Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to this Truworths Group results presentation for the 52 weeks to the 28th of June 2026. I would like to introduce myself. For those who do not know me, I am Sarah Proudfoot. I am the Co-Deputy CEO. Online today we have our CEO, Michael Mark, who is currently in New York. Because his Wi-Fi connection is a little bit unstable, he will be listening and joining when possible. Other than that, we have Mannie Cristaudo, who is the other Joint Deputy CEO and our CFO, and also Reon Smit, who is our Financial Director. We have quite a lot to share with you today.
This is our agenda, and we are going to try and move through it quite quickly so that we can cover the strategic areas with more of a focus there than on the numbers themselves, which you will have had the opportunity to read from our results statement. You all know it has been a challenging year for us, and we are a little bit disappointed in the results, understandably. It has been a challenging year for consumers generally, in both the markets in which we operate, both South Africa and the United Kingdom. We feel happy that there are some very nice positives that have come out of these results. For the first thing, we have protected our margin. We have continued to be highly cash generative. We in fact have a cash conversion rate that improved to 97% from 90% in the previous year.
We grew Office in the U.K. by 4.9% in a difficult economy in the U.K. Truworths, although we had a very difficult first half, had a much improved second half of the year. We continued to invest in growth, particularly in store expansion in the U.K., and our online contribution grew to 21%, and we had more than 20% growth in online in Truworths South Africa. As always, we build on the long term. Truworths is always guided by its business philosophy, and many of you will be familiar with it. It essentially is our beacon and our guide, and it ensures that we always focus on the long term as opposed to reacting unduly to any short-term things happening in the economy or in the business itself.
Because of that, we invest in organic growth, and we really try and return and are successful at returning our surplus funds to our shareholders. Action with a clear sense of how they are going to enable us to accelerate our business in the long term. Our growth is our challenge in Truworths Africa in particular, and we are very aware of that. Our growth is going to be deliberately driven by a combination of our brand and our product, which is what we call our hero, and we are going to talk to you a little bit more about that. Obviously by customer engagement through our very large account base and our very large number of loyalty customers. We believe that we are well-positioned to move forward for the next century. We are currently 100 [audio distortion] familiar with it, and I think it speaks for itself.
Today we are going to be focusing on telling you quite a lot about the strategy that we have for growth and a fundamental illustration of the essence of our business philosophy. We refer to this as the hero and the pedestal, and it is the relationship that determines everything that we do. To explain it a little bit further, [audio distortion] all of which are wholly owned and exclusively available in Truworths stores only. It is that that creates the unique model of our Truworths emporium, which we believe we have not seen anywhere else in the world. That is the hero. Very importantly, a hero is supported by what we are calling the pedestal, and we are seeing this as a, if you would [audio distortion].
Good afternoon. I know that there were some problems. There was some network issue. I think we had an issue with the service provider. We will carry on, and I know that we have lost some time, so we will have to move through quite quickly. Apologies for that. We will switch back to Sarah, who will carry on going with her presentation.
Okay. Thank you, everybody, and sorry again for that. I am going to try and do a very brief synopsis of what we said, and hopefully it will be clear enough to everybody the essence of what we are trying to get across. Essentially, the challenge we face is we operate in Truworths, is we are operating in a constrained economic environment. We have limited upside on store growth because we already have such a mature and well-positioned store portfolio in all of the top malls in South Africa. We also are sitting in a situation with a really well-established and mature account base. The ability to easily scale good new accounts at this point in time also represents a challenge. Therefore, in order to achieve the top-line growth that we are very aware of the fact that we need to achieve, it has to be through product.
We are focusing a lot on a strategy that is or an illustration that is the essence of our business philosophy, which is the concept of the hero and the pedestal, where the hero is the combination of our product and our brands, which is a very unique offering, and the pedestal is the platter on which the product is presented. That is made up of the store portfolio, the credit book, and the e-commerce and digital components, and obviously others that form the pedestal of the product. Very quickly, we are focusing on a product tiered architecture and really expanding on this and using our brands in a very considered way to build what we are showing you here, a product staircase.
We've worked very hard in the last few years at establishing a core range, which was largely absent in the Truworths offering in volume, and we are very pleased with the progress we've made in this regard. We now feel we have a nice range of well-priced, excellent quality basic product across the men's, ladies, and kids products, and we're going to continue to focus on building and scaling that. It comes to the tiering part. Because of our positioning, we can offer and we are required to offer our customers elevated products of a high quality and a high level of fashionability. That is the first step and that's what we're focusing on. Importantly, we are specifically tiering up from there with better quality fabrics, more elevated and detailed styling, adding detail into the product as opposed to chasing cheaper prices.
Lastly, introducing some top-tier product new ranges into the mix, and they are specifically Hechter and Ovillo, and we can talk to you a little bit more about that. The concept is we've got to make the product more desirable through the entry price point, through the tiering up. We believe that if we do this correctly, the customers will choose to trade up voluntarily. Because although the prices may be higher, the desirability of the product will be greater. This will change and impact our sales mix and give us some inflation. We've been operating in a negative or in a deflation situation intentionally for the last few years through the tough cycle, but we're now seeing the opportunity to actually drive some inflation into our mix, which we believe will be very helpful along with other things in driving sales growth.
That's what we're calling the architecture of aspiration. It's really, we believe, our key strategy for growth in Truworths. The merchandise has to be desirable, and importantly, our accounts enable the purchase of that elevated product to our customers, and it will enable the desired purchase. Excuse me. Importantly, we've got 17.4 million unique loyalty customers and a total of 24.3 million memberships to Truworths. In other words, people we're able to communicate with, which is a significant percentage of the potential adult customer base in South Africa. Mannie will talk a little bit further about that.
Okay. I'll go through the financial review. You've seen the results, so I won't spend much time on it and I'll try catch up a bit. Again, apologies for the technical issues and thank you to those that messaged us. I think we would have been chatting for 45 minutes and no one would have been listening. Anyway, I'm glad it's sorted. I'll just start off with saying how have we done relative to our plans. We launched Fuel Ladies and we're preparing for the launch of new brands, Hechter, Ovillo, and Offspring in summer 2026. Some of those products have gone to stores, very early days, but we're quite excited about that. As Sarah mentioned, there's been a lot of progress on product and brand differentiation and elevating our appeal.
We managed to sustain gross margin. In fact, our gross margin increased. There was an accounting change with our cellular sales. If you go like- on- like as to how we accounted for that before, our gross margin would have increased by 20 basis points. We thought that was good in this really tough environment. We consolidated our distribution centers. We have a state-of-the-art DC with path allocations running and high volumes of replenishment. We acquired the Office UK DC, that was ZAR 105 million, to support the expansion plans of the U.K. business. We refined the Emporium concept. We constantly refine the stores, and we have some really fantastic slides to show you about our plans around Eastgate and Sandton, which will be the first two of the refined Emporium concept. We invested GBP 12 million in Office UK store development.
We opened eight stores, and the weighted average trading space growth was at 8.1%. There is still room to grow stores, and I will show you later what our plans are there. The online contribution performed well. It went to 21% from 20%. Truworths Africa is at 8.1% at the moment, and Office UK has stabilized at 44.7%. I must add that Truworths online and Office, it has been profitable from day one. We ensure that it is profitable, and we think that we have really good technology and expertise in this area. We sustained investment in technology. AI is a key component of our strategy going forward, and it has infiltrated in many areas of our business. We returned ZAR 2.8 billion to shareholders through dividends and share buyback. The share buyback you will see later.
You probably read it was ZAR 749 million worth of share buyback, and we generated net cash of ZAR 196 million. That was after the buybacks. If you look at our KPIs and what we achieved, we were all within our medium-term targets that we published last year. What is interesting for a long time now, we have outperformed local and international benchmarks. So although some of the KPIs would have reduced slightly from last year, they are really good from local and international norms. This slide here. Really, I just want to point out this is that, cash generated from operations, which is down 12.9%, but on a comparable basis, when you take the timing of monthly payments, it decreased by 2%. So excellent cash generation. You will see that in the slide later. Gross profit trend, 51.3%.
I spoke about the change in cellular sales, it would have gone up slightly. Really good, consistent gross profit performance in this market. This you can see there has been some normalization, particularly this return on equity and return on capital from the post-COVID period. But these KPIs are still relatively good, and we feel that we performed reasonably well with these. If you look at our return on invested capital versus WACC, this is something that is very important to us. We focus on this. We outperformed WACC. It was 21% to 13%. We continue to add to our business, and we think that this is a really good measure for us to focus on. I must say, when we build stores, we always look at the return on invested capital. In the U.K., it is excellent. It exceeds what we think, e ssentially, it exceeds the initial plans.
In South Africa, it's a little more difficult, but one must keep investing. We are pleased with this performance. I won't go into the balance sheet. You would have read it. Just for time, I'll move on from here. You can see here that we finished up with net cash of ZAR 196 million. This is after share buybacks of ZAR 949 million. Truworths Africa is still sitting at ZAR 2 billion. That hasn't really moved. ZAR 2 billion in debt. From a group perspective, we're sitting at ZAR 196 million of cash, which is, I think, really good, particularly in an environment that we face at the moment. The cash flow analysis will show you that we generated ZAR 4.4 billion of EBITDA cash. We received some interest as per normal. We acquired The Office UK DC.
That was ZAR 105 million of the ZAR 267 million CapEx maintenance. We funded the dividends, and there was ZAR 949 million worth of share buybacks. We would have generated ZAR 826 million of net cash, excluding the share buybacks, the acquisition of Office DC, and the acquisition of some land next to our DC at the airport. That land was around, I think, about ZAR 52 million that we bought. So really good cash generation. If you look at Truworths Africa, better second half performance, as Sarah mentioned, but it has been a tough environment. Gross margin has increased. That's the 54% to the 53.6%. Excluding cellular change, I think it would have gone up by 30 basis points to 54.3% versus 53.6%. So a nice improvement in margin, and that's essentially from less promotional activity. Retail sales, so tough all around.
The ones that battled the most were the kids business and Identity. Generally, it was really tough. Menswear had a relatively decent performance, and they were flat on the prior period. Stores, we closed 26 stores and we opened 24 stores. Net two down. Our sales densities at 36,000 are still good considering. If you look at the trend, which is this dotted line that goes across here, the trend is still slightly upwards. On the merchandise inflation trend, this is what Sarah was talking about. We had negative inflation. We typically don't perform that well with negative inflation. So we're expecting positive inflation in this next year, and we will force it where we can by adding more value to the product to increase the inflation. So probably finish at 3.4% I would think. GP trends, quite consistent, which is relatively quite good.
Analysis of the trading expenses, I won't go into this. You can see the detail other than the trade receivable costs. We had an increase in provision. The South African economy is quite constrained and the consumer has some challenges at the moment. I'll show you a slide a little later on the TransUnion index, which indicates some of the concerns in the credit environment. I'll just skip through those. This is ZAR 2.8 billion last year to ZAR 2.6 billion this year in profit before finance cost and tax. You know these numbers. In terms of store development or CapEx, I should say, you can see we spent ZAR 186 million on store development. We spent ZAR 33 million on computer software and infrastructure and ZAR 58 million on land, buildings, and refurbishments. In totality, we spent ZAR 280 million in CapEx versus the ZAR 467 million last year.
I don't know if you recall, but last year we had the distribution facility that we were putting money into, and that is now fully live and operating very well. Cash flow in Truworths is pretty good. You can see that even after we paid the dividends and Truworths funds the dividends paid completely. We don't get a contribution from Office in this regard, but we're essentially flat on movement of cash. Office UK. Profit before tax up 6% and retail sales up 4.9%. Not a bad performance. The second half struggled a little relative to the first half, but we are fairly pleased with this performance. An 18.6% trading margin relative to the 18% last year was good. I won't go into this too much. This essentially just shows you where the sales come from.
The majority come from the United Kingdom, and we have some sales coming from the Republic of Ireland. From a store perspective, we closed one store and we opened nine. Approximately 50% of our stores are now renovated, or new or renovated in the new format. I'll show you some pictures of those. They're looking wonderful. Sales densities are slightly lower than last year, but we still think they're pretty good at GBP 15,000 per square meter. The GP trend, slight decline in GP. There was additional promotional activity in Office relative to last year. Just a slight downtick in the margin. Trading expenses. I won't talk too much about this. We can go through it. If you guys have got questions you just click on the link and ask us. We'll try and answer those. Profit before tax, GBP 66.7 million versus GBP 61.5 million last year.
Improvements in EBITDA margin and operating margin. Capital expenditure. You can see most of the bulk of the CapEx is in store renovation and development, where we've invested substantially and in our distribution facilities. We mentioned that we bought the DCs in Kilmarnock in Scotland, and that was a purchase that we made. Then we're starting to invest in computer software and infrastructure, putting in a new merchandise management system that should be live in about 18 months. Good cash flow. We would have generated GBP 33.6 million net cash excluding the dividends paid to Truworths. Those dividends were paid to Truworths to do the share buyback and excluding the DC acquisition. A highly generative cash business. Account management. I'll go through a few slides here. It is an asset to us. It's how we communicate with our customers.
Sarah explained that it's part of the pedestal that supports the growth. It enables our customers to buy merchandise that is more expensive than many of our competitors. We had really good targeted account acquisition strategies, so we opened more new accounts at less cost this year. Loyalty has become a primary origination engine for that. We've got 17.4 million unique loyalty members, and of course, we score those more regularly. The ones that came to open an account who then failed, if they then pass, once we rescore them, we offer them an account. That represents about 55% of all new account opens. It's a tremendous asset. Our PAY3 product, which is our Group's in-house Buy Now Pay Later product, is gaining momentum.
It is still relatively small in the grand scheme of things, but we are showing some good traction with this product. Some really good disciplined credit management and some strides that we have made in customer engagement. We put some new technology in place to enable us to hyper-personalize our communications. AI, of course, as one would imagine, has moved into top gear here in this space with all our scorecards. We run the portfolio with around about 56 scorecards. This is the TransUnion Credit Index. It comes out regularly, and if it dips below 50, and it is currently at 49, it shows debt stress. One can see that this is really to do with the petrol price increase and the pressure on the consumers that it has dipped. When one looks at it, the household income has declined.
Lending has increased on credit card and personal loans, which is essentially a sign of distressed borrowing. This is available on the TransUnion website if you want more detail. This shows that there is pressure on the consumer in South Africa from a credit perspective. Hence, we raised the provision. I was talking about this. We still had 4.5 million account applications, slightly down on last year. It was more targeted, and we had a better risk approval rate and a better opened percentage as a result of that. The age distribution, 40% of new applicants are younger than 30. Of course, many of them cannot get accounts because they do not have good credit profiles. They do become loyalty members, and they feed into our pot. Then 58% are younger than 35. Some statistics around the credit book.
The number of accounts is essentially flat on last year. The trade receivables book is just slightly up. We increased the provision from 20.8% to 21.7%. You saw this on the previous slide, that we made improvements in accounts opened as a percentage of applications and risk approval rate. The overdue percentage of debt is sitting at 17%. Is there anything else I can speak on this slide? I think that is about it. I can answer any questions on that. This one here, active account holders purchased 77% versus 79%. We have got a query as to why is the overdue rate the same as last year, but the percentage of account holders able to purchase at period end is slightly lower? One is a value, and the other one is a number. They are two different statistics.
We are going to start to talk about aspirational fashion in our strategic initiatives. Just cognizant of times because we have 20 minutes left. I will hand over to Sarah to go through these next couple of slides.
Thank you, Mannie, and I'm going to move through quite quickly. We've already spoken about the initiative to elevate the product mix and the rollout of the new brands. The one I didn't mention was the brand new streetwear brand called Offspring. That's a men's very cool elevated streetwear brand. Then you're familiar with our Fuel Men's brand, which is also a young, energetic street brand. In this period, we introduced Fuel Ladies, and we're very pleased with the early performance of that brand. The basics we continue to scale and develop. Then importantly, the use of our branding, the brands that we have, which our customers love and often think are international brands, by the way. The application in very creative and elevated ways of those brands onto our product to drive aspiration and elevation through that technique.
We continue to have very good, quick response capability out of our design division. We are doing a lot of work with virtual product development, which is obviously shortening lead times and improving dynamism in product development. We are investing in a new AI-enabled product lifestyle management system, which we're going to be implementing over the next year or two. A lot of advanced AI integration into the merchandise side of the business as a whole for design, planning, and forecasting. Then we've seen very nice synergy opportunities between Office and Truworths on the merchandise buying side through supplier collaborations. Then also continued synergies within our design centers across men's, ladies, and kids, which are giving wonderful economies of scale. We're testing and scaling the brands Office and Offspring in the U.K. We particularly focus on, again, the aspirational clearing up.
There's a lot of opportunity for Offspring as we see it. Office is going really well, in terms of the expansion there. The MTO, made- to- order, or own- brands range of shoes within Office UK has seen an improved performance, and we believe there's opportunity to grow that component of the range. Obviously it comes with a higher margin. Then we've got work actively in place at the moment on both warehouse and merchandise planning systems in Office UK. Those will go live in the 2028, the next financial period.
Thank you, Sarah. I'll quickly go through these. I really want to try to leave some time for questions, so I'll run through these quickly. Just as a reminder, this will be published on our website. In fact, I think it's already published at the moment, this presentation. Supply chain, it's really to leverage the Truworths Africa distribution center and to make improvements in the way we part allocate. We also need to be looking at reviewing the logistic partnership to reduce costs. Of course, that's a massive cost in a retailer such as ours, so there's a ton of work happening there. We continue to strengthen the supply base and some of the local CMT suppliers we help and we support. We're looking at to shorten the lead times and in the U.K. we want to expand capacity, which is why we bought the DC.
In terms of the customers, expand the range of the credit products so we can continue to scale PAY3. We will commence rolling out with third-party Buy Now Pay Later products. Hopefully, we can get some of those in this side of the year. That's quite, but we'll see how that goes. We want to grow the active account base through targeted conversion of the loyalty members. Deepen the customer experience with this new product that we purchased, which enables us to personalize our communications. AI integration I spoke about. It's a really low-hanging fruit component of use in our business when one talks about credit risk and operations. AI has permeated across many aspects of our business. We want to grow e-commerce contribution and integrate the Office and Offspring apps into the CRM system.
If I talk about retail presence, we've got the largest store opening program planned since COVID. That's in South Africa. I can't remember the percentage, but I think it's about a 2.5% retail space growth in South Africa. We've got this new format concept, which I'll show you, which is looking absolutely amazing. We'll continue to roll out the new brands which are showing promise. We've integrated the Sync format into Identity. We'll of course continue to optimize trading space by introducing new brands. There's another thing. Let's look at here. This is transform the in-store customer experience through technology-enabled stores. There is a push to put more technology into our stores. We're always working to reduce fulfillment costs in e-commerce. We want to expand and modernize the Office UK's store portfolio. I'll show you some slides.
Then selectively expand Offspring. That seems to be an opportunity for us. I'll just go through these slides. The new concept is called Formé. We regularly redesign to keep fresh. This one here is in Eastgate in Johannesburg. This is the Truworths entrance, which is absolutely beautiful. That leads into Hey Betty, Inwear, and Ginger Mary. This is what we're doing in Hey Betty and what we're doing in Smart, Leisure, and Formal. You'll see Inwear. It's young and fresh and very enticing. OBR and Hemisphere is our jeanswear store. This is a concept that can be rolled out to be a standalone store. This is what the entrance will look like. It's the first time we've combined men's and ladies in a format such as this into an actual jeans store. Truworths Man. That's the entrance there. It's looking actually really good.
Some other pictures of the menswear side. You'll see Uzzi there. Fuel Men's featured on the bottom right. Then we've introduced Fuel Ladies, and that follows our introduction of Fuel Men's, and that's performing well. Context. That's Loads of Living. That's what it'll look like. Looks amazing. You'll see it over there. This is Hechter, and Sarah did speak about this leading into Ovillo, our upmarket product range which is not, w e'll still have Daniel Hechter of course, but this is Hechter which is tiered up a few price points similar to Ovillo. So these are just some images of what they'll look like in stores. Shoes and accessories area and our jewelry cash desk and a concept called Scribe that we're experimenting with. It's essentially a stationery concept that we'll be experimenting with. Identity. This is the new concept is called Signal.
This is the entrance, what it is going to look like in Eastgate. You will see a fantastic entrance with Identity ladies and with kids to entice customers in. The landlords are very excited about this as we are. You will see this is just some images of what we have done here. Sync, that we have introduced in Identity, is you can see that the sign there on the top left. Then you can see what it looks like on the bottom right. We will be introducing Sync Beauty. Then there will also be a stationery component in Sync. Those will be new experimental brands that we will introduce. Now off to Sandton. Eastgate was really quite different, but we decided to push the envelope a little further in Sandton. This is still in development phase, so still conceptual, but this is what we are talking about.
Beautiful round entrances, great architectural features, a massive shop front as you walk. This is across from Zara in Sandton City. We will have our jeanswear store there as well. It looks like this. We think it is a combination of Selfridges and Zara. So you have these pockets of enticement and different feel for each of the brands as you walk through. This over here, where you see this brightly colored sort of area here is Ginger Mary. Quite a different look and feel. Ladies, this is a young fashion concept that we have got going here. Ginger Mary, what it is going to look like. This is conceptual, of course, but should be something close to this in any way. Then just to the U.K. now. Now we are in a fantastic location in Carnaby Street for Offspring. We will be building an Offspring store there.
This is the rendering of the images, the entrance to Offspring and the first floor, which is very exciting. Then we are also taking Offspring further into Selfridges. So this is what the concept looks like. This is the Offspring Selfridges men's concept over here. It is really good digital displays that looks fantastic and enticing. This is our Office stores. We have this new format, and we are rolling this out. It looks beautiful. I will show you some before and after images, and you can see the difference. So here is the before in Belfast High Street. This is what it looked like before. This is after we finished it. This is in Leeds Trinity, what it looked like before, pretty dark. This is what it looks like afterwards. The landlords love this concept of ours. So that is what the stores look like.
I will go through the outlook because we have literally nine minutes. You saw this training, this update. We sent it out. I just want to point out that this increase, the gross profit increase in Truworths Africa in rand value and Office UK in pound value increased by 3%. This is not an increase in the margin percentage. This is an increase in GP. [audio distortion] 16.4% on the weighted average in the U.K. So some really good growth in the U.K. We believe the Group is very well positioned to take advantage of improvements in the macro environment. We are confident that there is a gradual recovery in retail spending over the medium term, and the new fashion brands and store concepts will be introduced in trial to extend the appeal.
Growth is expected to be driven primarily through product innovation, through the brand development that Sarah was speaking about, and of course, through customer engagement and improved value extraction. We will leverage off our 2.9 million active customers and our millions of loyalty members. The growth will be supported by the large [audio distortion] investor relations mailbox. If you have any questions that you need to send to us after this presentation, please direct them to this mailbox. We have got a team of people that respond. We try to get back to you within 24 hours. I will now go to the questions. It was good. In Office, the cost growth will come primarily from new stores. The debtors book primarily. Other than that, it is well contained.
There is a question here, "Michael, when will you retire and spend more time with your loved ones?" We joke and we say Michael's loved ones are Sarah, myself, and Reon, and other people in the business. But seriously, the nomination committee is comfortable with Michael and they will decide and he will decide when it is time to step down. I have just been told that we are hanging again. I am not sure how true that is, but I will just carry on. SA sales came under pressure, but to what extent did SA's relatively short winter have on this? We started off winter quite well. It is a good question. We did start off quite well, but June was fairly poor. We look at the weather and it was perhaps a little milder this year, but we do not really talk like that and look at it.
We just focus on what we can do. It was milder and probably contributed a bit, but I am not too sure by how much. What level of inflation do you see in Truworths Africa in 2027? The answer is about 3%. Why a change in accounting policy for telecoms revenue? It used to be commission-based. It is now sales-based with a gross margin. The partner that we had in the telecoms area asked us to do that. It looks like we are hanging again, guys. I am not sure. Let us have a look at this. I will just carry on. Please can you clarify what the normalized Office UK EBIT margin was, and what the profit growth excluding the adjusted and excluding foreign exchange gains? Reon, I do not know if you want to answer that one.
Yes, sure, Mannie. We have not disclosed the full detail, but all the information is in the financial statements. You can easily calculate it from there. Given time, I think I will leave it at that for now.
Okay. Thank you, Reon. This is another question. How does profitability of online versus offline compare to one another in SA and Office UK? What is interesting about online, we have been profitable from day one, but online has a higher contribution of markdown sales. When product goes on markdown, online spikes. It spikes more so relatively to the other product that we sell online. So it is probably slightly lower profit, but still very profitable. This is another one. Could you provide some insights surrounding the downtrend in your inventory allowance? Since 2019, that this downtrend is at the same time as your inventory turn has been deteriorating and GP margins have been under pressure. Is this a change of assortment or is there another dynamic that I am underappreciating? So this is insights surrounding sustained downtrend of our inventory allowance.
I do not know, Reon, if you want to answer this one.
No, Mannie. I think all I will say is that we have always managed our stocking in exactly the same way for many, many years. We know exactly where we want to end the season, and we target very specific terminal stock levels. So we are very comfortable with the levels that we are provided at. As always, we are fully provided at the end of the season, and we are working towards achieving our terminal stock levels.
Thank you, Reon. This is one for you, Sarah. What caused the poor performance in kids?
Thanks, Mannie. Yeah, kids had a disappointing year. I think there were some issues with lack of brand, adequate brand differentiation, which the teams are very aware of. We have been working very actively to bring in much better brand differentiation, which results in better differentiated product so there isn't internal competition within our brands. I think we're comfortable that good progress is being made with that initiative.
Okay. Thank you. One question here. What is waiting on cash sales post period end? I'll answer that. The first seven weeks, I think there's like an infatuation with the first seven weeks. The first seven weeks is not indicative of what's going to happen in the season. There's a lot of promotional activity that's going on. One cannot say these are the first seven weeks you're trading poorly, and therefore this continues, it's going to continue. But the cash sale performance is down, and I can relate that likely to be the consumer that's under stress. So they're preferring to use credit where they can pay off the installments rather than pay a lump sum off in cash. Then, there's one more that I've got time for because if I look at this we're at 2:00 PM.
Given the strong cash generation attractive share metrics and excess of cash offshore, will you be initiating a new share buyback program? Thanks for that question. We consistently look at share buyback. When we have excess cash and with the permission of the Board, we look to buy back shares regularly. It's likely that if we have excess cash and we get approval from the Board, we will continue with our share buybacks. I'm sorry, guys, but we don't have time. We're actually at 2:00 PM now. I really apologize for the technical glitches. I think there were some glitches even now while I was speaking. So please send your questions through to Investor Relations, and we'll answer them as speedily as we can. Thank you for your time, and we'll see some of you at the conferences, the upcoming conferences that we attend.
Thanks very much.