Good morning, and welcome to the Vertu Motors plc interim results for the six months ended August 2026. My name's Robert Forrester, Chief Executive, and I'm joined this morning by Karen Anderson, our long-standing CFO. If we move to the investment case, first of all, in terms of Vertu, I think our investment case is very clear. The results announced today demonstrate this. We are a scaled operation with 5% of the U.K. automotive market, one of the biggest brands in the U.K., and with significant capacity for future expansion to add value and future returns to shareholders. We have excellent scaled relationships with our growing number of vehicle manufacturers. We are having growth opportunities presented to us which will allow future investment.
Our management has capacity for growth, especially having appointed two managing directors at the start of the year, and our systems and technology is leading edge and scalable. The business is actually underpinned performance-wise by our aftersales business, which shows both resilience and growth. It's aided by nearly 200,000 customers who are either on service plans or have Motability service contracts. We have customer experience levels higher than the sector average, and that promotes retention. The last two years have seen a real focus on cost optimization. This included greater efficiency through technology gains, but also increasingly using data to make sure we've got optimization of marketing spend and that we make good decisions. The board is focused on shareholder returns. Our portfolio is reviewed to deliver long-term returns, not short-term wins. We are here for the long term. We have a very disciplined capital allocation approach.
We are pivoting towards Chinese brands, but with a very long-term strategy. That process will continue. Our buyback program has aided earnings per share and tangible net assets per share, and long-term, we have purchased 22% of the company's equity back. Let's have a look at an overview of where we are. Today, we announced the third profit upgrade to this current year's profit numbers. The half-year results represent a 19% in adjusted profit before tax. We've also delivered a strong September when we get to the current trading and outlook section. Our cash generation has been very, very good, a 94% conversion, and that's helped to deliver a better-than-expected net debt number below GBP 55 million. Our net tangible assets per share of nearly 81 pence is a record and shows our balance sheet strength. In terms of the wider sector, there is plenty to talk about this morning.
The zero-emission vehicle mandate has drained automotive profit pools but is now undergoing consultation. Chinese brand market share has been spectacular in terms of growth. 25% of retail registrations in September were represented by Chinese brands, and our portfolio mix is clearly starting to reflect that. Scale is critical, and I think we have scale. Small dealerships and small regional groups are finding it far more difficult to get things working. We are in the super group bracket, but I think at GBP 5 billion revenues and 5% market share, there is a path now to certain groups getting to GBP 10 billion revenues, 10% market share. Technology and AI is certainly going to aid those scale economies, and manufacturers are now looking for efficiency in their retail partners to be super efficient and to deliver for them, and I think that stands us in good stead.
Let's turn to current trading and the important month of September. Why is September important month? It is the second-biggest profit month of the year and the biggest in H2. I am delighted to report we had a strong September on the back of a very strong quarter in terms of new retail car sales. We hit the manufacturer targets at a high level, and that gave us the bonuses dropping in in September. The new retail car market, the results have already been published by the SMMT, exhibited strong growth in registrations, and it is probably worth just spending a moment as to why that is. The manufacturers who saw the fleet retail mix move last year to 65% fleet have been working hard with better offers to stimulate the retail market, and that has paid off.
Registrations have been bolstered by the high growth of Chinese brands, but also by a substantial increase in pre-registration activity where cars get registered by retailers and then sold as used cars. We now have nearly 20 Chinese outlets within the Group, and with plans for more, which I will outline. We are still, as we have said for a number of periods, underweight relative to the market in general. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Motability, as predicted when we did our finals, has been very strong due to the timing of renewals, and we have performed well in that channel. In all channels, we have had a real focus on pricing discipline to manage volume and margin to maximize profitability, and I think that is exhibited in these results.
Indeed, if you ignore the JLR cyber attack effects last September, every channel has seen increase in gross profit irrespective of that impact last year. Profits have risen year-on-year, and this is the biggest month in our H2. When we turn to look at the outlook, it clearly gives the board some confidence. The board now anticipates full-year results to be ahead of expectations, and this is the third profit upgrade we have delivered this year. We are very focused on self-help initiatives to continue this delivery of results. The launch of Value Cars by Vertu, where we look to progress market share in older used cars, continues and is doing well. We are now launching a new initiative of Sharia law compliant used car finance to grow our market share in some of our core territories with strong Muslim populations.
Our new sales executive packages have driven performance, and we are now going to extend those into the premium side. That is giving us greater retention of sales teams. We are also looking to enhance our technician packages in the next month to gain more resource, to drive our after-sales profit, and to give us higher efficiency. In essence, the business is in good shape, as can be seen by the fact that last week we won two Autotrader Retailer Awards, including Retailer of the Year for the second year in a row. I will talk more about the ZEV mandate shortly, but I think it would be unwise to factor in much relief from the consultation in the next few years. I think we will see some short-term relief, but the targets for 2030 will still be very high.
We are seeing, given the pressure on cost and the ZEV mandate, more growth opportunities being presented to us each week. Smaller businesses are tending to struggle. Pricing, we feel, is moving in our direction, so we will assess these opportunities against our investment hurdle rates. We turn to strategy. The group strategy, which is outlined here, has been presented before and remains very consistent. The sector is moving fast, and our strategy is flexible enough to allow us to respond. We certainly have the desire and the capacity to grow in terms of outlet numbers of franchise dealerships, but also in related ancillary businesses which bring the wider group synergies. You will see growth. We are implementing technology consistently to reduce cost, to be quicker at making the business more efficient, and make better decisions. These initiatives are much better for customers.
We are enhancing our customer speed of response, but also quality of response. It's also fair to say that the advent in the last nine months of AI coding is a game changer for our development team. However, we're still a people business. People buy off people, and I'm pleased to report we've got a strategy that gives us highly trained colleagues who are motivated and have high levels of satisfaction. That in turn drives above-sector levels of customer experience. It won't be a surprise when I discuss the evolving competitive landscape in new vehicles, that there are two somewhat linked themes. One is the electrification of new vehicle sales, and the other is the growth of Chinese new entrants. Let's turn to electrification first, which is really around the government's zero-emission vehicle mandate regulations mandating sales of battery electric vehicles. This is a well-known subject.
Clearly, we've covered it before. Let's just reiterate. This year's targets are 33% for cars, have to be battery electric vehicles in the new car market, 24% for vans. This is then backed up by fines on the manufacturers for being above target of GBP 12,000 for cars and GBP 15,000 for vans. This is powerful stuff. The sector will not hit the battery electric vehicle mix on cars this year. I think we'll be around 25%, 26%, target 33%. In fact, the industry will not hit last year's target this year. The target in 2030 is currently set at 80%. This is putting massive pressure on manufacturers and on retailers, and everybody within the automotive world because it clearly upsets supply and demand and it leads to massive discounting to try and stimulate battery electric vehicle sales.
The government is currently consulting on these targets, which sounds in itself great, and is something to be welcomed. The lowest 2030 targets in the consultation are 50% in 2030 for cars and 40% for vans. They are still very stretching, so I think we can see continued pressure on the sector if these targets land, and they might not land. The actual targets coming out of the consultation may be higher. I suspect 2027 we'll see some short-term relief from where we might have been, but I think this is not a panacea, this consultation. In terms of the Chinese, and you can't pick up a newspaper any day of the week and not see an article on the growth of Chinese brands and discussions about tariffs, et cetera. They did hit 25% of the market in September.
That excludes Volvo, which is owned by Geely, but we don't class as Chinese. Why are we seeing this rise in Chinese brands? The Chinese car market is depressed, and there's currently around 20 million surplus cars produced every year in China. That's the root cause. The U.K. has the lowest tariffs in the Western world regard to Chinese battery electric vehicles. But also, the Chinese are very adept at making excellent plug-in hybrids, never mind battery electric vehicles. Any tariffs the U.K. government imposes may slow down the Chinese onslaught. However, they have a major cost advantage, some would say a technology advantage, so it's unlikely to stop them in their tracks.
The U.K. government is currently under pressure to put in place battery electric vehicle tariffs, and that may allow the European Union to let U.K. car production into the Made in EU protection measures that have been put in place. That is not for certain. Tariffs would change the playing field with regards to the incumbent manufacturers and the Chinese. As an aside, the Chinese government has also announced in the last couple of days that from April 2027, their export VAT rebates will be reduced from 13% to 9%. That, again, lowers support levels for Chinese manufacturers exporting, and therefore we could see increase in prices of Chinese cars coming into the U.K. Our view overall is that this could slow down the Chinese, but is unlikely to halt the growth of different Chinese brands taking market share.
Of course, it's also true to say that if the U.K. ends up with tariffs on battery electric vehicles, that will make the overall industry hitting the government's ZEV mandate targets even harder. I should point out, when we talk about battery electric vehicles, we are not negative on battery electric vehicles. In fact, Vertu has outperformed on the sale of battery electric vehicles for the past three years. In this period, our battery electric vehicle retail sales grew 126%. Given that sort of backdrop, what are we doing about Chinese brands? The answer is we are actively engaging with Chinese brands. In fact, it's been one of our core occupations for the past 12 months. I actually believe the Chinese brand see Vertu as a must-have partner in the U.K. because of our scale and our ability to deliver volume, property, and indeed, customer experiences.
As this table shows, we've made good progress in terms of introducing new brands and introducing increasing number of Chinese outlets. By mid-2027, we will have at least 15% of our outlets being Chinese. Again, that excludes Volvo, where we are also strong. That number may indeed be higher. What we're actually seeing is wave one partners of the Chinese who came in two or three years ago, actually in some cases being replaced, some cases by us, where they failed to deliver on property investment, operational excellence, or indeed a solid relationship, and we stand to benefit as the shakeout comes in the first wave of partners into second wave. The Chinese brand strategy is clearly a key part of what we've been doing strategically over the past six months. However, there are other strategic actions that we've undertook, which largely fall under the controlling the controllables banner.
I've mentioned technology quite a lot already, but I think it's worth just focusing in a bit more detail. Digitalization, including AI adoption, is critical if the business is to be efficient and to deliver scale economies. Smaller players cannot adopt this strategy. I'd just like to go through three successful examples of where we've been implementing technology in the past six months. Opportune has been developed with our telephony partner to provide a sales customer experience that is much better and to enhance sales conversion. By using large language models of 40,000 inbound phone calls linked to sales data and linked to our training material, we can now predict after a phone call has been received in the sales contact center, the predictability of making a sale, and the sales people in the dealership get, "These are the three things you need to talk about.
I wouldn't mention this very often. This needs to be in the video." That is moving our sales conversion up, and we've been piloting it in a number of dealerships as you can see here, and it's so far given a 12.7% increase in conversion. This is not a small thing, so we are now clearly rolling it out. Vmax is a personalized dashboard where each salesperson can see their earnings real time, how much they've earned month to date, where they've earned it, where they've missed out, what the next transaction is worth. It uses gamification around successful KPIs to stimulate the outcomes we would like, by effectively having a dashboard. It's in place in our volume dealerships, and it's had good effect. We're now going to launch it with new sales packages into our premium dealership.
The final third area is an area of the business we don't often talk about, which is our parts departments. We've used a dashboard, again, for each parts department with league tables and gamification. For each KPI, you can earn points which then puts you into a lead table. That has led, in the last three months since we've implemented it, into a significant improvement in controls and efficiency on the nuts and bolts, literally, of running a parts department. It's also highlighted a few low-level frauds and some poor practice, and is certainly doing its job. This is good use of technology to make our business better. When we spoke at the finals, a few six months ago, we discussed the launch of Value Cars by Vertu. This was an initiative to grow our market share in the car age of seven-year-old cars to 14-year-old cars.
Not something that we'd put much attention to previously, but is a growth area. With the cost of living crisis, is clearly in a sweet spot. Now, we have implemented this on the 1st of April, and it's been a big success. We actually changed a lot of things. How we prepared the cars, whether the cars can be moved across the Group, our finance products, our warranty products, to make it easier to sell these cars, but also to make them more profitable. We're delighted with the progress. 1,400 + more cars sold. Stronger margins in this age cohort than we previously had. When you look at the margins, our normal younger used cars have a 6.9% gross margin. These cars had a 13.5% gross margin. So it does augment the margin as we expected.
They also sell quicker. There is more to come as we focus on this and as people get used to it. The next initiative is to launch Sharia-compliant used car finance, where we can effectively sell cars with a counterparty on finance fully compliant with U.K. and Sharia law. There is no interest on the loan. This will enable us to take customers from that growing minority and to deliver a main dealer experience, which we think we can take market share. For all the talk of technology, the world is still populated by people who buy off people. I am delighted to say that we have made good progress again in this area, and we have got good plans to make more. There is definitely a benefit in a stable sales team.
The graph on the left-hand side shows that this industry has a high level of sales executive turnover, always had, particularly in new starters within the first six months. We have seen a step change in our sales team stability, with turnover declining from 53% to 39% in the last 18 months, which is a major change. Why? We have adopted new sales executive packages. We have been very good at selling cars, which is always good if you are a sales executive. I think we have tightened up on recruitment. I think there is a number of reasons, but this could have quite a material impact going forward in terms of customer experience, sales retention, our overall effectiveness.
Turning to technicians, this is clearly going to be, and it has come in and out in terms of being an issue, but there is a long-term issue around retirement of technicians versus the number of apprentices coming through in the industry as a whole. We are putting a lot of apprentices into the business. We want to get on the front foot and make sure we have got the right level of resource to grow our aftersales business. In November, we are going to launch revised packages, particularly around new bonuses to drive efficiency, and we expect a benefit from that and to enable us to recruit more people and retain more people to grow aftersales. Overall, I believe we have got a committed team of colleagues. We drive and really look at colleague satisfaction in a lot of detail.
We have very high levels of colleague satisfaction, and then that translates into customer satisfaction. This is critical not only to drive retention of customers, they do not come back if they have had a poor experience. You can see in sales, compared to the manufacturer franchises, we are 38% better than national average. In service, we are 6% higher than national average, and our used car Net Promoter Score is absolutely excellent. This clearly helps us win awards like the Autotrader Retailer Awards, but customer satisfaction scores are also vital in terms of making sure we deliver for manufacturers and able to buy new dealerships, but also to drive search engine optimization and AI search. We have got excellent Google and Trustpilot scores, which help us drive that web engagement. I am now going to pass to Karen , who is going to look at cost reduction and control.
Thank you, Robert. The Group came into the financial year having completed the second consecutive year of targeted cost reduction programs. These programs, which included some dealership closures, have kept cost growth in the total group to 2.1% in the period and have driven a reduction in operating expense as a percentage of revenues. Salary costs, as Robert said, this is a people business, so it is no surprise really that salary costs remain the largest single cost of the Group. These costs rose by 3.9% or GBP 5.4 million. This explained by higher sales commissions and performance-related bonuses to colleagues based on the improved financial and sales performance we have delivered. The headcount savings delivered as part of the cost reduction programs offset the increased costs of company national insurance and of national minimum wage, as we expected they would.
The improvement in sales performance also impacted on marketing costs, which include fleet introductory commissions. The increase in fleet sales volumes increased costs in this area. In addition, the Group also delivered two Group-wide new vehicle sales events in the period, with such events not occurring in the prior year. Cost control clearly remains a priority for the Group, and we are taking further proactive action to mitigate cost headwinds. For example, the deployment of technology to increase efficiency, installation of building management systems to reduce energy costs, and increasing the use of data and sales attribution to improve marketing cost return on investment.
If we turn next to another key element of our strategy, which is returns to shareholders, the Group continues to seek a balance between investment and growth, targeting returns in excess of weighted average cost of capital to deliver on the Group's strategic objectives and shareholder returns. We have a pipeline of potential acquisitions currently under consideration. A key element of the Group's approach to capital allocation remains pruning. You have seen the impact of this actually already on the cost side, and the Group maintains its discipline in reviewing dealership operations regularly to ensure each generates an adequate return on investment and a contribution to group profitability. In terms of investment in organic growth, the Group anticipates net capital expenditure of GBP 21.6 million in FY 2027 full year, with this spend including the investment in additional Chinese manufacturer outlets that Robert has outlined.
The Group has had a program of share buybacks in place since FY 2018. The Group spent GBP 1.8 million in the period on share buybacks, and since the start of these programs, has bought back almost 22% of our issued share capital. We announced a further GBP 12 million share buyback program back in March for the FY 2027 financial year, and we have GBP 10.2 million left to deploy under this program. The board are committed to continue share buybacks at prices up to 105% of tangible net assets per share, around 85 pence a share. Finally, we propose an 11% increase in the FY 2027 interim dividend to 1 pence per share, and this will be paid in January. Turning now to the financial performance in the period, slide 17 highlights some financial highlights for the year.
Strong organic growth drove revenues to a new record. Like-for-like growth in gross profits was delivered in all channels, as well as strong cost control being exhibited. Adjusted profit before tax, therefore, increased 19% to GBP 23.8 million, with a non-underlying profit on sale of surplus property driving PBT to GBP 24.2 million. That is a 24% increase. I was delighted with the strong conversion of operating profit to cash, driving the low level of net debt at the end of August, which frankly exceeded my expectations. This was thanks to better than anticipated fleet sales cash flows around the period end. If I turn over now to slide 18, is a summary of our group income statement for the period. Group revenues grew by GBP 86.5 million, with actually a growth of GBP 106 million delivered from the Group's core dealerships.
New and acquired businesses added GBP 29.5 million of revenues, while site closures reduced revenues by GBP 49 million over the period. Gross margin was stable at 11.2%, and costs as a percentage of revenue declined to 9.9%, increasing together operating margins to 1.3%. The Group's interest costs reduced by GBP 800,000 compared to last year. This was driven by reduced charges on manufacturer new vehicle funding. This was due to a reduction in the level of funded inventory held by the Group. Adjusted profit before tax, therefore, rose by 19% to GBP 23.8 million. Non-underlying income actually represents a profit on the sale of surplus property, partially offset a little by some site closure costs. If I turn over again now to slide 19, we are presenting our bridge of the Group's adjusted profit before tax compared to last year, the last prior year period.
Core group gross profit increased by GBP 10.9 million over the prior period, with increases in all four segments, new fleet, used, and aftersales. The Group's resilient and high-margin aftersales operations generated an additional GBP 3.9 million of gross profit in the period. New vehicle sales generated an additional GBP 3.4 million of gross profit, which has been very welcome following two years of declining profits in this channel. Used gross profit generation in the core group also rose, again aided by the success of the Value Cars by Vertu initiative. As anticipated, core group operating expenses grew year-on-year, with much of this increase driven by the improvements in financial performance, which have driven increased sales commission and performance-related bonus earnings for colleagues, as I have just outlined.
Turning then to slide 20, the Group's balance sheet is very stable and strong, underpinned by a freehold and long leasehold property portfolio of GBP 327 million, prudently carried at a historic depreciated cost. A recent desktop valuation by Knight Frank indicates supports of property values at current net book value, with just over half of the Group's property portfolio unencumbered by mortgages. Vehicle inventory reduced, with this reduction arising in new vehicles. These are largely funded by manufacturer facilities, and therefore, the reduction had little cash impact, but did obviously result in reduced stocking interest costs being paid. Tangible net assets per share increased again to 80.8 pence, and this is a new record for the Group. Slide 21 summarizes the Group's debt facilities and net debt at the 31st of August. This week, the Group has agreed the renewal of its bank facilities.
A new facility comprising a GBP 70 million revolving credit facility for general commercial purposes, together with a GBP 50 million accordion, has been put in place. These new facilities replace the old GBP 93 million acquisition facility. The same counterparty banks, namely Barclays, Lloyds, and NatWest, have remained in place, and the facilities are for initial term of three years, with the option for the Group to extend for a further two years. The new facility reduces the margin payable by 0.25% and increases flexibility, allowing the Group to repay and draw funds as cash and working capital fluctuations allow. We anticipate that annualized finance cost savings of up to GBP 500,000 are anticipated as a result of this new facility in terms of the reduction in margin, reduction in limit, and our ability to flexibly pay back.
It is worth remembering, though, that approximately 60% of the Group's net debt remains long-term property-backed mortgages with no covenants. Slide 22 highlights the Group's cash flows. The Group generated a free cash inflow of GBP 17.5 million in the period, with an excellent 94% conversion of operating profits to cash flow from operating activities. The working capital movement represented an GBP 11 million outflow in the period, driven by lower vehicle deposit levels and an increase in trade receivables driven by the growth in fleet sales in the period. Sustaining capital expenditure of GBP 5.7 million was spent in the period, with this partially offset by proceeds from sale of surplus properties and other assets of GBP 1.6 million. A further GBP 1.2 million has been spent in the period on capital projects, which enhance the operating capacity of the Group and freehold and business acquisitions.
Net debt at the end of the period was GBP 54.2 million, excluding lease liabilities, representing a GBP 7.1 million decrease on FY 2026. I will now turn back to Robert to cover some of the trading and operational elements of the period.
Okay, so go through each of the key segments in a little bit more detail. If we turn to new vehicle sales performance, and that includes vans and fleet. The market overall for new vehicles, but particularly actually the retail market, has been surprisingly strong in the past 10 months really, and we have seen a rise in retail registrations versus fleet. After fleet got to 65% of the market, a real high watermark historically, six months ago. Historically, the market between retail and fleets has been about 50/50. So why is the retail market being so strong? I think there are a number of answers there. If you go 10 years ago, the average age of a car in the U.K. was seven years. It has now risen to nine years, 10 months. Big, big increase.
You could argue there's a lot of people who are looking to replace their cars if an offer is affordable. The manufacturers have been making new car offers far more affordable than in the past two or three years. In addition, the Chinese manufacturers have come in with very competitive monthly payments and have probably taken some used car customers out of the market and put them into the new retail market. On top of this, we've seen a far more normalized market in terms of levels of pre-registration. Pre-registration is where a retailer buys a car from the manufacturer, a new car, and then sells it at delivery mileage as a used car. It bolsters registrations, but you don't see the same in new retail sales. I think that's why the market is up. We've actually underperformed notionally against the market data.
But of course, we don't have pre-registration registrations in our sales data, and we've hit manufacturer targets at high levels. So albeit on a headline basis, we've lost share, we're actually quite comfortable. So we've got a rising market. Motability was particularly strong and is actually accelerating as those contracts come through. If you actually look at sales prices of vehicles, and we've got new retail and Motability, and then we've got fleet and vans here.
You can see sales prices actually coming down for a variety of reasons. Car sales prices have come down because we've got now cheaper battery electric vehicles, both in terms of smaller vehicles and deep discounted vehicles to hit the ZEV mandate. That's clearly having an effect. In the van market, we've seen a shift to smaller vans, away from larger vans for sure. And we've seen more car fleet as opposed to van fleet.
Vans are clearly more expensive than cars, so therefore the actual average sales price has come down by over GBP 2,000. The key thing for us is clearly a combination of volume and margin, and I'm pleased to say that our margin percentages in car retail has gone up. That's pricing discipline. We are very aware that we need to generate profitability and balance volume and margin. We don't want too much volume with no margin, clearly, or the other way around. So we've been very clinical, actually, in trying to balance that. And we've also been helped by agency, where Honda and MINI went into the agency model, where we don't have a revenue. Actually, we just get a handling fee. So that has augmented our gross margin percentages.
In terms of fleet and commercial vehicle margins, actually, they reduced, but that is entirely due to the fact we've done a lot more fleet car. We've taken a lot of market share in fleet car, as opposed to vans. And I think overall, a margin of GBP 984 gross profit per unit is actually very respectable. So reasonably complicated picture, we have generated more gross profit. We turn to used vehicle sales, much bigger market than the new vehicle market, quite clearly. We've now had two periods of like-for-like growth in our used vehicle volume. That's despite this thought that Chinese manufacturers on new cars have taken some used car business and put it into new cars. And I think why have we managed to grow like for likes in that environment?
The Value Cars by Vertu initiative has clearly given us access to a new market, and we've done well with that extra 1,400 cars actually in growing volumes. It also enhanced margins, as you saw. The margin expansion I was actually envisaging will be greater. I was expecting to see greater margins in used cars as a result of value. That's because that effect has been offset by weakness in values of large premium SUVs. I think that's for two reasons. One, the escalation in fuel prices always seems to knock large petrol, diesel SUVs. They tend to go down in value in that period. The manufacturers have been really adopting an aggressive stance on new vehicles, which has an effect on residuals. I think I was expecting slightly more in used car margin than we actually delivered, but for good reasons.
If we turn to aftersales, this is clearly a major high margin and growing profit generator for the Group, and has been for many years. Gross profit overall was up GBP 3.9 million across the channels in the six months, so we're very pleased with that. Service represented the biggest increase, even though I think we were a bit resource-constrained on technicians, which we're about to fix. The vehicle health check process, the Vertu Pay Later process, has added real value to our service operations, growing revenues and margin. Interestingly, since we started Vertu Pay Later, which I think is two years ago, we've actually lent out GBP 60 million on the Pay Later product on a three- to five-month basis. We are running with excellent recovery profiles, and it's really helping boost profitability.
Our parts businesses saw strong revenue growth, actually mainly in the trade wholesale sector, where we have a real expertise and resource, in trade parts, and those businesses did really well. In accident and SMART repair, fairly complicated here, actually. Accident repair saw a reduction in number of accidents as technology continues to reduce major accidents. We saw a nice increase in our SMART repair business of actually repairing alloy wheels where we, in our sales department, sold a tire and wheel repair insurance policy. That's reasonably good margin. You can see the margin enhancement in accident SMART repair, 1.4% up. We don't often talk about petrol forecourts. We have one petrol forecourt, an excellent petrol forecourt in Widnes, if you're ever passing. Interestingly there, you can see a 33% increase in revenue. That is clearly higher fuel prices coming through.
You can see it in our numbers. Final slide from me. I think the Group is very well positioned. I think we've got real scale, and that gives our Group a competitive advantage over much of the sector. We are in the top four. Many outside of the top four are struggling. We have a balance sheet with management and technology and strong manufacturer relationships to grow and grow with significant additional shareholder value going forward. We are in a great position. We have a winning team, and I think today's results are witness to that. Thank you.