Good day and welcome everyone to the 2022 half one results call, hosted by Steve Ashmore. My name is Judith, and I'm your event manager today. During the presentation, you'll like to remain on listen only. If you need assistance at any time, please press star one on your device. I would also like to advise all parties this conference is being recorded. Now let me hand it over to Steve. You may now proceed.
Good morning, everybody, and a warm welcome to our half year results presentation. It's not just me, actually. It's accompanied by Paul Quested.
Good morning, everybody.
ably assisted by Greg on my left.
Morning.
We're delighted to be able to present the half one results. I think they're typified by headlines such as double-digit growth continues, improved returns, and the fact that we've reinstated the dividend. It's not only those headlines that we wanna talk about, and we've got a relatively short presentation today. We just wanna highlight some of the developments around the operating model, which we're gonna use this word quite a lot today, but we're truly excited about. We're at the very, very-
Yeah
Nearly at the point of being able to deliver the full picture. Without further ado, Greg, if you'd like to index forward to slide five, which is the summary introduction. I talked about the double-digit growth, so I'll talk about the financials first, and that is actually 11% year-on-year growth. Coupled with the new operating model we're working with, the EBITA margin expands to 8.5%, which is up 0.5% over this time last year. That means the PBT has increased by GBP 7.6 million. Actually on a like-for-like basis, that number is GBP 9.2, but Greg, the nine and Paul explained the difference on that. Obviously, that's something that we're quite pleased with.
That increased profitability. The fact that we refinance at low interest rates means that our EPS genuinely has step changed to pence, and it was just negligibly positive. I'm not sure that's English, but you know what I mean. We moved that forward substantially. Other points to note, financially, the return on capital employed has grown to 24%. I think Paul catches me out, it's 23.8, but we can round to that magnificent number. But again, that is supported by, you know, the work we've done in delivering changing operating model, the improvement in capital-light services revenue, et cetera. The other thing I wanted to share financially is the balance sheet, which we consider to be strong and in good health now. Leverage non-IFRS 16 is 0.9 times.
Financially, that's the sort of highlights. Paul will dig behind that in a second. The other thing I wanted to touch on today was organizationally. I know last time I talked about the changes we weronee making. If you can see the slide on the right-hand side there, we just depicted this in a little picture. What we've got now is our new organization. On the left, you've got this tech-enabled, asset-light sales organization. And on the right, you've got our HSS Ops, where all our assets contained, whether it's the equipment or the sites or whatever. The HSS Ops is one of many suppliers which provide the range for our sales organization in ProService to sell to our customers. I wanted to give you some sort of measures which you relate to from the full year presentation.
The first one is services like light growth. This is our rehire and our training businesses. We've seen that improve 16% year-on-year. Again, obviously, we're very pleased with that. Training part of that's probably around 13% and the rehire side just over 16%. That has really continued that positive momentum we talked about at the last presentation we did. In terms of builders merchants, I talked about we're opening some more. We've got 60 builders merchant locations now open. We've seen same-store revenue growth of about 15%.
Now, similarly to what we said about services, you know, targeting revenue growth at 10 percentage points above market, I think we're gonna get to the merchants in a few months' time, towards well, the beginning of next year, really. We'll see same-store growth of up to market plus 5%-10%, and those are the levels that we're targeting that team on. If we have those in mind, we still see strong growth in both the services and the merchants, but of that order. The final piece, if we looked at the operations side, we're delivering a really good service. I'm gonna touch some more on the operational model and the service and some of the changes we've made, in a few slides' time.
Now, what's helped us on this journey of creating the new organization is the technology. We're gonna use that word, as I said, quite a lot. It's exciting, but it is. We've made some significant progress. The last time we spoke, I talked to you about the actions that we needed to update on, the milestones we needed to deliver to get to where we wanted to be as far as the vision for this business is concerned. We're in pretty good shape on that, and I'm gonna give you an update and tell you exactly where we are. I think you'll agree it's in great shape. The final thing that we wanted to just talk about was outlook. Our Q3 finishes actually on Saturday.
We can say that a half year, we had this double-digit growth that's continued into Q3 with 10% growth. We're confident that our EBITDA, EBITA will be in line with our expectations and market expectations as well. Number one. You know, although we look at the markets and we're unsure of how they're gonna move, we can only deal with what's in front of us. What we're seeing at the moment is continued good growth. Our operating model supports that. We feel we're in great shape, whatever the markets bring. At the moment we're just seeing what we're reporting, which is good growth. Second point, I mentioned before, we're targeting the services growth at 10 percentage points above market, and I'll add to that.
Remember, the builders merchants, I think we're gonna be 5%-10% above market in the builders merchants growth as well. The final piece that we just wanted to tidy up on here is, mentioned at the beginning, we've reinstated the dividend. That's a sign of the board's confidence and faith in the plan that we presented. That's reinstated, and as we can see 0.17p per share declared. That's the secondary highlights to this presentation. Paul will now take you through a little bit more of the detail, and then I've just got 4 slides to take you through an update where we are on the strategy, et cetera.
Okay. Thank you very much, Steve. Morning, everybody, again. A bit of housekeeping before we start. All of the numbers we present on a continuing operations basis. Just as a reminder, last year, we sold Laois Hire and All Seasons Hire, and they've been stripped out of the numbers. Everything under IFRS 16 unless otherwise stated. Predominantly, that relates to net debt. We'll make reference to like-for-like growth performance, and that's adjustments to the comparators to strip out effectively two things. There was an additional week's trading in the first half of last year, and also you'll recall from when we presented the year-end numbers that we benefited from an insurance claim from the business interruption related to COVID. Those have been adjusted to show the underlying performance.
Starting with the financial summary, effectively echoing what Steve said, we're absolutely delighted with our performance in the first half of 2022, with double-digit growth in the six months, especially when we look at our services business with exceptional performance of +16%. Now something which is very critical in the current macroeconomic environment is strong price management and disciplined cost control, and those are very evident and are flowing through, can be seen to flow through in our EBITA margins, which have improved by 0.5 percentage points, effectively addressing the headwinds and growing our margins. When we combine this with a substantially lower interest cost following the refinancing we completed in November last year, we're seeing a real significant increase in our profit before tax and our earnings per share. Steve's already quoted the numbers.
I'll repeat them, a GBP 9.2 million increase in adjusted PBT and our EPS up by 1.1 pence. Absolutely pleased with this trajectory that those are on. Now when we came together, what seems like a while ago now, one of our primary goals was to address the balance sheet, and we now have a very robust balance sheet in place. With leverage of 0.9 on a non-IFRS 16 basis, we are really well-placed to tackle and address any interest rate changes that come our way. In fact, it's this robustness and the trajectory that we've been on as a business and continue to be on has given us and the board confidence to reintroduce the dividend today as a major milestone in the continuing growth of our business.
Just delving a little bit in detail underneath the group results, we'll look at our segments. The first point is these are, obviously we've talked about the legal restructuring. As we come towards talking the year-end, we'll start to present our segments slightly differently around the new legal structure. For now, for continuity, we'll present them in the way that we have done in previous results. Just as a reminder of those two segments, rental, this is income generated from assets owned within the group, and services is income generated from third-party assets and our trading business. Starting with rental, solid growth of 9% versus the same period last year. There were a number of factors driving that.
We've already talked about expansion of our low-cost builders merchant network moving from 43 this time last year up to 60. Not only have we expanded the network, but on a same store basis we've seen good solid growth of 15% in those stores that were open in both periods, for comparable periods year-on-year. We see this as a real part of our growth engine ahead of the market as we go forward. We've also had targeted fleet investment to support the rental growth. I'll touch on that a little bit later on, but our size of our fleet now is at in the half year is 8% bigger than it was at the previous half year, if you take 2 points.
The growth of our fleet through using insight and targeted investment has also supported the rental performance. This is all underpinned by strong price management. While the reported margins, the contribution margins of rental have gone down, our actual underlying margins are stable. It's the impact of fuel price increases on our cost plus resale contracts, which has had the dilutive impact on the reported level. That's all mix related down to fuel. I now move on to services, an absolutely excellent performance growing at 16%. Within that, our rehire business, that has grown at just marginally above the 16%, and that's really come through the investment in our technology roadmap and also expansion of our rehire partner network, which now stands at 700+.
Combining these two together is improving the customer and the supplier experience, which is again providing that one-stop shop to our customers, making it easier for our suppliers, and Steve will touch on that a little bit later on. That's enabling us to move forward on our margins. Not only has the revenue grown, our margins have expanded, and this is all accretive at an EBITA level. Then moving on to overheads. Cost control is part of the DNA of our group, and never more so important as it is now in terms of following through that discipline. Despite the well-documented inflationary headwinds, our actual cost base year on year, like for like, is flat.
That is after we've also paid about GBP 800,000 out to colleagues as a one-off payment in May to support with the cost of living challenges, and a further GBP 600,000 to be paid to the same colleagues, next month in October. With all of that going on, our cost base has been broadly flat year-on-year. Moving on to my last slide, another period of record returns with return on capital employed up to just shy of 24%, which quoting the same number again, is a 24% growth versus this time last year. Now, I would describe probably three main drivers for that.
There's the growth of our capital-light services business, which obviously is accretive at an EBITA level and a profit level, but we don't have to load the balance sheet with fixed assets to deliver that. There's also our price control and a very important part, the discipline of our business, and then finally, targeted investment in fleet. Now moving on to the fleet, we invested just over GBP 19 million in the first half of the year, and you will be able to see from the presentation on the left-hand chart that that's higher than we have done in previous first halves of the financial year, but in line with plan.
Now that is really leveraging our insight, capability and technology, and that enables us to look at demand, to invest behind where there's clear demand, but also to be in a position whereby we maximize our returns through that investment. That's enabled us to maintain on a larger fleet, 8% bigger, utilization to be flat at 56%, which as you again can see from the middle chart, is well above where we were prior to our operating model changes that we implemented in the back end of 2020. In addition to our investment in the first half, we invested GBP 2.8 million in technology, and Steve will touch on the technology roadmap in a slide or two.
Bringing that all together, in April, I talked about our CapEx guidance being GBP 35-40 million, with technology being GBP 5-10 million of that total envelope. That guidance remains unchanged, for the financial year as a whole. Steve.
Thank you, Paul. I've got four slides to update you on our progress against all the elements of change. If you flick to the first one, Greg. This is the chart that I took you all through at the full year results presentation. Just to remind ourselves on the left is ProService, and this is the tech-enabled asset light sales organization. On the right, we've got our operations, and you can see all the sites wherein within they hold all the equipment. Now, operations becomes one of 700 odd suppliers which provide the whole range of which the sales organization on the left provides to our customers, sells to our customers. That's the best way to think about this.
Why did we, you know, pull this out and restructure, as we've done? Well, way back when we started this, the turnaround of HSS, we went down and asked all our customers, you know, what would make a different hire supplier in the market? What are their what are the critical points thfey need resolving? We got a list. One consistent piece or request in all the cohorts that we asked was that, look, when they do a particular project, they don't just use us, they use several suppliers. Those several suppliers bring them lots of problems because they've got to talk to several people. They've got to arrange all the drop-offs, pickups, different invoices, different terms. They've got to sign them all off, et cetera.
It became a real nightmare for them. We then also spoke to some purchasing directors of the larger customers, and they also spoke about the need to control in one place the costs to enable them to optimize and be efficient in serving the costs for a particular project that they were running. From that, they also talked to us about a proposition that we had at the time called One Call, where a customer could phone into one place and then we'd try to sort it out for them. They said they really loved that, but it just was really clunky. If we could automate that, and at the click of a button, they could have all this equipment available to us, and they could organize that through one supplier, that would be game changing.
It would be a real differentiator in the market. Hence, we started down the journey of developing all that platform, which we call Brenda. On this diagram, as you can see it, that's the brain in the middle of the chart there. Here's the idea, and as you've seen this grown with us, so we talked about we've got a few hundred suppliers on this, then we talked about 500, 600. Now we've got 700+ suppliers. Here's the idea. We take all their range, we provide as broad a range as we can, and the more suppliers we can add, the greater that breadth of offering is. The more suppliers also gives us a depth of offering to our customers.
The more that we can get that into our system, the more that if we can touch the customers, we can offer them at the click of a button whatever they need to do a project. The customers, the theory behind this is the more suppliers we get, the more customers will come to us because they can, in one place, very easily solve all their problems for the project. In essence, the more suppliers, the more customers we'll get. The more customers we get, well, the more suppliers we'll get. As you can see, we're moving down that track really fast at this moment in time and creating a great momentum.
Our vision, if we talked about that word, in this area, is to create a marketplace for business equipment services. When we look at this, what we needed to do is to get as many suppliers. We've got 700+, so we're in a really good place on that. Then we should be able to touch our customers however they want to talk to us, in whatever way we can, to make sure that they can conduct business with us. For example, a small customer, me, going online, hss.com, we wanna be able to offer the whole rehire proposition. In this case, 700+ suppliers and the rest propositions, that they can choose if it's our colleagues out there in the field, and we've talked about the iPad before, and the customer's got a request.
Similarly, they can get anything from the colleagues. In the top right-hand corner, you see something called the ProService portal. This is for larger customers. What we see here is that they will be able to control. They can on hire, off hire, whatever they need in terms of equipment services for a job. But also, we think that we can offer there, we know we can offer there, waste management services, training services in a different vertical, equipment tool sales. Because we've got this partnership with our merchant network, building materials when we need it for a job they're out on at the moment, emergency supplies or supplying the materials in total.
What we see is a massive opportunity to actually build this, marketplace, develop it, because we actually believe we can stand out and be really different and differentiated in this market by being able to aggregate market as opposed to consolidate. We think now, and that's why we use the word excited, we're really in good shape to do that and deliver this vision. I'm gonna move on to the next slide now, Greg, to tell you how close we are to being able to do this. The first one was that cash transactions onto HSS Pro that I talked about. This is the ability for our colleagues to handle cash transactions. At the moment, they can do account, by, you know, offering the rehire proposition. Cash transactions, we've done the, technology development.
It's in test, and very likely in the next week or two, that will be rolled out and available. That will complete that picture. Number two, the extended rehire range available on hss.com. I can go on hss.com, and I can rehire anything from the market. Well, that development is very near completion, and we do expect that to be rolling out as well, post-testing in Q4 right across our business. The ProService portal, which is for larger customers that I spoke about, right now, we have finished. We're ready to go. On 14th October , our first customer goes live on that portal. They're a top 20 U.K. construction company, so very sizable. We expect great results.
Actually, I'm looking forward to the full year results presentation covering that picture and showing you what we found. Not only that, we've also got agreement with our biggest customer to go live on this portal in the first quarter of next year. When we say excited, things are really moving at the pace here. The final piece is that supplier portal because we want to give more information to suppliers to encourage more suppliers to join us 'cause we can help them with what availability is they're providing, where kits should be, pricing levels, where they've missed out, et cetera. It's a really win-win, horrible phrases, but they really apply here, relationship.
Right across there, we're at the point where we're almost at the go live for the whole of that vision. We've been implementing and delivering as we've traveled, as you've seen. We put on the right-hand side some of the successes we've had. Actually, I talked about, remember, the conversion rate when we went with our colleagues with go live with Pro, went step from something like 55% conversion to 70%, is now stepped forward again to 73%. We talked about the revenue, 16% growth, which is quite substantial in this market. We've also seen an increase of 0.6 percentage points, and Paul, you went through that, in terms of services contribution. Look, digital penetration remains good and high. I talked about the you know, builders merchants.
Overall, when we're deploying this technology, we are absolutely getting positive benefits. We've used that word for the third, and we might even use it again. Exciting second stage of growth. I think we just had a mental block on words when we were writing these decks. The next one, please, Greg. Talking about operations now. Our mission here, remember, is to provide excellent service and just get down on those returns. Paul's talked about the returns, so I'll leave the sort of bottom chevron pretty much alone, except for mentioning the click and collect remaining strong still in our CDCs at 16%. What I talked about before with the rollout of Satalia, this is a planning tool.
The whole purpose about doing that, if you remember, was to enable us ultimately to be able to offer time windows to customers for delivery of products and collections of products, which again, will stand us out in this market. Now, the first part of that is to get all our teams reusing Satalia, making the best use of that. I can confidently say that that's happening now. We've had a few developments that we've done over the past few months, but we're in really good shape. Rolled out across, I was in a couple of CDCs recently, and that's really embraced by our teams now. Here's the, you know, the joy of this, using such systems, is in the middle there, improving efficiency.
We've actually found that the miles per job has decreased by 12% over the last, say, half one and half one, but particularly over the last three months. We've seen a 12% reduction, and that's material for us. We said if you put it in terms of emissions, that's 132 tons of carbon emissions that we've saved, or as pointed out to me it's the equivalent in miles of driving around the world 5.6x . A witty Mr. Quested has suggested we would roll this out to Santa, but I don't understand that one. Anyway, super supporting our ESG targets and what we're trying to achieve, it really does move us forward.
This is just a by-product of what we wanted to do because the ultimate aim is to actually offer those time windows and improve that service proposition to our customers. That's the sort of operational side. If I link into the ESG for a moment. Thanks, Greg. Three points here. We've rolled out our impact report that's available online, being received well by the customers when we present that to them. We've also been assessed by EcoVadis. I'm sure you're aware of those. An important governing body assessing ESG, and we were awarded the advanced status, which we're very pleased with. All the extra bits that they pointed out we've incorporated into our ESG plan. Also we've been working super hard at driving the equality, diversity, and inclusion.
We've started up a forum that's met a couple of times. We've had various spinoffs from that, but our mission is just to make ourselves more attractive almost and accessible to a wider range, not just blokes. The final piece there is a passion of all of ours, which is health and safety. Again, we've seen improvements, but I've got to be clear, our mission on that is zero riddors. It's so important. It's a tough working environment. This is something we preach and believe in every single day, and we continue with that. That rounds up the sort of strategy progress. It just brings me to my conclusion slide, thanks, Greg, which we will finish with. The first point there, business consistently delivering well.
If you go back to when we put our turnaround plan together and when Paul and myself presented that in 2017, Paul.
Yeah.
We religiously, slavishly delivered in pursuit of that plan. What we can see now, the team, the HSS team has delivered well. We've seen this significant, consistent financial progress made. We've done numerous record results for HSS. We've encountered COVID and I think by and large remember our services business in that time was. Was it, Paul, 3% down year-on-year when a market that was 20% down? There's a really robust business in there now, and that is reflected in our balance sheet. Paul talked about it. We've got a strong, effective balance sheet now. As a result, the confidence the board has in the plans we've got, we've reinstated the dividend. What's helped us get there is the operating model.
We've now done the heavy lifting. We're now in the space where we've got ProService, this tech asset-light sales organization supported by ops and 700 other plus suppliers to provide the range to sell. We've got the two businesses, they're performing well. We're in great shape. What has enabled that is the final point there. This is technology. That is the fourth use case that's exciting. We have got something that we're really quite pleased with. It is true, we all are excited because we're at that point where within the next quarter we will see those final bits roll out, and then it's just pushing this new model, and we've already seen positive signs that it can deliver for us. With that, I shall close and hand over to you, operator, to ask if there's any questions.
Everyone, if you wish to ask a question, please key star then one on your device, record your name, then press the hash key. If you then decide to withdraw your question, simply key star two. All questions will be answered in the order received, and you will be advised when to ask your question. All other lines remain on listen only. Please key star then one on your device to record your name, then press the hash key. The first question is coming from the line of-
David Brockton, Numis.
Please go ahead.
Good morning, all. Two questions, please. Firstly, the first question in respect of ProService, that there's clearly a really exciting marketplace that you're creating there. I just wondered if you could touch on where the sort of rehire partner growth is coming from, what the pipeline looks like there for adding new partners. And also, are you able to break out sort of customer growth, that sort of contributed to that services growth? That's the first question. And then the second question just relates to the balance sheet. Again, that is in a much stronger position than it's well been since you've been a listed business.
I just wondered if you could touch on the interest rate sensitivity now and how we should think about that, should the base rate move over the near term. Thanks.
I'm just gonna try and if I'm not answering the question, David, just restir me. The ProService one on the partners. That happens quite naturally with our business. You know, we provide, we're very good in that small tool and access market. When we go to our customers, we need to maybe provide the welfare, the larger access equipment. You know, we did the deal with UK Platforms. Actually the initial where our partners came from was a very natural group of suppliers for our customers. That's what they wanted. Whenever we talk to a customer, remember our One Call proposition, the customer phoned in, he said, "I need X, Y, and Z." As soon as we knew that, we knew what suppliers that we'd be targeting and getting on board.
In fairness, you know, we've been super supported by suppliers. The reason we step forward so quickly is because I think when we show this platform to our suppliers, they get it, they understand it. We're not trying to, you know, take their market from it. In fact, we're trying to help them access our, you know, customer base. We see profiling and building the supply channel. We've got to do it well. We've got to do it with thorough audit to make sure we get quality suppliers. But, you know, where it's gonna come from is complementary to, you know, what we're offering and what the customers are wanting. If that makes sense, that's the pipeline and
Yeah. Just if I was to build on that, David, as well, in terms of the expansion, I think we already had a very good national coverage of big players. What we've been doing as well is expanding out the local coverage. We always use the example, if we've got some kits in Southampton and a customer wants it in Aberdeen, historically, we would have put it on the back of a lorry and traveled all the way up the country. Now we're looking at filling some of those gaps with local suppliers. We're building up relationships with local rehire partners, say, in Aberdeen in that instance. It's kind of taking the national network and also filling it with local coverage so that we can offer even greater depth and breadth to our customers.
The second point I think you asked was about the customers on ProService. There is no, you know, target niche on customers or one that's developed more on this platform than others. We serve quite a broad church in HSS. It's one of the strengths, and always has been, of this business. You know, our exposure that we don't have big single point exposure to markets. We're a broad church. The developments of the ProService as a total, it's been aimed at all of those customers. I think I'm right in saying, Paul, that there's just no one that has been leading the charge. It's.
We talk to somebody, they're interested in it, we start to develop, and hence what's happened with the top 20 construction company. We just spoke to them about something else. We introduced this, talked about it, they loved it, they wanted it, and within a few weeks, you know, well, actually two weeks, we're gonna be live with it. Does that answer that question, David, or am I missing something?
Yeah. Yes, it does. Yeah, yeah. No, you covered what I was after. Thanks.
Yeah. Okay.
In terms of the balance sheet, David, in terms of the interest cost, our interest charge today at current base rate is in the kind of GBP 3 million-GBP 3.5 million range. That's our interest cost for our main debt facilities. To give you a kind of rule of thumb, every 1 percentage point move in the base rate, probably given we're on a SONIA plus margin basis, would equate to around about GBP 700,000 interest. If you look at the cash on the balance sheet, look at the free cash flow generation as we go forward, we can withstand quite an increase in the base rate based on the quantum of debt and also in terms of the level of the interest charge.
Great. Thank you very much.
The next one is coming from someone who didn't record their name. Please check if your device is on mute. Your line is live. With the call, you may now proceed.
Hi. Morning. Sorry, I was on mute when I should have left a name. It's Charlie Campbell here at Liberum. I have three questions, if I can, and they're all quite quick, so maybe I'll just ask them one by one. First of all, just on higher rates, just wonder if you could just explain sort of, the impact of higher rates on the numbers you've seen and, the trends going into Q3 and maybe even later. I'm just wondering if that momentum, it should be building.
Higher rates, Charlie, I assume you mean price.
Yeah. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Sorry. Yep. Yep.
Yeah. I don't think we've seen that much of a difference from what we said in April, which is approximately 50% of the growth is from volume and 50% is price. There's a bit of a mix in there. If you look at, as I said, with our resale, which is where we provide fuel for generators, et cetera, and that's on a cost-plus basis. As the denominator's gone up quite a bit, so has the numerator on that one. And then there are other areas where it is probably more volume than price related, but on average, it's about 50/50.
Yeah. No, thank you. The second one was just on bad debt. I guess, you know, the construction industry's had to kind of juggle sort of high costs of inflation, and that may be putting some of those businesses under stress. I just wonder if you've seen any increase in bad debts or expecting that to come through, if that's something that is worthy of note yet.
Yeah. Obviously, high up on our agenda is always looking at where we are from the bad debts perspective because there are. I think we can all look at the indicators out there, which suggest there could be challenges. If you look at the number of companies gone into administration, that's nudged up slightly in the construction world. We have seen that move up, I think couple of points. We've probably seen after about eight, nine months this year, about GBP 0.5 million increase in write-offs versus the same period last year. That's not a huge percentage.
Just as a reminder, at the year-end and continuing in the half year, we made an increased provision for bad debts, and so we are actually carrying a larger bad debt provision because we've put an increased weighting on expected losses to allow for that risk. Actually, if you look at the age profile of our debt and look at our contracts, the age profile's actually improved since the year-end. That's through our focus on cash management across the organization.
Right. Yeah. Thank you very much. The last question, just on ProService, 700 hire companies. How do you kind of ensure quality control in all of those? Is that just so that you wait to hear if something goes wrong or you're in there sort of checking the kit from time to time yourselves? Just how do you manage that part of the process?
Well, the first one is the onboarding of them, Charlie. So, you know, we've established a process by which we send our team out just to effectively onboard. We wanna make sure that they can deliver, they've got the kit, and actually what they say, you know, in terms of lead time availability, et cetera, is genuine. Then we have live feedback, you know, the supplier portal we talked about. So if there's any issues on a contract and they're not living up to what they should, we deal with it there and then. So this is live as we travel. The third aspect is the assurance side, which is just the audit of the suppliers as we travel.
Yep. I presume there isn't much churn yet, but I mean, has there been much, you know, of those 700, you know, is it a meaningful number that you have to kind of
No, I think you were right. You know, it’s in such a state and growing and developing that we haven’t seen massive churn at the moment. You could say that’s well done on the audit process and who we transact with. You know, proof is in the pudding on this one. Well, time will tell. We’re starting to see this, and we’re starting to see this start to, you know, really create growth for us, and that’s when, you know, more suppliers will come on board. I think we’ve got robust processes in place to manage that. No, we don’t see any much turnover at the moment.
Yeah. Thanks very much.
Thank you, Charlie.
Thanks, Charlie. At the moment, we've got no further questions. Just a quick reminder, everyone, if you wish to ask one, please key star then one on your device, record your name and press the hash key.
Well, if there's no more questions, operator, I'd just like to thank everybody for dialing in today, and we'll see you later, look forward to seeing you later. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.
Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Everyone, that concludes your call for today. You may now disconnect. Thank you for joining, and enjoy the rest of your day.