Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the interim group results for the six months ended 31st August 2023. It's with great pride that I present the first set of results as CEO of the group, and it's been a challenging first 100 days in the position, but we are satisfied with the performance during the period, notwithstanding a tough trading environment. As with many retailers, the constrained economic environment, high interest rates, and costs associated with load shedding contributed to a weaker performance by the group over the prior comparative period. In the current financial year, the group has also been impacted by the base effects of the prior year's performance, which were distinctly different across the two halves of the year, with the first half of the prior year delivering a strong performance when compared to the second half of the prior year.
A more equal distribution, which we will unpack as we go through the presentation, of earnings is expected in the current financial year. If I run through some of the group highlights, group revenue, excluding the contribution of vaccines and testings, up 10.3% to ZAR 17.9 billion, split across retail—the retail segment of the business, which is up 9.2% to ZAR 15.6 billion, and wholesale revenue up 13.5% to ZAR 13.7 billion. External revenue in the wholesale market, driven by TLCs and independent pharmacies, which continue to allow us to consolidate the independent market, up 19.1% to ZAR 2.3 billion, and a definite highlight of the success of the business model in the wholesale space.
Then the retail sector, strong like-for-like retail sales growth, comprising of both volume and inflationary growth, totaling 5.9%, and we've added 10 new Dis-Chem stores to our base in the first six months of this trading year. Online revenue growth, a slight step change at 32% as we continue to roll our hub-and-spoke model in a very profitable way, to benefit from the shift into the online space of certain consumers. We have, as we have previously maintained, to a certain degree, our total income margin at 30.5%. We do have two fundamental movements in the total income margin line, both from rebates and from transactional gross margin, which myself and Craig will unpack as we go through the presentation.
Earnings per share at ZAR 0.583, holding our dividend policy, which is 40%, resulting in an interim dividend of ZAR 0.232. In the wholesale space, we've also secured, and we'll unpack the additional cost composition of that, we've secured the additional 63,000 sq m of new warehouse, new warehouse space in Longmeadow. It's important as it bolstered the property strategy of the group. As we will go through the presentation, I will explain the direct and very succinct approach that we have to growing property, in the group and the importance of this, and obviously, to ensure that and to support that, the additional investment in the wholesale space is fundamentally crucial. Retail cost control, progress has been my personal highlight for the financial results.
Coming off a compromised sales line, certainly from the negative publicity in H2 of FY 2023 and filtering into the first half or the first quarter of FY 2024, H1, the risk of operational re-leverage, negative operational leverage definitely existed, and I think we've made huge strides through some of the initiatives that I'll speak about to ensure cost control, cost control, effective cost control, and the benefits of that in terms of it, it resulting in positive operating leverage in the second quarter of this financial set of results, and obviously to establish that positive operating leverage as we move into the second half of the financial year. And as we've discussed previously, we remain committed to this integrated healthcare ecosystem vision. We continue to make good traction.
We continue to see the benefits of being both a service provider and a holder of the financial services product, which allows us to design benefits. I'm now going to hand over to Julia, who will take us through the financial results, and I will complement Julia in certain instances, as we talk to some of the elements that ultimately are of a strategic nature.
Thank you, Rui. Good morning, everyone. In the current financial period, the group has been impacted by the once-off property gain that we had in the prior period of ZAR 72 million due to acquisition of the warehouse properties. You will therefore see, we have shown our results, both including and excluding this property gain, to give a better representation of true transactional performance. COVID-19 vaccine administration and testing services have also impacted the results in the current period, with ZAR 143 million in revenue in the prior period, which is not repeated in the current period. The main aspects from a statement of comprehensive income perspective is revenue growth of 9.4%, excluding COVID, 10.3%, and an operating profit decline of 6.5%, which we will unpack in the subsequent slides.
Three other points to note in the statement of comprehensive income is finance costs, tax, and profit from associates and joint ventures. Finance costs have increased in the current period with the increase in the prime interest rate, the use of the overdraft facility for inventory buy-ins, as well as the property acquisition loan that was taken out in the prior period for ZAR 455 million. The effective tax rate has reduced with the change in the corporate tax rate from 28% to 27%. Profit from associates and joint ventures has increased due to the excellent performance of the company holding the General brand and Kaelo.
In the statement of financial position, there is an increase in intangible assets due to the pharmacy operating system that is currently being built, which is a key component to our healthcare ambitions, as well as the goodwill on the acquisition of an independent pharmacy in East London. The inventory balance increased by ZAR 570 million from February 2023, due to the new stores that have been opened and promotional buy-ins that were done in August. The high inventory levels, together with the additional trade terms that have been negotiated, has resulted in the higher trade and other payable balance. Lease liabilities continue to decrease as we cycle through the lease periods. Revenue has been broken down between the wholesale and retail segments. Retail revenue has grown by 8.1% to ZAR 15.5 billion.
As previously mentioned, in order to get a better reflection of true trade over the six months, COVID-19 vaccines and testing need to be excluded, which results in retail revenue growing by 9.2%. Like-for-like, retail revenue grew by 5.9%, up from 3.6 in the prior period. External wholesale revenue growth has been well supported by the growing TLC franchise model at 20.4%, and the continuing support of independents at 18%.
As Julia mentioned, the group has been impacted by the contribution of COVID-19 vaccines and testing, in terms of its contribution to revenue in the previous periods and in the comparative period. What this graph depicts, as we have done historically, is just the contribution of vaccines and testing across each of the reporting periods. We anticipate that this will not be a contributing factor as we move forward, and certainly not into FY 2024. The table below illustrates the different reporting periods from the 1st March 2022, up until the end of this financial period, as well as the trading post this financial period, up until the end of October. What is noticeable is the improved performance from the 1st September 2023, until the end of October, of 12.1% growth at a group level.
This is supported by pharmacy revenue moving from 3.3% in the first half of FY 2024, up to 6%, and franchise moving from 11% up to 13.1%. This is a function of us cycling the softer base as a function of the negative publicity, and we expect this momentum to continue and improve into the second half of FY 2024. Another important factor to mention is just the external revenue in wholesale continuing to impress at 23%, and as Chris will describe, this is supported by the supply to independent pharmacy, but also the continued growth of the TLC base.
Total income from the group has increased by 6.6%, with the total income margin moving from 31.3% in the prior period to 30.5%. Total income margin has been improved by the group's focus on ROIC and continued improvement in back-end terms, with trade terms increasing by 13% against purchases growth of 11.6%. The increase in terms has been offset by the compression in transactional margin of 0.9%, due to the investment in price to maintain market share in certain core categories, as well as the increase in contribution of lower margin oncology products. More detail will be given on this when we discuss the trading performance of the group. Wholesale margin decreased from 8.3% to 7.9% due to the investment and price across the group.
Moving on to retail operating expenditure. There's been a 15.7% increase in depreciation, mainly as a result of the IFRS 16 depreciation from rolling out new stores and from the roll-out of the new point of sale technology. We currently have just four more Dis-Chem stores to put onto the new system. Occupancy costs have increased by 6.6%, predominantly due to increases in municipal charges, such as electricity and rates and taxes. Other operating costs increased by 14.1% due to additional advertising expenses, IT-related costs, delivery costs, and ZAR 22 million spent on diesel to support trade during load shedding. Advertising expenses are due to promotional activities and continue to be recovered with a marginal benefit in other income.
Employee costs are still the largest expense within the retail segment and has increased by 9.8% through the addition of new stores, as well as annual increases. I will briefly touch on wholesale expenditure, as Chris will cover this in more detail later. Wholesale has done well to keep expenditure growth at only 5.5%, which is below the growth of wholesale total income of 8.4%. Depreciation has increased by 26.5% as a function of new motor vehicles and forklifts, as well as depreciation on buildings. While occupancy costs have increased by 20% through higher electricity and municipal charges. Employment cost growth has been due to annual increases, as well as additional shifts for the increase in volume through the wholesale space.
Other operating costs only increased by 0.4%, driven by the Forex loss in the prior period of ZAR 28.5 million, that has not been repeated. When this is excluded, other costs increased by 6.6% relating to diesel, motor vehicle expenses, and security.
As I mentioned in the introduction, I think a highlight for this financial set of numbers is certainly the progress that we've made on cost control. If we think about H2 of the prior year, we had a much softer sales number. As I said, that continued into the first quarter of FY 2024, and as a group that invests for growth, negative operating leverage is a real risk. I think once understood, and certainly on the back of the expectation that it would take some time for the sales growth to recover, we implemented significant cost control procedures to manage the risk of negative operating leverage.
What this slide demonstrates is just some of the progress that we've made since the first quarter of the financial year, and then shows the progress by month from June all the way up until the end of October. And so up until the end of FY 2024 and the progress thereafter. So the focus is on cost saving, is on the employment line. We've been very specific around the relationship between sales growth and the payroll and payroll growth. Payroll makes up 64% of the total retail costs, and it's, it's fundamentally important to, to get right in order to create positive operating leverage. The top half of the graph, so the first line, represents revenue growth in, greater than payroll growth, so it effectively denotes positive operating leverage.
You can see that in quarter one, 42% of our stores were in that bracket, and that has improved up to 67% at the end of October. And as you would, you would have seen, we expect stronger sales performance as well as improved cost control as we continue to implement the cost control framework process that we've driven into the group. And then the second, the second line on that graph is just the opposite, so payroll growth growing ahead of revenue growth. So 58% of our stores in quarter one demonstrating negative operating leverage, which has then improved to 33% in October. And as I said, we expect the trend to continue.
That is graphed on the right-hand side of the slide, and you can see it physically or optically on the right-hand side. You can see the extent of the improvements. And again, as I said, we expect this to continue, and obviously, that will talk to a much stronger earnings performance in the second half. One of the ways that we implemented this was to establish a framework for store headcounts that is being developed and pushed down into stores to ensure that stores are optimally staffed, but while still ensuring high customer service. The basis and premise for this was the consistency across all of our regions, and we've used the property opportunity or the property growth opportunity to redistribute the additional headcounts into new spaces.
We've had some wins recently with some of the staffing of our newer stores being done from our existing base. To complement all of this, the framework targets, which is a fundamentally important driver of the cost control progress and certainly the positive operating leverage that we seek, have been included in the KPIs for all management, and will be rolled out both at a central level and a decentralized level.
Operating profit for the group declined by 5.8% from the prior period, with operating margin declining from 5.7% to 4.9%, which is a function of the delta between total income and total expenditure in the period. Earnings per share and headline earnings per share for the period is ZAR 0.583 and ZAR 0.582 per share, which is a decrease of 16.7% and 17.2% respectively. When taking out the property gain of the prior period, which gives a better representation of trade in the current period, EPS and HEPS decreased by 8.9% and 9.4% respectively.
As I've mentioned previously, the distribution of earnings is an interesting phenomenon that's part-- that's played out in the group. And what this slide talks to demonstrate is both the principles of positive operating leverage playing into FY 2024 second half, as well as the impact of the softer base that we will be cycling in, in FY 2024 H2. So this table represents profit before tax. You can see that the linear trend from FY 2021 up until FY 2023, outside of the specific FY 2023 year, is an even distribution of earnings across the first and second half, slightly weighted to the second half of the year, so around 48% in the first half in terms of earnings delivery and around 52% in the second half.
In FY 2023, there was a fundamental shift, and a reason for that was obviously the negative publicity, which caused a much softer sales line, and the inability for the group to adapt cost growth in relation to the impact that we saw on sales growth. That softness cycled into the first quarter of FY 2024, and as I've explained previously, necessitated a quick change and a quick focus on cost control and certainly on the ability to move negative leverage to positive leverage, which we've now implemented, and we've seen the results of that, as described previously. We anticipate the distribution of earnings to be similar in FY 2024 to what was the case in FY 2021 and FY 2022 from a contribution perspective, and certainly a strong earnings recovery in the second half of FY 2024, as we think about the full year outlook.
We now move to the working capital in the statement of financial position. Debtors' days is being well managed and increased slightly from 26.5 days in February to 27.2 days. This increase is mainly driven by the wholesale growth to independents and TLCs, and the debtors' book recoverability is still a key focus and well controlled. Increased inventory is held within the group at August from promotional buy-ins, but inventory days has been held at 88 days. Inventory days is a strategic focus for the group, and we plan to have a 10% improvement over the medium term while maintaining debtor and creditor days.
The creditors' days calculation has been adjusted in the current period in order to take into account trade terms that sit outside of cost of sales, as this is influencing the growth of trade and other payables in the statement of financial position. Taking this into account, creditors' days have improved from 94.6 days- 95.3 days. The waterfall graph depicts our cash movement in the current period, with an increase of ZAR 242 million since February 2023. Cash inflows have come from normal trading as well as working capital movements, with creditors' days exceeding inventory days. Cash payments have been made as per normal for taxation, finance costs, and the dividend declared in February 2023 results, as well as for lease payments, CapEx, and loan repayments, including in investing activities, is also the ZAR 55 million relating to the acquisition of Berea Pharmacy.
Expansion CapEx is mainly driven through the opening of our new stores and IT assets. Expansion CapEx to turnover has increased from 0.8%-0.9%, mainly due to the rollout of GK pods to the stores and the build of the new pharmacy operating system. Maintenance CapEx to turnover has reduced from 0.9%-0.7% in the current period, with reduced CapEx required through renovations in the first half of the year. There's been no significant change to the FY 2024 outlook of cost per additional floor space added. I now hand over to Rui and Craig in regards to retail trading performance.
Thanks, Julia. If we look at our core category market shares and the move from H1 2023 to H1 2024, dispensary market shares remain stable, again, impacted by the softness of the sales line as a function of negative publicity. As we said previously, and as we continue to see, we saw a much stronger dispensary performance in the second half of H1 2024, and as I described and depicted in the vaccine slide, we saw dispensary growth move from 3.3% to 6% post-year end. So we do anticipate continued market share gains in the dispensary part of our business as we cycle over the full year. Personal care and beauty moved from 19.2% to 19%. The market share loss was fundamentally impacted by a shift in beauty to mass fragrance.
The market, as a function of price point, has changed and shifted to participate in mass fragrance purchases, and the group is currently accommodating a shift to take the benefit of that. Healthcare and medical grew market share by 0.1%, from 46.8% to 46.9%, again, best-in-class type metrics, and we continue to be impressed with the performance of that category, considering the extent of the share that we have nationally. Baby Care moved from 10.8% to 11%. Again, great performance from within the Baby Care category. When you take into account Baby City, we saw a strong share gain of 1% in the total market to 17.7% in Baby Care.
I think fundamentally important to touch on the fact that the softness in the first quarter of this financial year would have obviously impacted all categories and thus all market shares, and we do anticipate stronger market share performance as a function of stronger sales into the second half of FY 2024. If we look at core category performance, so this really fundamentally talks to the revenue growth relative to the growth in transactional gross margin, and by transactional gross margin, we're looking at product margins, so this doesn't take into account any of the service-driven rebates. The dispensary revenue change at 6.1%, and the dispensary margin at 3.2%. Two impacting factors there: firstly, the investment or the continued investment in pricing in the OTC space, which has become increasingly competitive.
And secondly, the oncology business, which comes at much lower margins, outgrowing the rest of the dispensary business, so the oncology business growing at north of 13% compared to the dispensary business at 6.1%, with a fundamentally lower margin, changing, effectively, the mix and resulting in a slightly lower transactional gross margin. Personal care growing revenue at 13.1% and transactional margin at 5.2%. Again, just because of the fundamental competitiveness of the environment, there's been increased promotional activity in personal care and beauty, and a lot of price investment to retain share. Healthcare and medical growing revenue at 4.4% and gross margin at 6.2%.
A great performance in healthcare and medical, again, us taking advantage of a strong market share or strong leadership position in healthcare and medical, and extracting transactional gross margin out of some of the private label brands. And then Baby Care, as I said, again, strong sales line performance of 15.1% and transactional margin growing ahead at 17.8%, really a function of both mix and some of the private label pricing that we've seen in that category. I'm now gonna hand over to Craig, who's gonna take us through some of the ROIC and working capital metrics.
Thank you, Rui. We continue to focus on our return on invested capital strategy to drive good top-line growth, optimize margins, and increase total income while improving the working capital position. Despite the constrained consumer environment, retail turnover growth, excluding vaccines, was strong in H1 at 9.2%, demonstrating the resilience of the business model and supported by high growth in personal care and beauty and share gains in the health and medical, as well as baby categories. While margin grew ahead of turnover in health and medical and baby, we increased promotional activity in personal care and beauty, investing in price to adapt to short-term market conditions, and this played out in the retail transactional margin growth number of 5.8%.
We continue to offer differentiation and value via our extensive private label program, and we are tracking ahead of the planned private label expansion targets, having achieved 75% of the total ZAR 1 billion growth opportunity defined 24 months back. This resulted in growth ahead of retail. Growth from fee for service rebates was at 13%, which was ahead of purchases growth at 11.6. This reflects the incremental gains we are achieving in income from supplier rebates and underpins our efforts to drive total income margin, which in retail was at 29.8%, and group still above our 30% target level. From a working capital perspective, we continue to centralize and improve stock control and optimization, leveraging our fully automated forecasting and replenishment tool, FNR.
85% of front shop stock replenished into our stores is processed automatically via the FNR tool, and over 90% into the DC environment, improving accuracy and reducing lost opportunity sales. The pharma auto-replenishment project has commenced and is being rolled out in the second half of this year, which will support leaner stock holding in the category. Inventory was well managed, and as Julia showed, was up 9% and in line with turnover growth. This led to total stock days remaining stable at 88, with rolling stock days at 90. With creditors' days at 95, we remain in a negative stock to creditors' working capital position, supportive of positive cash generation. Suppliers' usage of our award-winning supply chain finance program remains high, supporting their ability to access cash for working capital at more competitive interest rates. Operationally, we manage working capital using the rolling stock days metric.
This gives a more current and dynamic view, using stock on hand at the time, relative to the most recent 91-day cost of sales. This rolling stock day number was at 90, with us holding three additional days in healthcare and medical segments due to the timing of strategic buying opportunities taken ahead of key promotional activity. Two green lines at the bottom of the chart show stock day trajectory for stores and DC in half-year increments. Store stock, which is the darker green line, moved to 51 days from the buys I mentioned, with the distribution center stock remaining stable at 39 days when compared to the same time last year. Stock is well managed and in line with our strategy. However, there remains significant stock unlock opportunity over the medium term, with solid procurement system foundation that we have in place.
Our ambition over the next 24 months is to reduce stock days by 10%. From a loyalty perspective, we have two types of interactions with our customers. In pharmacy, where we have 14.9 million customer profiles, up from 13.8 million, and in front shop, via the benefits program, includes 8.6 million customers, up from 7.8 million, contributing to 76% of front shop revenue. Our focus is to continually deliver more value to our loyalty members, and we are doing so via hyper-personalized customer engagements on the back of strategic data analytics from the technology tool we've invested in. Loyalty is supported by enhancements to our WhatsApp for business functionality, which facilitates our Pack My Meds chronic adherence program and caters for acute medication and script uploads.
Our e-commerce strategy complements that of our retail stores, facilitating access to Dis-Chem for our customers via their preferred channel. These channels include the Dis-Chem website, mobile app, and DeliverD, our popular on-demand service, which offers delivery within 60 minutes. Aside from being able to purchase an extensive range of health, medical, beauty, and personal care products, we are differentiated by the range of integrated healthcare services featured, including clinic appointments, prescription services, Pack My Meds, and medical insurance. E-commerce sales continue to trend upwards, increasing 32.2% on last year. Importantly, our e-commerce segment is profit enhancing, using a decentralized hub-and-spoke approach, which drives efficiencies and ensures good service. Delivery costs are well managed at 4.8% via our 85 in-store distribution hubs, and we run higher margins than in our retail sector, due to the absence of pharmacy online.
Service levels remain strong, with 97% fulfillment on orders, with collection time at 1.16 days, and then delivery at 0.72 days from collection. Thanks for listening. I'm gonna hand back over to Rui.
Thanks, Craig. As outlined, and I will recap it in my outlook, the property expansion strategy is fundamentally important to the delivery of future earnings growth. What we have tried to depict, and what I will explain in the next three slides, is just our direct approach, to how we're going to participate in property, in property strategy expansion. As we have described previously before, our dominant share, and when I talk about share, I talk about dispensary market share and front shop market share, resides in Gauteng, where the brand was started. Fundamentally, our property approach has got three prongs to it, and they will be delivered in parallel, within the square meterages that we intend on delivering over the next 36-month period.
What we've tried to do is just unpack some of the thought process and the rationale behind how we approach the property strategy, and how we've approached the potential growth opportunities within the property space. So the first prong is to replicate Gauteng's market share. So we went through an internal benchmarking exercise against our largest competitor to understand the amount of space relative to theirs, within the Gauteng Metro. We then applied the Gauteng space ratio to identify the other space requirements in the other regions. The additional investment in space results in the Gauteng pharmacy market share achieved nationally, and the proven business model then delivers the front shop market shares on the back of the pharmacy market share. So that talks to the core aspects of our brand.
You know, once we can access and retain the script, we do retain and we do grow front shop market share as a function of driving that foot traffic into our stores. So that was the first part of the property strategy, which we'll unpack in a specific slide post explaining two and three. We also appreciate, in point two, that there's a requirement to maintain our national share. That requirement is a function of how quickly our competitors open space, and those competitors are both pharmacy retailers as well as grocery retailers. We understand and we appreciate that there will be more and more doors that are entered into South African retail, and that will require a specific approach to maintain our national market share in terms of our property expansion strategy.
And then the third one is to grow our national market share within the consolidating pharmacy market. So we have ambitions to continue to grow a specific percentage point per year in terms of our market share, and that will be the third amber that will deliver the required square meters for us to package into a property strategy that we intend to deliver over 36 months. So this slide, although it's quite data-heavy, it intends to describe the approach that we had to rationalize the size of the opportunity by using Gauteng as a benchmark. So as you can see on the top right-hand corner of the slide, you have Dis-Chem's national pharmacy share at 24.4%, the largest pharmacy share nationally.
If you think about that in relation to the space that we have relative to our competitor, what we wanted to understand was in the market of Gauteng, where arguably it is the most consolidated market from a corporate pharmacy perspective, and where we have our strongest space presence, Dis-Chem's Gauteng pharmacy market share is at 35.9%. These are both IQVIA numbers. Our largest competitor in Gauteng's pharmacy market share is at 21.6, bringing corporate pharmacy up to almost close to 60%. I think that's also fundamentally important as we think about the consolidation of independent pharmacy. There lies the opportunity to further consolidate Gauteng, but it certainly is the market that is the most consolidated from a corporate pharmacy perspective.
The space ratio between ourselves and our largest competitor, with regards to square meters, is 1:1. So as much as we have less stores as a function of our stores being bigger, we have laid down as much space as our largest competitor, resulting in the metrics of the pharmacy shares that I've disclosed. And our front shop market share, 32.1%, quite close to our pharmacy market share of 35.9%. Taking into consideration that in the core categories that we represent the share, you have food grocers playing in that space as well. To me, that depicts the proven success of the business model. Once you attract the pharmacy spend through either OTC or script, you also get the full basket within the front shop, which are underpinned by the value and service that we offer.
What this then does in the table below is it translates Gauteng into each of the other metros where we are underrepresented from a space perspective. So you can see on the left-hand side, Dis-Chem to largest competitor space ratio in Gauteng is 1, as I've described, 1:1 square meterage added to Gauteng compared to our competitor. If you look at some of the other territories, Limpopo is 1- 1.53, Mpumalanga, 1- 1.63, and so it carries on. Eastern Cape specifically at 3.21. That just implies that there's more space that our competitor has in those markets, and the utilization of space to attract share.
The additional space line just reverse engineers the Gauteng market share and talks to the additional space that we'd need nationally per metro to replicate the Gauteng market share. The current Dis-Chem pharmacy market share at 35.9% in Gauteng can be seen to be lower in each of those other main markets, and again, that's a function of our lower representation of space. You can see the inverse relationship with respect to the pharmacy share of our largest competitor in some of those metros, where, again, they've got much more indexed, higher indexed space than we do. The same ratio plays into the front shop share, where, again, in Gauteng, we have a much higher front shop share.
The purpose of the slide, just to denote the approach to replicate Gauteng's market share and the dynamic that the market would see as we think about replicating Gauteng market share nationally. If we had to summarize this property expansion strategy, as I've discussed, to replicate Gauteng's market share, the space growth required over 36 months would be an increase of 21%, and we'd have to deliver, and we will deliver 65,235 sq m to replicate Gauteng's market share. We also appreciate that we'd have to maintain market share growth, and that would come at 62,168 squares with space growth of 20%. The requirement there is benchmarked against the space growth that we see in our competitors, down as we currently speak.
Then, in addition to maintaining the share, the continued ability to grow market share, both in Gauteng and nationally, so an additional 3% of space invested, which would be just south of 10,000 sq m, resulting in approximately 137,000 sq m of space added in the next 3 years. I think importantly to note that we haven't assigned a store number to that. We do appreciate that we're now considering the Medicare integration and rebranding, have the ability to deploy multiple store formats, and these store formats will play into the 137,000 sq m, depending on the opportunity that presents itself. So we have a very direct, succinct property approach. We appreciate the importance of property to drive the top-line number.
Property, as I said previously, also unlocks the ability to be cost efficient as we redeploy our resources across the property space and unlock that positive operating leverage. If we move into primary healthcare and our vision around building an integrated healthcare ecosystem, I've previously spent a lot of time describing our ambitions in this space and the benefits of integrating into the funder or into the financial services space. We've spoken about the benefits in margin longer, longer term. In many instances, the financial services space within this healthcare ecosystem come at higher margins.... as well as the ability for us to design benefits through the lens of being a service provider, and ultimately reduce the cost of healthcare and improve the access or increase the access to more and more South Africans.
As I said, this, this slide, we will continue to include in our presentations. We will talk to elements of it as we deliver on them. But the importance of an integrated healthcare system and the benefits that it brings the group longer term, we have discussed, and we have deliberately disclosed quite a lot of detail around the importance of it. And certainly from a social good perspective, the importance of increasing access and lowering cost of healthcare to more and more South Africans. As we've said, as the medical schemes come under pressure, and the ability for us as a service provider to start to influence that with some of the investments that we've historically made.
If we move into Dis-Chem Health, as you are aware, Dis-Chem Health was the rebranded product set that we put into the market that covers medical insurance, accident cover, and gap. This was complemented by a very specific reward program called Extra, which gives 20% off over 2,500 products, with a mandate of Extra really opening up value that could be invested or could be used to fund healthcare for the policyholders. What we have seen is we continue to see, and we continue to be impressed, that the market exists and is consuming our product. So the investment in policy acquisition has seen monthly new member additions doubling between March and August, and that trajectory continues, which is very positive. We are continuing to look, reimagine how healthcare gets accessed.
Some examples is we've reduced the waiting periods through the benefit structure in our products. So previously, medical insurance used to carry a three-month waiting period, which comes from the way that medical scheme benefit design was introduced. We've now moved it to one month, and we can do that as we understand the risk in the insurance space as a function of being the service provider into that insurer. And I think that's just an example of the way that we reimagine and how we will introduce and change benefit designs to cycle members through our ecosystem, but at the same time, to increase access and reduce cost. We do believe that there's an opportunity, as the previous slide denoted, to continue to add and to continue to build to health-centric products.
These financial services products, as we see them, will always be looked at through a health lens. One of the mandates that we've certainly have internally is to ensure that the service provider part of our business can contribute to value when looking at the specific financial services product that we bring to market. As I said, the reward program is fundamentally important. It allows potential savings of up to ZAR 600, and simply speaking, policyholders can reinvest that into healthcare and ultimately get healthcare at no cost. What we are seeing with Extra and the very high touch points of Extra, and obviously, the value that Extra brings, is up to 50% improvement in collections.
As we've discussed previously, collections and lapse rates are important in terms of how margin gets delivered in the insurance space, and that reward program is driving up to 50% improvement when members have the lifestyle benefits and the extraR eward program and are encouraged to participate in the value that those bring. I think the final point, and this will continue to play out, is just the nature of the value proposition. It is very, very relevant in the economic environment that we're in, specifically around healthcare delivery, specifically around some of the infrastructure that, you know, the state has and is compromised in terms of healthcare delivery.
We really are putting healthcare in the hands of people at much lower cost, and again, it's aligned with our ambitions of delivering healthcare at a much lower cost and increasing that, and increasing access to more and more South Africans. One of the fundamental investments that we've made, and we continue to focus on, is on our health clinics. I think that as we think about lower cost healthcare and access to healthcare, the utilization of our clinics become fundamental. The clinic system is the lowest priced resource in the market, and if adopted appropriately and if allowed to practice at the top scope of their service, they can reduce healthcare costs, significantly.
Again, if you think about the importance of benefit design and routing within a healthcare ecosystem, the ability to continue to prove, to drive additional volume through the clinics is fundamentally important, as we look to reduce cost of healthcare. So what the two graphs denote is just some of the ambitions and some of the principles and some of the investments that we've made historically. So the nurse-led clinic consults, excluding the vaccines, the vaccines, which obviously were COVID-related, you can see that they continue to improve. We are continuously looking at extending clinic hours. We are now opening on a Saturday with the ambitions of ensuring that our clinics are open when our pharmacies are open, really aligned with a mandate of healthcare delivery through our retail platform.
And then on top of that, the penetration of Clinic Connect, which is effectively a virtual doctor. On the back of those clinic volume, is just continually increasing. And I think the importance of that, when kind of you put the two slides together, is that you're delivering care at a much lower cost. And that is fundamental to an integrated healthcare ecosystem whose mandate is to reduce cost and increase access. Two of the other things that we've seen in the clinic space is obviously a significant progress with certain provincial departments in contracting and implementing family planning and baby vaccinations. And I think that's important because the way that the state sees the utilization of a resource like a clinic is very similar to ourselves.
From a service provider perspective, we're well-placed to play into private and public partnerships. The ambitions of both ourselves and the state are the same. You know, even if you look at the mandate of NHI, it's to increase healthcare access to more and more South Africans, and we're well-positioned as a service provider to do that. And certainly, we are seeing, across provinces, we are seeing more traction in some of the public-private partnerships, which is encouraging for us, you know, as we think about the integrated healthcare system. And then, I suppose the last point, which again talks to the concept that I've seen previously, I mean, we've spoken a lot previously about the importance of adherence management with respect to chronic illnesses.
We continue to invest, and the chronic script is the most profitable script that we have in our environment. The return that we get from chronic patients from franchise spend is significant, and on top of that, we are also able to reduce or manage or better manage the health outcome of that specific patient. So we continue to invest. We're keeping more and more people healthier, and that plays out into some of the financial service products that we're thinking about, and we will add to the portfolio further down the line. I'm now gonna hand over to Chris to take us through the wholesale segment.
Thanks, Rui. Good morning. [Foreign language] Thanks for the opportunity to present. I want to thank God for a great set of results. As you have heard, and you will now see more detail of, the wholesale division once again had a very successful and blessed trading period in the first half of FY 2024. I want to thank and congratulate my whole team on their dedication and continued focus on driving sales, exceeding customer expectations on service, and controlling costs. As the Springbok team has proven with their remarkable victory in the World Cup, success is only achieved if the team works together. So as you can see, this was almost on the same side. We now turn to Slide 33, External Wholesale Revenue. Total wholesale revenue growth of 13.5% was achieved.
Looking at the diagram, we can see that external wholesale revenue grew by 19.1%. There were no internalized sales in the first half of this financial year. The number of TLC franchise stores have increased from 153 to 180 up till August year on year. The TLC customer group revenue grew by 20.4%, which once again proves the feasibility and success of the business model. The independent customer group grew revenue by 18%, which can be attributed to two things: firstly, our sustained focus on maintaining and improving service levels, and secondly, our increased customer footprint. We are pleased to see these growth numbers despite the low SEP increase. If we now turn to Slide 34, Expense Efficiencies, this graph seeks to compare total revenue and total income growth to total expense growth.
It can be seen that total revenue has grown by 13.5%, and total income has grown by 8.4% compared to the same period last year. Total expenses grew by only 5.5% over the same period. This was attained through a sustained focus on efficiencies and cost control. I will address some of the higher percentage growth costs first. If we look at depreciation, it increased by 26.5%, and this is mainly due to the acquisition of new motor vehicles and forklifts. Rent and municipal charges increased by 20%. This is mainly driven by an increase in electricity costs and municipal charges. Payroll expense increased by 9.8%, which is below revenue growth of 13.5%.
This is mainly due to inflationary pressure and the implementation of an extra shift in the KZN DC due to increased sales volumes. Motor vehicle expense, which includes fuel costs, increased by only 5%, and this is despite significant fuel price increases. Repairs and maintenance costs on buildings decreased by 5% due to substantial maintenance done in the prior year, resulting in less expenditure being necessary in the current year. Courier expense decreased by 3%, which is great to see, as this is an area of continued focus for us due to it being a big cost driver in our environment. It was influenced by the following main drivers: firstly, Pallet Height Optimization; secondly, renegotiation of fees with service providers; and lastly, route efficiency improvements.
Other expenses grew by only 0.4%, but this was influenced by a ZAR 28.5 million Forex loss in the prior period. If you now turn to Slide 35, Distribution Expansion, the Longmeadow facility. The investment was done to cater for the growth ambitions of the group in the medium to long term. The graph seeks to convey our expected forecast of the increase in expenses due to the investment in the Longmeadow DC. The new facility totals 63,000 sq m in size, and the transaction has been approved by the Competition Commission. Transfer is underway and is expected to be completed in the new year. We have entered into an interim lease agreement with the seller, which came into effect on the 1st October 2023. There will be an investment into infrastructure and movable assets necessary to get the site operational.
Stringent cost containment measures have been implemented, and we will leverage off some of the Midrand facility's resources in the interim. The graph compares the Midrand second half of FY 2024 cost budgeted to the Longmeadow budgeted for the second half of FY 2024. As can be seen, the costs equate to only 9% of the budgeted Midrand cost, which is then offset by a move from Midrand of 2%, causing the net effect to be an increase of only 7% of the budgeted Midrand cost. Our strategy to offset these costs involves identifying and targeting external vendors that service our Dis-Chem stores directly due to our historical DC space constraints, and then to move their supply into the Longmeadow facility. A conservative view puts us at break-even in the Longmeadow facility within the next 18-24 months.
If you now turn to slide 36, The Local Choice retail performance. As can be seen, the group's retail revenue has increased to ZAR 1.882 billion for the first six months of the 2024 financial year. This is a 13% growth in the group's retail revenue. The TLC customer revenue growth is partly driven by front shop support and ranging that we, as a supply chain, offers them. We currently have 196 TLC franchisees, and we'll be above the 200 store mark by the end of February 2024. I will now hand back to Rui for the outlook.
Thank you, Chris. As part of the outlook, I'm going to just explain the simplicity of our focus as a group and how we see our group strategic growth drivers. What we've tried to do is try and illustrate it in the way that we think about it. If you look at the wheel, and we start with property on the top right-hand side, property ultimately will drive many of the ability for us to extract both total income, cost control, some of the working capital ambitions, and is fundamental to the group growth going forward.
As I said previously, we are looking to deploy 137,000 sq m over the 36 months in a, in a very analytically based, based manner, which replicates capturing market share nationally and continues, and further than that, continues a growth profile above the space that's also needed to maintain as we think about h-how, how our competitors add space to, to their own portfolios. The total income line, which has been a big focus for us, and as Craig has described from a ROIC perspective, continues to be an area that we look at. We think that as a function of the work that we've done, there are incremental improvements to come, but our goal is to maintain and move that, move the needle on the total income line, slowly over the, over the medium term.
From a cost control perspective, as I said, our focus remains on the relationship between payroll growth and sales growth. Payroll growth, being north of 60%, will continue to be the biggest cost of the group, and it's the biggest opportunity for us to redistribute that cost across the property portfolio that we intend bringing to the group, which will unlock the positive operating leverage that ultimately drops into the EBIT line and into ultimate earnings delivery. From a working capital perspective, I think if we think about debtor days and creditor days, with working capital finance, we've certainly extracted what we can out of creditor days. We do believe that over the medium term, there will be a 10% improvement in stock days as we cycle F&R through the entire base.
We are already starting to see some of the benefits of that, and that translates, if you look at the net working capital metrics, to a 50% improvement in net working capital. The wholesale market share expansion as a function of the market consolidating is always going to be important for us. The continued addition of TLCs and what that brings from a return perspective is fundamentally important, as Chris has described, and a big success factor in the way that wholesale is continuing to deliver operating margins. As in the past, it will be lumpy in its nature as a function of us investing in the additional 63,000 sq m , but that 63,000 sq m is really there to support our growth ambitions over the next 5-7 years.
The integrated healthcare ecosystem, as I spoke about, this is a much more medium and longer-term play. We will focus on a portfolio of health-centric products. We will expand that. We will continue to bring new products into the market, and the benefits of that are not only the additional margin that comes with this segment of the business, but the ability to change the benefit structure of these products to cycle people through our retail pharmacies and our retail clinics, ultimately get the benefit or the synergistic benefit of that collective integrated healthcare system. Then importantly, as we've started to do, predominantly in the integrated healthcare ecosystem space, Extra is a good example of it, the benefit design in our medical insurance program is another good example, but it's really to internalize some of the analytics that we're leveraging.
So to take what we believe is differentiated in terms of us understanding the health consumption data of our customer and patients, and pointing that or commercializing that internally to build better products and create more value. And I think if I think about this, the delivery of these seven elements from a group perspective, which will be a focus, which is translated into the way that we think about leading the group, certainly from a leadership perspective, all the way into the decentralized store environment, will be fundamentally important to the success of the group over the medium and long term. On that note, I'd like to say thank you for listening. I'd also like to thank my team that has assisted me in the transition over the last 100 days. I think there's an exciting time ahead for all of us.
I think there's a simplicity in our approach as a group, and we're quite excited about building this integrated healthcare vision.