Good morning, everyone. Thanks to those joining online and to those of you in the room today. We are going to be running through the Victorian Plumbing Group's full-year results presentation. Mark and Dan will take everyone through the slides, and then we will open up for Q&A at the end. This is going to be recorded today, so Mark, you will hear a voice saying just that, and after that, please do go ahead.
Good morning. Welcome to Victorian Plumbing's full-year results for 2024. Myself and Dan are presenting to you today. We'll go through quickly with an overview of 2024 and then on to the financials, which Dan will cover. So just as a quick summary, we'll go into more detail on each of these points as we go through the presentation. WMS now complete, which is obviously a major part of what we had to do through the story from when we listed till now. It's been a part of our plan, and I'm happy to say that we have now completed that transition. Our namesake and competitor for the last 23 years, Victoria Plum, was acquired and closed, another major event in our story. We're now clear to invest in marketing for further growth. Operationally, we've got revenue outperforming the wider RMI market, which is really good.
Pleased to say that our trade growth is moving in the direction we want it to, even with the restrictions we've had, obviously from the warehouse perspective historically. And the same with our adjacent categories, tiles, decor, and lighting. So all positive in that regard. Dan, do you want to take on some financials?
Yeah, good morning to everyone in the room and to those joining virtually. So Mark, just giving you the key highlights, and more of which come later. Before that, just a quick run-through. FY24 results focusing on like-for-like. As, following the closure of Vic Plum, this will be the basis for the comparison numbers in FY25, and it does provide a more balanced and fair assessment of performance. Headline level, and against a volatile macroeconomic backdrop, and putting aside the significant strategic progress that sets us up for success for the future, we've grown order volume for the third year in a row, improved profitability and free cash, and increased shareholder returns. So a good set of results overall. Before we dig in, let's step back and appraise FY24 reported group numbers, which include four and a half months of trade for Victoria Plumb.
Another record year then for revenue, which finished just shy of GBP 300 million, or up 4% on order volume exceeding 1 million for the first time. As we've reported throughout the financial year, we saw a strong improvement in gross profit to just shy of GBP 150 million, which represents growth of 10% driven by year-on-year mix change to own brand to improve gross margin by 3 percentage points to 50%. Adjusted EBITDA increased by 14% to GBP 27.2 million, which is in line with market expectation and reflects a 9% EBITDA margin up 1 percentage point. Finally, reported adjusted EPS grew in line with profit to land at GBP 0.053 or 13%.
And this has facilitated the proposed final dividend of GBP 0.0109 to land a full year dividend of GBP 0.0167, which is up 15% with EPS covering the dividend by 3.3 times, down from 3.4 times last year and in line with our progressive policy. It's worth pausing here to highlight that adjusted EBITDA includes GBP 2.2 million losses incurred in the four and a half months from Victoria Plumb. If we exclude this and so operate on a like-for-like basis, we can see the underlying adjusted EBITDA was GBP 29.4 million. I also want to draw out the gross profit differential between Victorian Plumbing and Victoria Plumb at 50% and 41%.
Victoria Plumb's policy under previous ownership of heavy discounting and unsustainably low pricing drives, together with a suboptimal and oversized fixed underlying cost base, Adjusted EBITDA losses at GBP 2.2 million, which post-closure and central spiral risk will drop through profitably under the Victorian Plumbing financial model, so order growth improved slightly in H2 versus H1 to finish a growth of +3% for the year on a like-for-like basis. We continue to take market share gain on the competition, which I've drawn on the graph to the right-hand side of the slide. This compares our like-for-like revenue performance to the Barclays credit card data on household RMI spend, which was down between 7% and 2% during the year. Of course, let's remember also that when Victoria Plumb that did, we have grown reported orders by 10% to over 1 million in the year.
Trade performance was strong with growth of 8%, 7% in H1, and 9% in H2. It makes up the consumer decline of 4%, which highlights the importance of our strategy to continually refine our proposition for trade, which now equates to 23% of our business. Own brand revenue now represents nearly four-fifths of sales, resulting in a well-publicized reduction in AOV, though this dynamic significantly improves gross profit as margins sit 20 percentage points higher for our own brand versus the third-party brand. It's this natural hedge, together with the fierce competitiveness driven by Mark, that underpins the investment proposition in Victorian Plumbing and gives us as management the confidence that no matter the weather, we always find a way to prevail and win and hit numbers.
The next slide sets out our expansion category progression with continued strong year-on-year growth in tiles and decor, with FY24 delivering 23% growth to GBP 12.4 million, and this, as Mark said, is despite the space constraints, which until the turn of the new year, we have enjoyed for some time. CAGR of plus 28% over the five-year period since 2020 illustrates both the appetite of the consumers to buy these products online and the future growth opportunity this expansion category represents. With an estimated GBP 1.5 billion TAM, a similar size to bathroom, but with much lower online penetration, and now the space to grow, we are really excited about this opportunity ahead.
You can see from the two graphs on the right-hand side of the product mix slide that both own brand and third-party brand margins have improved as a function of tailwinds in FX and shipping, but also an increase in improved purchasing arrangements and value creation in the supply chain. This bodes well as we monitor the recent fluctuation in both FX and shipping and demonstrates the importance as number one in the market of working with our suppliers during difficult trading environments. Gross profit on a like-for-like basis has increased by 5% to GBP 142 million, and gross margin has improved by 3 percentage points to 50%, returning to and in fact exceeding COVID margin levels, which is industry-leading.
For FY25 and caveating that predicting the U.K. consumer in this current market is difficult, I'm assuming no change to the consumer backdrop, so I expect gross margin to remain close to these levels. That said, when the consumer recovery returns, we'll likely see higher growth in revenue offset by lower margin for the consumer trade up. The message here is that we can't have it both ways, as I've always said. Softer growth equals higher gross margin, and the opposite would also be true. Three key points to draw your attention to when thinking about marketing. Firstly, online marketing spend, both as a proportion of revenue and in actual returns, reduced in the year. Secondly, this benefit has been reinvested into what we call brand marketing, so TV, radio, outdoor, etc.
us in a much better place than I am to extol the virtues of short lead times, but in essence, as the slide states, it paves the way for future growth. Thirdly, the reinvested brand spend is second-half weighted and reflects media creative and production spend that is set to benefit us in FY25. This acceleration of brand spend, financed in part by marketing efficiencies, is much easier to justify from an ROI perspective following the removal of Victoria Plumb from the market. Now, when we spend on TV, for instance, we don't also increase our competitor sales. A busy slide, but to focus on people costs and property costs, so let's take each in turn.
As is well documented, both inflationary national living wage hikes from successive governments continues, and the impact is clear and continues to drive the cost of hiring, as well as the compression impact and employment costs throughout the organization. As you're all aware, this theme has continued under Labour, albeit with the added burden of extra social security taxes. We've also experienced an increase in FTEs in the years we moved away from agency hires under supplier contracts to permanent hires that we can better invest in to drive efficiency. Of course, and positively, we are protected by two factors that don't require us to guide to a reduction in profit or increased prices, albeit the options there are available to us. The first is productivity improvement will follow as we embed our new ways of working into our warehouse. And number two, our model is people-light.
Whilst absolute costs increase relative to other bricks and mortar retailers, we are positioned better to capture more market share gain through our less expensive model. I think that's really important as an e-com retailer. Profit costs more pleasingly reduced as we exited expensive short-let property as planned in the second half of 2024. And we're pleased overall to have held underlying cost increases to just 1% in the year. So going back to group numbers now, the first chart to the left clearly shows a continuing improvement in EBITDA margin over the past three years, now at 9% revenue. The chart to the right highlights the benefit of cost of sales from the switch to own brand, offset in part by a strategic choice to invest in brand marketing.
Lastly then, and to wrap up the financials, free cash flow increased by 16% to GBP 18.6 million at robust conversion levels in line with the prior year. I just wanted to say at this stage, it's a reminder also that reverence for cash in stock remains at the heart of this group. It makes my life much easier that it does, and it's a testament to the disciplined way that the business operates. We've got a small but very dedicated and entrepreneurial management team. It holds deep proprietary knowledge in all roles and truly blessed in that dynamic. It also wouldn't be right for a CFO to exclude the balance sheet, so it is included in the appendix for those that want the detail. Suffice to say, it's as strong as ever, and it's ready for what's to come next.
Now over to Mark to take us through Victorian Plumbing and the warehouse program.
Thank you, Dan. A little bit of report on the financials. Okay, so an update on the Victoria Plumb acquisition. I think most importantly, having competed with them for most of my working life, it was very pleasing to finally get that done. Acquired, closed, and the confusion has gone. So we haven't been in this position for most of my trading time with Victorian Plumbing. So yeah, it's quite exciting actually what that means going forward. Dan mentioned it briefly in his financials there that the confusion gone now, our marketing spend becomes far more efficient and beneficial. So yeah, it's early days, but yeah, it's quite a strange position to be in actually. So we're really looking forward to that. With regards to the closure of Victoria Plumb, I mean, we always knew the business was run very poorly. Their discounting and pricing was not sustainable.
We weren't surprised when we did acquire to find that the fixed-based underlying costs were just disproportionately large compared to its customer base. The working from home culture was not sustainable, very inefficient. There was a lease for the warehouse which expired in December 2024. All of these things combined, it confirmed our suspicions that it was always the case that it wouldn't be savable and it was best to close. As I said, there's no longer any confusion. We can now focus on investment in our brand going forward, which I think, again, is going to be really interesting. There's less, I guess, focus on dealing with another competitor, which frees us up to focus on other areas, maybe includes the expansion categories that we've got and other competitors out there in those areas. The warehouse. Again, another major event in our history.
The fact that both Victoria Plumb closed around the new warehouse landed within the same period was not planned. It's just the way it worked, but it was quite extraordinary for us to take on two of the biggest ever tasks that we've had in our history at the same time. So a testament to the team, both myself, Dan's team along the financial side has been tested. And even from the management side of things, I've worked in the warehouse for several months going back to basics, basically, whether that's building, racking, putting stock away, fixing forklift trucks, just whatever was needed in order to make it work. So the transition was, it was surprisingly difficult, probably one of the most difficult things I've done for a long time in this business. So it's really nice to be in a position where we've successfully delivered this warehouse.
There's a picture there on one of the slides that gives you an idea of the scale of this building. It is extraordinary. Every time I walk into it, even now, I still can't get over the vastness of it and the fact that we're utilizing the building. So again, it's a really exciting position to be in for us. We haven't been in this position for as long as, again, I've traded. We've always had constraints when it comes to space. So to be in a position where we don't any longer have that is fantastic. And then there's the efficiencies that Dan has mentioned there in the financials. Another really interesting position for us going forward, the embracement of technology in this wonderful space with automated trucks, robots that scan pallets for us and check locations.
There's so many wonderful things that we've invested in, and we should see a return for all that investment in the months and years to come. There's a few ESG elements within this warehouse. We've taken the opportunity to embrace some solar and then obviously the electric self-guided trucks, another area that covers that. Moving on to the strategy, strategic focus. Not changed in all the time that we've been doing these reports. So the core bathroom, we're still taking market share, still focusing on being the number one U.K. bathroom retailer. So that continues as always. The expansion categories, we've made progress despite some of the challenges that we've had with the warehouse space. But obviously, we're free now to keep pushing these forward, continue expanding the ranges and seeing where we can get to those. Again, another really exciting position to be in. Trade, trade.
We've started to cover marketing specifically to help and encourage the trade business, and we made some good progress. Some of the interesting things that we did were some sponsoring the Bolton Wanderers Football Club. And then another new addition, which we really enjoyed, was the snooker and the UK Championship for 2024. We were the title sponsor for that, and you'll see a continuation of that approach when it comes to our marketing in months and years to come. Resilience of our operating model. One-stop solution for consumers. It's a tried and proven process, and it works, and it continues to do so. 36,000 products, over 150 brands. So again, no change there. Really strong balance sheet and an unrivaled approach to marketing, which has always been one of our plus points, and that continues.
Warehouse transformation, as I've said, that new distribution center puts us on a path to exciting times. Brand strategy. You'll see that we've improved with our brand awareness, 64% from 16% in 2023. But I think there's more to come from that. I mean, this information is relatively old. Going forward with Victoria Plumb now no longer in existence, you can see on the graph there that has been provided the position of both the two brands. When they're now combined effectively, it'll be interesting to see where that moves. I think we'll find ourselves further up that table and very close to being that household name that we've always had the ambitions to be. The growth in brand awareness, as you can see on the graphs, whereas the bricks and mortar have got declines, we've got improvements consistently. So it's all highlighting that this is the right strategy.
Our marketing strategy has always been very, very clear. We never divest from it. We push and find new ways to take the brand further. We've got a few pictures there that sort of highlights some of the things that we've done, again, with the football sponsorship. We've got Dan there, very smartly dressed in his velvet jacket at the snooker, which we found hilarious and complimentary, so really, really good. This is the way we are. We say that we're going to be strong in the marketing area. We're going to try new things. We're going to take it forward, and we continuously do. We're always delivering what we say we're going to deliver, so again, super, super excited. We've never been in a position where the spend is going to be entirely to our benefit.
So if you think about what we've done historically, also being aware that it was being diluted with a similarly named competitor, it's now making spending what I still feel like my money on marketing more encouraging. So yeah, I'm really, really excited about that. So just briefly, I mean, Dan has mentioned supply chain and customer offerings. I won't repeat that, but Trustpilot, just a little plus there that we've again improved our rating with Trustpilot through the 2024 year. We're still working on improvements in customer services, and they've been delivered in these numbers, which is nice to see. We continue to focus on making sure that we're delivering a good service to the customer. Technology, you'll know this is quite an important and passionate area for me. Development continues. We've got a large development team. We continuously invest in that team.
We've always taken it forward to bring more people on board so we can do more work. We have a lot of developments ongoing simultaneously. We keep adding more. We keep adapting as a business as we find new technology and new ways of working. The development of an in-house AI model to improve the speed and accuracy of customer search. That's a constant development. It never stops, but it's launched and it's proven to be successful already. We've got digital trade credit, which we've introduced, which is rolling out through 2025. Free tile samples with an express checkout functionality to make that process seamless and really simple for a customer. Again, that's rolling out through 2025. You'll know from previous updates with regards to our app. The app is now proven to be successful.
2% of revenue going through the app with the full launch that was in summer 2024. Lots more to come on that still, but a good start regardless. Operational effectiveness, mentioned briefly before with the warehouse. We've got lots of technology in the warehouse. We continue to develop our own warehouse management system and that almost develops on a daily basis as we continuously improve. We find ways to improve efficiency in the way that goods are picked, packed, checked, put away. So again, another really, really exciting area. It's a day-to-day running of the business. I find it absolutely fascinating and almost obsessive that we can find small tweaks. And it really genuinely is on a daily basis that we make changes to that to improve what we do. That was too fast, but do you want to move on to the social, environmental, and governance stuff?
Yeah. So, lots of progress, and some of which I've circled out for you to focus on today, so from an environmental perspective, fitted around a third of the roof with solar. Our new fleet vehicle is entirely electric, and we're going to use 2025 to determine the energy needs in our new home, and then we can set out a detailed plan for 2026 to make sure we're meeting our stakeholder requirements, so big acceleration this year. From a D&I perspective, increased proportion of women in leadership roles and reduced our mean hourly gender pay gap, and lastly, we do continue to invest in less sexy infrastructure. Particular progress made this year to better our new finance system. It's really important to ensure we've got the right level of monitoring and oversight control alongside the ambition, and the two kind of feed into each other.
So as we've seen in our announcement this morning, from a trading and outlook perspective, overall Q1 revenue was up 3% in 2024 against its upcoming parity. Trading in October and November was soft, impacted by a cautious approach to marketing as we started bedding our new warehouse infrastructure without disrupting customer experience and, of course, ongoing U.K. consumer uncertainty. As the transition to our new warehouse infrastructure neared completion, we reverted to our usual marketing approach and pleasingly recorded high single-digit growth in December. Gross profit margin improvement continues as the benefit of the closure of Victoria Plumb and our new warehouse infrastructure starts to come through, albeit some of this benefit will be eroded by the inflationary increases in national living wage and employee national insurance costs.
Through 2025, we will prioritize our expansion category growth plans, trade, and more confidently spend on efficient marketing to drive more volume. We remain confident in delivering profit in line with four-year market expectations. Thank you, Dan. I hope that's been helpful and informative. Thank you for listening. Look forward to updating further in the future.
Thanks, Mark. Thanks, Dan. So yes, as I explained at the outset, we will now hand over to any questions in the room. If those online can either raise a virtual hand or feel free to drop questions into the Q&A tab. We do have a hard stop for the guys just before 11:00 A.M. So Dan, I'll hand back to you to take cues in the room.
Thanks, guys. Thanks. Brilliant. Somebody else needs to know as well. I'll leave it to you. I mean, I play down marketing and really interested in how you think about, I guess, driving consideration for offline customers online. Is this a brand issue in terms of the brand marketing you're doing? Is it more a range or price? Because obviously, you clearly have online and have always had that. I think the opportunity to go into a better market. How do you think about that from a sort of marketing point of view?
I think it's just a case of being there. So you're at the front of mind when a consumer does make a decision to switch from offline to online. So I always go about brand recognition. So when someone decides to search for one of our products online, as we refer to maybe going out to one of the usual places at high street stuff, they recognize the brand instantly and trust it. And that's the first part of marketing. It's one of the basics, I guess. And that's why we continue just to, and now we're taking our investment further on brand is just to keep going with that. It's never done. That's the thing about marketing is that you've got to refresh people's memory. You've got to find, put yourself in front of potential new customers continuously. So taking the brand in new directions is very helpful.
I think the fact, as we mentioned previously, going to these new categories and now having dedicated marketing on those categories, which, again, is another exciting step for us, which is investing in it. And again, as I always say, we're going to do something. We've got to do it. So we've got TV adverts that have been filmed that are sold for those categories. We've been airing actually already. So we've got tile, dedicated tile and flooring. We have one for radiators. So there's lots more to come. We've got the sports sponsorship, which we've mentioned. So the brand's been taken further into other areas now, which is helpful. Our ambition to be a household name. I'm looking forward to the next surveys that are done, which are more up to date with the change in the landscape now with Victoria Plumb not being there.
So yeah, just more of the same. I mean, we can't force people to switch from offline to online, but their options are decreasing and they always have been. I think with the cost pressures that the Labour government have put in place, those previous governments are going to put further pressure on the high street and put us in a position to, again, to soak up more of that. I mean, really now we are the only choice. We've just got to now take those other categories to be, again, the only choice, the only logical choice. And that's going to get done through. So I know we've lifted up beyond your question here a little bit. Yeah, the product ranges have got to continue to be developed. And we've got to lead the way in these new categories. Tiles is a really big exciting area for us.
We've done a lot of work already historically. So the foundations have been well laid. We've done a lot of work in the background from an operational perspective to really support that growth. So there's no real excuse for us not to be getting on with it now. Historically, we've had space constraints. That's gone now. The brand confusion's gone. So the pressure is on really to get on with what we can and should be able to do.
I'm going to ask a follow-up on that. I mean, so what are you in terms of hard numbers now? Obviously, you've got as much space, right? So what are you seeing to escalate the things like sort of tiles on the floor? How will that grow this year?
It's going to grow. To what levels? I can't really say what we've been able to grow. We know what the successful market is. It's GBP 1.5 billion as an overall market. We know what some of our competitors are doing. It's the same approach that we've done historically, where we see competitors and we start focusing on those competitors to take market share and hopefully, again, embrace anyone switching from that offline bricks and mortar to the online. We've got to try and bring people over. The whole category is fairly well under accommodated for, if you like, online, so it was joining this market and pushing and having dedicated adverts. That's the first, really, so we're hopefully going to change the way it works, and yeah, we've got some good numbers. The growth's already there without us really making the effort.
It's unbelievable numbers, but that's the situation. But I think we'll see a big difference going forward.
I think there'll be a little bit of SKU development, but there's a good range there already, and the key with tiles and floors is how many in stock. Because it doesn't take much for a couple of orders to deplete your stock. If you think about the nature of the product, people are buying pallets of it. Once a couple of pallets have been sold and you've not got the stock in, you can't list it on the website, so I feel like range is there. Stock's there now. The warehouse infrastructure is ready to sell, so it's all in place. It's just to come through.
On prices, what did you do historically? You said you priced in it deliberately out of whack because you didn't want to drive demand.
I don't like reducing prices at any point. So again, it's in our back pocket. If that's what we need to drive more growth, then we've got that available to us. I'm not going to lead with that unless I feel like it's important to do so. Let's see if our product offering and our brand awareness is enough to take us forward and maintain some of the wonderful profitability that you've seen because we don't want to go backwards with profitability. But we have got that as an option to drive market share gains if we feel it's logical to do so. We did go through a period in the bathroom category for many, many years competing with people like Victoria Plumb where price was an important part of the strategy to hurt competitors, to damage the business ultimately so we could take all of their market share.
Maybe that will fall into part of our strategy. Just depends how the competitors behave as we start to come through now and we push harder on the marketing.
Thank you. Can I just ask a quick follow-up on that, please? I mean, are you surprised at how much volume you've been able to do given you've not chased price at all in those categories?
Yeah, but again, it feels relatively easy because we haven't really tried. But I think that's just testament to that offering as we have as a brand. I mentioned it. We know we are a reliable and trusted source of product. And I think there's no getting in front of waves. In fact, we served a lot of the consumers in the U.K. Generally, wherever I go and I mention the name, people are aware of it or they purchase from it. It was over a million orders in 2024. So historically, there's a lot of consumers in that space, home improvement that have already shopped with us. So looking for other product categories. And now with the marketing push, we are going to feature for those.
There's going to be a period of education that we go through aided by our new marketing pushes offline, the TV things, which will be helpful. It's just really exciting, I guess. We're the easy part of it. I say this part is the easy part. When you get market share, it's then a lot more difficult, isn't it, to then keep driving it forward. But this path now should be relatively easy. The stock is the really important part of that because we don't really know what our potential is even at this moment in time because we've been so constrained by the space. And as Dan said, we bring in what appears visually to look like a lot of stock on a particular range of tiles. And it can be gone in a day.
And it's not going to.
It's without stock. We never really find out the sales patterns for certain product lines. Some of them are coming from China. Some of the trade tiles that we have, they're from China. We really do need to hold large amounts of stock. We've repurposed one of our existing warehouses to be dedicated to tiles, which gives us scope to really take that category forward. There's no. I can't use that as a reason for growing in the past. We've got space. We are going to have the stock. We're going through that process as we speak.
I think when we came to see you, I think you were sitting on, I'm guessing, three to five million of stock in the category. What would be a more comfortable level for you if you're going to pursue the opportunity?
Well, obviously, with a strong balance sheet, we've got flex. We can expand working cap to take the sales. No indebtedness in the group, and we will. Mark Brogan, he was fantastic at the purchasing side and the forecasting. And touch wood, he kind of tends to get it right in terms of making sure there's enough to supply the sales but not drain the cash. But actually, the expansion can be done. So we might see a little bit of outflow as we build it up, trying to get rid of problems out from my perspective. As long as the revenue keeps going forward, as a percentage of sales, it will all make sense as it has done historically with the other categories.
Yeah. I had a few more follow-up questions on the new distribution center. Obviously, it sounds great. Can I say about the productivity improvement and the leverage? Because obviously, you're not running a full capacity space. As you add volume, obviously, if it was all labor, you really get no leverage because you'd have to employ that. You've got seven automated vehicles. So how much sort of marginal costs going into expand are you expecting to see quite a lot of productivity improvements come through?
I mean, we were talking about this. We were expecting to because given numbers on it. I'll leave Dan to say what he needs to say on it. But it's very difficult to tell where this efficiency will go. It's very clear visually that we are working in a very different way to we've ever worked before. I mean, from day one of being in that warehouse, the staff were shocked and are still shocked at how easy it is to pick. So if you've seen our previous operations and how extraordinarily difficult it was, stuck all down the aisles, stuck in the wrong place, and they managed to do the job and do the job very extremely well. Now everything's in the right place. There's nothing in the way. We've got the best equipment. We've got guys who've been pulling pallet trucks around for years and years and years.
Now we've got millions of these electric things that are driving around. The speed in which we can pick is extraordinary. We can have. There's people that consolidate pallets and there's people that pick. And we only have to have a handful of pickers. We can have 20 or 30 consolidators, as we call them. And the stock just arriving constantly. It's extraordinary. And then we've got, obviously, vehicles. One particular piece of machinery, which has impressed me considerably, which has saved us about six members of staff, is a robot. What do we call it? Dex. Yeah, Dextery. Dextery. And it scans the. It elevates to 15 meters and has cameras and scans every shelf and every pallet. And then it sends that instantly back to a computer we've been purchasing. And if there's any pallets in the wrong place, it highlights it straight away with a picture and it's corrected.
It does nothing new. We just put it in the location. Its first outing, where it went out for three hours, it probably saved us several weeks' work. So there's lots of things like this that have come into play. The automated trucks put the stock, put the goods in, are live, but not fully live at this moment in time. But we're talking days, maybe even hours. We actually can say, "Yeah, it's done." So yeah, there's lots of areas.
Yeah. We've essentially gone from kind of landmark into zone or particular analogy. And that did require, in fairness, that did require a degree of learning, like any change in tactics. That's a part of that two months and has just been in the end. But it does work now. And like Mark said, the pick rates are phenomenal. The consolidation's really picked up behind it. And we're pretty confident we can do a lot more now, a lot more growth now. The point is we're looking for a number. Everybody is. And I'm not giving one. And that's classic me. But Mark's right. It's hard to predict. The thing that the different—if we grow, the shape of the growth and where it comes from will determine it. You've got four shifts you can put on, three are currently on. You've got step change if you put another shift on.
You reduce the numbers in the shift. You've got all the dynamics of which roll goes where. It's still being worked through, in all honesty. I might have been a bit more bullish if we hadn't had the news that we had on the national living wage and national insurance, but I've just netted the two off for now. I'll know more as we go through the year, and we'll see it come through. I'm, at the minute, saying it nets off. Hopefully, there's a bit of upside there. But really, I'd prefer to grow, and actually, once that cost base goes up, but not proportionately as much as the revenue we've got. We've still got that sweet spot of the shift on, and that's the target, isn't it?
Yeah. We're not here to just keep to be flat, really, to keep going forward, and revenue is an area that we've got to work on now, so it's important what Dan said there is that the efficiency gains will be there, but they won't be so visible because of, hopefully, there's lots and lots of growth and where we need more people and more times of the year. That's the interesting, but just something that the questions may lead to, but I'll just cover it anyway. The warehouse management system that we developed, and I've always said this about developing these things in-house, we are changing it daily to the way that they consolidate the pallets, the way that they pick, the order in which they pick, and where the products arrive, where they could actually land on the floor, as in the software is doing everything.
It's auto assigning the type of product, where the picking areas are based on location, and we just keep improving it every single day. I mean, literally every day. I'm not lying when I say that. It's extraordinary, so that's been really, really nice, and it's testament to what I believe it will deliver when I say that having your own piece of software where it can be dedicated to your business and your product and your space, because what we reinstated, what I've always said, you go from one warehouse to another. Just the layout of pillars or the gapping and the racking, it changes everything from a software perspective, the way software needs to work.
Is that software actually AI and learning, or have you actually got people there who are kind of going, "Actually, we can consistently tweak it?
Yes. It's that on that basis. Yeah. The AI element to it is more on the side of it or on the product. We have what's called staging areas. There's nine staging areas now. These staging areas are being utilized. The AI element is where product location is based on staging area and also what teams are then signed in for those areas. There's many angles and elements to it, but it's the team that are obsessed with it. They just won't leave it alone. As they deal with it, they think of something else. They'll think, "We can try this." So we just introduced yesterday something called auto assigning, where it's auto assigning to certain people based on the KPIs. It's reasonably ticking.
Richard? Yeah. You've been in the warehouse. Victoria Plumb's gone. You've got lots of things to think about. So what are you prioritizing? Core business, tiles, trade? I suspect you'll go through all of them. But what are you really trying to prioritize?
It is. The answer is simple. All of it. So trade is really, really important to us. We've been talking about it for what feels like forever now, same with the adjacent categories. We've got the space. We've got the opportunity. The consumer is basically going to control where we go from this point. We're just going to be in the best position possible to deliver on all those three areas. We've mentioned in the past the next-day delivery being a critical part of our trade. So we are making progress on that. So we're making positive steps in that direction we need to go because that's what's going to win there versus our competitors. What they're offering is a more convenient solution at this moment in time. But as our next-day delivery moves forward, it's already made the first steps, which is good.
Part of our proof and our warehouse integration being successful. That's what's driving that, so we've just got a little bit more time before it comes to the ultimate time looking at some tickets strategy.
What are you at now on next-day versus competitors?
So versus competitors, we're way behind still. So we were historically 12:00 P.M. for cut-off. We're now at 2:00 P.M. Plans for 4:00 P.M. are days away. So we're just chipping away at it until we can get to what would be a competitive comparison with the 5:00 P.M., 6:00 P.M.
Interesting. Just a very quick follow-up. The gross margins for tiles and deco versus trade versus the core business, anything you should think about there?
Our wash-throughs are roughly the same levels. Depending on what we do with price for tiles, we may be a fractional drag, but it'd be a great place to be if I've got the volume of the take in the pot, so we're looking at 45%, 46%, 47% in tiles and flooring. Great. Like I say, when it starts impacting the overall, fantastic. We've aced it.
You said you couldn't have it both ways, but you have got now 35% gross margin to third party.
How is that going to apply?
That's your idea.
Just working with us, make sure the rebate arrangement's in the right place. The third party has a lot of respect for us. Mark's always treating them well. We don't lead by discounting that same policy again. We're maintaining sort of value and the margin by not being, that's not the driving factor for sales conversion. It's not price, it's availability and that range. Nobody can compete with that availability. I think going forward now, the position we're in as a strength from an operational point of view with this warehouse, we've never been in this position before where we had a strong offering historically in awful conditions. And now we've got wonderful conditions, which then should be an even stronger position. So the competition is going to, I hopefully, feel it. And then it's likewise with the consumer.
The offering will be better, as in the availability will be improved again. Another step change in availability. There's no reason for it not to be on the shelf. Being a lot of B2B suppliers as well, Richard. They're treated badly on administrations. It plays out. So Vic Plumb goes into administration as a private entity. They lose money, real money that hurts. We've got a strong balance sheet. Mark's always paid them on time. Good dialogue. It counts for a lot. And even the big third-party brands, we've always respected. We've never discounted. We give them information about why they may not be selling, what they can do more. There's a partnership dynamic within that. So I think it all counts, and you then see the purchasing power we have.
It's sustainable.
Thank you. Do you pay quicker than the competition, do you think? Well, we pay. Yeah. Anecdotally, I know it. Yeah. From the conversation we have, there isn't a supplier that doesn't want to work with us. And we don't believe small companies should have that. We don't. We generate cash and we just pay them. So that's simple.
Ben's asked about PPC costs posted. So has one website been shut down? How have they moved?
There is going to be some efficiency. We're not going to quote. It's still very early to tell, but the Google model, we talk about AI. That's probably the most advanced AI in that arena that you can possibly imagine, so again, I've always said this from way back that I didn't expect to see much in that regard, but life is definitely easier, but if any savings come through and some savings have come through, it just wouldn't be purchased anyway.
But no bigger percentage?
I just don't trust them, and again, I said it. I mean, before, when Endless had it, they went through a whole process, spent a fortune on getting a report on the - what do you call it? - the Victoria Plumb, the savings that we would get from the merger's in the synergy, so that's the word I'm looking for, and that's just what we should know, and it's not dramatic in that regard, but we are pushing really hard because when there's space for the tiles and flooring, we've got to really push on that area. We've got to do what we did in the flooring again, so the benefit will come at some point in time, as I believe our business becomes a household name.
But the Google tax, as some refer to, when we talk about the High Street having an easy life, sorry, the online having an easy life and the High Street struggling with online costs, we do have this element. This is a bit that I don't want governments to not be aware of because that exists. If you just trade online, it's a very difficult proposition. It's very expensive. And if you don't get the marketing right and have that efficiency that we have, we're probably one of the best at it. It's very difficult. It is ending online businesses, isn't it? Yeah.
I think it's interesting because there's less chat about omnichannel these days than there was two years ago. But that expensive kind of pay-to-play environment, I think, does undermine a lot of omnichannel. And when I look at our stock, actually, you don't see baked in enough cost in marketing to generate the revenue. And obviously, some of them have got brand awareness greater than ours. It's still expensive. You look at Trustpilot, and you don't see many investing in it at all. So it's annoying. And of course, we'd like it to be better, but it also is a barrier to entry. Yeah.
I've shared a couple on Victoria Plumb. I get them the right way around. So to close it down, and it's obviously early days, but are you seeing that traffic transfer to the Victorian Plumbing site generally? Has there been any learnings from Victoria Plumb in terms of, I don't know, product ranges or brands or anything positive in that sense? And is there any, obviously, you mentioned the warehouse lease ended anyway in December. Is there any other kind of underlying costs we should expect to come through this year associated with closing down that business?
The cost element.
Yeah. So a little bit of cost. Cash outflow is much more tangible. But which kind of put in the pack of GBP 7 million. But remember, we've got the stock now in our warehouse. And once we sell that, that covers it. So when we do that, when we get round to it in terms of priority, Richard, it might not be a priority because it's a cash flow. We've got a shoot for growth, but it'll come through within the next 15 months. We have just to know extending the lease to the end of January, just for a point of accuracy. Just we're in the list of the day. I mean, this week is all played out. And then, yeah, traffic's come across. Yeah. There was always going to be some dilution of that traffic as customers, obviously, the choice opened up.
Other people moved on the order, if you like, within Google. I'm not worried about that. The timing of the acquisition was awful, but it had to be done. There was no, the fact that we were integrating a new warehouse at the exact same time. Again, as I mentioned earlier, the two biggest tasks that we've ever done in history that coincided, which was just bad luck, bad timing. We couldn't push as hard as we would like in those two-month period. I think we mentioned it in our trade updates. There would have been some loss of traffic there as we could have embraced, I'm pretty sure. It was a sensible thing to do because we didn't want to destroy the customer experience by being too ambitious in that integration of warehouse.
Bringing all the staff on board was a very, very difficult thing. So yeah, so the traffic is there. It's there for us to now process and work. I think there was a temporary gain for other people. I think now we're in a position where the brand confusion's gone. We were probably in the consumer's mind to be the only one that ever existed. They won't even know that that was ever there. That's the really unusual and interesting part of it. So learnings, not really. Just confirmed what we always knew and what I always said about the business. So yeah, I mean, without being too confident, we do a good job. We do a very good job of all elements, and it just confirms just how good we are. I think without our existence, that business would have still traded reasonably well.
We've always done things so differently and so much more efficiently than all of our competition. The management team, they were lovely to help. They weren't part of the problems, previous owners. They themselves, when they came to our site, talked admiringly about the work-from-home culture. I don't think you can take away from that. There's no soul to that business because there was no office-based environment. I think without the, I know we talk about it, and we're perhaps still an outlier, but without the human connection, you can't make the best decisions as quickly. I do think it's hard to measure the cultural aspect. It validated our view that in the office, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M., Monday to Friday is the right way to go. Keep the management team small and make decisions quick.
I think they felt that was missing and had been missing for a long time, and it was sad, actually, because there were good people.
Do you think the finance department wouldn't run in the business a little bit?
Yeah. Probably. Yeah. You do have to finance functions. You're going to be, we're all, a lot of us in here, are numbers people. But you do have to be careful that you position it right. There's a balance between the decision-making because spreadsheets are easy, aren't they? Real apps are a lot of them, so.
When you're looking at your competitors in the tiles category, you've obviously got Topps Tiles, and you've got B&Q. Do you think their range authority and their online, the ease of use and their online platforms in that category? How do you benchmark against that?
Yeah. I mean, it's not difficult, actually. I mean, our range is growing now. I'm not sure where we positioned. We're probably somewhere in the region of being now equal with Topps in the number of products within the range and available. The areas that we're lacking on are the samples, free samples to consumers. The process of that is an important part of the buying process currently. I think that'll change over time as the consumer changes in the way they appreciate products visually online. But at this moment in time, the samples are an important part of the buying process. So we've been making improvements and rolling out those improvements as we speak to help with that. It's more difficult than it sounds because not every manufacturer of tiles will provide you with samples.
You then literally have a manual process of cutting the tiles, which is a terrible job. And then the process of being able to order those online freely and quickly and easily. We've covered the digital element of it, the physical side of it of actually cutting the tiles or having arrangements with all of our suppliers. Some, where we're doing good volumes with, are very helpful and provide us, but it's not a full complement. That's going to take time because that will improve things for us. The more we spend, the more we'll be able to demand it almost. I think at some point in the future, it'll be a case of we will take on a supplier of less people who actually samples. But we're not in that position at the moment to have to dictate that.
So that will make a big difference.
It was free then to charge for postage?
Historically, we've charged them for postage, but we are moving forward to a free model, which would be in line with competitors then. But we haven't needed to. We couldn't support it anyway. So this is a step in the right direction for being a like-for-like proposition.
Sure.
Yeah. So a couple from me. First, just a follow-up on Victoria Plumb. You mentioned kind of the high-cost base and that now you expect more of that revenue to drop through into profit. Is that you're expecting to get a better gross margin on sales through that because of the pricing or the cost mix, or is it just on the operating cost side of things that you're expecting to see it come through?
Both.
Both. Okay. And then secondly, obviously, you mentioned national living wage and national insurance coming up. Are you expected to be putting through some price inflation to try and offset that, or are you more focused on your kind of the cost side? What does that look like in the year ahead for you?
We've nothing decided. I mean, we're keeping a close eye on it to see where we can go with it. We've briefly spoken about potentially looking at price increases as we've done historically when we went through that huge inflationary period. Yeah. No confirmation of whether we're taking that action at the moment. Our profitability is strong as we sit here now today. I'd love to move it forward and bring some more in. But again, I don't want to upset our growth opportunity plans. So see what the competitor space looks like. I mean, the bit that I wish I could report more on is what the landscape looks like now. What does it feel like? And how do we trade in this new environment? And it's just too early to call.
We don't want to get anyone too excited or too disappointed about whatever we say at this point and what we're seeing. It's very unusual. That's all I can say is that having somebody which was so big in competition for so long now just gone, the world's a different place for us.
I think as well, the brick-and-mortar, they're going to be under much, much more pressure to increase prices. I don't see how they get out of not doing it. Whereas for us, it's an option. We don't have to. And so, yeah, that point that Mark made around just watching. Sometimes it's best not to be the first mover. And let's just see. Because John asked about offline to online. For me, if prices go up offline and we stay as we are, then there's a big demand to come across. Equally to Mark's point, it's an opportunity. We won't miss it. I do think we'll always stay positioned underneath brick-and-mortar, clearly, as a better place to shop and as a better experience and value proposition for the customer.
Thanks.
Thanks, Hugo. I think.
Basically.
On the cash, next couple of years, you've got a little bit of a spillover, I think, from the warehouse into the shoebox for exceptionals as well. Do you want to run through the phasing on 25s?
Yeah. I think so. Net cash for 25, currently in conservatively, I'm looking at kind of GBP 9 million. And then the delta you may have would be around phasing of CapEx and a bit of discontinuation of Victoria Plumb. It's well within our gift to improve on that. But on the priority point, we shouldn't have to labor it. There's a lot for the small management team to do. We don't need to focus on it as much as others might. So this year's probably, from a cash perspective, there's still a little bit of exceptional cash. But beyond that, it lifts up and out. You can see me stepping through the dividend policy that we've got. We continue to be progressive. So the percentage growth in divvies are always higher. I don't see a reason why that can't continue.
And you get into maybe 26, and you've got a barrel full of cash to come in. Unless there's good reason to spend it, we would turn to shareholders via a special. Or me being me, I'll perhaps look at the dividend allocation policy because we might not get recognized for that and just kind of do something with the ordinary. So look, I've got one of the biggest shareholders sat next to me. And we'll meet some of the others in the next few days. And unless you're American, I think everyone would please.
Great.
Yeah.
Yeah. Thanks. Just a question on Q1 trading. And if you could provide any color on how consumers behaved in the core business, did you see any kind of trends in changing mix or consumers trading down to cheaper ranges?
It's just levels. We've been reporting for some time now. It's continuing. So the consumer is definitely in a different space. If everyone's looking for guidance on what the consumers do, there is a guide for you. That trading down seems to be similar in lots of other businesses. Still, as a sample, I think we're a good gauge on where the consumer is in regards to spending. So we don't influence that trading down in any shape or form. It's their decision. Nothing's changed in the way the products are presented or promoted. So that is a consumer choice to trade down. And that continues as we've seen previously in Q1.
Close of time. I think we'll pass over to Alec and see if there's any questions online, and then we can close the meeting.
Yeah. I think I've got time for one quick one, if that's okay, gents. There's been a slip in Trustpilot rating of late. Any color on what's driven that, please?
Yeah. I always say things how they are. And we can be honest that warehouse transformation definitely affects us for a brief period, two months. But again, I think reflective on it, it was a very, very small period of knock. I mean, it's almost equivalent to what we've done historically when we couldn't keep up with demand due to space constraints. We'd have a similar sort of knock, which we'd recover shortly after. So typically through January, February, peak trading periods, we would historically have a bit of a knock from the warehouse operations struggling. This time, we're not going to see that. From what I can envision now, that we won't have that same knock during that period because of our new operations and how wonderfully efficient it's become.
So the damage that was done there, that small amount of damage that was done there, won't be repeated as we typically saw each year in the January, February trading period. So we kind of just had it a bit earlier. It's the one way out of the way I'm thinking about it. And it was worthwhile. So yeah, it was just the transition. And it was all to do with people training and bringing in such a large volume of people. There were many different approaches we could have took to that process. We tried to keep it from a cost perspective as low as possible by moving over a short period of time, which method had many different paths to get to the same point. We took one, and it did hit our Trustpilot.
But I'm glad to say that we're past that now, and everything is back to normal or better than normal, should I say. So it's a small blip in the story. I think delivering that warehouse the way we have it, it was an extraordinary move. And anybody who's been to see it will confirm it's quite an extraordinary facility. So it was worthwhile.
Perfect. Just over to you for any closing remarks. Thank you.
Nope. Thank you for listening. And I'm sorry I've not had any more time. Quite a high demand on this roadshow. And Dan has been very accommodating to accept lots of meetings. So I apologize. I would prefer to stay here and talk for another hour. But we've got to. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.