Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us today. Larry and I look forward to updating you on our FY 25 performance. We will discuss some of the highlights from the year, as well as what we've seen so far at the start of FY 26. As always, please refer to our disclaimer around forward-looking statements in the appendix. Let's start off on slide four. This is a slide that no doubt many of you will be familiar with. You have seen it a number of times now, and it provides a good overview of the business and the history. To quickly recap, we are a unique specialty retail business in Australia and New Zealand in that we're the only pure-play personal care grooming retailer of any substantial size, with both a significant bricks-and-mortar presence as well as a strong digital offering.
We've now expanded to 124 stores across the network, which is one store up on the same time prior period. We are the market share leader across many of our core categories. This is particularly true in high-end men's grooming solutions like top-end shavers, trimmers, clippers, and body groomers. This market position has been developed over many years by working closely with our global supplier partners and has enabled us to secure exclusive access to many of their latest innovative product launches. This gives us a highly differentiated range with both substantial depth and breadth of offer. We feel we are now the recognized go-to retailer for men's and increasingly women's personal care appliances, with very strong unprompted brand recognition in Australia. Our balance sheet is strong, and it also generates considerable operating cash flow each year.
This has enabled us to continue investing in the business as well as maintaining a healthy dividend yield for our shareholders. Finally, our executive management team has significant experience with an average tenure at Shaver Shop of almost 12 years. Moving on to the business fundamentals and strategy on slide five, in addition to the points I just mentioned, the market itself, particularly in men's grooming, remains a very attractive place to be. It's less competitive than female beauty and cosmetics and benefits from new innovations coming to the market each year as people become increasingly self-conscious about their image in the social media age. These new tools allow all generations to get salon quality looks in the comfort of their home. Our business model also relies heavily on investing in and training our store teams so they become trusted experts in the categories we sell.
Shaver Shop has always prided itself on providing exceptional customer service, and we are very fortunate to have passionate store team members. Our store network is now 100% corporate owned and is highly profitable. We've also built a significant online sales channel, which reflects the investments we've made in this area over many years. Now, in terms of our growth priorities, strategic category management, which is really about driving differentiation in and maximizing the performance of the existing categories we sell, remains a crucial lever for the business. In addition to growing TRANSFORM-U, our private label offering, we are focused on securing additional exclusive brands and lines that are in high consumer demand and will increase customer engagement. Now, a great example of this was the distribution license we signed with Skull Shaver just over a year ago.
This brand has a viral following that is 100% aligned with Shaver Shop's go-to-market approach. We're on the lookout for similar innovative global businesses that are looking to expand into Australia, given we can provide them a turnkey market entry option for these suppliers. We are also adding new categories and brands through our range expansion and category creep initiatives. Finally, we are evolving our store format and footprint to best meet customer needs, and this will remain a key priority for our business. Pleasingly, we made significant progress advancing our strategic initiatives in FY 25. As you can see on slide six, we successfully launched our new TRANSFORM-U private brand, and Skull Shaver has continued to grow both sales and margin. We've secured more exclusive distribution brands like Epilady in FY 25. We have had some hits.
We will make some hits and misses along the way, but trialing new brands is a crucial way to differentiate, increase our relevance, and hopefully grow our business over time. To enable this activity, we have opened our first relatively small warehouse facility, which we expect over time will improve both our efficiency and effectiveness for distributing both our private brand products as well as those we import. We also added a significant number of new locally sourced brands last year, both in our core and complementary categories. As this category and brand creep continues, we expect our average store size to increase proportionately so that we can appropriately display and merchandise the product and category range. Our store network expanded despite shutting three stores, and we upgraded many stores to our latest store format and brand standards.
The quality of our in-house store training modules is now absolutely world-class, providing bite-sized learning modules that educate and empower our store teams. Many of our suppliers are now envious of the quality and frequency of the training modules we produce. This is a true differentiation point for our business, and our library now helps new starters and experienced team members alike by delivering the latest knowledge and insights about the products we sell. Quickly touching on our key highlights on slide eight, total sales were approximately AUD 219 million in 2025, relatively flat versus last year. Online sales declined slightly to just shy of 23% of total sales, or approximately AUD 49 million. Gross profit margin was a real highlight, continuing to expand and setting a new annual record for the business at 45.5%, up 110 basis points. With operating costs well controlled, EBIT grew 2.4% to AUD 22.5 million.
We continued to generate strong operating cash flow at AUD 23.6 million, which led to net cash of AUD 3.9 million at June 30, 2025. Having regard to the resilient financial performance and Shaver Shop 's solid financial position, Shaver Shop 's board today maintained our fully franked final dividend at AUD0.055 per share, bringing total dividends declared for the year to AUD 0.103, + AUD 0.001 on last year. Finally, our passionate store teams maintained a service focus with our net promoter score coming in at 89 out of a possible 100. Overall, a pleasing set of metrics with the standout being our gross profit margin, which reached an all-time high. The next slide provides a little bit more color around the sales trends for Shaver Shop across FY 25.
You can see that the first half was challenging for us, with sales declining in both quarter one and our crucial quarter two trading period. The second half was more pleasing, with 2% growth in quarter three, followed by a 0.9% decline in quarter four. Overall, however, our second half sales grew at 0.5%, which was pleasing, following more than four halves of comparable sales declines. You can see in the bottom graph that Shaver Shop has done well to retain the top line sales that were realized through the COVID era. We view some of our categories as being largely non-discretionary in nature, which makes our business quite resilient. That said, we are intently focused on driving growth back into the top line, despite Shaver Shop now being relatively mature.
Now, back to our FY 25 performance, the sales decline was entirely due to our online channel contracting AUD 1.2 million for the year. Pleasingly, this channel returned to growth in the second half, up 2.1%, and importantly, has continued to grow into the first half of 2026. We will cover that more later on in the trading update. In terms of consumer behavior, we see customers being increasingly value conscious, with spending more and more focused around key promotional events like Black Friday, Boxing Day, and end of financial year sales. We also saw competitor activity in these periods increase, which means winning these key events remains an absolute priority for the business. Let's now dive into the gross profit margin result on slide 10. As we noted at the half, the gross margin uplift is coming from three key areas.
The first is TRANSFORM-U and the success we've had over the last eight months since TRANSFORM-U was launched. Secondly, the exclusive distribution agreement for Skull Shaver commenced on July 1, 2024, so this is the first term of the initial five-year term. As part of this arrangement, we secured significantly lower unit costs on this key range, which continues to grow into share of sales in FY 25. Lastly, over the last three to four years, we've been heavily focused on maximizing gross profit dollar contribution by balancing sales volumes with margin percentage. We haven't always got it right, but the balance is much better, with almost all categories generating higher gross margin percentages in FY 25. The combination of the above factors led to gross profit dollars increasing AUD 2.0 million or 2.1% to AUD 99.5 million, slightly below the all-time record for Shaver Shop.
Moving on to our category analysis, we saw slight share gains in hair cutting and men's manual shaving, in part due to increased stock weight and availability, with a number of additional brands added during the year. This offset share declines in DIY massage and hair styling, with the latter seeing ruthless competition around Black Friday and end of financial year sales periods. We still see long-term hair removal solutions being a long-term growth strategy and story for Shaver Shop. However, competition has certainly increased with a number of new solutions now being offered in the market. Moving on to our operational metrics on slide 12, our stores did a really fantastic job again this year with sales conversion up to 44.7%, which was integral to offsetting the declines in the shopping centre foot traffic.
While transaction volumes were down 0.9%, this was able to be offset with average transactional value growth, leading to in-store sales growing 0.2% in FY 25. As mentioned previously, online proved more challenging for us. Sales conversion declined slightly year -on -year, leading to transactions being down 1.9% and average transaction values online dropping 0.3%. Pleasingly, we have seen a return to online sales growth at the start of FY 26, and we're intent on maintaining this positive momentum as we head into our peak trading periods in quarter two. It would be remiss of me not to provide a thorough update on TRANSFORM-U. TRANSFORM-U is our new private label brand that was launched in October 2024 after close to two years of planning, sourcing, and development. This is a critical element of our strategic category management program and was an absolute highlight for us in FY 25.
To recap, this initiative was driven by our desire to close gaps in the range that were unable to be filled by our existing global supplier partners. Since launch, we've sold almost 120,000 units of TRANSFORM-U products and have expanded the range with more than 70 individual SKUs generating sales in FY 25. Overall, the TRANSFORM-U brand contributed 3.4% of consolidated sales for the year and had an average consumer product rating of 4.8 stars out of a maximum of five. This strong customer rating is supported by our return rates for the brand being well below our company average. In summary, TRANSFORM-U's overall performance last year well and truly exceeded our most optimistic expectations. This is despite not really investing at all in the TRANSFORM-U brand. Almost all sales were generated in-store through the strong support we received from our store teams.
Whilst we're very proud of the way our store teams got behind the TRANSFORM-U launch, we're looking to significantly reduce this reliance in FY 26 with an improved online presence, investments in building the TRANSFORM-U brand through engaging social media activity, as well as selected advertising on television, particularly through our relationships and partnership with ESPN and Kayo. We'll also be looking to expand the range further and improve some of our demand forecasting, given we actually experienced out-of-stocks of TRANSFORM-U products across a number of lines over key promotional periods. In summary, an absolutely outstanding achievement for the business this year, which we believe sets up for even more success in the years to come. I'll now hand you over to Larry to go through the financials in more detail.
Thanks, Cameron. As Cameron mentioned, the combination of in-store sales growing at 0.2% and online sales declining by 2.3% across the year led to total sales remaining relatively flat, down around 0.4%. Like-for-like sales were also relatively flat, declining 0.1% in FY 25. Pleasingly, the rise in gross profit margin, which Cameron discussed, led to gross profit dollar growth of 2.1% or AUD 2.0 million. Operating expenses were again well controlled, rising 1.4% across the year, despite continuing inflation and cost pressures in some areas. One area where we did experience having some higher expense growth was in lease interest and lease depreciation, given we renewed a significant number of leases during the year, as well as having one additional store in the network at year-end.
The lease renewals have led to the average remaining lease term at the end of FY 25 increasing approximately 50% to almost 1.8 years, which leads to a corresponding increase in lease expenses, particularly lease interest. The impact of lease renewals is very clear on the next slide, where you can see that our lease liabilities and right-of-use asset balances have increased materially versus the same time last year. In terms of operating earnings, EBIT grew 2.4% to AUD 22.5 million, and pleasingly, this drove operating leverage, with our EBIT margin expanding 30 basis points to 10.3%. Finally, our NPAT decreased AUD 0.2 million to AUD 14.9 million, giving us basic EPS of AUD 0.115 per share. Moving on to our balance sheet, which continues to be in very solid shape and is shown on slide 16.
This time last year, we highlighted two factors that would impact our FY 25 cash flow and closing net cash balance. The first was the fact that one of our largest suppliers had trading terms that extended into the first week of July, given the 30th of June was on the weekend. This resulted in AUD 3.8 million that would otherwise have been paid in June, being deferred into the first week into July 2024. If we adjust for this, last year's normalised net cash balance was AUD 9.5 million. We ended this year FY 25 with net cash of AUD 3.9 million, a reduction of AUD 5.6 million compared to last year's normalised net cash balance. This reduction is entirely due to the expected increase in stock levels that we flagged both last year and at the first half.
Firstly, we noted that our ending stock balance was around AUD 1 million- AUD 2 million below optimal levels due to the strong sales we recorded in our end of financial year program in June 2024. We also noted that our TRANSFORM-U and exclusive distribution brand initiatives would require an incremental AUD 2 million- AUD 3 million of investment in FY 25. Lastly, with one more store in the network compared to the same time last year, it requires about AUD 250,000 in additional stock. While there is a significant incremental investment in working capital, it's absolutely consistent with our expectation, and we have no concerns regarding the realisable value of this stock on hand. The final point to call out on this slide is the increase in lease liabilities and right-of-use assets, which I discussed previously.
These increased more than 50% in FY 25, which led to the corresponding increase in lease interest, as well as a smaller increase in lease depreciation. It's important to note that we still had approximately 15 leases in holdover at 30 June 2025, or around 10%- 15% of the network, which is slightly higher than what we normally expect, but not materially. As these are renewed, our lease asset and lease liability balances are likely to increase further. Now, let's move on to our cash flow statement on slide 17. While operating cash flow remained a healthy AUD 23.6 million in 2025, it's a decrease of AUD 10.6 million on last year's result. This is largely due to the increase in stock and prior year supplier payment anomaly that I referenced on the last slide. Together, these accounted for almost AUD 10 million of the AUD 10.6 million change in operating cash flow.
We also had an increase in the quantum of supplier deposits for TRANSFORM-U stock at period end, as we continue to invest in expanding our range and building this brand. Net CapEx came in at AUD 4.7 million in FY 25, as you rolled out four new stores and completed seven full store refits and undertook two relocations within existing centres. We also completed the integration of a new point of sale and order management solution for online fulfilments. After dividends and principal elements of lease payments, we had a net cash outflow of AUD 9.4 million, bringing net cash to AUD 3.9 million at 30 June 2025. Still a very sound and healthy liquidity position for our business. Let's now move on to the next slide, which illustrates our dividend history.
The resilient financial performance and sound financial position of Shaver Shop Group Limited has led the board to declare a AUD 0.055 fully franked final dividend. This is flat on last year's final dividend and brings total FY 25 dividends to AUD 0.103 per share, an increase of AUD 0.001 on FY 24. At this level, it represents a payout of approximately 90% of reported net profit after tax and around 86% of cash NPAT. The board's intention is to either maintain or increase the dividend payout when it's prudent to do so, and there is no better investment alternative for the capital. Importantly, FY 25 marks the last year of Shaver Shop being able to claim a tax deduction for the franchise buybacks that were undertaken and the termination of the associated franchise licenses.
Given the significant cash benefit of these deductions, Shaver Shop 's dividend policy up to this point had been based on cash NPAT, a measure that adjusted reported NPAT for the franchise buyback tax benefit we received each year. Looking forward, the board has determined it appropriate to amend the dividend policy so that Shaver Shop will pay out approximately 65%- 90% of underlying NPAT. That is up from the 60%- 80% of cash NPAT that was the previous dividend policy. This should allow Shaver Shop Group Limited to maintain a healthy dividend payout while at the same time investing in the strategic initiatives like TRANSFORM-U that are intended to grow sales and profitability over time, as well as improve our competitiveness. That now concludes my section of the presentation. I'll hand you back to Cameron Fox to discuss our FY 26 priorities.
Thanks, Larry. Not surprisingly, our priorities for 2026 are very similar to those for last year. Most importantly, we want to build on the TRANSFORM-U success we've experienced to date to cement this brand as a key component of our go-to-market strategy. This means building the brand in its own right through traditional channels like television advertising, as well as digitally through social media posts and online. We also will be expanding the range to close even more gaps in our offering. Secondly, we want to secure additional distribution brands like Skull Shaver so that we continue to lead and offer a unique range of innovative products and brands. We're excited to be importing a new back grooming solution called MANGROOMER prior to Christmas, which builds on our offering in this area. We also want to continue creeping into additional categories and expanding our range in existing categories.
As mentioned previously, we've improved our social media presence, but there is still much more that we can do and we can implement to attract the younger demographic and those that increasingly choose to shop using this channel. Finally, our store network optimization program will continue with the increasing number of brand additions and range expansions. We'll be looking to increase the footprint in a number of our stores so that we can showcase all the products we offer in the best way possible. We will continue to carefully evaluate new store builds, with three to be added so far in FY 26, being Westfield Albany in New Zealand, Bathurst in Country New South Wales, and ECQ in Sydney. We are clear on our priorities for the upcoming year, and we are well placed to execute. This now leads us to our trading update on slide 22.
It's early days, but we're encouraged with the way we have started the year so far. It is a bit difficult to compare directly with last year's performance, given Father's Day, which is one of our key gift-giving promotional periods, is a week later this year. That said, it's still been a pleasing start. Between 1st of July and 21st of August 2024, sales are + 2.7%, with in-store sales being + 2.2% and online + 4.4% over the prior corresponding period. Like-for-like sales are + 1.5%, noting that we're comping last year when like-for-like sales were down approximately 1%. We've already added to the TRANSFORM-U range in FY 26, with men's body groomers and nose and ear trimmers being added to the portfolio. This, together with our ongoing efforts to increase gross profit dollars, is leading to gross margins being higher than the same period last year.
As mentioned earlier, we have secured three new Greenfield locations. Two of these will open in the first half, with one scheduled to open in late March 2026. Our store network optimization program will also continue, with the expectation that fit-outs, relocations, and new stores will lead to net CapEx of approximately AUD 4- AUD 5 million. Finally, in terms of outlook, consistent with prior years and having regard to the material contribution of the upcoming Black Friday, Christmas, and Boxing Day promotional periods to our full year financial results, it is not appropriate to provide sales or any guidance at this point in time. I'll now hand over back to the moderator, who will open up for any questions that you may have. Thank you.
Thank you. If you do wish to ask a question, please press the star key, then one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press the star key, then two. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Thank you. Your first question is from James Casey from Ord Minnett. Go ahead, thank you.
Good morning, gentlemen. I just had a question on the recent trading activity, obviously spanning a small period. Just with regard to the recent interest rate cuts we've seen, are you starting to see improved foot traffic both in the shopping centers and, I guess, more importantly, within your stores?
Yeah, it's a good question, and the answer is yes, we are. I think the sort of historical trends that we're seeing are starting to reverse in terms of material declines in customer footfall. Certainly, over the last six to eight weeks, we've seen some encouraging signs there, and the actual customer footfall has actually been positive versus the same time prior period, which is the first time we've seen that probably since the pre-COVID days.
Okay, that's great. Thanks, Cameron. Larry, maybe one for you. Just with regards to the store optimization program and also the new stores, where would you see your CapEx landing for the year?
Yeah, we think it'll probably come in roughly the same as this year. This year, after landlord contributions, we came in at AUD 4.7 million, and we're guiding to around AUD4- AUD 5 million in FY 2026.
Okay, that's great. Thank you, gentlemen.
Thanks, James.
Thank you. Your next question is from Andrew Johnston from MST Access. Go ahead, thank you.
Morning, Larry. Morning, Cameron. I wanted to focus on a couple of things. First of all, what changed online? I noticed in one of the opening slides, one of the things that you'd wanted to achieve and you'd flagged that, it looks like you flagged that you didn't actually get there, was in terms of social media. Yet, in spite of that, we're still seeing a pickup in online sales. Can you just talk about both those issues and obviously a pretty good start to improvement in online sales for the last few weeks?
Yeah, I think it's been a combination of factors. What we did experience Black Friday last year was paid search conversion was becoming increasingly challenging. Your cost of conversion through paid search and your effectiveness, the result for our dollar spend was declining. Obviously, the ultimate goal has always been to try to drive more organic traffic. I think we've started to do that. We're starting to see some of the benefits of our improved content management, our improved social media presence, our improved quality of social media connecting with the customers as well. I think that's transcending through to some increased organic traffic, which is obviously bolstering our top line online sales. It also is obviously organic traffic and conversion is far more cost-effective than through your paid search channel.
I think that may seem a subtle change as I'm saying we're working on long term, but obviously the ultimate goal is always to try to drive more traffic through organic means, which is primarily through improved content management.
Okay, so on 0.6 on page six, where you didn't have a tick next to maintain social media management, is that in reference to the point you made about Black Friday sales last year?
Yeah, in part, because it's a work in progress. Andrew, we're still not satisfied with where we're at. We're improving our organic traffic, we're improving our activity, we're improving our content management, we're improving our YouTube presence, we're improving our Facebook, our Instagram, but we still are probably halfway through the journey. We're still not at a point where we're saying, you know, we're best in class.
Okay. Let's pause it for FY 26 and beyond. Were there any, just coming to TRANSFORM-U, and you know, obviously the, and most of this came out in the first half, you know, what an unbelievably successful launch of TRANSFORM-U that happened in the first half. Were there any additional products added in the second half? You mentioned, you obviously mentioned a few things that you've added at the start of this period, but were there any in the second half that are worth noting?
I don't think so, Andrew. I don't think there's anything that materially changed in terms of the range between what we had coming into the main time coming into Christmas. Most things were in before Black Friday, just before Black Friday. The new products are really coming in now because until we really got through Black Friday and Christmas and understood that it was going to be a success, we didn't want to necessarily invest significantly more capital in identifying, testing, rolling out new products until we actually knew. It takes a bit of time, obviously, to go through that process. Yeah.
Right, okay, that makes sense, yeah. You'd said, okay, here's the bunch of products we're going to launch in the first half. When you saw their success, you pressed the button on getting ready to launch products that you've just done now.
Exactly, correct.
Okay, that's great. Larry, leases, the bane of it, the accounting for leases, the bane of our lives.
I know.
We've seen some increase in the accounting expense for leases.
Yep.
In terms of actual real numbers, however you want to, however you think about them from a management perspective, has your average lease expense, from a real sense, not an accounting sense, has that increased as a result of signing those new leases? If we strip out all the accounting stuff, what does it actually look like and what sort of real dollar increases are you seeing in the resigning of new leases?
Yeah, there's probably a couple of areas that I can point to to help you. I would say overall, a bunch of the leases, like a significant proportion, I would say, I'm putting rough figures, maybe 35%- 40%, 30%- 40%, let's say, of the leases we signed last year were with the major landlords. Those have tended to be more difficult to get, you know, reductions with, where typically, you know, with our smaller landlords, we're able to negotiate, in some cases, reductions on those renewals. A significant proportion of those renewals came through after the COVID era, when we were taking two to three-year short-term leases with minor increases.
Some of them, I wouldn't say we saw increases, but the way the accounting works is when you renew a lease, and say you renew it for a six-year period, you're setting up essentially a debt on your balance sheet with an associated asset. The maximum period where you get interest on that lease is in the first year when the principal balance is at its highest. What we've included in the results presentation in the appendices is a six-year trend in P&L. In there, you can see that lease interest expense has oscillated a bit between when we started at the start of COVID, we had lease interest coming in at about AUD 1.8 million in FY 20, and it was AUD 1.5 million this year.
The principal elements of lease payments, which you can see on our cash flow statement, if you pull that up on our cash flow and our financials, that will give you an indication of the principal amount of the lease payments. You take the principal and the interest and combine them together, and that's the total cash payment we make each year. In a long-winded way of responding, there's part of this, which is just because we've renewed a number of leases with major landlords that tend to be longer periods, four, five, six years, which is leading to a higher interest expense coming through this year and is likely to increase again next year a bit as we've renewed more leases. The actual principal elements of lease payments have increased a bit, but not as significantly versus what you're seeing year over year.
Principal elements of lease payments in our cash flow are basically flat year over year between FY 24 and FY 25. I hope I've helped you.
Yeah, that last sentence helped a lot. I understand where you're going with those other numbers, so if we were to think about it another way, the percentage increase in the principal payments in your cash flow gives an indication of what your total lease expense increase has been.
Yeah, that's probably a better indicator because your lease interest does fluctuate year over year based on where you are in the lease.
Okay, that's great. I hate having to spend time talking about these things, but unfortunately, we do. Yeah, good to see that dividend range expanding as well. That's it for me for the moment, but thanks, thank you.
No worries, thanks Andrew.
Thank you. Once again, if you do wish to ask a question, please press the star key, then one on your telephone, and wait for your name to be announced. Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Fox for closing remarks.
Thank you. Thanks everyone for joining us. In terms of a few final statements, firstly and foremost, we're a segment leader both online and offline. As we've said a number of times through today's presentation and previously, we're a large and growing market driven by changing consumer preferences and new product innovation. Our product range is applicable to almost all consumer demographics. We're a differentiated and resilient specialty retail business model. We thrive in service excellence, and we have unparalleled product knowledge at store level. Product exclusivity is critical to our business model, and you can now see with the expansion and the inclusion of our private label brand TRANSFORM-U, we are well positioned in this area. We offer our customers competitive value-based pricing, and we also have potential to further increase our market share across numerous products and categories.
We have high brand awareness in Australia, albeit New Zealand is increasing off a lower base, obviously. We have a proven and highly profitable omni-channel retail business. As Larry Hamson has spoken about, we have a clean balance sheet, no debt, with high cash conversion. We have an experienced management team, and I mentioned before the average tenure of the management team at Shaver Shop Group Limited is nearly 12 years. We're focused on investing for growth and improving total shareholder returns. As we've mentioned at numerous times throughout this presentation today, we offer an attractive dividend payout and fully franked dividend yield. Thank you for everyone's attention today. I hope you have a great day.
Thank you very much. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect your line.