Well, good morning, everybody, and a warm welcome to the 2022 results presentation. I'm joined as always by Mr. Paul Quested.
Good morning.
A slightly subdued Mr. Quested as to his beloved Arsenal failed last night a nd we have on my left helping us drive through the slides, a new guy, which is Phil. Greg refused to do the job anymore, so we've had to move on. If you move on, Phil, to the agenda. The only thing I wanted to highlight, usual format, is in the financial review.
We normally talk about our numbers in terms of services and rental, and Paul this time will talk, in that format. We'll then introduce our new format, which represents our organizational structure, which is ProService and Operations. On that basis, we'll be reporting going forward. If you step on to highlights for me, Phil, I shall just give a quick whiz through.
On that basis, we've split this into our usual look back on the past year, our outlook, but also focusing on the ProService side of our organization and the Operations side. In terms of the financials, as the title suggests, delivering a strong set of results. Again, second year that we've been able to announce double-digit growth, which, you can understand we're reasonably proud of.
That double digit is 11% up on obviously previous year. That, coupled with our operational gearing, has allowed us to deliver almost doubling Adjusted PBT to GBP 21 million, just shy of doubling, but a substantial step forward. Obviously that's cascaded through to the earnings per share at GBP 2.4, which is, again, nearly double. Other points to note, return on capital employed.
Very pleased again that that's a step forward. It's in the right zone for us, so we're very happy with that. All that is backed and supported by a now, in our words, very strong balance sheet. In fact, the net debt leverage on an IFRS 16 basis, we're at 0.8 x. We were 0.9 x, so a slight improvement, but to be quite honest, would have been delighted with 0.9. 0.8, reflection of where we are.
That's the look back, if you like, on 2022. If we looked forward now, and looked at ProService, what we've done, I think every time we've been doing an update, I've been telling you about a development or we're landing something. We're super pleased to be able to announce the marketplace has launched.
In fact, it's the largest marketplace for building services in Europe. Along with that, we've seen our Net Promoter Score, as a measure of our customers' view of ourselves, increase from 38, which is, I think, slightly COVID impacted, but still nonetheless a great step forward to 44. The second point on that, I'm gonna go into a little bit more detail later on, but one of the ways that we capture customer orders is through a portal we call HSS Pro.
We set this up, and when we designed it, we had a vision of how the customers, the buyers would use that. We use the word buyers are embracing the marketplace dynamics because what we've seen is a self-service rate up at 88%. We are targeting around 95%. We've got nine customers on there now.
I think before I was talking about last time we updated, sorry, we were talking about launching the first. Nine on there. What we've seen is that high level of self-service, also, the revenue when you compare pre-going on the platform to going on the platform, a sort of growth of 45%. I'll talk about that a bit more later on.
The next piece that I wanted to highlight is something that we're particularly pleased with, is we're actually able to now launch. In fact, this week we've launched, the next vertical besides hire is equipment sales, which is small tools, screwdrivers, all that sort of stuff.
A customer can be on the site, hire whatever they want to, and the next little button they can press, and they can buy the relevant equipment sales to support their project. By the end of May, we will also be launching building materials, I'll talk about that in a little bit more because the whole range of what we're doing is quite exciting in that, in that vein.
In terms of the operation side supporting it, we have, again, we've tagged this continuous improvement, but high level of service delivery. Again, we talked last time about rollout of the planning system we've got, the Satalia system. That's now super embedded. We've got, higher service levels, but we've seen a 40% reduction in miles per job. I'll talk about the what that means later on.
Right now, we've just launched as well what we call a Digital Service Portal. This is enabling our engineers and tech guys to be more efficient and effective in what they do, get it right first time, but also trace the quality of what we do. I'll explain that a little bit later.
All this is set against the background of a low RIDDOR rate. In fact, it's our lowest we've ever had. This is more the passion we've got for driving health and safety in our organization. Not a finished story by a long way, but I think we're taking steps forward. That said, the last piece on this is outlook. We started well.
We feel that first point, EBITDA, EBITA will be in line with market expectations as we travel. We are gonna continue to invest in the marketplace. It's another point we wanted to highlight. I shall talk a little bit more about that in the strategy section. If you remember, we're targeting that 10 percentage points above market growth.
The board has, you know, has a vote of confidence in proposing a dividend of GBP 0.37 final dividend, making a total of GBP 0.54 for the year, confidence in our plans in such a proposal. With that's the overview of what we'll be talking about today. I'm now going to hand over to Paul, which will give you a quick whiz through the numbers.
Thank you very much, Steve, and thank you for your kind words to support me and bring me out of the gloom from last night. Good morning again, everybody. A small amount of housekeeping before we start. Last year, the comparative year, FY 21, includes an additional week's worth of trading, and also includes some non-recurring COVID benefits, principally a successful claim for business interruption insurance.
When we talk about like-for-like, we strip those out so that we can have a comparison that is valid. On the financial summary slide, as Steve said, we're delighted to be able to present to you today another good set of financial results. I'll cover some of the metrics in more detail on subsequent slides, but just honing in on a few of the highlights.
First of all, our Adjusted EBITA margin has been maintained on a like-for-like basis. That's through continued price discipline and cost management, which has been essential in the last 12 months and going forward in the light of obviously the well-documented inflation headwinds we all faced into.
Importantly, our double-digit revenue growth, our operational gearing through the operating model we've put in place, and lower interest costs following our refinancing, has all enabled a substantial increase in profit before tax. In fact, Steve touched on it before on the reported level, but if we look on a like-for-like basis, we have more than doubled our PBT, which is a great achievement which we're very proud of. All of that flows through into a step change in our earnings per share.
Again, one of the important things and one of the bedrocks of all of this performance has been a robust and a continued robust balance sheet. We reduced our net debt during the year by just under GBP 4 million through cash flow generation, which we then invested behind strategy, et cetera, which I'll come onto later. That's enabled our leverage on a non-IFRS 16 basis to be at 0.8.
As we said before, our kind of ballpark figure is to be around about one, so we will look at how we invest appropriately to drive the returns as we go forward. If we move on to the next slide, Phil can go into a bit more detail. Looking at our segments. This is looking back.
As Steve said, we're changing, and I'll talk about that in a moment. As a reminder of our historic segments, we have two. There's rental, which is revenue generated from equipment that's owned by the group and ancillary revenues such as transport, fuel, et cetera. Services, which is revenue generated from the rehire of third-party equipment and our training business.
Starting with rental first, a strong like-for-like performance with growth of 9%. A number of contributory factors to that, but I'll just hone in on a few and pull them out for you. First of all, our builders merchant network, as we know, low and variable cost model with access to increased footfall. We expanded the network during the year from 55 at the end of 2021 to 63 at the end of last financial year.
We're now running at 65, and our expectation is to put on a few more weather this year, up to around about 10 over the coming months. That network not only has it driven performance growth through increasing the number of locations, but on a same-store basis, those stores that have been in place in the comparable period in each year, we delivered 22% growth. Delivering more business through a lower and variable cost model.
We've also in the year invested in a data-driven central sales team based in Manchester. This is a team leveraging our technology and the insight that it affords to be able to be very targeted on customers and to drive revenue opportunity at each stage of the customer's project, as well as the cross-sell opportunities that definitely exist.
That team has been built up to currently now stands at 78, but it's built as we've gone through the back end of last year and into this. I'm pleased to say the early signs are positive. 10% growth in the final quarter of last year with an improving trend, and that trend has improved as we've gone into 2023.
As always, we continue to invest in fleet, and I'll touch on that later on, but it's very targeted investment where we know that we have demand and can drive returns. Of course, over the last year, been very strong price discipline, making sure that with the inflationary pressures we have, that we're managing that effectively with pricings with our customers.
As I said at the half year, you may recall, we did see a drop in our contribution margin in rental. The gap has contracted since the half year. That's been virtually all driven by product mix. When I talk product mix, I talk about fuel, where our fuel contracts are on a cost-plus basis and with an materially increased cost that's resulting in a dilutive impact to the rental segment.
Moving on to services, I could just copy and paste exactly what I said this time last year. Double-digit growth, expanding margins. Hopefully, if we were doing the same segments next year, I'll be copy and pasting again. What it's really showing is that customers value our one-stop shop of being able to access all of their requirements in one place, making it easy for them.
Our suppliers also value that, the easy place to access multiple customers. Evidenced by our supplier network increasing from 600 a year ago to over 700 now. All of that is stitched together with our technology platforms, which Steve will come on to later, making it easy for customers and suppliers to transact.
Other point that we talked about before is we migrated, replatformed our sales team onto the instance we call HSS Pro POS of our technology platform, and we drove a massive step change in our conversion of inquiries, moving from mid-50s up to over 70%. I'm pleased to say again, we've seen more inquiries, and we've improved our conversion, with conversion now increasing up to 74%. Other area within services is training.
Last year, I talked about training delivering record revenue and record profit, it stepped forward again with 16% growth and therefore, not surprisingly, profits moving forward again. An excellent effort by the team, we've got more opportunities to drive that forward, which, again, Steve will touch on later.
Finally, on costs, as a reminder, in FY 2021, the non-recurring COVID benefits are all in there, so it is a deflated cost base in the prior year. One of the things that Steve and I, since you've been in place, has really instilled, you have seen a constant theme through our presentations, is cost control being part of our DNA. That's been very important over the last 12 months. By having that, it's enabled us to continue investing in the strategy.
We're investing in the central sales team, we're investing in technology, it's also enabled us to support our colleagues with additional payments as they faced into the cost of living challenges. We can move on a slide, please, Phil.
As we look forward, we will be reporting our segments to reflect our legal structure and our management structure of how we run our business. As a reminder, there's two parts to this. There's our technology-led capital, like marketplace business, HSS ProService, and then our asset-based business focused very much on service and fulfillment, HSS Operations. We've broken out the data there.
We did a legal separation in the summer of last year, but we felt very helpful both to provide the anchor for our future years reporting, but also to give you a scale of the businesses to pro forma all of the last 12 months as if that change had happened on the 1st of January. Therefore, you can see the EBITDA that both of those business made.
There is some intergroup eliminations, and that's because obviously HSS Operations is a seller into HSS ProService. We remove that intercompany elimination through that central column. This will be the basis for how we report going forward. If we move on slide, Phil. Then my last slide here is another record year for return on capital employed, improving by just under 1 percentage point to nearly 23%.
This, again, benefits from the strong growth in our capital light business, in our capital light services business, but it also against the backdrop of increased investment, both in terms of technology and our hire fleet. With regard to hire fleets, that's all against the where we understand the demand and the appropriate returns we want to make, but all informed by our insight capability, which continues to be enhanced through our platforms.
Utilization remains high in the late 50s, that's well above historic levels. The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice it's dropped slightly since last year. That's in line with where we'd expect it as we expanded the builders merchant model and appropriately put stock in each of those units. We're pleased it's in the right ballpark of where we expect to be.
As always, we'll look at can we nudge it forward, but being in the high 50s is the right optimal level. As we look forward, we expect to invest between GBP 34 million-GBP 38 million over this year, with around GBP 5 million of that balance being technology-driven. We do have a very agile approach to our investment, and therefore we will continue to consider this balance in light of how the market performs and how the macros are over the coming few months. With that, I'll hand back to Steve.
Just hold the next slide here for a moment, Phil. Those that can see the screen, we have included just a couple shots of the electric fleet that we're starting to bring in. I just wanted to highlight the bottom one, which is our 2.5 ton drop side. It does a lot of the work of a hire company. We got five of these on test.
The range is about 90 miles. Within the big cities like London, Glasgow, where we've got it on test, it's perfect because our average journey is about 50 miles there. Using this, we're getting very positive feedback from drivers, etc. We got another 15 of these coming in.
Anyway, I just wanted to show you an image of how HSS is changing and how we're moving slowly and testing to see whether we can, you know, the range endures on these vehicles over time and with weight. Anyway, the real exciting piece about this, I've got three slides I'm gonna talk about Pro Service.
I've got two to just summarize on Operations, and then I've got one to talk about on ESG. If we flick on Phil. The first one, Pro Service. When we talk about our marketplace, I know I've spoken in different pieces about development, etc., etc., but this is it. This is what we've got launched now. If you look at the bottom lozenge, that's the size of it. I mean, Paul gave you clues there.
GBP 300 million turnover, GBP 27 million EBITDA. Our conversion rate, if you remember, that's gone from 50% when we went onto part of the platform up to 70% in that cohort. Now we're seeing conversion rate of 74%. Digital penetration at 21%. We've got circa 600 colleagues. Remember, this is a technology-enabled, asset-light part of our business. As Paul said, 78 of those are based in our Think Park, Manchester head office. They're central team, they call out positively to customers.
If you look at the chart above, on the left-hand side, you've got the customers, the buyers. On the right-hand side, you've got the suppliers, the sellers. When a customer generates an order, our Brenda technology, which is the blue lozenge in the middle, takes that order and services it to our suppliers. They surface their offer, the customer accepts an offer, and hence a transaction is placed.
If you looked at the customer, we've got about... This is B2B only, over 22,000 live. Average spend about GBP 12,000, and average contracts, each, 24. On the seller supplier side—Sorry, supplier seller side, you've got over 700, as Paul's highlighted, truly national offering, and they're ranging, you know, averaging about 250 contracts each.
That's the fourth, the dimensions. How Brenda captures the customer orders is on the sort of middle piece there. What we call larger buyers, but you could be a smaller buyer as well if you want this facility, goes onto a portal, HSS Pro a nd that, if you can just see in there, you've got little buttons.
One of those, for example, will be hire. You can hire what you like. What that allows is those customers to manage their own account on hire, off hire, PO levels through their organizational authority levels, et cetera, et cetera. Captured in one place, I'm gonna go into that a little bit more in a second.
If you go to the bottom, we've got hss.com. What we've got on there now surfaces our rehire proposition from our suppliers. If you go on there, not only would you see our HSS ops pros, but also our other 700 odd suppliers with the products. That's the smaller buyers. In the middle, we have our sales team are out in the field, in branches, builders, merchants, and we've got the 78 centrally.
They reach out to our customers or take inquiries from our customers. Whatever way a customer wants to contact us, we now facilitate, and that's done by Brenda. The theory being that the more suppliers that we onboard, and we continue to drive that, the greater the breadth and depth of our proposition, the more customers we bring on. The more customers, the more suppliers are gonna come on. We create that real marketplace dynamic.
If I just follow through on the HSS Pro for a second because you click on... When I last presented, I did talk about onboarding our first customer. We've got nine onboarded now. If you just go to the left, you see the screen, top left, and that's what HSS Pro is. You've got all the lozenges, I think we call them tiles.
The top left is hire. You press that, you go into hire, whatever you want as a customer. What we want to create and what the customer wanted was this single service platform or one-stop shop in one area, then to get their, you know, customers be able to control their own organization, the POs, et cetera, and actually optimize their own costs of procurement. We've delivered that portal. We've got our nine customers working on it. What have we seen?
In the middle, you see what the early adopters... This is early days, so you're not talking, you know, massive volume at the moment. We've got nine customers, we've taken before performance and then how they performed like on the platform. The onboarded potential is some GBP 20+ million of those customers alone.
We're at the very leading edge of that. What we have seen is this. If an activity is a contract, a sale contract raised, we've seen a fourfold increase in that activity levels with the customers that have gone on. That fourfold increase has enabled us to drive and deliver this growth of some 45% revenue growth.
What we really see and catches our title of embracing marketplace dynamics is this self-serve at 88%. They are managing their own account. They come to us when they've got a question or a new product they're seeking or whatever. However, what we feel we can get to is about 90% +, 95% on that, but we're pretty pleased with where we are.
The last dynamic we've seen, the range of products taken has increased threefold. We went round, and we thought we'd get a comment from the, you know, the customers, and this materialized. You know, this buyer talks about it revolutionizing procurement process, easy transition to go from where they were to using it, creates a really efficient, effective process, and more importantly, they can't wait to get equipment sales and training via HSS Pro two. I'll talk about that in a second.
You know, that's what we see. The people that are on it are really embracing it and going for it, and it's really pleasing. On the right-hand side of this slide is the potential. By the end of the year, we'd like to onboard another maybe 20, 30 customers with a potential, spend potential of some GBP 50 million.
If we got those on, we'll continue to onboard customers, obviously. More our passion then is increasing penetration, share of wallet, you know, improving service levels for those customers to drive that stickiness o n this platform. If you look to that top left, the portal itself, and if you flick onto the next slide for me, Phil, this is how the proposition will continue to expand.
Before we started, we commissioned a bit of work to go out there and ask our customers, "Look, you know, would you be interested in an online marketplace, you know, that brings everything together in one place?" A high percentage, sort of 80% said yes. We also asked the question, "Would you be interested in purchasing a range of products and services online, on Ditto?"
We started down that journey and created the portal, which is HSS Pro. As you can see there that the tiles are highlighted different colors. HSS Hire has gone live. We're pleased to say this week, equipment sales went live as well. We've got a whole supply chain of suppliers supporting that.
A customer can now go on, hire his goods, and buy small tools, you know, saws, drills, et cetera, et cetera. Whatever that person needs to do the job. By the end of May, we're quite excited about this one, we're gonna get building materials there. That's gonna be supplied by our builders merchant , builders merchants partners.
A ready-made supply chain that's super keen to sell into that. Just to give you an idea of the potential of this, we soft launched this at the start of the year with our, with our training, our sales teams about this. It's not live on the platform yet, and still, I think the previous month and this month, we're trending a little high. We did GBP 70,000 worth of sales.
Just through our guys mentioning it to a customer, and they're coming back, and we're testing it out, we've done GBP 70,000. We really think this has potential. Talking of potential, when you look at the lozenges, with things like PPE, fuel, waste, all these will begin to surface as we travel through the year. By the year-end, we aim to also put trading on.
Why we're excited about this, if you look towards the right, we have a bit of a golden nugget here, a jewel in our trading business. As you can see, over a period, it's grown consistently and consistently well at 9% CAGR. Year- on- year, 2021-2022, 16% growth has been delivered through this platform, and this year, they've started incredibly well, beating those figures.
We've got a training business that's got a very good team and is delivering very good numbers. The blue is our self-delivered, so we've got our own trainers, classrooms, et cetera. The yellow is the third-party delivered training whereby specialist area, so we hook up a customer to a specialist and deliver that training. Maybe it's medical, maybe it's whatever of that order.
In essence, we've got our own little marketplace operating within our training business. By the year-end, we will have this live on HSS Pro, and that'll enable our customers to self-serve and book their own training and get that going. That link we found in the past incredibly strong and incredibly fruitful. We're really excited about getting that one. By the year-end, we will have all those tiles.
This time next year, I think when I'm presenting, that'll all be green, and we'll really have a fantastic, unique proposition in our marketplace for our buyers. Next steps is driving the delivery of the verticals and obviously, you know, getting value out of those verticals. Supporting this, if you'd like to flick on, Phil, we have our HSS Operations.
This you'll have seen many times before. On the left is our footprint, truly national across the U.K. The large blue dots, obviously the CDCs, where we hold our stock. All our transport runs from that in a hub-and-spoke system. We've got the branches. We've got 40-odd. We've got 65 now, builders merchants, and we've got the ABird platforms.
Dimensionally, Paul's taken you through most of those stats, there's thousands of colleagues in that, and a high level of engagement, which I'll come to in a couple of slides' time. What typifies Operations, if I zoom in on that, is this philosophy of continually developing the proposi tion.
You flick over for me, Phil, what we've got here is a slide which talks about our journey. In 2019, which is not here, we launched the first driver app. That's a total change for those guys. They lapped it up. In 2020, digitalization enabled us to go paperless, track and trace delivery, and we also got our click and collect functionality. 2021 was a major step forward for the guys, but absorbed it, moved on with that very suc cessfully.
I talked about Satalia being deployed. That's now right across majority of the estate, and we've got high levels of usage, which are giving us the results you can see there. We've saved the equivalent of something like 200 metric tons of carbon by just reducing the amount of miles traveled.
For those that love stats of this order, that's the equivalent to driving 21 x around the equator. I do think Mr. Quested was bored one day. However, this year, we've also seen developed what we call the Digital Service Portal.
What this is we've got a system now whereby the engineer, he takes the product, and if he's either repairing it or testing it and servicing it, each stage is mapped out, and he's got a screen which allows him to follow step by step. He takes a photo in each one of the steps, and that's loaded up automatically onto the system.
It makes sure that we've got a trace of how the product's been serviced, the quality, and the standard of kit that we get out because what we want is right first time, good quality kit. Actually, we wanna know the standards at every stage, so if we do on the occasion get an issue, we can reference back to exactly what we had done and delivered. It gives fantastic traceability.
In the future, we will be looking to drop in, and that's why we've talked about deployment of the planning system, Satalia, customer delivery windows, which will help develop that service journey even more. On the right-hand side, all the stats, pretty much most of those Paul's gone through.
I just wanted to focus for a moment on the top one, which is the RIDDOR rate, which is our lowest rate. If you flick to the next slide on ESG, that's the top left of that. One of our passions as a team is to try moving towards this zero harm. About this is one of the sort of litmus tests, I guess, is how you're doing on the RIDDOR rate. So we are trying to drive a culture of awareness in our teams.
Doing things right, doing it right once, saves a lot of agonizing and pain at the end of it. What we've seen by that philosophy, you know, a never-ending drive by the teams, is this RIDDOR rate reduced to the levels we've got now. We've got a couple of things down there. Safety starts with me. What's that all about? It's just ownership of what you're doing, and if you see somebody near you not doing it correctly, just call 'em out in a positive way and fix it.
That's the philosophy we kinda drive in our organization, every single person from me right the way through the organization is responsible for delivering this. We do lots of profile safety weeks, et cetera, et cetera.
'Cause looking after our colleagues is important, and we measure this every year with colleague engagement. This is our update. We still got consistently high levels of engagement, but this year, our response rates stepped up a notch.
We heard from a greater voice from our teams, and we were pleased to see it's still at that high level, substantive of the natural average. We got lots to do in this area. We've created earn as you learn programs. We've set up lots of forums. We're trying to make ourselves more attractive, interesting for a greater diversity of candidates, and so we're working a lot on that, but also with our colleagues that are in.
You know, I think COVID highlighted a lot of, you know, sort of mental health challenges in our society. We're recognizing that. We've got Wellbeing Wednesdays, where we put in lots of external sources to help our guys if they need that sort of help and actually coach them through that. Love a colleague, this is something we set up just to respect your colleague, really. Nominate somebody for a fantastic job, and we'll reward them.
That's the philosophy we're trying to drive within our teams. The final piece on this chart is the ESG. That screen is actually what we provided to a customer. It's about their carbon footprint. Then off the back of that, we generate ideas about how we could improve that further. That's what we're working through. We talked about EcoVadis.
We're at silver. I think we're in the top, 10% as it clearly says on the slide. Activities we're doing, I showed you the electric vehicle just as a point of interest, but that's what we're doing. Got another 15 of the, you know, the drop sides on order, ready for delivery. All our electricity as a step is now renewable.
We're working through all waste recyclable, et cetera, et cetera. We're really driving the top things now, and we've got a team on this, formed by myself, moving towards our target of Net Zero 2040. Final slide, bringing it all together. In summary, there's four elements. Number one is what we see as a business, we're delivering strong results. You can see that from the stuff that Paul's gone through.
Double-digit growth, second year in succession actually. We've got a very good balance sheet now. Again, that's been there for a while. We intend to keep it there. ESG plan on track. Overall, a business in good health running forward. What we've also launched is the largest marketplace building service in Europe, which we're very pleased with. You've seen a taster of what's happening there.
The next time I update, I hope to have a few more green tiles on that chart and starting to see some real engagement on a broader basis by a lot more customers. We're really pleased with that and excited about where that's gonna go. Operationally, you can see that philosophy of continual improvement, delivering service, NPS at the top end, and driving the embracing all that with obviously the safety culture.
In summary, you know, we've, the board's recommended a progressive dividend policy, which the final dividend being the GBP 0.37 proposed. We are absolutely gonna be stepping forward, investing in the marketplace, but we're well aware of the commentary around the market.
We've started well, thus far, we can only deal with what's in front of us. We're very aware that, you know, at the moment, the market could turn. There's a lot of challenges out there, but we're in great shape to respond to that market turning. We keep our expectations in line with what's in the market. With that, I would like to hand back to you, operator, to take any questions there are.
Thank you. 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. Once again, that's star one if you'd like to ask a question. We do have a question in the queue, so please stand by whilst I take the caller's name. Thank you very much for standing by. First question, it comes from the line of David Brockton from Numis. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone. I've got two questions, please. Firstly, just picking up on where you finished there in terms of sort of the commentary in the market about, I guess some sort of softening that one or two others have touched on. Can you give any more detail around what you're seeing from a current trading perspective and maybe some more granular detail around pricing and volumes?
That's the first question. The second question relates to the marketplace, which is clearly very, very exciting in terms of what you're building. I just wondered if you could touch on how broad that could ultimately be in terms of adding even more verticals to it and where you think the competitive landscape is for that as well. Thanks.
David, your two questions encompass about 20 questions.
Sorry about that.
You've been working on that all night, I bet.
Sorry.
Let me start off, and Paul can supplement it. What we've seen at the start of the year is, you know, a strong start to the year. It's been pretty much in alignment how we exited the last year, and that's what we're dealing with, you know. When we talk about, you know, market in line with expectations, that's where we're at.
We have heard commentary. We do, you know. You can just read in the basic economic press and everything that, you know, there are some challenges in the market. If we look at this, the CPA, they think there'll be a negative, there'll be a decline this year, sorry. Probably more edged to the front end and then coming back.
We look at the European Rental Association. They're slightly positive, actually. David , you know, how are we gonna get granular about that? What we're gonna be doing is be in the best shape to handle whatever comes our way. What we've seen so far is a pretty strong start. Don't know if you've got any pieces to add on that piece, Paul.
Yeah. I echo everything Steve said. I mean, if you look at the market at the moment, various, it ranges from -4.5% - +3%. Focusing on ourselves, I think, David, we gave at the pre-close announcement, we said that we had been at 12% growth the first eight weeks, and the first quarter was double-digit.
That gives you a bit more granularity and, in anticipation of maybe a supplementary question, last year, around about, I would say it was probably 50/50 price and volume in terms of the growth. At the start of this year, it's more skewed towards volume. We have put price increases through, but on a number of contracts, they're on fixed terms, et cetera, existing running contracts. Therefore, price increases take time to come through. About 50/50 last year, but a bit more geared towards volume in the first quarter of this.
On to the second piece about the platform, how far could we go? What we wanted to do in that, in the picture of the portal with the tiles on it is demonstrate our ambitions as we see it, and these are the natural products that our buyers would require. The one on there that's outstanding is in gray, I think is labor.
We're gonna see how we develop the ones that I mentioned before. Maybe that's an addition to that, but we see massive potential in those alone. You know, and then we're just gonna see how that develops and, you know, what the requests are from the customer base. We think there's a massive market in that alone.
That's how we see the potential for the platform and the competitive landscape. I think there's not many competitors out there with a marketplace such as this. In fact, I term it as unique, especially when we get those other verticals in play, which as I said, building materials at the end of May, will put us in a very, very different position. What's out there is probably just trying to trade more assets, higher assets that we've seen. The potential is pretty strong.
Just to add to those, we mentioned earlier on, we've explored a lot through external research. Our customers are telling us that the broad range of different services that they are very keen to have in one location. We're being informed by what our customers say and also in some of these areas we're already doing.
Steve touched on building materials. Without trying with one or two people kind of just selling the proposition, we're really seeing demand and traction. We're very excited about all of that. Also, going back to the quote in the presentation, this is one of our existing customers. You can see from that quote, they're already talking about verticals. We call them verticals, so the product services.
They're already talking of those outside of just equipment rental as wanting to, when we get them live on the platform, immediately transfer over because It's the ease of transaction and service it provides.
Thank you very much or the answers. Much appreciated.
Thanks, David.
We currently have no questions in the queue. As a reminder, please press star one if you'd like to ask a question. We do have another question in the queue, please stand by while I retrieve the caller's name. Thank you very much for standing by. The next question, it comes from the line of Mark Howson from Dowgate Capital. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Good morning, gentlemen.
Morning.
Morning, Mark.
Well, just a couple of questions from me. Just in terms of some of your peers in the past have located rental locations inside the merchant stores. Is that something that you would move away from or, I mean, you'd move to? I mean, obviously you want to have your own platform rather than be associated directly alongside them within their location. I'd be interested in your thoughts on that. Secondly, can you give us a guide on CapEx as it currently stands, your outlook for 2023?
Mark, the builders' merchant piece. We've got 65 locations live now. How we run a builders' merchant is we have one of our guys implant in on the sales desk of that particular merchant. We have a, you know, a taken range, which is a small range, which we know moves. He sits on the counter, and the idea is he just then takes that natural group of customers. They just naturally. They bought some materials. They need some hire equipment to deliver.
We've got 65 of those already. We will probably look to do a few more of builders' merchants, it's a really, really fantastic relationship that we've developed. We've got 18, 19 partners, sorry, we've picked those as strong regional players, so high footfall branches only. You know, there's a reciprocal nature to this so that we bring in trade.
The trade, you know, buys the products, building materials, and vice versa. Obviously, when we launch the building materials on the platform, they will be the supply chain that delivers. We've got a strong relationship with that. I don't know whether that answers your question or colors the picture a bit more.
Yeah . That does color the picture a bit more. Honestly, I'd probably like to come out and see it. That'd probably be an idea.
Yes.
It sounds interesting.
Can we just build on that and just take us a little back in history? We actually used to have the branches, where we literally had them ourselves. Back in October 2020, we closed 134 permanently and started the transition to the builders' merchant concessions. There a number of reasons for that. One, it took a fixed cost and made it variable, and to do the same volume through the location cut that cost in half. Imagine we're doing to provide the same, location, half the cost, and it's become variable.
The second bit is, it substantially increased the footfall. Whilst not everybody going into builders' merchants is looking to rent something, before you might have five or six people going into a branch, you now have access to 200+ going in. It gives you both a lower cost model but also access to a whole set of customers that you might not have had before. That's part of our strategy and will continue, as Steve said. Shall I touch on the CapEx? Our CapEx for this year, the guidance we've given is GBP 34 million-GBP 38 million as the range.
Within that, at around GBP 5 million on technology, so the balance is spread across hire fleet and a little bit of property costs when we roll out the builders' merchant model. Think of it, the balance is mainly hire fleet. That is slightly lower than our spend in 2022. What we have is, through all of the work we have, we have a very agile model for reviewing demand, supply chain, lead times, returns, et cetera. We continue to be dynamic with our investment approach so that we can manage whatever the situation is that we're facing into.
Okay. Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mark. Thank you.
We currently have no questions in the queue, so as one final 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 hand the call back to your host for some closing remarks.
Well, thank you very much for attending the call. Much appreciated. One thing I didn't mention is we do have, in the presentation, a little embedded link. If you click on that, it will give you a little bit more. You'll learn a little bit more about ProService. It's well worth a visit there. It gives you an idea of what we've set up. Thank you for your time, and any questions, come back to Paul or myself. Thank you very much.
Thank you, everyone.