Everyone good? Okay. Well, welcome everyone. It's great to have everyone here in person and needing more chairs. A really good sign. Thanks for joining us this morning at what is our London creative hub, and there's quite a bit of investment gone into this. You'll have heard me say before that this is where we bring our products to life for customers through industry-leading storytelling. This here is our latest innovation on that journey as we convene hopefully some of the best talent across the market to explore how we take that concept to yet another level. We're of course doing this in conjunction with our global brand partners, and we're doing it in a really cost-effective way together.
The vision that I set at the beginning is that we will do to product information off the screen what Pixar did to the world of animated film when they launched Toy Story back in 1996. The truth of that is, as similar for them at the beginning of that journey, is that exactly what that means right now, how long it'll take or exactly what it will cost is actually a bit uncertain. This is the hub that we're investing in, and it's crucial to our journey to relentlessly make online a better way to shop electricals, explain product, and generally do everything on every metric better for customers. Our last update for the full year was only three months ago at the end of August. Today we intend to be pretty brief.
In fact, we expect this to be a reasonably uneventful update. The key messages are that sales are in line with where we guided, profit is around the top end of guidance, and our profit guidance is above consensus for next year. Quite a positive message. I'd like the rest of this presentation though to be, frankly, reassuringly boring, at least by our historical standards. Put simply, we're doing what we said we'd do. We're making solid progress with all the sort of strategic realignment goals that we set out at the full year results.
With that in mind, I'm gonna take you through that progress, then Mark's going to explain the financial output, and I'm sure you'll have all seen and have a copy of the RNS, then we'll take questions at the end. Looking at the sort of macroeconomic picture first. Even with the U.K. government's chaos and recent course corrections, and despite England comfortably winning their first game of the World Cup, you don't need me to tell you that the global economy is experiencing a dramatic slowdown, and that the consumer outlook is tough. The era of cheap money, rising house prices but low inflation and full employment despite low growth feel pretty well behind us. The disruption though, and the cost of COVID, feel firmly still with us. In the U.K., the cost of living crisis has been building since early 2021.
Consumer sentiment is weak. The economy is now in recession officially, I expect growth to stay negative for the rest of 2022 at the very least. Interest rates are rising, for the first time in years, The Bank of England is forecasting that inflation will be in double- digits for the remainder of 2022. Over time though, our core major domestic appliances category has proved to be resilient through various cycles, as you can see from this graph. We've been helped by the fact that it tends to be less discretionary than other categories, and a decent percentage of our sales are distressed purchases. In this calendar year, market movement data suggests that an exceptional 18% decline has happened in MDA volume. That's the biggest single year of decline in our 22 years in this market.
It's even meaningfully higher than we saw in the recession in the 2008/2009 period. Data providers suggest that the online market will marginally grow in 2023 and 2024, but will still fall short of that during COVID. In short, market conditions remain unpredictable and volatile, so the uncertainty we expected and we have planned for continues. Against that challenging backdrop, what are we doing? Well, back in August, I said that we were battening down the hatches ready for the storm that looked pretty clearly on the horizon, and I set out the immediate strategic actions that we were undertaking. As a reminder, they were, number one, a focus on cash and profit generation, primary lens. A simplification of our refocus across all operations of what we needed to do to achieve this. Number three, reduce our overhead.
Number four, to remove all international costs. The short-term consequence of this is a reset of our sales level. In the medium term, our ambition is to be a cash generative business, producing in excess of 5% of EBITDA and then kicking on and growing again at a rate of more than 10%. Well, in just a few short months, that approach has already proven to be a prudent one, and I've been really pleased with the buy-in to this and the approach across the business, and we're making steady progress against every one of those priorities.
In August, I said there would be parts of the business that we would consciously and deliberately remove as they no longer fit with the priorities through the new lens. For example, we chose not to roll out the partnership with Tesco, and we've ended our whole business in the house building sector. Actually, still firmly believe that both were attractive opportunities that over time could have contributed well and added scale to the group. Through the lens that I've set out, they don't fit with our focus on profit and cash generation in the short term. In fact, quite the opposite, both require meaningful investment in both P&L and capital, and both consume a lot of cash in the short term. We're also acting to ensure that every product we deliver contributes positively to our profit and cash focus.
As Mark will explain in more detail, the actions we've taken include range reviews and introducing things like delivery charges. We've removed pockets of sales, and we're reducing costs accordingly. It's improving profitability and cash generation. We believe that the long-term migration of customers to online will continue despite the COVID blip. Without a legacy store estate to distract us, this actually remains a significant growth potential for us over the medium and long term. Our sector-leading customer service proposition means we're continuing to see repeat customers across all of our categories. In terms of the cost reduction actions that we've taken, we've continued to identify and drive increased operational efficiencies over the past six months. This includes removing hundreds of thousands of sq ft of warehousing that we put in through COVID, rationalizing vehicles and reducing our office footprint as well.
We also continue to reduce our overheads. In the last six months through our lens of simplification, we've significantly reduced headcount, particularly in senior and middle management layers. Combined, these actions have significantly reduced our cost base going forward. We anticipate that we'll have removed about GBP 30 million run rate of overhead. Given a large element of this relates to our people, I'd like to publicly thank everyone in that process for the AO way that they went about it, because necessity doesn't mean at all that it's easy. We'll start to realize the full benefit of all those actions during the second half and fully into the next financial year. On Germany, ever since we decided to close our operations in Germany in June, we've been managing an orderly closure of the business.
Trading ceased on the 1st of July. Physical operations were largely closed about a month later. The main warehouse in Bergheim is now fully vacated and sublet to a new tenant. There's strong interest in the remaining two properties that we have for sale. We now expect total cash cost for the closure to be around zero against our original estimate of up to GBP 15 million. The majority of AOers in Germany have now left the business. I'm grateful for the professional way that they approached this difficult situation. I was really pleased that we've managed to help the vast majority to find new roles elsewhere. We've also mitigated the key risks. In true AO style, have reached amicable solutions to any challenges that we face with partners in the territory.
By March 2023, we expect to have materially exited Germany, and the small number of property leases and contracts that remain will wind down throughout 2024. In summary, the actions we're taking are yielding the results we expected, and I'm pleased with the progress that we've made. We've always been a well-oiled machine, we're now less complex and an even more efficient business as a result. We expect our EBITDA run rate to be about 5% in FY 2024. We will see the benefit of the actions that we've taken in the second half, this will mean that our profit for this year is around the top end of previous guidance. This excellent progress has not been achieved by accident, I'm really grateful for the hard work of all AOers over the last six months.
It hasn't been easy, but I'm proud of their commitment to delivering the plan. These are unquestionably tough times, but with over 20 years under our belts in this industry, this is not our first rodeo or indeed our first recession. Scale in our world matters, relationships matter, and they are not built overnight. I said during COVID that when our manufacturers were experiencing hugely challenging times and supply chains, that it was a time to deepen our relationships rather than exploit the situation for short-term profit. Well, that trust that we've built with the consistency with how we've done that over 22 years means that those relationships with manufacturing partners are now stronger than ever. I'd like, as ever, to publicly thank all of them for their support through this period in the moments that have really mattered.
As our industry-leading Net Promoter and Trustpilot scores show, we continue to amaze customers, old and new, through our obsession with treating them all like our gran and making our moms proud as a result. I am very proud that from our humble beginnings, we retain the title of being the UK's most trusted electrical retailer. Thank you for now, and I'll hand over to Mark. Without covering him in coffer.
Thanks, John. Good morning, everyone. It's good to get the COVID nonsense behind us and again, be together in person. Welcome everyone today. John's already been through the detail of our strategic focus for this year, and our medium-term objective continues to be a pivot towards cash and profit. The current economic landscape has clearly impacted this period. AO has tracked slightly behind the market with a 20% drop in sales, and this is as a consequence of the tactical decisions we've made to stop certain sales or improve profitability. We've also removed free delivery slots from the site, and that was at the beginning of August. This offsets the growing cost of logistics, given a growing realization with customers that deliveries aren't free.
We've been pleased with the reaction from our customers who see the value and the quality of the delivery service that we provide. We've accelerated our pricing structure development, particularly in newer categories that have been in the investment and growth phase over the past few years. As a result, very few products are now loss-making with the corresponding margin drag removed. We expect and are planning for this to reduce sales volumes. Following these operational changes and the pivot to profitability, we have delivered three-year growth of about 36% in the U.K. Gross margin has remained robust given the global inflationary pressures of the last six months. Maintaining margin this year, particularly, is as much about the actions that we've taken regarding what to stop doing or to charge more for as it is the usual actions around optimizing costs and sales prices.
Our operating model review has focused on two key criteria: Does it operationally fit with what we do well, and does it produce sufficient gross margin? Those that don't, we either have or will stop doing. We are optimizing the physical logistics network for current levels of sales, although shipping and driver costs remain elevated. We have a fixed price fuel agreement in place until February next year, and that mitigates the price volatility in a key variable cost line in our logistics operation. Our drive to profit has seen the business make a number of changes around the overhead structure. We continue to invest in acquisition, marketing, and brand, but we're no longer chasing sales into negative margins. We're reviewing our warehousing footprint to right size for our current logistics requirements. The management and operational simplification has led to a significant reduction in headcount and cost base.
That reduction, compounded with some limited hybrid working in the business, leads on to us reviewing our office space requirements, and we will continue to drive the cost base in line with sales with that laser focus that John mentioned on delivering EBITDA of 5% or more as we enter the new financial year. As we have worked on simplification, there have been a number of one-off costs that we've adjusted for in the period. These are associated with the discontinuation of the store trial with Tesco, termination cost of employees through the simplification program, and some ERP software provisions. These exceptional costs totaled about GBP 3.6 million, including about GBP 2.6 million of those in cash. Looking forward to H2, our continued review of overheads could lead to further asset impairments, particularly in our property footprint.
We have continued our focus on an efficient working capital model. Inventory levels have remained flat relative to sales, and we're happy with our current stock holding, although we'd maybe like a few more American fridges and PS5s. Global supply chains in our category are still not as efficient as pre-COVID, but the trend is definitely improving. Reductions in the levels of B2B stock as we exit those channels that John spoke about earlier mean we can do a bit more on general retail to protect customer availability. Debtors and contract assets have seen a small reduction since year-end. The focus on maximizing profitability in mobile has brought the asset down a little bit, and prepayments have fallen in line with revenue in the main retail business. Payables and contract liabilities have also both fallen since year-end in line with the reduction in revenue.
The working capital outflows we saw from peak trading in 2021 through to the summer of this year as our run rate reduced have now all normalized. We expect working capital to be fairly flat in the second half of the year. CapEx remains minimal in H1. In H2, we expect to buy the land that is currently leased for our main recycling site, and we'll fund that mainly through a commercial mortgage. Otherwise, again, CapEx will be very low in H2. Our RCF expires in April 2024, and we'll refinance that in the first half of 2023.
For the year ending March 2023, revenues, as we remove certain pockets of sales, are still expected to be at our guided range of GBP 1 billion-GBP 1.25 billion, with continuing Adjusted EBITDA now expected to be around the top end of our previously guided GBP 20 million-GBP 30 million. That's as we go through this pivot year. In the medium term, we're targeting Adjusted EBITDA margins of over 5%, we now expect to achieve this in our next financial year. We'll continue to focus on cash generation and again, in the medium term, we intend to deliver revenue growth of over 10%. In conclusion, we're making solid operational progress. The actions we are taking are delivering the results we expected. We continue to delight our customers, and our manufacturing partnerships remain strong.
I'd like to add my appreciation to John's for the hard work and focus of our AOers through this challenging period. Thanks again for coming today. It really is great to be back together in person. With that, we will take questions. We'll start with John from Peel Hunt.
Great. Thank you. Morning.
Morning.
Two questions to get us going, please. I guess, once upon a time, you know, World Cup and Black Friday were the first opposing mix. I don't know if you can sort of comment on where consumers are at the moment, any change in product credit penetration, that sort of stuff, and just sort of a general feel about how people are reacting. Then second question is on marketing. Obviously long-term growth depends on you sort of really driving share in those non-MDA categories. Can you talk about how you see, you know, medium-term marketing evolving and how you're going to break into those categories further?
If we take the World Cup, I mean, clearly we've been gripped by a dominating performance against Iran, which we should all think we're gonna win the World Cup now. I think there's a simple formula, the longer it goes on through the World Cup, the more TVs we sell. I think that's the way to think about it. From a Black Friday perspective, you know, Black Friday is a brilliant concept for consumers because it means that they can buy everything from a gifting point of view that they need for Christmas at discounted price rather than inflated prices or full prices. We're not seeing any great collision of the two that's creating any massive challenges.
Clearly we've planned through the lens that we've said that we wanna make cash and profit, not give everything away through that period. Hopefully that answers that. From a non-MDA perspective, again, we're looking at it through a profit and cash lens. You know, we're not just blindly chasing sales across those categories. Through our existing customer base, our growth and penetration in those categories is pretty consistent. Where we've pared back on that a little bit is in the marketing efforts of attracting newer customers, as the origination into those newer categories, that was frankly still in investment phase. We've pulled back on that.
That'll probably mean that the growth in those categories will be slower, but we're relaxed about that.
I mean, do you see the percentage, if you like, of marketing shifting over time, or are you happy where it is and you're happy to look at lower acquisition activity?
I think we're pretty happy macro where it is at the minute, yeah.
I think for now where it is, yeah.
Yeah.
Dave?
Morning. David Madden, Barclays. David, a couple of questions, if I could please. One for John. John, I wonder if you'd maybe expand on your perception of the Black Friday event in 2022. I guess it's never been particularly loved by most retailers. Do you see it declining in volume this year, or do you think it's gonna continue to grow and grow as an event?
I think the retailers that don't love it, I wouldn't count us as one of those. We're all about delivering incredible value for customers, and I think Black Friday does that at a time that people wanna buy stuff. If you're a retailer that sits in a golden quarter and makes all your profit out of customers that need to buy stuff for Christmas, and then you reduce the price after Christmas, I think it's quite problematic. From our perspective, we think it's a great phenomenon. I think that what's changing over time about it is the shape of it. It was an extremely big spike, and that's flattening out more. Black Friday is now more known as November.
It's how do we deliver that value for customers, but do it brilliantly. If you have such an accentuated spike around a few days, then it's impossible to do that from a logistics planning perspective, and it's both from a quality and cost-effective perspective, and the two very much go hand in hand. What we've been working on is thinking much more from an airline perspective of, right, we're gonna set ourselves up around an amount of capacity, but it's not an infinite amount of capacity. It is very much more a kind of when the capacity's gone, it's gone. You know, when the Ryanair plane is full, Mark's not gonna put another plane on just 'cause you wanna book another four seats.
It's about how do we drive the profitability within those seats as well, where do we lean our marketing efforts within that? It won't surprise you to know that doing promotional coffee machines at GBP 39 is not an area we're gonna get particularly rich on. It's a part of the mix. Of course, it is.
Mm.
It's a part of the promotional calendar, but it's not what we wanna be filling all the seats up with. I think just focusing more intellectually on, through a profit and cash lens, how we fill those seats up and how we make the most of the opportunity that is definitely present in that period.
Got it. Thanks. Super helpful there. Mark Higgins, could you just give us a bit of color around the exceptional cost around the ERP project? You know, what happened there? And.
Yeah. So, you know, of our exceptional charges, the biggest element by far was the people restructuring costs. There were some small charges around some write-off of some software licenses that it doesn't look like we'll use in the in the short term. We were obviously looking at a big bang ERP implementation last year, which we've paused indefinitely. As part of that, there was some licenses we paid for that we no longer require.
Got it. Got it. Thanks.
Tony next 'cause you're right there.
Okay. Tony Shiret from Panmure Gordon. On sales, one question on sales margin and gross margin. Can you tell us what MDA sales decreased by within product revenue line? Could you also, on sales, tell us what your inflation was in terms of MDA and in total? That's a sales question. Can you sort of take us through the sort of non-movement of the gross margin? 'Cause I presume there's gonna be some volume-related payments that you didn't get. I don't know how you look at it, but if you could give us some sort of categories within the overall movement of gross margin to give us a bit more insight into what actually happened.
Okay.
You know what? I can do any or all of those.
Do you wanna do the first? Well, I mean, I'll take the last one first, which is the fact that sales have stepped back has not created. We're working really closely with manufacturers such that we don't drive dysfunctional behavior around that. That's not an issue within the mix. The rest of it, I'll.
Yeah. MDA sales, you know, we are still very, very driven by MDA sales, Tony, I think you can, you know, close enough our top line movement in sales is representative of MDA. The sort of the direction of travel of the top line is similar for the category. It's so big for us I don't think there's a meaningful difference. In terms of the mix of what's going on in gross margin, you know, sorry, I'll take the inflationary point. Inflation, we're probably seeing price inflation running at about 7%, something of that region. Taking the mix of gross margin, we've obviously seen sort of a number of bits go in there.
You've got the inflationary pressures that we're seeing in logistics particularly. Towards the end of the period, we've improved our delivery charging somewhat, but that is right at the end of the period for the first half. We've also then got some mix effects, so we probably skewed slightly more towards MDA than we were in the prior period, which is, you know, is helpful generally towards margin. It's the basket of those things. Actually a lot of the actions that we've taken around, you know, whether it's action on affiliates, whether it's action on charging customers for delivery, most of that's happened right at the end of the first half, so there's not a lot of impact actually in those numbers.
Okay. In terms of the inflation, 7% sales price inflation, is that sort of roughly the cost price inflation as well?
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, I think on, and on the inflationary point, we've seen that go into the market faster than ever, on the basis that nobody sat around with that margin being able to absorb it. As those price increases have come through from manufacturers due to their own input costs, explode quicker than ever into consumers.
Sorry to keep talking. In terms of the trend, are we currently 7% or are we currently 3% or 10%? Is it going up or down?
Well, it.
Tends to stick.
It tends to stick. You know, and it's also dependent on exchange rates and so, you know, we were mindful that there was likely to be another batch coming through in January. As it stands now, I think there's a bit more of a wait and see given the sort of the strengthening of the pound versus the dollar in recent weeks.
Hughes from Stifel. In terms of the input costs.
Thank you.
Shipping freight rates look like they're down around 70% year- to- date.
Mm.
How much of that are you seeing coming through versus how far out have you booked in your kind of shipping rate? Or when would you expect to start to see a benefit coming through from that?
Yeah. In line with sort of all of the U.K. electrical retailers, we pretty much buy everything in a U.K. landed price from the U.K. subsidiaries of the global brands. You know, we all buy from Samsung U.K. in GBP in the U.K., actually that sits in the books of Samsung rather than us. That'll be partly to do with the increase in input prices that we're seeing, partly reflects the raw materials, but also shipping and the interest rate, sorry, exchange rates all sit effectively in the suppliers' books, and it's consistent for electrical retailers in the U.K.
We don't have an OEM business where we'll own the brand and take control of all the shipping and everything that goes through, so it's not a part of our business of any materiality. Simon?
Morning. It's Simon Bowler from Numis. You're very clear on your EBITDA margin expectations for next year. I just wanna touch on a couple of bits that really kind of sit below the cash flow perspective. In terms of kind of CapEx, clearly kind of running at quite low levels this year, is there any reason to expect your kind of midterm CapEx needs are gonna be beyond what we're seeing in this year in terms of how you're thinking about the system? I think that's just the bits to notify.
With our sort of simplifications strategy, we intend to keep CapEx at pretty low levels moving forwards.
Okay, cool. Then with regards to your rental/leasing costs, how much further is there to come out of that bill as you go through, you know, first of all, we can see in the first half, you've done with the cash flows, a meaningful step further down as you sort of lease and exit further properties or are we closer to a runway?
I think that there may be some small improvements to come in H2, and then there is probably a question around it. It'll be a balance between other income, and there might be some incremental other income that offsets some of that, or there will be some to come out, and that's a bit of a debate that's still ongoing. There's probably one property, one warehouse that will either see some additional other commercial income offsetting it or actually that cost coming out, but it's one warehouse I think that's up for debate. Do you wanna just do the.
Thanks. Alan Thomson from [audio distortion]. Just the first question is around online versus stores. You mentioned in the statement the continued structural growth in online. I'm just sort of thinking about the market going down 9% online when down 18% suggests some swing back towards stores there. I'm just wondering if you could talk about that and any data points you're actually seeing that give you confidence in that structural growth with regards to online continuing.
Yeah. I think what we're saying is that the COVID's a blip, clearly, for blindingly obvious reasons. If you take the overall trend, the overall trend is still towards online. We would expect online to be more down than total given that it's correcting as you come out of COVID. That's the point that we're making, that is despite that, the overall trend is still one towards online.
In terms of the overall trend, what are the sort of data points that you can see to support that?
Yeah. I mean, as well, I mean, it's, you know, we look at GfK data on a pretty regular basis, you know, as we've said, we can clearly see the blip of COVID where it went massively up and then it's come backwards. There's still a big step change between pre-COVID and post-COVID sort of, you know, the live data that we have on a weekly and monthly basis is suggesting that the trend has now normalized, you know, and it's our expectation, is that the, you know, the online shift, you know, in the medium term will continue.
Thanks. Second question is, you've covered sort of the restructuring so far and rationalization of staff there. In the context of the value creation plan that you've been outlined, can you just talk a little bit about underlying staff turnover and things you can do there around staff retention, particularly for late market acquisition?
For me, that's just the business as usual stuff that we would do around culture. Clearly, we've taken a lot of cost out of the business, so, you know, it's been a disruptive time in the business for that and, but we're through that now. You know, any concerns that people might have around that, you know, if you're on the bus now, you're on the bus and you're coming on the journey with us. As we've said, a lot of the cost has come out of senior and middle management as well. You know, the rest of that question is very much business as usual around different areas of the business, and we don't go into it in that level of micro detail there.
Yeah. We firmly see the reset of the value creation plan as being key to, you know, retention of great staff for, you know, the next five years or more.
Okay. just the final one is, anything you're seeing around warranty customer acquisition, just behavior there?
No. Acquisition rates, you know, remain very consistent with the long-term trend. In terms of cancellation, you know, there's some notes in the back of the accounts, but in terms of cancellation rates, you know, we've seen customers be very sticky actually, at the moment as that product, you know, particularly when consumer finances are squeezed, you know, is very important to people that they've got that. Those who want that protection have got it in place, to replace that washing machine when they might not have the cash to do so.
Thanks.
Great.
Andy?
Thanks. Andrew Wade from Jefferies. Just one from me. You implemented delivery charging or charging for delivery, should I say. Just interested as to what we can see what your sort of major competitor has done. Be interested if you can just talk about what market reaction has been to that. Have others followed? Have others held their position? How that's played out in terms of immediate market share impact.
I think there's been a different reaction across different competitors and, you know, you highlight, sort of major reactions. From our point of view, what we've been most pleased with is the demonstration in the resilience that you can see in the top line sales number, is that, actually, the best way for you to understand the difference of AO is to shop with us. Because you experience it. People don't wake up in the morning thinking the way that they buy electricals is a problem. Our low frequency of purchase in that is inherently, if you like, a structural disadvantage relative to people who have much broader ranges.
For me, this is a demonstration of the fact though, that 10 million customers in our base that have shopped with us, understand that we deliver 10,000 orders a week absolutely brilliantly and we impress them. When we're charging for that, they believe that that is a price worth paying for the quality of service that we deliver. We believe over time that that will be the direction of travel for the market. You know, we've been really, really pleased with the customers' reaction to that decision to charge for that.
Thanks.
Any more? Tony.
Yeah, just a bit more detail, please. Just wondered if you could tell us about the sort of trends in terms of what people have been buying. Have they been trading down? Can you tell us what the ASP is year- on- year in MDA? You referenced sort of deep relationships with brands.
I just wondered if you had any sort of changes in brand use, or change in the weighting of the brands that you sell when you consolidate your supply base, anything like that , that's it?
From an ASP point of view, without getting into the micro detail, it's actually increased slightly. What we're actually seeing, driven largely, I think by the energy crisis, is customers migrating more towards more energy efficient products, and more energy efficient products tend to be slightly more expensive. Customers are making that conscious investment to buy a slightly better product for an energy saving over the life of that product. You got to remember that we sell predominantly into an ABC customer demographic, and so that choice, even in a spending squeeze, that choice is still one that's available to the majority of our customer base.
I think that's actually been quite positive, and I think the energy crisis has driven, that innovation and that change and that adoption faster than it would've ever happened. From a brands' perspective, I don't think there's any massive call-outs other than, you know, the rise of, the brands from the Far East, particularly China, and how aggressive they are about taking share in the market, whether that's through acquisition of brands or the way they're going about trading, is a definite trend of them increasing their influence, both through investment in marketing, and support for the business. Any further questions? Great. Okay. Okay.
Well, so to finish for me, the, you know, the message that I'd like everybody to take away is that clearly, you know, we said we were gonna do some stuff, and we are doing it, and we're getting on with it. Most of it is not actually reflected in these results and will come in the second half and next year. You know, we're getting on with what we said we would do and it's working, and that is manifesting itself in the results and the outlook that we're giving going forward. We're feeling pretty good about it. Thank you very much for making the effort to come in person. All right. Thanks, everyone.