Welcome to BRR Media. I'm delighted to be joined by Robert Forrester, the CEO of Vertu Motors. Good morning to Robert.
Morning.
Robert, your preliminary results came out this morning. Maybe you could start by summarizing the last financial year.
Sure. Well, we're pleased with these results because we delivered record revenues. We delivered record free cash flow in what was quite a challenging environment for the industry in the second half. We saw a used car price correction, which we'd not seen for many years, which impacted our used car margins and profitability. So I think to come in with market expectations around profitability and indeed beat market expectations on net debt free cash flow was very pleasing, actually, given the context of the second half. The business now has a very strong balance sheet. We have substantial property assets. We didn't use used car stocking loans at the end of the year. Our net debt was substantially below where people expected it to be, and our tangible net asset per share has actually increased to GBP 0.70. So I think we're in a good place.
We can be proud of weaving our way through a challenging market and set fair for the new financial year.
Maybe you could remind investors of your strategy.
Our strategy has been consistent for a number of years. It's to develop a business that generates significant levels of cash from ensuring we've got a very sustainable business. Have we got the right colleagues in the right numbers? Do they have the right attitude? Do they deliver the customer experiences we need so that we can retain customers? We've got over 2 million customers on our database. So that is the objective. How we see ourselves generating value, we have four pillars. One is growth, continuing to grow the business. We think there are significant scale benefits in terms of sharing marketing activity benefits, IT cost benefits, getting manufacturer expertise by having divisions of efficient scale that can have one person per franchise. We think the growth pillar is really important. We have 56 software developers and robotics experts developing software.
Digitalization is pivotal to both the customer experience and journey, but also increasing productivity within our business to make sure we can keep costs under control. I think we've done that. We are a people business at the end of the day. We've seen high-profile casualties in the online retailing business. We retail online, but the predominant customer journey is starting online, then ending up in a dealership to touch and feel the car. Having the right colleagues with the right attitude, the right skills, deliver great experience, and having that customer focus is absolutely pivotal. We've delivered well in that area. The final pillar is ancillary businesses. These are non-dealership businesses which complement the group. They are automotive in nature and generate value in themselves. We continue to look for those opportunities in addition. That is a summary of our strategy.
Robert, how is current trading and what is the outlook?
Current trading's actually set off well in terms of March and April. Trading forums were slightly ahead of the board's expectations. We substantially delivered more new retail cars than the market dynamics. The market was down quite substantially in terms of retail, whereas actually we were down only marginally. Importantly, our used car business generated 5.8% like-for-like growth and margins improved. So really pleased with that. New car margins continue to come off from a very high position as it happens, and we would expect that probably to continue. But we're seeing robust used car values, which was really important for the industry. We're now back into normal seasonal trends, albeit we do see weakness in BEV. The after-sales business continues to really do well and show good growth. We've again massively 10% increase in technicians as a big impact on our business. Clearly, costs remain an issue.
Still got some inflationary pressures, particularly around minimum wage. In terms of going forward, I think we're well set. The one item we flagged to our shareholders today is that the ZEV Mandate, which is the 22% target this year for battery electric vehicle mix in the new car market, which rises to 80% by 2030, is out of kilter with the government's aim of a ban in 2035. There is a supply and demand imbalance. There are no financial incentives for the retail market of battery electric vehicles, and that, I think, could create issues. We could very well get to the situation where, to avoid fines, if you can't naturally sell battery electric vehicles, then actually the manufacturers might pull back petrol and diesel supply, which could affect the new car market. So we've got to monitor that and weave our way in.
It could also affect positively used car values if the new car market comes down. So we anticipate fully your expectation at this stage to be unchanged. We will see some selective acquisitions, we expect, but overall we have a positive outlook.