Good morning. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Nathan Scholz. I'm the Group Chief Corporate Affairs Officer for Domino's Pizza Enterprises. I'd like to start with an acknowledgement of country and welcome you to the Domino's Pizza Enterprises half year results. We recognize the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, which is the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. Today you'll be joined by speakers from managers, joining you from Australia and dialing in from internationally. With that, I'm going to hand over to our Group CEO and Managing Director, Mr. Don Meij.
Thank you, Nathan, and good morning, everybody. I'm gonna start on slide two and remind everybody of our mission as our mission is unchanged: to be the dominant sustainable delivery QSR in every market by 2030. There's really important translation here. Obviously, sustainable. Sustainable comes in so many forms in our business, including the profitability and viability of our franchisees. Every product we launch today, we're focused on making sure that it is more sustainable than products that preceded it. Also delivery. Delivery for us is really that we design everything to be consumed off-premise, and that is that whether a customer chooses to be the driver through a carrier or whether it's a more premium service with our delivery, everything that we do is designed to be consumed outside our stores.
If we come on to slide three, our strategy is the same, both past and present. You know, we continue to work on the value equation. We're in the value industry, and it's the heart of everything that we do. During this half, we haven't always fully balanced the equation right, particularly in delivery pricing. Delivering the right product, the right service, the right image, at an affordable price is front and center and you know, quite vibrant actually in this community. We acknowledge that the QSR industry as a whole, when we look around the world, be it in different forms, is really vibrant at the moment, and it's for us to get right largely in delivery right now.
As we rebalance this equation, we anticipate that we'll continue to build a frequency of our customers as we win new customers as well. If you come with me onto slide four. You know, clearly these are not the numbers we wanted to put in front of you today, but we wanna be really transparent to make sure that we can share what has occurred and more importantly, what are we currently doing to address these. If we look at our network sales, in constant currency, they're up 1.2%. Our online sales in constant currency were up 0.5%. We materially lifted the network in store growth this year or store count, by an additional 509 stores this last 12 months.
As we do report in AUD, our EBIT was down 14.3% this year, and we'll talk to why as we proceed in this presentation. What's really important is that this business has materially lifted in store count in the last 12-36 months, and we believe that as we get our pricing right in delivery and get a return to strong order count growth, we'll see a pretty sharp inflection point at that time. If you come with me onto slide 5. We wanted to just be, once again, transparent in highlighting some of the headwinds that we've that we've had over the last three years, but also in the same transparency, already just in that 1 month, the profitability from the Malaysia, Singapore business that turned on in December.
If you come with me now on slide six, you can see in our first seven weeks of trade that our network sales are up 4.2%. Obviously now also enjoying the sales from Malaysia and Singapore. Essential sales were down 2.2%. You know, as a result of that, and noting that we're still working through some pricing around our business. Getting our value equation right, that we think that in this particular year, that we may come in under our 3-5-year outlook. When we talk about our store openings, we've built materially bigger development teams across our business in the last three years.
As a result of that, our store pipeline is actually really full, and if we were able to open all of those stores, we would be achieving our 3-5-year outlook. At this point in time, we just bring a little caution to the business in that our franchisee sentiment, largely in Europe, may have a impact on that in this half. On the other side of that, we are seeing a ramp up of store openings in Singapore and Malaysia, which are adding to these store counts right now. If we come through to slide seven and we talk about some of the short-term headwinds that we're experiencing, there's no question that we've acted quite rapidly on inflation in passing prices through, and that in the early phases of October and November, we were benefiting from that.
After multi cycles, some of that initial positive effect started to downturn, and that was largely in delivery in December and into January. Higher prices in delivery bundles or in some markets, 'cause it's not everywhere, including a delivery service fee, did reduce some of the customer counts and we've been now actively engaged in changing that. Customer counts have not met our expectations in December, largely in Europe and Asia, which has lowered the store profitability and ultimately our profitability. December EBIT was particularly impacted in Japan due to the large number of corporate stores, especially the maturity of those corporate stores in some of the regional co-locations in Japan. Pricing strategies are currently being worked through, and we continue to try and balance that value equation.
You know, just highlighting once again that there's been some FX and also an extra trading week that we've been rolling from last year. If we come onto slide 8. Despite some of the earnings challenges that we've had in the last 6 months, there are actually some really high achievements in the business which really do set us up for the years ahead. First and foremost, the management tenure in this business, the franchisee tenure in this business is almost second to none in our industry. You know, I really wanna recognize our franchisees, our team members, our executives and support team navigating some of these historic challenges that we've actually had to navigate the last 3 years.
We really do have a great team and we are getting many things right, including our technology. One of the things that we can point to is that, you know, things like our mobile app has grown dramatically in our mix of digital. We'll talk more specifically about how that mix changes later in the presentation. We can also point to the fact that our operations are executing well at the moment. Our NPS scores. When we think about our operations, considering we're materially bigger, when we think about our technology, those parts of our value equation we've got right. We've also got some of our product initiatives right, which are also inspirational coming into this year. The Burger Range in the ANZ business was the most successful since the Taste the Colour in 2016.
Our new Crispy Fries, launched in the recent weeks in France and the Benelux, are the fastest growth side items and the largest, most successful side item implementation in those businesses. The fastest growth consumer since the invention of the aggregators has been the single eater. The pizza category hasn't always catered for this fast growth consumer. Japan is the first of all of our markets to launch the Domino's My Box, which is an individual, sorry, meal that can be customized, and we look forward to rolling that into the rest of our business in various forms. Right at the beginning, we've gone out of our way to protect franchisee profitability, and this is sustainable despite the historically record high inflation that we've had to roll in our business.
As I mentioned earlier, our customer experiences are getting better and stronger. We know from all of our data that when we get towards an 18 minutes or better delivery time, NPS skyrockets. When the customer rates us out of 1 - 5 in the app, if we can get a 4.5 or better rating from a customer, NPS skyrockets. We've got more and more stores that are migrating as we are able to work and focus on that. The Malaysia and Singapore acquisitions are going well and trading well, so we're excited to have them a part of our family, and you're gonna see some fast expansion there. We're imminently hoping to be able to settle that last third of the German business, and we're just working through the mechanisms at the moment.
In the face of challenges in this post-COVID world, you know, management and franchisees are working in partnership to make sure that we can deliver on the success for all stakeholders. If you come with me now onto slide nine. You can see here that we talk a lot about the, you know, the network sales and we did actually get growth in constant currency at +1.2. Our online share, we wanna talk later about the mix of that. It's really important to note where carry out's going, delivery's going in there, even aggregators and so on, and where our business is growing. We did actually get a growth in constant currency out of our digital platform, which is one of the big engine rooms of the business.
If you come with me now onto slide 10. You know, the business expanded in this half by 357 stores, with, you know, just under 80 stores organically and 278 stores that were acquired in the Malaysia/Singapore business. As a whole in the last three years, this network is now 44% bigger in store count than it was just 3 years ago at this point. Some of that is immature, particularly in Japan. What we do know is that, with this extra 1,140 stores, that we haven't seen the leverage from all of that in this current window. As soon as we get this order count right, we believe you'll see that inflection point.
If you come with me now to slide 11, this is just showing more transparency about how our results have been achieved in the last half. You know, later in this presentation, we're gonna talk in detail about the causes and the solutions. If you come onto slide four, an obviously really important slide that we introduced a couple of years ago. Franchisees are the heart of our network, and we've worked to make sure that within material inflation, that we've been able to protect our franchisee profits first. What we can see in our numbers, our most sophisticated investors, our franchisees, and those that grow internally, is that the stronger operators are getting stronger. You'll even hear that in parts of our business, many of them are enjoying record profitability despite inflation.
You can see that expansion there, of the 3-5 and six or more stores per franchisee. Even within a like-for-like industry like our own, 2.6 stores on average per franchisee is at the higher end, and it shows the depth. When we break out the tenure in our business, we know we have really strong tenure in our franchisees, which also sets ourselves up into the future. You can see in the earnings that the headwinds that we faced, you know, at a store level are the same we face as a company, and it's the same solution for both stores and ourselves. It's all about order count growth, and specifically it's all about delivering order count growth, which we've got to get right in the near term.
At this point in time, I'm going to pass back over to Richard, and thank you very much.
Thank you, Dom. If we just move to slide 14, I think it is, Nathan. As Dom highlighted, our network sales are down 4%, but positive 1.2% in constant currency. With an FX translation headwind of AUD 105 million. Our net income's down 21.5%. However, this was impacted by FX of 4.8% and a further 3%-4% from the additional trading week that we had in 2022. On a apples with apples, if we adjust for that, there's a decline of 13% versus the 21.5%, approximately. If you move to the next slide, if you have a look at our this is our normal summary around the geographic performance.
As you can see, our revenue was down 4.3%. Positive 1.4% in constant currency, noting here that Asia having the largest headwinds of AUD 51 million, or 11.5% of the 12.5% downturn. ANZ is the lighthouse for the rest of our business, having grown earnings positive 5.2% with one less trading week as a result of strong product launches and our ability to more successfully pass through inflation. Moving to the next slide. Non-recurring costs increased materially, predominantly due to our legal defense costs ramping up for the trial, which was held in November. In addition, the acquisition costs predominantly relating to Malaysia and Singapore for and CTB Cambodia. Moving to the next slide.
A strong result from a free cash flow perspective, with net operating cash flow up 17.6% to AUD 109.1 million, inclusive of timing headwinds and working capital, which we expect to wind slightly more in the second half. Moving to slide 18, where we go into more detail on the CapEx. As you can see, this slide highlights our continued planned investment back into the business with store-related CapEx up AUD 29.9 million and digital investments a further AUD 23.3 million. Moving to slide 19, our balance sheet.
You can see here that there's some quite large movements this year, predominantly due to the, you know, the timing of our first time consolidation of Malaysia and Singapore and the related funding in addition to the recent capital raising, also moving some of the numbers here. On that note, I wanna highlight to you, I've put an additional slide here highlighting our group debt position and probably how we've strengthened our balance sheet, both in terms of our debt financing and the recent capital raising. I can now highlight that we now have raised new debt with four-year committed debt facilities following our acquisition of Malaysia.
More importantly, we've now locked in our interest rates of AUD 367.2 million of our debt at less than 1% with a maturation profile of 4-6 years. That's a nice position to be in coming into, you know, a world that's maybe, you know, fairly volatile at the moment. It's also worth noting, we now have undrawn debt multi-currency, undrawn debt facilities of a further AUD 453.7 million in addition to our cash and cash reserves of AUD 143.7 million. Moving to slide 20. You know, we're just highlighting again, some of our key ratios.
As you can see, the return on equity and capital employed have come off as a result of lower profits, and some small amount of dilution in the recent capital raising impacting return on equity. Still a strong number at 29.3%. You can see our cash conversion is gone up from 71.6% to 86.6%. Our balance sheet, in terms of our covenants, you know, we're conservatively geared now with the interest coverage at 24.8 times and net leverage ratio now at 2.1 times, which is well within where we like to be. We now move to slide 21, you can see our group underlying EPS.
Obviously, this is down considerably as a result of the numbers for the first half down to 21.8%. If you look at our underlying EPS at 10-year rate is still a respectable 15.3%, which gives us confidence in our long-term future. I'll now pass you to back to Andre. On to Andre.
Thank you, Richard. If you wanna follow me to page 24. What's very obvious from this page is that we managed to grow the top line but missed our bottom line, our EBITDA and EBIT. Let me take you to the next page to go through the European performance. It's been a challenging environment in Europe. We've experienced high levels of inflation, and with the Ukraine war just on the European borders, it's resulted in very low consumer confidence and an increased cost base for the system, our stores, our commissaries.
Price increases have helped us, the top line, as you can see, did result into a decline in customer count, mainly in delivery. Remembering we're comparing delivery with the year before where most of Europe was still in a lockdown, and dine-ins and restaurants were closed. The decreased volume obviously has a big impact in our earnings. We are a volume business, and less volume is not helping. As you might remember during COVID, we've indicated that that would be a great time for us to invest more into the business, and we have actually put our foot to the floor. This has resulted in some short-term impact on margins. At this moment, I'd like to take over to hand over to Stoffel who joins us from Germany at a late night time.
Thank you, Andre, and good morning to all on this call, or afternoon, night, as it is here. As mentioned before in the presentation, we really doubled down on investing in the store growth. So we've got significantly more people on our development teams. Even though the numbers of store openings might look a bit soft, we've decided it is the right thing to do because some of our multi-unit owners, if I look at Germany, they've all opened one or more stores in the last years. Now with some economic headwinds or challenges, uncertainties, they've chosen to consolidate the business before taking the next step of growth.
We wanna be ready for that, and that's why we've got we wanna deliver on all the projects that we've got in our pipelines, so that the moment when our customer accounts turn positive, we can go back to store growth straightaway. If we then look to the Danish business on our full year results, we've broken more out there. Since then we've created a three-step approach. Step one is to get away from the negative brand image that the previous owners left the brand with. Step two is creating store-level profitability. Then Step three is to make the whole business profitable by growing the number of stores and the sales that we do.
The marketing campaign that was just out when we spoke in August actually did a lot for our business and for the customer perception of our business. That has resulted in the Danish customer accounts being the best in the whole of the European business. With that, even though we're not done with step one yet, we can more and more start focusing on step two as well, and start focusing more on the bottom line of our stores and making the stores profitable. I must also add a little shout-out to the team in Denmark because they've done some amazing work in really increasing the productivity of our stores, which is a big step towards profitable stores in a high labor market like Denmark.
Once we've created a solid bottom line, we can actually start focusing on step three, which through more sales in our corporate stores and adding franchise stores to the mix, would result in a profitable business. We look at franchisee profitability across Europe, we actually see that the last quarter has been resilient given the trading conditions. I take Germany as an example, we faced a minimum wage increase of 24% year on year. This on top of the commodity and utility inflation that everybody was facing. We're actually very proud to say that despite these headwinds, the actions we took resulted in the last quarter being the strongest earnings quarter of calendar year 2022. I now wanna hand over to Josh.
Thanks, Stoffel. If you come now to page 27, I'll take you through the results for, as it relates to Asia. you know, what you can see here is that we had good top-line sales growth, like the other markets, you know, we didn't produce the results that we would've liked on the bottom end due to the inflationary pressures, some timing delays in lifting prices, and a shift to, you know, sort of carry out, which is at a lower ticket. I will point out that our stores are now stronger than pre-COVID in our mature store sets and delivering meaningful returns for both franchise and corporate stores.
While we would've liked this, six months results to be a bit better, and if you come up with me to the next page, you know, we would've liked to be better. Our strategy is really, it is sound. I wanna outline that the strength of our growth platform we've built in the region, which, you know, if I take you back to August 2020, I told you very clearly at my intentions to grow the business in Japan exponentially. It was the first time we had available sites, people, very strong value equation, you know, really strong operations. I guess that mindset, that growth mindset.
That enabled us to grow from 646 store business, you know, back in August 2020 to now a 960+ store business. You know, at that time, we also told the market that we're active in the acquisition space, we've delivered, we've added 4 markets in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and Cambodia. Of course, this enables DPE to really dimensionalize our growth across the region. Another way to look at this is that, you know, since 2020, our store numbers have grown from 642 stores in just Japan to now 1,417 stores, and now not operating in just 1 country, but across five countries in the region. It represents 121% store-based growth.
As these stores move along their respective maturity cycles, we will see margins return, and we aim to deliver the more expected numbers shareholders have enjoyed in the past. Of course, this is multiplied across a much larger base. You know, we are confirming our 3,000 store goal for Asia alone. I guess to this end, I'm proud to report that the newly acquired markets that we've are performing well. You know, we're really looking forward to in the next six to nine months getting all the integration done. That means integration with our tech platforms, all that means digital and tech, and back-end tech, but also just getting our knowledge in those markets over the next six to nine months.
At this point, I'd like to hand over to Martin Steenks, who will take you more on through the specifics on Japan.
Thank you, Josh, and good morning, everybody. For those not fortunate to visit Japan last year for our investor day then, where I met actually some of you, let me introduce myself first. My name is Martin Steenks.
25 years in the Domino's business right now. My background includes all facets of the company, from driver to franchising, towards op director in Holland, towards the recently job as CEO of Japan. As Josh mentioned, we have multiple plans ready to improve profit, which will be shown later on in this presentation. Warehouse earnings were lower than prior year in Japan, mainly due to lower sales and due to food cost increases not being fully passed on to stores in this half. Franchise profitability remained strong in Japan for Q2, mainly due a very strong October month. Corporate store profit for our mature stores in Japan, although below expectations, remained on par with last year.
The maturation of a significant portion of the Japan business opened during COVID is expected to deliver growth in earnings and margins in the medium term. That said, I would like to give it over to David Burness.
Thank you, Martin. Again, good morning, everybody. If we go to slide 30 to the financial highlights, you'll see that we had sales of AUD 687 million for the half, which is down 0.3% on H1 2022. Like all markets, we had an extra week of sales in H1 2022. If we normalize that, we would have been up 3% in network sales. That's flowed through to an EBITDA increase of AUD 3.3 million or 4% and EBIT of AUD 3.1 million or 5.2%. I mean, the reason for that is primarily that we've managed to pass on enough of the inflation costs throughout the half to do that.
You know, we're really over that six months, we've been really nimble on our testing of pricing and the number of pricing changes that we've rolled out. One thing we will be doing in the second half is to really focus on customer count, not just sales growth, because we know that's where the, where future sales will come from. You know, we've unlocked a model that we think is making a real impact there. Some real range groups have seen that customer count growth, which I'll discuss in a moment. If we just go to the next slide, 31. Just going to the second point. You know, we reinvested in the franchise space through Project Ignite that we shared with you in the last year.
That is working. You know, we've seen 23 new stores in H1, that's compared to 23 for the full year in the prior year. In fact, in the Gap Map data that we see, Domino's has opened more restaurants in that half than any other QSR in Australia. Included in that number is three of our Mobile Pizza Kitchen stores, which, you know, we've shared that with many of you. It's a fully fledged store on wheels. It's a truck. What it gives us is the ability to get into some smaller communities where previously we might not have tried that with a traditional store.
The Mobile Pizza Kitchen comes with a lower cost base, and it's also got the flexibility to be able to move if that particular town didn't work. That's a really exciting prospect for store growth in the coming months. Of course, just on to point 3 there. You know, protecting and rebuilding franchisee profitability is our most important focus in the business at the moment on the back of that really heavy inflation that we've had in the last half. What we're finding is that we're getting variable results from franchisees. Certainly in our top 25%-50% of franchisees, we're seeing some really good results where there's stores and franchise groups are actually making more money in H1 of this year versus H1 of 2022.
That's really on the back of those stores that have been able to execute operationally and pass on that value to customers are getting rewarded by customers. Those stores that have not been able to execute operationally and have given the customer the same or lesser service than what the customer got previously, they have not been as successful in passing on that inflation. We know that we've got lighthouse stores that we have our national rally coming up next week where we'll be sharing with all of their franchisees. We've got a record attendance at that rally, and we've got some really clear lighthouse stories that we can share with the network of what it looks like to successfully pass on that inflation and get rewarded by customers.
We did have, just to the fourth point there. We did have some franchisees that exited the business, due to underperformance. You know, we measure that through our ABF program. That's why we can see that our corporate store count has increased in that path. We will aim to re-franchise those stores. Of course, that'll happen on the back of just good unit economics. Also something we're doing is our manager to franchisee program, that we have designed, and we'll be launching that at our national rally next week, where we'll be working with franchisees to sponsor their managers into a franchise. That'll be a really exciting program.
Just to the last point, you know, rebuilding store returns and payback is our main focus by increasing our average weekly order counts. Something that Josh is going to expand on later in the presentation is that we've been working on a new voucher system. We call it our Flexible Voucher system. What it does is it gives us an ability to start with a really sharp headline price for customers. I mean, we're talking, you know, for some of our delivered deals, as much as $10 cheaper on the headline price of the deal. It gives the customer the ability to upgrade that as they wish. We...
No green shoots so far, but we've been testing this in ANZ since December, and we've started to roll that nationally now over the last two or three weeks. We're seeing some really good results. We feel as though we've found a bit of a sweet spot where we can give value to the customer, but we also give the customer the ability to upgrade that deal. That's where we provide margin to franchisees and corporate stores. All the data we're seeing so far is that we are getting that sweet spot of margin protection whilst also getting customer count growth. Josh will expand on that a little bit later in the presentation. I'd like to hand over to Marika Stegmeijer, who will take us through everything we're doing in Domino's for Good.
Thank you, Dave. Good morning to everyone. I'm pleased to share with you today another update on our ESG program, Domino's for Good. As VP, we're committed to contributing to a more sustainable, prosperous, and inclusive future for all our stakeholders, which of course include our team members, our franchisees, our customers, our business partners, investors, and the communities in which we operate. With our Domino's for Good program, we believe in a better slice for everyone. To us, this means to achieve a measurable positive impact for our main key stakeholders by 2030. As my colleagues have shared with you today, we're putting in place the right strategies to further improve the performance of the business. These responses today, in our view, do not undermine, I'm gonna stress that, the delivery of our critical longer-term sustainability objectives. Moving on to the next slide.
As you may have seen over the last few years, we've worked hard to build our global ESG strategy and performance framework. Our FY22 sustainability re-report, which was released this half year, of course, reflects the progress we've made so far. As we've shared in previous updates, the progress we achieved this year is clearly the result of a very dedicated leadership team, many engaged team members and external partners who share our passion to create a better slice for everyone. This slide summarizes some of the main highlights of our FY22 achievements. I'm not gonna read all of them here, as you can read them already on the slide. Just wanna stress that with our last sustainability report, we started to report with reference to global ESG reporting frameworks, GRI and SASB.
We're working on further improving our ESG data collection and reporting process, we're also considering other reporting frameworks like TCFD, which I know many investors are interested in. We're also working towards compliance with the upcoming European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. We're keeping an eye, of course, on developments in that field in our APAC markets. Moving on to the next slide. As we shared in previous updates, we believe that science-based targets will help us to do the right thing, and it will help us to measure and report on our progress consistently over time. These targets are based on keeping global warming to our 1.5 degree pathway, our impact on that. To reach these targets, we've set net zero emissions target by 2050 and intermediate targets by 2030.
In order to achieve the targets, we focus our actions on three main impact areas, which you can see on this slide. On sustainable stores and operations, responsible sourcing, and sustainable product innovation. For each of these focus areas, we've identified the most important actions. They're also summarized here. We've put in place roadmaps that further help us to take the right actions for our business. Some concrete examples on the work that we're currently doing, that's currently taking place. In stores, we are measuring the energy and waste, and we're creating guidelines on sustainable stores, the markets can adapt and should adapt. Some of them are already opening sustainable stores soon or planning to do that soon. We're engaging with our key suppliers on environmental ambition.
We're discussing projects to reduce our emissions in our value chain, such as looking at improving animal feed, sustainable farming, and tackling deforestation in our value chain. As was mentioned before by Don Meij, our new products also are supposed to include a big sustainability component. Every new product needs to be more sustainable than the previous one. We're working on sustainable packaging guidelines, and we plan to communicate the footprint of our products in some of our European markets soon. To conclude, we understand that now more than ever, our stakeholders expect us to take action on environmental social issues. In our view, there can be no wavering from our joint commitment to build a sustainable future, We recognize that the long-term success of our company is linked to a thriving planet and society.
Moving forward, we would like to maintain a transparent, as we are trying to do today, and with our sustainability report and constructive dialogue with our stakeholders on our journey towards 2030. We encourage all of you to please share your observations and your feedback, and we welcome that. Thank you for today. I now would like to hand over back to Don.
Thank you, Marieke. I know we're all proud of the work that you're leading and that the teams are all working on around the world. Well done. If you come with me now onto slide 36, I'd like to talk a little bit now about looking forward. Firstly, we do still expect to see some commodity increases in this calendar year as we forecast. Although they are coming on at materially less than they were last year. We are also forecasting, listening to governments around the world, that we will be getting labor increases.
One of the first things is that there is a potential for unanticipated inflationary pressures. There can be still surprises, even spikes in labor, in different markets around the world in the way that they may react. We're very well aware of that. That's built into our planning as we think through the initiatives and knowing that we've constantly gotta make sure that we're able to pass through the inflationary pressures that come our way. I think the toolbox that we've been learning and building is really growing. One of those you're gonna hear a lot more about from Josh in our Flexible Voucher, the voucher that is the voucher for everybody, I'm gonna let him go through the detail for that.
I also can share that at this time, as we do take price up, we're still focused on more for more, that as we, you know, products need to grow with those prices, and you're gonna see that in the imminent weeks with the value range in Australia as we make those better. Ultimately, we're in the value business. The QSR industry is the value business, and the value equation at Domino's is product plus service plus image divided by price and affordable price, and that's central to attracting and building our frequency. We've got that right in carryout, and we're gonna keep throwing more fuel on that fire. We didn't quite get it right in delivery. That's saying as an aggregate across the group.
Already, we can see elements of our business where we are getting that right, and we're seeing the positive shift in momentum, be it early days. Management are confident on the strategy that we're employing, and we do expect to see increase in our customer counts and sales rebound. The fundamentals of the value tree that we presented last year are still alive and well in the business, and you're gonna see that on the next page. Then I'm now gonna hand over to Martin as one of the first initiatives to put into more detail around the value tree on slide 38. Thank you, Martin.
Thank you, Don. Let me take you through the store initiatives we have already taken place. Delivery times remain industry-leading through fortressing e-bikes and Domino's end-to-end ownership of the ordering experience. Supply chain initiatives, including the expansion of in-store dough-making through whole Asia, will support operational efficiencies with offsetting savings. Reduced delivery times are still the key in the determinant of heightened product quality and customer satisfaction scores. We also launched Club 1845. It's included 18-minute delivery times and a 4.5-star product ratings for the highest achievers each quarter. Year-to-date, we are currently at 17 stores who are in this Club 1845, currently 63 stores are on track to reach Club 1845 in Q3.
I also would like to tell or ask you to please watch this video, on a later stage, where one of our best franchisees in Japan is explaining actually what Club 1845 is. With that said, I will now give it over to Andre.
Thank you, Martin. Let me take you to page 39. As Don mentioned before, the digital sales channel performed very well and grew based on constant currency, which is even more remarkable giving the lower delivery sales that historically have a way higher online percentage. That's a testament to all the things that we've rolled out with the new app. App users are higher in CLV and have a higher frequency. I'm really excited about the additional functionalities that we continue to roll out also over the next 6 months, such as more payment choices for customers and functionality that gives the customers even more control about what they're eating.
If I conclude Martin's point on store operations and the digital performance, it is clearly that product development and pricing should be our primary focus. Let me take you to product development first before Josh takes over and talks about our pricing initiatives. We have developed a lot of new menu additions, and we already talked about the Crispy Fries in the Netherlands, the Burger Range, the My Box. The good thing is that there's a lot of learnings that we share across all our markets. There's a lot more coming, and what I'm excited about is that the things that are coming are unique to Domino's and designed to be delivered. To talk more about value and pricing, I will hand over to Josh at this moment.
Yeah. Thanks, Andre. I think, you know, excuse me. With, you know, operations being really strong, you know, with evidence by strong NPS. You know, we've got strong tech, we've got new products. Really the last remaining piece is pricing. You know, we've been. You know, it's quite complex in each one of the markets that we operate in. You know, in the last six months as it relates to, you know, raising prices, you know, it's fair to say we haven't always got it quite right. You know, our pricing strategy has really been all about trying to provide strong order-driving value whilst protecting our margins of all our stores.
I think the good news is that we've found a mechanism to do this, and subsequently we've been testing, which is being referred to in this presentation already by Dave and by Don. Basically, a mechanism called a Flexible Voucher, which, in our view, answers all those items of, you know, margin, flexibility, and giving customers what they want and presenting strong headline value. The look of these, the look and feel of the vouchers is gonna be very familiar to many of you, as it is already in the marketplace, across some, you know, other companies out there. Let me highlight some of these, the, you know, a couple of examples of.
What this looks like. If you look at this page alone, you can see headline pricing of two pizzas, two sides for AUD 17. Now that's new flex pricing. If you look back only three months ago, we would have been presenting a headline price of AUD 27.99 for that same deal. What this means is that the customer can tell, you know, the headline price is AUD 17, attracts the customer into the platform, then it's up to them. If they'd like to upgrade or change out sides or pizzas, it's up to them, it's their choice. What's interesting is that we're actually seeing higher ticket, with a, you know, even presenting a lower, a lower headline price, by offering more choice in this platform.
Now, of course, we grab these learnings very quickly, and we start rolling these out across our group. You know, I'll give you an example of what this looks like in Japan. We've got a big value layer there called Big Wednesday. Our original headline pricing would have been around the 2,600 JPY for three small pizzas. We can now offer that headline price at 1,990 JPY, and that is being tested throughout the market over the next, you know, now and over the next months ahead.
If you take Europe, an example of this is that we used to be presenting, you know, two pizza offer for $30 pickup. We can now present a headline price of $19.99, which is great positioning in the market, great value positioning, but important to note, driving a higher ticket and contribution to the business. It's a, it's a win-win. Customers get what they want. They can do it whichever way they like. It does protect margin at a store level. We continue to roll this out, test it, and perfect this over the months to come across DPE. At this point, I wanna hand back to Don to the final slides.
Thank you, Josh. You come with me now onto slide 42. I want to reconfirm our future outlook that we will have 4,000 stores or more than 4,000 stores open by the end of this calendar year. We'll also have more than 5,000 stores open in the calendar year, somewhere at 2026, 2027, and that we believe that we will be able to achieve our outlook of 7,250 stores and growing over the next decade. You come with me onto slide 43. As we've talked about today, as a result of lower than anticipated sales in the recent trading period, we are allowing for this one particular year, the anticipated same store sales to be below the 3-5-year outlook.
We do continue to reconfirm, we believe that the 3%-6% is accurate over 3-5 years. We have big development teams, and they have a full pipeline of stores right now, and it really comes down to just franchise sentiment in this half, and flowing into the next financial year on when those stores will open. That's largely led out of Europe. You're seeing strong openings in the rest of the business and now additionally with Malaysia and Singapore. CapEx is within the region of what we expect and have given as an outlook. If you come onto slide 44. Whilst we did achieve positive sales in Q2, they weren't as strong as anticipated as we saw some of the unwinding of our delivery pricing late into December into January.
We've seen a short-term decline in those delivery customers, now we're getting that into a new balance for the value equation. Flexible Vouchers is one of the most significant examples of that, where since December we are now seeing improvement in those original test stores now rolling nationally, an improvement in delivery count. Equally as important, I wanna reinforce accelerating the carry out market, which has already been performing well. There's a couple of headwinds that we just point to there. The acquisitions of Malaysia and Singapore are trading to expectations, we expect that you'll see some good acceleration in growth there, we anticipate to take on Cambodia in the coming months. The Asian business is materially bigger than where we were just three years ago.
You know, Josh pointed out it's 121% larger. There's some maturation in the Japanese stores as we really did put the foot to the floor, as we said we would. By and large, as we get this order count right, we do expect to see that pivot in the leverage. Customer satisfaction is high through our stores. Operational execution, one would argue, well, if you're 44% bigger, is one of the problems execution? Well, execution and delivery pricing, you're absolutely correct. Execution and operations, no. We've actually got that right. We're actually improving as we speak, despite the fact that we're larger. Our technology platforms continue to get better. In fact, aggregator sales that have declined globally, we're winning share inside the aggregator sales.
Even better than that, it's actually our own platform, which is the most profitable way for us to drive our business, continues to grow and accelerate. That's worth noting in a time when there's a shift that, you know, carry out customers typically run at a lower percentage and a lower ticket average than our delivery customers. That's blended into that online environment. For us, it's always been about value, and we've just really focused front and foremost on getting that pricing right. We're in a buoyant QSR industry. We've been the exception and it's, you know, it's disappointing for me to share that with you in delivery, that we've been the exception. The actual industry itself around the globe in different ways is really strong and rebounding.
We, you know, we can point that the fastest growth stores currently in our business are the CBD stores again, as you know, they... Customers are returning back to the offices and therefore picking pizzas up on the way home. That behavior, we, you know, we're literally seeing in some cases record sales in the CBD stores, whether they be in a small town like Kansas City all the way through to a downtown Sydney City store. If you come with me now onto slide 45. With the new markets and organic growth, you know, we now have an additional 1,140 stores and 44% larger than we were just 3 years ago.
I really feel positive about the strong tenure in our franchisees and as we highlight, they're investing and they are the elements of our business that are growing. The high tenure in our leadership team and support around the world is literally second to none in our industry. That's why, you know, we feel so confident about our ability to deliver as we have in the past and will into the future. We continue to drive performance of our network through various initiatives like the Flexible Voucher, the new app, and, you know, we're also targeting savings from our stores. You know, the big projects of the back of house dough rollout.
Producing dough in stores brings savings into our stores, and also delivering a high quality outcome for our customers, potentially reducing the number of deliveries to our stores. Once again, a saving, but even improvement to our ESG and, you know, our carbon footprint. All positive initiatives that we're focused on in the business. We anticipate that our same store sales may be lower than our 3-5 year outlook in the current window. We also are saying that we've got a strong pipeline of stores. They're there to open. It's just timing. Largely that sits in Europe. We got a very transparent pricing model we feel really good about. That digital Flexible Voucher, which by the way, will also be seen in our in-store experience as well through our point of sale systems.
You can't get that on an aggregator platform. It's an all-in-one voucher. We talk about it as the unlimited voucher. You can do everything and anything with that voucher. Whereas typically in the past it's always been focused that it's a certain way. It's only a pickup, it's only a delivery voucher. It can only do these things. It's the customer's choice, the way they want to do that. It's worth also noting that whether it's a value range and for AUD 5 more, you can get the premium pizza. Ultimately, that's still very affordable pricing and it's something for everybody that we're quite excited about.
It's now from here to be able to execute, get all accounts back in the right place in the delivery segment, and then we'll be able to pivot from our larger network, maturing our corporate stores that are newer, particularly in Japan, and then leveraging that big scale both for our franchisees and for you, our shareholders. Let me be really clear in my last statement before I hand over to questions. The QSR industry remains positive, and it also should be clear that the long term growth is through convenience, and we believe largely in the areas of delivery with carryout and actually Domino's delivering. And we believe we have the strategy, the store footprint, the expansion ability to deliver on this. At this point in time, I'm gonna hand over now to Q&A. Back to you, Nathan.
Thank you very Don . We have a number of questions that have come in on the Q&A. As I mentioned in the group chat to all of our attendees. For those attendees who, for compliance reasons, are not able to send questions via Zoom, you can also send questions to investor.relations@dominos.com.au. As I said, we have a lot of questions and so let's get straight stuck into them. Where I can, I will try and group some of the questions who've asked the same kinds of questions into themes. The first question is from Michael Simotas, and I'd like to thank Jefferies for hosting the results week this week for us.
At the time of the equity raise, you seemed to be expecting materially better, first half NPAT outcome given you seemed comfortable with consensus at the time, which was AUD 77 million-AUD 78 million. What happened in the tail end of the year?
Yeah, one of the things that historically is pricing, needs to go for a number of buy cycles. In a normal year, you're doing a good three, six-month pricing tests. The pricing that worked in, that we implemented throughout the October period continued to show good results into November. As we got through more buy cycles, the delivery element started to reduce. We realized that some of these structures in our bundling, in some cases, potentially our Domino's service fee, which by the way, isn't in every market, but it is in some markets. That, you know, that unwound into the December and January period, which you can see January, February period. Already with Flexible Vouchers, we can see a change in that momentum in the Australian, New Zealand business.
Strong momentum in Denmark, good momentum in Malaysia, Singapore and even in the Netherlands. A lot more work. We've got teams right now in Japan and the rest of Europe, making sure that we're getting this pricing right. It's all about delivery order count growth. That's where we've got to get it right. We see green shoots of that. We've got to see, like we saw in the last window, caution is because we've got to see that run through a number of buy cycles before you can say it's absolute.
Thank you, Don. now, are you expecting, then, trends in the second half to be better or worse than in the first half?
It just comes down to the timing of these order count growths. You know, where we can see, as I mentioned, I just pointed out some markets with Australia and New Zealand and the new markets, Malaysia, Singapore and, the Netherlands and, Denmark. We're seeing positive momentum. We've got to see those same items implemented now through France, Japan, Taiwan and, Germany. You know, I put all of this, but the inflation we've taken in France and Germany is extraordinary. I mean, you know, when we woke up in April, May, dreaming about how we were gonna get through this, I had a much bleaker view in those early months than I do now, and I feel quite confident.
I think, you know, hats off, to Andre, Stoffel team on keeping our franchisees whole at this point and delivering. It's just timing now. That's really when all this flows through.
Okay, a few questions then. Let's dig into franchisees and franchisee profitability. Again, Michael has asked, so franchisee margins have deteriorated sharply. Can you talk about trends across the territory? Michael has asked, sorry, is there a significant tail of loss-making franchisees? The final question, this has also been asked by some other analysts, including Richard Barley. Has DP done anything to support franchisee profitability? Will you need to invest more to support the franchisee base?
Yeah. I'm gonna hand back over to the rest of the team here so that I'm not the only one speaking. The first thing, it's all about order count growth. When we get that order count growth, our franchisees' profitability accelerates, our profitability accelerates. That, you know, when we look at our objective and key result focus in this business this quarter, it's a single focus: order count growth, largely led by delivery growth. That's the first thing. I'll hand over to Josh and Andre and the rest of the team. Maybe start with you, Josh, on the first few parts of that question?
Sorry.
I suspect, while Josh is unmuting, I do believe Colin's the last investor call, but that means Josh will make a AUD 50 donation to Domino's for Good as our standard bet. While Josh is just figuring that out, we'll gracefully hand over to Andre, and we'll give some color on the European franchisee situation.
Yeah. As we said in the presentations, we have not passed on all the increases at the same time that they happened. In that sense, we have supported the franchisees in their profitability. It's not, it wasn't necessarily something that we planned, but this is how we help the franchisees. Yes, their EBIT has been impacted like ours. And like Don said, it is order count growth that we need to get up and especially on delivery. We're not forgetting about the value conscious customer that comes up for pickup. That's the good thing, that we have those two legs in our business. Yeah. Not sure what I can add to that.
Maybe just press the unmute button now.
Yeah, sorry. I was having a fight with my laptop. My, my apologies. you know, same thing. It's about order counts. Are we providing more support to franchisees? no more than we have done to, you know, to grow our store base. Those types of things are still in place. Yeah, not much more to add there on that.
If we can go country specific. Over to you, David, and then follow it, Stoffel.
Yeah. I indicated earlier that we're seeing a real difference in performance if we. I mean, there's an average, but what we're tending to do with franchisees is to drill down into percentile groups. If we look at four different percentile groups, our the top percentile of franchisees are actually considerably more profitable this year than they were last year. and that's about execution of the model. Then when we look at the group that's 50 to 75% percentile, they're similar to where they were last year. Then we've got the 25 - 50 percentile that are a little bit low. Then we've got the bottom percentile that are not managing to pass on the inflation or to deal with it.
I mean, similar to Josh's point, we're not having to offer more support than what we have in previous years. You know, what I think we'll find is that those franchisees, and this is probably no different to any other trading year, that those franchisees who execute the model really well and maintain their profits, we imagine will look to expand at some stage. You know, it's likely that those deals may come from the franchisees in the bottom percentile who are not managing to execute the model as well.
Stoffel.
Yeah. Building on what Dave just said, we haven't done anything what we haven't done other years either. We always look where we can support franchisees, by doing the right thing by the customers looking for growth. Have we done this half, but not in a different way. What you also need to remember is that some of the things that actually hurt our bottom line is because we've taken some tough decisions to make sure the franchisees stay profitable. If I look at the some of the decisions we took, they hurt the customer count, but they actually increased, per order profit for franchisees. Franchisee profitability in the last quarter, we're pretty happy with.
If I could have signed off on that amount at the start of, the Ukraine War, I would have, definitely. I wouldn't have blinked to do so. Yeah, there's work to be done. We need to increase our customer counts to get to the next level. Some of these decisions were made to make sure that our franchisees stay profitable.
Maybe some comments, last comments from David Burness then on, franchisee profitability, for ANZ.
I think that's AUD 50 as well, Nate.
I did comment on the different percentiles that that we've got. I do notice some other kind of questions in the chat around, you know, a goal profit % for franchisees. One thing that we're really focused on with the franchisees, and this has always been the HBN conversation, is that, you know, we're not focused on a profit % or even a dollars, because as a franchisee myself for many years, I was very passionate about that fact that, you know, I've never been able to pay my bills in any month or quarter with a %.
Is paid in AUD. You know, we're working with franchisees to make sure that as they grow customer counts, that they're making more AUD than they did last year. Similar to what I said before, we're seeing big bands of franchisees, and I'm talking hundreds of stores, where they are making more profit AUD than they did last year. You know, that will be our focus with the franchisees.
Thank you, David. Another way that we've talked about in the past, 'cause that's absolutely front and center accurate, is that it's the return on investment. When we see our stores move towards, in a dollar sense, a three-year payback, we see acceleration of 2.5, we can barely stock the system. We haven't got that in every market right now as some have migrated up towards 4. That's where we've seen a slowdown in appetite. Yeah, it's all about the dollars to the investment and trying to head towards that 3 and ultimately 2.5 times payback.
Thank you for that, team. That question had been essentially asked by Bryan Raymond, Craig Woolford, Shaun Cousins had also asked similar, but then also asked: Can that be achieved? This really goes down to the strength of the model. Can that DMP achieve an 8%-10% growth store, with store growth with franchisee EBITDA margins at 7.5%, whilst also the franchisees are also able to get that? Can those percentages both be right?
The percentages isn't quite the right way to look at it. As we just said, it's all about the ROI, the return on capital employed for a franchisee, and we've got to move towards that 3-year payback. With an accelerated order count growth, it really does quickly pivot. Many of these stores are past the break-even, so the contribution margin is really high. It's both ways. Leverage down when we've been -2%, we also have that, you know, a negative leverage that way. We're really, really focused on this order count growth. We believe we get that pivoting, and we've got strong store count growth. We have solid store count growth in Australia. We have solid store count growth in most of Asia. You know, you're gonna see imminently.
I should even have flagged earlier in the presentation, in fact. It says we've opened 15 stores. You'll see in the next 24 hours or so, that'll add by 4, so it's closer to 19. That's 3 more than Evelyn's, another one in Malaysia. You know, ultimately, it's about that. It's about getting that pivot in order count, get the leverage from that, 'cause most of the stores are past their break even. Then you'll see these stores open with the confidence mostly in Europe that we've gotta be.
Thank you, Dom. There's some questions in terms of some commentary made at the AGM regarding the profit outlook for the full year. I just wanna make sure I've got the correct person in front of me. James Lee had asked you previously guided the AGM to FY23 NPAT growth ex AUD 7 million foreign exchange impact. Do you believe that's reasonable? If so, is it good growth year-on-year? What's gonna be that key pivot?
Look, if I don't get every element right, somebody please jump in. You know, ultimately for us in this window was the timing of getting all of those Flexible Vouchers, all of that pricing right, lifting delivery, increasing the momentum in carryout. Because we're in transition with all of that, You know, that's really why we are where we are in removing that conversation from the AGM. Nathan, have I missed anything that I should say to that or Josh or Andre?
I would simply follow up. I mean, to be really transparent, there's some commentary this morning from some analysts who'd essentially said that, you know, is this by not repeating or not restating that guidance, is this essentially walking away? Perhaps, Dom, if you could then talk to, you know, what you do think the outlook looks like for the full year. You've talked a lot about customer count growth.
The outlook for this full year is that, we're not going to come into the 3-5-year outlook for same-store sales. The outlook for store count is the stores are in the pipeline. We could be in that 8%-10%. It all comes down to sentiment now in, likely in Europe and the timing of that. Do some of those stores move into the next half, or even to the timing of when we have that profitability right. That's really the variable here. It's unlike in previous years where you know, like any year, the length of time of anywhere from nine months to two years to get a store in the pipeline, they're in the pipeline.
It's now just the appetite for the franchisee pushing go on that site. For us, with the site, if you can imagine, in many cases, the site's built. You could drive to that location and look through the windows. There's a full store behind that site. Then, you know, we may be enjoying rent-free or starting to pay rent, which on a relativity basis is small. It's just waiting for that sentiment to move to say, "Bang, I'm opening it now," or, "I'm opening it next year.
Thank you very much for that. I've got some questions from Richard Barwick. I'm just going around just different regions. If customers have stepped away from Domino's, where have they gone? Are people switching to other QSR alternatives or switching to supermarkets and preparing their own meals at home?
It's really important to note, and I'll hand back to Ruben and with Andre and so on. The QSR market is buoyant. The industry is buoyant. Our carryout element is buoyant. Delivery is down, but we've been down more against what we should be down, and we know that through our data. That's what we've got to get right. Andre?
If you compare to the same half year, obviously, dining was closed last year in Europe around this time. Some people went from having more deliveries to back to going to dine in and going to restaurants because they reopened. In general, we've seen aggregator turnovers. We've seen share of other QSRs in aggregators go down. We took some share back to our app, which is a good thing.
The biggest, where customers went, is back to dine-ins that were available and drive-throughs.
Thank you. Let's just, while we're on that same topic, Bryan Raymond has asked that, I mean, we've obviously talked about a buoyant QSR, but are our prices out of line with QSR competitors?
Yeah. I think I might hand over to, once again, to Josh, David, and Stoffel and Simon to give some more specifics.
Yeah. Look, I Sorry. Go, Dave.
Go ahead, Josh.
Yeah. I was just gonna talk in relation to maybe Japan and, you know, what we're projecting. You know, there was a shift away from delivery, as everything opened up and people started looking for more value options. There's many, many options in both Taiwan and Japan. You know, you walk down the street and find, you know, relative value around everywhere. We saw a sort of drop out of delivery and, you know, our pricing didn't move to reflect that fast enough. We're now, you know, going back to the Flexible Voucher, this is the way we present better value in the marketplace and, you know, actually we'll come in and present that headline price a lot lower than our competitors in that space.
That's why we're putting a lot around this, and, you know, looking forward to seeing those customers return, both on a carryout and a delivery. Get more carryout than we already do, which is buoyant, but then get the customers to return from a delivery aspect. Dave, do you wanna add to that?
Look, we've found, you know, the question around is our pricing right in comparison to competitors. You know, we're looking at our pricing in comparison to two things. Firstly, to competitors and also to CPI. We're seeing a lot of data. We're talking to DPC, you know, the franchise store around that fact. What we find is that if our pricing t here's a real sweet spot where we sit about 1% under CPI and also slightly under our competitors where we see order count growth. I think what happened in the second half of or in the first half of this year was that we took our pricing slightly above where it needed to be. In that, you know, we talked earlier about that flex pricing.
We've been very, very conscious of competitive pricing when we're doing that. I mean, some of those prices that Josh was alluding to, you know, we're finding that our headline price for a delivery deal is a similar price to what our QSR competitors are doing for a pickup deal or a carryout deal. That makes it exceptionally good value as a headline price. What customers are then doing is they're choosing to upgrade that deal. For example, the deal that is two pizzas and two sides for $25, that's a comparative value to what you would get when one of our competitors to carry that out. What we're finding though is that the average ticket on that is about $38. It's, you know, that's where the sweet spot sits.
I think that we've probably got our pricing, right going forward.
If I can add one other thing, element too, Dave. A good example in our business is that the Australian business for many years was requiring the AUD 5 value range to be a part of its arsenal. What flex has done is as we've taken price to AUD 5.99 in some markets and AUD 6.99 in Sydney, the Flexible Voucher with the carryout of one plus two and two plus two is actually fulfilling that gap. That's why we're still seeing strong custom account growth even though we've been able to move value range, which we haven't been able to do as easily in previous years. This flex is flexing delivery, but it's also flexing carryout.
On top of that, for Germany, I actually see some real good opportunity because, as Don said, carryout is pretty strong. Delivery is where we're still searching to get the pricing right. Germany has the highest delivery counts in the whole of our business. It's as a percentage of our business, delivery runs the highest. In most other markets we went after carryout in the past. We started in Germany, then we got into the age of delivery, fueled with a lot of COVID, delivery not really being able to attract customers to come and carryout, having shops close for carryout due to local legislation. We really focus on delivery end of things.
We've got a underdeveloped carryout business in Germany, which a great opportunity for us. We're searching for the right pricing there. We see that with our newer stores that are built in locations that we picked, that are also really suited for carryout. We're doing really well, and we're getting to closer to where Dutch is with the division between carryout and delivery. We see great opportunity for our other stores. That for, specifically Germany, is something that we're exploring and we're driving as hard as we can.
Thank you, team. Richard has asked a question in terms of a spike in corporate stores. Richard Barwick, not Richard Tony. Richard Barwick has asked a question in terms of the increase in corporate stores in ANZ. Will this go higher, and what risk is that will occur in other territories? Maybe if I start with you, David Burness.
Look, we don't imagine we'll see a, you know, a substantial further spike in those corporate store numbers. I mean, that's been a conscious decision to remove underperforming franchisees from the system. Now we might see a little bit of movement, you know, either way within that corporate store group. As we're seeing some of those increases in order counts, and that flows through to profitability through this half, you know, I imagine that we would see more appetite from franchisees to existing franchisees to expand. The other thing I touched on earlier was that we're launching a manager to franchisee program where we'll be encouraging franchisees to sponsor store managers as franchisees. I'd imagine that that's where a lot of our expansion will come up.
Thank you very much, Dave. I think that answers in terms of then the issue of whether it goes to other markets. A question in terms of then immaturity of stores in Japan on slide seven. Are you saying, Josh, that these newer stores have been hit harder by weaker customer counts, and does this bring into question Japanese store targets?
Look, we made a decision to grow at that point. I mean, you know, we've got relatively lower order counts than other markets and, you know, a slight move in any order count does sort of, you know, make for some lower EBIT. Those stores are still maturing through their cycle. You know, we made the decision. We wanted to get critical mass in each one of the prefectures that we operated in. That was a strategic decision, so we'd get more TV and more brand bandwidth out there. Those stores will mature through that cycle. What we're doing now is actually moving some of the store growth away from those areas that we previously had, sort of split, sort of carved out in our own territories.
We're moving those to regional areas and different areas where it just takes the pressure off the model, while we get those stores to return, you know, go along their maturity cycle in a, in a more orderly fashion.
Thank you, Josh. A question in relation to Denmark. Have we confirmed a AUD 4.9 million EBIT loss for the half? I know that's in question. One store was added during the half. Why add further stores until you're at least breaking even?
Thanks, Nathan. The AUD 4.9 million, that's the comparison against the first half of 2020. We haven't broken out the half year, we are still expecting a full year better result than we had last year, as we also said in the full year announcement back in August. Coming to the store opening, it's a good point. In the three-step approach, we've also said that until we get to step three, we don't plan on adding any stores. We really wanna first work in step two on the store level profitability, before we plan to open the next store. We do need to keep in mind that one of our major or the major issue in Denmark is the brand image.
Where we see that we're hurt most is in smaller towns where the old owners did operate stores. Actually, some of our new build stores in new areas operate a lot better than some of these old ones. When we go, when we go back into growing, we're actually pretty bullish on those. If we feel the time is right in step two, we might do that. For, for now, there's, there aren't any store openings planned, and we don't see any store openings till the end of this financial year.
Thank you, Stoffel. A question from Sridhar from the Bank of America. Given the lower customer count and pressure on delivery you're seeing in Europe, do you think you negotiated the right price for the Germany acquisition? Do you think you could have got a better deal?
In fairness, we're still in those final stages. There's some mechanisms in there that are just in the final price negotiations. It is still our expectation they'll be accretive, and shareholders will be happy. I think we're doing the right thing.
Thank you, Don. Just a question in terms o, I wanna make sure I don't miss any of the analysts who've asked the same question, but I'll start with Niraj. What's changed since the capital raise in respect to cutting guidance? Term was positive and trends all improving. Are you losing share? The peer updates have been more optimistic, which I think, Don, you've already addressed. Also Tom Kierath, on the back of that question, which regions have missed expectations and why?
The bigger unwinding happened in Japan. We had a phenomenal Christmas, but then the new year all the way into January has, you know, disappointed. That was the unwinding of some of this price. Even Australia's been a shining light through this, but even Australia had windows in there where it dipped and then came back as the flexible pricings kicked in. Predominantly it was Japan, a little bit of Australia, and then Europe, where we now have just gotta sharpen our prices to get this growth back in delivery. Sharpen our prices means the toolbox of flex.
You know, You're hearing these, I'm not sure if it's resonating, but, you know, When we're going out with a very customer-friendly, digital voucher which we call internally Flex, and the customer's choosing to pay more, we go out with a beautiful headline price, gets a lot of conversion, a lot of traction. It's more profitable for the franchisee. The question is: What is the longevity in that? That's where there's just that little bit of caution on, you know, maintaining that guidance, that we were offering at the AGM. If the trend continues as we're seeing it currently, and remember, this did start early in December for Australia.
If that continues, then you'll see us a lot more bullish as we come into the, into the full year announcement.
Thank you, Don. Questions from Sam Haddad and others in relation to commodity inflation. Can you provide further color on your current outlook comments with respect to commodity inflation versus current spot rates being off recent highs? I understand cheese is locked in on a forward six-month contract and therefore may need to wait for the next roll forward. Can you confirm when that roll forward date is going to be? In the same vein, we have a question from Bryan Raymond . How long is that lag between easing commodity and energy prices flowing through to franchisees and their prices?
I'll hand over to Josh and Andre specifically. By and large, with food, we haven't seen the spikes that we saw last year. You know, the ones that we'll see some cost increases in March and then July and then September. September is a little far out, so we get a guide, but it's not as clear with September. A lot more visibility, obviously, with March, April and then July. The commodity prices are not spiking anywhere near what we saw. Wages is a different story. Governments are talking about wage growth. What does that mean? We haven't seen one to my knowledge, unless something changed in the last week or two. You know, those will most likely still be quite reasonable. That means higher than historical averages.
I think the markets as informed as we are on that and have their own opinions. Josh, Andre, have I missed anything there?
Yeah, I think as we sort of out, you know, look at all the commodity pricing exactly for, you know, the way I see it is exactly that. We're probably seeing a bit of FX softening as it relates to some of the more import-heavy markets like Taiwan and Japan. Even as we go, sort of go through the cycles with Malaysia and Singapore, we're starting to see that sort of come off a little bit. You know, yeah, I'm not, I'm not too concerned about big changes just now. I think we'll stabilize, hopefully.
No, Don, you're right. It's mainly labor that we're looking for the next couple of or basically this calendar year. We just had an increase on the 1st of January in the Netherlands of minimum wage going up 10%. Stoffel in Germany has had big increases over the last year. Our inflation actually in store was a lot higher than the national inflation because we were hit on labor, energy and food. All at the same time. Our inflation compared to what is reported as the national average, was just a national average. In our stores, we felt it a lot heavier than what the national average was.
We expect labor, we expect it in France as well as governments tend to make up for the inflation in the, especially in the minimum wage range. Although we don't pay minimum wage in all markets and especially in bigger cities because we cannot pay minimum wage, we wouldn't get any staff. Also those wages have to go up to to have the same delta between the minimum and what they are paid.
Yeah. I wanna reinforce that we would talk a lot pre this window about our whole, you know, cycle that getting closer to customer, doing more deliveries per hour. That's still in our business. You know, in the Australian rally next week, we've got guest speakers talking about how they're thriving with higher paying more than the minimum wage in different markets because they're just more efficient. That's still the macro element, that we can do more deliveries than anybody else, and that's how we win. Whilst we're more concerned in the near term about wage growth, it then puts us down to that pressure on efficiency and getting these bundles right.
You know, obviously, if a driver goes to the door with AUD 2 or AUD 3 more than they may have only six months ago, that helps to leverage that in, 'cause it's still the same driver. If they can do it in a shorter run because we've got improved run times, we're more efficient as well 'cause we get more deliveries per hour. That's front and center as we think a little bit more about labor than food in this 12 months.
Thank you, Don. A couple of questions from Ben Gilbert. Do you think you need to pause growth projects for a period and consolidate your base to lift profitability and get this humming? The profitability and ROIC price looks bigger here on a 1-3 year view.
I think that it's still our view that this is an order count issue based around delivery. It's not a big, full macro problem for DPE. It's not like we've got a lot of different other issues. This is predominantly about getting this delivery order count growth right, continue to accelerate carry out, and then metrics improve and we're all winning. We're in a buoyant market. QSR is really buoyant. I'm a little embarrassed to say that probably for the first time in a very long time, we didn't get it right in a buoyant market. We haven't got the share that we deserve. I would say that burgers overall is winning. Around the world, burgers are probably getting it more right in most markets.
The customer's there, and as soon as we get that right, there's no reason we shouldn't continue to accelerate. That's why when we look at that, you know, this year getting out of 4,000 stores, 2026, 2027, getting out of 5,000 stores. We believe that's very realistic. It's just this short how long is this window getting that delivery order count growth right.
Thanks, Don. This should make a pretty simple follow-up question for you to answer then for Ben. Despite M&A and new stores the first half, EPS was below pre-COVID. Do you see the second half as likely to be as well? Is the business now just structurally a lower margin, lower ROIC business? In theory, it shouldn't be, given the franchisees, mix, digital mix and scale, but it looks to be.
Yeah, the scoreboard says that right now, but that's not what we believe will happen as soon as we get the leverage from that order count growth. Both franchisees and we will benefit from that. You know, it's unfortunate. We've accelerated all this growth. We've added already three new markets with the fourth one about to be added, and we've put a serious amount of new stores on the ground, and we haven't had the leverage from that yet. I think that my observation in this business is as soon as we get that right, franchisees accelerate, and then immediately that 44%
You know, as you've highlighted, our earnings are lower now than they were when we had 44% less stores. I don't think that that's a long-term issue. This is a near-term issue. Near-term being as long as we. It is all about delivery order count growth and accelerating the carrier growth.
Thank you, Don. A couple questions here from A.J. from Macquarie. How's franchisee profitability in Europe and the percentage of stores that are operating below 8%? Can you give us a feel of the pipeline for store openings in Europe over the next 18 months?
Over to you, Andre.
Sorry, Nathan, can you quickly repeat that? Yes. Just reading.
No, that's okay. Yes. There's some questions from A.J. from Macquarie. Just asking, in relation to franchisee profitability, in Europe and the, just follow around the number of stores operating below 8%. What do you see the store pipeline like?
Like Don said, it's all about the confidence of the franchisees in the future. As Dave pointed out, there are franchisees in all brackets, and the franchisees that are in a good bracket actually do wanna open stores and are opening more stores. I know we had a slow half year. We don't actually think in six-month cycles, you'll see an increase over the next six months. There's still a lot of franchisees in that higher bracket that do wanna expand their business.
Thank you for that. Just a question in terms of service fees, delivery service fees from Standard Ad. Just asking in relation to Europe, will this now not move forward? I've got a follow-up question for Martin in terms of the service fee in Japan. Will you now look at reducing or rolling that back to deliver growth? Maybe Andre, if we start with you in relation to service fees in Europe.
Yeah. We tested a lot, different kinds of fees, service fees. We even called them energy fees. It's not a surprise that fees are longer term. Initially, they look like people accept it, but longer term are not all, not driving frequency. What we see now with introducing the Flexible Voucher, we talked about that a lot, is that we think there's an opportunity to go back to more simple pricing and get away from fees. We still have fees in certain markets like Denmark, like France, where a delivery fee is more normal than other markets like the Netherlands, for instance.
We look at it as from a country base, and we really look what it does do with frequency, profitability of the orders. Data tends to take longer to really measure that frequency. The average order frequency in the Netherlands is or in Europe is roughly every 3 months. It takes you a while to see that, the actual effect of adding fees.
Thank you for that, Andre. I do note that it's currently 2:00 A.M. in Germany, so Marika is going to drop off the call now. She has some important meetings with our partners this day. We're just gonna continue on because we've got another about 8-10 questions that I'm keen for us to cover as many of them as we can. The next question will be for Richard Coney. Sorry, I just need to bring up the Q&A chat again in front of me. Yes, the question is, how comfortable are you with the balance sheet position versus covenants given the challenges ahead in the second half? That's from Brian Rak. That's AUD 50 for the Domino's for Good.
I would like to point out our Doing Good charity has cleaned up AUD 150 so far today, so. None of that from me this half. Thank you all for your generous donations. Over to Richard.
Just make sure you pay the $50, Nathan. I'll be auditing it. Yeah. Probably just highlighting again slide 20 where I probably, you know, Sorry. This is why I put in that sort of, let's say, slide 20, our banking partners or banking section, where fundamentally with Sorry, one second. Yeah, we're Yeah. Slide 20, where DPE, you know, we've basically raised new debt, you know, to four-year term. Most importantly, we've now locked our interest rates out 4-6 years at below 1%.
Obviously that makes that interest coverage, ability to service that debt, in a very strong position with our, you know, interest coverage ratio now at 24.8x , coming off higher rates, but you know, our covenant was 3 x, so we're a long way ahead of that. Our leverage is more back to sort of a position which we like at 2.1 x and, you know, our covenant is 3 x. Feel like we have a good headroom at this point.
Thank you very much, Richard. I had a question in terms of from Craig Woolford, and I'll address this one to David Burness. Australian profitability was impressive in the first half, given weak sales. How much of a contribution did the store acquisitions make to the half's results? Was it a benefit of increasing the number of corporate stores?
No, it was more about, the fact that we were, you know, we were quite nimble in our pricing.
Management through that half. You know, we probably managed to pass on a bit more of the inflation cost than what some other markets did. Having said that, we, you know, I did note earlier that, you know, our focus for this half is really around that order count growth. We feel as though we can probably do both of those things in the second half of the year. No, I wouldn't say that it was about the acquisition of those stores. It was more about getting that blend right, passing on cost.
Thank you, Dave. A question from Aryan Norozi. How can we recover inflation for franchisees that's still building this year when we are still sharpening our prices?
One of the beautiful things about Flex is it's digital. You should be aware that the digital activation teams around pricing are doing A/B tests 5 days a week, some markets 6 days a week right now. What that means is that, you know, they're playing with all sorts of little triggers. There's some Flex pricing, for example, that hasn't even been rolled in markets that we already know are successful, that have already tested really well, and then will go through a longevity test now. You know, it's an interesting thing with pricing and because we're presenting bundles, we're presenting individual pizzas, we think there's still a lot of elasticity in this whole Flex.
you know, I'll give you one thing that you can't do in the Flexible Voucher that you'll be able to do when it will be the unlimited Flex, is that you can't do unlimited pizzas in it right now, and you can't do unlimited sides. In other words, you get the three plus three, you can switch them out, adding another pizza isn't mechanically in that digital, but it's being built right now, and we see that as being accretive. There will be some mix and match ability coming soon. you know, right now it's pizza and it's sides. In some markets that could become, in the Netherlands, loaded fries or pizza, or it could become a pizza rice bowl or pizza, or pasta or pizza.
As that flexibility grows, the tests illustrate good ticket movement. I mean, the pasta test has been really positive where it's really accretive. It's actually, people are quite comfortable to add that as additional, as a meal, not just as a side. We think the benefit of Flex is the agility. Because it's digital, it's immediate. A lot of these other coupons leak into the offline and online, and they're whereas this is, you can track conversions, where the conversion's at, where tickets growth's at. If you can imagine a matrix for a franchisee and imagine on one end you've got order count growth, and on the that could be on the horizontal. Sorry, on the vertical. On the horizontal you would have contribution margin.
The sweet spot is how do you get up into the right hand. How do you get really strong order count growth, which really hangs the low margin. Sometimes in that it's also that just with a slight change, you can see that it produces materially more orders at just even a slightly lower margin per order, but therefore the net profit of that coupon is materially higher or higher. There's all these sort of tweaks and those tests are constant. You would expect, we're an agile digital business. We're just applying. What we just have learnt in the last six months is how to do this now with pricing. In the pre-inflationary world, we didn't have to be as agile in pricing. Price changes would happen in a six or 12-month window.
They were tested over long periods of time. The agility that we applied to digital platforms wasn't brought into pricing. We now have a tool that was built. It's unique. It's the only one that we're aware of in the market, and it's now what we think is our inflationary model, be it it's still early days. It's only been live since December in the Australian business and now expanding throughout the world. We're still gonna learn more as we go. That gives us a great confidence when you see, you know, David in his toolbox right now has offers which he hasn't even rolled out that are successful tests and that will contribute more profit to franchisees. He's the deepest into this learning.
Thanks so much, Don. A question from Tom Jurestko. We're down. I've got four more questions, and then I can get the audience on this off to group lunch. Tom Jurestko has asked you, with European profits falling considerably over the first half, can you maybe provide some more color on the profit by country? I'll hand over to Andre.
We already said that we expected Denmark to be better for the full year than this year. It's been roughly across all markets where Netherlands, where we're more mature and also, we can move faster because we're on TV every day. We can get a message out faster, has been impacted a little bit less. Germany, where the inflation was by far the highest in a market, has done the right thing with price increase. We've seen that a frequency loss and loss in delivery. In general, you could say Germany and France were the two markets that were the most impacted. Yeah. From a geographical perspective, that's right.
Thank you for that. In terms of central sales growth across the group, what's the composition of volume growth versus price growth? Obviously, we've spoken about a delivery count decline. Don, I'm not sure if there's additional color you'd like to provide.
Yeah. What's interesting is carryout runs a lower ticket. You can see that just by the two plus two that's highlighted in Josh's slide that he presented for AUD 17, and it's delivered for AUD 25. When you get good carryout growth, That's from a complete customer count masking some of the delivery drop. The start isn't as far, you know. The difference between same-store sales and customer count isn't as big because it's being filled in a lot by carryout. By and large, I think we've nine of the markets were still slightly negative in customer count in the most recent window. Three of the markets currently are positive in customer count, or were positive during that window.
Okay. Thank you, Don. Just a couple of financial questions back to Richard for at the end. A question from Richard at Jarden regarding how the CapEx been Domino's identify how much of the AUD 5.5 million is the back-of-house infrastructure investment? Not probably previously gone down to that level of detail. That's the question you have.
Yeah, predominantly it is all back-of-house operational initiatives. Yeah, to answer your question, we're investing in, you know, we're investing significantly in digital, but we're also looking at. We've continued our back-of-house investment and that's supporting, I guess, the initiatives in the business to get, you know, improve operational efficiency in store and give the tools to our stores to be able to do that, which is a key focus, which I think Don highlighted, in terms of how do we get that productivity in stores and give our store managers the tools to, you know, ultimately execute without complexity.
Okay. Thank you, Richard. The last question is before I then close off today's call is to Don, just which markets so far in our trading update have been the weakest to date?
That's scrambled a bit for me there, Nathan. Sorry. Which markets?
Which markets so far in our trading update have been the weakest ones to date?
Yeah. I think that was, that was touched on earlier that from a order count point of view, you would have had France, Germany, and Japan, in the order count growth. It's worth noting, I'm really impressed with the German same store sales because they still have been positive for most of this window, despite having the highest inflation in our group. When we say it, we mean it. We kept our franchisees whole. They had a, you know, they had a strong quarter, relative even to pre-COVID numbers in Germany. If we propel that with order count growth, which is what Stoffel and the team are really focused on, as is Martin, as is Joel in France, then we're into a really strong place because most of these stores are beyond break even and the leverage is phenomenal.
I'm not sure if Martin and Stoffel, because you're two of the businesses there, can add any more color to that.
Martin, you wanna kick it off?
Yeah. I was finding my unmute button before I start talking. Yes, it is actually. Store growth, order growth in this part is so important for us. It's also in line what Josh was saying about finding new locations for new stores. Actually, those regional areas are quite interesting for us to investigate. Also, because there is also a big part of our order growth. Looking towards, we see the order growth growing, or the order growth is there in carryout, we have to find it back in delivery. Especially in Japan, with finding the price point here is very sensitive.
It's not that we can easily reduce the prices here and say, "Well, we have found a silver bullet." In Japan, pricing is very sensitive here. We are investigating multiple options. Very happy with the Flex voucher or Flex voucher start last week or actually this week in general. Quite confident about the outcome there.
For us, for delivery and the business, Flex is gonna play a significant role as well. We've got our first test out and we're about to learn a lot on how to drive the customer counts and franchisee profits at the same time. As I explained in an earlier question, for Germany, it's also very relevant to add the layer of carryout. If we add more carryout, we will see higher productivity in our stores, which with raising labor costs, obviously, works very well for the bottom line of the stores. Driving these two, three things and then going into very different comps because we are comparing.
Last half, we were comparing to COVID times, as a predominantly delivery business that was pretty good for us, sales-wise. Obviously, a terrible disease. Now we're going into to compings, numbers that were already we already had the inflation. We were, business was cooling off a bit, after COVID. I'm pretty bullish on that. We still need to find a few... What's the right pricing for the carryout deal? What's the right thing that really drives the customer through the doors? How is Flex going to be interpreted? There are things we need to figure out, but we know they are the right solutions for the issues we've got.
With current store level profitability and then going back into growing customer accounts, we'll elevate to the next level of profitability if we, if and when we pulled it off.
All right. Thank you so much, Rahul. Don, perhaps, you opened the call, and I'm gonna hand it back to you to then close. You've obviously spoken to a number of journalists today, and you've seen some of the commentary, and you've got a full meeting week this week. What's the kind of key message that you're being asked and keen to communicate?
Yeah. Clearly, these were not the results that we were hoping to present, and the momentum loss in December and into the early part of this year is disappointing to us. The good news is we know why, and now all of the focus in the business is activating that why. It's largely been delivery pricing. Hand in hand with that, we will accelerate carrier because Flexible also already gets an accelerated business, and it's showing it can also make it better, 'cause that's where the customer is also vibrant. With a 44% larger network than where we were three years ago, the inflection point for us and our franchisees will be significant when we get that right. We are in a window where some of the markets are still testing.
There needs more time for that to run through for us to be able to bring more certainty to shareholders, hence the way that we've discussed it today. You know, we've got the right people, in my belief. We've got the right technology platform. Our people, our franchisees, our managers, and our team members are executing at a higher level, which is great because when you know, you sometimes wonder if a business gets bigger, does it lose control? When it grew as fast as it did it lose control of its operations? We can point to all the metrics. Even our food safety scores are much higher than they were in recent years. For nearly every operational metric, we've got better, and we're very focused on that.
Let's get this pricing right, time it, and then, let's get the leverage out of the much larger network, and let's get the leverage right for our franchisees, which is ultimately the most important for the long-term growth of this system. Look forward to more color and detail on specific markets as we do our rounds. Thank you very much, everybody.
Thank you all. We'll see you soon. Thank you. Bye now.