Right, good morning, everybody, and welcome. It's great to have you. I was gonna say, there's almost not a spare seat in the house. There's maybe one or two, but guys, I really appreciate, you know, for our inaugural Capital Markets Day get-together, that you all found the time somewhere in hectic diaries to come and spend some time with us. Obviously, to all those dialing in from overseas or remotely, great to have you with us, too. Yeah, we've got a full one and a half days that we're gonna spend together. Could stretch to a little bit beyond one and a half days, depending how late you guys wanna stay tonight, but we'll make sure that we're quite guarded in the late evening conversations. But welcome, it's great to have you.
In fact, it reminds me of the pre-COVID days. We used to have results presentations, hop on a plane, go to Johannesburg, have a presentation there, have some one-on-ones, get on a plane to Cape Town, do the same there, and it's not too often we get in a forum like this with so many people in the room. So it's great to interact because I think you lose a lot remotely. Yeah, that I think engagement's certainly the preferred mode for us, but I know that the way the market's moved, I think it has made it a lot more convenient for people, but certainly, the interaction is what we like. So thank you for making it. Guys, a huge thank you to Investec for letting us use their very humble offices.
You must forgive our excitement. We value retailers. We don't often get to be exposed to this kind of environment, so we're very thankful to Investec. Thanks, guys. Yeah, and I think the room is one thing, but obviously there's a whole expo set up outside. So we've tended to take over the floor, but I think from our side, guys, let's really use that as engagement sessions. The managing directors will be at each of those divisional expo sites. So whether you wanna chat during a coffee break, ask some questions that are on your mind about, you know, some of the divisions, I think let's really use it for its intended purposes. Of course, there's product there, but it's the engagement that I think will be particularly useful.
And just to let you know, we're here for transparency. So, we're a transparent business. It's the way. And Nigel Payne's here, our chairman, but it's the way that we run our business, and it's the relationship that we've got between our board and our business. They've got access to people in our business. The, you know, there's no Chinese walls or lines they can't cross. So within that, I think let's just respect that we're here to talk about the long term and the strategy. We're not here to actually talk numbers and short-term performance and all that kind of stuff, because there's nothing in the public domain.
So if we could all just respect that, and really don't put yourselves in a difficult position and don't put us in a difficult position, where we start testing those boundaries. Okay. So it's great that we're gonna have a really detailed look at our business. So it is a real opportunity when, you know, other engagements, one-on-ones is one thing, but results presentations, guys, it's pretty... We're pretty pushed for time, so it's gonna be good just to slow things down, tell you a lot of what we think you want to know or some information that you do want, and where we haven't met that objective, well, there's definitely gonna be Q&A after that where we can spend as long as you want. You'll also notice that on the...
When I go through, or you've seen the agenda, we're not talking risks specifically. Our group risk director is in the room, so you can certainly ask questions if you want to, but the reason that we didn't address risk is that it's really embedded in our divisional thinking, in our group thinking, and I can just give you the assurance that we've got proper methodologies of managing risk. It is involved in the strategy process, it's involved in our operations, but we didn't think that we needed to cover that per se. So two days, we've got the better part of two days.
Timing is tight, so if Matt thinks I'm ad-libbing too much or waxing lyrical, you're gonna ring a brass bell, but there is a time at the end, and I know that people are dialing in at certain times for certain slots, so we'll try to keep to that as much as possible. Yeah. So I think let me just... If you then look at the agenda, and you have pre-sight of this, this is really dealing with day one. And what you can't see here, but obviously there'll be slots coming up, is engagement sessions with the expos, coffee breaks, lunch breaks, and certainly a session at the end where we can also talk around divisional stuff with on the expo sites as well.
If you guys don't have too much of a rough night, we're gonna hit the DC tomorrow morning. We look forward to starting off with a tour there. We'll then get into a discussion about logistics in totality. Pelser will take us through that, and then we'll also talk ESG, and then a Q&A on those two topics thereafter. But if you've got any mop-up questions from the day before, please feel free to ask that too. I'd like you to meet the team. I think you've probably engaged a little bit in coffee before the session, but this is the exec team. You know, myself, and I think you've all met Praneel already. But besides those two people, I mean, when did you last see such a good-looking and capable management team?
Wait till they speak, you're gonna be even more impressed. But if they and I won't go through everybody, but I think just from the Exco side, if you wouldn't mind just raising your hands, so people can you can identify yourselves to people. Antoinette Joubert, Group Director of Strategy and Growth. There she is down there. Liziwe Masoga, Chief People Officer, also known as the Director of Fun, internally. Kim Sim, Chief Information Officer. Werner Pelser, Group Director of Logistics. Don Baney, Group Retail Director of Apparel, and Clint Larsen, Group Retail Director of Homeware. People in the room go way beyond that, but I won't ask you to identify yourselves. But we've got Kevin Smit, Managing Director of Mr Price Division.
Bruce Penny, MD of Studio 88 Group, and Finlay, the recent appointment as MD of Mr Price Sport. Unfortunately, Natalie Wills isn't here today. In fact, she hasn't joined us yet. She's only joining next week, I think it is, the eighteenth. She recently joined us. She's the ex-head of Cotton On Africa, but has been appointed Managing Director of Miladys, and will be starting with us soon, as I just said. And then last but not least, on the apparel side, Roger Mainguard, who is the MD of Power Fashion. And Roger has been with the group, I think, probably the longest in the room. Where's Roger? There you are there.
We'll get onto it, and you'll see a bit about how we operate and how we work, but having someone like Roger's skills was an excellent position to put us in for an acquisition where we had to transform the management team, you know, put Mr Price culture in there and the like, and that's exactly what succession and leadership is all about. On the homeware sector side, we've got Sally-Ann Jackson, MD of Mr Price Home. Melissa Dempster, a recent appointment as the MD of Sheet Street, and Mark Hill, a recent appointment as MD of Yuppiechef. On the financial services side, Roxanne Miles is also quite a recent appointment, been with the group a number of years, but she's expecting, in fact, this week. Okay, maybe even today, so I think it's a valid excuse, though.
It's a pity she can't be here, but a very capable lady. Then we go into the centers of excellence, which is the old terminology of service divisions, which is a very inappropriate word. They're here to lead our strategic thinking in areas and to work with our trading divisions to move the organization forward. So of course, there's a whole lot of operational things, but they're really strategic thought leaders in the group as well. A couple of people that do slot in here were Exco people, as I just mentioned. Werner Pelser, Group Logistics Director, Kim Sim, CIO, and Dr Liziba Masoga, CPO. Sheron Roopnaraine, the Group Risk Director I was referring to earlier. Shaun Sweeney, our Group Real Estate Director. Janice Cheadle, our Group ESG Director, who will chat tomorrow. And then Matt Warriner as well, Group Investor Relations Director.
Neeraj Sukhraj is our Group Finance Director, and Octavius Phukubye is our Group Director of the Mr Price Foundation, the Executive Director, I beg your pardon. So that's the team. I think before I hand over to Nigel for a few words, I did spend a minute just thanking Investec for the use of their facilities, but I think there's a couple of other people as well. It's certainly my gratitude to our leadership, our Exco members, who put a lot into this, not only in the presentation, but in the setup as well. Thanks, guys. But a special thank you to Antoinette, who was instrumental in putting some of the information together, and a very special thank you to Matt, who has either lost hair or gone gray.
But, certainly, Matt, what we see today, I think it's a stupendous effort, and thanks to everybody involved. It's really appreciated. Great. So I'm gonna hand over to Nigel. Nigel's just gonna say a few words, Nigel Payne, our Chairman, and then we'll... Then I'll come back and pick it up and get into the investment case, in a sec.
Thanks, Mark. Good morning, everyone. At Mr Price, we don't refer to the people who work in the organization as employees. They're our partners. Thirty-four thousand people in the Mr Price Group. So on behalf of all thirty-four thousand of us, good morning, welcome. Thank you for joining us. So that's thirty-four thousand people at all levels, up to the level that Mark has introduced our senior executive. Welcome from them, from our board of directors, from our founders, Stuart Cohen and Laurie Chiappini. We'll be hearing from them on video, shortly. We've been becoming increasingly excited about this Capital Markets Day as it's got closer. Not only Matt, but all of us. The opportunity to engage with you, like Mark says, hasn't really happened since pre-COVID days.
So thank you all, in person and online. We've got almost 60% of our shareholders with us. That's just incredible. Thank you all. We really appreciate your time, and your support. Wow! 60% of our shareholders. I'm sure you're gonna experience a few things about Mr Price today, that you don't really get in results presentations when you're looking at how big is the dividend and what's the date, and that kind of stuff. You're gonna get a big dose of our culture. Some of the things that are gonna come through: our passion, our growth mindset, our will to win. Retail can be tough, particularly fashion retail. In addition to all of the other things that other retailers face, we've got seasonality, the weather, and the last couple of years have been tough.
I liken it sometimes to looking out there at the ocean, paddling out in a surf ski when the conditions are quite tough, and you've got to work hard to get out there through the surf. But then when you turn, you ride the waves, and the harder it was heading out, the more fun you have riding the waves back in. Of course, if you decided to sit on the beach and watch those paddling out, well, then when they turn to ride the waves, you're still sitting on the beach. I think during the next day and a half, you're gonna see that we haven't been sitting on the beach. In fact, I've been on the Mr Price board for a number of years. When I joined, we were in favorable times. Things were going well. We were pumping.
The economy was supportive. Then we hit tough times, and we had to paddle through the... We continued investing and, wow, when the conditions turned, we were able to surf the waves. We had some incredible growth years, the years that Mr Price really pumped. In the last four and a half years since COVID, we all know what the challenges have been, so it's been tough. One thing about being a fashion value retailer, which we are, we take the hit first, but we also bounce back first. And provided we've been paddling out through the surf, not only do we bounce back first, we bounce back strongly. So yeah, the last four and a half years have been the toughest in our forty-year history, but we've been doing the right things. We've been paddling appropriately.
I'm enormously confident that our management team has been investing in the right things during the tough times, that ensure we're in for a number of really good years. The good news is, I'm not an economist, so I'm not gonna forecast specific stuff, but I've seen it before a number of times when the cycle turns, when consumer confidence turns. The combo that we going to experience in the next couple of months, of a drop in the interest rates and a simultaneous big drop in the petrol price. Petrol price often doesn't get modeled in, but it's huge, in your pocket immediately, or not out of your pocket into the tank, and that's direct in your own vehicle or in the taxi that you use for your transport, plus indirectly in the cost of everything.
I'm confident that our management team have been investing in the tough times, in the right things. We've invested in great acquisitions. We'll talk a bit more about those, I'm sure. Those acquisitions left plenty more room for growth. We've invested in our people, in our systems, our technology. We've invested in our stores, our existing stores, ongoing store refresh, that customers love. We've also invested in new stores. One of the realities of paddling out in the surf in tough times is that's when store space tends to be available, 'cause the people who are sitting on the beach, one of the things they were doing was exiting good space. When you turn and start riding the waves, new retail space doesn't get built overnight or over a year or over next year or over four years.
So when everyone suddenly starts looking for retail space, the good stuff's gone, because the paddlers invested in it in the tough times. We've been investing in new growth vehicles, expanding our brand. Mr Price Kids are obvious example. So our brand appeal, and again, across a broader segment of customers. We can do this because we've got a highly cash-generative model. Most of our sales are for cash, and we're very disciplined with capital allocation and cost control. So when the tide turns, the consumer confidence turns, the extra cashflow that's available, and you can add two-pot system and a whole bunch of other things into lower interest rates and the impact of the petrol price.
And we've managed to do that while still generating cash, still paying dividend according to policy, still maintaining a strong balance sheet, and not sitting on the beach. As investors, in person and online, I think you know that retail is probably the sector where your stock selection has to be most accurate. 'Cause the difference between those who are gonna be surfing and those who are gonna be looking for, "Where's my paddle?" The difference can be huge. The contrast between the outperformers and the underperformers in our sector is perhaps the biggest in any of the major investment segments. And I think you'll hear in the next day and a half, because of our investment in the tough times, we're in very good place. Of course, many of our competitors have tried to copy us.
Yes, you can copy our goods, and you can try and copy our store, our look or our pricing model. You can't copy culture. You can't copy our people, you can't copy our value mindset, you can't copy our passion, and you can't copy our forty years of experience since Stuart and Laurie started the Mr Price Group. I'd just like to mention two examples of things that will show that we know what we're about. The first one, couple of years ago, we decided in the Mr Price Sport business, running shoes were just getting too expensive. ZAR 1,500-ZAR 1,800 for a pair of the kind of running shoes you would need to run the Comrades Marathon. So we decided we're gonna launch a Maxed Elite running shoe with two objectives.
Firstly, it must sell for under ZAR 300, and secondly, it must win the Comrades Marathon. So we launched it, just under ZAR 300. It took just a couple of years before we started winning gold medals in Comrades, but. In fact, I got a smack. I celebrated the fact that, wow! Our shoe came fifth, and I got moaned at because, no, we wanted to win. But the following year, it did win. By then, it was selling for about ZAR 450. But wow, what a story to be able to say, "We're gonna do it. We're gonna implement it." So we know about innovation, we know about brand building, we know about value retailing, we know about expanding into segments next to us. Then the other opportunity.
So product is one of our big opportunities in our brands. The other opportunity is the opportunity for people to grow. I mentioned thirty-four thousand people in the Mr Price Group, but in the recent past, over six and a half thousand people, previously unemployed, never had a job, got their first job in the Mr Price Group. Trained through the Mr Price Foundation through our JumpStart Retail program, and then started working for Mr Price in their very first job. The start of their careers, their opportunity to grow. And how far can you grow in a growing group like Mr Price? How much people growth is available? So my favorite example, it's even better than Maxed Elite winning the Comrades Marathon. In nineteen ninety-three, a grade eleven pupil started working for us part-time in our store in the Pavilion in Durban. Nineteen ninety-three. He grew.
He grew so much that 5 years later, by nineteen ninety-eight, we appointed him as a trainee planner. Planning is an enormously important part of our business, and he kept growing. Today, Kevin Smit is the MD of Mr Price Apparel. That's the kind of growth we like. Welcome. Thank you again for joining us. We hugely appreciate your confidence in the Mr Price Group, in our prospects, in our team to deliver on that. To dive into some of the detail, the 40 years of experience from our founders, Stuart Cohen and Laurie Chiappini, we're gonna play a few clips of them. I look forward to engaging with all of you in the next day and a half. Welcome, thanks again.
So there's been a lot of talk about founder's mentality, and people have been asking me, and I guess you, what was the mentality when we started the business? And if you want to distill it into two things, it was value, and it was passion, about people and about product. Those were the two things that drive the business, and that was what we set out to do differently. We said: We're gonna create a special kind of company where people enjoy what they do, where they have fun, where they're respected. And if we can create that environment, that atmosphere, we will outperform even the biggest retail. I was quite stupid and naive to think that, but that's what we believed. 'Cause if people are switched on to enjoy what they do.
Absolutely.
They will outperform. It's like a sports team.
Well, we didn't want the politics that we'd seen-
Politics and the bureaucracy.
Yeah, we didn't fancy that at all.
Politics and bureaucracy destroy businesses.
Mm-hmm.
I think we said right, as early as within a year or so of coming into the business or starting the business, we wanted to be the top-performing retailer in South Africa. That was our vision for-
Absolutely
... for twenty-five years.
Absolutely.
We achieved that vision, and so now it's a new time for a new vision. Our success was actually built on being different. I think the key differentiator has to be the culture of the business, because if your environment is a more positive environment than that of your competitors, you're halfway there, so-
You know, it's interesting when we talk about the culture, because the culture, if it translates to a business with 20,000 of our people there, I would have thought that the culture is influenced more by talking to one another than anything else. The ability to be able to talk to one another about the good and the bad, that's how you harness the good, you build the good, and you eradicate the poor stuff.
If there is an atmosphere of trust, then people can be very open.
Yeah.
That environment, culture, it's an open, honest, trusting environment.
Yes
... where anybody can say anything to anybody-
Yes
... without fear. It's a no fear environment.
Mm.
So I think that's the key point of differentiation, where everybody then wants to do better, where ordinary people want to do the extraordinary, where people want to add value to the lives of others by giving them better value in stores. That's powerful. That's the powerful team spirit that I was talking about. If you've been running fast and hard, and then you hit a bump in the road, sometimes you can turn around and give up, and sometimes you can see it as a bump in the road. And so it's back to how good our team is. And we have to have the best performing team in retail, so we have to be good at everything we do.
If you look at any top performing sports team, whether it's a basketball team or it's a rugby team, there's a collectiveness, there's an electricity between the team. They're playing with each other towards a common goal. And if you can get that in a big business, you'll be unstoppable. You will destroy the other bureaucracies, because they can't do that. So we have a rare ability to take our passion and to take our trust and the communication recognition. We've got the formula in place. We can hit it on the head and watch this business grow into something superb over the next few years.
Great video. I'm gonna talk about the investment case, and I think I'm often posed the question, I'm sure many of my colleagues are, too. Guys say, "You know, we think there's something different about Mr Price. What is it that you could put on it? What is the reason that you're different?" And, of course, it's quite easy to go into the more technical answer. Well, we're cash-based, we're omni-channel, we're obsessed with providing differentiated fashion. I mean, this is all 100% valid, and fashion differentiation is at the very core of what we do. Differentiated fashion, bringing value to it so that you can feel good by dressing well with up-to-date fashion at a fraction of the cost.
And to our diverse range of customers, because I think there's a preconception that we only service the low to mid-income. I think we'll certainly talk to that a bit later. And by the way, when I'm talking about differentiated fashion, and if any of you, anyone in the room or anyone listening in does want it, I think let's just understand that what we see as differentiated fashion, obviously, it's part of it. It's at the roots of our business, but we want you to understand it as well. And why I'm saying that, we actually took a group of investors... I'm going back a year or eighteen months, and in fact, I'd extended the invitation at a meeting in Cape Town.
Guys, if you don't know what we mean, and it's not translating about what we mean about differentiated fashion value, we're gonna organize a dedicated tour for you. They are very big shareholders, and we took them out, and we showed them differentiated value in the stores, what we do, would you find this product at competitors? And I think the penny really dropped for them. So I'm just gonna open an invitation, whether it's tours that are designed for a larger audience, or you want a one-on-one. You know, Nigel was saying about 60% of our shareholders in the room. I think it's a really important part of us showing you what we do, and so that you can understand it the way that we do.
But for me, that's probably the more technical side of the response to what makes Mr Price special. And I think, you know, if I really had to distill it down, Nigel spoke about culture. I think we're now starting to go in the direction of the things that make Mr Price special. So if I had to really look at culture, and then I had to distill that down further, what is the thing that makes Mr Price special? And I think you've just seen the video. It's actually Stuart and Laurie. Once in a generation, people who had big plans in mind, but started with real discussions very early on in their career and in the history of Mr Price, to put people first, to build teams, and to build a special organization.
And it's decades later, and we still feel it alive in our business. And I'll go through talking a little bit about, who we are and the kind of things that we do. But certainly, that's the slide, and I think it came up in Stuart's presentation as well. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things. So Stuart and Laurie, what they created, and we're still blessed by having them involved in the business in slightly different capacities, but it's, it's really what they started off on day one, and what we've indoctrinated in our business as an absolute non-negotiable. And when you... I'll show you a slide just now on the Mr Price way. That's not a bunch of fluffy words. Our people will understand it. We live by it. We hold people to account by it.
New people are indoctrinated in it, and it's at the very, very core of what we do. So, I guess my job as the CEO, my job is to preserve and to nurture that culture. I'm the temporary custodian of it, and when I hand it over to my successor in time, then you can bet your bottom dollar that my successor is gonna be someone who's got a very balanced EQ and IQ as well. I was chatting to someone a bit earlier in the room about finding people and EQs and all the rest, and I think for any leadership position, you're always looking for that balance, an EQ and an IQ, but I think even more so at Mr
Price, where when you can see what Stuart and Laurie are saying about people, what Nigel was saying about people, that ability to grow teams and harness their collective power, and together, the team can do more, is really what we're all about, and in so doing, there's no airs and graces in turning in our business. Leave titles at the door, treat people with respect, and just, I guess, at the end of the day, just be real, and I think that's who we are, so I'm on this page that says, you know, what really drives Mr Price, and this is now what I'm talking about, the Mr Price way, so this is a summary of, in fact, it's a document I take everywhere. A couple of things in my briefcase is my corporate, my calendar.
I've always got our budget and our strat summary in place. I've got a four-page document on the Mr Price way as a constant reference point, and it's an incredibly insightful thing, and it always has got the ability to bring you back, so we set out, obviously, on a and I'm gonna talk about the our vision a little bit later. Being your value champion, it's the reason that we get up and go to work every day to bring value to our customers, so that's our purpose, and what Stuart and Laurie were just talking about, and Nigel, it's our value system, so passion, value, and partnership. I'm not gonna unpack them all in totality, but passion is exactly that, ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
Value, everything that we do in our business, whether it's the ultimate price and quality of a garment or the way that we have to think about expenditure, capital, CapEx, anything like that, it's always at the center of the decisions that we make. So we've got some words up in our boardroom. Every decision made every day must support our value roots, and those are the kind of things that always draw us back to stress test our thinking. It's an incredible belief system that's been developed, and of course, there's a lot under this, and we'll get into the DNA in the bottom right quadrant just now as well.
But you saw a wording called Founder's Mentality, and what Stuart and Laurie were talking about a little bit earlier, and what Nigel was talking about, is: what are these qualities? How do we wanna run the business? How are we running the business? And if you wanna just expand your horizon, your thinking on it, there's an amazing book called The Founder's Mentality. The author is Zook, Zook and Allen or something like that, I can't quite remember. And what we use that to... if you read that book, it's, it's- you'd swear it was written about Mr Price.
So what we just use is some of the frameworks there to formalize some of the thinking, but it would be a great reference point just for you to understand what a founder, originally a founder-led business, with the founder still in the room, what it means and what makes that special. So in that founder's mentality, it's insurgency. And what I mean by that is, whilst I spoke about our purpose in getting up in the morning to bring value, it's this bold mission, and really what inspires us is that we feel that we're at war on behalf of the consumer.
So everything that we do, and, as I said a little bit earlier, selling prices, the amount of the volume that we order to drive down selling prices, that's all in that bold mission of an absolute fight on behalf of the consumer. And in this country, I think people really need that, when you look at the demographic spikiness, that there's just a bold mission. We're clear on the big things, and the big calls and why we have to do them. And limitless horizons, we think long term. Even if we take some short-term punishment or there's a short-term impact, that's absolutely fine. We'll probably have modeled it already, but we're prepared to go through that for the long-term good of the company.
Then you get into an owner's mindset, and any entrepreneur will tell you, cash is everything, so strong cash focus. It's one of the reasons that we actually just don't open the taps on credit, but I'll talk to that a bit later. Bias for action means less bureaucracy, and then we get onto frontline obsession. It's an absolute obsession, fighting on behalf of customers and making sure that whatever happens on the front line, that we treat those people with the respect that they deserve, and I think we do that as an organization. We're one of the few companies that I know of that offers basic pay, STRs at a store level and LTRs at a store level. They affect store associates or the ambassadors of our business.
What we have to do then is make sure that the learnings we can take from that have to permeate up through the organization and, ultimately to the boardroom. So frontline empowerment and, and our people having a say, and our people having a go, takes me on to relentless experimentation. To always try and stay ahead, you have to be trying things. Some will work, some won't work, but we never want... and we do think really deeply about things, but we never wanna create an impression or an internal thought process that we're not prepared to have a go. If we've done our best thinking, we must be prepared to put, effort and CapEx behind it. And then if we fail, we must fail fast and move on.
I think over the years, we've got our fair share of failures, but we've got far more successes than failures. We then get into the guide to survival and prosperity, which is something we use in our merchandise area, which guides us, and they're things like clarity of offer, category dominance. I was talking about when we make big calls, and I'm sure that the Group Retail Directors will cover this in their presentation. Everything that goes into making that call, and then the volume that we place, is there a very, very detailed process behind it, which limits risk. And then there's a whole bunch of other things, center of which is also control, and I said that a little bit earlier. Making sure that we fight for every cent.
Making sure that value's at the heart of every do of everything that we do, and making sure that costs is a thing that's alive, and cost management is alive in our business. So I often get the question: "How do you guys manage to do it? You know, when times are bad and maybe some top-line pressure, 'cause we've been through such a disruptive five years, how do you always manage to manage your costs?" I say: "Well, you don't have to look at me. You don't have to look at Pick n Pay. Of course, we, we're the leaders in this business, managing those things." But when I talk about indoctrination and a belief in the business, the thing's already happening. We, you know...
Sure, we'll start putting targets to it, and we'll try and start managing the process, but the organization is this live organism, and they're already dealing with cost curtailment. So if that's in your DNA, Nigel was talking about a bit earlier as well, things come naturally. So all these kind of things I think all contribute to the special thing and have to be preserved at all costs. Yeah, then there's the whole DNA and culture. There's a lot of detail behind this. I think for the sake of time, I'm not gonna dwell too much on that. I've spoken about teamwork, I've spoken about being brave and having a go, being real and empathetic as a leader. But at the end of this, we're not a flowery organization.
We're very hard on performance, and if you can match that special culture with performance, then I think you really have got something worth preserving. So we started off with a vision, going back to a couple of years ago, probably three or four years ago. And when I assumed leadership of the group, I really thought I had a great team of people. Perhaps a lot of them had been in their positions a little bit too long, so we needed some refreshing. But I, in many other respects, I thought that we needed to move the business forward a bit. And what we did is, when we came up with a vision and therefore the strategy, we collaborated widely internally. And the vision that we had was to be the most valuable retailer in Africa.
So there we are looking at the market cap of food and drug retailers and the general retailer index in South Africa, and at the time, we had placed ourselves fourth in that. And look, this is a long-term thing, so it's not gonna happen in five or 10 years, but it's something that keeps us anchored in what we're actually after. The good news is that, play it forward a couple of years, and what I just described is the worst retail environment I can remember, and, with disruption, we've actually gained a place. But the reality for us is that the people above us have pulled away from us.
So when I start talking about our strategy and the next wave of research that we're doing, and scalability and all these things, it is in pursuit of that vision, and I think you'll leave with an impression that we've got a really great team, we're quite clear on our plans, we're not at risk of distraction, and I'm feeling really comfortable that I'm in a place now that I can start spending even more time on the pursuit of that vision. But that's what the next day or so is all about. Stakeholder engagement, that our relationships are based on the true spirit of partnership, and that the group is ranked as the leader in engagement and delivery. And that's an area I'm really, really happy about. We've been recognized. We do surveys among all our stakeholder groups.
We've got landlord surveys and interactions, we've got suppliers. With our investors, we are ranked number one in investor relations. And the great thing is that the internal surveys with our own associates, I'm not gonna steal Lizzie's thunder, but we're doing exceptionally well there, too. So stakeholder engagement, and when I was getting back to the values, I think. Let me just spend a minute, maybe just discussing and reflecting on probably the time where you play your cards is when it's the darkest days and where your values are the most important, and you're really put on the spot. I'm going back to hard lockdown and the like in COVID. So it's very easy to panic because this is big things that's affecting the globe. We are very calm.
We knew that was a crisis. We knew it had catastrophic potential consequences, but we got together as a leadership group, and we said, "Right, what's gonna guide us through this?" In comes our value system, in comes our culture and our DNA, and at the end of it, we said, "How do we wanna be judged when we come through this?" That was a critical sort of think tank and a critical outcome for us. So we were never one of those organizations sending supplier letters to suppliers saying that, "Sorry, I don't care if I've ordered, we're not accepting an order at our DC tomorrow." We actually worked through it with suppliers. And in the true spirit of partnership, and why I'm elaborating this, it's under our stakeholder engagement, is that, sure, we lost.
Our suppliers also lost a bit, but we worked with them to manage our way through it. At the end of that process, we came back and evaluated ourselves, that was a massive tick for us. We came out with reputation enhanced, and I could only look at the larger business and how they worked together, worked with stakeholders, and here we are a couple of years later, it's almost like it never happened. That's the way you forge long-term relationships... The other pillar is innovation and growth. We'll talk at length about that over the next couple of days, and also where we're going. Brand promise. Continue to surprise and delight our customers with value. I've spoken about that.
This particular pillar, I am looking at consolidating at a group level, 'cause it's now owned at the respective divisional levels, so there's some potential, some change to org design coming on that, and then people, we're gonna talk at length about people, that's really having this energized environment of engaged people, driving performance, and being really attractive as an employer in retail. Strategic enablement, that was enabling growth and innovation through what I said were our centers of excellence, and everything that's comes around that, and the sustainability to be recognized by stakeholders as relevant, ethical, sustainable, and proudly South African, and for me, this is also another area that we've done very well at.
In fact, when we meet with investors and maybe particularly so, some of the international guys, for a value retailer, which I suppose it could be this thought that we're behind the curve with ESG or we're in a third world country, what can we possibly be doing? I think they're actually very, very pleasantly surprised when they found out what we actually do, and we did have an ESG day, which I think worked very well, but certainly I think we're taking a leading position there in retail, so those are the strategic pillars.
I often also then get asked the question, "But what kind of operating model have you got, and, can you just explain it to us?" So I think over the years, we've had a sort of a blend of between two and three, but, we're probably more, a model three, as you see on the slide. And part of this has been a transition, because if you go four or five years ago, a lot of our group thinking and strategy was actually bottom fed, so it actually came up through the divisions and, there was an aggregation and a stress testing of that. I've turned that completely around, that although we still have that process, strategy group strategy is a top-down process, and the two meet, and we deliberate, and we discuss.
So corporate center sets top-down direction, approves trading, so you know, there's Exco representation at the trading division board meetings, trading division strategies, and we obviously deeply into the detail in those organizations. And then we've got some shared services that span the business, but right now, we don't necessarily span all the business because of acquisitions, but we'll talk about some of that just now. So very much in an operational orientation block, but our current operations, where we expect to be moving to, is more towards the four. So much more integration, but it's not gonna be forced at all cost. And there's a reason that I think will surface over today as to why we've taken the approach to integration that we have and where we find ourselves now, and what are we ready for?
Part of our history and the things I think we've done well over a number of years is. And this is going back, you know, some time. It's going back to 1987. But the point here is that we're not, it's not one thing in particular that we're looking to do to push on our growth. So we've got organic growth in our businesses, and that is, we'll talk at length about that over the next couple of hours. But we've actually been. It is a really good balance here between acquisitive growth and then new concepts in the business.
And you go back through a number of years, at some point, and I suppose a long time ago, Sheet Street was acquired, but then we had a job to do to grow it to the business that it is today. Home was obviously a startup. Sport was our own startup. Money was our own startup. Cell C and Mobile and Mr Price dot coms, dot-com, our e-com offer started in 2012. Those are all organic concepts. We started testing Baby a couple of years ago. Where did that lead us? It actually led us into refining the assortment and deciding that, in fact, what we had there was the... It was a really, I think, a really solid offer with a, with good potential, but we had to change the shape of that assortment, and it morphed into a kids business rather.
And then more recently, some acquisitions that we, as Nigel was saying, we had a really strong balance sheet. In an environment that was as bad as it's been in the last five years, we took the view to invest, and I'll leave it to Antoinett to explain the process we went through and to remind you. It'll just allow you into our thinking a little bit deeper once again. So a really great history of building businesses and brands, and I think that's really set us up in a really nice position for an improving economy, and I love that analogy of the paddling out to backline, and I think that explains it quite well. And if...
Yeah, look, I think if you, if you now think about where the economy is poised, where our operations sit, the growth that we've got ahead of our operations. Well, you can't argue against this, and this is the power of the Mr Price brand. Although there's other retailers ahead of us, we're the only apparel and footwear and homeware brand, but we currently sit as the 25th most valuable brand in South Africa, and that's not our estimation, that's per Kantar, and certainly the only retailer that, in that on that page, that doesn't incorporate a food offer. Also, per Kantar, we are recognized as the value champion, so a lot of the focus that I said we bring to the business, this puts us firmly in that great value component.
And that's a mix of pricing power and perceived price, and that's exactly where we wanna be. So I think just to bring that to a summary, at the end, talks to a business model that we think is correctly positioned. And by the way, I think the other thing is, I just wanna talk to you that when we talk about the size of the retail sector and market share and all those kind of things, and it's gonna lead us on to the presentation that we've got tonight and the discussion we'll have around that. We're all talking about the formal markets. It's Stats SA, it's RLC. Very important, 'cause we can judge ourselves versus our competition in that. But there's this massive informal market, and I'll let our speaker take you through that tonight.
But if you then think of, well, who the retailer's best placed to serve that market, and it is massive, then we'll certainly be in that discussion as one of the top two. So positioning with everyday low prices. Everyday price is really key. It means that our customers don't wait for sales and sales events. We offer them the best price all the time. I said a little bit earlier, we fight on their behalf, and they're not conditioned to waiting for an end-of-season sale with us. If the fashion's in the store, they must go and buy it, and they'll get a really good price. We're leading brand awareness. We've got a defensive low-cost model that Praneel will talk about. We've got a...
And I'm gonna talk quite a bit about e-com and our thoughts around e-com a little bit later, but we do have a strong e-com offering. I've spoken about ESG leadership, that it doesn't come, and it's not all the pursuit of profit. Of course, we could, in the short term, probably be making a lot more money if we weren't doing the things that we're doing, but it's all to build a sustainable future. The balance sheet and our zero free debt, I'm not talking about operating leases, but other types of debt. Cash generative, we all know that. Stakeholder engagement, I've spoken about. And in our growth, what we will spend quite a lot of time over the next day, is talking about how does our growth look?
How is it shaping our balance sheet, and how do we think about metrics and where's the shape? What's the trajectory of those metrics over the next couple of years that we're expecting and that we're certainly striving for? And as I said, it's a long-term track record which speaks for itself. But as I said as well, that we've been through five of the most difficult years that I can remember. Our compound growth rate and sales were still 11, touching 12%. Didn't quite have the leverage down to operating profit. Our compound growth rate was six, but it's getting back to what Nigel said as well. Invested through the cycle. I honestly believe we've transformed our business internally, much of what you won't see. We've got added growth vehicles back in place.
We've got space growth opportunities across our business, and there's a lot to be happy about, so what you've seen is obviously a kick on in the share price in the last 12 months, and, you know, when we look at are we lagging or are we ahead of the pack, there's two things that always spring to mind is, well, what side of the equation we're on and what base were we on? And a lot of you can go back to last 12-24 months, and I know that I stood up explaining to the market why, whilst we had lost market share, what the reasons for that loss of market share is, so just to reiterate, we had power disruption through load shedding, and we had to get all our stores on backup power.
And we also had successfully gone through an ERP transition, which would have been effectively a ten-year journey, but it did cause disruption as people got used to it, and of course, there were tweaks necessary to change the way people understood the system and could use the system.
So in that environment, and with those, that kind of disruption, and the loss of market share that resulted in whilst people were distracted, I stood up and I said to the market, "I'm 100% confident our merchandise offer is right." That there were some things in context, in the backdrop of a really poor economy, that, that I'm very confident getting the market share back, and I think that's what you've seen, and it's a reason that our share price has reacted the way it has. The messaging I gave to the market did transpire. We did gain market share back, and in fact, it was probably share that we should never have lost in the first place, but there were those events that, that I spoke to.
Great to be in a position where we're now ahead of the market in performance, and certainly what I'm looking for as the head of this business is making sure that those jaws, the gap between our performance and our competitors, actually grows, and that we offer a lot more consistency, given a lot of that disruption is now out of the way. Okay, that's it for me. I'm gonna hand over to Antoinette, who's gonna talk about the progress that we've made in our strategy over the last couple of years.
Good morning, everyone. In the spirit of transparency, a few confessions. I'm the shopaholic in the group. I think in pictures. I love a Post-it note, and so you're gonna see some of those Post-it notes now when we show you how the strategy has progressed. And they generally ask me not to talk about numbers, because I'm not a CA, and so I'm gonna talk about how the strategy has progressed, and then Praneel is gonna come and wrap it up for you in terms of how it's changing the shape and the numbers in the business.
One of the best parts of my job is actually when I was here last night and just watching the merchants set that expo up last night, because part of what we get to do, if I didn't work from Surprise, is that I'd work in the FBI, and that is because I love trying to solve a problem. What we try and do in the strat team is we solve whether we should do things organically or inorganically. Just watching that team last night, you realize how many amazing things this business can do, just with the talent that we've got. My father always says to me that he would be much happier if I was a doctor, 'cause it would be easier to explain to people what I do Monday to Friday.
So I'm gonna try and give you an analogy of how I do explain what we do, and that is, I say to people: "Think about a ping pong ball in a vortex." So I know this diagram looks very static, and it looks like our strategy process is very circular, but in a day, the ball can jump from any part of that vortex in terms of solving problems for the business. So we are responsible for making sure that we do the right things to deliver growth at a group level, and then making sure that the divisions are doing things right to deliver on their own visions and growth trajectories. And part of that comes through the process that we've built of continuous monitoring and calibration of strategy.
Now, I know that can often come across as being very negative, and people think that we only obsess about the red KPIs, but we don't. We're a very competitive business. We're a very passionate business. And so part of the excitement for us in monitoring and calibration is actually when the KPI is green, 'cause that means that we can stretch ourselves, and it means that the opportunity was bigger than we had originally identified. So we spend a lot of time in that, and then on the other side of the vortex is we get to be the detectives. So we spend time researching different markets, looking at different customer segments, trying to identify how we can deliver long-term shareholder value, and then the best model to bring that to the market, whether it is organically or inorganically.
So interestingly, in twenty-nineteen, as Mark said, the executives were faced with an interesting space. We'd had senior leadership change. Mark had moved from the CFO to the CEO position. He'd made some executive changes. The market was in a bit of a tricky space, so at a market level, markets, the sales were growing at sort of low single digits, and costs were coming. For all of you who are sitting in this audience, the worst thing for a retailer is negative operating leverage. We hate it, and so we started thinking about: What do we do? The other thing we discovered in twenty-nineteen is Matt's favorite joke, and that is that Ant loves a due diligence. Actually, what a lot of people don't know is that in late twenty-nineteen, we actually did our first DD.
And it was very interesting about that process was that we'd identified an organic opportunity, and because we were nervous about capacity and bringing too much change into the business, we actually identified a business that we could buy to fill that gap. And so we spent six months in DD, and we learned about all sorts of things that I still have nightmares about: MAC clauses, W&I insurance, shareholders' agreements. But the thing I'm actually proudest about is the fact that we didn't do that deal, and that's one of the things that is so interesting about working in the vortex, is that we sometimes are incredibly busy deciding what not to do. So 2020 came, and for those of you who remember the twenty-sixth of March, we all packed up our offices, computers, screens, the notes we thought we were gonna need for three weeks.
I'll never forget walking out of the office, and Mark said to me, "So what are you gonna do for the next three weeks?" 'Cause we'd literally just decided to walk away from the deal. I thought I was gonna spend three weeks learning to bake banana bread, run the comrades around the pool, paint my own nails, stare at the sea, and it lasted forty-eight hours. On Sunday morning, I was sitting on the patio, and I got an email from Mark saying, "Could we chat the next day?" On the Monday morning, we decided that we were gonna use lockdown to just take a step back. We were gonna look at the market, we were gonna do some research, and we were gonna use the time to just think.
And so we started with trying to understand the big macro of SA, and that process has actually become a very powerful framework for us in terms of how we think about growth. So as Mark was saying, we've become quite top-down in terms of how we think about things. And what we did was we analyzed the market to try and identify the segments that were gonna present great opportunities for us, but that were also gonna deliver on all of our other investment criteria. So we didn't wanna bring a lot of cannibalization into the business. It had to be about new customers, new products, new formats. We like margins, so we didn't want to go into anything that was too low margin. And we also are incredibly aware of bringing too much distraction and too much complexity into the business at once.
So I stupidly sat at my dining room table, and I drew some Post-it notes, and I didn't know that the Post-it Note was gonna become something that you were all gonna have to look at for the next five to ten years. So this was one of the first Post-it Notes that came out of the process, and this was how we tried to plot the company based on how we saw product classification and ESG at the time. So we looked at, we talk about price value, fashion value, aspirational value, premium. If I worked for LV, we'd go another level up, and we'd put in luxury, a girl can dream. And then we looked at the different categories that we play in, so apparel, homeware, financial service, and telecom, and e-com.
On my Post-it Note, the white space looked very interesting 'cause it identified all the areas that we could potentially go into that would simply grow the business. Two years later, along with all of the talented people that are in the room with me, the business now looks like this. I think we can all be very proud to say we've closed a lot of gaps, three of them via acquisition and two of them via organic launches. I think I'm allowed to say we're not done. You know, we are always busy, and we are always researching. To talk to you a little bit about the three that we did acquire, you will know them all.
Power Fashion was the first, and that was really because we identified that there was this huge customer market that sat in the price value space, and that it was an easy opportunity for us to go and compete in. It was also a fantastic deal for us 'cause it was identified, we knew the owner, and so it was a bilateral process. It was negotiated through masks in COVID with lots of Zubiscoffs, but it was. It's been an excellent deal for us, and so that has closed that bottom price value. Sorry, the screen's a bit slower. The bottom price value side. The second business that we acquired was Yuppiechef, which has given us access to that higher LSM homewares customer. It's also brought in an omni-channel offering to the business.
Perhaps if we weren't so busy going back-to-back into doing the Studio 88 deal, I would have actually learned to bake banana bread after we bought Yuppiechef because of all they sell. Then the third deal we did was acquiring Studio 88, which of course introduced the group to that very high-growth athleisure branded market. We get asked a lot about integration when we buy businesses. A few things that are very important for us when we think about it, we don't buy businesses for synergies. If the investment case doesn't work for the strategic, you know, for the strategic side of the business, it's not something that we're looking to do. Synergies and efficiencies that come through in time, that for us is cream on the top of the margin.
It's very important for us that we acquire businesses that are already high performing, that they have strong management teams, that they've got clear product differentiation, and that they have a clear CVP. You know, when you acquire businesses, it's very disruptive for the management teams, and so we need to just give them time to settle. And so our approach to integration has always been light touch to start. But as Mark and Nigel have shared with you, we have an incredible culture, and it's contagious, and so it doesn't take long for us to want to become one big family. And so the easier parts for us to integrate are typically in the centers of excellence. So we did quite a lot of work with them in finance. There's often huge benefits on the people side.
Werner runs world-class logistics, and so that brings efficiencies to the business as he starts working with them. Kim probably has the toughest job, 'cause tech tends to be more on a case-by-case basis. Is it right for the business, and it must be an appropriate investment, but also, the thing about integration is to remember that these businesses teach us things, too, so we don't want to integrate businesses only to do things the Mr Price way. We have bought businesses and categories that we didn't typically trade in, and so we try and collaborate to make sure that we're taking best of breed as we integrate the businesses, so that the whole group is in a better place.
So some of the early sort of successes we've had, Power Fashion, I think Roger will tell you that he quite enjoys the benefits of being part of group supply chain, and he certainly keeps our real estate team incredibly busy. He was our biggest store opening in terms of a single chain last year because of the real estate team. Yuppiechef has benefited from stealing some skills from the Mr Price team. So Mark Hill, the new MD, was from the Mr Price Apparel team, and they are also working with the logistics and real estate team at the moment, and Kim's had to get involved in some tech PCI and cybersecurity for them.
And Studio 88, you know, they also work with our real estate team at the moment, and they interestingly are doing some work on the supply chain through Don and our apparel merchandise team. But it's not all about letting me spend money, although I do need to spend a little bit more in the next two years as we acquire the last two tranches of the Studio 88 business, just for those of you that haven't seen this slide before. So the first two deals we did, we acquired 100% of the business. In the Studio 88 business, we acquire the last 30% of the business over the, over three years. But we also have this huge talent in the business. We have this incredible brand....
And often there aren't businesses to acquire that fill the white space that we've identified. And so the two big organic businesses that we are busy with at the moment, both actually have very different backgrounds. So Kids is an amazing opportunity for us because it's not only about the learnings of which part of the baby market we wanted to serve, but it's also been about giving kids and the kids customer their own store format and their own shopping experience. And then we get the added benefit that when you take kids out of the mothership store, it allows that store to use the space for the categories that were underindexed, and to give that core fashion value customer, who's 16 to 24 and quite funky, a shopping experience without her baby sister.
And then the cellular business was also an opportunity to grow our brand. If you haven't been to the Expo yet, Praneel can tell you all about the white label cell phone. You know, it was interesting when we listened to our customer. I mean, they've asked us to launch Mr Price Airlines, they've asked us to launch Mr Price Liquor, they've asked us to launch the Mr Price real estate business. So we know that the customer believes in product. Petrol stations, you know, so we know that the customer knows that we live and breathe their value, and it was just a very easy extension for us to do that in the cellular and data space. As I said, living in the vortex is about making sure that we do the right things.
It's about making sure that we execute with absolute discipline and that we manage distraction. So part of what we do is making sure that we deploy capital well, and that's often about the trade-offs. So often there are five or six things that we'd love to do at once, that is just not the right thing for the business, and that is very much led by our commitment to long-term metrics and market-leading metrics. So that's a very big part of how we decide where to invest our money. As Nigel says, we've invested through the cycle, but it hasn't only been about letting me spend money outside of the country, it's also been about doing things, in terms of our own existing business, and so this slide just talks about everything that has happened in the business in the last four years.
And so if you think I've done a terrible job of talking about the progress we've made in terms of growing the business through what has been some of life's experiences that we really don't want to relive. We did this through lockdown, we did this through the terrible social unrest of July twenty-one. We survived the KZN floods, and we've hopefully come out of the worst stages of load shedding for the country. I will ask you, when you've got some time, to go and look at the two thousand and six results presentations, if you really want to understand the progress that we've made. And the reason I ask you to go and look at two thousand and six is that's actually when my journey with the business started. So in May two thousand and six, I went to my first Mr
Price results presentation at the Hyatt Hotel, and we are forever indebted to Matt that our presentations look the way they do now versus the slides you used to get in two thousand and six. But when Praneel shows you how the numbers have changed just in the past four years, I think it's very evident how the team has progressed over the past four years. I'm gonna hand over to Praneel to talk numbers.
Thanks, Ant. And I can confirm that Ant has the biggest credit card in the group. She is the shopper, and she loves buying businesses, so all of that we can confirm. Good morning to everyone. It's great to see so many of our shareholders and stakeholders present here today, and also to all those joining in online. Thanks for your time on the webcast. It's really gonna be a great two days, and I hope that by the time you leave tomorrow, you're as excited about our business as we are. Today, I'm gonna talk to you initially about the changing shape of our business.
I think this is probably one of the most, often asked questions whenever we engage with investors and stakeholders, and for all the things that Ant has said, there's been significant change, in the market, but also significant change in the business. So it's, so it's great today to be able to give you a view of the business from the lens of the management team, to understand how we see the business. At the end of the presentation, I'll also just give you a view in terms of how we see our positioning in relation to some of the changing, environment or economic environment, that we see coming. So moving on, what have we been doing over the last five years? Is the question you're probably asking, and to Nigel's point, we haven't been sitting on the beach.
We've actually been quite busy. I think you can sum up the last five years in two words: It's been about growth, and it's been about diversification. When we started in FY 2020, we started with retail sales of ZAR 21.7 billion, and that has grown to ZAR 36.6 billion by FY 2024. Nine divisions, growing to—sorry, six divisions back in 2020, with five retail chains growing to nine divisions and 15 retail chains by 2024. And the diversification really coming through as you look at the pie chart, with the Mr Price apparel contribution at 58% in 2020, moving to 42% in 2024, based on the acquisitions that have come through and some organic growth in other verticals.
From a store perspective, we were at 1,378 stores in 2020, growing by 110% by 2024 to 2,900 stores through both acquisitions and internal growth of the core business. Our associates grew from 18,000, up 78%, to 32,000 by the end of the financial year. 78% increase in people, and it's, as you've seen in the slide earlier, it's really created some great opportunity for our people in the business. What has been quite pleasing to note is that the significant growth that we've delivered has come in a very highly disruptive operating environment over the last five years. And if we could just pause there and maybe reflect, and started talking to you about some of the big things that have happened over the last five years.
But in recapping, I think it's important to pause and think about the effect of COVID-19 that started in 2020, with a hangover into 2021. During the civil unrest in 2021, we had about 111 stores that were looted that took various stages of time to get back up and running, the flooding in 2022, and also our internal ERP go-live, which Mark spoke about earlier also. And we saw the intensified impact of load shedding that started in 2022 and then grew into 2023 and into the early part of 2024. Also, earlier this year, from an elections perspective, uncertainty pre-elections and also in terms of how the GNU would be formed and how that would settle. And I guess overall, in that context of five years, there's also been severe macroeconomic challenges which have impacted consumers, and results.
But in that highly disruptive operating environment, it's really then put our performance into context. With retail sales, we stayed growing at 69%, from ZAR 21 billion to ZAR 36 billion. Operating profit grew 33% also over that time. EBITDA up from ZAR 5.6 billion to ZAR 8.2 billion, up 47%. From a headline earnings perspective, headline earnings grew from 1,047 cents to 1,286 cents, so up 23% over that five-year period. So really, the summarization of the growth over the last five years has come through the acquisitions that we've done, but also from the organic launches that we've done over the last five years, and also growth in the core business.
So not to forget some of the market share gains that Mark spoke about, together with the new store opportunities where we were investing through the cycle, that was quite quite a good opportunity for us. In terms of how our business margins have evolved over the last five years, this is also quite a big area of focus that we get quite often from the investment community, and you will remember when we presented our year-end results a few months ago in June, we spent some time talking about GP margins and operating margins, and for the first time also, we had given you a view as to what medium-term targets could look like.
When you look at the five-year view, you can see that from a GP perspective, our acquisitions brought great growth, but also brought a little bit of lower margin into the group. I think the great opportunity there is that we've identified opportunities for some margin expansion from that perspective, and hence you see the medium-term targets, the red dotted line, trending slightly up based on those opportunities. From an operating margin perspective, you'll also note from 2022 to 2024, you see the operating margin also slightly lower than the historic returns. We spoke to you then also about the acquisitions, op margins being lower than the core business, but also important to note, on a slide earlier, you would have seen that our five-year average op margin at 16.3%, ahead of competitors at 9.3% over that time.
Again, the red dotted line for the medium-term target shows you the opportunity for us that we see in the op margin space. And I think it's important context to know that over this five-year period, there's also been quite a significant higher cost of doing business that we've had to manage. So while we've been really great at cost management, there have been. If you just look at the last two years, for example, and some of the costs that influenced the business, food inflation, for example, up 8% for our consumers, fuel was up to 7.8%, and the national minimum wage averaging about 9% over the last two years, with electricity also up 13.4%.
So these escalating costs impacting the cost of doing business over that period, and we also mentioned the disruptions from the operating environment. The immediate next question we get when we talk margins is about how do we close that gap, and how do we achieve the medium-term ranges that we've set? I think from a GP perspective, we have spoken to you before about the fact that from an acquisitions perspective, there is growth. We've identified the private label assortments and an increase in the contribution of private label to those businesses as a great way to unlock GP margin. Also increased opportunistic stock buying for Power Fashion, which has really been a lot of Roger's time over the last probably six months. That strategy is really taking off now.
We're able to deliver great value to customers at improved margins. Ant's slide on integration spoke to you about some of the efficiencies we've seen coming through integration, but also more opportunities on the horizon. For the core business, it's really been about executing the merchandise strategy, managing markdowns, and I guess we saw over the last couple of years, from a sector perspective, the impact of, you know, what's happened from an inventory perspective with overhanging inventory and quite a difficult markdown environment, but more regulation in the markdown space would help, is anticipated to help the GP margins. Obviously, the other big one, which we've started speaking to you about over the last twelve months, is the sourcing benefits from segmental procurement.
So the opportunity there is for the core business and for the acquisitions, for the first time through the introduction of the org design, where you'll hear from Clint and Don later, from a sector perspective, across apparel and homeware, we're able to negotiate across all our trading chains and introduce the wider supply base across all those businesses, which also unlocks some GP margin. From an operating margin perspective, you know, we spoke earlier about having disciplined cost management. We're not a business that has lazy or excess costs lying around. There isn't any excess fat in the model, but what we are is we're very reactive, and you'd have seen in Mark's slide earlier, that cost mentality is ingrained in the business.
So that effort to, you know, pull back costs when we need to, based on the trading environment, is something that we hold the trading divisions quite tightly by, and we always get the support when we need to. Also, in terms of closing the gap on the operating margin, the anticipated cost of business lowering, led by some cooling inflation, to have a double effect, both for the business and for consumers, and also the extraction of synergies and efficiencies. So in the short term, we've also identified the opportunity for a new role in the business to focus on re-engineering, some cost savings and some efficiency savings, which will provide some relief from an operating margin perspective.
To reflect on my comments just now about having a low-cost model, what you see on the right is the five-year average in total expenses as a percentage of sales for the Mr Price Group at 27.7%, average over the last five years, and competitors at 34.7%. So there's obviously, for our business, an ongoing focus on cost management and part of the DNA of the business. In terms of gross debt, you know, we have quite an ungeared balance sheet, which we've spoken to you about before, but you also see that, you know, the debt that is reflected here is the IFRS 16 debt, which came through from leases, but largely ungeared.
So in terms of the track record that we've created, yes, we do have the track record of tailoring costs, but we also acknowledge that we can't save our way to the future. It's really about growth. In terms of returns of the business and the evolution thereof, return on net worth and return on capital employed over the last five years have been a focus for us, and they've been quite stable, in terms of the delivery. But a point to note over this period, also, that returns have changed or been impacted by the introduction of IFRS 16 on the leases side, which obviously affects your capital structure. The acquired businesses being slightly more capital intensive and lower margin to the rest of the group.
And then, also great to see from a return on equity perspective, our five-year average at 26.7%, ahead of competitors at 22.6%. On the right-hand side, we've also modeled the WACC for you on the black line, and it's really great to see that, the returns being generated from an ROE perspective ahead of the WACC. Also, there's been detailed plans put down from divisions in terms of how we close the ROE gap, so you see the medium-term targets presenting some opportunity for us into the future. So we spoke about investing through the cycle, and I think that, you know, in the highly disruptive environment that we've seen, to be able to have invested through really does position us well, and benefit from that change in the cycle that we're expecting to see.
Over the last five years, we've generated cash of ZAR 21 billion after working capital and leases. Our first returns from a capital allocation perspective goes to returns to shareholders, so the dividends paid have come in at ZAR 8.6 billion, and credit card at ZAR 5.3 billion, with the acquisition purchases, quite a big allocation of capital, and then store investments. We spoke about investing into the retail store environment over the last five years, when it's been quite disruptive and you've seen different strategies play out at the different retailers, but quite a significant investment of ZAR 2.2 billion by the group. Later in the presentation, you'll hear from Mark around how we manage returns from the store investment perspective, so quite clear on the returns that we expect from stores and the physical feasibility processes that we use.
Technology and logistics, ZAR 1 billion invested into that. We've spoken about the ERP platform that we upgraded during the course of that five-year period, which again, is a great setup for future growth. It was quite a mega project for us. And then we closed cash out at ZAR 2.8 billion by the end of the financial year. So when we speak about strong cash generation, so the business, 89% of the business, cash-based and 11% on credit, which we'll talk a little bit more about when we get into the financial services presentation, but the cash conversion ratio really at a big focus for us at 86.9%. So in terms of managing working capital to achieve the cash generation and conversion targets, and important really for us always, is watching inventory days.
I think the first point to note on working capital, as we look at inventory days, the sector graph on the left-hand side gives you the view that since around 2020, 2021, there's been an increase in sector days, which has been quite substantial, and if you look at the graph on the right, Mr Price Group has had a similar increase in inventory days to the sector. Some reasons really around the view of inventory days from a Mr Price perspective, we spoke quite a lot about acquisitions that happened over that period, so in 2022, when our inventory days starts increasing, you see the introduction of Power Fashion and Yuppiechef into the business, and then in FY 2023, the introduction of Studio 88 into the business at lower stock turns.
I think we've spoken about that before, as quite a good opportunity for us. Also, there's been a significant growth in new stores, so in terms of outside just the acquisitions, but about a 20% growth in the core business, new stores. And a really big focus for us has been on de-risking the business. So in terms of the global shipping, disruptions that we've seen come through, and you'll hear more about that from Werner tomorrow, in terms of the Red Sea, together with the national infrastructure challenges that we've seen play out, has really required us to increase some lead time buffers into the inventory planning cycle. So the contribution of all those factors really impacting the increase in inventory days.
I guess the, the big opportunity here then is how do we get those days down into a more acceptable range for us? And the opportunity for us, really, is around improving those stock turns. And you, you will see in the medium-term targets, we've set stock turn at four, which is a bit of a stretch from where we are now, but with plans to achieve that. And also, in terms of the improvement in infrastructure, the national infrastructure, obviously, we've seen some investment being made into Transnet and will continue to do so over the next 12 months, we hear. So once that infrastructure's in and the efficiency of the port increases, we're anticipating to see, you know, a reduction in the inventory days, but more in the medium term than in the short term.
Moving forward, looking at debtors days, so over the five years, over the five-year period, you'll see a decrease in debtor days, really due to a very conservative credit granting posture that we've maintained. You know, it hasn't been a really good cycle from a credit perspective, with interest rates being high, disposable income challenges for consumers, so we've just maintained a very focused strategy when it comes to credit. Also, quite a big focus on the collection strategy from a group perspective to help manage that book, and the opportunity, really, here is about how do we grow the book in a better environment, so as we speak about the cycle changing, you know, there's many data points we look at when we look at book growth.
One of the data points is on the bottom right-hand side, the TransUnion CCI, the Consumer Credit Index, and we see that the credit index for the industry is moving back towards the neutral zone, which is great. But there's obviously other data points that we look at internally in terms of debtors health before we start looking at that portfolio growth. A key metric that we track from a debtors perspective is the net bad debt, and you know the range would have been between 7.5% and 8.5% over the last short term. It's important to note that even within the net bad debt metric, there is opportunity between divisions.
As you can imagine, the different customer profiles for a Miladys customer or a Home customer being slightly higher from an LSM perspective than the rest of the group. For example, a Sheet Street customer does present an opportunity to take more risk in the higher LSM, better-performing customer segment. And then moving on to creditor days. I think the supply chain finance program that we've spoken to you about before has really been a great headline for us in terms of how we're positioning the creditor days increasing over the last five years. Momentum gaining from 2022, so you see the increase in days coming through, and I think that's been a great outcome for the business. So a high component of our local suppliers are on the SCF program, with still some opportunity to extend to the international suppliers.
To date, we've unlocked about ZAR 1.5 billion in working capital, and if you just fast-forward that over the next two years, we're anticipating a further ZAR 900 million to be unlocked through that supply chain finance program, so getting on to the medium-term targets, and you've seen these before at the year-end disclosure in June. I think the important part for us was around enhancing transparency and disclosure with the market. For the first time, we disclosed these targets, and I hope they've been helpful in terms of how you've understood the business and how you've started modeling the business.
I guess, on reflection, on the last five years, with all of the disruptions happening, together with acquisitions and organic growth, I'm sure you guys have had a hard time trying to model the business and anticipate where it would head to. But the medium-term targets just provide you with an opportunity to understand how we're thinking about the business from a medium-term perspective. So these targets will be reviewed and refined and reset as we track progress against the targets. One point to make also is that the targets we've set are not falsely optimistic, so it's on the back of a strategy planning process, and I think Ant and Mark spoke to you about the top-down and bottom-up approaches, process we approach to the strategy, and that's really what's driving the medium-term targets that we've set.
In terms of outlook on CapEx for the next couple of years, we put a four-year view for you. So anticipating to spend about ZAR 5.5 billion, so to continue investing. In terms of where the bulk of that's going to, you can see that the bulk of the approximately 50% will be allocated to stores, new stores, revamps, relocations, and expansions over the next four years. And in FY 2026, you see an increase in the gray bar, which is the technology and logistics piece. You'll hear from Werner tomorrow around some of the risk mitigation that we're doing from a DC perspective and some further investment to enhance our growth enablement.
That project on the DC also enhances integration opportunities for the acquisitions, and will be closed out when Werner gives you a view tomorrow. So if we had to pause here in terms of the five-year review that I've taken you through, what's really important for us to understand is the dilutive impact of the returns of metrics was considered quite clearly by management and weighed up at the time of the investments that we had made. Investments made in acquisitions of organic concept stores and IT was really about growth and diversification, and I think we've delivered that quite successfully over the last five years in what has been quite a challenging environment operationally. These platforms are also great for us.
It provides a great opportunity for us to continue to grow, and we've set some stretch in our medium-term targets. It also shows the opportunity to bring sustainable returns into the long term. Okay, so now that I've taken you through the highlights package of the last five years, little bit of forward-looking views now. I think the next few slides, just want to plant the seed around how we're thinking about what the changing economic cycle could look like for the business. So we've put a few data points together that's shaping our thinking, in terms of the change in the consumer environment. The first graph that you see is the and we took it all the way back to 2020.
GDP growth in 2020 at 3%, which was quite supportive of the household consumer expenditure growth at 5.7% and real wage growth at 7.2%. You see the downward trajectory of that line graph into quarter one of 2024. I guess we've been speaking about the macroeconomics for quite a while, but that's what it looks like when you look at those data points over that period. In terms of what the forecast looks like, so if you draw your attention to the 2025 forecast, that last column in the table, GDP forecast at 2% for 2025, which will likely support improved wage growth and household consumer expenditure over that period, with positive impacts expected for the sector.
If we had to hone in a little bit on customer spend, so in terms of dissecting the data, this data from Stats SA goes back to 2018 and brings it back to 2024. And the key point to note is that despite the cycles that we've spoken about just now and the disruptions that we've seen over the last five years, the average spend from a wallet perspective of the consumer on apparel and footwear ranges between 12, 13 and 14%. So with the inference that as the wallet grows, and is anticipated to grow in the changing cycle, we expect more rands to be diverted to the sector, into the discretionary spend sector, where we will be quite a big beneficiary of.
In terms of giving you another lens, another data point, you know, quite a big portion of consumers or households in South Africa rely on social grants. You'll see that the stat shows that 50% of South African households are social grant beneficiaries. We've given you a view that really talks to the increase in grants since 2020. So that line graph on the bottom left, you see the black line is the increase in unemployed people since 2020, with also an increase in the number of social grants, which have been quite a big surge since 2020 to date.
From the macro conditions that have played out over the last five years, this has been quite a significant increase in reliance on social grants, which has sustained household income for households, together with other forms of income, like side hustles. Social grants account for 17% of total retail sales, and this was from 2023 Stats SA. Social grants also support the informal sector, which is valued at about ZAR 750 billion. As Mark mentioned, you'll hear a bit later from our speaker on the informal sector and how that ZAR 750 billion spend, how he thinks about that spend and where that opportunity lies.
But all in all, I think what we're trying to position is, quite a large customer base of ours comes through from the social grant beneficiaries, and we anticipate that as they get relief also in the changing consumer cycle, we expect it to see some uptick. Then from a customer profile perspective, this is one area that we wanted to share with you and give you a view in terms of what our customers look like, because there's been a quite misconception that we only target the lower income customer. So really, this data source is from MAPS 2024, which is quite a reliable marketing or product survey.
This was released a few months ago, and quite a substantial sample size, about 20,000 data points in the sample, covering both metro, urban, and rural areas across all provinces, and the really big takeaway is that in the last quarter, Mr Price was the most shopped apparel retailer with 3.2 million shoppers, quite substantially high, but more interestingly enough, when you dig into the detail, you have a view that across all income bands, starting with the red block, ZAR 1-ZAR 5,000 monthly income, all the way up to the greater than ZAR 20,000 income per month in the gray block, are all shopping at Mr Price.
So the perception that we only service the lower end of the market was, you know, quite an important point for us to share with you, that it's actually consumers across different income levels. With the cycle turning, what do we anticipate? Obviously, we've spoken about moderating inflation across markets, the anticipation of the interest rates being cut over the next six to 12 months by about 100 basis points. We've already seen the reduction in load shedding come through this year. The two-pot system, which has been quite a big, I think, ahead of forecast for everyone's expectation. This morning I read that SARS was saying that they got up to ZAR 4.1 billion in requests in the first 10 days from a two-pot application perspective.
So it shows quite a significant increase that could bring into the fiscus. And then obviously the consumer sentiment and business sentiment entering more positive perspective. Also, with some gains, further gains expected on the rand and higher GDP obviously being the big stimulator to real disposable income, really the big beneficiary to the retail sector. So what we graphed for you below also is a view from 2001 up until 2023, the correlation between discretionary sales growth and household disposable income. It's quite clear to see that when household disposable income increases, so does discretionary sales. So with all the data points that we've gathered around what the cycle turning means, together with the customer profile of the Mr
Price customer, we do believe that we are well placed to benefit from this changing customer, consumer cycle. Great. So, that brings me to the end of my session.
... All right. I wish I'd had a head up, heads up that my mic was on. I nearly said something bad. Morning, everyone. Yeah, for the - I think I've met most of you. My name is Don Baney, but for those I haven't met, hopefully we can meet in the course of this afternoon or this evening at The Pencil. I'm gonna take you through an overview of the apparel sector. In the break, I spoke to a couple of you. You posed some questions, and I said, "Hopefully, I'll be answering them through this presentation." And so, if I haven't answered all of your questions, then we can catch up after the break. But just a reminder, many of you would have seen this information before.
The apparel sector makes up a little under 80% of the group's turnover, and in the middle there, you can see how each of the divisions constitute that. Praneel shared a little bit earlier, at one point, I think in FY 2020 was just under 60% of the group's turnover, and that's now down to 42%, and that's by virtue of our acquisitions, which is Power and Studio 88. Studio 88 a little over 20% of the group sales, and then Mr Price Sport, Miladys, and Power, sort of 5-6% each. We've shared this with you as well, our operating margin for the segment, 15.3%, and it is our medium-term target to get that to 16-18%.
And again, as I get into some of the divisional slides a little later, hopefully give you some insight into some of the things that will help us to achieve that. Also, just a reminder, I think Praneel touched on this as well, but we went through a little. Sorry, I think Mark touched on it. A period where we suffered some market share losses up until about June, July of 2023, and as you said, that was by virtue of two key factors. On the one hand, the load shedding that caught us by surprise, the escalation in load shedding at least, and we had very little to no backup power.
And then the second being in the transition into our new ERP, which created a couple of hiccups for our merchants, and we weren't able to trade optimally, but you'll see there from the graph that over the past twelve months or so, once we had our backup power in place, and once we had settled our ERP issues, that we've been gaining market share consistently for the past twelve months or so, and so we're back to, we're back to normal, so to speak, so just in the break, having a couple of discussions, Saad, Warwick, and you asked me the question: Well, what is it that helps us to be differentiated?
Because we often speak as a business of us being differentiated on fashion and value, but we don't often talk to how we're able to achieve that. And so, over the next couple of slides, I wanna just lift the hood a little bit, on how we achieve that. I can't go into all of the detail in terms of everything that helps us to achieve it, but I've chosen five areas to just delve into a little bit that essentially is the enablers for our fashion and value differentiation. Also, just to note that what I'm sharing with you now is applicable to, obviously, the apparel sector, but also to Clint's sector on the homeware side, and so really, I'm just speaking on behalf of both of us here.
And Clint can point out any differences when he pops up. So those are the five areas, and so I'll just jump straight in. And again, in the break, a number of questions on our supply chain. And so, probably worthwhile just starting off by saying that we've got a number of different types of supplier relationships, both locally in South Africa and nearshore, in Swaziland, Lesotho, Mauritius, Madagascar, and also further afield in places like China, Bangladesh, and so on. And so I wanna draw your attention to the far left-hand side of your screen in the white shaded area, and you can see a red spike and a black spike. So the black spike represents a fabric that we use in merchandise. It's what we call single jersey.
It's basically T-shirt material, and then the red spike represents a different kind of fabric. It's what we call seamless. Now, the point to note here is that seamless merchandise or fabric and single jersey fabric are made in completely different factories, with completely different yarn, completely different equipment, completely different technology. And so if we owned our factories, then what would be difficult would be to achieve what I'm gonna show you on the right-hand side of the graph. If you fast-forward two years later, just to the peak of 2023 year, so this last festive period, you can see that the red line and the black line have reversed, and that the seamless line is far higher than the single jersey line.
Now, if we had owned our factories, for example, a single jersey factory, and the fashion demand pitch trend had changed, we'd still be compelled, as the factory owner, to feed that factory with the units, because we wanna make sure that it's breaking even if not making a profit. But because we don't own our factories, and we have agility in our supply chain, we're able to flip and switch the kinds of factories that we're working with continuously. That allowed us to chase the fashion trend that was moving into seamless back in festive of 2023. So really, if I had to say one word that defines our supply chain, it's agility, and that agility is a key enabler of the fashion part of our fashion value matrix.
Before I leave this slide, you'll notice on the bottom right of your screen as well, that there's a little blue line and a gray line that's spiking there as well. And if I had to fast-forward this slide into festive of this year, you'd see those two lines really spiking up well above the other two. And for obvious reasons, I won't say what those are yet, but it's just to show that you know we work with many different kinds of factories, and agility here wouldn't be possible without the kind of supply chain structure that we have in place. The second area I wanted to touch on is around our merchandise processes, and I really feel that this is a differentiator for the Mr Price Group.
And any retailer of significance will largely have a process that focuses around the area on the left of your screen, which we call post-mortem. And really, this is the science part of how we build a future assortment. So the merchant teams will. It's what we'll call a post-mortem, and the merchant teams will analyze what sold in the previous season. So if I'm planning this for winter of 2025, what did we sell in winter of 2024? And we'll analyze it by what sold, we'll analyze it by what we call apparel, and how quickly did it sell? We'll analyze it by what the input margin was, and of course, the net margin, the GP margin, and net of promotions and markdowns, and so on.
And the kind of data points that we'll look at is, was it core merchandise versus fashion? What was the seasonality? How deep did we go? How wide did we go? What sizes did we sell? What fabrics did we sell it in? What silhouettes did we sell it in? Which stores did we sell it in, both the size of store and the location of the store? Which week in the year, the point in the product's life cycle, what color, what patterns, and many other attributes. We'll analyze it, and I would say most retailers would probably kind of end the process there, or at least have 99% of the focus there.
The reason why I wanted to show this slide, and it really answers the question for those of you who asked me earlier, what enables us to be differentiated from a fashion perspective? It's the rest of this chart over here. And I think two things I wanted to highlight is really just, first of all, the volume or the number of disparate data sources that come in to inform our merchandise process for a future season assortment. And the second is how all of these data points come together seamlessly into one congruent process for a single decision-making sort of process. And so the kind of stuff we'll look at is just above the post-mortem there, you can see, is digital data.
We're subscribed to a number of sources of digital data intelligence. A lot of it incorporating AI, that help us to predict where future trends are going. We'll take a look at current trade and what's selling in our stores currently. All of the stuff that's sitting in the post-mortem, we'll look at current trade by all of those factors. We'll look at what our trend teams are telling us, and I'm gonna dive into a bit more detail on that in a moment. We'll look at our own web and app traffic, as well as our social media insights, and how our customers are engaging with us on those platforms. We'll look at a bunch of research, both internal research and external research. One of those is the RLC, which is market share.
I'm gonna go into a bit more detail on that in a moment. We have our internal product development departments, and so they'll feed into the process. Our merchants travel the world, looking at retailers and trends all over the place. They'll bring that information back home. And then, of course, at any point in time, we've got a number of tests deployed into our assortments for future seasons, and so that also feeds into the process. So lots of disparate data sources there, and it's all of that that comes together in a seamless process for a decision on a future assortment, that I really think is the secret sauce of this business. And it's a process that I think is very difficult to replicate, and it's why we are sustainably differentiated on the fashion value matrix. Just to...
I said I'd go a little bit deeper into the research and the RLC aspect of what I've just shown you. So this is I've chosen just to show you a graph from the Mr Price Apparel division in this example. And if you take a look at the white shaded area, the vertical axis represents the size of the market, and so you can see that everything on the left-hand side of the graph really has a larger share of or larger RAMs, so it's a larger market, so to speak. And towards the right-hand side, the market, the RAMs in that category gets smaller. All of the red and the black lines represent a category in the business.
And so, the line that runs that separates the black and the red is basically the average market share for the division, in this case, Mr Price Apparel. Anything above the line means that there's a category that we are over-indexing in market share. In other words, in that category, we are taking more market share than what the average is for the division. Anything in the red means we're under-indexing in market share, and it means that there's a lot of opportunity there for us. The reason why I wanted to build this slide in was for two reasons: number one, is to talk about growth opportunities.
If, if you take a look at everything that's in the red, outside of store growth and all the other growth mechanisms that I'll chat about a little bit later, you can see that there's loads of opportunity just to grow comps within each of the respective businesses if we focus on the red lines. And so, as we build a seasonal assortment, we'll look at the stuff with the higher ends opportunities on the left-hand side, and we'll focus on those, but at the same time, we'll look to defend the ones in the black as well. Perhaps the final point on our merchandise processes is that it really is just a coming together of science and art.
On the one hand, the science that the planner brings with that post-mortem, and on the other hand, it's the art and it's the qualitative side of things that comes from the buyer. And when those two elements come together, is where the magic really happens. And so those are decades-old processes for our business that really just help to set us apart and help us with our differentiation. The third area I wanted to touch on in terms of enabler for the things that allow us to be differentiated from a fashion and value perspective is our trend capability.
Our group's been going for around four decades or so, and within that, our trend department has been established, you know, sort of two, three decades ago, and so our processes here as well are really well established. I wanted to use a live example for you, and so I've used a historic example. So this is about about two years old. But some of you who might recall about two years ago, we had a trend called the corsets trend. Effectively, what it was, is basically like underwear is outwear. And so you can see that on the left-hand image, you'll see there's somebody on a catwalk, and you can see that she's wearing a bodysuit, and it's kind of got that corset-style styling.
Our trend team, we have trends people for the different departments in the business, but they would start off by analyzing what's coming off the catwalks and a bunch of other sources of data, and they would start to form a high-level view of where things are going 18-24 months ahead. It's quite far ahead. It's not gonna be commercially viable yet. If they had to go and put that into our stores straight away, it would flop. They then start to build on what they've seen coming off the catwalks. Again, we'll use a number of sources of digital data, some of them that scrape website data from retailers from around the world that we can procure and shape in any way that we choose.
Also, other platforms that help us to predict trends, including AR, to help us see what is going to be coming in the future. We've then got processes that overlay some social media insights. So as a basic example, you can see Kim Kardashian here wearing something similar in terms of styling, and that just becomes reinforcement of the whole sort of view of the trend department as well. If Hailey Bieber, who's a big fashion influencer, is wearing something as well of a similar ilk, it's just, it just builds on to the reinforcement.
I've really shortened the process just to kind of show you the key points, but the net result of all of that is that they will then deliver to the merchandise teams a trend document. And in that trend document, at the beginning of the season, as we're planning the season, they'll say to the buyers: "Listen, yeah, we think that you guys... These are the new fabrics. These are the new silhouettes, the new colors, the patterns, the prints, hardware detailing, any features of the merchandise.
“This is what we believe are the must-haves for the season,” and then finally, they’ll then physically sit and work with the merchandise teams, as well as the marketing teams, to physically build it into the assortments in a responsible manner, and then with the marketing teams to make sure that it is shot in a manner that is inspiring for the customers, and so in this example over here, you can see that ultimately where we landed about two years ago was, this is an actual store window that we had, and we’ve got the corset styling there, headlining things at ZAR 69, was our opening price point there.
The fourth area that I wanted to touch on in terms of the enablers is something that Praneel touched on towards the end of his presentation, which is just our current trade agility. And I thought there was no better way to learn the point than to say that more than 60% of the orders that we place with suppliers are changed at least once. You might say to yourself, "Well, that sounds really inefficient." But what happens is, on a Monday, the merchants will come in from the weekend, and they'll analyze what sold in the previous week. And once they've done that, they'll then look to manipulate the future assortments based on what they've seen in the previous week. And so it really is, again, comes back to that word agility.
But were it not for the agility that we have in terms of the number of times that we change the orders, you know, we wouldn't be as fashion-forward as what we were, or as what we are. So agility in the way that we run our merchandise processes and the way that we work with our suppliers as well, is absolutely key. And again, all of these things are interrelated, because if we owned our own factories, manipulating the orders and changing the orders also wouldn't be possible. And then finally, I wanted to talk a little bit about our customer diversification. Praneel did show, similar information set out in a different way, but I wanna highlight a couple of different points.
So this is MAPS. It's an extract from MAPS, and as Praneel shared, we are the most shopped retailer in South Africa. You break it down into the four buckets as I have here now. There's a couple of things I want to point out. The first is that Mr Price is the most shopped in three of the categories. The top left-hand category being largely the growing customer, but households earning less than ZAR 5,000 a month. The top right being customers who earn or households, at least, that earn ZAR 5,000-ZAR 10,000. The bottom left, ZAR 10,000-ZAR 20,000, and the bottom right, over ZAR 20,000 a month household income. The second thing that I wanted to point out on this slide is just where Shein sits on the slide.
You can see that they sit relatively low down, but the area that they index the highest is in the bottom right category, which is the ZAR 20,000 household income and above. And the reason why I wanted to highlight that is because often the correlation gets made that Mr Price is the most exposed to Shein because of, by virtue of our price points and our fashionability. And while we are definitely exposed, as you can see, we have the most amount of shoppers in that segment. I would argue that retailers that have exclusive or the most exposure in that bucket are more at risk. And we're fortunate that we have good coverage in all the other areas.
Probably the final point to make on the whole Shein matter is that, over the next quarter, as many of you will know, there are supposed to be some changes coming to the regulation. Customers should be charged VAT and duties, so we hold our breath to see if that transpires. I believe it will. Once that happens, it's, yeah, the jury's out as to whether they are able to sustain the kind of growth trajectory that they've had over the past couple of years.
Yeah, you can make up your own minds about that, but certainly, their value will definitely deteriorate once those duties and VAT start to get charged. Then finally, just on the customer side of things, we've spoken about us being the most loved fashion retailer, the most loved brand. One of the ways that we can measure that is just by how highly engaged this customer is. Almost 7 million followers on Facebook, 874,000 on Twitter, more than 500,000 followers on TikTok. We have 155 million visits to our websites and our app every year, and almost 3 million Instagram followers.
Most of these actually the highest in, out of all the retailers in South Africa, and if it's not the highest, it's very close to being the highest. But as I said, most of these are the highest. I'm now gonna just dive into, into each of the, trading divisions, and I'll start with the largest division, Mr Price Apparel. And some of this you know already. We are ranked as the number one, most valuable retailer in South Africa. It's as, as we've said already, the most shopped retailer in South Africa. They have the highest brand equity, out of any fashion retailer in the country, and this business also had twelve consecutive months of market share gain, enabled by that process that I've just taken you through.
Just to give you an idea of the scale of this business, we thought we'd just drop in some trivia here for you, but this business sold a T-shirt every second the stores were open. Sold a pair of denim every two seconds these stores were open. Sold enough ladies' outfits to outfit everyone at the 60 Taylor Swift Eras Tours. I can see the propeller heads here trying to do the math. I haven't figured out how much that is yet myself. And we sold enough dresses to clothe three out of every 10 women over the age of 16 in South Africa.
Just on the fashion value differentiation that I spoke to you earlier in that process, I have a rail here, which is why I'm wearing this fighter pilot's jacket. But we have a number of different, and afterwards, you're welcome to come up and chat with myself or with Kevin, who's the Managing Director. But there are a number of styles here that are gonna be coming into our assortment in the next couple of months, that I would argue our competitors probably won't have. I say probably because I can't tell the future. But just because we are differentiated on fashion and value, and because of that trend process that I've taken you through and that merchandise process, we have ilks of merchandise like this.
I won't get into the detail of it now, but it's highly unlikely that you'll find this kind of merchandise in our competitors, particularly the value retailers, for that matter. So Mr Price has 660 stores, trading density a little over ZAR 41,000 per square meter. And as we said earlier, a highly engaged audience over 4 million followers on social media. They say that digital is the new store window, and this really is the case for this business. 50% of the customers that make a purchase in store go actually and research it on our online website first.
And so what we sell online is just the cherry on top, but it's actually the strength that our website has to grow our physical store sales is what's really key here. But those that do decide to make a purchase online, two-thirds of them will have it delivered to a store to have it collected. And once they go to store to collect, 15% of them will actually make another purchase when they go to collect their order. So truly omni-channel business, as you can see how the online and the digital world really work well together. While we are a private label business, another way that we differentiate ourselves on a consistent basis is just the kind of collaborations that we do. Just pop three examples here for you.
The one on the left with a collaboration we did with Refuse, Karla Gonzalez, in the middle, we did an exclusive range with her. Kay Yarms, a very big influencer in the makeup space is our Scarlet Hill, which is our brand of makeup. She's our brand ambassador. And so brand collaborations, while we are private label, are another way that we can put ranges forward to our customers that our competitors can't copy. We've spoken a lot about the fashion value matrix, and you can see here on our fashion value matrix, the table, fashionability on the vertical axis and value on the horizontal axis, that Mr Price sits clearly in its own space in the top right there.
That's the beauty of this model, is that we differentiate ourselves through fashion and value, and as I said, I've spoken to you a little bit about how we do that. One of the pieces of research that we do every year, in fact, twice a year, it's a piece of internal research that we do, and it's called the value for money research. I'm sharing a bit of detail on this because I'll go into it in some of the other divisions as well. One of the questions that we ask our customers is: Do you believe that Mr Price provides the same or better value than it did in the previous year? And so asking the Mr
Price apparel customers that question, 96% of them believe that that is the case, which is an incredible stat, that our customers believe. You know, particularly in an environment where inflation is as high as what it is, for them to say that we're offering the same, if not better, value than the year before, I think just talks to, the strength of this brand. Thought it worthwhile just diving a little bit deeper into Mr Price Kids as well, because we've had a number of questions and, yeah, about this. This business really is going well. From a standing start, we're now at 44 stores. We opened 10 stores in the first half. We planning to open another 11 stores in the second half.
Of the six hundred and sixty stores that Mr Price Kids merchandise is sold in. The forty-four stores that are the standalone stores now contribute for 20% of the total sales, which really just talks to how well these Mr Price Kids stores are working. So 7% of the stores, just under 7% of the stores, are selling 20% of the merchandise. So this kids business is really working as expected, and I think as Ant mentioned a little bit earlier, that when we exit kids from the mothership store, the adults business is able to expand into that space beautifully, and it's trading to expectation as well. So we continue to look for space here.
We'd have more stores opening if we could find the space quicker, but we have a hunting list that's with our landlords. They're actively working with us on that space, and, yeah, like I said, if we can find the space, we'll take it. What are the growth opportunities for this division, just looking forward? First and foremost, it's always about comp. And as I showed you in the graph a little bit earlier, the RLC graph, that there is a number of categories in this business where we are under index, that have high rand value, and so we'll continue to strategize on those every time we build a seasonal assortment. Mr Price Kids or Mr
Mr Price in total, there's opportunity for store growth only at 660 stores, relative to, you know, some of the competitors, 1-2,500. But within that, Mr Price Kids, as I said, is a big vector for growth for this division. And then finally, we'll continue to invest in revamping our physical stores, as well as continuing to invest in our digital channels. Mark will talk a little bit about that, further on just now. And so, yeah, we'll continue to do all of these things, and hopefully the result is more of those market share gains that I've shown you already. Getting into our second division, Mr Price Sport.
And if you take a look at the middle of this graph, you'll note there that Mr Price Sport has the highest brand equity out of any other sports brand in the country, which is an incredible feat for this business. And we'll go into a little bit about the why this is the case in the slides that come. That value for money research that I spoke to you about, this is the sports customers' answer to that question. 82% of them believe that Mr Price is offering the same, if not better value than the year before. And again, an incredible feat in a high inflation environment. Another standout for this brand is the strength of our partnerships, sporting collaborations and so on.
I'm gonna go into a bit of detail on that in a moment. This has been quite topical, and we've had a number of questions on the role of brands in the sport business, and so I wanted to just dwell on this slide a little bit, and first of all, just to talk to the structure of how Mr Price Sport works from a brand perspective. So, on the top level there, you'll see our own brands, our private label brands, Next, Next Elite, Journal, and Terrain. These guys are our heroes. They're front and center. They're the spotlight, and they'll never represent less than 80% of what we put in front of our customer. In fact, probably far higher than that, but eighty is the threshold that we've set.
Below that, we've started working on some exclusive brands, two of them there being Everlast and Slazenger. The great thing with exclusive brands is that we're still able to control margin there, aligned to what our private label margins are. And in the case of these two, brands as well, we're actually able to design the merchandise ourselves to the taste level of our customers and, and make it in our own factories as well. And then on the non-exclusive brands, you can see them on the bottom row there. I wanna just give a little bit of rationale as to why we have brands that support our private label brands, and the best way that, I've used to explain it in my own head, is to use what I call the Florida Road effect.
For those of you who know Florida Road in Durban, it's a popular restaurant venue. And at one point in time, Florida Road would have probably had one restaurant, and when a second restaurant and a third restaurant came along, it might have been a logical assumption to assume that maybe business for the first restaurant is going to start dropping because you're splitting your customers over two venues. Actually, what seems to happen is that you start to get known as a destination to, as an eatery, and so your customers actually go up. And so as you get to five, six, ten restaurants, restaurant number one's business actually has improved. And very much in the same way, we as Mr Price Sport are wanting to be a destination for sporting goods.
As I've said, that doesn't mean that our own brands will never not be the hero. They'll always be the hero. The rest of the brands are a supporting act, but they're an important supporting act because if we want to become a destination, you've kind of got to give the customer choice on the one hand, and on the other hand, it really helps to accentuate the value of our own brands, which I'll illustrate in a moment. Mr Price Sport has 177 stores, trading density a little over ZAR 25,000 a square meter. Also, a highly engaged audience on social media at 570,000 followers.
While they've been online now for many years, in the past year, really good trajectory in the online space, 20% growth in visits to their site. Also, very much omni-channel, this business. 47% of orders that are placed online are collected in a store, and 35% of their customers prefer to shop both online and in store. So just a really great omni-channel experience for these customers. Actually, for Mr Price Sport, we fulfill the online orders out of a store, and in October this year, we're going into a centralized fulfillment facility alongside Mr Price Apparel. And with that, we expect a nice lift in the service levels that we're able to give the customers.
And so as a result of that, expecting some nice lift on the e-commerce side of things for this business. Competitive pricing makes sporting apparel and equipment accessible to and a good fit for the value-focused customer. I wanted to just share two examples, and so I feel like a very mark sales agent here, but I wanted to use this example, and you're welcome to come up afterwards. So I've got a branded, let me get the right example here. I've got a branded hockey stick over here. Hockey sticks are, generally, the quality of the hockey stick or the performance of a hockey stick is largely gauged by the amount of carbon that is in it.
This branded hockey stick has a 20% carbon contribution in the makeup, and it's selling for about ZAR 1,199. I'll take another branded hockey stick, which is another brand, that's got a 40% contribution of carbon in its makeup, and it sells for ZAR 1,500, understandably, because it has a higher carbon makeup. You've got the next one, which has a 70% contribution of carbon in it, and it sells for ZAR 799. It really just shows that, yes, we're gonna give you choice. We've got the brands for you. What these do is highlight the value of our own brand and the performance can be there as well. It doesn't need to necessarily be an inferior product.
In fact, in this case, it's actually a superior product. I do have some other examples here on the sports side in terms of the outerwear, but if anyone's interested afterwards, you're welcome to come up and chat with me, and I'll show you some more examples. I said that collaborations, partnerships, sponsorships are really important for this brand, and they really are. Our athletes have just returned from the Olympics, and I think the message to our customers is that if Maxed and Maxed Elite is good enough to win an Olympic gold in, well, then it's good enough for the rest of us. We actually have the Olympic kit on display outside, the Maxed gear.
And so if you haven't seen it yet outside at the sports stand, you can see it all hanging there, but it really is beautiful product, and it's no wonder the guys performed so well at the Olympics. And then on the right-hand side our sponsorship and partnership with the Comrades Marathon. And again, as Nigel said a little bit earlier, if our shoes and our Maxed and Maxed Elite gear is good enough to win in and to win gold in, well, then it's good enough for the rest of us as well. And so these kind of partnerships are really key for us. What are the growth opportunities for Mr Price Sport?
I've touched on the whole brand side of things first, and there's definitely an opportunity for us to grow the branded side of the business. We've set a threshold. We won't go above the 20%. The reality is it'll probably be far lower than that, but we just needed to build some guardrails in place. The second area is to diversify our customer base. Mr Price Sport, the ilk of merchandise that we have is skewed towards a more moderate taste level. There is an opportunity for us to bring in more junior silhouettes, fabrics, colors and so on, to complement what we already have, to broaden the target market and the customer that we currently have. And so aligned to that as well, is an opportunity to bring in more athleisure. So that's the non-technical merchandise.
It's the after-sport stuff. Any of the big sporting brands will have kind of the technical stuff and the non-technical stuff. This business is under-indexed in the non-technical, the athleisure stuff, and so another great opportunity for growth. Then space expansion. Its largest competitor has over 340 stores now. We're at 177, and so some great runway for space growth for this business as well. Next up is Miladys, and I said to the management team of Miladys a couple of months ago, when we were sitting in a strategy session, I said, "Name any...
Bring any brand into your head, Rama, Vodacom, Toyota, and straight away, whatever brand you choose, try and correlate that quickly with the target market. You probably have to think for a little bit, but if I say to you, Miladys, even though you don't fall into the target market, you're probably gonna come to a quick decision that it is an older, fuller-figured female, and if that's what rings into your mind, you'd be spot on. But the point I'm trying to make is, I don't know how many brands are able to have such a strong correlation with their target market, even for people outside of the target market. One of the reasons for that is that this business has been going for 77 years. It has the second-highest brand equity in the market. The customer really loves this brand.
Its customer 92% Net Promoter Score, which is exceptionally high from a Net Promoter Score perspective. One of the things that differentiates this business from the rest of the group is its high contribution of credit, 50%, far higher than the other divisions, and so, an opportunity in the short term as we've kind of hopefully seen the tail end of the banana part of the credit cycle. 266 stores. Its trading density a little higher than Mr Price Sport's. It's just under 26,000 ZAR sq m. This business also launched online in 2020, but they are also, alongside Mr Price Sport, we'll be going to a centralized fulfillment facility in October.
And again, because they're currently fulfilling out of the store, we expect a really good improvement in service levels for this customer, and so, I'm looking forward to what that change is gonna bring in the next few months. Next month, in fact. So what differentiates this business? I think first and foremost, it's important to point out that it's the only local fashion retailer that offers sizes thirty-two to fifty across its entire assortment, and no other retailer does that. And you might have some retailers doing it for certain elements of the assortment, but sizes thirty-two to fifty across the entire assortment, you'll find we cater for all women of all sizes in Miladys.
One of the key growth areas for this business is our private label brand, Wonderfit, and again, I'm gonna act like a very marketing agent and just jump around. And I'm gonna pass that around, if you wouldn't mind. Maybe you can get through it by the time I end this presentation. Wonderfit is really just a private label brand that we've developed in-house at Miladys, but it really just represents elevated quality, even elevated comfort, elevated fabrics. And so the example that I'm passing around, if you just squeeze your foot into the heel on the insole there, you'll feel that comfort. It's a memory foam, and it's that level of comfort and quality that we talk about when we say Wonderfit.
That goes across many of our categories, swimwear and underwear and elsewhere, and so, great opportunity for us to expand that in time. We also have some exclusive brand, exclusive brands offered within this range. Playtex being one of them. Playtex has a really high brand affinity with, the Miladys, target market, and, currently, it's only available in Miladys. Body Comfort being another one, and I've got some examples for anybody who would like to come and see that, after this. What are the growth opportunities for this business? 50% of Miladys customers are currently a white female, and so that's not congruent with the broader demographic of South Africa, and so we see a really great opportunity to grow this brand with the black market.
And so, from a merchandise perspective, and with our marketing teams actively working to making sure that we become more relevant into the black market. Just internally, and from a margin perspective, there's a great opportunity for this business, as it gets closer alignment with some of our other divisions to lock in with their supply chains to get the benefit of economies of scale that would ultimately bring A, better margins for this business, and B, better customers... sorry, better lower costs for our customers. This business in particular, because it is so credit dependent, will definitely benefit from the drop in the interest rates that are hopefully around the corner, and also from the recovery in the consumer market.
And then, of course, Wonderfit, as I've spoken to already, it's represented in some categories in the business, but we on a focus drive to make sure that we expand that into as many categories as possible. Power Fashion, and yeah, we know we're not allowed to have favorite children, but if there was a favorite child, maybe this would be it at the moment. This is just an incredible business. It's grown market share for twenty-nine months in a row, consecutively, which is just an incredible feat. We recently opened the three hundredth store in West Street in Durban.
And I think testament to the number of stores and the kind of merchandise and the kind of marketing that we're doing, over the past year or two, that the brand equity has grown from seventh place to fourth place. Also, which is just, I mean, these are the kind of trajectories that you'd expect over many years, not over a year or two. Who is the customer, though? It's LSM 2-5, 18-45 years old, mainly female. She's a value seeker, largely customers that have household income below ZAR 5,000 or are receiving a grant. So very clear on who this customer is. That value for money research that I was speaking about a little bit earlier, I mean, this is...
I feel like I've said incredible many times, but this really is an incredible stat. 99% of their customers believe they offer the same or better value. A large part of that is aligned to how we're changing the kind of merchandise we've put in the stores with more what we call opportunistic stock buys. And that is sourcing merchandise from retailers you know across the world where they have excess inventories or directly from the factories where they have excess inventories, and we secure it at prices that are well below what their market value is. And so, as we put this forward to our customers you know, they're really seeing that value, and that's why we get a number as high as this, 99%.
This is just unbelievable, but for those of you who've been into a Power store, you'll remember that there's those red bins that kind of run down the middle. And out of those red bins, we call them our treasure bins. Out of those red bins, one in every five pairs of ladies underwear in the country is sold out of those bins from Power Fashion. One in every four pairs of girls' underwear and socks is sold out of those bins in Power Fashion. Which is just, it's mind-boggling to think that that is happening out of just our three hundred stores. I actually have a bunch of samples of those, yeah, girls' underwear, but to make things not awkward, I'm not gonna pass them around.
I had contemplated it, but the examples that I've given here, that I do have up front, are sourced from an international retailer, where typically they would sell. I went onto their website, they sell sort of between ZAR 200 and ZAR 300. In those value bins, they'll sell between ZAR 10 and ZAR 20. So you can understand why we sell so much of them, and at great margin for ourselves and of course, great value for the customers. Actually, maybe just so that it's not all about underwear, I have another example here from Power Fashion, and maybe just to keep things a little trivia going, that this is a piece of knitwear that we. I'll pass it on this side this time. You can pass it around and just have a feel.
So this is sourced from a northern hemisphere retailer, a well-known retailer, you'll all know it. The value of that at the international retailer, they sell it for ZAR 720, if I do the exchange rate calculation. Maybe to answer in your own mind, and this is for both things, right? Or maybe you get a free drink at the bottom out closest to the pin. Who can guess what we sold that for in Power Fashion gets braaiing rights. So maybe you can put your hands up at the end, and whoever gets it closest will get the braaiing rights. So remember, it's ZAR 720 at the international retailer. Have a guess what we sell it for here at a really good margin.
So Power Fashion has 306 stores. Their trading density, a little over ZAR 29,000 a sq m. Huge growth in their social media following in the last year, 46% growth. One of the unique things about this business is that they have a highly engaged audience on WhatsApp. About 200,000 customers a month engaging with them through this channel, asking for copies of the catalog. But this brand really gaining traction. One of the key growth areas this year is customers asking or doing searches on Google for store locations of Power, and you can see we've had a 66% growth in customers searching for store locations for Power over the past year. So how are we achieving differentiation in this business?
Just talking to the supply chain, and I spoke about agility earlier, but they source from 150 suppliers across nine countries. Key to this is exclusive and strategic relationships with key retailers around the world, including the likes of the jersey that the piece of knitwear that you're passing around. One retailer in particular last year gave us 1.5 million units of merchandise alone, and we continue that relationship with them and many others. But that all said, we are a South African retailer, and we procured 27.7, almost 28 million units locally last year. That alone, in Power Fashion, is more than the other listed retailers in the country in totality. Just gives you an idea of the scale of the units that we procure here.
Where are the growth opportunities here for this business? Double or triple or more the amount of stores than we currently have, and so, we're opening stores at a rate. We'll continue to grow our private label brands, and they're a key component of this business. But on top of that, we'll continue to chase those opportunistic buys. That is the excess inventory from factories and retailers from around the world, and that's where our customers really do see that value. And even if we can't buy finished merchandise, it's excess fabrics that we buy that we then CMT ourselves. That's a key component of this business. As this business continues to scale, so will the operating leverage grow as our fixed base...
Our fixed cost base is largely fixed now that as we grow sales, we should see some really good improvements in that regard. And then lastly, our integration. This is obviously one of the acquisitions, and there's a number of acquisition opportunities, many areas we started getting stuck into already. One of those, and probably the most significant, in the supply chain. We've started that journey already from a systems perspective, but over the next two, three years, looking to be physically integrated into the supply chain as well of the broader group, and with that, hoping to unlock some margin opportunities as well. And then finally, the newcomer to the division, or the sector, at least, is Studio 88. And here you can see the makeup.
399 stores in Studio 88, 198 in Skipper Bar, 160 in Side Step, 118 in John Craig. The specialty division made up of a number of different brands, and probably a sector that we're gonna look to wind down over time. And so the focus is going to be on the four first four areas. But in total now, 915 stores, and trading density almost at ZAR 43,000 a square meter. Similar to Mr Price Sport, this business is structured with its own label brands, which you can see on the bottom row. It's exclusive brands, that you can see in the middle row, and then the non-exclusive brands on the top row. The exclusive brands, there's some big hitters in there.
I think we've shared it before, but LS is around ZAR 1 billion sales a year. But there's other big ones in there as well, VW, Playboy. There's demand for these brands from our customers, and they can only be found in the Studio 88 Group of brands. And then on the top row is brands that are non-exclusive, that you can get at other retailers, but you know, many of them are... We're the top seller of that brand. So Adidas, Studio 88 Group is the top seller of Adidas in South Africa out of any retailers. Nike, we're the second, and many of the other brands that you can see there we are, you know, at the top or very close to the top, if not at the top.
The location strategy is one of the things that differentiates this business and has allowed it to build the kind of market share and dominance that it does have. And so kudos to the founders and to Bruce, the MD, who's been there pretty much from day one. But while I think many retailers are sort of focusing on the top spots and the big suburban malls, these guys were focusing in kind of the more outlying locations, and that's where they started cleaning up from a market share perspective, and so that has stood them in good stead over time and will continue to stand us in good stead going forward. Where are the growth opportunities for this business?
I think I'll combine point number one and the last point there together, is that there definitely is opportunity to improve margins for this business through better stock management and increasing the stock turn. One of the ways that we will be able to achieve that is through integration into the group's broader supply chain. That journey has commenced at a very early level, but over the next couple of years, sort of the short to medium term, expect some proper integration there, and with that, unlock some margin opportunity as well. We'll continue to grow the private label brands, as well as the brands that are exclusively available in this business. Online is another area of opportunity.
Skipper Bar and John Craig will launch online shortly, but all the chains are also looking at building their versions of the app. That work has commenced already. Then space opportunity. None of the brands exceed four hundred stores. In fact, Studio 88 has just under four hundred, but the rest are half or less than half of that. So a great runway for growth for these brands as well. I think that is it. I'm gonna call my colleague, Clint Larsen, who's gonna talk to you about the homeware sector. Oh, any guesses on the knitwear price? How much? You're cheating, eh?
Even nine hundred now.
No. Okay, we'll give it to our chairman. Yeah, it's ZAR 120 that will sell for. So, yeah, inside of trading, yeah. I can't be held accountable for that, sir.
Good afternoon, everyone, on behalf of the homeware sector. Somebody had to get the pre-lunch session, and at the risk of having multiple hungry people in the room, I'm gonna do the best I can to keep it within the thirty minutes that I've been allocated. And the other thing I won't do is show products. I'm gonna trust that you engage with the team in the back of the room, in the expo room. And I also won't be talking through merchandise process, which Don has covered. But suffice to say, those processes are consistent throughout the divisions, which enables our merchants to move from one division to another, or from one sector to another without any trouble. So let me get straight into the sector stats.
The homeware sector contributes 17.1% to group sales, but watch this space. Mr Price Home, currently at 11.3, Sheet Street at 4.4, and Yuppiechef at 1.4. In the last financial year, operating margin for the sector was 10.5%, and as you can see, our medium-term targets are between 13% and 15%. We've spoken a lot about a structural change in the sector. Post-COVID, we know that pre-COVID, the group held a very high market share of close to 40%. Since the onset of COVID, once we came out of it, we've seen an excess of 300 stores open in the homeware sector, not only by existing competitor set, but also new entrants that have entered the homeware sector.
We've also seen, traditionally, apparel retailers creating combo stores by giving space to homeware within their stores, and that's increased the footprint. And then, of course, we've seen supermarkets also introduce homeware, and we know that it's more margin-rich than what we see in groceries. But despite this expanded footprint, we've seen the South African market only grow at 3.4% in the last eighteen months. However, things are changing. If you look at what's happened since the beginning of January 2023 to where we are now, at the end of June 2024, the black line shows how the rest of the market was growing, and the red line shows how the Mr Price Group homeware sector has grown. And you can see, we lost market share through the early stages of 2023, quite significant amounts of share, but you can see those lines getting closer together.
Interestingly, in the last six months, that market share loss has subsided quite significantly. In fact, Mr Price Home has achieved market share gains for three consecutive months. Most importantly, in June, we saw a crossover of those lines for the first time, where every division in the homeware sector gained market share. Critically, and we've spoken about this at length, it has all been achieved with better margins. We don't want market share with distressed margin. We want full margin business. Despite the turmoil of the last couple of years, we continue to hold the highest market share in South Africa's homeware sector. How are brands positioned? There's been a lot of discussion, particularly around Mr Price Home and Sheet Street, so I thought it good to show you exactly how we position these brands.
So across the three, we have six hundred and three stores, and of course, all three divisions do trade online. But just to show you how we position them, Mr Price Home leads on fashion value, Sheet Street leads on price value, and Yuppiechef, as we saw earlier on, is an aspirational value chain that is, at this stage, in a niche, branded appliance part of the business. The Mr Price Home customer is an early fashion adopter, so when there are new colors or new patterns or new fabrications or new silhouettes, they expect to see it first in a Mr Price Home store. However, the Sheet Street customer is a late adopter of fashion, so if we see something new that is introduced in a Mr
Price Home store, it might be a bright yellow, as an example, and a geometric print, you will typically see that surface in a Sheet Street store six, maybe even up to eighteen months later, because that customer waits for that adoption into the late majority in the marketplace. Yuppiechef, conversely, well, the name says it all. They want, they want it early, and they want it now. So if there's anything new, and it's a new appliance, they want it now. So they're early trend adopters. Who do the divisions target? Mr Price Home targets the mid to high LSM customer, where Sheet Street targets the low to mid LSM customer, and of course, Yuppiechef is the more affluent consumer. And how do we position our ranges? Mr
Price Home is dominant across multiple categories in the home, whereas Sheet Street dominates in textiles, with a focused offer across categories and kitchen accessories and furniture. Yuppiechef, in the interim, is a kitchenware specialist with curated homeware, and that will continue to grow. Both Mr Price Home and Sheet Street are predominantly private label businesses, where we see in Yuppiechef, they have specialist brands that dominate. However, we are growing private label in that business. What do our locations look like? Where do we target for these businesses? Mr Price Home will typically go into your more primary locations where there's high foot traffic, and although there is overlap with Sheet Street, Sheet Street will also look for secondary locations. If you take a gateway and you've got the crescent outside, it's within the node.
It's a secondary location with high foot traffic, but it typically comes with lower rental that suits the Sheet Street model. Yuppiechef, for now, is targeting your suburban or your super regional shopping centers that are also high foot traffic locations. What are the differentiators for the sector? Our three brands cover every category across every room in the house, and within that, we have a good, better, and best pricing matrix, which means we appeal to all LSM groups. One of the key differentiators is that since the inception of Mr Price Home, our five largest suppliers have reliably supplied to the group for more than twenty years, and our top ten suppliers for more than fifteen years.
It means that all three businesses are able to leverage these long-standing relationships, and because of the volume that we drive through the business, we're able to deliver the best value to our customers. Getting into Mr Price Home. What is their purpose? It's to make beautiful homes affordable and accessible to all. We're passionate about making life beautiful, firmly rooted in our belief that good design shouldn't cost extra. Some of the wonderful accolades I can share with you about the home division is that they have been the most loved homeware retailer in South Africa for fifteen consecutive years, despite the turmoil I spoke about in recent years. They have the highest brand equity in the homeware sector, and they are the most shopped homeware retailer in South Africa since two thousand and nine, and very proudly, 40% of the products are locally produced.
But to give you a flavor of the personality of the brand that has enabled these statistics, we have a short video to share. So if we move on to who is the Mr Price Home customer? So we appeal to a broad spectrum of trend-conscious and value-minded customers in the middle to upper income segment, and they love to express themselves through their homes. How do we describe these customers? Well, there's a whole bunch of them. There's an enterprising go-getter, there are these movers and shakers, the accomplishers, and the overachievers. What differentiates Mr Price Home? Well, it's had a long-standing in-house design capability, and it coordinates looks across all rooms in the house and across taste levels. Now, it's the only retailer I know that does this across all rooms.
So when we talk about taste levels, for decades now, we've worked out exactly what the... There are three predominant taste levels that exist within the South African consumer. The first is what we call the classic customer, and that is typically your florals and botanics and your more pastel shades, and what we would describe as pretty patterns. Then we have an urban customer who's younger, who wants brighter colors, wants geometrics and abstract type prints, and then we have a rustic customer who wants more neutrals and naturals and more earthy tones. And the contribution of these customers is, has been well understood, and we move them through the trend journey as trend shows us from one season to the next, so that the product doesn't become stale, but within their lifestyle, they get newness every season. And that's all, enabled by in-house design.
Mr Price Home leads by a long way in collaborations with local artists and designers, and I'll talk to that a little more in a minute. They have an extensive width of assortment across all rooms in the house and are the best priced in the market relative to any other fashion value competitor. Mark spoke earlier about the EDLP model. It's what we stand firmly on, and we support that with our surprise and delight promotions that we run every week. We don't discount. We don't get into that 40%-50% of distressed sales. Mr Price Home is proudly South African accredited, which supports local job creation.
So this is a busy slide, but it gives you a flavor of the collaborations that have been done over time, and they are by far the largest support for local designers, and this has been running for 12 years, and to date, 80 collaborations have taken place, and that will continue. The South African consumer loves it because it brings something new to the market. You're not sure when you're gonna see it again, and they love the fact that we support local talent. So what is the value positioning of Mr Price Home? If you look at the fashion value matrix, the top right-hand corner is where you wanna be, and as you can see, they lead by a long way on fashionability and compete very strongly on value. And 85% of consumers recognized that Mr
Price Home offers either the same or better value than last year. On to the omni-channel experience, currently 232 stores with a trading density of just over ZAR 27,000. But what is interesting is that whether you're in a small store, in a small town, there is a kiosk in that store. So if you wanna shop the full range that's on offer, either online or in the mega stores of Gateway, you can go into the store, you can click, and a couple of days later, you can collect it at your local store. Mr Price Home was the first mass-market homeware retailer to sell online and to launch an app, and e-commerce is currently its largest store.
They have 569,000 Instagram followers, which is the highest in the sector, and 20 million people on average per month access their digital platforms, with 1.6 million social media followers. So what are the growth opportunities? Well, Don talked about it in the apparel sector, it's about growing comp growth, and it's about supporting and growing the under-indexed categories. So I just wanna talk for a minute about what that actually means, because it sounds great that we wanna grow these under-indexed categories, but how do we actually do it? So we have a very detailed process in this, and what we do is we grade all of our stores from grade one to five, and they're graded based on the store size, the store turnover, and the store location.
So as you go through the 230-odd stores, they will either be in grade one all the way down to grade five. So your super regionals will be grade one stores, and as you move into smaller suburbs or smaller shopping centers or into smaller towns, the stores will get a little smaller, the turnover will be a little less, and they'll be graded accordingly. So when we wanna test something new, and we look at these under-indexed category, and we say, "Those are the ones that we're going after," the opportunity there is to expand width. But how do we know what the customer acceptance is gonna be as you look through this huge profile of stores across the landscape of the country? So we have what we call a test grid, and that will cover...
It's more or less 10% of the footprint, so in this case, it would be 25 stores. And we'd make sure that we cover the from grade 1 to grade 5 stores, and we make sure that we cover the width and breadth of the country. Because we know that within those grades, there are like stores. And then we'll monitor the clearances of this product that we put in, that we know very little about. And as we see the clearances, if it clears only in grade 1 stores, we know we can scale it into those 20. If it clears down to grade 3 stores, we know we can scale it quickly into 150 stores. But if it clears right through that test store band, all of a sudden, the entire national footprint will get this new range of product.
So on the one hand, we manage risk, and on the other, we create huge opportunity. The other growth opportunity is to grow GP through low-cost sourcing. Well, we do our best not to grow GP through RSP inflation. So how do we do this? We fight hard with our suppliers. We look for new factories. We look for new countries of origin, but we also look to optimize our supply chain to make sure that we drive down the cost of goods sold. And in the merchandise mix, typically, you'll find opportunistic stock that's margin rich, or we'll grow accessories that's margin rich, but it's the combination of those that will grow GP. So with two hundred and thirty stores, we know that there's still lots of runway for Mr Price Home to open stores.
Provided they meet the thresholds that we set and their feasibilities, these stores will continue to open. They will responsibly continue to grow credit, and there's lots of runway to grow lay-bys. And then finally, the new stores will adopt the beautiful store of the future design, which will support the brand's strength. Moving on to Sheet Street. So what is their purpose? Sheet Street's purpose is to help South Africans create a home they can be proud of on a budget that they can afford. And quite amazingly, 67% of product you find in a Sheet Street store has been sourced from South Africa. They have the third highest brand equity score in the homeware sector and are considered a heritage brand. They've been around since 1990. And who's the Sheet Street customer?
We appeal to the low to middle-income customer, age 25 onwards, who are family-focused, responsible, fashion followers, as I said earlier, and they shop for price value. Having said that, this customer is very savvy about how they spend their money, and they still want what they buy to look good. They look for convenience through an expansive store footprint. I don't want to travel far to find a store, and Sheet Street has a large footprint, and of course, they have now introduced an online channel. This customer is budget conscious, and they're looking for functionality and durability, which is exactly what you'll find in a Sheet Street store. So in terms of value for money, interestingly, the average price point-...
In a Sheet Street store is below the market, in categories contributing 86% of their turnover, and 97% of their customers say that Sheet Street provides either the same or better value than last year. So what is the brand's differentiators? Well, Sheet Street's customers recognize their brand in more categories than any other homeware retailer. They have the widest choice of color, and you get more for less than you would expect to pay in a Sheet Street store. And of course, they're focused on small space living, which, let's face it, that's the majority of the South African population. On to their omni-channel, 354 stores with a shade under ZAR 28,000 a sq m density, and this is optimized by the fact that they have a fairly consistent store size, which enables a wide store footprint.
They launched e-commerce in 2020, and research has shown that 23% of shoppers are influenced by social media before spending, and to that end, Sheet Street's got 1.2 million social media followers. They have last year had 1.6 million video views across their platforms, and almost 40% of their online orders were clicked and collected at store. So what are their growth opportunities? It's to grow these under-indexed categories that I talked about earlier, with the same methodology that I described. It's to exit non-profitable space. Now, this comes in many forms. You may have stores that are slightly overspaced. You may have stores that are not giving us the return because the rentals are too high.
We'll relocate those stores into the same node, so you don't lose the customer, but at a rental that makes more sense, and it will extract profit for the division. And then finally, if needs be, it'll be a store closure if the store is not profit-making. We'll shift the product mix to incorporate non-comp merchandise categories. So for those in the room who remember last year, we said we were testing this in Sheet Street in Q1. We followed exactly that test methodology that I spoke about, and the business is already scaling into the appropriate band of stores based on the learnings, and I think your June market share gain is indicative of what's going on.
Store rollout per hunting list, as I said, provided the thresholds are met, Sheet Street will open stores, and they will grow their GP in the same way that I described in terms of low-cost sourcing. They will increase the contribution of price disruptors. Now, this is quite different from under-indexed categories or from non-comp merchandise. This is opportunistic passes, which Don described a little earlier, so it could be overruns in a factory, it could be cancellations from international retailers. And we all buy the stock on two conditions. The first is it needs to come in significantly lower priced than its peer in the South African market. And secondly, it must carry at least the company average, GP or better.
On those conditions, it'll come in, and Sheet Street is already well on its way here, and will grow the contribution of this, and lots of runway to grow lay-bys. So moving on to Yuppiechef. They are the go-to retailer for the most wanted premium kitchen and homeware brands, and I've listed quite a few. Interestingly, 12,000 premium options are available on the online channel in a Yuppiechef store, and 89% of products that were rated by the customer received a four-star rating or higher. They pride themselves on high-touch service through the omni-channel offering. Anyone who's bought something from Yuppiechef will know. When it arrives, there's a little fridge magnet and a handwritten note, and the customers love it. That personalization means a great deal. Who are their customers?
Sheet Street appeals to a broad spectrum of higher LSM customers, from first-time homeowners who are foodies, entertainers, homemakers, and gift givers. Passionate food enthusiasts who constantly seek new tools, and of course, the homemaker looking to create a beautiful home, and we are in the process of growing their homeware offering. What is their differentiation? It's curated quality ranges of brands as well as private label. Yuppiechef is known for innovative products. That image on the screen that you can see is what is called a smart garden, or if you want a robot vacuum cleaner or window cleaner, Yuppiechef is the destination of choice. They have over 500,000 newsletter subscribers and have a highly utilized gift registry.
And then they have another arm called Edison Stone, which is a sourcing arm to distribute into Yuppiechef, and in some cases, into other retailers, but it certainly is an enabler for exclusive brands into Yuppiechef, and as the business scales, that will become a greater contribution of the assortment. They also support local brands, so you can see a number of them listed on the screen, and these are all brands which resonate with the South African target customer. So on to omni-channel. Sheet Street currently has 21... Sorry, Yuppiechef, sorry, Mark, has 21 stores, with a trading density of ZAR 44,500. They will launch an app next year, and we know this will enhance marketing capabilities, 'cause it means you can send push notifications to your customer.
We know that increases basket size, and we know that the app customer conversion rate is higher than the web-based customer, and it builds loyalty, because the app-based customer tends to shop more frequently. So what are the growth opportunities? As I've said, to grow private label, to increase the width of homeware, and to grow the gifting assortment. Yuppiechef is known for gifting, but there is still lots of opportunity to widen this offer.
... We will integrate them into the merchandise planning systems of the group to enable this growth and for these additional stores. We plan to grow this to 55 stores in the next five years. The launch of the app will accelerate online growth, and then further integration into supply chain to unlock GP will be pursued. Then finally, the business will introduce credit.
Good afternoon, everyone. I hope you had a good, long, little lunch break and an opportunity to also go and have a look at the stands. I also hope that you took some time out to look at the Mr Price Cellular stand, because that's what we're gonna get into now in the session after lunch. I'm really excited to present to you the financial services and telecoms segment. Really, my favorite segment within the group.
It's one of the coolest divisions that you can come across within the Mr Price Group, if I do say so myself. All right, let's move forward. So looking at the telco segment, in terms of how it's made up, so the financial services and telco segment currently makes up, and you would have seen the slide, 3.1% of retail sales. And that really talks to the telecom, telco business. In terms of how that's made up from a divisional perspective, Mr Price Money contributes 53% to the profitability of the financial services and telco segment, with the Mr Price Cellular business contributing 22%, and the insurance business contributing 25% of the operating profit. That's really been quite a strong story around diversification in the financial services and telco space.
When we started the business a few years ago, well, if I go back maybe 10, 10 or 12 years ago, we really had started financial services in terms of a credit offering to our customers. Thereafter, we saw the opportunity to move on into the insurance business, which was a great adjacency, and after a few years, the opportunity then to move into the telco business, which I'll talk to you just now about how that's related back into the business. So all in all, the segment gets to an operating margin of 24%, which is the highest operating margin in the group.
If you strip out the telco segment, which we spoke about at the June presentation, the telco op margin at 9.8%, you can then imagine that financial services, credit, and insurance, obviously, have a much higher op margin than the average 24% for the sector. In terms of how the sector is made up from a customer-facing brand perspective, within financial services, we have Mr Price Money, which is the credit book, which you're quite familiar with in terms of the store card. Mr Price Insurance is a cell captive, which we have a very special relationship with Guardrisk, and Mr Price Extras launched most recently from an innovation perspective, to the customer segment. In the telco space, we initially started off with Mr
Price Mobile on the right, one of the first clothing retailers to go into the MVNO space, mobile virtual network operator space. That was quite an attractive space for us to enter, and this was leading edge. I'm talking twenty-fourteen, ten years ago. Cell C was the only network operating in an MVNO space at the time, and we were one of the first retailers actually to take on that model. Great opportunity from a margin perspective in that model, and it allowed us to bring value to customers based on price points that we were able to control in terms of giving value back to customers in a quite a, I'd say undemocratized data and airtime landscape that's dominated by quite a few big players. And then the ability to use the halo of the brand, right?
We saw that earlier this morning, that through organic concepts, we've been quite successful in leveraging the Mr Price Group brand, and no different from a, from a Mr Price Mobile perspective. A few years thereafter, we then decided to go into the Mr Price Cellular space, and the differentiation really is that Mr Price Cellular is an, is an MNO, a mobile network operator. So, for example, if you walk into our store, you see a kiosk in the store where we're retailing devices, and other accessory products on behalf of other retailers, and you would have seen that in our competitors for many years. So we were probably one of the last clothing retailer to enter the space.
The space was quite crowded at the time when we made the decision to enter into it, but we thought there was an opportunity for the customer. Using our knowledge of the customer and what she wanted, and being able to put that together for her in a very curated design or assortment, is what helped us get really good traction in that Mr Price Cellular business over the years. When we initially started, we started with 10 store-in-store concepts, and very quickly, we managed to scale to where we are today in over 500 store-in-store concepts and over 40 standalone store concepts, which I'll talk to you about just now. And then more recently, with the acquisition of Power Fashion, we were able then to access the price value customer from a cellular telco perspective.
They also have store-in-store concepts in about 80 stores, which we'll touch on a bit later. Moving on to what the product looks like. So, Don was able to show you a bit of the product. My products here are more virtual. So from a credit perspective, the real main reason the credit store card lives is to provide access to our customers to the merchandise. So very much to be able to support customers being able to access merchandise at price points via the affordability that comes through from the store card. So a tender type, really, more than anything else, was how this business initially started. And we started with the traditional store card, so six- and 12-month rolling facility, a book that we built ourselves with an in-house data team.
Built our scorecards also over the years and got them quite specific in terms of the customer profile that we were after, because we were quite intentional in terms of how we manage bad debt. So the six- and twelve-month facility is substantially probably 90% of the portfolio at the moment. And a few years ago, coming out of COVID, we decided that we needed to access the younger customer segment. So we had had lots of requests from customers, younger customers, who were either new to the credit market, so they didn't have much of a credit profile, or they were, you know, just younger customers. And we then started up a three- and four-month facility term called the Startup Facility, and that's really a great opportunity for us.
It gives us the ability to access data for customers on a three or four-month revolving facility. Smaller terms, smaller limits, allow the customer to understand financial inclusion and how financial education impacts their credit scores, and then able to migrate them when they're ready, up into the six-month and 12-month facility, so that they're able to access a higher credit limit and continue shopping. More recently, in the last year, we then launched the Bigger Buys product, which was after an innovation phase that we had gone through in the financial services business, and the real crux of this really was to move away from revolving credit and really offer a 24-month fixed pay-down facility.
So more facility that customers could use for bigger ticket items like a couch, for example, where we get to average credit limits of about ZAR 10,000 on the Bigger Buys facility. In contrast to the 6- or 12-month facility, where the average limits are closer to ZAR 3,800. So that really talks to the product set within the credit business. Moving on to the insurance business, again, as I mentioned, quite a good adjacency for us. The Mr Price Insurance business has been probably under the radar, for all intents and purposes, so you don't see it when you walk into stores, for example, but we operate quite a significant insurance business through a call center. It's micro-insurance, both in the long-term and short-term space.
And when we initially started the business, it was really about creating an opportunity to look after the credit customer. So we launched the Lost Card Protection and the Customer Protection Plan, which was very much linked to the credit base because we had known customer data. She had an affinity to the brand, and we were able to upsell her these products to look after instances of either fraud on her account or if there were instances of risks to the balance. A few years after that, we did another innovation phase, and we launched what we called the second-gen products. And here we went away from just the traditional store card and looked at what did the customer actually need from a micro-insurance perspective.
We knew that she couldn't afford high premiums on a monthly basis, but she needed to be covered, and that's when we went into the Life Matters plan. So it's simple life cover of up to ZAR 100,000 or ZAR 250,000, premiums from as little as ZAR 38 a month. Really talking to our one-up from a funeral product. We also launched the A2 B Commuter personal accident product, and that talks to our customers when she's in public transport, in a taxi, moving from point A to point B. It covers her for any accidental or any accidents on the way. We also launched the 360 Degree program, which was quite a comprehensive cover that looked after customers from a hospitalization, critical illness, death, and disability. Again, micro-insurance for micro premiums.
And more recently, we launched the Device Cover product. Obviously, it was a natural progression after we started the telco business to start offering device cover and, again, phenomenal value to the customer. Premiums start from as little as ZAR 30 a month for device cover, and covers your major risk incidents there. All in all, from an insurance product perspective, they are conveniently billed to the store card, so quite easy for customers to pay when they're paying their store cards on a monthly basis. And really an opportunity for us also then to access cash customers via the debit order, which I'll talk to you a bit later about. Then the value-added services was just an opportunity for us to add extra value to the customer, knowing that the VAS market is quite a big market in South Africa.
I'll talk to you about some of the stats just now, but some of the big products that, that index with our customers really well is prepaid electricity vouchers, person-to-person money transfers, I'll give you some stats just now, Showmax vouchers, and then the big one, airtime and data, which is quite a commodity these days, for, for all customers. If we pause a little bit more and talk about the credit market, so I'm gonna spend two minutes just talking to you at a high level about what the credit market in South Africa looks like. All in all, 25 million consumers in the credit market, making up ZAR 2.2 trillion in debt, from the May 2024 Experian CDI data point.
As you can see in the pie chart, a significant portion of the 2.2 trillion comes through from secured lending in home loans and vehicle loans, the black and the red piece of the pie chart. Then the 25% is made up from unsecured credit, so the personal loans, clothing, retail accounts, and credit cards. The clothing retail loan market is 2% of the total market, at ZAR 43.3 billion, and within that 2% of the credit market is where we play the Mr Price book, at ZAR 2.5 billion, accounting for 6% of the clothing retail market. If we just move on to talk about the landscape, what have we seen in the credit landscape over the last few years?
I think flowing on from the discussion this morning in terms of what the macroeconomic situation has been over the last twelve to eighteen to twenty-four months, we've seen quite a large increase in originations and applications for credit in the market. You would have seen the same from the banking sector and from other sectors in terms of credit, but the challenge really being about customer affordability. So, you know, the strain that customers feel financially and their ability to then try and increase their wallet using credit tender types, really being a risk to the sector. Also, at the same time, high interest rates over the last twenty-four months, really, like, ramping up the risk of bad debt.
In terms of our posture and our response, we also noted quite a significant increase in credit applications over the last year. In June, at our year-end presentation, we said credit applications or requests for credits were up 40% on the prior year. Again, talking to, you know, the customer demand. And the new kind of nuance we had seen was that younger customers are now, you know, looking at credit more seriously than they did, had done in the past. We did maintain our credit posture of conservatism, which we've spoken to you about before. Our approval rate at 18.7% is more or less in line with some of the other clothing retailers.
And I think the big point for us is we wanted to make sure the book was as healthy as possible, and also getting the book ready to be able to take advantage of a turning cycle, which I'll talk to you about just now also. So from a health of the book perspective, you know, we do a benchmark exercise, and the Mr Price credit strategy shows that the good-to-bad balance ratio at 6.6% is much better than the market, at 3.2, almost double better than the market. Moving on to the insurance landscape. So we spoke about insurance being quite a commodity for our customer base. The research shows us that over 40% of South Africans have a funeral product. Most of them have more than one funeral product.
The new trend in that space also has come through from flexibility in benefits and premiums that customers are after. Digitization is also quite a big trend in the insurance market at the moment, and the drive to Insurtech is something that everyone is incorporating into their strategies. Our response really has been about looking at how we can access cash customers, so I spoke to you earlier about the fact that we were quite conveniently billing insurance products in line with the store card, gave us a great base of customers to sell to, but the big opportunity now, through the access to debit order products, is to sell to the cash customer base, and that has recently been launched and also helped us attract a younger customer. Also, we've partnered with a digital insurance platform.
You know, we don't wanna build all the tech ourselves in this specific sector. We know there could be, you know, significant investments from that perspective, so we've partnered really well in terms of being able to provide an insurance platform that digitizes the onboarding of customers all the way through to the claim stage, and then the product development life cycle continues in terms of trends that we see coming through. The VAS market I spoke to you about just now, quite a significant market, ZAR 35 billion-ZAR 40 billion per month in terms of transactions, and in that mix, about 9.7 million customers transferring money monthly to themselves, and then we also hinted earlier at what the informal market looks like.
A lot of these person-to-person money transfers operates outside a traditional bank account, so these customers have a need to transfer money to friends or family in different provinces without going through the traditional banking system, and here we have the ability of a customer to go to a store in Gauteng, put some money into a relative in the Durban who lives in Durban, and then she's able to access that money transfer via our store network. That's also taken off quite nicely, and I'll talk to you about that just now, but the other big player within this VAS market is prepaid electricity and airtime and data, which have become quite commodities.
And the big thing with VAS is about the convenience factor, so are quite good in terms of driving footfall into stores, but also good as an impulse buying. So while the customer is at the POS desk, our ability then to upsell her basket with these products are quite good. Our response, we launched the money transfer service in partnership with Absa, and again, talking to the partnership approach and not building everything ourselves. And in the last year, we've seen more than ZAR 58 million rand transferred, from a money transfer product perspective. Prepaid electricity vouchers also doing really well in terms of store card and cash customers. And what really helps also is the omni-channel strategy, so customers are able to purchase these, not just in store, but also online.
In terms of differentiation in the financial services sector, so convenience is a big thing, and also the ability to access merchandise we said was important, so we launched the OneCard program a few years ago coming out of COVID, and that really allowed us to give customers the opportunity to cross-shop between different retail chains with one store card, as opposed to just shopping in the brands that you had originated the card in. From a value perspective, coming out of COVID, also, we spent some time on innovation, and we launched the Mr Price Insiders Rewards program. I've got a slide just now that I'll talk to you about the Insiders Rewards program and how that works for the credit customer.
But the biggest call-out there is customers are able to get 50% of their monthly spend on the store card back in free data. So as an example, if a customer shops for ZAR 1000 a month, on average, she gets 500 megs of free data every month on her Mr Price Mobile SIM card. So when I spoke about the ability to bring the telco sector and the financial services sector together, that's really what we've been able to do with the Mr Price Insiders program. From a choice perspective, multiple tender types, insurance products that were relevant to the customer. And then quite a big thing for us, we've been through quite a big digital journey over the last three or four years and starts all the way from the onboarding process from an omni-channel perspective.
So we've been able to grow customer acquisitions through WhatsApp chatbots, online, through the call center, in-store, as well as through the cellular store, and you'd have seen at the expo there's a digital application process. From a QR code perspective, customers are able to start their credit journey. So quite a big investment into digital and also in terms of multiple payment types. Self-service also has become quite a big thing for our customers in financial services, so their ability now to resolve queries that they have has actually transferred to 30% self-service. Whereas, you know, in the past, we would have 100% of customers either phoning through the call center or going into store. Now, she's able to self-service via the online chatbot platform.
And the store card customer also is quite a big omni e-com shopper. 31% of store card sales contribute to e-com. So in terms of who the customer is from a demographic perspective, she's Black female, she's aged between 36 and 41 years on average. Her average credit limit is about ZAR 3,800. Clothing retail is really the first point of entry into the credit market for most South African consumers. She enters the market via this product, builds a reputation over time in terms of her credit score, and then she migrates to other credit products, like personal loans or credit cards. Her average income, ZAR 10,000 per month, and 34% of the base have credit cards.
So talking to the indexing into credit cards, we don't see a significant cannibalization from a credit card customer. If anything, when you look at the bureau data, you actually see that she has balances on her credit card, and she has balances on retail store, and she maintains both those balances, talking to the utility that she needs from a affordability perspective. In terms of the average transaction, and this is what gets us excited, is that the credit transaction is 49% higher than the average cash transaction. These customers have approximately two SIM cards, which we love to hear, because we're able to give her more value in terms of offering her SIM cards. 75-76% of consumers have other retail accounts, so not only the Mr Price clothing account, but she does have other retail facilities.
85% smartphone penetration, and 58,000 with Mr Price Mobile SIM cards. Just in terms of customer insight, so this is one area of the business where we do have access to structured data, just by the nature of having a credit offering. So our base of 1.4 million customers, we know who she is, we know how often she shops, we know what she shops, we know for who she shops. So we were able to build quite a data-driven model in terms of using recency, frequency, and value of spend. And then we're able to use that data-driven model into our rewards program, when we talk about how we reward customers for shopping on the store card.
The other behavior that we've been rewarding recently, also, is the payment of accounts, so not just in terms of shopping up, but also being able to pay off her accounts. I told you I would speak to you about the Insiders rewards program, so yeah, as I said, we actually did quite a bit of research before launching this. And what do we know? 73% of South African consumers belong to some form of loyalty program or the other. Most retailers offer some program, and in 2020, we came across the opportunity to actually leverage existing assets within the group. So prior to 2020, the MVNO, Mr Price Mobile, was operating as a profit center, selling prepaid and postpaid packages to customers.
But in 2020, we said, "Let's bring the assets that we have in the business together, and create the reward that I spoke to you earlier about, in terms of offering free data for customers as she shops." That's one item, or one reward area for the customers on this program, but there are various others also. In terms of some of the key highlights from the Insiders reward program that we've seen in the last year, we've delivered 1.1 million reward moments in the financial year, 7% additional customers shopped year on year. 31,000 customers with a mobile SIM have earned 13 terabytes of free data for shopping on their account, and the biggest ROI for me is that the rewarded customers are shopping 10% more, versus customers who were not rewarded.
Obviously, a continuous research loop here in terms of how we continue to refine that Insiders rewards program, so in terms of the growth opportunities, what does the financial services opportunities look like for us? You have heard quite regularly over the last five to 10 years, this term fintech being thrown around, and there's obviously various models of fintech that we've seen being landed in the market, but really, for us, how we see fintech, it's really a convergence of retail, banking, and technology, so the ability of bringing all those three together to be able to provide a product to the customer when she needs it, and in terms of providing a payment mechanism for her, is really key for us.
In terms of the projects we've got going in terms of the landscape, our financial services modernization project is something that we started last year sometime. Really, that project is about making sure that we have the right tools and right systems in place to be able to scale this business together with strategic banking partnerships. I used the example earlier about Absa from a money transfer perspective, where Absa is our sponsor bank. Again, we are really looking for that partnership approach, where the partner brings licences and functionality, and then we're able to leverage our retail platform and customer base to unlock products of value. Other opportunities in credit really is around how we take credit to acquisitions, and what we're thinking about there.
And obviously, business cases will be built over the next short term. A key part in terms of taking credit to acquisitions is landing the financial services modernization project, and then, once that is done, we'll be able to look at capability to take to acquisitions. The other opportunity I think I spoke to you a bit earlier about is in our net bad debt. We've set quite a metric at 7.5% or 8.5% net bad debt as our key metric. But within that metric, there are opportunities between the different brands based on the customer LSM. So there are some opportunities in the short term that we will be looking into, together with the change in the cycle, right?
So we spoke about the opportunity for what could credit look like in an upcycle, where interest rates are lower, customer affordability is there, and that's something that we will consider. Moving on to the telco segment. So telco, I think we spoke to you about the three brands. The Mr Price Cellular brand, really talking to the fashion value customer segment, aligned with the Mr Price halo brand, providing cellular devices, accessories, airtime, and data. The Power Fashion customer, the price value segment of our matrix, talking to cellular devices, accessories, and airtime. And then Mr Price Mobile, also bringing in on billing and SIM-only products to the customer. In terms of differentiation for the telco business, pricing is quite a big thing for our customers. She's very price sensitive, which is quite a big lead into our strategy.
58% of devices are cheaper than the markets, based on the comp shops that we do regularly, and 32% are in line with market. If you've had time to go to the expo, you would have seen the [salt] device. So we launched our own private label brand last year in December. Again, understanding what the customer wanted was quite key in this, in this launch. We looked at the features of the smartphone device that she was really after, but obviously couldn't afford the top-tier brands, and we were able to bring really good specs to these devices, but at really value price points.
So the price ranging of ZAR 1,499-ZAR 2,999, really the sweet spot for the customers, and in a short space of time, got to a 5% contribution of device sales. And I'd continue to encourage you after the session also to look at those devices in the expo. In terms of the experience, so we launched our standalone stores, and we've grown to about just over 40 now. Quite a nice digital experience in the store if you visit it. Quite fresh looking, funky, and keeping in line with our customer. You'll see that there's opportunities for a Find Your Fit app, if you're looking for a good match between you and your cell phone, that you can do within the store space.
You can also start a credit journey in that store from scanning a QR code, and then you're able to also buy your device after your credit facility is granted, and a whole host of extras products available in that standalone store. Also, alternate tender types have become quite important to this customer. Obviously, we spoke about affordability being an issue, so we have launched alternative tender types, like buy now, pay later, third-party providers. Again, we've partnered with businesses who are taking the risk, but providing us the access to the sales. And then from a Mr Price Mobile perspective, differentiation comes through the MVNO. I told you when we started, we had started the journey with Cell C in twenty fourteen, as they were the only telco that was offering the service.
But we've now just gone live with Vodacom as the secondary MVNO provider. We're the first retailer on the Vodacom MVNO platform. It's been something we've been working on quite hard for the last year, and the ability for the customer to access the quality of that network has just been phenomenal for us, but within the value price segment also. In terms of the customers, I won't spend too much time here, but other than to say, the Mr Price Cellular and Mr Price, and Power Cell customers, very in line with the Halo customer. So Mr Price Cellular in line with the Mr Price Apparel customer, and Power Cell in line with the Power Fashion customer. With Mr
Price Mobile, we've seen a bit of a trend into the male customer, which has been a new kind of trend for us. In terms of the offerings, so we spoke about the digital in-store experience. This is just a picture of what one of the standalone stores look like, and then we spoke about the SALT devices also. So we're in 43 new standalone stores at the moment, and 507 store-in-store concepts across the Red Cap divisions, and also operating from an e-com perspective on the Mr Price Apparel app, which is the number one ranked omni-channel app.
In terms of some of the accolades we've won over the last couple of years, Vodacom MVNO of the Year award, Telecom Retailer of the Year award for market growth, and the Huawei Appreciation Award for highest sales. In terms of Power Cell, again, differentiation here into the price value segment. So, for example, where we see average device prices in the Mr Price Cellular stable of around ZAR 1,400, in the Power Cell space, you're seeing average device prices of ZAR 350. So quite a big differentiation from a customer perspective. Presence in 80 stores at the moment, and also a dedicated service in-store model, with the opportunity to grow to more stores. And from a Mr
Price Mobile perspective, again, the MVNO, one point five million SIM activations since launch, and positioned, as I said, as a differentiated through the Mr Price Money Insiders program. From a growth perspective for the telco segment, the expansion of the footprint is quite important to us. This year, we'll land 25 new standalone stores, and 10 new store-in-store concepts. The increase of the private label contribution from SALT, really a big thing for us. You know, we spoke about private label being, allowing us to access greater GP margin, and that's exactly what this is about. And then white labeled accessories to be launched also later this year. So once the devices are landed, the next kind of big area of opportunity is white labeled accessories. Also, we will consider an alternative to prepaid device financing.
That's a business case we're working on at the moment. And then from a Power Fashion perspective, launching the SALT devices into the standalone and into the Power Fashion stores, right product for that customer. That's what we're really focusing on now, and prepaid device financing and the store footprint expansion. The big focus for the mobile MVNO really is to migrate the customer base to the Vodacom platform, and then the ability to access better GPs through the merchandise mix in that space. Great! So I've given you the overview of financial services and telecoms. I'm sure now you understand why it's my favorite part of the business. It's all about the margins, which look really great. I'm now gonna hand you over to our Director of Finance, Liziwe.
And as she comes up, we're gonna get kicked off with a video. Thank you.
... Why we do it? For our people.
For my family, for my grandmother. For the future.
For the love of Mr Price Home and the passionate partners that show up every day.
For the Mr Price Foundation. For our amazing people. For me and my family. For my son. For our future.
For our associates, my family, and the entire South African nation.
For our people and for who we are. From Mzansi!
For our DNA and our values.
For the people, for the future.
For South Africa. For our people.
For employment. For my kids.
For the love of it.
For my passion for fashion. For the DC and for those before us. For my family. For our people and for our country. I'm doing this for Mzansi. For the passion and commitment to providing consistent customer value. For the culture of the business. For those that never give up, the future trailblazers. It's for the DC and for you.
For all of our customers.
For my family.
For our passion. For the 500 stores to come. I can't wait. I am doing it for me and for those who come. For the breadwinner that is providing for her family. For who we are. For the future.
For the South Africans that love to look and feel good in their clothes and their homes.
I'm doing it for five-year-old me. For the future generation. For our customers. The economy and future generations. For the customer who wants to make their house a home.
Most definitely for our loyal customer.
For the young lady in the Transkei. For our customers.
Hello, fellow South Africans. For the young man in the township.
For our beautiful country. For our legacy. For the people and for Mr Price Money. It's for everyone who is out there, either in a disadvantaged area or in any rural places. For all of our partners. For our customers. I'm doing it for my late mom.
For our people.
For South Africa.
For my family.
For faith, for family, and for our future. I'm doing it for the culture. For the people. For you guys.
For all our female associates, for the beautiful women of our country, and for the young girls who are our future leaders.
For our vision and making an impact. For our culture. For Islam. For our passion and for our future. For the trendsetters. For the front line, for our teams, and for our families. I'm doing it for those to come. The best that's still to come. For our people. For our fashion-obsessed customer.
For the red that runs through our veins.
We are Mr Price.
This is why we do what we do. I've watched this video more than ten times. Each time I watch it, I get goosebumps. When you see the diversity of our associates, their reasons, as different as they are, representing the diversity of the teams that we have in the organization, you can't help but just want to be here. Mark, in your section, you said, "We'll talk more about this." I don't know what you were talking about, probably culture, under the people section. So what I heard was, "Forget the timeline that Matt gave you. You have as much time as you need to talk about people." Sitting down, listening to all the presentations, at some point, I thought, "I think my job is done.
Actually, we don't need a people section. For Nigel to open up with a slide, you can't copy culture, to Stuart and Laurie talking passionately about just what's important for them, their associates, the purpose, the passion, to Mark talking about culture and everybody else. Culture, people, skills. We have a special place, we have special people. We have a secret sauce, not just in our people, but in how we do what we do. I was thinking, "I don't think the people section is needed." But now that Mr Blair has given me more time, we'll just... We'll go where we need to. So good afternoon, everybody. I am mindful that this is the graveyard shift, and there's drinks waiting after this. So I hope that we'll do justice to the slot.
You saw when Mark put up the six pillars of the strategy, that people was one of the pillars, and here we have an integrated people strategy that we put together. I'm not going to cover the whole strategy, but we thought we'll pull out just four key themes that we know, as shareholders, you'd be interested in, and the discussion can go wherever else then it needs to go. I'll start with the first one, our organizational health index, and there's a bit of a story here to tell. Even before I joined, when Mark put together that strategy, he had a vision for what he wanted to see in the people function. One of the outcomes was, he wants the board and the organization to have independent data that would tell us how healthy the organization is in terms of our associates.
Based on an understanding that, if you have associates who are engaged, they are going to be productive, and you get the outcomes that you need. So one of the first conversations we had when I started, he shared the strat document, he shared what he had under the people pillar. It took us a while to build it, but this is our third year now of having an organizational health dashboard, and you'll see the eight areas that are covered... And you know, in any people function, there's all sorts of data sets, and as an organization, it's your responsibility then to pick the data sets that are relevant to the strategy that you are driving, which is what's represented there. What you don't see, though, is the reporting. We thought we'll show you just what the categories are.
The reporting that sits behind this that starts at divisional level, it rolls up to sectors, and then we have a group view. At any given time, when we sit in our conversations, we are able to look through the organization of the number of divisions that have been shared earlier on, thirty-two thousand associates. You know that your people agenda then is absolutely aligned when all the divisions are able to produce that amount of data, look at people through the same lens, which then drives the decisions that need to be made in order to improve the health of the organization. This you can almost see as an internal scoreboard that says, "We have a strategy. Those are the elements that we know will tell us whether we're winning or not.
Are we winning or not?" When we went to the board, now in August, reporting for quarter one, the OHI, we call that in short, it was the best organizational health score overall at group level that we had delivered since we started this journey over two years ago. All those elements were green, except transformation. And transformation, you can understand two parts. It's beginning of the year. It's only quarter one reporting, so we know that we have time to make up. And then the second part is a challenge at top management. The other levels we know will be able to score. And net promoter, there's some improvement that's needed, but every other element, strong performance in line with the parameters that we had set. We'd never delivered a result like that before. Then you look back and you say, "You've put a strategy.
You have measures of success." They didn't start off being green, right? You work hard. Our conversations are quite targeted conversations, and I've learned when you work with CAs, it is: What's the score? What was the target? How did you not get to the target? How are you going to get to the target? Being a psychologist, you know, we can tell stories. There's no stories with the CAs. So what are the three things you are going to do to get to the target? And that's great because that focuses us to make sure that we do what needs to be done to improve those, and the results are also coming. So that's the organizational health dashboard. I've put Top Employer there because when I look at Top Employer, in my mind, it's an external measure of success, or if you're not successful, then it's not success.
So internally, you have your own data. Externally, you have independent people looking at your people, practices, and policies and telling you whether they are... they measure up to your other employers. Top Employer, also a journey. Decided in 2022 that we want to at least have a sense of where we feature, and the goal at the time was just enter, let's get baseline data, and then you can decide. But secretly, we were hoping that we would get certified. Everybody wants to win, especially in this organization. Results came, devastating results. So with Top Employer, how it works is there's over 20 dimensions that they measure, and they look at practices you have over those 20 dimensions, and it's a whole verification process. So really hectic process, you must show documentation, there's interviews, so proper audit processes are followed there.
Our results in the first year, we got to 36.5%. Entry level is 60. Now you understand how big the gap is. But working with the team that we work with, even that shocking result was not an issue. It was like, "Right, we have the baseline data. We know where the gaps are. We're going to put a focus plan to get us to where at least we need to be, which is accreditation." But because the gap was so big, when we set our target, we ended up saying, "Okay, we'll live with a 25% improvement, at least for the following year." 'Cause you know now where you're starting. Last year, we got our results, and we got accredited. So you move from 36% overall to a 60.7% in one year.
Tell me that that does not show dedication, absolute focus, and making sure that you are able to change the dial. Year three accreditation, I think we will continue. My sense is we will continue to improve the outcomes of Top Employer. You must just watch this space. I think the announcement will happen in the next couple of weeks. So in terms of your scoreboard, processes are put in place, measures are put in place, focused action across the whole organization to drive to an outcome. Now we are at a point where our internal scorecard and our external measures are starting to say: You're moving in the right direction, and that's what you want. Before I move to the next slide, I just wanted to talk about engagement.
You'll see it's one of the areas that we measure, but I've pulled that out specifically because most organizations run engagement surveys. We do that as well. We know that globally, engagement levels are dropping. In fact, that 72% was Gallup's global number for last year. This year's number has come out, it's dropped to 70%. For us as an organization, to year-on-year improve from 68% to 73% engagement, we know that there's something special in this organization. Everybody spoke about our culture. They spoke about our secret sauce. They spoke about the passion of our associates. That's how you see where that comes from. In an environment where we spoke about all the macro factors that are really working, or at least have been working against many organizations and associates as well.
So, really proud of, we have a strategy, we have a plan that drives execution there, and we are able to measure success. When we don't succeed, we don't give up. We roll our sleeves higher, and we make sure that the teams are focused. So that's the organizational health, and, Nigel is here. He knows we take this to the board via our SET committee on a quarterly basis, and great discussions happen because you sit with the board that has a full view of what's happening in terms of people in the organization. Second topic is transformation. Personally, a topic that is close to my heart, because I know how, if you drive this well as an organization, it just benefits organizations.
Being in retail, we also know that the retail sector as a whole has not transformed as much as it's needed to, unlike other sectors, that have taken this and really transformed. We've had many debates and conversations, both with the board and our Exco, to say our stance is, which we could say, "Is it compliance, or are we doing it because we know that fundamentally, the organization is going to benefit?" And we're saying it's not compliance. Transformed organizations, and there's research all over the place, create associates who are engaged. They see people who look like them, in different levels of the organization. They know that there's opportunities for them in those organizations as a result. They are better at problem-solving because you bring diverse perspectives.
They are better at understanding customer needs and delivering those because of the diverse inputs that you bring, especially in the type of business that we are. And ultimately, all of this delivers value to you as our shareholders. This year, we made a decision that our employment equity committee is going to be led by a business owner. So Kevin, sitting there at the back, who is the Managing Director of Apparel, chairs our employment equity committee, and a few colleagues sit on the committee with me, plus other people in the organization. You can't get progress if this is something that sits on the HR agenda, but the business does not own it.
The conversations we've been able to have and what we're putting in place to make sure that we don't just meet the targets, but we just excel because we understand the business value, has been great. You can already see also, if you look at our percentage of new hires that are ACI, 99%. Percentage of promotions that are ACI, 95.6%. Those numbers don't deliver themselves. It's deliberate strategies and a commitment from leaders to make sure that our teams are transformed. We saw that in that video that was playing earlier on. Senior management levels, there is definitely a shift. Are we there yet? We are not there yet, but there's a significant shift to what our senior levels look like compared to three years ago. So this one is one to watch, that I'm really excited about. The next one, succession.
Okay, I think I have many favorite children. I also want to say that's a topic that I'm also excited about, but excited about this because as leaders, our responsibility is to make sure that we build processes and systems that deliver the talent that's needed, and we never find the organization in a place where there are roles and there aren't people who are ready. If there's an area that we should be losing sleep over, it's this, when it comes to succession, and for us, succession is not just board succession, Exco succession, it's at all levels. To say: How do we make sure that, A, our succession plans have successors who are verified?
I'm sure you also know that sometimes you can have people on the list, and when the opportunity comes, the person is not ready, either because they were not the right person to start off with or no development has taken place. We've spent a lot of time with our senior team and our leaders to say, firstly, how you identify successors is a science. It's not because the person has just performed in that role, or they have good values, or you have a better connection with them. There's an element of performance, there's an element of feedback from the line manager, and then we have a battery of assessments that we use, right? Personality, leadership, problem-solving, ability to deal with complexity, emotional intelligence, whatever is needed in that role.
You want to know now what that person is able to do and what the gaps are. So that's the identification that's important. Because once you have all of that information informing whether the person is a successor or not, at least you know that you're starting off with the right individuals. People are not born ready for these roles. So we also then have a responsibility as an organization, once we understand what their gaps are, be clear to communicate, and they put together their individual development plans, and then they at least make sure that those development plans at least through those, the gaps are closed. And sometimes development doesn't have to be a training program, attending a course. It could be coaching because there's a gap in a particular area.
It could be expanding the person's role because all they need is an additional skill, and all of those are available in the organization, and we, we make sure that at least people know that. If succession was not an area that the organization had done well, you can look at the roles at the bottom, right? In the last eighteen months, and this is a big, big shift for us, seven senior roles, these are managing director-level roles, became available for different reasons, and out of the seven, only one has been filled with an external person, and that's Natalie, that Mark was talking about, who starts next week. Every single role we had at these levels was filled with somebody internally. If Pernille sounded a bit biased towards money, you can see, right?
He's Chief Financial Officer now, but he was MD of Money before he got promoted in August last year. What also is great is you're seeing the movement here, and, in fact, all the MDs are here except for Roxanne, who's on maternity leave. Any part of movement into these roles, you can imagine the ripple effect it has on the rest of the organization as these opportunities now become available. That is also part of our secret sauce, because we say to people, "We are a big organization. We are a growing organization.
We want ordinary people to come and do extraordinary things, and if you are ambitious, you are a performer, this is the place for you, because the world is your oyster when it comes to career opportunities." When they see these movements and understand what those mean to them, then you have people saying, "I know I can start in this organization as a casual, like Kev did, and there is no limitation of where I can go. I know I can start in this organization on a learnership or an internship. In a learnership because I didn't have money to go to university, and that's the only job I can find. But through this organization, I can get a qualification, because we partner with the SETA on qualifications that they fund.
When the learnership is complete, I have something that I can keep with me." And our learnership pool is an easy pool for us to recruit from when opportunities are there on a permanent basis. And we look at associates then at different levels to see: what do you need, what are the gaps, how do we make sure that we close those gaps? So that homegrown statement is something that's really close to our hearts because we know the people who succeed here, who understand the culture, who love this organization, if they-that's what they choose, the opportunities will be there. So really proud that we were able to do this. And as you can imagine, the conversation never stops, because the bench now is a bit empty, right? Because we had all of those people lined up.
But the exciting part is, there is a process and a methodology in the organization to already identify these individuals. We then have two other categories of people. I spoke about succession at all levels, where we have HiPo s. There's a way that we identify that also includes assessments, and we have watchlist. So our watchlist are typically people who are in specialist or maybe junior management positions, but show really good potential. They just don't have the experience yet, and we put them in a pool that then allows them to be able to start getting the experience that they need. So at any given time, there's conversations around who's sitting in that pool, what's happening with the individuals, and those conversations are also owned by the people in this room and the people who report to them. So that's succession.
Can we go to leadership? Leadership, as you know, really broad topic. And leaders, in my view, are critical because they are, you can almost say influencers, right? But we spoke about culture earlier on, which is really important, but our associates, at the end of the day, experience the organization through their leaders. We can have a DNA, we can have good people processes. If the leader's behavior is not in line with that, the associate experience is not going to be a positive one. At least we know how our associates are experiencing the organization, because that's what the engagement survey tells us, and we run that on an annual basis. The second part why leadership becomes important is, we spoke about frontline obsession, and our customers are important. We don't have a business if we don't have customers or even look after them.
The customer experience that Kim, Clint and Don, and all the divisional people focus on, can't work if we don't share a similar experience with our associates, because at the end of the day, the people who deal with these customers are not Clint and Don. It's the frontline. It's the call center agent. It's the person in the store, right? So if their own experience of the organization is not a positive one, how do we expect them to then extend a positive experience to the customer? So you can see the link now, right? So your leader holds everything, includes including culture. They create the experience for your associate, who then creates the experience you want for your customer, and then everything falls into place. So leadership, really important. We have a leader DNA. Mark spoke about, just a broad DNA for associates.
A leadership DNA is very specific about what does leadership mean in this organization? What type of behaviors do we want you to have as a leader in this organization? Then we'll give you the support that you need, but the expectation is clear. The point that I thought I should also address here, we've had a few shareholder calls, talking about the REM Report and the leadership. Leadership and transformation, actually, they are two areas that always come up. On the leadership, the sense is, well, leadership is, like, vague. What do you really mean? Is it qualitative? Is it just as people feel? For me, it's not, it's not qualitative at all. It's three things that we measure.
One is how you treat your associates, which is through your engagement score and how you drive the culture, so engagement scores becomes the measure. The second one is a transformation measure, which is for the opportunities that came up in your division in that period, how have you used them to address underrepresentation? And number three is succession. What succession do you have? And can you see how it links to all the topics I spoke about? What succession do you have in your division, and what are you doing about it? Because if that's not crystallized in the organization, it becomes difficult then to drive some of these initiatives. We have a new short-term incentive scheme that we shared with the associates, 'cause you want to drive accountability. So leaders who are leading people and have a component of their short-term incentive...
Sorry, short-term incentive linked to leadership will be measured on those. If you have a team, it can't be because you're a good leader, and we like you. It's those three things: What's your engagement score? What's your employment equity number, relative to the target that we set for you? What does succession look like in your department? You can imagine if that measure goes right across all the leadership levels, you start seeing different changes then in the organization, because that's where you drive the accountability. The last piece is org design. Mark spoke a little bit about it. The operating model is changing. We initiated changes in 2021, and this work continues, right? As we refine the operating model, we look at what the design looks like, and at the same time, we're supporting the organization through the changes.
In closing, I just wanted to share two pieces, maybe of a personal reflection. One is, in the thirty years that I've worked, at the risk of giving away my age, in largely retail organizations and financial services, I've gotten used to CEOs and leaders talking about their culture. It's special. I've never met a CEO who doesn't think that their culture is special, and you have those conversations, and that's why it wasn't a surprise when I interviewed for this role, and Mark and I were talking, and he spoke actually a lot about culture in a similar vein that he did today. Which is one of the reasons why it was appealing for me to come here, right?
'Cause you feel like there's a connection, but at the back of your mind, you're thinking, "Every CEO is going to tell you that, so let's go there and see." And part of my onboarding included sitting with Laurie and Stuart. Almost similar conversation that was on that video, so I'm glad you were able to see it. I had for an afternoon, both of them, and for people who have built the size of business that we have and how successful it's become, you'd expect that they'll talk about all of that. 90% of the conversation was our people, our culture, what's special about this organization, and what their stories were and what was in their hearts at the time that they started this business, that they wanted me to just understand.
Now, you can't sit in that conversation with the two of them, and they can get a bit animated, especially Laurie, and not feel a sense of absolute responsibility, because then you realize this is not just another CPO job in a listed organization. This is a job where you are trusted, not me only, with this expert team and the board, to continue the legacy of the co-founders and not lose the essence of what they wanted to see in this business. Then the sense of responsibility dawns, right, on you, as much as the sense of deep feeling, like, blessed because you are chosen. Mark, earlier on, said... You spoke about you have a responsibility for as long as you are in this role, so that when you hand over the organization to the next person, that it's in a better place.
That responsibility sits on all of us, on all of us. We are writing these chapters, right? These are the chapters we are writing. How we write those chapters also must be in a way that honors that legacy. So feeling absolutely privileged because of that, and not taking this for granted at all. So the other reflection, though, that I had, is in the thirty years I've worked across the industries, having heard every CEO say that their organization is special, there's only two organizations I've worked in where that sense of culture is not just what sits on a piece of paper or in board meetings, and Mr Price is one of them. When you walk through that front door, you feel it. When you see people, how they deal with you, like, you can't not feel it.
Earlier, actually, this week, this is my final comment, I met with a young person, just joined us, comes from Joburg, in the people team. She's relocated. So we're talking about just career prospects, the role that she's in, and she was saying, "I can't believe that there are organizations like this one, where people," she's been with us for two months, "are genuinely helpful, where there's no toxicity, where people want to support, but my guard is up, and I'm not sure whether I must let it down." So I had a conversation then with her to say, "No, no, no, this is the organization. They're not going to change. That's just how the teams work here." And that makes us really special, and that is what drives us to do what we do.
When you go back to that video and the goosebumps, and it gives you, like, rugby, South African team vibes, 'cause that's what I got as well, you understand why, right? Because of what's sitting in this organization. And to have every other speaker talk about culture the way that they did, I hope that gives you a sense of just what sits in the system. Thank you. Kim, sorry. There we go.
Good afternoon, everyone, so I think there's two things that I wanted to say. The first is that, everything that everybody has told you about today, all the sexy stuff anyway, that's thanks to my team, so I don't think I need to present much more, no, and then secondly, Liz said that, you know, you want to leave here with a legacy where you are comfortable that you've left it in a better place than what you found it, and I can assure you, I joined the group in twenty-nineteen, I certainly like to believe that the technology space is in a better place than how I found it, so I want to talk you through, firstly, what we define technology as. So to simplify it, we've broken it into three separate areas, so firstly, there's infrastructure.
So infrastructure, in our world, is really anything that you are hosting your environments on, so your servers, whether they're on-premise or in the cloud, cybersecurity, networks, and hardware. The application there is really the software that we have in the business. So either the users are interacting with it, the customers are interacting with it, or it is talking to each other. And then lastly, innovation. So I'll go into more about the innovation later. So I want to take you through the progress that we've made on these different layers since twenty-nineteen. So firstly, on infrastructure, we used to spend a huge amount of our time and energy as a team managing our infrastructure, and that isn't the strategy in the long term. So what we did was, firstly, we moved the majority of our infrastructure into the cloud.
That enabled us to have a far more efficient, scalable, and cost-effective option to run our systems. We also migrated what we did host into professional data centers like Teraco. That removed the responsibility from our team and also meant that we didn't have to manage data center environments at our head office, and we also implemented enhanced disaster recovery solutions, which obviously are critical for the kind of risks that businesses face today. At a network level, we upgraded our networks. We managed to implement much larger links to every single one of our stores and to our head office at reduced costs. That's obviously improved our redundancy and our monitoring, and as a result, we're now able to guarantee our uptime, which obviously keeps us trading, and then lastly, on the cybersecurity front, we developed a five-year cybersecurity roadmap.
This is an area of concern for every business, regardless of what industry you're in, and we recognized that we weren't gonna be able to get from zero to hero in one day. So we developed the roadmap, and the roadmap effectively defined the skills, the tools, and the resources that we would invest in as we went along that five-year journey. That roadmap is quite flexible, so although we had defined our maturity from year one to year five, we need to be open to what's happening in the market. So as threats exist and as things become more prevalent, we can move things around in terms of our roadmap and make sure that we respond appropriately. If we look at the application space, so those of you who know retailers, most retailers in South Africa started with homegrown systems, so they built them themselves.
This meant that those systems didn't typically have enterprise architecture, scalability, or security in mind. And when I joined, I managed to find an environment that had 399 different applications. That is a massive amount of software to manage and a lot of complexity to manage as well. So effectively, those applications had been built for every user's demand and every use case that the business could think of, and with very little thought for how that was gonna be managed in the long term. So it was a very complex application landscape. The decision to go with an ERP was made before I joined the group, but certainly a good decision. And so the ERP, as much of an interesting journey as it was, it has managed to ...
It was the first step, really, but it has managed to reduce the complexity in that landscape. So today, we're sitting at just over 100 applications. It's still more than what we would want to manage, but it's certainly getting better. And the strategy is to move off of our legacy environments onto off-the-shelf solutions that basically bring thought leadership. If we build things ourselves, it means that we're limited by the IP of my team or potentially others in the business, and if we take things off-the-shelf, we can basically leverage opportunities. If you think of in the financial services space, an off-the-shelf solution would be able to allow us to unlock new products and whenever it suits us and whenever we are ready for that, rather than to build it from scratch, which takes a lot more time and inevitably designs in limitations.
So what we've done is we've developed a modernization roadmap for every functional area of our business. So by that, I mean finance, supply chain, e-commerce, real estate, every single area. And that five-year roadmap just reflects really where we need to implement brand-new technology or applications, where we need to refresh or upgrade or update, or also where there's neat new opportunities that we haven't embarked on before, that we need to bring technology to support. Those roadmaps are significant, and those roadmaps require significant capital investment, so those roadmaps will take as long as it is that the capital becomes available. So what we're trying to achieve really is we are trying to migrate our ... If you look at the triangles, we're trying to effectively invert that triangle, and we're trying to migrate from the first version to the second version.
So at an infrastructure level, infrastructure is always the core of everything that you do and the foundational layer on which the data and the business sits, but we don't want to spend our time managing it. So by modernizing and automating as much as possible, we spend less and less of our time managing that layer. At an application level, we will always have them. We need to just introduce newer applications that are modernized and that have security and scalability and agility built into them. And then, really, what we're trying to do is unlock our resources. So we're trying to unlock our resources to focus on innovation, and by innovation, we're talking about exploiting big data opportunities, data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation, and more. So I have two areas of the business that I look after.
The first one was technology, which is really what I just spoke you through, but the second one is a team called Advance, and Advance was really created to enable us to be better as a data-led business, so to enable us to gather our data into a single place and to give insight and analytics to the business that they can use to make the best decisions possible, so the Advance team effectively has five functions. The first one is business intelligence, so business intelligence is made up of the data warehouse itself, as well as the reporting tool that sits on top of that. We have the data science team, so that really is just data scientists, i.e., mathematicians, who spend their time building algorithms to help our merchants make the best decisions. The RPA team, that stands for Robotic Process Automation.
That team really is about automating manual and repetitive tasks that we don't need humans to do to unlock their value and let them do something else. Artificial intelligence and machine learning. So there's two ways that we exploit these. So either they are embedded in applications that we've already purchased, and so we really just use that, utilize that in the way that we use those tools, or we purchase them specifically for a focused area. So, for example, Don spoke earlier about the trend process. We've specifically purchased an AI tool that gives us insights in terms of the trend process.
And then insights and innovation. It's really a special projects kind of space, where we can take skilled resources that understand our business and are very analytical, and apply them to either a current sort of challenge in the business or an opportunity, and that opportunity could be unlocking revenue or cost savings. It isn't necessarily limited. So if we look at the journey that we've had to date on the business intelligence side, back in 2019, we ran multiple legacy on-prem data warehouses, which were very clunky to manage and took a long time to synchronize, and we moved that to an enterprise cloud warehouse solution. And that sort of enterprise cloud data warehouse solution has, again, unlocked massive scalability. It's allowed us to move our processes much faster, and it's actually more cost-effective.
We then deployed an enterprise data visualization tool on top of that, so that's effectively the reporting layer, so within that, we manage about 450 reports that the business uses on a fixed basis. They do have data democratization, so they can analyze the data as and when they please. We have about 20,000 views of those reports monthly and about 1,000 users that are using the tool across the business. And then also what that's done is it's increased our capacity. Instead of us spending our time managing the infrastructure to support the data warehouse and making sure that things are up and talking to each other, the team is able to spend their time on the analytics and supporting the business needs, so in terms of future focus areas, we wanna unlock more value for the store base.
We want to build store dashboards that give them insight into their own performance, and again, how they're tracking against their KPIs. The more real time that data, the more effective they are in their response. So onboarding of our new division. So all of the acquisitions have data flowing into our data warehouse already, which enables us a level of group reporting, but they haven't necessarily got all of their data in there, and they therefore haven't unlocked the opportunity to use all of our reporting. So that's one of the projects that we're busy with. I'm gonna come back to product affinity on another slide. And then sustainability, a critical area of our business and something that obviously relies very heavily on data and analytics, so we're working on that. And then another tool we're working on is just on the new store location analytics.
So using a lot of our data from us, well, our internal data from our location strategies, but also from our competitor landscape, so that we can enhance those location strategies. For the data science side, as I said, it's a team of people effectively that are writing algorithms to support business process decision-making. These guys spent time once we moved across to the data warehouse, the cloud data warehouse, they spent their time rewriting our calculation engines, and this reduced run time significantly, which means, again, that we can put the data in front of the teams in more real time. But some of the tools that they focused on, it largely has been in the merchandise space. Some examples are, for example, we've got a markdown recommendations tool.
So what that does is it looks at the products in season, it looks at when a product should be considered for markdown, and it also considers what quantum of that product should be marked down and at what price point, so that we optimize the margin. So you can do that manually, obviously, but if you've got the engines running, it can kind of give what we call the merchants a smart start. So the idea is not for the data science to do the job, but the idea is for the data science to do some of the hard work and the math and give the merchants a starting point to work from. They then add on top of that, the data sets that they've got access to and make their final decision.
Something like the sales forecasting engine, similar, it will look at, obviously, the demand and the sales, and it'll forecast sales for each store by day. But it takes into consideration things like public holidays, grant payment days, et cetera. So it factors in as much data as we're able to access, and then again, the merchants can apply their minds on top of that. So the plan is to extend a lot of the skills that we've got in this space and the work that we've done across other areas of the business, not just focused on merchandise. And from a sort of maturity model perspective, if you look at that graph on your left-hand side, we believe we are somewhere pretty between the predictive and the prescriptive analytics.
So predictive, meaning that we believe that we can write the algorithms and use the historical data sets to make predictions about what the future might look like. Prescriptive is when the users just accept everything that we tell them without interfering with it. I'm not sure that we are ever gonna get there, but we're hoping to get closer. And then another exciting addition for us is that we're looking to partner with other organizations that have the capability to do big data computing, but also have the skill set from a data science perspective. Because we can then give them problems to solve, they can go away and work on those, and then we can have a look at the solutions and then embed those and that IP back into our business.
It also creates an opportunity to build pipeline of skills for us. Data scientists are quite hard to find. They're in huge amounts of demand. And so any way that we build relationships or opportunities to bring youngsters that are interested and have the skills in, we will do so. Moving on to automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning. So firstly, on automation, that wheel on the left-hand side, that just indicates some of the different areas of automation that you can tap into. We do play in all of those areas of automation. Praneel earlier referenced the chatbots that we've been running in Money for quite a long time. We've got a lot of process automation running.
Automation really makes sense where a business process is well-defined and quite mature, but there's a lot of manual steps, and those steps do not actually need a user to do them. They are quite repetitive and quite easy to replicate. We've implemented bots across the shipping team, the real estate team, and shared services, which is our group finance function. In the last financial year, we saved over 1,600 man-days just by automating certain processes. We anticipate by the end of this financial year, that'll be over 3,000 man-days that are saved. Obviously, the idea there is to unlock people who've got other skills and talents, that they can do things that add more value to the business.
We're also looking at more back office processes at the moment to automate, and one of the areas we're looking at is automating processes which make the customer experience more seamless. So one of the examples is that if we have promotions running in the group, those promotions get loaded into a system at the head office, that the information of that promotion then needs to get down to every single store, and we need to make sure that it's being captured accurately. So what we've got a bot doing is the bot runs every day, checks all promotions that are loaded at head office. It then logs into every single store in our group. It checks that that promotion is effective at the point of sale, and that enables a seamless customer experience.
From an artificial intelligence and machine learning perspective, we've got quite a lot of different use cases on the go. The first one refers to more of an internal use case, so we've got a tool that we use to manage calls into our call center, so not the Money call center, but the sort of tech call center, and we get a significant amount of calls. We get about 12,000 calls a month, and what this tool does is it's got self-learning built into it, so if stores log calls, for example, for a particular problem, as we resolve those calls, the sort of knowledge engine builds and the machine learning gets applied, and we can actually resolve those calls as and when they get logged.
And it enables the store, for example, the store associates, to sort of self-help and self-learn, which takes some of the pressure off our team. Our demand and forecasting tools all run AI, are trained in monitoring, as I mentioned. We have product design tools where we start with AI, so we can give a sort of baseline theme almost into the AI design tool, and then our designers will work on top of that. Again, it's a smart start. Huge amounts of these tools run in our e-commerce platform, particularly for our search engine optimization and recommendations for detection. Sentiment analysis across social media, we use a lot of tools to help us with that, and then in cybersecurity, there's also a huge amount of these tools running. And then the last area of advance is insights and innovation.
As I mentioned, it's dedicated resource focused on sort of problem-solving for anything that we come up with. One example of that is shipping container optimization. So there was an opportunity to review the way that we optimize the containers that are on the ships that are bringing our product in, to look at rates and to look at routes and to see if there was ways that we could optimize across the group, and we have identified opportunities that will bring material savings to the group over the future years. And a second opportunity, for example, that we've looked at, is using AI to enhance our product descriptions and attributes. So if we look at the merchant process today, we are relying on an individual to look at a product, and we're relying on them to capture the attributes that they see, touch, and feel.
They're limited. They're limited by what they can interpret, and they're limited by how much time they can give to this process. If you put that same product or an image of that product through an AI process, there is no limit to how many attributes the AI tool can potentially derive from that product, and those attributes can be added into our merchandise tools, which then helps the merchandise process, but also into our e-commerce and our customer-facing tools. If you're searching now for a product and you specifically are looking for, I don't know, some sort of buttonhole or whatever the case might be, if that attribute's been captured, you'll be able to find that product. Whereas, if we had just captured what we were limited by with the merchant team, it probably wouldn't have got to that level of detail.
Some future focus areas. We're investing in intelligence, or so we like to believe. Further enhanced use of our AI and ML capabilities. I don't think there's any limit to where that may take us. We wanna automate our strategic allocations process, which is critical for our group. As I said before, we've got a partner for innovation and big data analytics. We've got a large amount of projects in terms of integrating our acquisition businesses across various areas of the business, whether that be supply chain, in the people function or in just the data analytics side. We're looking to build a supply chain control tower, which gives us much better visibility across the supply chain, starting from the source of the product and bringing in external factors, weather patterns, et cetera, that gives us more predictability about delivery.
We're looking at extending our human capital management feature set. We've bought into a tool, we haven't yet optimized and utilized all of the functions. And then also, you know, Praneel referenced some of it earlier, but there's a lot of plans for the financial services side of the business and a lot of opportunities to unlock additional revenue and products in that space. And then also in efficiency, more enhanced reporting, but really, it's about focusing on exception reporting. So getting to a point where we can manage our business by exception, and where we've got people spending their time managing and understanding the exceptions and letting the rest of the business run on the tools. We are looking to invest in an inventory management system or a new inventory management system, which unlocks the future need for a point of sale upgrade.
We're looking at product lifecycle management and assortment planning, products or tools, and then also there will always be further, robotic process automation tools as well. So if that doesn't sound as sexy as you were hoping, we weren't gonna give away the state secrets today. So but, yeah, that's everything from me. Thank you. Hand over to Mark.
Fantastic! Thanks, Kim and Liziba and Praneel. Matt, I think we're still on target to end at about quarter past three. I was allocated, I think, 45 minutes for this final slot, but quite frankly, I think there's been a lot to absorb, and there's absolutely no point in replicating or duplicating what you've already heard, so I'll go through it quite quickly. I just have a couple of key points that I really wanna stress. But hopefully, you've enjoyed this morning's session and the early afternoon session, and particularly hearing it from the senior people in our organization. I told you earlier that their looks were matched by their talents, and hopefully now you can see why I said that.
But I must say, I think you can see why I rate them so highly, but certainly their thought process, and I think the level of comfort investors would get, is if we had to go a level deeper than Exco into our managing director and director levels, I think you'd get exactly the same sense of comfort. So whatever Liziba was talking about, developing leaders, succession planning, things are going really well, on that front. Spoke a little bit earlier about the strategic pillars. You can see them down the bottom there. Nothing's changed. We did present this slide, I think it was at the half-year-end presentation recently, but this just talks to the strategic outcomes that we're after. So because we have spoken about that before, I'm not gonna go through everything.
Because, as an example, profitable market share, I think Clint was actually talking about that, that we're after market share with good margins. That came up at an earlier discussion. Growing comp sales, I think you've all been left with a very clear view of what opportunities exist in our various trading divisions. Space growth, I will touch on that in a minute, but then as you go through that list, being customer-obsessed, we spoke about the brand equity. Customer engagement and the brand pillar owner is one of the areas that I did say I wanted to bring into a more central leadership position. It's fragmented in the divisions, and as we do that, to consider things like, do we take loyalty into a different place?
Do we consider implementing a CRM system, and how we use the customer data that we've got? Bearing in mind the fact that you're less than 10% credit means we've got limited data on our customers, but there's a whole cash customer base that we need to get more data on. We spoke about diversified offerings, differentiated fashion. I think you've got a good understanding of that, and how everything we do is focused on value, and everything that we also do, and therefore the focus, is making sure that whatever area of new opportunities we look at, that we are actually investing time in things that are scalable, and we have to resist. You know, Antoinette was talking a little bit earlier about being very proud of the things that we didn't do, well, the same applies to this.
Don't waste time on small things that aren't scalable, and concentrate your efforts on the big, big things that will move the needle. And then under operational excellence, I think Kim gave an excellent overview of the kind of things that we're looking at, and the skills that are actually in the business that we don't really talk about that much publicly, but I think we're doing so much really clever stuff and innovative stuff. And it's not the last year or two, we've been doing it for a number of years, that we have to do a better job of telling that story, and I think this is the start. There is more to come on supply chain and ESG tomorrow, so I won't speak anything under that.
Praneel did talk about under slide five, tab five there, operational excellence, and us looking for efficiencies, and that'll be unlocked through process reengineering and the like, and that's a role that we're in the process of defining now. And then top quartile returns, we've spoken at length about that. The targets, we've spoken at length about, and I think just put things into perspective as well. You know that when we're giving targets, we are a conservative management team. We're not gonna give things out there that aren't achievable.
But when we do set targets, I think just bear in mind when we set those targets and what frame of mind we were in as a result of the economy and looming elections, and load shedding, and all the rest, that, as these benefits start to be realized, then we'll have to just assess what time is appropriate to start communicating revised targets, if any. So this is the part that I'm not really gonna also go over in too much detail. We split our business into opportunities in comp growth and non-comp. I think those have all been documented. And on the bottom left-hand corner, on the comp growth, that really talks about the ownership changes that I was referring to.
One of the things that I didn't mention two minutes ago under those changes was also group-led e-commerce thinking, which is also fragmented around the divisions right now. But I'm gonna talk about on e-com more on e-com in a sec. But just to go into a couple of key messages on geography, and I'm talking Africa versus South Africa. You can see this, the scale or lack thereof, that we've got in Africa. Let's just round it off and call it 8% of the business. That's obviously not getting the lion's share of our efforts, and in fact, we're gonna be concentrating on the 92% and making sure we deliver on everything and all the opportunities around that. So it's the home of our primary operations.
We even run, I suppose, the African operations from our central base as well. But I think what we've just spoken about in terms of the opportunities that we've got in South Africa, and they are numerous, we'd rather be concentrating on the 90% and not the 7%. It doesn't mean that in Africa we won't consider the franchise opportunity that comes along, et cetera, but for us, the really two scalable markets or some sense of scale would be Namibia and Botswana. And quite frankly, other territories have proved to be quite a bumpy and unpredictable environment with limited scalability, so some of you remember four or five years ago, when I was appointed, a couple of the first things I did was close down Australia, close down Poland, close down Nigeria. They were distractions.
Delivered punitive losses anyway. It wasn't even small, you know, low-level profitability. But I think that focusing of the efforts was a journey we started five years ago, and something that we'll definitely carry on doing. So yeah, certainly not the lion's share of effort into Africa. Turning to, I think the only real data point, and those of you that were around a number of years ago, and I'm going back a number of years. I remember talking to you about, well, how big could credit get? And we kind of thought we'd probably have to cap it out at about 20% of our total sales. And I think at the time, we were probably approaching 16% or 17%, somewhere around there, but you can see how it's pulled back over time.
That's not to say, and it's just on the back of what Roxanne was talking about in the money section. It doesn't mean that we... I mean, 10% of our business is still a lot of money. It's 4 billion ZAR. So I think as time progresses, that can creep up a bit. We don't want to change the nature of being a really cash-generative business, but the point here is, and just to reinforce what Roxanne was saying, in this improving cycle, the data has to be showing us first that it's appropriate to open taps, and we'll take that. The data has to talk to us first.
And of course, as we do that, we do know that generally basket sizes in credit is bigger than cash, so there's obvious upside to that, and in addition to considering credit in the acquisitions that Praneel spoke to as well. I think there's been a lot of talk about channel, so I'm gonna talk about bricks, and I'm gonna talk about e-com. I think the real takeaway here is that it's our investment is gonna go behind the things that matter to our customers. So we've got to be very careful about being caught up in this big e-com play, because we've got a customer set, excuse me.
Now, when Don was talking a little bit earlier, he was talking about how many shoppers actually go research online, and the huge percentage that will then come into the store and actually purchase. So being an omni-channel retailer is critical to us, but you can't take away that need for the shopper to be in store and shopping, and it's particularly important for our customer. I'm not saying it's not the same for other competitors' customers. For our customer, we need an e-com presence, but our shoppers have told us that they want to be shopping in store.
We started e-com in 2012, so been going 12 years, and where we're sitting now as a group is just over 2% contribution, and that's not from spending, and it's not from investing, and it's not from doing smart and innovative things. It's, at the end of the day, the customer will dictate where they wanna shop you. So obviously, in the store environment, they're getting a lot there that they can't get online, but they're using online for an informative process and to see what fashion is, to see up what value is, and they're probably comparing us against a whole lot of shop competitors at the same time as well.
So certainly, as we go forward, as much as I was talking about Africa versus South Africa, if you just take online into that, and although online is growing faster than bricks, take online's contribution at two percent, take Africa at eight, together, they contribute 10% of our group sales. We're gonna be doing work on e-com, but the lion's share of our efforts is going to the 90%, and when you start going through all those opportunities that you've been hearing about for the last four or five hours, I think you can get a sense of scale of exactly what those opportunities are.
Just looking at store profitability, this just gives some insight into the process that we go through to make sure that we've got a robust feasibility process, and that we've got a postmortem that really looks at the performance versus expectation, and I think we've done a pretty good job. And I think the way that we have to evaluate it is, or one way is, obviously, to look at store returns, but actually look at the number of closures we have. And as a group, we've got a minute number of closures every year, which means that we've been very conservative about the selection process going in.
So this is just a, excuse me, a scatter graph showing how we're performing versus the internal threshold that we set on a return on operating assets, and also then versus this specific store feasibility, because in this case, you know, feasibility could have been way higher than our threshold that we put in place. So we'll do this in the whole grid of stores. We'll talk about the store footprint as well, because Nigel was talking about that we were opening stores while others were sitting on the beach, and I think I didn't wanna really make that. Well, that's been happening over the last two years or so, because in fact, I think there's a real opportunity lying ahead still.
So, you know, there might be a view that a lot of the good space has been taken up, but I also think that that's a view that is definitely valid if you're looking for more of the premium trading locations, super regionals, et cetera, et cetera. But, we've got a group of stores, and you look across our brands, and our stores can translate into many, many different areas, so we're definitely not dependent on those super regionals and those large store formats. So if you had wanted to put numbers to it, we're looking at somewhere between 150 and 175 stores a year, and when you're sitting at 2,900 stores now, that will translate to about 3,700 stores in 2029.
So I think really, really positive. If you picture a scenario that there's a lot of opportunity in a comp growth scenario, and we've still got decent space growth opportunities ahead of us, then I think that what's emerging is quite a nice picture. Generally, the way that e-commerce has played out in South Africa, total contribution to sales has increased from 2.9% to 4.7% since 2020. But certainly, the e-com performance here has lagged the EM peers. And I think there are some structural issues in South Africa as to why it's not higher, and I think we're all pretty aware of those. But data costs and addresses to deliver items is certainly one thing.
But we've also internally used third-party fulfillment and pickup points, and they're not exactly being grabbed onto by consumers. They tend to still come into stores, and that's just, it's reinforcing our position all the time... This is a statement, and I'll just let you read it up front there. That's from Euromonitor, a year or so ago, and it really talks to what our position has been for many, many years, and that South African consumers enjoy a physical shopping experience. And once again, I'm talking to our customers. So how are we thinking about e-com overall? First of all, I think it's a channel that's really struggled for profitability in the greater marketplace, and that could be South Africa, it could be international players.
We've also known that marketing costs for e-com, especially e-com only players, is very high, and once you pull back on the marketing, the sales come off at the same rate. We've been very focused on making sure that the channel is profitable for ourselves, and it, in fact, has been almost since inception. Chasing top line at all costs is not something that we are after. It's got to be profitable top line. We've spoken about click and collect and the translation of how that happens into stores, and of course, we're still very mindful of our customer experience must be good online. Delivery times, the load speed of pages, et cetera, et cetera. I think we have been focused on that and still got a bit of work to do.
Don spoke about the import duties being addressed, so let's see how that plays out as well. But I think from my perspective, whilst e-com central ownership and in fact a revised e-com strategy or a revised strategic process, I'd rather say, is very unlikely to end up in Mr Price Group forming one platform with all its brands on the same platform and hoping that, for example, a Power customer, in an extreme example, will shop a Yuppiechef product. It's very difficult to do when you've got a cross-section of brands. Our customers are retailing us. It's not their preferred mode of shopping, and they want to be in our stores. They want to feel product, they want to see the value, and they want to compare items because we've got great width to our product.
So, I think it's. And in doing so, my stance on e-com, I'm actually feeling very comfortable about the road ahead. And it comes back to, as a value retailer, we have to think very clearly about where we're investing. We can certainly ramp up investment in e-com. It's gonna challenge us profitability, and we all know that the e-com model, even overseas, which is very developed, is going through a bit of a structural shift as well. You probably saw last week, ASOS now thinking about charging for returns because it's not profitable, and we all know top and tailing and how that works. So, I think we've got to make sure that we're investing our efforts in the 90%.
It's gonna be the greatest place of return for us, but recognizing that there is a omni-channel requirement for our customers. Antoinette spoke a bit about this much earlier, but Kunal also spoke to the capital allocation framework. It's critical, it does guide our investment, and it's a framework that we hold ourselves to account, and in fact, Exco and our investment committee is very involved in the final decision at the end of the day. So I won't read them all out, but you can see the acquisition considerations. I think they've been adequately dealt with this morning, and then also organic considerations.
I think the organic is, as Antoinette was saying earlier, it is the environment where our special people can bring their special skills to life, and also, I think you've seen some of that today. But I think certainly under organic, and when you start to look at all those customer stats and our brand health and all those kind of things, I think you've got to realize or it'd be hard to argue against, that we've got some amazing brands in this Mr Price stable. First of all, the halo effect of the Mr Price brand itself, and you heard about customers, you know. And you go, even go back to times when we launched Scarlet Hill, for example. Our customers write in and tell us, well, not even write in, post on social media, that Mr Price is looking after them.
They're now going into makeup, and then also all those things that Antoinette said, service stations, and when's this coming and when's the liquor store coming? Such an amazing following, and it's in the hearts and minds of South Africans. But that's been built up over many, many years. I'm feeling right now that Power Fashion or the Power brand is on the very early stages of building up a similar cult following. It can probably translate into other things, but that will be part of our thought process going forward, too. But I think, particularly between, and it's not. It's paying all due respect to the other brands that we've got in the stable, but I think the Mr Price and Power, when you're thinking massive scalability over the long term, I think we've got two absolute gems there.
Okay, so I'm just gonna then leave you with this. That's the current, and that's the medium terms in terms of what's gonna contribute to our sales growth. Split between the existing business, organic, which is kids and cellular, and the acquired business, so it doesn't... Sorry, acquired businesses, so it doesn't include any further investments or areas. So it's our known businesses, and then it shows you split between growth in the core, what we have to do to accelerate growth in kids and cellular... and then acquiring on the acquired businesses and delivering value and what the priorities are there.
So that's why I said that I wasn't gonna repeat all that detail, and, yeah, these slides will be made available to everyone, so if you are missing any detail, you will certainly have access to it. So I think when you start, if you page together all the conversations that have previously happened, clear opportunities in each of our divisions and an improving economic cycle, and the fact that through efficiency and reengineering, there's an opportunity, in addition to that, it's not just sales growth, there's also margin opportunity. It starts giving you a sense that it's not one thing that we're betting our future on here. So I think that's very important.
Certainly from my perspective, and you've seen the quality of our team. Excuse me, I've been through a process the last two years, reducing my direct reports. In terms of org design, two of the big changes we put in there was effectively Don and Clint in the group retail director roles. There's probably a final tweak now, and I've touched on where I think those things are gonna be. Then it's really on to the fulfilling of the vision. In that regard, Antoinette was describing. I think it was four years ago, the process that we went through to start thinking about the market and where the opportunities were. We're at the very early stages of now thinking about the next wave. That's exactly what we're gonna do.
We're gonna start with a blank piece of paper, and we'll be going through the opportunities, knowing that there's absolutely limited distraction. We've got a great team in place. The opportunities are really clearly identified, that we've got a vision to fulfill. So I'd just like to leave you with that comment, and once again, thank everybody for their participation and to my team for the work that they've put into this. I think we've left you with a very clear synopsis of where our future lies. Great. Thank you.
Okay, so it is open floor for questions. There is a mic going around the room, so happy to open up to a few questions in the room before we go online. Do you wanna start, Junaid? Just wait for the microphone.
Hi, good day. It's Junaid Bray from Naurium Capital. Thanks for the comprehensive presentations today. Maybe just on acquisitions. So, I think in the past, you've mentioned, like, restricted to South Africa. Is that still the case, that you wouldn't, you know, that you'd exclude foreign markets? And then maybe just a sense of ticket sizes. What's the max you're willing to look at if you are considering acquisitions?
Yeah. Thanks for the question. I'll hand over to Antoinette to answer that one. Yeah, look, I anticipated this question, and I think we've... If I reflect back on that first sort of round of research that we did a number of years ago, we didn't sort of pre-announce, we didn't get ahead of ourselves and, or partly 'cause we couldn't, 'cause we were in lockdown. But, but I think the process really worked well, and I think for a management team, we've got to be quite clear about things that we think strongly about first, before we start sharing it with the market. So, so I think we've got to learn from the last process, and I think it was actually, I think it worked well for us.
As I said a little bit earlier, we're now at the start of the next research phase. I think it's sort of premature for me to talk about the sort of brief that we've agreed on. I suppose in our future, there's definitely a mix of organic and acquisition. I think it's in fact both, and part of the sort of deliberation and the thought process that we're going through right now is, because, you know, you acquire a really small business, you might get a lot of the potential growth ahead of you still, but you're traditionally inheriting a business that hasn't got infrastructure for that growth.
And, and certainly, the potential of maybe having to delay some of that growth because you've probably got to go through a management process change. So, that's... But if you get that right, and I suppose Power Fashion is a great example. We've, in fact, changed the entire management team. Now they're well on your way. 29 months of market share gains, you know, that's the real story. But we've had other ones that haven't gone that way. So, we, we're not quite final in our thinking, whether it's acquire a business 100%. Studio 88 is working very nicely for us. It's, locking in shareholders, engaging with shareholders, but we've still got the lion's share of the shareholding, but it's all about retaining current management.
So, so touch wood, that carries on working for us the way it has to date. But there is another potential model, and that is, is there a thought about taking a smaller stake in a bigger company? As we do that, we then have to start thinking about, well, what does that mean? You know, what size of company? We haven't applied our minds to that yet. And what is that stake relative to the growth that lies ahead of that business? So you do know that accretion is, like, very important to us, because if you're just really substituting cash returns for, you know, a couple of % more, that's really not gonna get us to our ambition either. So, so we're not quite sure on where that's gonna land.
But I think the deliberation between 100% small and a smaller stake of a bigger business, and then relative to that, how do we now think of what stake is that? How are we gonna fund it, and what debt levels are we interested in taking on if it goes into debt, if we go into debt for it? So, I think it's pretty much the process has started to get into play, but I think we'll wait for the right opportunity to start sharing our thinking at the appropriate time. Go for it, Dave.
Thanks very much, team. So the last five years have obviously been incredibly tough from a macro point of view. You haven't made it easy for us to understand how the 2019 business has performed over the last five years versus the add-ons, and I appreciate that core a lot of the growth comes in.
So could you help us sort of frame what the margin compression's been like in the core business, assuming things rebound? Because that frames the opportunity versus how much is the mix effect from the new businesses. I don't know if you're willing to share that. And then there was quite a big delta on the acquired businesses and the medium-term targets on that chart. It's pretty exciting stuff. Can you just frame in your mind what you think medium-term target is?
And just, am I right in saying it's like a three or four X on sales, relative to where we are now? Is that the right way to think about that chart on the black bit?
Look, I'm not gonna comment on the specific numbers in each of those categories. I think. And let me just deal with the question on acquisitions first. I think by and large, and I'm talking in aggregate, and I'm, I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, what growth is without the acquisitions. But I think the way things are trending at the moment, I think two out of the three are really working for us. So we showed you ZAR 977 million operating profit. The revenue it's added to us, to our business.
But for me, you know, if you just go back and you think about the process that we had for each of those businesses, in Power Fashion, we actually had a seller who we knew was exiting, so we are prepared for that. But and I'm just gonna openly share our learnings during this process as well. I think what we underestimated at the time was the control that that person had in the business and therefore the strength of the management team to make decisions in the absence of that strong figure being around. And when that person wasn't there, our team struggled to make decisions, and that's hence the change that we've had. We've got Studio 88, which I spoke about, which the current management team are all still there.
That's going ahead very nicely, and I'm talking about relationships, and I'm talking about performance. To me, the disappointment's been Yuppiechef. I think it's a great little business. We acquired it for the right reasons, and I'd acquire it again because it looks after a sort of nice place in our portfolio. But I think we were effectively let down by a management team that I think had sort of grown up in a very small entrepreneurial business and couldn't quite make the step to fit into a larger corporate in the plans that we had.
And as a result of taking over that team and with a particular style, we also then, when the founders left, appointed someone internally to keep that team intact, to keep you know to sort of soften the gap between a small entrepreneurial business and a corporate like ourselves, and that didn't work either. So I think we're on the right path now. You've all met Mark Hill. A lot of the opportunities in Yuppiechef relate to product and planning, and because it's not quite at the level that we need, we can't really be in a position to accelerate store growth right now. So I think yeah that side of the business obviously added to the to our overall operations very nicely.
But at the same time, as much as that's been a positive, we've had some things going the other way in the rest of the business. Over the last, I would say, couple of years, Miladys have struggled a bit. Sheet Street has struggled probably the most because of the, I think, its customers struggled financially, and I suppose together with Home, there was just a lot of sort of movement around in that sector. Mr Price Apparel went through a dip, and it was around that period that we spoke about, backup power not being in place, the disruption from ERP, and so that took a dip, but that was back quite nicely this year, and I'm feeling actually really confident about that business. Money actually performed very well through the cycle.
I'm not unhappy with that business at all. So I'm not giving the absolutes in terms of what y Itou call compression, but there are a lot of moving parts in the last couple of years with a lot of disruption. So we tended to focus on, well, what are the opportunities lying ahead? Some businesses, we've actually got a soft base now. And I think the picture that we're trying to paint is, although there's opportunities, it also doesn't necessarily mean that all businesses are gonna get back to the place that they were before.
Of course, we're gonna try very hard, but I think we need to be realistic when, you know, especially, I suppose, in the homeware sector, and the impact that it's had on someone like Sheet Street. I think to get back to where they were would be a big challenge.
Go for it, Yash.
Thank you for the opportunity. Just to follow up from Dave's question, just with regards to your acquisitions, I mean, if you back out the margin there, it's sort of 9%, there and thereabouts, whereas your core business is probably closer to about 16%. Does that gap ever close between the two? Or where could we see those acquisitions deliver? I mean, is it a 10, 11, 12% margin? I assume a lot of the makeup of that margin is Studio 88, so I guess what initiatives are within that Studio 88 business to get that margin higher?
Yeah, look, I think. So I'm not gonna give targeted guidance for acquisitions, per se, so it'll have to fall into that broad sort of sector position that we had. I don't expect the acquisitions to get to the same operating margin as our existing businesses. I think that'd be a stretch too far, and we haven't modeled it yet because we haven't been through an integration layer yet. So the opportunities in Studio 88, I think were actually covered by Don in his presentation. It was continuing doing well on the brand side of things, but making sure we've got opportunities in brands that are only sold by Studio 88, exclusive to us, and making sure we do a better job in private label at higher margins.
And store growth is a huge opportunity there, too. The opportunity that comes with leverage depends where we settle with supply chain, for example, and supply chain on. And so we have had some benefit on margins by Studio 88 being introduced to some of our suppliers. But the other side of things is, well, what happens to transport and the whole logistics side of things as well? So Werner and his team are currently working with the Studio 88 guys to sort of unpack exactly what that benefit is, but that'll be another potential improvement to margin. Don, is there anythi ng else that you think we left out there?
Yeah. Thank you. And just one more question from me, just with regards to acquisitions. Is that going to be limited to groups that are perhaps, or companies that are perhaps on a strong footing? Or could there be certain companies that you'd consider that are maybe fixer-uppers, in terms of maybe evolving to a better margin?
Yeah, look, so I said that I had, or I could foresee in the near future, capacity once some of the things that we are working on are structurally sorted out. But what I really don't plan to do with my capacity is start spending it on a fix up. It's just too negative, and we've got better opportunities to seek out. So in fact, you know, and we have published our criteria somewhere before. I'm not too sure when we last did, but it doesn't involve fix ups. And in fact, we've stayed away from those in the past as well.
Perfect. Thank you.
Thanks, Yash. We're gonna move to some online questions, too, just with regards to merchandise trends. So Don, maybe just to start with this one. "The trends in fashion have become short-lived, and especially with social media viral trends, where consumers could rush to purchase viral items. How is your sourcing/buying process being adapted to reflect these changes in light of your processes described this morning? Thanks." That's Atiya from Avior Capital.
Thanks, Matt. Yeah, I think it's what I showed on the slides earlier, is that our supply chain, our current trade processes, and our merchandise processes, the thing that underscores all of those is agility. And so while we might have called a trend for a future season, we're not necessarily locked in, because as you monitor, you know, all the inputs that I shared, social media, current trade, we're able to react accordingly. And because we don't own the factories, and we've got the agility in the supply chain, we're able to be very agile. So that stood us in good stead up until this point, and it will stand us in good stead as things continue to change.
Fashion is an ongoing, changing world, and all of our processes are structured in a way for us to be agile, that allow us to move with the times. So the trends that you're talking about now is no different to changes in trends over time.
Thanks, Don. While we have you, and another question from Atiya just relating to apparel divisions. "Does Power Fashion not benefit more when economic conditions are tough, i.e., when retailers have access to excess inventory? As South Africa's economy recovers, will supply become an issue since the majority is sourced locally?
I think in the value space, certainly for Mr Price, and Power Fashion will be the same, they'll benefit from when times get tough, when at the bottom of the cycle, because customers are looking for value. But when times get good as well, and there's more disposable income, they benefit from that as well. So, good times and bad times, and Mr Price has proven that in their model, and so Power Fashion is no different. In terms of the opportunistic stock, the vast majority of our opportunistic stock actually comes from international sources, and so we're not exposed from South Africa's economy improving, in that regard.
And in fact, as the scale of Power Fashion grows, it gives us access to inventories that we wouldn't be able to take as a smaller retailer, because there's a lot of parcels of stock out there that are large, that we can't access as a smaller retailer. And then probably the final point to note as well is that it's not always just opportunistic stock in the form of finished product, but often we find excess fabrics that we can get at really rock bottom pricing, and that we will purchase and convert it into finished product ourselves. So yeah, there's definitely no negative exposure in terms of South Africa's economy, you know, improving.
Thanks, Don. Thanks, Atiya. I see that you have sent through a few other questions, but we'll come back to you online in a minute or two. If we could take a few more questions from the room. Okay, let's go.
Thank you. Thank you. Mark, maybe just, you've highlighted throughout the day, quite a few. There's one or two business units where there's gross margin potential to improve. You've mentioned operational leverage quite a few times. But it does seem as if you look at the group guidance that you guys are giving, you know, that from an operating margin point of view, you're already in the middle of that guidance. So it almost seems as if that group guidance is conservative or kind of soft, given, you know, some of the individual pictures that you've been painting for the different divisions.
Yeah, look, I think it's a good observation. I did say that, I think we generally are a conservative management team. And when you look at the buildup of our strategic planning process and the timing of that, and then obviously, the timing of releasing the margin guidance that we've given, let's face it, it was in a negative environment. And although we only reported in June, you know, these numbers were looked at relative to information that was, I suppose, available and surfaced through our strat planning process that emanated sometime earlier than that, and it was in, it's in a bad cycle. So I think we're gonna stick to those targets right now, but, you know, we look at them continually.
I think at the appropriate time, where we think guidance has been soft, and therefore, we need to revise. I think we'd be foolish not to, because then we're just shooting ourselves in the foot. But I also don't wanna get ahead of it and start posting things out there that haven't been well thought through, haven't been through a formal process, and by that, I mean through the divisions, you know, due process. I don't wanna come out of the helicopter view and just drop in targets until we've actually built them up.
Paul?
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. Paul Seegers. So historically, Mr Price had one of the highest return on invested capitals in the retail sector. Now, obviously, the economy's been poor, but you've also done the acquisitions that we know about, which have lower returns at the moment. You've given some metrics on store openings going forward. Seems pretty robust, with phenomenal paybacks, two years max, and high returns, as I can see. If the economy improves, as we all hope, why do you wanna make more acquisitions? I mean, are there any burning categories that you really think will add to the group now? Because otherwise, you should just open stores with those returns and improve.
Because, I mean, unless you think you can get an acquisition that makes a 25% post-tax return on invested capital, then go for it, but I think it's unlikely.
Yeah. Now, thanks for the question. I think it's a case of... I think there's room for both. And although we're probably quite bullish on space because of our model and because of the reach that we've got in the store model, that I think we can do that and look for growth through acquisition. So, you know, I suppose when you're looking at your ROICs and what the target does deliver, it's wholly dependent on how you can scale that business over time. Because if you can get it at a good value, and you can then, you still got lots of runway, then you're back in the category that we've got. Well, it's just more stores at really good returns.
So, I think there's two ways to an end result, and I think we are guided by our vision. So we do wanna scale more, leverage central cost and infrastructure more, and I think we're now at the place where we've actually got the capacity to do that.
So just before we go to your question, do you mind if we just do two online questions, just to give the audience a chance? Nick Webster from HSBC. Nick, I think we've been through the question on acquisitions. So just moving back into merchandise process, maybe just start with you, Clint, and Don, chip in. You talk about global retail trips. Do you have any particular partnerships or companies you liaise with, or can you expand in a bit more detail around how you manage the process on those trips?
Yeah. We don't liaise with any of the international partners. It's more to go and examine trends. So what it'll do is it'll confirm what our trend team is showing us, and it'll give us a good idea of how big the trend is being called. So whether it be color or pattern or fabrication, they're more confirmation trips. And we go to a wide variety of stores so that we get good overlap on where the trend is going, but certainly not collaboration with any individual retailer.
Do you wanna add to that, Don?
Yeah, it's. There's no also not one destination, then that's why we said global. You know, men's will go to they have different countries and different destinations and different retailers that they would look at relative to ladies and relative to kids. And even when within a broader category, like ladies, there's different destinations, countries, retailers that we would look at for a junior customer relative to a more moderate customer as well. So it's not a one-size-fits-all approach.
Don, while you have the mic, just back to a question from Atiya around Studio 88. 7% private label is quite low. Do you have any targets on what this could grow to over time?
... No, we don't have any specific targets. Suffice to say that we do see it, as we said, as an opportunity. And yeah, it's not just the private label, it's also the exclusive brands as well, that obviously deliver superior margins, because we're not competing with other retailers on those. We don't have any specific targets to say that, no.
Okay, thanks. Saad?
Thank you, guys, for the day. It's been great. Just quickly, is there anything that's keeping you awake at night, your divisional team, going into the next year-
Yeah.
that you're worried about?
Just Liziba and her need to become a CEO. Yeah.
No, look, I think, certainly as the head of the business, there's a lot that fills our minds when we, when we're not in the detail. I think they really relate to org design and filling gaps and capabilities and culture and all that kind of stuff, which we've, which we really covered today. I think we, I think we're in a really good place. I think there's some skills that we can add and some positions that I've covered. And, you know, I think we're all sitting here pretty hopeful that the economy is gonna improve, and there's gonna be no hiccups from the GNU and all that kind of stuff. So I think we're all feeling a bit confident, but I think we also need to see it play out first.
To the extent that there's a talked about recovery and it doesn't materialize, then I think that's one thing. But I think at the same time, well, then it talks to the research that we're doing to find more growth other ways. So it's probably that. I think from internally, is there anything else that's causing a problem for us? Nothing really springs to mind. So I really think it's about...
It's me as the leader that I've got to have faith that I've got the right team in place to deliver all the things that we need to deliver, to have the capacity to take advantage of opportunities, and when there is an opportunity, that it's well thought through, well modeled, well considered, and therefore we're placing the right bet. So I guess that then leaves open, well, where is this next growth thing gonna come from? So right now it's a black hole, but I think one thing we do quite well is we think forward with architecture in mind. What will this, you know, where will the shape come from? Where will the opportunity arise?
And we've got to rely on the process that we've got to unearth it, and I'm fairly confident we'll do it.
Thanks. Just one more question. On the exclusive brands, is there any risk that you could lose those relationships or brands to a competitor? And how long do your contracts or agreements last?
There's always risk, but at the end of the day, why would a brand want to keep their brand with a retail group? They'd want it performing, and they'd want it growing, and that's what's happening in the business. So, it would be an illogical move for the brands to want to do that, and it hasn't happened yet, so that's not something that's keeping us awake at night. Yeah. Sorry, what was the second question? What? No, that's it.
Thanks for the question, Saad. Chamele?
Yeah. Hello, everyone. Thanks for the presentation. Just a quick one for me on Power Fashion. I think, I mean, it's done phenomenally well. And if you can just, I mean, just simplify it for us why it's doing so well. I mean, I think when you did the acquisition in 2021 or 2022, you speak to the other retail CEOs and CFOs, and they said it was a really horrible acquisition. And then now we look two years later, it's a really good acquisition, and everyone wishes that they had bought Power. So if you can just simplify for us, I mean, why is that business doing so well? And what's driving that double-digit top-line growth we continue to see?
It's quite a ridiculous comment that if you're not in the detail and you haven't done DD yourself, to throw a dirty comment like that around, and I'm not saying it's from you, it's from ... For a minute, but it's.
It's definitely not from me, Mark.
It's a comment that was out there. But look, you know, it was never a bad buy. We did DD. We thought it had huge legs, because when you consider South Africa and the consumers and the value space that it was in, and you also study overseas, who's done well in the value space, to us, the opportunity was absolutely clear. What we couldn't do was take advantage of the opportunity soon enough, because Roger had to change his team. That was the catalyst that then opened all the opportunities that we're speaking about now. So I think one thing you know about our group, we don't throw stones unless we know the detail and we're in the know.
As a result, we will disregard comments from others that are throwing stones.
It's definitely not from me, Mark. And then just on Core Apparel, I mean, at the risk of running a sample size of one, a lot of people are saying, I mean, they're seeing quite good improvements from the Core Apparel business over the last six to nine months, 12 months, I mean, the product that is coming through there. If you can just talk about some of the, like, more tangible stuff and, I mean, just the sustainability, because if you are bearish on Core Apparel, you can say it's just base effects, and as soon as you roll those, roll through those, top-line growth will come down materially. So if you can just help us a bit more in understanding what's really happening there as well and why it's doing so well. Thanks.
... Look, the honest answer is that there's nothing significant that's shifted. The blip that we had was the spike in load shedding, that we didn't have power to trade, we didn't have backup power, and the ERP changes. Those were two significant things that caused, it was about a year or so of market share losses. Prior to that, just post-COVID, that division had gained over ZAR 1 billion in market share. In fact, it was a lot more than that. And now, in the past 12 months or so, as we've got over that ERP hurdle and the load shedding hurdle, it's back on to its old winning ways as well.
You know, close to ZAR 1 billion market share gained, and it's just doing what it does. That's the model, so nothing's shifted. It's just doing what it's always done. But you've kind of got to just remove that blip of the ERP and the load shedding.
Yeah, thanks. I think there's probably one thing I would just wanted to add to that, in that with all this disruption, it also wasn't so much what we were doing, per se, versus what was going down in the competition. So we've also been through a phase of quite a few competitors, and in fact, it was a bit of a market thing in general, of through this disruption, being totally overstocked. And as a result, the market is decimated for quite some time on them liquidating that stock. So as that happened, and of course, it's. We're hopeful that these kind of things never repeat, and I'm sure they're hoping the same, 'cause they don't have to damage their own margins.
But you can just picture that higher prices being severely discounted to manage stock in a very severe way actually brought prices closer to ours in some cases. So that was a third thing, in addition to what Don said. But And I also think at the time when we were sort of going through that underperformance, call it underperformance, I think that we are quite clear in communicating to the market that, guys, there's nothing wrong with our merchandise offer. It it's these other factors, and where's David? I think it was David actually commented about six months ago that, "Mark, you're looking so confident now.
Well, like, what's happening here?" It is because the guidance that we had given to the market played out in the way that it did. Yeah, so look, there are some base effects. There's no doubt about that. We're in a market that's very tight at the moment. There's a fight for market share, but I'd rather be backing a horse that's been gaining market share and has got the following, and you've, you know, all the brand recognition and the things that we've spoken about. I think that you can't question the power of that brand and what it means to consumers. So yeah, I think the business is in a really good place.
Yeah. Question from the room? Sorry, Darren, do you mind just using the mic there, so we can just get the online team to listen? Thanks.
Yeah. First of all, thanks for this. It's been a very good day. Just two questions. The first one, if you could elaborate a little bit on the three hundred home stores that have opened and over what period and what brands they were. And then, in terms of your target of being the, I don't know how to define it, but the main retailer in Africa, what are you... The largest, what do you measure that on?
So I'll start with the competitors that have rolled stores post-COVID. We've seen PEP Home open a number of stores. But more importantly, some of the competitors that, as I said, were traditionally apparel retailers, have started putting homeware into the space in their stores. So of course, that feeds the RLC. It's less about. So if you take an example of one that's got a national footprint, it's got three or four hundred stores, and they're now putting homeware in, it's another three or four hundred doors that get made available, albeit with a smaller component of homeware. So that's happened across two retailers around the country. And then, of course, there are new emerging players in the market.
Although they're not in the RLC, when you take a business like Mr Price Home, that's got the widest offer in a particular category, as soon as a new player comes into the market, the chances are they're gonna cannibalize Home more because they've got a wider offer than the competitor set that sits in the RLC.
Yeah, in terms of the vision of being the most valuable retailer, it was really looking at market cap, and it was market cap, therefore, essentially, South African businesses. That's the answer to that. And it was in the food and drug and the general retail index.
Yeah, Yash, you've got a question? Do you want to just grab the mic there from Darren?
Sorry. Yeah, it's Yash again. Just a quick one with regards to how you've perhaps prepared as a business for what could perhaps be a strong festive season, just considering the consumer liquidity events that have started from about the first of September. From a stock point of view, how have you prepared? And especially considering the current backdrop, where trend growth is probably anywhere between 2%-3%. So how do you prepare knowing that?
Yeah, look, obviously, in the planning ahead of season, well ahead, we make sales calls that we think are appropriate at the time. That then gets into our normal sort of, ordering process. So I suppose, I think, if I'm reading the question correctly, it's a tight market, but there's two parts and other things coming into it, how big could festive get? So all I can say is, we think we've made an appropriate call, but in that appropriate call, we haven't-
... now gone and placed more orders, because we think there's a windfall coming in two-pot, okay? So I think we all think there is something coming, and the early numbers do indicate that. But then, geez, what a wonderful opportunity to just sort out stock turn and clearances and all those kind of things. And, you know, retailers have really run out of stock. I think, you know, the last time I can remember running out of stock was when we came out of hard lockdown, and we had stores that had literally nothing in them. So I think we'll definitely have the stock to trade. You know, I think certainly...
In fact, I was chatting to Van this morning, and the last couple of weeks, strangely, and we don't really have the answer to it at this stage, is that the stock's flowing through the port. So geez, I mean, like, we're about to close off at the end of September, so we'll have to consider how that affects the stock at the end of December. But what a fantastic potential risk mitigant as well, that in fact, it looks like we haven't got any problems of stock being at stores at festive. It looks like that's really gonna happen.
So if there is a trade up, and there is opportunity coming, and consumers get into a more sort of confident headspace, then, then helped by the port, and also, I guess, just the call that we made for summer, I think we should be in a good place. In making those calls, sure, Don didn't, or you guys didn't really go into that process, because that's another detailed process all on its own. But you do go into the product opportunities and the underrepresentation and all that kind of stuff. Even if the economy is bad, you're still betting on gaining share in areas above others. We certainly didn't make a call that was reflective of a very poor retail environment. I think they're a bit bolder than that.
Thanks, Mark. Do you want to add? Anyone to add? Don?
Maybe just to add is that, as Mark said, we haven't gone and built our sales call on the two-pot system. Our sales calls were actually built before the two-pot system. But one of the things that we went through earlier is our trading agility, and because 50% of our stock is procured locally and through SAtc, we are able to trade in season as well. So if demand does start to creep up beyond what we've called, we know that we can trade that. It's what we do well, and we're set up to trade into that.
Thanks. Just acknowledging Humotso's question on Transnet port issues, but also international shipping routes. We will deal with that in more detail tomorrow from Werner. So if we can park that question for tomorrow, and Werner should answer that through the presentation. Guys, we've probably got about five minutes left. Are there any more questions in the room? There's nothing more coming through online. So the last couple of opportunities. Okay. Thank you, everybody, for joining us today, and to our audience online, I appreciate that you haven't had the chance to be with us in person, so thank you for staying on for the day.