Many thanks for joining us today for Ultimate Products Full Year 2025 Results Presentation. Just while we wait for people to join, just a bit of general housekeeping. So this webinar is being recorded and will be available in due course on the Equity Development website. You can also access our research on the website. There will be a Q&A session with management at the end of the presentation. So if you do have any questions, please feel free to drop them into the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. I will now hand you over to Andrew Gossage, the CEO, and Chris Dent, the CFO, to run through the presentation. Over to you guys. Thank you.
Thanks, Rachel. Well, for the non-holders here, I thought I'd give the sort of 60 seconds background to this. Obviously, there's lots of detail in the annual reports on our website. But we are a branded consumer goods business. We have two brands, Salter and Beldray. Together, they account for 60% of our overall revenues. Salter is the U.K.'s oldest housewares brand, dates back to 1760, before America existed and before the French Revolution. And that is our scales and kitchen brands. We say scales first because that's always what people remember it for, and it's its main heritage. Albeit, the majority of the revenue comes from the kitchen sides. By kitchen, I mean largely cookware and kitchen electrical items. Beldray is a mere nipper. That's 150 years old, dates back to 1872. And that is our laundry and floor care brands.
And again, laundry is where its heritage is. It was back in the 1930s or 1940s. It was the patent holder for the adjustable ironing board. And those two, as I say, account for 60% of our revenue. We then have a supporting cast of other brands that we own, typically heritage brands. And they account for 20% of our revenue. We typically use those brands for channel management purposes, where for whatever reason, it wouldn't be appropriate to use Salter or Beldray. We then have a license under Russell Hobbs. We don't do the electrical, but we do license the brand for cookware. And that accounts for approximately 10% of our revenue. And then the balance is a mix of different things. Like we have a close-out business still, and we do do some bits of own label. We are headquartered in Oldham, Greater Manchester.
The bulk of our product is sourced from China, where we have an office and showroom in Guangzhou. And we also have a showroom in Paris, which we use for our European customers. If you can go to page four, please, Rachel. So this is our highlight slide, which is a misnomer, should we say. It has been a disappointing year, FY25. It's led to quite a lot of introspection amongst the management team. And if we can turn to page five, you can see to some extent the output of that introspection. We've looked back all the way back to when we IPOed in 2017. And we've looked at what have we achieved? What have we maybe not achieved? And actually, over the course of that period, the business has been transformed and transformed for the good.
Back in FY17, less than half of our revenue came from brands that we owned. In FY25, that was over 80%. And the brand execution has also been transformed. We've recently rebranded Salter and Beldray. And I think the way we now have a marketing team, which we didn't have as recently as four years ago. And I think we're doing fantastic things, particularly with our Salter and Beldray brands. We've addressed channel and customer concentration issues, which featured quite heavily in our prospectus. We were over 60% from the discount channel. We now have a broader mix. Supermarkets, for example, which were 8% of revenue back in 2017, are now circa 30%. Online, which was less than 4% of revenue back then, is typically in a range of 20%-25%. So we're much more balanced in terms of channel concentration.
Back then, we also had over 40% of our revenues with two customers. That customer concentration has also been addressed. We had quite a lot of licensing risk, both Russell Hobbs and Salter at the time were licensed. We acquired Salter outright in 2021. Hence, we only have 10% of our revenue arising from licenses. That was another key risk that featured in our prospectus. I do think the business has transformed in terms of its operational execution and our use of AI and tools like RPA, Robotic Process Automation, and the recent installation of the PIM, our Product Information Management system. We are viewed within the industry in terms of execution as a global best player in the way we go about our business. We've, of course, absorbed quite a number of external shocks: COVID, of course, but shipping crises, cost of living crises, etc.
So a lot of improvements over this period. But it's probably fair to say in terms of our numbers, we have stalled over recent years. And it'd be very easy for me to sit here and say, well, FY22, the high watermark of post-COVID boom in general merchandisers, as consumers still largely in lockdown and unable to go out, spend money on physical goods. Coming off that peak, I could talk about how tough the market is. And I think probably most of you on this call would be conscious of that. It's an exceptionally tough market for discretionary non-food. Not helped, of course, by significant cost inflation. Some of it's market-led, some of it's government-led. But to use that old English proverb, fine words butter no parsnips. And we have to look to self-help because we can't influence the overall market, but we can influence our own actions.
If we go over onto page six, our starting point with all of this is our overall culture of continuous improvements. This culture is largely anchored on our Graduate Development Scheme, where we bring talented, bright young people into the business each year. We are a business which we have complexity imposed upon us because retailers make things complicated for their suppliers, so it makes it simple for them. Exactly what I would do if I was in their position. But that complexity can be difficult to manage and difficult to scale, and what we aren't able to do, like say a retailer can, is we're not able to take a top-down approach in terms of how to drive improvements into the business. We really do need our people from the bottom up to bring those ideas to the table that we can then automate.
And this is an internal graphic really that we use quite regularly in the business. We started using it externally in investor meetings because I think investors do find it interesting to see how businesses think. We create this virtuous circle of ideas generated by our teams, those ideas for automation, that automation being delivered, that leads to increased productivity. Much of that has been recycled into higher salaries, but that allows us to find even better quality talent. Around the outside, you see the benefits of this. Now, it does feel at first sight like an OpEx play. And certainly, it is. And we've delivered flat OpEx over the last three years. Highly unusual, I feel, for a consumer business given the inflationary pressures which all of UK plc has seen. But actually, that's not what gets me excited.
What gets me excited is the ability to recycle the benefits of increased productivity into areas like branding and marketing and better product developments and improved product quality and price, and I'll tell you a bit more about that in future slides. Let's go over onto page seven. So one of the biggest areas of self-help is, as I said before, how we execute our branding, which has been transformed really, particularly since we appointed Tracy Carroll as our Brand Director at the back end of 2022. And Tracy has subsequently been promoted to Chief Marketing Officer. We thought we knew a thing or two about brands before then, but I've learned an awful lot in the last two or three years. And I think the way we're executing our brand and the way we're marketing our brands is fantastic. And our brands have delivered.
There's been significant growth in our brands since we IPOed, as you can see from the graph on this slide. If we go on to the next page, product development has always been a key strength. But what we've seen over the last couple of years is, I believe, a step change in the quality and execution of our product developments. One of our key metrics is our product development failure rate. You always want to have a bit of a failure rate. If all of your products succeed, then you're probably not taking enough risk. But you obviously don't want to have too much of a failure rate because then that investment is wasted. Our failure rate has improved from 25%, which I was broadly happy with, to be fair, to 15%, and I put that down to the benefits of more focus.
We've reduced our product developments from an astronomical thousand new products a year to a fairly substantial 600, so plenty of newness still, but just a bit less than we were doing before, given our team's greater focus on individual lines to really bring great products to market. The automation has released our talent to focus on product. Bringing product to market is administratively very, very heavy. You have to collect a lot of information and a lot of data about the product you bring to market, which then has to be reported on to many people, such as customers and government agencies, so for example, the new packaging tax EPR, we have to collect all of the details around the packaging of our products, the weight, the types of packaging, what's card, what's plastic, what's being recycled, what hasn't been recycled, what is recyclable.
All of this is administratively very heavy. The more we use the automation, the more we can release our talent to focus on the product. Then finally, we've been much more data-led. I'm a great believer in allowing our buying teams to use their intuition. I think we have a team that is very talented and has strong intuition. It's always good if we can use market research and the data to verify their intuition. We've been doing that much more so over the last couple of years. That has led to much better, in my opinion, from a high base and a more improved quality of execution on NPD. You can see an example on this page here, the Beldray Trio Steam. The youngsters these days don't even own an iron and board.
They hang their shirts on a hanger and they steam. This is a three-way item. It's a steamer, it's a travel iron, and if you put it into the plate, you can use it as a conventional iron, so this would retail at about GBP 50, maybe promoted at GBP 40. We have other products like the Sushi Maker, the Crisp & Go, our version of the versatile air fryer, the VertiCook, and for those who don't know us well, our approach to product development is very simple. We want to be a fast second, so we aren't there to make markets. We follow the trends. We look at what premium brands are doing, and then what we look to do is bring the product to market that the other four quintiles can afford, we are the advocates for the squeezed middle, and we are proudly mass market.
Our products have to pass a very simple test. We call it the countertop test. Because our mission is beautiful products for every home. What we want is product that our consumers can be proud of, but is a price point that they can afford. And when they take it home and put it on their countertop and their friends come around for dinner, we want them to keep that product on the countertop and not put it in the cupboards. So beautiful products for every home. There is a case study on the next page there, Rachel, which is our Beldray All-in-One Floor Cleaner. So this is for hard floors. It vacuums, it cleans, and it dries. And there are a number of other brands on the market which have products with similar function. Brands like Dyson and Shark, Kärcher, Gtech, Bissell.
And when all of these brands were reviewed by Which?, our Beldray All-in-One was viewed as the best buy, the best product. Not the best value product, but the best. It was also the best value. It was the least expensive of the cohort. And this, for me, is what we must always aspire to as a business, to bring the best product to market, but one which is less than the half price of those premium brands to really be able to win that mass market. Keep an eye out for this one. We are going to be utilizing the Which? branding. We did a soft launch in late summer, which was very successful, led to this review. We're going to be doing a hard launch and a big go-to-market in spring. Plenty of PR. We're paying the money to Which? to use their branding.
And you'll see lots of marketing activity around that in spring 2026. Let's go to page 10. So I mentioned before about the things we do in the business using AI, RPA, and our Product Information Management system. All of UK plc have seen these headwinds. And using the sales per head metric, you can see the benefits that this focus on productivity has given us. We've reduced headcount from, I think, from a peak of about 410. I think at the moment it's in a sort of range of 320- 330. So we are becoming sort of, as I think all of UK plc needs to be, we are becoming much more productive in the business, recycling the benefits of that into not just good control of OpEx, but also benefits around branding and product.
If we move on to the next page, I mentioned that we went internally through sort of this period of introspection. We looked at the business and what could we get better at. I think we've sort of set, we've looked at our sales function and we realized that we've been guilty of underinvestments in our sales function. That's something for which I personally need to take significant responsibility. It's no excuse, but it can feel risky to make changes in sales, particularly if you're listed and you're chasing numbers to some extent. Of course, in the medium term, if you don't change, that's the biggest risk. We are kind of circling back on our sales function.
We are going to be focusing in terms of human capital on backing talent and investing in talent, which kind of broadly mirrors what the rest of the business does. Linked to that, big investments in training and development where perhaps we'd underinvested previously. Much better use of technology. The business generally is fantastic at use of technology, but less so in sales. So we're going to sort of improve that over the coming months. We've already rolled out the PIM, which is a cross-business tool, but including in sales. We've got a CRM as part of the new ERP system coming into use during calendar year 2026. Then some differences in some tightening in terms of management process, particularly around setting expectations and measuring performance against those expectations. We brought Duncan Singleton into the CCO role. So previously, Simon Showman, the Founder, was the CCO.
Simon, our CCO, looked after both buying and selling, which was a very, very wide brief. What we've done now is we've split those two roles. So we've got Katie Maxwell, who is our new Chief Product Officer. And Katie oversees four people with this, but Katie is someone who's come all the way through from the Graduate Development Scheme back in 2013 when she joins into that role today, which is a fantastic achievement for Katie. And then Duncan Singleton has moved across from buying into the CCO role. And some of you will know Duncan. Some of you, maybe most of you wouldn't. I mean, Duncan is really a heavyweight both in the business and in the industry. Duncan has taken the small domestic appliances business from GBP 5 million of revenue when he took it over in 2011 to nearly GBP 60 million in FY25.
He sort of transforms that product area. He also chairs one of the big industry groups, the BHETA Small Domestic Appliances Trade Group. It's a big appointment. Duncan is moving across from buying into that CCO role overseeing the sales function. Just following on from that on the next slides, Rachel, many of you will have seen the announcements around our promotions within the operating boards. The guys you see here are our operating board, plus myself and Chris Dent. I think maybe I did this for two reasons, really. I think, first of all, like I've just mentioned, I needed to split the buying and sales role, hence Duncan and Katie's appointments into the CCO and CPO roles, respectively. I also wanted to maybe change some misconceptions.
I think often externally, people have perhaps fallen into the trap of thinking that it was about me and Simon. But the business has always had a very, very strong senior executive team. And it was a great opportunity for me to communicate that more explicitly to the wider world. I won't read out their thumbnail CVs here. I'll leave that to yourselves. But we have really fantastic strength and depth at senior executive level. And indeed, strength and depth below that, we do our human capital model, which broadly mirrors the professional services industry, where we bring lots of people in at graduate level, and then we train, train, and train again. And then we bring people through the pyramid right the way through to the top of the organization.
Means we do have a tremendous strength and depth, not just with the people you see on the slides here, but further down the organization as well. Okay, I'm going to hand over to Chris to go through the financials.
Brilliant. Thanks very much, Andy. So obviously, it has been a disappointing year when sales go backwards. So sales down 3%. But actually, the bigger hit to profit has been in relation to our gross margin, where we were hit last year by extra freight costs due to the closure of the Red Sea. So sadly, gross profit down by 14%. Admin expenses have remained flat, and they've remained flat for three years, where the inflationary pressures that we have seen, and quite a lot of those inflationary pressures government mandated, have been offset by productivity gains.
So on to the next slide, looking a little bit more into the sales breakdown and where that loss of revenue has come from. Now, there are many different ways to slice and dice our sales. And I'm sure many of you have sort of looked at the very long revenue note that we have in the and the accounts. I quite like this breakdown of sales myself because what it does is it sort of shows what's really going on on an underlying basis. So one of the factors has been air fryers. So we saw the boom in that during FY22, which was fantastic when it happened. But obviously, when a boom like the air fryers occurs, you're always there going, "What's going to happen next year?
What's going to happen with my comparatives?" but at the time, you do still take that revenue because, to be honest, air fryers are one of our core lines, and therefore, we are going to continue to sell it, so what we saw is that the air fryer boom ended in Q1 FY24. Since that point, it's reached about steady state. It's been steady state for the last seven quarters and continues to be in a steady state of about GBP 10 million a year in the start of FY26, so that's one of the big trading items, so GBP 5 million of the decrease. Then the other has been third-party closeout. Now, for those of you who don't know, third-party closeout is almost where the business started when Simon founded the business 20 years ago, so this is buying other people's excess stock and selling it out into the market.
Now, obviously, this isn't a core part of our business because it's not UP-branded sales. But last year, it was very helpful for us because it sort of masked that sort of or not masked, but softened the blow of the air fryers coming off their boom period. Now, those are great for us, but they're only tactical sales. They aren't strategic for us for the long term because one of the issues is that it can end up distracting both our sales team and also our customers because it causes confusion about what Ultimate Products is. Ultimate Products is the home of brands. And as much as I love those sort of third-party closeout sales last year because they're relatively high margin and they were great for sort of filling a gap, I love our brands more.
I love Salter and Beldray more than I love those third-party closeout sales with their high margin. So although they've come down this year, they are not strategically important, and you will see those going down further in the future because they are not the future of our business, and they are not strategically important for us. What's strategically important is our own brands. And I'm very pleased that they went forward in the year, albeit by a relatively modest 4%. And within that, what we've seen is quite a difference between our international business and our U.K. business.
Our international business is growing quite strongly at the moment, mainly off the back of the E.U. discounters, where you can see that they were up sort of by an impressive GBP 8.6 million or 42%, which is great because we see that we can grow quite strongly in in the medium term. However, we've stalled in the U.K. So in the U.K., we are down relatively mildly, pretty much just about flat. However, even though it is a tough market, we can do better here. This is the area where we believe that we can be taking market share in the U.K. rather than just remaining flat. So if you want to move us forward onto the next slide, I can show what sort of happened in relation to profit during the year. So you can see that the revenue at prior year margin is a relatively minor effect.
So that brought profit down by about GBP 1.4 million. The bigger changes in relation to our profit year- on- year is in relation to gross margin. The largest segment of that is in relation to freight, so freight prices rose during the mini crisis we had last year when the Red Sea was closed. Well, the Red Sea is still closed, but we have seen markets normalize, and freight has now come back down again. In fact, overall, for gross margin, we're in a relatively benign period in relation to the macro effects, so freight has normalized. FX is in a relatively benign period with FX rates sort of above GBP 1.3 in relation to the dollar, and we aren't seeing a huge amount of factory gate inflation with our Chinese factories. However, we are at the moment seeing pressures in relation to the micro in relation to gross margin.
This is in relation to sales mix. As I mentioned earlier, those third-party closeout, which we do not see as strategically important, they are relatively high margin. What we've seen is those go down and our own brands go up. Now, yes, as a CFO, I do like high gross margin sales. However, if they are affecting our underlying business, they aren't great for us for the long-term strategic health of the business. We will be concentrating on UP brands going forward, even though on a blended basis, they may be at a slightly lower gross margin than those closeout sales. The other thing we can see here is how we've managed our admin expenses. Although we've seen GBP 1.5 million of pay increases, we have counteracted that by headcount reduction, which is all through our productivity gains, which we've been making.
So moving on to the next slide, looking further down the income statement, so pre-IFRS 16 amortization relatively flat. Finance expense up slightly in the year because net debt was slightly higher over the period. The one sort of interesting thing to sort of draw out is our ERP expense, so this is the money that we've been spending on upgrading our ERP system. Now, this is quite a major project which we're undertaking. Overall, it's probably going to take about two to three years and will cost around GBP 2 million. What we expect is that that will further enable us to continue with our productivity gains. But in the short term, it is going to be quite a risky and time-consuming project. We've tried to de-risk that as much as possible. For instance, the PIM that we have done this year, that was an initial phase of our ERP.
Previously, all the data in the PIM was actually held within our current ERP system. By moving the bulk of that data out, it means that we're less reliant on the ERP as a core system, which therefore ends up de-risking the project overall. Moving on to the next slide to look at the movement in terms of the balance sheet. Overall, the balance sheet has remained stable. The slightly odd thing that's happened in the period is in relation to the movements in working capital and net debt. When a business shrinks, you'd be expecting your working capital to shrink as well and be getting money back from that working capital. However, we've seen our working capital and hence our net debt go up by GBP 2.4 million in the period. If you look at the individual lines, that's what's happened. Stock is down in the period.
Debtors has fallen, but creditors has fallen by an even larger amount. What has happened here is in relation to the deferral of some orders. Some of you may remember when we downgraded our numbers earlier on in the year. Part of the reason for that was the deferral of a couple of million pounds' worth of orders by one of our big customers. So those orders were meant to be being delivered in June and July, and they were actually delivered in August and September. So what that meant is at July period end, we had stock on our balance sheet, which we paid for. Most of our stock is usually funded by our creditors, but because it was being held for longer than we would normally hold it for, we had to pay the factories, and therefore, that stock was being covered by net debt instead.
So hence, that investment in working capital and the net debt being marginally higher than we would be expecting it to be. So we can see that on the next slide in relation to the cash flow in the period. So opening net debt sort of like 10.4, closing net debt 14.1. That 14.1 on an EBITDA ratio basis is 1.1, which is ever so slightly higher than our capital allocation. So our capital allocation policy is looking for net debt to be around 1x EBITDA. Now, in terms of risk, as a CFO, I don't necessarily look at that ratio. Our net debt is there to fund our working capital. Therefore, for me, I more look at what our net debt ratio is to our working capital. And at the moment, that's two times covered and therefore leaving me fairly happy in terms of a risk basis.
So, Andy, over to you to look at the outlook and conclusion.
Thanks, Chris. Yeah, it used to be a good time of year to do this roadshow because for us, as a business with 60% concentration on discounts, our kind of Christmas order book was already put to bed by now. Because we have a much larger online business than back then, which is even more concentrated in November, December, we do still have some decent amounts of trading ahead of us. And I would say we are, as we say in the summary and outlook, it is a difficult market. However, I'm pleased with how trading is progressing. I'm pleased with how the order book is progressing at this point. But we have our February pre-close, and we'll be able to give you all a bit more color around the key Christmas trading at that point.
But certainly, so far, so good, I would say, at this point, at the very end of our Q1. Okay, Rachel, that's all from us. I guess over to questions.
Great. Thanks for that, guys. Very comprehensive overview. We have a number of questions that have come in, so I will endeavor to get through those. Let's have a look. Okay. What scope is there to expand the product ranges which fall under the Beldray and Salter umbrellas?
So we've actually gone the other way over the last 24 months. Not excessively so, but we have certainly done some trimming. So for example, within Salter, we did launch a laundry range a few years ago. We've unwound that. And we've done that for very clear, our branding has to when people look at the Salter brands, for example, they have to be very clear as to what it stands for. And we're very clear. It's a scales and kitchen brand. So we need to be clear so our consumer can be clear. And the same with Beldray. It's a laundry and floor care brand. Now, within that, that's a lot of product. Everything from cookware, kitchen electricals, scales, the full range of laundry-type items, vacuum cleaners. It's already an extensive range that we can go out and offer to our retailers and to our consumers.
But it is more focused than it was a couple of years ago, and we intend to retain that focus.
Okay. Thank you. Excuse me. And leading on from that, does the focus on Salter and Beldray preclude significant brand acquisitions for now?
M&A has never been and you can review every annual report with every issue. M&A has never been a part of our strategy. We have, along the way, picked up some bits and pieces, mainly to provide us some optionality in terms of channel management. Obviously, the big one was the Salter acquisition we did in 2021, but that was really acquiring, to some extent, a piece of ourselves and securing that brand. No, we are focused on the brands we've got, which give us extensive product coverage and therefore substantial potential for growth.
Because we've got to remember that both of these brands, they are still challenger brands. Therefore, we believe that we can grow market share moderately in the U.K., but we've got huge amounts of room for growth with those two brands in Europe.
Okay. Thank you. Leading on from that, what explains the relatively small portion of international business done online?
The thing with online is your business has to be where the stock is. So when we're selling to, say, I don't know, a European retailer, they can take that product. Typically, we're selling on a forward-order basis. They're delivered into their DC or often handed over to them in the Far East via an FOB route. With online, you have to have stock in territory. So we are seeing rapid growth in the E.U. with regard to our online, but it's typically via the Amazon vendor channel.
Okay. Thank you. And what does the brand split look like internationally relative to the U.K.?
Our focus in Europe, just to take a step back so we can explain what our approach is to Europe. We are looking to; there's two strands to our approach. First of all, we look to market our brands, particularly Salter and Beldray, via the Amazon platform, utilizing skill sets that we have because we're adept at utilizing the marketing tools that are in that platform. So we've been operating on Amazon for a long time, and indeed, we've been operating on Amazon in Europe for a number of years now. So we look to; the logic is really simple. Amazon is Europe's biggest GM retailer. If you're well-known on Amazon, you're well-known. So it's as simple as that. In terms of capability, the second strand is to market our capability through what we're doing via the discount channel at the moment in the E.U.
We don't tend to discuss individual retailers because it's commercially not the right thing to do, but we are marketing our capability via what we're doing via that channel.
Okay. Thank you.
In terms of more the numbers in relation to that, you'd be saying that Petra is primarily into Europe at the moment. George Wilkinson as well, which has been used with the E.U. discounters, and Russell Hobbs, we kind of tend to use as a door opener an awful lot in Europe, so those three brands tend to be a higher percentage in Europe than they are in the U.K.
Okay. Thank you. And with regard to the discount sector, the U.K. discount sector seems to have moved down market in SDAs and housewares with less interest in retailing recognized brands or having beautiful products on every shelf. Do you see this as a function of the cost-of-living crisis, a temporary buying trend, or something more permanent?
It's really to do with one particular retailer. Now, I think when you follow U.K., you do have to sort of accept that from one year to the other, there will be some individual ups and downs relating to individual retailers, some of which is sort of diluted amongst other developments and some of which stands out sometimes depending on the account. In this case, there's one particular discounter that's had a sort of an own-label focus in recent years and away from brands. And that's the reason for that decline. We do see more opportunity with that retailer going forward.
Okay. And where do you get your consumer data for new product research from, given the retailer owns the consumer loyalty schemes, etc.?
So it was always a huge problem because, I mean, the traditional place to go for consumer data is always GfK, but it costs an absolute arm and a leg. And because we have such a diverse product offer, by the time you buy the data for every single category you're selling, you kind of end up spending all your profits on buying data. I'd say it was about seven, maybe eight years ago, we started using a new product called Vypr. That's V-Y-P-R, which is an app. So it has a huge panel of consumers, and basically, you can interact with those consumers via the Vypr app, and you can basically ask questions of those consumers.
So it's fantastic for sharing, for verifying everything from what would be the best choice of color for a particular product, say, because often when we're doing NPD, we've got color options through to what pricing, what might be the sweet spot on pricing, all the way through to whether there's an interest in the product at all. So yeah, we found Vypr to be a cost-effective and super useful tool to use throughout the product development process.
Thank you. And a question on the Beldray All-in-One Floor Cleaner. Can you outline how this product competes with Dyson, Vax, etc., on much lower advertising marketing budgets? Is it based on retailer-supported promotions or purely price?
Price is inevitably going to be a very large component because it unlocks markets that say, I mean, some of these other products that have just been referred to, brands you've just referred to, you're probably looking at only the top quintile in terms of income. Maybe top quartile can actually afford. So price is a key component of moving that item. It will be a key component of moving that item. But we do an awful lot more marketing now than we did a few years ago. We basically didn't have a marketing department four years ago, and now we do under Tracy's management. But everything we do has got to be super low cost, included in what we spend on marketing. We're never going to take an advert in the break in Coronation Street or something like that.
So we do a lot of what I term kind of guerrilla marketing. So lots of use of social media advertising, influencers, particularly micro-influencers. Yeah. And actually, good old-fashioned PR works pretty well. Journalists are proper last-minute Charlies when it comes to deadlines. And the brands that can get the samples to them really, really quickly often sort of engender some loyalty. So if you follow our LinkedIn, our Ultimate Products LinkedIn, you'll see and maybe some of the social media channels on Beldray and Salter, you'll see a lot of the activity that we get up to. I mean, for example, we hosted a baking day down in London with about a dozen journalists.
So, we do lots of things, but it's not going to be what Dyson and Shark do, which is we're not going to be having David Beckham as a brand ambassador at these price points. But we can do an awful lot of marketing that's great value for money.
Great. Thank you. What are the early signs of positive impact from the promotion of the five senior executives into the C-suite?
We do need to try changing our sales function. Of course, Duncan's at the sort of tip of the spear on that. He's got his sleeves rolled up and is very busy with that. He's doing so with the full support of the rest of the operating boards. All of us, including myself and Chris, are doing our bit. That's great. I think I mentioned before there's two aspects: to split the CPO and CCO role, but also to give the correct recognition and, I suppose, status really to our senior executives, both externally and internally. I've certainly seen the benefits of that around the business and also outside the business as well.
Great. Thank you. And Chris, we've got a number of financial questions. I know you touched on it within the presentation with regard to freight costs and that they had stabilized. Do you have any view on how those freight costs are looking going into 2026?
I mean, they're looking to be in a normalised range at the moment as they were sort of pre-crisis, so about $2,000, that sort of level. What I would say is that we are in a more volatile environment now from a geopolitical basis, which means that if there are any sort of supply or demand peaks or troughs, we're seeing the prices to be much more volatile. So if the Red Sea reopens tomorrow, we'd probably see a collapse as a huge amount more supply came on in terms of shipping. So at the moment, it is benign, but there is volatility there.
Okay. Thank you. And you mentioned circa 600 new product launches this year. What is the R&D budget supporting this? It appears to be well under 1% of sales, which is not typical for a business new product development on a sustainable basis.
We've sustained that over the last sort of 25 years. I mean, it's a fair point. I mean, our investments in NPD is people predominantly. So if you were to go visit our site at Oldham and go to the fourth floor where all our sort of office team is based, and you were to hit a pause button and go around and ask what people are working on, you'd probably find 60% of them are working on something linked to new product development. It could be the buying team actually looking at a sample. It could be the design team creating the packaging. It could be the online team creating the new listings. It could be the QA team making sure that that product is compliant. That's where the investments in our NPD comes from. It's people.
Thank you. Do you have estimates for the cash implementation cost, timescales, and incremental annual overheads for the replacement ERP system?
Overall cost is about GBP 2 million, so spread over the next three years. So obviously, GBP 600,000 taken this year. It'll be a little bit more in FY 2026 and then come back down in FY 2027. Overall cost will probably be a couple of 100,000 more than we are spending at the moment. But as we've sort of seen with the PIM and everything else that we are doing, I would be fully expecting productivity gains to be offsetting those extra costs.
Okay. Thank you and how much weight should investors give to the FY 2026 forecasted sales and EBITDA numbers? What is your order visibility like at this point in the year?
We're standing by the guidance that is currently out there for FY 2026. Obviously, they are disappointing numbers, but we expect that the changes that we are making in relation to the sales function will start bearing fruit not this year, but in FY 2027. In terms of order book at the moment, so at this time of the year, the order book's probably about 60% or 70% complete. So we do have quite good visibility, but there are still 10 months of the year well, 9 months of the year if we kind of exclude October still to go. And therefore, there's plenty of in-month trading to do. 10 years ago, this business was almost much simpler because all of its business was forward orders. As we have gained more respect of an online business, for instance, that is more short-term in month.
And especially for the online, November, December will be key for seeing how that trading goes. So although I've got quite good visibility, next couple of months are very important.
Understandable. Thank you. And excuse me, we've got a number of questions around buybacks. So first off, is the current cash debt trajectory likely to trigger buybacks in FY 2026? And on the back of that, some shareholders are disappointed to see their dividend reduced. Would you consider reducing the share buybacks and maintaining the dividend instead?
So we are following our capital allocation policy at the moment. And with anything like this, no capital allocation policy is absolutely perfect at all. However, we do have a stated capital allocation policy, and I think it is best to have that in place and continue to run to it rather than chopping and changing on it. So just to be clear, that is targeting net debt to EBITDA at 1x and then paying out a 50% dividend of post-tax profits. And then if we are below 1x net debt, then we would be sort of doing share buybacks. So we are going to continue to work in line with that policy. At the moment, we are above 1x , so we have paused on the share buyback.
Thank you. And Chris, hopefully, you can answer this one quite quickly. Could you run through the EBT accounting and how this works? Is it funded by a loan from the company? Where does it appear on the balance sheet? And how does this relate to the EBT reserve?
Oh my word, that is not a quick question. We make a loan to the EBT, but it's not expected that that loan will be paid back. But because it ends up sort of being inter-company, it won't show in the consolidated accounts because you end up consolidating your EBT into your numbers. Therefore, in the plc accounts, you will end up with the balances being showing because they are an individual company. But when it kind of comes to the consolidated basis, you do have that really in there. If that sort of a question holder wants to sort of reach out to me, I can probably go into that into a lot more detail at another point in time.
I'm just conscious of time, and we've had a few more product questions come through. Maybe I can move back to you, Andrew, just to finish off with a few questions. How are you using AI? Is it led by management or part of IT mandate? And can you provide examples of how it has helped so far and what you might expect in the future?
A bit like the question on the EBT, I could spend the rest of the day on that one. We use an AI in lots and lots of different ways. Our process for originating opportunities for use of whether it be AI or RPA or other forms of automation is very much bottom-up. That is based upon our Graduate Development Scheme because we have a bunch of people who are really happy to automate elements of their job away, confidence that we will move them onto higher value tasks, which is a culture which is not typical, I think, in businesses generally. Automating great parts of your role can be a source of huge anxiety in different cultures. We have a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of excitement, and a lot of identification of ideas.
These are formulated into tickets which are submitted to our Process Development Department, which is led by our Process Development Director, Tony Pole. And Tony and I joined the business within a few months of each other back in 2005. The Process Development Department, in turn, is made up of about 10 super talented, outrageously young people who often aren't from a computer science background. In fact, I think only one of the 10 are. We often find what happens is we bring people into the business more generally into different departments. And if we spot that they've got an aptitude for Process Development, then maybe sort of a year or 18 months in, we'll move them into the Process Development team. But it's not often computer scientists. And it's often we're agnostic, by the way. I don't care if you've done English.
If you're good at process developments, you'll be given a crack. But it often tends to be people from maybe a science or an engineering background. I could spend all day giving you case studies. I'm just going to give you one. Translations. So translations, this is always going to be one of the areas where AI was going to be very effective. But the problem with AI is it can misfire. And so relying on it completely can be dangerous. So I often refer to AI as an augmentation process, not an automation process. So if we have a user, an AI can take 80% of the burden, but you still need that human being for the last 20%. Let's say with customer services, we can get AI does our draft emails, but a human being has to review them.
And that can speed things up considerably because starting with a blank piece of paper can be very difficult, whereas editing something that AI has written is much more effective, but translations, we're using AI for our instruction manual translations, but the problem is it does misfire, so I said to our guys, "Well, what are we going to do about that?", and they said, "We're going to verify the translations which AI produces", so I said, "Well, how are you going to verify them?" "We're going to use AI", and I was going to, "Isn't that like marking your own homework?", and they explained why it wasn't, which I have to say I didn't fully understand, and there's some really incredible stuff going on, and I don't worry about boasting about it because it's not a technology play. It's really the tools that we use are readily available.
I mean, ChatGPT is on most people's iPhones these days. It's how you use it. I'm going to give you one more example. Sorry, I know because I can't help myself. We introduced a Product Information Management system recently, and we had to get all your digital assets onto that platform in high-res format. And we asked the providers to tell us what people normally do. So normally people start with day zero. So they don't bother. They just start with their existing range, and then from there, everything goes. But I said, "Well, that means I'm going to lose 20 years' worth of digital assets.
That's just, I can't stomach that." So one of our smart guys in Process Development decided to because the problem you've got is your digital assets are being spread all over your servers, different file names, different places. And so we used a combination of RPA and digital facial recognition technology. Basically, facial recognition technology that the police use to crawl our servers to identify the digital assets that we needed and then to upload them into the PIM. And 85% of our digital assets were automatically uploaded into the PIM. I mean, it just completely blew my mind. The kind of lateral thinking required to deploy police facial recognition technology in conjunction with RPA to solve that problem is just fantastic.
Great. Well, excuse me. Thank you for those examples. I'm just conscious of time and that you guys have got other calls to jump onto. So maybe I've got two more questions, and hopefully, these ones are quick. With all the new product development, is any of it patentable?
Typically, no. I mentioned we are fast seconds. So most of our products use open technology. Ironically, the Trio Steam that you saw on one of the slides is one that we are in the process of patenting in conjunction with our manufacturer. But typically, no. It's a rare exception that we have that kind of opportunity.
Okay. And I'm going to move on to the final question. And apologies, there are lots of questions that we haven't been able to get through in the time. But can you give us some rationale around the potential move to AIM? Do you expect your annual listing cost to decrease? And if so, by how much?
So I think it's that AIM is the more natural market for us at the market cap size that we are. So if we were listing today, you certainly wouldn't be kind of going to Main Market as a GBP 50 million market capitalization. Certainly, it's not really a cost move. So GBP 20,000-GBP 30,000, which is not really very much in terms of cost saving. But at the edges, probably sort of save in terms of some of the complexity, some of the admin side in relation to some of the corporate governance. So it's really about simplifying and being on the correct market for the size of business that we are.
Right. Well, thank you very much. I'm going to conclude it there. Just want to say thank you for everyone who joined the webinar, and thanks to Chris and Andrew for your time today. We will send around a short feedback document if you could complete that. I know that management always value your views, and just to say, we look forward to hearing from you again in spring 2026.
Great. Thanks, everyone. Thank you.
Bye now.
Bye.