategy. Signs are good, and I think full implementation will allow us to really capitalize on it. So thank you for your time today, and hopefully speak later at a later date. Thank you, operator.