Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Truworths International Limited 2025 Annual Results Presentation. In the room with me are five of my colleagues. I won't introduce all of them to you at this stage, but I will refer some questions to them. Emanuel Cristaudo and Sarah Proudfoot are both with me, the Joint Deputy CEOs. When we get to question and answer time, I'll try and refer as many questions as possible to the appropriate people. I'm going to start with the presentation. I'm going to go quite quickly through the numbers because you all have them already, but we'll try and give some insight into some of them if we can. There are slides contained in the presentation that I might not even refer to, but they're for your sake to look through afterwards.
I know, as usual, we get tons of questions after the presentation over the next couple of days. You're welcome to send them to us, and we will respond as usual within 12 - 24 hours. The agenda is, as normal, finance, accounts, strategy, social and governance environment, and then general questions. As an introduction, I want to talk straight away about the seven-week update where it was disappointing in the market. Besides being disappointed in our numbers, we're disappointed in the seven-week update. I want to give a little bit of insight into that. Firstly, in the Truworths side, we have been working on a new markdown optimization program. It's early stages, but this is the first time we are using it to the beginning of the new thinking. Considering that it is a July end season sale, it's quite an important time.
Essentially, the goal is a simple one. It's pretty obvious. Markdown is one of our biggest costs. If we can achieve the same outcome with the lower costs, then we're trying to do that, which is what optimization is about. You don't want to sell coats on sale when it's cold, but you also want to make sure you get to your terminal stock targets at the right time. Optimization does that. We've got more sophisticated thinking, and we try to embark on it. We have spent significantly less on markdown in the first seven weeks than we did last year. That has impacted sales. Margin, of course, then is positive.
On that end, I can't tell you if it's going to work yet because I only know when we, in a couple of weeks' time, if we get to our terminal stock targets acceptably, then I'll know it worked if the cost was still lower. That is the main reason that Truworths was negative in sales, but positive, slightly positive in margin. Office is a completely different story. They don't have the same issues with markdown. They sell shoes and sneakers. It's a little bit different. In Office, they have had a little bit of a tougher run in the last short while, I'd say two months or so, primarily because they're competing with last year. One of the brands was absolutely flying last year. While that brand and others are still steady as she goes and doing well, their base is quite high on this particular one.
I'm not going to say which one it is. That has impacted Office a bit. The other thing is the non-like for like in Office. Because of the annualization's impact over the last couple of months, two or three is quite low. It starts picking up quite significantly around November this year, October, November, and then for about 14 months, all the way till December 2026. If all things go according to plan, the escalation in real estate space, new space, and remodel non-like for like space is quite significant. That's as best I can give you an update. One's always got to be careful about the first seven, eight weeks of a new season because everyone is very heavily involved in markdown activity. That's the best I can do to give you a bit of insight there. It has been a disappointing year.
At the beginning, our expectations were cautious, mildly optimistic. We saw lots of analysts, and we were optimistic. I think we continuously said cautiously so, anticipating a gradual economic. We didn't think it would be boom times, but we were hoping it would be an improving economy. Somehow, the macroeconomic conditions were tougher than we would have liked in South Africa with low GDP growth and persistently weak consumer confidence. I'll talk a little bit about the TransUnion Index soon, which most of you are very familiar with. Because we're sort of slightly optimistic but still feeling cautious, we adopted a very cautious approach to higher risk credits. I'll talk a little bit further about that soon, which to some degree dampened sales growth. I'm not sure we did that because you'll see why our credit book is really settling down quite nicely now.
That was important for us to do that. We, as usual, managed expenses well. In the Truworths Africa context, we continue to be quite conservative with real estate. In other words, we're consolidating space where we can, and we are avoiding rapid expansion unless it's an obvious opportunity. That's been the approach for the last couple of years, and it was the last year. We're waiting for improvement, but we still adopted quite a conservative approach. I know there's a lot of questions about our new distribution center near the airport in Cape Town. It did initially face some teething operational difficulties during our winter 2025 period. For the international global players, that means January to June, but especially around April, the peak winter time, we did have some teething problems. The whole DC got running a little bit later and a little bit slower than we would have liked.
The problems were very speedily resolved. I must say the team was amazing in fixing the issues that they had, technology and manpower, and getting used to the new DC because it's so much bigger and more sophisticated than the old one. It took a couple of weeks to do that. The new DC is now expected to be fully operational with over 90% of Truworths merchandise operating through it by the end of quarter three, end of September. In other words, even now, it's ramping up speedily every week. By the end of September, we'll be at what we consider to be a perfect state. We're very happy with that, which means it will be really ready for the peak season, October, November, December period. Office does continue to perform, outperform the market despite some challenges in the U.K. macro. You all know about that.
The real estate program is delivering strong results. As I alluded to at the beginning, because of the timing, the like-for-like is quite low at the moment. It picks up every month a little bit, and from November, it starts being much more aggressive. It speeds up all the way through. The biggest months, as I recall, are April, May, June 2026, and carrying on until December, 2026 and thereafter. A lot of runway in the U.K. I think all of our shareholders are very familiar with office now and the unique position office and Offspring, the sneakerhead business, and office , the ladies' fashion, and some men's as well, their positioning. The group continues to be highly cash generative. I know that we've received a lot of compliments for that and to deliver best-in-class returns. All of our medium-term financial targets were met or exceeded.
We have a strong balance sheet. We're net positive cash now. There is an improving credit book health, but it's sort of tentative. We are, I'm sort of loath to say it because I seem to say it too frequently, but we are starting to feel again more optimistic about the future. I just want the guys have been looking at the correlation between the CCI and the GDP versus the sales growth in Truworths since 2004. It's quite remarkable to look how Truworths aligns so closely with GDP growth and the CCI. The consumer confidence, GDP, and Truworths sales seem to be strongly correlated. I know the analysts are very familiar with our strategy and our positioning of aspirational, more expensive, higher quality merchandise sold to every South African. For them, it's quite expensive, so it's on credit.
We'll talk more about the merchandise and the strategy as we move forward. Talking about the TransUnion Index, which the shareholders who know us well know that we as credit retailers being so strong in Africa with 70% of our sales on credit to our own book, our own customers. The TransUnion Index gives you an indication, and it's a strong one because we really believe in it about the prospects in the neck of the credit market depending on what cycle it's in. We prepared this graph to try and show you that in the periods 2015 - 2019, that index pretty much was most of the time above 50, which means it's improving. That was until the COVID era, and then you had a whole lot of disruption there. It's been pretty tough since then.
It did recover from 2023 onwards, but it was still below 50, which means it was worsening, but at a slower pace until it got to over 50 in December or around about the third quarter of 2024. Now we have had two quarters above 50, 53 there, and you see 52. That is a good sign, but it's sort of tentative. TransUnion, the way they talk about it, they say the recovery is on the way, but it remains fragile. You see it is seeming to dip a little bit from the one quarter to the next. Obviously, we are hoping that it will have a more steady, consistent above 50 stay there for quite a long time, we're hoping.
When you look at that background and the tough macroeconomic circumstances which we've been facing in Africa, Truworths Africa, the result and the impact has been a very challenging period for a good four or five years. The average annual space growth has only been 0.3. That's been a strategy intentional. It helps us contain costs, and we don't want to, and we already are very, very well exposed in South Africa and neighboring countries. Our average annual growth in active accounts is 1.9%. In a tough consumer environment, our average product inflation is 4% over the past five years, but there's an element of post-COVID in that. The last year has only been 1.2%.
Obviously, given our positioning and the tough economy and the lack of consumer confidence, we are very aware of the need to maintain our differential in quality and fashionability to the rest of the market, but not let our premium price get so inhibited, so much higher than our competitors that it enables our sales growth. Sarah and her team are spending a ton of time trying to sort of get that balance right. Average sales per account customer has increased only 0.8% compounded over the last three years. It's almost most of it's in a kind of a holding pattern. In the U.K., the turnaround since post-COVID has been fantastic: 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025. We really are very confident about the U.K. I'm not saying there are no headwinds. I'm not saying there's no challenges there, but we seem to have quite a lot of runway ahead of us.
As I said, it starts ramping up, especially from around November. The group strategy, therefore, is for the last period or two or three even the last couple of years on cash generation, focused capital expenditure that's in store, renovation a lot in the U.K., some technology. We've been quite aggressive in upgrading the U.K. and our own technology in South Africa and the new DC, of course, distribution center. Our money has been focused on that. The Truworths Africa credit and space expansion I mentioned has been constrained. Intentionally, we've been careful about what we've done with credit and with space in South Africa. We have spent a lot of work and effort and time on our internal processes, our infrastructure, and our technology in Truworths Africa. We've made some, what we think, are massive inroads.
We are hoping the benefits of those really start to come to the fore in the next couple of years, starting now. I mentioned the markdown optimization and the other ones I'm going to talk about soon. Some of them are facilitated by the amazing new DC that we have, which gives us so much more power and influence in how we distribute our stock, plan it, and buy it, and so on. We feel we're ready for the next three or four years in South Africa. When you read the commentaries from most of you guys, as well as the banks and the experts, GDP in South Africa until 2027 could average 1.5% to 1.8%. We would like it to say 2%. That's for us a magical number.
However, 1.5% to 1.8% is much more appealing than the 0% to 0.5% and 6% and 7% we've had in the last couple of years. There are prospects of interest rate reductions. With slightly more optimism about the macroeconomic environment over the next years, expansion in real estate and credit in Truworths Africa is likely to be escalated, as is real estate and technology development in the U.K. Looking at the financial numbers, which I will go through quite quickly because you can read them afterwards, as I said, and you can send questions to us. We did meet all of our medium-term financial targets. At this stage, the board has decided not to adjust them, even though we exceeded return on equity.
Notice that we're way above all the local and international benchmarks, with the slight exception of gross margin, where we're way ahead of the local benchmark, but mildly below the international one. The other criteria we're way above. If you look at the pro forma, which I urge you to focus on the pro forma because it takes out all the noise in the figures, the group sales were up by three, but profit was down by one and diluted debt down by three. If we look at the dividends over the last couple of years, return on equity and return on assets, asset turnover has been steady. The 1.1 and 1.3, there is a slight decline there, but we think that's fine because it's post-COVID. The return on assets, return on equity has all been declining to lower levels than we've had.
Although we were way above the benchmarks, we are not comfortable with the decline, and we obviously are very aware of the need to not build up too much cash in our balance sheet. There is a normalization of return on assets due to the growing cash balance and the impairment reversal. The next slide shows our critical measure, return on invested capital versus our weighted average cost of capital. Similarly, it has been declining, but the differential is still about 9%. You'll note that it's not very different from 2021 when the ROIC was 24% and it's now 23%. Post-COVID and all the events after that have made a difference. Our goal is to keep it around this level and not to let it continue to decline. We do have strategies and plans to achieve that.
I've said before, and you do know this from the numbers, we are now cash positive. R720 million net cash in positive in June 2025, R306 million negative the year before. This is the group, R2.9 billion cash generation for the period. We pay dividends of R1.9 billion. Sorry, I'm skipping there, but there are monthly payments. If you take those into account, the cash realization rate for the group drops from 101% to 90%. The cash after paying the monthly payments is R447 million. A highly cash-generative group despite the expansion in Office of the DC . This is the Truworths Africa pro forma numbers. I think you know them. The sales were roughly zero, the retail sales. Gross profit slightly down, but profit before finance costs before tax dropped by 10% and 7% respectively. There are some other factors that have taken that into account.
Basically, we can't keep on running our business with low sales growth. The whole opportunity in our business is top line. It's not really about gross margin. There is some work we can do there. We're all busy with it. I've mentioned it already, but it's about getting the top line up. The expenses are very well controlled. Main expense that went up in the Truworths Africa figures are occupancy costs, grew by 9%. Others are negative. When you look at a little bit more detail, I'll show that later on, but rental went up actually by about 5% or 4% depending on how you look at it. That's more due to like-for-like growth in rental. There are some new space things that happened in the year. The tough top line was across the board.
You can see it was in our ladies' wear, our men's wear, and our kids' areas in what we call other, but that's big. It's cellular, cosmetics, the Office ., South Africa, Truworths Jewellery, Lowe's & Living, even Sync. All of them together were on average dropped in sales. Identity was negative by 3%, and even YDE dropped. It was a very tough year. Obviously, we never expected it to be as tough as that. You can see the mix of our sales in our business where the ladies' wear is about 36%, men's is 25%, Identity 15%, and others got bigger and bigger. It's now 14%. There wasn't a lot of store changes. There were eight new net stores, but space is roughly the same. It's a little bit growth, so not a lot of store movement in the last year.
The sales per square meter has only increased by 2.2% over the last three years. Although the sales per meter identity is unusually high by South African standards in clothing retailers, it has not been increasing. It is all part of the same discussion. It is all about the top line. I mentioned earlier on this balancing act that we have to play with trying to keep a differential in merchandise without becoming too expensive for our customer, and that is a difficult one. Sarah will talk about that later on. Other than the unusually high depreciation of RAND periods in 2017 and 2023, we have been managing to keep inflation relatively low. This last year, it was not bad either. There are moves afoot to either keep prices lower or improve the quality and offering and product component while not increasing prices.
There is a lot of work that is going on behind the scenes there. As you see, our gross, because we had a really disappointing winter season, our markdowns during the season were higher than they would normally have been. That caused us to drop below our ideal of 55% to 53.6% gross margin. I mentioned occupancy cost earlier on, 9%. There we describe that if you exclude non-comparable stores, other occupancy costs increased actually by 4%. Rentals paid on a cash basis were increased by 5%. All the other expenses are under really good control. The receivable costs, the ECL allowance changed a little bit, but not much. The charged off, that charged off book performed better than we had anticipated. The ECL allowance actually was decreased there, so total trade receivable costs actually dropped.
Again, we see the same issue here with our profit before finance costs, EBITDA margin, operating margin, all under pressure. Yes, very acceptable numbers as a yardstick compared to competitors and compared to international competitors, but nevertheless declining. It is almost exclusively because of the top line. Coming in the year ahead in Truworths, we just spent R220 million. The committed so far is R231 million, but you are going to see a little bit of early stages of we must spend a bit more than that this year. Definitely the year after, in other words, the year 2026 to 2027 will be quite a lot more aggressive because we have some more ambitious real estate plans for the following year. This coming year, it is pretty static. The distribution facility, we have finished paying it off now. There's no more capital expenditure to talk of in that regard.
Truworths, despite the top line problems and all the rest of it, still was a cash-generating business, R2 billion. All the dividends of the group were paid out of that cash generation. I know there's some talk about whether we should bring money back to buy back shares. That is being considered by the board, especially with the drop in the share price. There might be an opportunity there. There's a possibility the board will decide to revert to a buyback program. Having a quick look at Office , nice numbers, 10% up in sales, 11% in EBITDA, 12% in profit before tax. The numbers are excellent. Notice the numbers, EBITDA of £75 million. It's become a really wonderful, successful business and with lots of runway. GP was 9% up, profitable, finance costs up by 12%. Not much change in numbers of stores.
Trading space increased by 6.4%, but that's, as most of you know, that we've been managing to use the existing space much better, and that's evidence of it. As I said at the beginning of this presentation, from about November onwards, even in the next two months, the non-like for like starts to increase. From November on, there's quite a lot of non-like for like. The number of new stores starts to pick up accordingly as well. It's not as much space regaining as much as new stores starting to kick in. This is just all part of the turnaround in Office was this wonderful sales density. It is a shoe business, so you do get high value in small space, but these numbers are spectacular, and it continues to do well in sales per meter. The margin's been fine. It's a solid, steady margin, a good business.
Other operating costs are increasing. Of course, a business that's expanding as aggressively as Offices , costs do come along with that. 11% was the biggest single one, other operating costs. If you exclude foreign exchange losses, other operating costs only increased by 2%. The depreciation went up by 9%. The rights of use assets increased 13% due to the net impairment reversal. Employment costs have increased in the U.K., partially because of the new store payroll and also the national minimum wage. Using our sort of thinking and approach to cost saving, we apply that in the U.K. equally in the same way as we did to South Africa. It's a little bit more difficult, especially because the business is growing. We contain costs, but we don't get silly about it.
There you can see the results with the great trend in margins and EBITDA and EBITDA margin in Office . Store renovation, despite what I've been saying, is not going up by that much this year, although again, I have to say we spent £5.4 million, which was less than the £6.5 million of the year before. In this coming year, we've committed £6.4 million. I suspect it may be higher than that by the time we finish because there's so much in the melting pot at the moment. That is the situation. We spent a lot of money in the first two years on remodeling existing stores. As I say, more of that money is now being skewed towards new stores. There is quite a lot of work going on with computer infrastructure and software upgrading in Office
Office despite everything I've said about capital expenditure and expenses, still managed to generate £39 million. It's a wonderful feeling to have two businesses, both even in tough times, generating cash. Looking at the credit account management, I have already referred to the 53 and the 52 the last two quarters, about 50. Good thing, good sign, but TransUnion say, despite an improving index score, the recovery remains fragile. Sorry, I did jump to the slides there, but I'm going to just go back. It's great. It's looking better. It's tentative, but at least two quarters in a row. I'm hoping and praying that that continues and that the credit market in South Africa remains above the 50, up to 55 over the next four, five, six, or seven quarters. That will be very, very good for Truworths .
We've been working tirelessly over quite a long time now, aware of what we consider to be a tough economy and not euphoric about the future of the economy. We've been very careful on the credit side. This is quite interesting because it shows you that over the last four years, our goal to improve the balance health is really working because you can see the good balance growth, the blue on the very right there, in all of the years has been getting better and better in terms of risk. If you just look at our risk profile, on our better risk, we are improving it. We are managing to contain the values in our bad risk quite nicely and bring them down. The book is definitely improving in health. We compare ourselves to our competitors.
We obviously have access to our customers where they have balances with our competitors. We know that because we have that data. Because we have that data and because we are so large, you know, a couple of three, four million active customers, but about 20 million customers who are on our books, we call them loyalty customers. They've applied for accounts. They still interact with us. We can quite easily have a look at what's going on in the marketplace. This one's quite interesting because it shows you, if you look at the high risk, what's happening on balance on average with the competitors' high risk. This is in a stress. It's competitors with our customers. I'm not in any way trying to tell you what competitors are doing in their own books with all of their customers.
To the extent that there's an overlap, which is significant, we can see what's happening to our customers with our competitors. You can see that the gap on the high risk between us and our competitors in terms of the average installment was very small. The competitors until 2023, the extent of installment was slightly higher than Truworths. Look how the gap has grown in 2024 and 2025. We've, if anything, brought it down, the installment for the high-risk customers. It's been our strategy. Is it a good strategy or a bad one? You'll have to form your view. I suppose it's a marathon, not a sprint. We'll only know in a few years' time. We've intentionally been constraining our high-risk customers and our average competitors, or with the customers that are overlapped, have been radically increasing it. Look how that gap has changed.
When it comes to the medium and low risk, it's the other way around. The gap is pretty similar, but Truworths does have higher installments and our prices are more expensive. You can understand that with the medium and high risk, low-risk customers, we offer more credit. We've been constraining ourselves with the high-risk ones, which is a change for us since 2023, a gradual steady containment against competitors who have been, on average, much more aggressive with our customers. Number of applications, interesting. I mean, it's pretty solid now. The mix keeps on changing the way we appeal to different customers to entice them to try and open an account with us. We're sitting there with 23% were approved, risk approved. There's always a lag between those who approve versus those that actually come and open their accounts.
Of course, we keep on working on the ones who were approved but didn't come and open. That number seems to be settling at a steady 22%, 23% and down to somewhere between 15% and 18% or 17% in terms of open. That's versus number of applications. Again, it talks to us trying to be conservative. What is interesting always to look at is the young people. I mean, 43% of those 5 million people or so who seem to apply to us every single year, 43% are 29 years or younger. Actually, 25% of them, one in four, is under 24. Obviously, they tend to be the poorer ones. They aren't yet settled in long-term work and they haven't got a good credit track record. It speaks to the fact that they want to shop at us.
When they apply, we call them loyalty customers and we permanently have a relationship with them and we work on it a lot. Many of them over time become customers. In terms of the health of the book, it's pretty static. Active accounts able to purchase, you know, they're not in arrears, around 79%. We like it to be about 80% or so. It has been as high as 82%, 83% in amazing times. 79%, 80% is sort of normalish. Overdue accounts, about 17%. All the other metrics are pretty in line with each other. Total receivable interest as a percentage of gross trade receivable dropped a bit, but we know that was related to interest rates. Truworths has got some strategic initiatives. I think what I'm going to do, Sarah, if you don't mind, would you talk to this quickly and then I'll just put myself on mute?
Sure. Good afternoon, everybody. Looking at the buying and range building initiatives that we've got, a lot of this has been facilitated by some of the thinking around our distribution center. We have the capabilities that Michael's mentioned there. From a mainstream perspective, we're really focusing on some simplification within the mainstream emporium and range building and creation of clearer product statements. I think we often receive feedback that the Truworths emporium can be difficult to shop. We are focusing on volume statements of key fashion items. This is also impacting on our ability to drive better value in those items. That is through higher volumes and therefore better economies of scale. It's important to mention that we're not dropping our quality on these items and we're maintaining our elevated quality standards, but it's the value equation that we're looking to improve.
You can see that the color statements on the deep products category consolidation. We've got excellent trend information from our fashion studio, which we've always had. Now we're really enhancing that with some AI-driven trend analytics that we are overlaying. This is improving our upfront trend identification. We're able to channel this in two directions through the supply chain, one being through development further ahead of time with our international offshore suppliers, which is delivering some very nice results on fashion product, and maintaining the use of our internal design center for its quick response capabilities and also fantastic product development capabilities.
Thank you, Sarah. I'm going to just talk to this a bit because I want to go quickly through it. We've been working on improved allocation models, this part allocation you're all familiar with from the new distribution center. There was a delay. We were hoping by the winter season for February, March, April, we would be using it fully. As I say, it's probably only going to be 100% or 90% used by September. I would guess about 40% to 45%, 50% at the moment. The part allocation model really makes an enormous amount of sense. I do hope that over the next six months for sure and years into the future, that's going to be a major benefit to us.
The guys have been working for the last 18 months on a much more sophisticated replenishment system, which is not quite the same thing as part allocation, but it's complicated. I'm not going to go into that. They've made some great headway there, and that is about to be fully implemented in our business. They've used some quite sophisticated modeling to deal with that terrible problem that every fashion clothing retailer in the world has with trying to get the right sizes in the right stores for the right garments at the right time. It's a nightmare, and it's a complication. We've always been quite proud of our size curve planning systems, but there's been a big project working on that the last 12 months or so, and that is being rolled out at the moment. I think the major benefit from that will start happening from peak summer 2025.
Those are very important processes. The markdown run I've already mentioned to you, it's all about getting the same terminal stock at a lower cost of markdown, irrespective of whether it's a good or bad product. Forgetting the fact that obviously if you buy a good product, it'll sell better, you won't need to mark it down, assuming it's the same, but having a way of marking it down exactly at the right level and exactly at the right time. I think we could well make some good progress there. Sarah and her team are working with the real estate people, the designers on the identity megastore, which is starting to look really good. We've got a couple of new identities.
It had a tough year, identity, but some of the new stores, and there are only a few at the moment, but as they get rolled out, it looks quite exciting. There is a new experimental concept that I'm not going to tell you about yet. I'd rather not shout about from the rooftops until I've got something to show. We're quite excited about a new concept we plan to launch in the next six to nine months, maybe a little longer than that. There is a lot of work on this. This is a real estate opportunity and a brand one, taking some of our brands that are long established in our emporium, a big store, and creating specialty mini stores or mini emporiums separate or linked from the emporium. We've got a brand called Fuel, another called Moscow. They're sort of street.
There's a plan to make a lot of headway with those. They're doing well anyway, but to have some standalones, which we haven't done for a long time, that gives us real estate expansion opportunity. Daniel Hester, great brand, been with us for 40 years or something, going nicely. There's a new elevated Hester, China, Europe, which we are introducing and to have more elevated standalone stores as well as the emporium one, but the standalone side I'm focusing on. Ginger Mary, another one of our brands, is an African-inspired fashion business that we've created out of nothing over the last 15 years. There's now an opportunity in our mind to roll that out as a concept, shoes, accessories, homewares, and so on. Those four or so concepts are all able to be expanded as we feel more ambitious about real estate and about things improving.
They're working on ladies' accessories and bags. As everyone else is talking at the moment, the beauty segment is looking promising and thriving, and we are also very involved in it. The difference, though, is we want to maintain our elevated image. We will tend to avoid the very low-end brands because they don't reinforce the status of our business. Still, there's a lot of opportunity in beauty. We're busy with that. The newer brands, this is a photo just to give you a feeling of Fuel that is in our stores, doing great street business, Fuel. We're going to roll that out in quite a few standalone stores. There's Moscow. You can look at the product and the picture. You can see the difference. You can imagine the alignment between the Fuel and the Moscow and how those two stores could stand alongside one another.
Remember, we already have these brands. We already sell this merchandise in our stores, but it's just being much more aggressive and having standalone concepts, which are, you can obviously do much more with a standalone than you can within a department in a big store. That's more of the Moscow. Then Daniel Hester. Everyone knows Daniel Hester. It's an aspirational, quite upmarket brand, but it's got like a steady, stable base in South Africa, men's and ladies' shoes, accessories, a big part of our business in men's and ladies. There's a new Daniel Hester, if you want to call it that, which is more sophisticated, more upmarket in our Hester. Europe calls it Hester, not Daniel Hester, and we want to introduce that into our Daniel Hester. We may and probably will have some standalone upmarket Hester stores that offer an elevated product.
It is quite interesting because whereas the whole market is talking about value and gaining value, we are, if anything, gaining street fashion and even upgrading to cater for more niche markets. That's a little bit more about the Hester. There are some pictures of what the stores are looking like. There are some in China. There are some in Europe, just to give you a feeling for the level of sophistication. Then Ginger Mary. I in-house developed it from scratch, and it's a nice big business for us now. Fashion, international, global fashion, but inspired with African sense, African themes. We haven't introduced homewares before. We are going to maybe fragrances and again, standalone stores. We go into supply chain. There are a lot of initiatives there. I'm going to go quite quickly because I am worried about the time. There is a lot of work.
Our DC, as I say, is already up and running, but it's going to be fully capacitized by September. There is also a lot of work on our customer predictive capability. Everyone's doing AI there, and of course, we also are. When 70% of your customers shop in your own stores with your own card, and we know so much about them, it gives us an enormous advantage when you start interacting with that data. We also are, there's a serious lot of work going on with our digital offering at the moment. Our emporium reimagined. Those stores are doing well. I've already spoken about the standalone stores. These are just some photographs of the new identity and the new True Worth. This is the brand new YDE. It can now walk. A beautiful store, very different look, and it's doing very well since it opened.
In Office U.K., that you sort of know about. The real estate expansion, modernization, 13 projects have been approved, and there's several others, a lot of others who are being evaluated at the moment. To all open within the next 12 to 18 months at most. Offspring, we opened a new store in Camden. It's not a new store. It's an old store, but we remodeled it completely. In King's Cross, King's Cross about a year and a half ago, two years, Camden a few weeks ago, they're doing fantastically. It shows there's new, there's runway separately from Office for Offspring. Bear in mind, our two biggest stores are in Offspring Selfridges, ladies and men's. That's what the new Office in Bluewater looks like. Crawford. Oh, this is, this is the guys are very proud of this.
Adidas did a massive collaboration with us in Oxford Street last week, I think it was. They're just launching the new superstore, and they asked us to partner with them. That shows the special relationship that the guys have with Adidas and with the big brands. We were their partner for the launch of the new superstore. Both Office and Offspring have now apps, and both are going nicely, especially the Office one. The Champion Challenger methodology in Truworths that is so well established is now on a fast track in the U.K. Working on the DC, working on systems in Office, same thing. I'm not going to talk much about environment, social, and environmental issues other than to talk again about we follow these seven good practices of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal.
We've got a couple of hundred million in our charitable causes, and we're doing an enormous amount of work. More of that information is available for those who are interested in sustainability and charity. You can see that on our website. There is a lot of work going on non-exec rotation. Nine new non-execs have been appointed over the past seven years, and that's continuing that process. We are making every year more and more good progress with our BBB EE score. I think we're at level four now, and it's going well. For the 18th consecutive year, we have been ranked in the top 10 of the E&Y Excellence in Integrated Reporting Award. We're the only company by miles who's achieved that. I'm not talking about retailers. I'm talking about any company on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
We know that we've been formed on the top 10 again this year. Outlook, I'd like to say, I almost am, I don't want to say it because I think I say it too often, but we're starting to feel again more optimistic because there's a lot of work going on behind the scenes. If the economy does pick up a bit, and if this credit stabilizes and the U.K. carries on as it is, we're hoping for a much better performance in the next 12 months and thereafter than this very disappointing past year. I'm not going to repeat what I've already said, but you can read this in your own time. I'm now going to go to questions. I'm going to stop sharing, and I'm going to read the questions. I've got lots of questions here.
I'm very much aware of the fact that we'll never finish all of these questions in the short time we've got left. I repeat, with pleasure, send us questions to our investor relations address, and the team of us, the people you see here and a few others are involved, and we do respond to those questions really quickly. This first one is, thanks for the presentation. Three questions. One, Office , we shared reported sales growth for seven weeks. How is like-for-like sales growth doing at the moment? U.K. peer reported intensifying competition and rising promotional activity in the U.K. and a question for Michael, what do you think the medium-term earnings pathway will look like for Truworths International Limited if the recovery in South Africa continues? Do I think there's more strategic changes needed? What could that look like? They're three questions.
Why I like answering that is because they cover, when I've gone through it, many of the others. The like-for-like component in Office growth is, we don't disclose that number, but it's above zero, but it's not very high. It's a couple of %. We try and push it to, in good times when you've got a brand that's going crazy and we can get all the stock, then you try and push it to 3%, 4%, or 5%, but it's a bit lower than that when you can't do that. Like-for-like is not brilliant at the moment in the U.K., but it hasn't been for quite some time. The growth we're getting is out of our remodel stores, but of course, when you get a big brand flying, that does well. Also, our new stores are very successful. You mentioned intensifying competition and rising promotional activity.
Yes, our team in the U.K. does talk about a lot of promotional activity in the U.K., and I'm sure that is the case. One's just got to beat your competitor. I really feel in the U.K. that niche that we've got gives us a big advantage. What do I think the recovery will be like in Truworths over the next six months if things turn around? Remember, our base is now quite low for the summer and winter. I've shown you our thinking about some of the fine-tuning we are doing with the way we distribute our merchandise, the way we buy it, the mix of sizes, and the expected results. There should be, if the economy picks up, a comfortable improvement over this coming year, the year we're in. Yes, do we need strategic change for sure? It's complicated. We can't make Truworths into a value retailer.
It's impossible. You can't be what you're not. We're doing all the things that I've mentioned in this presentation and many more. That is our strategy to try and emphasize our point of difference while not being ridiculous about price. The question about market share, what is Truworths Africa's same-store sales growth in 2024 and 2025? Reon, do we don't disclose that, I don't think?
No, Michael, we don't disclose that.
No, I don't think. Remembering that we don't have tons of new, I mean, because there's 800 and something stores in South Africa, irrespective of what we do with renovation and that, the proportion of new is small. When I look at it compared to the U.K., it's massively different. It's very similar to total. Now, one question here, Reon, you've got to answer this, maybe Emmanuel. I would like to understand why financial year 2024 performance numbers have been restated.
Right. Emanuel, you go?
Yeah, I can answer that. They haven't been restated. We don't restate the performance. The performance are essentially calculated by taking ones off non-comparable items from one year to the other. One could have, for example, we had a reversal of a trademark impairment of around about £44 million. We exclude that. There might be some big insurance claim that happens in one of the comparable years. We exclude that. We really do this to try and make you understand the fundamental performance of the Truworths International Limited business without the ones offs. They change from year to year, and it's not a restatement. It depends what happens in the prior years where we're comparing the two years.
Anything more you want to say, Reon?
No, I agree. That's perfect. Thank you, Michael.
The other question I've got here is the consistent market share loss and what's the reason for the loss and what are we doing about it? It's pretty clear to us that much of the loss is on the higher risk customer base. We've just taken a view that we can, now that our own base is more stable and it looks more healthy, and that if the credits carry on improving, we can perhaps be a little bit more ambitious. Of course, we've got some plans that are already in action to somehow take advantage of our technology without increasing the risk, drive sales more, even in the high-risk category areas. We're very busy with that. We've got some interesting projects that are underway, meaning that means they're live and they're in tests. We have groups of customers that are being exposed to that.
This high-risk customer segment that seems to have damaged us quite a lot, and that would be even more in the kids' way, that is an area that we are trying to use our intellectual capital and our technology to deal with in a clever way. In other words, don't increase our risk. We don't want to go down that way. You may be able to, and we think we are, give more credit to the right customers on different terms so that the high risk can still shop at us and yet it will not increase our risk. The active credit customers are now falling. Why is this? Do you want to answer that, Emanuel or Gary? Maybe Gary, it says, why are your active credit customers falling? Why are they not going up?
Yeah, Michael, thank you. I can take an answer to that. The active base is reducing due to the normal process of customers becoming dormant. It isn't anything out of the ordinary. It's just a slight reduction in the number of new accounts opened, which translated into the active book shrinking.
There is a question here about competitors, like which of the competitors are pushing the high-risk customers. Obviously, it's not my job to say that. I can see from which of the competitors that have overlapped customers of ours are giving our customers more credit to the high-risk ones. It's not appropriate for me to say anything more about that. There's a lot of questions about cash. There's this whole debate going on, and I can see it's going on in our board, by the way. We had a board meeting yesterday, and I can see it's also going on with our shareholders. They're saying, look, if the share price is weak and you've got a couple of billion coming down the track in the U.K. in cash, why don't you bring some of it back and buy shares? That's true. I mean, we have exactly that same debate.
That issue is being considered. The board hasn't resolved what it wants to do yet, but it's very topical. We are with you with that. The other question is, how many standalone Daniel Hester, Ginger Mary, Fuel, Moscow stores could Truworths International Limited be rolling out over the next year? Very few in the next year because you can imagine we've got all these. They're designing it now. They're having to buy the merchandise. We only can negotiate real estate probably from August, September 2026 if you get very fussy about what your real estate is. We are taking some of our existing stores and remodeling them and reconfiguring them, but those are big ones. Anyway, they are 2026. That thing about these rolling out of these concepts, when we next meet, I'll be able to show some real live examples.
I don't think the momentum is going to suddenly take off this year. It can't be. It'll be the year after and the year after that. The next question is markdown optimization, DC improvements, all those other things we mentioned. What are you hoping to get? What are you hoping to get your GP percentage back to this year? I'm obviously not going to do that. Truworths Africa always had that 55%. That was our sort of yardstick. When it was a great year, it went even to 56%. In a bad year like now, it's dropped below 54%. We obviously want to push it right back to its original state. Bearing in mind that part of this, these better size curve, part allocation, better distribution, markdown optimization, that might help margin. The big thing is how do we get our top line to grow?
They all end at that, more than margin growth. They end at top line sales. As we do it, we push the top line sales more. What will it take to lift acceptance rates in the book into the 35% to 40% range? I'll pull that acceptance rate from the 25%. Gary, Manny, do you want to try and answer that? They're saying, why don't you accept 40% instead of 25%? Then a higher percentage will open if you know. You want to try, Gary?
Thanks, Michael. As you know, we run credit to enable sales in the book. Going to 45% with our existing product isn't something that we would want to do. We have got, as Michael has said, tests of alternative products, which we can increase acceptance rate with and will be following a measured approach as those tests give us actual results that we can expand.
There's another question here about collaboration with Adidas and Office U.K. They're saying all the other brands equally support when collaborative on promotional activity. Obviously, they're all different. I mean, Adidas is massive, so big. That was a real feather in our cap, almost came to us by surprise. That is unusual to have such a big launch and such a big event. The others don't seem to do that. We have a fantastic relationship with Nike as an example. It couldn't be better. I mean, I can only rave about it. Even the smaller brands, I'm not going to mention all of them, but these are the brands, and I can go as far. It doesn't only have to be sneakers. It can be other brands that we stock. We stock winter brands. We stock boots. All the brands, we have a real great relationship with them.
To some or other degree, there's a great level of cooperation with all of them. I'm trying to see if there's anything else I can offer, Sarah. How much order? This one I won't give to Sarah, I'll give to Manny. How much, because Manny is an expert at this, how much more is it to squeeze in the cost base? They're saying you can't bring your costs any lower because they're already so low. How much more can you squeeze out of that lemon and sucker dry? So Emanuel, what do you say to that?
Thank you. It's a very interesting question. What we found is that there is always opportunity to squeeze the costs and to renegotiate agreements with suppliers and so on. We have been very frugal this year and we continue to be frugal. There is a saying that says Truworths is frugal in good times and in bad. That's what we are. I don't feel that there's the end of the road in terms of cost savings. You must bear in mind that the biggest cost we have are rentals. That's really set by the contracts that we have. There's the markdowns, which is another big cost, and that's determined by how well we perform. There's the provision on the book, and that's how well the credit environment's doing and at what level we are in terms of selection of customers. Then there's the sales staff costs.
Those are normal sort of normal increases. Other than those four, there's lots of other opportunities to save costs in our business, and we see it every day.
I mean, we're really three minutes past 2:00 P.M., so I'm told we should end now. I'm going to summarize by saying, firstly, I want to thank my colleagues, Rian, as all the critical financial work that goes on behind the scenes. Then Peter and Miles, who are our expert planning, merchandising, marketing, buying experts, and they are the ones who are actually driving those projects under Sarah's vision and supervision. Thanks to Gary for all the stuff he does on credit and IT. Of course, my colleagues, Sarah and Manny, who I don't know what I would do without them, but they're both so fantastic. Thank you to all the shareholders. Please, as I say. Write
To our investor, Reon. Would you mind saying what the address is so I don't get it wrong? The email address?
Sure, Michael. It's investorrelations@truworths.co.za.
Thank you. You can write to us, and we will respond to you as soon as we can. We look forward to seeing all of you at the forthcoming conferences over the next few months. If you still want to see us virtually after sending us any questions, only with pleasure. Now, speaking to all of you, thank you and goodbye.