Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Dis-Chem Financial Results Presentation for the full year ended 28 February 2025. As I normally do, I focus on the group highlights initially before I hand over to Julia to take us through the financial results. Before I do, I'd just like to thank everyone in the organization. You will see as we go through the presentation, there's a constant theme of change, and change is difficult. Firstly, to the leadership team who have been very supportive in administering the change, thank you to every other employee who's operationalized the change. It's very much valued, and I think we are all grounded in the common purpose of increasing access to care and reducing cost. With that being said, and certainly the mandate which drives the eight strategic pillars, as we presented previously, just some highlights on each of the pillars that we've delivered.
Starting with pillar one on property, the current pipeline now is at 130,000 sq m. I will break down the status of those sq m as we go through the presentation, but we're in a good position to deliver on the 137,000 sq m, which represents a step change in space and really is the arrowhead of our strategy as it's complementary to the other seven pillars. In addition to that, we've also secured resource capability to operationalize the pipeline of property that we're generating. If we move over to total income, importantly, the total income focus is that it tracks ahead of sales, and in this year we have achieved that with total income growth at 9.2% ahead of revenue growth at 8% for the group. That's resulted in incremental margin improvement to 31% from 30.7%. Julia will expand on that in the financial results section.
Cost control, a very successful deployment of staffing framework 1.0. I will talk about where we are in the delivery of staffing framework 2.0 as we move into the outlook, but certainly embedding staffing framework 1.0 in both the way that it rendered in the front shop and in the pharmacy has resulted in like-for-like retail payroll cost growth decreasing by 0.2%, which has created the operating leverage that we intended, with operating profit increasing at 18.3%. Working capital management, tactically we continue to focus on this area with a large focus on inventory. We are now F&R compliant, so F&R deployed completely, and we are starting to move into a world where the inventory execution strategy is centralized.
I think as I've described previously, we still had a lot of manual ordering in store in a very decentralized way, which creates barriers to efficiency when you think about centralized mechanics kind of optimizing inventory holdings. That has been taken away from stores, and now we are fully central in terms of inventory execution strategy and comfortable to commit to a working capital unlock, which we'll cover in the presentation. As we think about wholesale market share expansion, Chris will go into the detail of this, but really just some high-level numbers which demonstrate the continued success of this business unit.
External wholesale revenue growth of 22.1% in what is a flat-lining market, so tremendous market share growth for us, and that is really being driven by the TLC franchise model with TLC franchise stores increasing support of our wholesale business unit by 21.2%, and then traction being gained in the independent customer space, which purports to be a pipeline for TLC, their revenue increasing by 22.7%. As we have discussed, our ambitions to be an integrated healthcare ecosystem, certainly to deliver on the mandates of increasing access and lowering cost, we launched successfully Dis-Chem Life. We continue to see improvements in bi-directional metrics, which I will touch on as we go through the presentation. The concept of bi-directional metrics really talking to how much of the healthcare wallet we own from the consumer, and we are seeing positive results in the bi-directional metric measurements.
We continue to see very, very positive growth in both the retail and corporate health policyholder space, which is indicative very much of the need and want. Certainly when we think about bi-directional integration metrics, we are starting to see some very healthy spend of those policyholders and some very different behavior of those policyholders in our retail product and services space. We've also recently launched X, bigly lab s. X, bigly labs i s effectively our innovation hub that prioritizes the focus on customer digital data analytics and automation. I will expand on this through the presentation, but principally it's an innovation hub that prioritizes these elements, which traditionally, or certainly in the way that the traditional business units would have focused on, those would have been deprioritized ahead or below certain traditional metrics.
It is really a tech-enabled agile business unit whose focus is on operationalizing and product design and development into the traditional business unit, which then unlocks value in all of the eight strategic pillars. I will talk through that as we move on to the outlook. I am now going to hand over to Julia to take us through the financial results.
Thank you, Rui. Good morning, everyone. The group is pleased with its strong performance during the 12-month period to February 2025, and specifically with the implementation of our cost management strategy. The main aspects from a statement of comprehensive income perspective are revenue growth of 8% and total income growth of 9.2%. This is ahead of expense growth of 7.5%, resulting in an operating profit increase of 18.3%, which we will unpack in the subsequent slides. Included in total income in the current period is a one-off property gain of ZAR 103.7 million from the release of the finance lease liability and right of use asset on the acquisition of the Midrand Warehouse in December 2024. Three other points noted in the statement of comprehensive income are finance costs, tax, and non-controlling interest.
Finance costs have increased in the current period with the Longmeadow Warehouse acquisition in November 2023 and the Midrand Warehouse acquisition in December 2024. Finance costs on bank overdraft facilities have reduced through the reduction in interest rates. The reduction in the effective tax rate is due to the additional 12H and 11D allowances in the current period. Non-controlling interest increased due to the strong performance of minority interest stores and oncology. In the statement of financial position, there is an increase in property, plant, and equipment due to the expansion of the warehouse space, as well as the 20 new retail stores opened and renovations completed. Intangible assets increased due to the pharmacy operating system and other IT technology that is currently being built, which is a key component to our healthcare strategy.
Inventory balance increased by ZAR 743 million from February 2024 due to the new stores, as well as the pharmacy buy-in of ZAR 566 million ahead of the ACP price increase. Trade and other receivables have increased with the growth in the wholesale debtors book on the back of external sales growth of 22.1%, as well as additional service income earned. Other assets have increased with the acquisition of the 50% interest in Dis-Chem Life for ZAR 156 million. An additional bank loan of ZAR 650 million was taken out in the current period with the acquisition of the Midrand Warehouse. This acquisition has resulted in us now owning all key warehouse property in the group. Revenue has been broken down between the wholesale and retail segments. Retail revenue has grown by 5.9% to ZAR 33.6 billion, with the like-for-like revenue growing by 4.1%.
When excluding the additional trading day in the prior period for the leap year, retail revenue grew by 6.4%. This growth was influenced by the opening of 20 new retail pharmacy stores, as well as the higher ACP price in the current period, with dispensary revenue increasing by 9.5%. External wholesale revenue growth has been well supported by the growing TLC franchise model at 21.2% and the continuing support of independents at 22.7%. The TLC franchises have grown from 205 at February 2024 to 240. Total income for the group has increased by 9.2%, with the total income margin moving from 30.7% in the prior period to 31%.
The total income margin has been improved due to transactional gross margin growth ahead of sales growth in the healthcare, personal care, and beauty categories, as well as continued improvement in the back-end terms, with trade terms increasing by 9.6% against purchases growth of 7.8%. Wholesale margin increased from 8.1%- 8.5%. Excluding the property gain, the total income margin increased from 8.1%- 8.2%. Moving on to retail operating expenditure, with the focus on retail cost containment, it is pleasing to see retail expense growth of 6.8% being below total income growth of 7.9%. There has been a 7.1% increase in depreciation, mainly as a result of the IFRS 16 depreciation, the rollout of the new point of sale technology in the prior year, as well as fixtures and fittings from new stores and renovations. Occupancy costs have increased by 19%, predominantly due to increase in electricity charges.
Employee costs are still the largest expense within the retail segment and have been well controlled through the implementation of the retail framework. Other operating costs increased by 4.5%, mainly due to an increase in IT-related costs, security, and courier costs. This has been partly net- off by savings in generator and advertising costs. As discussed in the previous results presentation, we implemented a new retail staffing framework at the end of the 2024 financial period in order to better manage the employment cost line. Since implementing the framework, positive operating leverage has been achieved, with like-for-like payroll costs declining by 0.2% compared to revenue growth of 3.2%. As new stores have been opened, payroll cost per meter squared in real terms has reduced, thereby shortening the new store break-even period. This will enable costs to continue to be managed through our property rollout plan.
Wholesale has done well in the current period with increased warehouse space to keep expenditure growth at 11.1%, below the growth of total income of 14.8%. Depreciation has increased by 13.4% as a function of new forklifts and equipment, as well as depreciation on buildings. Employment cost growth is predominantly due to additional staff in the Longmeadow Warehouse, as well as the annual increases. Other operating costs increased by 12.7%, mainly due to motor vehicle expenses, repairs and maintenance, and insurance costs. This slide indicates the payroll costs across the different warehouse campuses in the current and prior comparable period. The addition of the Longmeadow Warehouse has resulted in the Croughton campus utilized space increasing by 27.4%, which has resulted in an increase in payroll costs, but a net decrease in the payroll cost per meter squared of 14.9%.
Cape Town payroll costs increased with the addition of a night shift in the current period due to the higher volumes through the warehouse. KZN payroll costs have been well managed and remain consistent to the prior period. Operating profit for the group improved by 18.3% from the prior period, with operating margin improving from 4.9%- 5.4%, which is a function of the delta between total income and total expenditure in the period. Excluding the property gain, operating profit improved by 12.4%. EPS and HEPS for the period is 137.6 and 137.5 cents per share, which is an increase of 20% from the prior period. We now move to the working capital in the statement of financial position. Debtors' days are being well managed and have increased by one day due to the increase in the wholesale debtors book.
Increased inventory is held within the group at the end of the period due to the additional stores, as well as the pharmacy buy-in ahead of the ACP price increase. This has resulted in inventory days increasing from 88 days in February 2024 to 91 days. If the ACP buy-in is excluded, the inventory days reduced by one day to 87 days. Creditor days continue to be well- maintained. Overall, net working capital days, excluding the ACP buy-in, have improved by one day when compared to February 2024. When looking over the 12-month period, the rolling stock days have improved from 86 days- 84 days. With the F&R deployment complete and the centralization of ordering, we expect to unlock ZAR 500 million in cash in the 2026 financial period. The waterfall graph depicts our cash movement in the current period with a reduction of ZAR 768 million since February 2024.
Cash inflows have come from normal trading and the additional bank loan for the Midrand Warehouse purchase. Cash payments have been made for working capital, taxation, finance costs, dividend declared, as well as lease payments, CapEx, and loan repayments. Included in investing activities is also the ZAR 156 million relating to the 50% acquisition of Dis-Chem Life. Expansion CapEx is mainly driven through the opening of our new stores and investment in information technology enhancements across both retail and wholesale. Maintenance CapEx has increased with additional warehouse space and renovations of existing stores. I now hand over to Rui to take you through the retail trading performance.
Thank you, Julia. As I go through the retail trading performance, I will break it down into three sub-segments. Initially addressing core category, then moving into property, as I said, the arrowhead of our strategy, and then talking a little bit about the success and the initiatives in the integrated health space. If we start with core category market shares, what is very noticeable is the increase in the dispensary market share, which means we maintain our leadership position as South Africa's largest pharmacy retailer by dispensary market share. We have always felt it very necessary to continue to chase the script. We see that as our defensive moat when comparing ourselves as a brand to the rest of what is traditional South African retail. Dispensary-associated customers or patients, anyone who carries a script, be it OTC, be it acute or chronic, is our best returning patient.
That reinforces the principle of ensuring that we try and win the script and what underpins our ambitions to be an integrated healthcare ecosystem. It is nice to see the dispensary market share gains. We have seen market share compression in other core categories, so personal care and beauty, healthcare, medical, and baby, really as a function of two principles that impact each of the categories collectively. One is the timing of new space rollout. Previously, and certainly what drove kind of our ambitions into the property space was the amount of retail doors that sold the same products that we sell coming into the South African market, and competitive retailers outpacing us from a relative addition of space in terms of new space to current base. That has necessitated the need for us to focus on property, which I talk about and which we have delivered on.
What was very interesting was the shift into more and more contribution on promotion. I think as you think about the differentiating aspects of our brand, range, and service from a consumer decision-making perspective, those are less important in a promotional shop, really more about value. Your competitive advantages as a brand are watered down in the promotional space, and we see more and more of the shift moving into the promotional space, more and more of the revenue shift moving into the promotional space, indicative of very value-conscious South African consumers.
I think that necessitated, again, through the bigly environment, a need to understand kind of our market share or our market shares on and off promotion, and very visible to see that the way that we approach the promotional mechanisms into our stores, we lose share in the promotional space, we gain share in the non-promotional space. I think that's a function, or it certainly initiated a piece of work to simplify our promotional mechanisms. It's also established the need for a better reward program, which is being launched in the second half of FY2026, which is digitally led, ultimately analytically thought out. That coupled with traditional promotional mechanisms are our two kind of arrows to address some of the promotional challenged market shares that we've seen across those three. We're quite excited about the launch of those two as we look to FY2026.
Maybe the last point is the baby care market share with the addition of Baby City at 14.6% as opposed to the 9.3% that we read in the traditional sense, or certainly in the traditional baby care stack of products that we sell through our Dis-Chem stores. If we move over to the next slide that depicts core category performance, essentially the slide illustrates the relationship between a changed percentage in transactional gross margin and a changed percentage in revenue. Essentially what we're looking for here is aligned with total income as a strategic driver, ensuring that from an income statement structure perspective, each category is delivering slightly higher transactional gross margin than a change in revenue share, which is a function of the scale that we bring and certainly the way that we look at mix of product within each core category.
The contributions, if you look on the right-hand side, have stayed relatively similar. The mix of product selection in a customer's basket or in a policyholder or patient's basket has stayed relatively similar, hence the contributions not necessarily moving year- on- year. The change in revenue dispensary 9.5% with a change in transactional gross margin of 8.5%. We have seen a little bit of compression in there, really driven by the timing of medical scheme pressure on drug price reductions. We have seen successful trading in the dispensary. Again, I speak about the importance of winning the script and the continued market share growth. I am very, very proud of the 9.5% which has taken market share. We watch the transactional margin in relation to the revenue change very closely.
In personal care and beauty, healthcare and medical, and in other, transactional gross margin has grown ahead of revenue as we intended to grow. We've used quite a lot of analytical pricing tech to understand appropriate price points between elastic and non-elastic products, and we've driven some nice margin change there. In baby care, we've seen the reverse. We've seen transactional margin lag sales, but that is really a function of the higher penetration of lower margin subcategories in baby, really being baby food and baby paper products.
If we move away from core category performance and we move into property and the property expansion strategy, just in terms of national progress, and I think the way that we have reformed our approach to property, really through a property forum that has started to create a pipeline that we can deliver on some important numbers, but the current three-year space pipeline of 130,000 sq m, which is 95% of our plan of 137,000 sq m, that really is carried across multiple statuses. In FY2025, the current year that we are reporting on, we opened 20 stores with a cumulative sq m of just under 22,500. We always described it as a non-linear kind of contribution of space as a function of the work that we needed to do in the property forum.
In FY2026, the year that we're in today, we've got nine stores that have opened and are trading and influence the post-results sales number. We've got an additional seven stores confirmed for H1, so 16 stores confirmed in H1. We've got 20 for H2, and we've got three that are currently being negotiated, which takes the tally up to 39 stores, which effectively is a 2xing of the stores that we delivered in FY2025 and really a consequential output of the work that we've put not only from a property pipeline perspective, but also importantly from an operationalization perspective as we've enhanced the resource capacity to be able to deliver that space. We then have in FY2027 some stores already confirmed, so 14, and we are negotiating another 10. And then we've got pipeline that will fall into each of those respective years of 61 stores totaling 45,000 sq m.
If you naturally think about the evolution of property, it's initially identified, so a market's identified as we've described it previously in terms of our underrepresentation in certain geographies. It then moves into the negotiating space as and when we find an official site to access the market that we found and then to confirm. If you had to benchmark this table against tables that we've kind of delivered previously, you would see the increase in confirmed and negotiated space as we go through the evolution of that property funnel that I've described. I think one last point to make on the slide is just the analytically led nature, again influenced by bigly of the way that we look at property in terms of understanding the size of the market, both from a franchise core category perspective and from a dispensary market share perspective.
If we look at the localized progress of the property strategy, the pipeline coverage is across all provinces, and we do have a CEDEC line with greater coverage in the underrepresented areas. If you go back to how we understood and kind of identified the opportunity, we really were underrepresented in all areas other than Gauteng. Obviously, Gauteng still contributes a significant amount of space. It's a very real opportunity. If you look at the percentage of square meter growths, you can see big gains in the markets of the Eastern Cape, obviously KZN, the Western Cape, which were the bigger markets that we were underrepresented in. As I said, the strategy for Gauteng is to continue to maintain and grow ahead of the competitors. With all this being said, we still have the industry theme, which is the consolidation of corporate pharmacy.
We need to maintain the pace of space even into markets where we feel we are relatively well- penetrated or well- saturated. As I said previously, a very, very, very analytical approach to how we identify sites. That analytical approach is servicing or certainly allowing us to add space into the localized areas in line with our strategic intent, which was or has been described earlier. If we move from property into the integrated health ecosystem, visually, I mean, this really sums up how we think about our ecosystem. You can see elements that are being expanded on. We speak very much about a data ecosystem. If you think about the innovation hub and housing data analytics across each of our strategic drivers, you can see how the innovation hub starts to service an integrated health ecosystem.
We then have the products and services that we offer, which really are supportive of the entry door into healthcare delivery. We have the health-funded or health-focused financial services. These are solutions that we bring onto the market as we've brought on Dis-Chem Health and Dis-Chem Life. They are very much structured from a benefit stack perspective through a healthcare lens and are structured in a way that encourages further integration and consumption of our healthcare ecosystem. That is obviously delivered through a health asset stack to ensure that the expertise that each of these assets have is delivered through the Dis-Chem brand. Ultimately, the mandate of this ecosystem simplistically and the way that we'll continue to evolve it is to provide affordable healthcare to more and more South Africans. The commercial return associated with that is that we capture more and more of South Africa's healthcare spend.
If we move on to the concept of bidirectional benefits, and I explained that we had made some progress into the bidirectional space when I spoke about the group highlights. I think firstly, in the financial services space, we see policy acquisition from our own retail channels have doubled year- on- year. I think importantly, when you think about the bidirectional benefits of our retail asset in the financial services world, it's a 64% lower policy acquisition cost compared to market. When you look at the statutory entity that houses the insured products and you look at the performance or the return on investment of those products, lower acquisition cost is a fundamental driver of better returns.
Extra Rewards, which is the program that we designed and that I speak of and that has become almost the heart of how we reimagined the entirety of our reward program that we launched in the second half of the year, is driving engagement that's improving policy retention. Essentially, the two fundamental metrics that you are managing in the financial services space, which is your cost to acquire leads and obviously your retention mechanisms, are being supported by the asset stack that is the traditional retail business. It is a bidirectional benefit that you see in the financial services space. In the bottom right-hand side, you see the exponential growth that we've seen in corporate and retail products. Obviously, the corporate space comes from an existing business that we had bought into, being Kaelo.
We're starting to see nice traction as we start to encourage our own vendors to support the healthcare investment of their staff. In the retail product, we are now by far the largest retail medical insurance provider in South Africa. We've seen close on 40% growth in the sale of policies year- on- year. If you look at retail, we see increased policyholder engagement with extra Rewards. If you think about a policyholder who's consumed the financial services product, what we're really looking to see is how does their behavior change in our retail environment. Total policyholder spend, so these are policyholders of predominantly medical insurance products, is at now ZAR 500 million, which is relatively small from a penetration perspective. What's really exciting is their behavior change. Shopping frequency increased by five visits per year.
Our extra program, which has got participating brands, the sales of those brands within the basket of those customers has increased by more than 100%. You have this halo effect on non-participating brands as a result of the increased shopping frequency of up to 20%. We have also got a 262,000 script from policyholders, which is up from 10,000 in FY2022. This is a function of how we think about network curation, how you think about benefit design. Through benefit design, we have increased adoption of our virtual doctor consults with 14,500 consults facilitated by nurses in our Dis-Chem clinics, which is driving foot traffic that is coming from our policyholders. These are very real bi-directional benefits and really the manifestation of the control of an integrated healthcare ecosystem.
If we move from Dis-Chem Health to Dis-Chem Life, which has recently been launched, we sold our first Dis-Chem Life policy on the 5th of February, 2025. It's a comprehensive basket of life products. We've had successful in-store financial advisor pilots where we've got phase-accredited financial advisors currently in 17 stores, expanding to all of our stores and certainly a consistent delivery mechanism along with pharmacies and clinics by the end of FY2026. As I said, the basket that they're selling are funeral plans to comprehensive life cover and protective plans. They're all designed through a healthcare lens to meet the needs of South Africans. It also includes cover tailored for people living with chronic conditions, making affordable coverage more accessible. This is one of the products where we've really applied our healthcare lens in making it accessible. We understand the risk associated with chronic patients.
We are globally best in class at managing adherence. We invest behind adherence management. As a function of that, we know that a chronic patient can be as healthy as a non-chronic patient. By virtue of that, they shouldn't necessarily be penalized in terms of their life premium. For any chronic condition or any individual carrying a chronic condition, we are making life insurance drastically more affordable. In doing that, we are encouraging a bidirectional benefit, which is us servicing the chronic condition and understanding the consumer's healthcare baseline. As is the case with any of our life products, we fund within the product. It's a benefit that a policyholder receives. We fund what is a clinically led health check. That health check gives us a baseline reading on the policyholder.
It then allows us to manage the healthcare of that policyholder in a much better way. On the right-hand side, what you have is a very simple X and Y table that shows the different health ratings that come from the initial health check and the evolution of what the discount structure would look like within the life space as a function of the relationship between premium and health rating. Fundamentally, or very simplistically, what it's trying to describe is the bigger your share, the bigger we have, as Dis-Chem, the bigger share that we have of what is your health wallet, the greater savings we can unlock for you.
If you're a health rating one and your premium is a very low life product, you can get 20% off if you improve your health rating or you give us more and more of your spend across life, across protective plans, your ability to generate increased percentage discounts on all extra qualifying products off the base 20%, obviously, potentially on a net basis, makes the affordability of these health-related products very, very competitive in the market. I am now going to hand over to Chris, who's going to take us through the wholesale trading.
Surrounding the top-line revenue numbers achieved by CJ Distribution Business Models driving the revenue growth that we are seeing. As mentioned by Julia earlier, wholesale revenue has increased by 9.9% to ZAR 30.1 billion. Our total income achieved a growth of 22.1%. This number will be further elaborated on in the following wholesale revenue slide.
If we turn to the wholesale revenue slide, the table illustrates wholesale customer growth by channel with corresponding revenue growth. Support from Dis-Chem stores grew from 85%. Franchisees grew from 205- 240 stores, which equates to a 17% growth in revenue. Support from 8.9% growth in independent customers. Support from independent customers grew from. Our independent customer count grew by 8. To CJ Distribution. We are also incredibly proud to see the support from TLC customers. 87%, which can be partly attributed to additional. The full 12 months of the 2025 financial year. This is a 17.7% 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 offer them. We currently have 247 TLC franchise stores. If you turn to the next slide, the independent pharmacy model.
As mentioned previously, we are extremely pleased with the growth in revenue and support from our independent customer base. This has been an area of increased focus and attention, and it is rewarding to see that our hard work and focused commitment is bearing fruit. If you look to the right of the diagram, you will see the results of our efforts displayed. As you can see, we now service 1,264 independent pharmacy customers. These customers supported us with ZAR 3.1 billion worth of revenue over the 12-month period. The most exciting number to see is the revenue growth of 22.7% achieved with a 13.9% increase in support from our independent customer base. These numbers were achieved by the core initiatives listed on the left, which we consider imperative to the continued success of the CJ Distribution Business Model.
These are our business processes, marketing initiatives, product range, service levels, and a private label range. The gears in the middle represent the operational engine that converts the core initiatives on the left into the results we see on the right. Some interesting stats are that we processed over 1.6 million orders over the 12-month period and delivered just under 3.7 million parcels over the period. Thank you very much for your time, and I will now hand back to Rui.
Thank you, Chris. Before I go through the outlook, we just wanted to introduce X, bigly labs in a bit more detail. As we described, and as you will come to see, X, bigly labs is a structured innovation hub that is at the center of unlocking value across each of the strategic areas or pillars. On the slide, it does justice to how the team is structured.
As with any sort of agile tech business, it's structured in tribes and chapters with squads delivering and executing on certain ambitions that we have prioritized, ambitions driven by commercial opportunity. Just a quick explanation of each of the tribes, which will give you insight really to unlock a world where we rethink and reimagine the delivery of healthcare not only through our physical stores and physical settings, but also through digital ones and certainly reinvent healthcare's omnichannel experience. I think in the past, the business as for. The customer life cycle value tribe is really. Program going forward, the way that we deliver personalized journeys, the way we think about segmentation and micro-segmentation. Inventor collaboration and unlock new revenue streams. I spoke previously around the. Sales. I mean, we've spoken about wholesale as a strategic driver. We've had significant success.
In the same way that we intend disrupting healthcare delivery in the retail world and in the omnichannel world, certainly wholesale requires a focus really to elevate the wholesale offering by deploying advanced capabilities into the independent pharmacy channel and further enhancing the TLC franchise offering to create a pipeline or to play into an established independent pipeline that we've built through Chris and the team. The fifth piece, with the technology stack that they have and the exposure that they have to the capabilities that sit within the other five, I guess if I had to summarize this, it draws on global best practice. It carefully adapts with meaningful work and ensures that they continue to grow. Currently, we have close on 50 individuals in this. The decision isn't just reinforced by talent, but by the fact that it makes every part of the strategy more executionable.
Strategy as we think about it going forward, you will notice. Labs business. I think importantly, what you start to. Squarely at the heart of the business, the executive. As an example, if you take. Its efficiency through process, which manages cost. A commercial decision intelligence, for example, will influence the way that we potentially think about store staffing and the way that we drive framework 2.0, which inherently manages cost control. Another example of. And market size of our traditional core category. Of our customer through an omnichannel experience. If you think about the mechanism of delivery, how is a store facilitated to cater for digital orders. I think one of the things that we have squarely focused on as a leadership team is the importance of our employees.
We've always spoken about our employees as important to delivering a service, but I think fundamentally we need to think about our employees as priority customers and treat them as priority customers in the services that we offer. Policyholder customers or patients. I mean, ultimately, we sit on potential 20,000 healthcare ecosystem ambassadors and kind of change custodians for the group. We need them to experience what we think and what we offer through the ecosystem almost in a supercharged way when we think about the traditional South African consumer, because they enlarge the ability to kind of sell what we're trying to achieve, which is access to care at a lower cost to every single South African that walks through our door. If we move on to Outlook, Outlook has been done in a more traditional way and really encapsulates the focus of our FY2026 efforts.
As I said, arrowhead of kind of our property strategy, of our strategic real property, a continued acceleration of space identification and rollout. Simply speaking, the pipeline continues to get filled. We continue to change the status of pipeline to negotiating to confirmed. The store of the future designed to facilitate true omnichannel retailing and healthcare delivery, incorporating ecosystem elements aligned to brand architecture. Again, if you reference kind of the strategic wheel, we've settled on brand architecture, which is a new look and feel which simplifies or certainly makes it easy for consumers, patients, policyholders to understand what Dis-Chem as a healthcare ecosystem represents. That gets incorporated into a store that's designed for future omnichannel retailing, which incorporates kind of our ambitions into the digital space and not only the physical world that exists today.
Evolve and simplify the promotional mechanisms following the relaunch validity programs in the second half of FY2026. I have spoken about the importance of relaunching our loyalty program. I think on top of that, we have been very transparent around the effect that promotional sales have had on our top line number and the clunky, complex promotions that are being run in store that need to be simplified. It needs to be analytically led. We are understanding the best promotional mechanisms that work and the way that funding structures and vendor finance flow into that, and that will be delivered alongside and on top of the relaunched loyalty program in the second half of FY2026. We are deploying a staffing framework into the cost control strategic pillar 2.0, which is really focused on rethinking the way that we think about in-store management, considering the centralization of decisions.
Committed now to the ZAR 500 million working capital unlock, which really comes from a reduction in day stock cover. Both myself and Julia had spoken about kind of our ability now with complete F&R deployments and the manual orders being extracted from our stores to really control and harness and unlock the ZAR 500 million, which we will do over FY2026. Reimagining online retailing and the digital healthcare access, starting with a complete revamp of our digital channels. I think in this space, I mean, we're really ambitious about what we want to do. We understand very transparently that our digital channels are relatively poor compared to the rest of the market. It's not only about keeping up to pace with the rest of the market, but really leapfrogging and utilizing digital channels to deliver differentiated healthcare delivery and differentiated healthcare retailing.
Build increased customer engagement with enhanced value creation, driving customer lifetime value across our ecosystem. Again, centered around tribe two. A lot of customer research sitting in that environment, personalized journeys being launched with a fully fledged kind of CRM tool, all centered around enhancing customer value and ultimately driving what is the most important bi-directional metric, which is share of healthcare wallet. I think our approach to the strategic partners has also changed. I think as a national brand with ambitions to do what we do, which is increase access to care, the way that you think about strategic partners needs to give you access into mass market South Africa and non-industry compete scenarios. Some of that will start to render this year as we think about those relationships with what would be non-traditional strategic partners.
I guess importantly and really the center of the thank you that I said earlier, we've delivered a lot of change over the two years that I've led the business. Change is hard. I think both from a leadership perspective, as I described earlier, the adaption to change, the belief in what we're trying to achieve as a brand, as people that are purposely aligned to the brand has started to render really well through the culture project with every single employee in the organization. As I've said to the staff, it really remains our commitment as leadership to ensure that what we do for our consumers, our policyholders, and our patients gets done with a very different level of prioritization for our staff.
In doing that, not only can we be true to kind of driving health enabling and health improvement to what are our prioritized staff and prioritized customers, but we also start to create 20,000 purposely aligned ambassadors delivering on an ecosystem strategy, which is audacious. Very few global examples, but something that we all believe can really change the healthcare landscape delivery in South Africa. With that, I'd like to say thank you for listening to the presentation and enjoy the rest of your day.