Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the ABF Trading Update call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, George Weston, CEO. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining this call. This is our final trading update for the year, the final one before the results presentation in November, and it covers the year to September the fourteenth, our year-end. So we're not quite through the year, but we sort of know where we are. It's a year in which we've delivered good top line growth, very significant improvement in profitability and, alongside that, excellent cash generation. Cash generation even better than the profit growth. Overall, we're pleased with the performance of the business. Primark has been good. Most of our food business has been good, and I'm optimistic about the outlook for next year. There is one big however, though, which is sugar.
Both the expectations of profitability for this year, which although the year that we're reporting although well up on previous years is down on market expectations. And then, we're telling you today that the profitability for sugar next year, on the back of much lower European prices, will be more in the range of GBP 50 million-75 million than the sort of GBP 200 million plus that we expect to see this year. We won't be able to mitigate the consequences of that decline in the total business performance next year. The good news, though, is we expect these lower levels of profitability in European sugar to be very short-lived. We expect to bounce back well in 2026.
We've got good visibility. The confidence for that is that we've got very good visibility of our beet costs going into 2026 now, and we've negotiated significantly lower beet prices from our farmer partners for the year following the one that we're going to be in. Disappointing that we're not where we thought we were going to be for 2025, but sugar is an agricultural commodity, and we're paying the consequences of, I think, very good harvest across Europe. Big, very big acreage on the back of high beet prices that the whole of the European industry had negotiated with their farmers for the year to come. The market is simply oversupplied.
Moving on from sugar to our other businesses, Primark sales are expected to be about up around 4% in H2. The profitability remains strong, and the reason that we've had a decline in like-for-like growth in this... Sorry, in total sales growth in the second half is like-for-likes in the UK and Ireland. We believe that to be entirely the consequence of poor weather, particularly in April and June. Our European sales outside the UK and Ireland have been good, and the rollout has gone well in the States. We continue to look at on the question of rollout, at new market opportunities.
We're announcing today a franchise agreement that we've reached with for the opening of Primark stores in GCC, so in the Gulf. The year in Primark has been characterized by strong margin delivery. We see no reason why next year's margin delivery shouldn't be good as well. Grocery continued to perform well in half two. We've seen good demand for our international and regionally focused brands, good growth in Twinings, World Foods, and some others. We've increased marketing investment, particularly in Twinings, and we'll continue at higher rates into next year. Ingredients, good. Yeast and bakery ingredients have seen good growth across most regions.
And the specialty ingredients part, where that sector has been under pressure from destocking, that destocking seems to have come to an end, so the back half of this year has seen volumes returning to more like normal in specialty ingredients. We're well positioned for future growth, Rita Ora, grocery, ingredients, sugar. Just reminding you that we look at our sugar businesses in two parts: European sugar, which is where the problems for next year come from, but also Africa, where we are as excited as we've ever been about our prospects on that continent. We've completed our GBP 500 million share buyback, the second share buyback that we've entered into. We've finished that a bit earlier than we expected.
We're just gonna roll it through to November, on the back of confidence, in our cash positions. We will have more to say about our balance sheet and shareholder returns, in the annual results announcement in November. With that, I know that a lot of you have got your hands up, though I can't see. And, I look to others to decide who gets to go first.
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To end your question, please press star one one again. We will now take our first question. Please stand by. And the first question comes from the line of Sreedhar Mahamkali from UBS. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Hi, good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. I guess I've got three questions, please, if that's okay. First one is sugar. If you could just help us understand how much of the drop next year and the recovery year after in sugar EBIT, driven by the beet contracts versus obviously, sugar prices have been falling for a while, so we did know that. And you also talked about signs of supply and demand rebalancing. If you could just flesh that out to give it a bit more confidence on that rebalancing point, that's on sugar. Secondly, if you could just help us on Primark, second half price mix, volume, dynamics, and how we should think about it for FY 2025.
Thirdly, I think, George, you talked about cash generation being very strong and a key highlight, but I guess the question would be, you've announced GBP100 million incremental buyback. What held you back from potentially announcing a more fuller buyback plan for FY 2025? Admittedly, this is trading update, but it would be helpful to just hear your thoughts. Thank you.
Yeah, I think I might just handle the answer the last question first and just agree with what you said. It's not the time. A trading update isn't when we would typically announce the kind of shareholder returns.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think that's right. It's Eoin here, sure, you know, look, it's just a kind of a nice add-on, given the fact that we finished our buyback early. But we'll give a full and wholesome update in November, and it didn't feel right to do anything other than that, given it is a trading update.
If I turn to sugar, we are paying in the harvest that's about to begin, for the harvest we're about to begin, the same price, give or take, not much, forty quid as we did the year before. And so the profit decline really isn't about sugar beet prices going up. It's all about price of sugar coming down. For the year beyond, so beet that starts getting drilled in March, April 2025 for harvesting September, October 2025, we've negotiated a price much closer to GBP 33 per ton. Across, you know, that's not much shy of GBP45-GBP50 milion cost reduction for the following year.
It's what gives us confidence that the profitability of this business is gonna bounce back. The consequence of paying a very high sugar beet price, and growers and processors across Europe did the same thing, is that acreage has gone up. And it hasn't been helpful that at the same time that acreage has gone up, we're looking into a very good crop in terms of field yields. So supply has gone up because acreage has gone up, field yields have gone up, and then finally, quite 750 million tons of Ukrainian sugar entered the European market at the same time. The European market is oversupplied, and there's been a price reaction, which we knew would come.
We didn't think it was going to go as far as it did, but it's the best part of EUR 300 per ton has come off the price, and that's what's driving these price declines. It happened quite late in the year. It went further and faster than we thought it was going to do, both in the UK market and also in the Spanish. Do you want to talk, take the Primark price mix?
Yeah.
Question.
Yeah, look, I mean, as you know, we didn't have any price movement in the second half of this year, so the last price was in the first half of this year. We do have some mixed benefit in the second half. It's some of it's just kind of like what I'm gonna call good old-fashioned mix, right? You know, we just happen to sell some categories which are slightly higher priced categories than other categories. And then some of it's to do with the, you know, we have some higher priced items, like the collaborations, and some of the license activity as well.
So we'd expect the latter trend to extend into next year, Sreedhar. It's not material. It's like it's a kind of a subtle part of the proposition, if you will. But it's still kind of it sort of adds to the like for likes.
Got you. If I may just follow up. Is that part of your confidence in Primark margins for the year ahead, the kind of mix and stable gross margins?
... No, not especially. No, that's not really factoring into confidence on that. I think it's just more that there's a bit more stability, I would say. I mean, I know there's less stability in freight, and I'm sure we can come and talk about that. But apart from that, there's just a bit more stability, I would say, in most of the gross margin components. And as we've flagged a number of times, we are investing in our operating costs. So, but it's less, I would say. It's less about the mix point.
Thank you.
Thank you. We will now take our next question. Please stand by, and the next question comes from the line of William Woods from Bernstein. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking the questions. I've got three. The first one's obviously on the Primark margins. You're reasonably positive on the external factors into next year, but that you're investing in strategic initiatives to drive growth. Would you still see your kind of underlying store contribution margin increasing next year? And where are the strategic investments going? The second one's on the like-for-likes. They weren't great, but margins were reasonably strong. Why didn't you invest more to get growth in the half? Was it just that there you don't think there are any volumes out there, and the elasticity wouldn't be great? And then the final one was, I think store openings were a little bit weak, at 13, I think, in the half.
You've got to open, I think about eight or just under eighty to get to your 530 target by FY 2026. Do you see a big step up from just around 20 per year to around 40 per year over the next couple of years? Thanks.
On the store one, we'll get close enough to that five thirty. We know that you deserve a bit more clarity on where we go after the 530 But we think that we're gonna be there or thereabout. I think we've always got to be careful about the pace of-
Yeah
... non-like-for-like. I think we're pretty confident about the medium-term outlook for white space and like and non-like-for-like. But, you know, we're not gonna rush to open a store because of that, because of that target. So sometimes you're just gonna have, you know, slightly less active periods. But the underlying opportunity and the underlying pace of activity is still strong.
Going to your question about where the investments are going. It's in a number of different places. It's in product ranges, collections. There's good momentum in collaborations. We want to see more. There's good growth in licensing. We're putting more cost into the digital engagement, the website, the store checker, more paid marketing is working very well for us, the Click-and-Collect rollout. There's more refits going on now as we catch up on the freeze we put on them during COVID. That comes along with some incremental non-capitalizable costs, and then we're investing in the brand in two markets, in particular, Germany and the United States. Germany to improve brand perceptions and in the States to improve brand awareness.
Those are the big ones. There's some other IT non-capitalizable costs in there too.
Yeah. And I think that's where we think the store contribution, underlying store contribution comes from, Will. I think just your final point in terms of investing more, I just don't see. I mean, we're kind of, you know, we always reflect back and so on. I don't think we would have done anything differently. I mean, our price point positioning is strong, it's very good. You know, I think we're just fundamentally, you know, the period was sudden and, you know, we don't. We think a lot of our shoppers just didn't shop during that period of time. I'm not sure us investing would have made a huge amount of difference to it.
I'm sorry, I was just gonna follow up on the store margins piece. So you think that the underlying store margin will continue to expand next year, but you're choosing to invest some of that into other activities?
Correct. Correct, yeah.
Correct.
Correct, yeah. Yeah.
Correct.
Thank you.
No, I just wanted to reassure you that despite the wet weather, despite the fact that we haven't invested back into increasing sales, our stock levels are good.
Yeah.
We're in good shape going into autumn, winter.
Understood. Perfect. Thank you.
Thank you. We will now take our next question. Please stand by. And the next question comes from the line of Gary Martin from Davy. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Morning, all. Just a few questions from my side. Just maybe starting with Primark in the USA. I mean, it was a good performance just due to the uplift from the store rollout. But I guess, can we get a bit more insight into the trajectory of profitability in that region and how it's kind of pairing up relative to the overall group average? I mean, I know you'd mentioned that you know, store profitability was increasing into next year. It'd just be good to get a bit more color on that one. And then just secondly, just on the ingredients piece, I mean, it sounds like it was obviously a very solid year for FY 2024, but I guess looking at the FY 2025, what's the expectations there? Yeah, is there an expectation of continued improvement?...
I guess just as a further follow on, are you expecting any more, inorganic, investment in that particular, area of ABF? Thanks.
Yeah. So no new news on Primark USA. We're pleased with how the year has gone. We're pleased with the trading of the new stores. Particularly, we think we've got a good brand campaign running, thrilled by the opening of the second store in Florida, where we had 1,500 people queuing up. We're on a good track. Now, with only the number of stores we've got, I'm just repeating old news, the overhead absorption is less good than it is in more mature markets, but we're growing into our overhead at some pace. The ingredients, yeah, 25, we expect to see further improvement. We expect to see volumes continue to recover in specialty ingredients, perhaps particularly first half on first half.
And we'll let you know about inorganic investment. It's always been part of the toolkit for specialty ingredients, and it remains so, but we've got nothing more to say on it at the moment.
That's pretty helpful. If I could just actually have one additional question, just on the Primark side. I just thought it was interesting, on the statement, and in your prepared remarks, that you'd mentioned, your expansion into or your agreement with the GCC, just into expansion into the Gulf. I mean, can we actually get a bit more information around that and some of the moving parts and just the opportunity set there? Thanks.
Yeah. Okay. The partnership is with a well-established player in the Gulf called Alshaya, and we're excited by the potential in the Gulf. It's a big market. It's a market, quite frankly, that we're late to. We've been courted by players in the Gulf for years and years, but we'll see how we get on, which would be the answer I would give to entry into any new markets. We'll get on with finding the right sites and getting trading through Alshaya. I think it's evidence that the geographic rollout hasn't come to an end. It doesn't end in the US. There are plenty of new markets for us to go into. This is the next one.
I mean, and just one thing to add, on that, Gary, I mean, it's a franchise arrangement, so it is, it is our first franchise structure, so that's kind of obviously gonna be interesting. That's a pretty well-established brand in the Middle East, as you probably are aware. You know, we think the returns are attractive, and it obviously just gives us another interesting angle from an operating model perspective.
Excellent. Thanks so much. Good call. I'll pass it on.
Thank you. We will now take our next question. Please stand by. And the next question comes from the line of Richard Chamberlain from RBC. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Yeah, thank you. Morning, guys. I just got three quick ones, please, if that's okay. On the Primark margin outlook, I just wondered if you can give a little bit more color on the external factors, looking out to next year, how you're seeing those, you know, particularly freight, I guess, versus FX in the back half. Also, George, maybe you just wanna give a little bit more color on Illovo, how you're seeing the prospects for that business, particularly for the medium-term prospects for growth for Illovo.
And then anything more, I guess, on the U.S. grocery would be helpful, you know, how you're seeing the pricing there evolving and demand for, you know, Mazola and the other big the U.S. grocery brands. Thank you.
Okay. Let me pass over to Eoin on the margin outlook for Primark, and then I'll come back and do Illovo and-
I'll do it, too. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I think, I'm just trying to think kind of just broadly on external factors. So, let me deal with freight firstly. You know, obviously, freight volatility is a concern for everyone. I mean, I think we ... when we switched to going around the Cape rather than going through the Red Sea, things did stabilize, but it just does demonstrate that there's still a little bit of an inherent volatility, which you're seeing, particularly as people kind of ramp up for peak. So we are navigating through that.
We think we can kind of navigate. I mean, I don't want to use the expression, but we think we can navigate through it next year in such a way that it's not a material impact on our performance next year versus this year. So, but it's still higher than, you know, what it should be, if you will, because I mean, fundamentally, the cost of going around the Cape of Good Hope is higher, and also, I think, as you say, as we noted, it's a little bit of inherent volatility built in. But it's not something. It's something we're kind of taking on, and we're managing.
The FX. Actually, we get a tailwind. I mean, actually, it's really a tailwind into the first half of next year, and it evens up in the second half, and a second half of next year, just the way our hedging has gone, and obviously, you know, theoretically, you should get a benefit actually into the first half of FY 2026.
but, that, that's sort of the, that's where the way that the FX is working. And then just the only other, I mean, other external factors, just quickly, just to kind of cover them off, you know, it does feel like kind of raw material prices and, you know, and sourcing has kind of stabilized, you know, certainly from kind of the volatility of the last number of years. And Bangladesh, you know, for now, you know, is calmer. It will cause us a little bit of delay in terms of stock, but we don't think it's gonna have a material impact on sales. So I think they're all the external factors.
Right. Yeah. Thanks a lot.
Illovo then, we remain excited by the prospect of Illovo. I think there are sort of three sources or three reasons for that. The first one is we you know these markets are still growing both in terms of population and also in terms of consumption per head. So that's a kind of market situation. It's sort of unique. The second one is that we think there's a lot of self-help available to us. We can increase field yields. We know how to do that. We can improve factory performance. We think there's good profit potential in simply doing what we currently do better. We'll reduce costs. We'll increase availability of sugar.
And then the third one is that there are, yeah, there are any number of potential growth projects beyond what we currently do that we will judiciously look at. The first one is the expansion of sugar production in Tanzania, which will be done by sort of June next year. But we have opportunities to produce more bioethanol in Africa. We have the potential to produce more electricity to sell. There are other co-products, too. So there's just lots of different things that we can do, good places to deploy capital, but we'll do that carefully in a sustainable and sensible way.
The bit in the short run, I think I'm probably most excited by, is the self-help parts of getting the factories working better and getting cane growing better than it has been for a couple of years.
Got it. Okay. Thanks, George.
Sorry, and then US grocery. Great. US grocery, really good. Now, we said, Eoin said at the half year that we're expecting some of the Mazola margins to come off, and we're seeing that. Now, we're seeing them a bit less and a bit later. And I think the competitive positioning of that Mazola brand is stronger than it's ever been, so I'd expect margins to remain higher in the future than perhaps they would have been a couple of years ago. And then the bakery ingredients, our portfolio in the grocery business is really very good. We've recovered entirely from the COVID effect, and we've seen good increase in domestic yeast consumption as people continue to bake more bread at home.
That was a habit they got into in the States, like everywhere else, during COVID. Going across to Twinings, we're absolutely on a roll in Twinings. Very high single digit growth rate. Brand advertising, which absolutely works. Product development, which is doing really well. And trade collaboration, very strong as well. So Twinings, really, really good. And then finally, World Foods, which has been growing in double digits in that country, albeit from a low base, but we've seen another year of really good growth there in Patak's and Blue Dragon, and we expect more of the same in 2025. I think that covers most of the US grocery businesses.
Sure. Thank you very much. Thanks, George.
Okay. Thanks.
Thank you. We will now take our next question. Please stand by. And the next question comes from the line of Georgina Johanan from J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Hi. Thanks. Morning, everyone. I've got two very quick questions and then one sort of slightly longer question, if that's all right, please. The first one was just in terms of your comments on the sugar outlook, and I appreciate, you know, it can be slightly higher one year or slightly lower another. But just thinking about it from a modeling perspective, I think consensus is looking for about a 5% base contribution to Primark in fiscal 2025. Would it be sensible to understand from your comments that that should probably nudge down a little bit? That's my-
Yeah.
-first one.
Yeah, no. Just quickly doing that one. I'd nudge it down a little.
Yeah.
Not much, but not much. It's there, it's there or thereabouts, really, to be honest to Georgina. Yeah.
Thank you. Second one, just a clarification on freight. Appreciate that costs are kind of higher than those normal levels still, but for fiscal 2025, are you actually expecting your average freight cost to be higher than fiscal 2024? And how far through the year are you, like, locked in for? Like, how confident are you, and how much sort of visibility have you got on that?
... Yeah, we are expecting freight to be higher across next year than this year. I don't really wanna sort of go into sort of contractual sort of arrangements that we have, but suffice to say that, you know, we feel pretty confident with our current contractual arrangements for most of next financial year.
Thank you. And then just finally, just sort of appreciating your comments around, if I understood correctly, that you're sort of attributing some of those U.K. market share losses to kind of a kind of channel mix effect due to weather, effectively, which makes sense. But obviously, Click-and-Collect has been in place in a number of stores for some time now. That rollout's been extended, and perhaps doesn't seem to have helped over that period, therefore. Is that just because it's kind of still to be sort of fully rolled out? Or actually, does the experience in H2 perhaps make you reconsider whether Click-and-Collect is the right strategy? Just interested to hear your thoughts there, please.
No, nothing about the second half has made us reconsider the Click-and-Collect strategy. We know exactly what it's there to do. Essentially, it's there to drive people to our stores to be profitable in its own right, but also to drive profit into the attachment basket, but if people don't wanna come to the high street because it's raining or they're feeling a bit miserable about summer clothes, then whether it's Click-and-Collect or more traditional retailing, you know, it's not gonna happen, but we're delighted we've got it. It'll be a good part of the year 2025 before it's rolled out into all the U.K. stores.
Into this year, yeah, we've expanded Click and Collect into a number of stores, but we're probably only a third of the way through the rollout through the rest of the U.K.
Yeah. It's still not kind of up to scale, Georgina, to have the effect that, you know, that well, that we want it to have. It's just not like... Remember, they were trials. It wasn't even the full categories as well.
Yeah.
It was only London and the North West, so it, North West, sorry. So, and the rollout's only just really just be kicking in now, so.
That's helpful.
We didn't see anything. Yeah, sorry. Just to reassure you, we didn't see any significant movement in the metrics that we watch for Click and Collect, so nothing to affect the profitability of it going forward. So it remains the good thing, the right thing to do, but it suffered from weather, too.
Thank you. That's really clear. Just to follow up, if I may then, am I right in understanding, though, that you are attributing those market share losses to not having, like, a broader online offer because of kind of the weather? Or do you think there is some other dynamic going on in the UK market at the moment that perhaps adding competitive pressure a little bit?
I think the market for clothes in general has been soft. I don't think the UK consumer has recovered his and her confidence quite as quickly as we might have thought they were going to a few months ago. Weather then is the big bit. It drives the decision to economize on summer clothing and it drives people online. I've every confidence that both will improve as we get into 2025.
There's no other kind of dynamic that we think, like, you know, our price position is still very strong. We don't. We're not seeing sort of switching from to other players that of any significance. It appears during that period of time, a lot of our shoppers just didn't shop.
Super helpful. Thank you very much.
Okay.
Thank you. We will now take our next question. Please stand by, and the next question comes from the line of Warwick Okines from BNP Paribas Exane. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Thanks. Morning, everyone. Apologies, I've got three as well. Thanks for the puts and takes on the full year 2025 gross margin for Primark. Is it fair to interpret from your comments that the gross margin should actually be up a bit, and it's that which should mitigate the step up in investments that you're talking about? And that's the first one. Second one, on grocery, is your outlook that your absolute profits in millions should increase, or is the growth in sales that you expect being mitigated by or offset by margin weakness? And then thirdly, appreciate it's just a trading update, but any sort of comments on whether CapEx is rising in the year ahead be helpful as well. Thank you.
Okay. Look, in reverse order, for the fun of it, CapEx will rise a little, but not significantly. And the split between Primark CapEx and food will remain approximately the same, we expect. Grocery absolute profits, we expect to be off a little next year, largely on the back of Mazola profitability reducing from the very high levels where it's, we've enjoyed this year. And then I think that bread will step backwards a little, too. We had a contract to supply bread that one of our competitors couldn't supply after a fire. They're back up and running, so we lose a bit of volume there. And then in Kingsmill, Hovis, and Tesco's, we'll see that we've lost Kingsmill business in Tesco's on top of that.
We expect bakery to step backwards a bit, ACH to step backwards a little, good growth in the rest of the grocery portfolio globally. Yeah. Like, what that really means for kind of numbers work is that, like, as you see, we think we'll actually do a little bit better this year, largely because the kind of correction in US hasn't really happened until later in the year, if you know what I mean. But we wouldn't expect people to really change their numbers into next year that much. And then the question on them, on-
Gross.
On gross profit margins. A little bit better next year. As you say, and then we're gonna get, you know, the continued benefit of growth in terms of leverage, which all, you know, a combination of those two things offsets the investment in operating costs.
That's brilliant. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. We will now take our next question. Please stand by, and the next question comes from the line of Adam Cochrane from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Good morning, guys. Apologies, only two questions from me. Firstly, when you talk about the... I think the success of your marketing spend, both in Germany and the US, can you just give us any flavor around how you think that's going, what it's doing? And is there any scope for that marketing to be introduced into other markets if it proves to be more successful than you hoped to help Primark sales in other areas?
Secondly, I know you've talked that you're happy with where your price point is, but as you are seeing the mix impact, the movement to licensing products and things, is there any risk that the consumer is feeling like there's more expensive products in Primark, so it doesn't feel as good value for money, so on average, as they look at the store, rather than in absolute terms, maybe the pricing still is attractive? Thanks.
Yeah. Look, two very good questions. It's too early for the marketing analysts to have come back to us and said, "This is what the marketing campaigns have done." Anecdotally, Germany is good. The German performance this year has been one of our highlights. Is that connected to the marketing or to what extent has it been? We don't have a read on that. We'll have something to say in November. And in the States, it's only kicked off in the last couple of weeks. So again, much too early for that. Marketing is always gonna be targeted. I mean, we know...
We started in these two markets because we know we have a brand reputation issue in Germany, and we're trying to address it through marketing, and we know we've got a brand saliency issue in the States, and that's what the marketing there is for. We won't simply advertise for the sake of it or hope that it get drive sales wherever. We're always gonna be targeted. That's that question. Product perception of price, we're very alert to it. Paul, in particular, is very alive to it. We don't think that we've got an issue, but every time any of us go into a store, we do look to see what the windows tell us about who the store is for and what the layout tells us.
We know that the more that we succeed in selling high price points, higher price point, great value products under Rita Ora or The Edit or license, the more that we have to call out the fantastic fashion on the on the entry-level price points, and we and we do. In anticipation, because it was a good note that the Deutsche put out the other day, 85% of all our units are still under GBP 10 . So the reality is that we're not seeing. You know, we're very pleased with the performance of the high the higher price points and the expansion of the price architecture, but we remain still fundamentally a great value retailer for everyone.
But, you know, trust me, having seen other retailers lose their way in this very issue, we are all over it. But, we don't think that that has been what's driven the like-for-like, the disappointing like-for-likes in the UK. It's been weather.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. As there are no further questions, I would now like to hand back to George Weston for any closing remarks.
Thank you. In some ways, I'd expected you to give us both a harder time on sugar. It's very disappointing that the profit's going where it's going. It's gonna go for a short period of time, and then we've both got a lot of confidence that it's gonna bounce back again. Our Primark has really had a good year. For all that the U.K. has been wet and disappointing through the summer, Europe really good. The performance in Northern Europe very reassuring. The rollout in the States really good.
That continuation of good margins, which I remind us all that there was a disbelief that we could ever get back to these sorts of margins, and here we are, about to enter the second year of those sort of historic margins. So all good there. Lots of investment confidence, I think, in the balance sheet with the continuation of the buyback. And we feel great going into the next year, and you know, to put it slightly more crudely, we're pissed off about what's happened in sugar, but it remains both in Africa and also in Europe a good business. Over a five-year period we've made a lot of money and a lot of cash out of European sugar.
Now we've got a bad year, and then we'll be back on track again. Let me stop there, and we'll talk to you in November. We'll talk to you in November. Thank you.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Speakers, please stand by.