Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our H1 results presentation. Back in October, we discussed how in the previous 12 months we've been focusing on strengthening the foundations for growth at ASOS. Restated our ambition and mission to be the world's number 1 destination for fashion-loving 20-somethings, and how the ASOS brands, the ASOS platform, and the ASOS experience will drive that ambition. Today, we set out our results and strategic progress for the last six months, and we're going to share some learnings with you. Let me turn to the key results during the half. We've had an exceptional first half, with record PBT, which was more than three times greater than last year. Even when adjusting for the COVID tailwinds, this has meant we have delivered double the profit we landed in H1 last year.
We reported strong retail sales growth of 24%, with the U.K. delivering outstanding growth of 39% year-on-year. The U.S. market delivered solid growth of 16%. The EU grew 18%, and the rest of world grew by 16%. We've added 1.5 million active customers in H1, and we've seen strong momentum on visits, particularly in the U.S. and in Germany. We ended the half with a positive net cash position of GBP 92 million, after paying out GBP 266 million for the brand acquisition last month. During the period, we also successfully acquired and integrated these four brands into the ASOS venture brand stable. We did both the acquisition and the integration in an exceptionally short space of time, with the customer relaunch taking place just three weeks after closing the deal.
We're also progressing well for our 100-day integration plan, with more work to do on team structures, key processes, and the supply base. I thought it was worthwhile reflecting on the last 12 months, and what we've learned and sharpened during that time. You don't need me to point out the unprecedented disruption throughout the world from the pandemic and the economic consequences. In terms of our market sector, the shift to e-commerce has created a huge tailwind for ASOS, but the social restrictions have also created a headwind for us. Obviously, much of our product is tailored towards going out, buy now or wear now occasions. Either way, it's created a huge shift in the product demanded by our customers, and our people have pivoted quickly to meet that need. The ASOS's resilience, commitment, creativity, and passion has always been remarkable, and a source of delight to me.
Over the last 12 months, they've really shown up again and blown us away time and time again. Their commitment, resilience, and professionalism has been unparalleled during a time when their lives have been turned upside down. This year will have taken its toll on the mental health of all our people. We're working hard on this with them. Out of necessity, we have built greater agility into our business model, our organizational decision-making, and the mechanisms that we use to manage and run our business. This is most tangible in enabling us to pivot our product offer at short notice, while also delivering enhanced product width in activewear, casual wear, and face and body. We have literally stress-tested the resilience, capability, and flexibility of our tech, our operations, and our processes. We're delighted with the strong operational grip and execution discipline that's resulted.
Lastly, the significant disruption over the last 12 months has forced us to metaphorically rip up the playbook and rethink and refocus on what we do and how we do it. This process has driven more innovation and we've explored new ways of doing business that we are convinced will ultimately improve our business model and we will have built a more robust business overall. I'd now like to hand over to Mat, who will take you through the detailed financial performance.
Thanks Nick. Good morning, everyone. Let me start by briefly taking you through our key financial metrics. We delivered total sales growth of 24%, with revenue just below the GBP 2 billion mark for the half year. We saw improvements in growth rates in both the U.K. and EU in P2, with the U.K. in particular posting an exceptional 46% growth as we capitalized on our strong position in our home market. Gross margin stepped back by 200 basis points in the period, driven largely by COVID-related factors, which I'll take you through in more detail shortly. In terms of profitability, we are now showing adjusted measures, which adjust for one-off items relating from the acquisition of the Topshop brands, as well as any resulting amortization, and as a result, are more representative of underlying performance. Adjusted EBITDA also excludes non-cash share-based payments in line with our peer set.
We saw a marked step up in Adjusted EBITDA margin to 9.2%, which represents 320 basis points of margin expansion. This reflects strong cost discipline and operational grip, as well as the profitability benefit we've seen from lower returns rates associated with COVID-related consumer behavior. We delivered record adjusted PBT for the half, and even after adjusting for the COVID-related tailwind of GBP 48.5 million, it's still double what we posted in the first half of last year.
To date, we've spent GBP 64.7 million of CapEx, with the majority of our investments geared towards the TGR rollout, the completion payments for the automation of Eurohub, our new fulfillment center in Lichfield, and additional tech infrastructure projects aimed at improving our overall customer experience. Lastly, we ended the period on a net cash balance of GBP 92 million, after the investment of GBP 266 million into the Topshop brands, and after the anticipated working capital unwind that we outlined at year-end. Turning now to gross margin and warehousing and distribution costs, which I'd like to take a moment to unpack. As I mentioned, gross margin stepped back by 200 basis points in the half. The continued growth in lockdown categories, with face and body showing exceptional growth of over 100%, and activewear and casual wear growing by 95% and 69% respectively, continues to drive unfavorable mix.
As you will all know, we see the corresponding impact in returns benefit in distribution and warehouse costs with a lower returns rate associated with these categories. We've also seen our freight costs remain elevated, largely as a result of COVID-related supply disruption across air freight and sea freight, and associated rate increases. We have managed to mitigate a portion of these heightened costs, given the extent of the inflation, we still see an overall impact on our gross margin. Gross margin was also impacted by foreign exchange. We've called this out for the first time, given the substantial strengthening of the pound in the first half of the year.
In line with many companies, we net hedge FX, taking into account both sales and costs, and as a result, we typically see FX impacts associated with the strengthening of the GBP hit gross margin with any associated hedging benefits sitting in operating costs. Together, these impacts account for a reduction in gross margin of 260 basis points. Excluding these impacts, and on an underlying basis, we have seen our gross margin increase, largely as a result of improved buying margin. Conversely, warehousing and distribution costs both saw substantial improvements as a percentage of sales, benefiting significantly from our lower returns rate profile. Overall, COVID-related net benefits had a 70 basis point favorable impact on warehousing costs and 190 basis point favorable impact on distribution costs.
Distribution costs were also impacted by adverse outbound freight, particularly in our rest of world markets, whilst underlying warehousing costs also benefited from the productivity improvements associated with the automation of Eurohub. The GBP 48.5 million benefit we disclosed in relation to COVID consists of the cost benefits seen in warehousing and distribution and the adverse inbound and outbound freight I have mentioned here. Having covered gross margin distribution and warehousing costs, let me briefly cover marketing and other operating costs. Last year, during the initial COVID lockdowns, we reduced our marketing investment to allow us time to pivot our business in response to COVID restrictions without further stimulating demand. As a result, we reduced our marketing investment in FY 2020 to 3.7% of sales versus our usual investment levels of around 4.5%.
In this half, we've actively reinvested back into marketing to capture demand, and we expect marketing investment to remain elevated in the second half of the year as we continue to invest behind our growth in the U.S. in particular. However, we still anticipate that our long-term run rate will be similar to historic levels. Other operating costs showed significant improvement as a percentage of sales, reflecting the hedging benefits I spoke about earlier, which partially offset the impact in gross margin, but also improved due to our efforts on non-strategic costs. I spoke to you last year about our business-wide approach to removing non-strategic costs, and we continue to drive these out wherever possible whilst looking for further areas of opportunity. As a result, whilst we've already benefited from many of the quick win opportunities, we do continue to see substantial further opportunity.
As a result, whilst we don't expect non-strategic cost removal to continue at the same pace as we saw in 2020, we do continue to expect improvement. Key benefits in the half have been driven by focusing our marketing investment on more efficient channels, further alignment of our structures, including improvement in average spans and some delayering, along with some targeted capability investment, centralized procurement activity, and increased efficiency across our returns, product reprocessing, and customer care processes. Our overall cost base has also continued to benefit from the annualization of the benefits associated with the automation of Eurohub. In time, we would expect to see similar benefits in our U.S. warehouse given the investment we have commenced there. We've also begun investing into lean capabilities with an initial focus on our supply chain.
I'm now going to take you through our performance by territory, starting with the U.K., where our performance has been outstanding. We believe our results in our home market reaffirm the strength of our customer proposition, which has allowed us to capitalize on the acceleration in online retail penetration we have seen. Turning to Europe, where we continue to deliver strong growth, particularly in France. Germany also saw good results, especially when non-essential retail closed towards the middle of the half. As referenced previously, we benefited particularly where there were restrictions on both hospitality and retail, as opposed to geographies where retail was open and hospitality was shut, where we saw more muted growth. However, particularly pleasingly, we have seen in France our growth rate sustain even with the resumption of non-essential store trading.
In the U.S., we posted pleasing growth of 16% for the half, despite our higher exposure in the region to going out wear, with ASOS DESIGN overindexing in the mix. We continue to focus on improving our stock profile in the U.S., although port processes made this more challenging in the latter part of the half. The overall stock profile was further supplemented by the first phase of our flexible fulfillment rollout, which augmented the stock pool and drove additional availability from our warehouse in Barnsley. We continue to invest behind growth in the U.S., both to improve our relative awareness in the market and also to ensure our pricing remains competitive. We hope that the U.S. will be a particular beneficiary of the resumption of demand for going out wear given our Skew in the market. We have seen some very early signs of this in recent weeks.
Lastly, in rest of world, we saw growth of 16%, with 5% growth in our active customer base. ABV grew by 10% as we shifted delivery thresholds to support our basket economics in the face of COVID flight disruption. We saw the impact of this with a step back in orders of 2%. Particularly pleasing was the fact that we've delivered strong double-digit growth in Australia year-on-year, despite significant disruption to our delivery proposition. Russia, however, declined, reflecting the continuation of weaker market conditions and aggressive competition. Turning now to our customer base across all markets. We've grown our active customer base by 12% to 24.9 million customers. Within this, we have seen an increase in churn rates, with low frequency occasional wear shoppers dropping out of the base as a result of the lack of event-led reasons to shop.
However, we've also seen strong customer engagement amongst our most loyal customer base, as well as promising dynamics from customers newly acquired during lockdown. Turning briefly to cash flow, where our strong profitability has translated through to free cash flow, despite the anticipated working capital impact of GBP 133.6 million outflow, which included the GBP 89 million working capital unwind that we referenced at year end. Our cash CapEx investment of GBP 60.6 million spans investment in TGR, the commencement of the fit-out of the fourth fulfillment center in Lichfield, and our continued investment in tech transformation and our customer experience. Overall, we retained a net cash position following the Topshop acquisition. Turning our attention now to where we expect our outlook to land.
I wanted to start by going through what we have seen in terms of customer behavior over the past six to 12 months and where we expect it to go in the immediate future. We have consistently seen lower returns rates over periods of strict lockdown as consumers look to limit their returns through a more deliberate purchasing dynamic, as well as a shift into casual and activewear products and face and body, all of which have lower returns rates. Given the likely easing in restrictions in many, if not all territories in the months to come, as we look forward, we do expect returns rates to normalize as vaccine rollouts proceed at pace and social restrictions lift. Associated with this opening up, we do expect a shift back towards going out and occasion wear, a shift which we are well-placed to capitalize on.
We have seen going out wear step back as a proportion of our product mix by nine percentage points. As we gear up for the summer and as social restrictions look set to lift, we expect the demand for occasion wear to return, albeit perhaps not back to historic levels. Looking now at overall demand, we know that 2020 accelerated the underlying shift to online, whilst we expect some of this demand to return to more traditional offline channels, we don't expect the shift back to be as significant, with the demand for online retail stabilizing somewhere between 2019 and 2020 levels. You can see, there are both positive and negative impacts for us as we look forward to a more normal trading environment. Many of these we are excited about as long-term opportunities which will benefit our business.
In the immediate term, as a result of these expected consumer shifts, we expect a much more muted impact from COVID in the second half of the year. Whilst we expect returns rates to normalize, the timing of this is uncertain, with the outlook on social restrictions changing almost weekly. However, we don't foresee any material changes to freight rates, even with the lifting of restrictions in the short term, and as a result, expect them to remain elevated for the remainder of the year with a double-digit pound million cost impact. As a result, whilst we have positioned ourselves to capture event-led growth, we remain cautious on the short-term outlook. Despite this short-term uncertainty, we will continue to focus on the global opportunity available to us and are set to invest deliberately behind the U.S. and Europe in both the short and medium term.
Taking all of these factors into account, we have increased our outlook to reflect our strong performance in the first half, whilst leaving our expectations on sales and profit for the second half unchanged. As we've done throughout the last 12 months, we will keep you updated as things evolve and become more certain. I will now briefly cover some more specific pieces of guidance. Firstly, when we announced the acquisition of the Topshop brands, we guided you to expect roughly GBP 20 million worth of one-off integration and acquisition costs. Having made strong initial progress, we now expect these costs to be in the region of around GBP 10 million. We will also have amortization arising from the transaction, with GBP 6 million being incurred this year, which we expect to be about GBP 11 million on a full year basis going forward.
On an underlying basis, we are still retaining our approach to Topshop performance for the year, with any sales uplift being reinvested back to be EBITDA neutral for the remainder of the year. Our Brexit guidance remains unchanged, as does our cash flow expectation. We still expect free cash flow to be positive in the second half, and we retain our CapEx guidance of GBP 190 million. As I mentioned at the beginning of my presentation, we've adopted adjusted measures going forward to better demonstrate underlying performance and aid comparability following the acquisition. We will continue to use these going forward in our presentations and in guiding the market where appropriate. We will adjust for any material one-offs as well as for acquired amortization with the aim of giving a clear view of underlying performance and momentum.
Any adjusting items will be clearly called out, so you as analysts and investors can include or exclude whatever you choose. Lastly, I'm excited to announce that 2021 will mark the return of a broader series of capital market events at ASOS. We will be hosting a series of events throughout the year, kicking off on the 20th of April with an event showcasing our market leading design capability. The event will be focused on our ASOS brands and introduce you to the retail team with a fuller update on our broader business progress plan for the late summer. I will now hand you back to Nick to take you through an update on progress against our strategic priorities.
Thank you, Mat. Building on the strategic framework, you'll remember that I took you through these five priorities in detail at the year-end. Against the volatile backdrop of constant change and uncertainty we're living through, these priorities have continued to guide our business, guide our business decisions, and guide our allocation of resources. Coupled with the ASOS purpose, the ASOS vision, and ASOS values, they serve as our true north. Today, I want to show you some key areas of progress, which have helped deliver the results in the short term and will continue to drive the delivery of our growth ambitions into the medium and long term. Firstly, I'm thrilled to announce we're finally live with TGR. TGR is our new software management platform for end-to-end product management. Our teams have worked tirelessly on TGR. We conducted a full dual run for six months, starting in September.
This was to identify any potential gremlins, and we launched it in eight phases over a five-week period, starting on the 20th of February and culminating a successful launch across the business a couple of weeks ago. TGR is an internal enabler to support our growth ambitions, and through this rollout, we've essentially delivered a seamless rewire of our entire internal architecture. The new tools and processes will allow us to restructure the way we plan, the way we trade our products, so we can offer the best choice to our global customer. More accurate, more relevant, more timely information will enable better and faster decision making too. The improved visibility of our stock pool management and inbound planning will give us better visibility for our forward-looking product offer at each of our multiple fulfillment centers.
The system design overall will support better local pricing flexibility across each of our markets around the world. In a nutshell, TGR completely revolutionizes our internal systems to enable us to operate and trade at pace on the global scale. Building capability in tech and logistics is critical for a high growth business in our sector. We announced at the year-end we'll be opening a new warehouse in Lichfield to support our U.K. and rest of world territories. The first phase of this will be operational by the end of this financial year. Lichfield will initially be launched as a manual facility with a total stock holding of 6 million units. Over the next two years with the phased automation we have planned, it will nearly triple this capacity.
We are currently in the design phase for the U.S. automation in Atlanta. We expect the full launch to take place in the H2 financial year 2023, and this will double our throughput. Make no mistake here, we have very ambitious plans for ASOS. By creating this capacity well ahead of time and building on the solid operational tech platforms in our existing sites, we anticipate these projects will expand our throughput capacity by a further GBP 2 billion in net sales over the next two years to over GBP 6 billion throughput capacity. Our second priority, focus on growing our unique ASOS brands. This new and enhanced ASOS brand architecture, which includes our recently acquired brands, Topshop, Topman, Miss Selfridge, and HIIT, is a really cool lineup of brands that are loved by fashion-loving 20-somethings globally.
I'm going to talk a little bit more about the Arcadia brand acquisition now. The ASOS deal team completed this acquisition in six weeks, beating others predominantly at the high level of confidence that was placed on our deliverability and our ability to move and integrate fast. We had a clear 100-day plan that was prepared prior to the completion of the deal to ensure we prepared for a seamless integration of these brands into our business. As I said at the time, we were almost able to drop these brands onto the ASOS platform. Three weeks after the acquisition, we relaunched the brands with a full digital and social media campaign under the customer messaging, Same Icons, New Home. This is our first significant acquisition and integration, and I'm proud of the approach, the speed, and the commitment displayed throughout this process.
We're also making great progress against our milestones set out in our 100-day integration plan. One area that's been new to us have been the existing Topman, Topshop partner program. We reviewed this strategy and trimmed the number of partners in line with our guiding principle of fewer, better, and more digital. We're also delighted to continue to be trading with Nordstrom, Zalando, YOOX NET-A-PORTER, and Global Fashion Group, with initial conversations underway with some other partners in key territories for us. You remember us discussing, in particular, the Nordstrom relationship, which continues to build. We're very excited about this, and we're in the process of developing a powerful partnership that will drive growth for both of us in the important North American market.
It's still early days on the acquisition. I'd like to give you a quick peek in some of the performance stats post the full customer relaunch on the ASOS platform. After the relaunch date, which was the 23rd of February, we saw site traffic to these brands increase by 226% year-on-year, remained on this level for the remainder of the month. We're seeing strong sales growth of triple digits across Topshop, Topman, and the HIIT brands since relaunch. Have seen phenomenal success with two campaigns run across the U.K. and North America with a reach of over 200 million and almost 3 billion video views, we're really thrilled with the early results. From a regional perspective, sales growth has behaved as we expected, with strong growth in the U.K. and Germany, exceptionally high growth rates in the U.S.
We knew from our data that these brands resonated well with the 20-something customers, especially in the U.K., in Germany, and the U.S. We're really pleased to see this translate into strong sales growth and sales momentum in line with our expectations. ASOS DESIGN category has always been dominated by a strong fashion product offer with going out gear and going out-out gear. This category struggled through lockdown. We quickly pivoted the product offer to meet the change in customer demand. As the chart on the left shows, if you back out going out gear, ASOS DESIGN delivered 24% growth year-on-year, which underlines the flexibility and resilience shown by design and buying teams to react and pivot to the changing customer trends.
Over this half, we've seen a continuation of these trends towards casualization with going out wear continuing to move back in our product mix. As social restrictions reduce in some of our key territories, we're preparing ourselves for the return of going out wear. We expect this will be led by day wear first, and then evening wear later down the line. We still expect this recovery in these categories to be dependent on the social restrictions in place in each territory, so this recovery will have some continued uncertainty. During this uncertainty, flexibility will be vital for us. To enhance this flexibility, we've been focusing on optimizing our short lead time routes, upweighting our share of short lead time products, and increasing our proportion of Open to Buy in these product areas. You'll remember me discussing the forthcoming launch of As You in October.
As a reminder, this is a super glamorous brand for the Gen Z. It's sexy, it's for the sexy, sassy customer who's unafraid to express herself. As a reminder, we created this from design board to launch in 13 weeks. We're really looking forward to the summer and the shift and easing of lockdown for the As You brand to really shine. On the next slide, I remind you what this brand has to offer, and we expect it to feature strongly as the shift back to occasion wear continues.
[Presentation]
Thank you. I hope you enjoyed that. That's an exciting peek of what's to come. The new product development ranges within ASOS DESIGN have also continued to perform well ahead of expectations, too. For example, ASOS 4505 has posted another period of 68% growth. The logo carrier product we offer has seen excellent performance. Weekend Collective has had a very strong start with over 200,000 units sold since its launch at the October. Dark Future has also performed well with 140,000 units and is trading up triple digit year-on-year. Our Venture Brands team have continued to perform exceptionally well. Collusion grew at 93% year- on- year and is now one of our top three womenswear brands. Collusion was the second highest search term on the site, selling over 850,000 hoodies and joggers, which is enough for those who are interested to dress the entire population of Newcastle.
We also sold over 150,000 pairs of dad jeans and 120,000 pairs of denim flares. Reclaimed Vintage has also posted stellar performance with 92% growth year-on-year. It's now the 18th biggest brand on site, selling over 150,000 pairs of jeans and 140,000 hoodies. With As You, we've expanded our product offering from 120 products initially to 600 products currently on offer, and we've sold over 200,000 units since launch, the majority of which are jersey tops and casual bottoms. As we said, As You was targeted at the Gen Z customer, with nearly 60% of those products coming to customers under 25 years of age. Developing a rich, compelling product offer for our platform is also key to our growth.
We're exceptionally proud of the triple-digit growth that we're seeing in face and body, with our beauty segment showing the strongest growth in the U.K., where it almost doubled its share of the overall sales mix. Activewear and casualwear brands have continued their strong performance during the half as well. Enhancing flexibility and the seamless use and convenience of our multi-brand platform is another vital component to growth. During the half, we added 120 new brands to the platform. Many of these are smaller, up-and-coming brands. We've made over 100 delivery improvements to our customer experience, including the extension of our electric vehicle delivery coverage on the U.K. next-day delivery service in the W1, W2 postcodes within London. Electric delivery vehicles in several large U.K. cities are all now wrapped in the ASOS white noise branding.
We launched improvements to our express delivery propositions in 24 markets, and improvements in standard delivery propositions in a further five. We've also added 4,500 new Click & Collect locations launched in Australia, 10,800 in Poland, and a further 3,000 in the U.K., giving us a total of over 160,000 Click & Collect locations globally. Flexible fulfillment enables us to optimize our stockholding, improve our product availability, and ultimately will enhance our width without corresponding working capital increases, and it comes as two phases for us. Phase I, which is unified stock. Two, which is partner fulfillment. We're seeing really strong results as we roll out flexible fulfillment. We've already rolled out phase I, which gives us the capability to fulfill from any warehouse within our network.
This capability has supplemented our core stock offering in the U.S., which has faced challenges from the port congestion in H1. The second phase enables partner fulfillment capability, whereby a third-party brand can fulfill from their warehouse directly to our customer. We expect this to be rolled out by the end of this calendar year, and we'll be trialing it initially in partnership with a limited number of brands. We'll give you further details of this as we continue to work on it and roll it out. Artificial intelligence and data science are now fundamental tools that we use to deliver a compelling customer experience. We've added 30 improvements to our customer experience in the half, aimed at reducing friction, increasing personalization, and ensuring a seamless experience both on the website and the app.
These include the launch of our ratings and review functionality. So far, we've collected million reviews, with an average rating of 4.1 out of five and promising early results around customer conversion. The New In recommendations now uses AI to ensure that the first products displayed on the New In page will be recommended to the customer on their preferred shopping behavior. We've also introduced a homepage countdown review, which lets users know how much time remains for them to buy at discounted prices, which has driven an overall increase in conversion rate. Lastly, we've rolled out the For You tab, which is powered by a new model that displays enhanced personalized recommendations. I'm thrilled that we now have a full exec leadership team in place, with José joining us in January of this year to head up our commercial teams.
I'm sad to announce, after nine years with ASOS, Mark Holland, our Chief Operating Officer, has made the decision to step down from his role at the end of April to begin a process of semi-retirement. Happily, Mark's agreed to stay on as a consultant, reporting directly to me to advise us on the continued supply chain development. During his tenure, Mark has played a leading role in our growth, the development of our global proposition, and the creation of a best-in-class supply chain organization, and the way in which the company has smartly responded and navigated itself during the pandemic. The strength in our exec team over the last year has also enabled us to realign responsibilities. Mat Dunn will take over the ownership of supply chain, alongside his remit of group finance, M&A, investor relations, governance and insurance, and corporate comms.
Patrik Silén , our Chief Strategy Officer, will now add the change and transformation program to his portfolio, and Insights will move under Robert Birge , our Chief Growth Officer, alongside his responsibilities of customer care and marketing. Fashion with integrity is a cornerstone of how we do business. We've had an incredibly busy six months pushing forward our sustainability journey. I'm going to call out a few highlights and key moments now. In September, we launched our first ever circular design collection, showcasing products designed to minimize waste and prioritize the reuse and recycling at the end of life. The collection was a great success, selling 8,000 units across the launch period and generating compelling social engagement with over 750,000 views and a reach of 3.3 million customers. We've continued to increase our engagement with customers on sustainability topics over the half.
We continue to lead the garment industry in raising sourcing standards. Over the period, we've supported our U.K. brand partners with implementing the enhanced requirements we set out in August 2020, including signing up to the Fast Forward Sourcing program and signing up to the Transparency Pledge. We've also taken further action to reduce emissions associated with our business. 75% of all ASOS operations are now powered by renewable electricity, and we also launched our electric vehicle next-day delivery proposition in Berlin. Finally, as part of our continued commitment to supply chain transparency, we're proud to confirm that we're aiming to achieve supply chain disclosure for the manufacturing tiers of Topshop, Topman, Miss Selfridge and HIIT brands for the first time by the end of the calendar year 2021.
Lastly, to summarize, we're delighted with the performance in the first half of 2021, with strong sales, record PBT, and a net cash balance at the end of the half. I'm exceptionally proud of our people and the strong execution delivery that continues to be on display on a daily basis, with continued cost discipline in place and strong operational grip. We've increased both our focus and investment behind the global growth opportunity against the background of acceleration in the on-ground penetration and the consolidation in fashion retail. Our integration of the Topshop brands continues at pace and is on track to deliver as per our expectations. ASOS is well positioned to capture event-led demand when social restrictions ease. However, we retain a cautious tone on the near-term outlook in the face of continued uncertainty.
We've increased our investment back into price and back into proposition to improve our future competitiveness. Our FY 2021 expectations have increased in line with our first half performance, with our outlook for the second half remaining unchanged despite this elevated investment. I'd now like to hand you over to questions with the usual pack draw, please. On to Q&As. We've added a new method of asking questions. If you have Zoom downloaded, you can ask questions in person, by a live video link, or by clicking the Ask Question via Video box underneath the live feed. If you don't have Zoom, you can ask questions by written text as per previous presentations. Thank you very much. Looking forward to answering your questions now.
Morning, everybody. I don't think we've got anyone just come through the video route yet, we'll start with a question on the text. First one is coming from Rocco at Arete. The share of the U.K. on retail sales climbed to 42%, which is the highest contribution since 2016, I believe. Can you talk about what's driving this? Is it brands like 4505, Collusion? Is there some sort of trickle-down effect to other regions?
Let me start with that one, Rocco, and good morning. We're delighted with the U.K. performance of just shy of 40%. That's been driven by strong brand performance from 4505 and Collusion, as you correctly call out, but also really strong brand awareness. In the U.K., as I said in my presentation, we've also seen an exceptional performance from our face and body category, and that's been most pronounced in the U.K. Mat, do you want to add anything on that?
No.
No. Okay. Thanks, Rocco.
A question coming from someone without a name. Can you provide a bit more color on the rest of world sales trends, in particular the softness in Russia and strength in Middle East and Australia?
Do you want to take that, Mat?
Yeah, of course. I think in terms of Russia, firstly, we've seen a couple of dynamics in Russia. The first of those is we've definitely seen an overall weaker market, online market that is, in Russia. As a consequence of that, we've seen the competitive environment step up, and we've probably chosen to be less aggressive than some of the competitors in terms of some of the levels of promotional activity and competitive intensity that's been on display. As I say, I think that's probably a function of the market. In terms of Middle East and Australia, I think our product offer and proposition continues to resonate. The challenge we have in both those territories and in Australia, probably in the most pronounced way, is our delivery proposition, which is currently at a disadvantage to local players.
Overall, I think our product traction in those markets has continued to be good. I would also bear in mind, particularly for P2, for those of you trying to calculate numbers for P2, that being a stub period of only eight weeks, there is some promotional timings that have gone into the numbers as well, just in terms of where specific promotions fall within the year, which you should probably bear in mind as you think about the performance in Rest of World specifically.
We've got our first question come through on video, we'll hand over to that. It's Simon Bowler at Numis. Assuming the tech works.
Hello, is this working?
Morning, Simon. It's worked.
Hi, Simon.
Can't see you, but we can hear you.
All right. Perfect.
Now we can see you.
All right. It's probably better when you can't. Never mind. A couple of quick questions. First one, can you just give a sense of what you're expecting to happen with regards to the range in the U.S.? If I remember correctly, I think TGR was part of unlocking third-party branded range and obviously flexible fulfillment piece coming in as well. Is there any sense you can give on how you think that moves the range forwards? [audio distortion] did I pick up, you mentioned a brief reference to some price investment going into that region as well as Europe?
As we move forward, we're going to be moving to driving and focusing on greater growth in the U.S. and Europe. Part of that TGR strategy was to enable us to plan our stock better, have greater visibility, and improve our ranging, particularly in North America. One of the things that Mat referred to earlier, we've also invested more in price in the U.S. too, to improve our competitiveness. Our confidence in the U.S. growth coming forward is underpinned by the fact we've also started the automation in the U.S. We're expecting much greater growth, much better ranging, and a much better stock pool for our North American customer. Bearing in mind, part of our North American strategy will be anchored around the work we do with the Nordstrom brands.
We're looking at that to build a very powerful partnership for the Topman, Topshop brands initially to drive more eyeballs to asos.com in North America. Mat, any points on that?
No.
No. All right. Thanks, Simon.
We will-
Anything else, Simon? No. He's gone.
We'll stick with a video question, and we've got the next one coming from Aneesha Sherman at Bernstein.
Morning, Aneesha.
Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. I have two for you. The first one is, in Europe, you mentioned that areas where non-essential retail was open performed worse. Can you share some color of how much of a range you saw on the overall 18% on the retail open versus retail closed areas? Are you using that as a guide for how you expect the U.K. to perform once apparel stores reopen? I have a second question around partner fulfillment and the rollout that you're planning for end of year. How would you price that to partners? Would that be similar to a three-tier platform pricing, where you charge a commission off the top, sort of a 20% commission as you do on ASOS Marketplace? Thank you.
Mat, why don't you take the first one?
Yeah. I think, at its strongest, some of our European territories would have grown at a similar trajectory to the U.K. if they were in a similar level of lockdown. It very much probably depends on our competitive positioning in the market and our kind of overall positioning in the market. At the lower end, you'd see growth rates, I guess, more aligned to what you might have seen in the U.S. or rest of world. It kind of gives you a feel for the range, and obviously even within one territory, we've had periods where it's been open and periods where it's been closed. I think in terms of the read across to the U.K., I think, yes, it is in our thinking for the U.K. Our market position in the U.K. is probably stronger than it is everywhere else.
We obviously are going to see hospitality, albeit in limited form, opening at the same time as non-essential retail. One of the reasons we've been cautious, I guess, in our outlook is actually, it's extremely difficult to predict what's going to happen, and probably, we just need to see how it evolves from next week ultimately, in the U.K., assuming everything opens on the 12th as is currently planned.
Let me pick up the ASOS fulfillment question, Aneesha. First of all, on Marketplace, for the majority of the last six months, we've been offering commission free on the Marketplace. We've done this to support the small up-and-coming brands and designers we know our customers love, and actually to provide a platform for those small brands and smaller designers and smaller boutiques to showcase their product on the ASOS site. The usual commission rate is around 10%. In terms of our strategy behind flexible fulfillment, first of all, phase I is to optimize our stock pool and make sure we use our own internal stock pool to fulfill demand and improve availability. The second phase we're building is to enhance, make sure we never let you down on availability, backfill the edit, and use our partners' stock pool to fulfill and never let the customer down.
We haven't decided the pricing structure yet, but it will probably most likely be commission-based on the sales, similar to the level you described. We haven't finalized that yet, Aneesha. That's what's in our thoughts.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
We've got another question on video here now coming from Simon Irwin at Credit Suisse.
Hey, Simon. Good to see you.
Morning, all. Thanks for this. Just some questions on TGR. Can you just talk a little bit about how you see the benefits from TGR flowing through in terms of cost and operations once it's up and running, both what the magnitude is and when you'd expect those to start flowing through?
I'll start with that. Mat probably won't give you the timing of the benefits, Simon, but he'll give you a flavor of where he sees it's coming. TGR fundamentally rewires our end-to-end stock management. The best way to describe it is from factory all the way to customer, and from inbound for our third-party brands, all the way to the customer, and actually improving our availability in the multiple stock pools we have through our fulfillment centers. It will give us real-time visibility, enhanced visibility on where to direct that product, so we get the product at the right place at the right time, with minimal transfers through the distribution centers. It'll also help our teams react more quickly, make more fast decisions, plan, and therefore trade better.
We see that as a fundamental set of new tools to help our buying and merchandising teams trade our operations and provide a much better service and availability for our customers. Mat, anything you want to add?
I think just given what you said, Nick, it is a fundamentally new toolkit for our retail teams. In terms of when to expect the benefit, I think you have to expect it to take some time for them to become familiar, particularly with the planning benefits that we're expecting. In terms of the pricing, we'll want to run some quite extensive testing. I'm anticipating that the benefit will be an F22 impact rather than an F21. I also wouldn't expect it all to hit down on the first day of F22. I would expect it to ramp up over time as the teams become more familiar and we experiment with the technology. Just in terms of the laydown of the benefits, I guess it was implied in what Nick says. It isn't just a cost benefit.
Actually, a lot of the benefit should be in supporting better availability and therefore underpinning sales growth. In terms of some of the pricing benefits, again, could be supportive of sales, but could also be supportive of gross margins. In terms of where they will benefit in the P&L, it's likely to be further up the P&L rather than further down, if that makes sense, Simon.
Thank you, Simon.
[Nick], can I just ask a follow-up on freight? Just in terms of whether you can break down the cost impacts from freight, in terms of shipping and air freight?
Sorry, I lost the last bit of the question, particularly where it, and then I didn't hear what you said after that.
Sorry, I'm just getting some very odd delays here. Just in terms of where we're seeing the impact on freight, and does it change the economics of your businesses, particularly in the rest of the world region, if air freight is going to be structurally higher for longer?
Do you want me to ask about that?
Yes.
There are two In terms of where it hits our business, clearly, there's an impact on inbound freight, which is mostly related to sea freight, because most of our inbound supply chain is sea freight driven. There is some air freight. That obviously goes through and does affect the gross profitability of our sales, and you can see that in the numbers that I gave earlier in the presentation. In terms of air freight, that affects the delivery costs, principally that you see being delivered to consumers and, as you say, mostly in rest of world. It does affect the competitiveness of our offer, of the pricing of our offer. We've done two things in response that I mentioned. The first is we've put the minimum thresholds up to make sure that we're not shipping parcels that don't make sense.
You've seen in rest of world the response to that with a higher ABV. People are choosing to shop less frequently, but buy bigger parcels. That's probably where it affects our economics and our consumer offer the most. In terms of the broader freight costs, in terms of our pricing, we've chosen to look through those. They are obviously being, at this point, more than offset by the returns benefit that we're seeing. Whilst the two things aren't directly correlated, they're clearly both related to COVID, and therefore, we've chosen not to affect our consumer offer for the broader inbound freight challenges that we're experiencing, as we would expect them to. Ultimately, the freight may, particularly the sea freight market, is running at an all-time high level, and you would expect it to normalize over time.
I don't think that will happen quickly, but I do think it will happen.
Thank you very much.
Great. We'll go through a couple on the text now. Next question coming from Rocco again, Arete. Can you unpack the on distribution costs and warehousing costs?
Go on.
Yep. Again, in terms of what I said in the presentation, and Rocco, I think your question came in before I spoke to it, so it may have already been answered. If you take the basis point improvement that we saw in warehousing and distribution costs that I broke out in the presentation, you could calculate from that what the GBP amount is. That's probably the quickest way to get at it. It is clearly a bigger number than the GBP 48.5 million overall benefit that we're calling out, because it is offset by some of the freight challenges that we were just talking to Simon about.
Next one coming from Greg at Shore Capital. Given the initial success since February relaunch, do you have any further plans on bringing the Topshop brands back to the U.K. high streets?
Morning, Greg. Let me take that one, first of all. You will have heard me say earlier, that the main thesis for Topshop Topman was to create a digital offer, enhance the digital offer, and actually also use some of the partners we acquired through the acquisition. We've done that with a fewer, better, more digital predominantly. There's been much speculation about whether we would relaunch shops. You know as well as I do that ASOS is a digital offer only. Never say never on stores, but it's not in our immediate thinking or immediate plans.
Next question coming from Emily Cooledge at Redburn. What proportion of sales is ASOS product if you aggregate all of the own brand ranges, including venture brands, logo carriers? How's that growing year-on-year?
Do you want to do that, Dunn?
Yep. I can do. Emily, it's not a number we've ever quoted. Obviously, the venture brands do make a contribution over and above ASOS DESIGN, and it's a material contribution, and obviously, we will, in time, overlay the full contribution from the Topshop brands. It's less than half of our portfolio, obviously. Obviously, it's swinging around at the moment because of COVID. I would anticipate it being somewhere in the 40%+ range on a steady state basis, but below 50%.
Going to now hand over to a question on video, which is coming from Anne Critchlow at SocGen.
Morning. On the partner fulfillment, could you say whether this is just U.K. initially, or whether you're going to introduce other territories? Potentially, could it be global one day? Also, does the stock risk rest with the partner? Does this give you a chance to increase your sales by limiting the risk?
We're building the capability, which will be live by the end of this calendar year, initially with two global brands. We're intending it to be a global offer, and we expect it, over time, to increase our sales disproportionately to the amount of working capital investment. As I said earlier to Aneesha, it'll be less stock risk, and we'll take a commission on those sales. The main thesis here is to not let the customer down, to improve our availability. If our third-party partners have got the product, we will ship it to them so they don't have to worry about shopping elsewhere, and we keep them in the ASOS ecosystem.
Thank you.
I'm going to hand over now to take a couple more on text before we wrap up, I think. A question coming from Rebecca McClellan at Santander. It's just moved. Is the FX benefit circa, I think it's circa GBP 14 million in other costs?
Do you want that?
Yeah. Unfortunately, it's an easy question to ask. I'm not going to break out the number. As I said, the total margin contribution from the hedging is less than the total impact in gross profitability. Again, I don't think it's helpful to split it out because it will vary. It's not a run rate number that's useful because it'll change depending on our exact hedging and the movements in the foreign exchange at any point in time.
Looks like we've got two coming from John Stevenson at Peel Hunt. First one, to what extent do you feel the growth in face and body and activewear represents a planned increase in market share that could be retained going forward?
Morning, John. Thanks for the question. I'm not going to do a prediction, but what we've seen over the last 12 months is an absolute acceleration in consumers choosing activewear and face and body products from our site. We think that's going to be a meaningful increase over the next period of time, and so we actually think it's more than just a temporary blip. We think that's going to be a feature that's here to stay, and it's a key element of us enhancing the multi-brand aspects of our platform. We'll be investing heavily in both those categories.
The next one coming from John. On marketing, given the success of removing non-strategic costs, is there an opportunity to more aggressively increase recruitment activity in the U.S. market?
Do you want to go for that?
The answer's yes, John, but I guess, more broadly than that, non-strategic costs has helped us to restore our profitability over the last couple of years. Our intent was always that once we'd done that would give us the scope to reinvest in our business across multiple fronts, the U.S. being one of them. In the results that we've announced today, you can see we've made quite a deliberate investment in European pricing, and we've also made some improvements to U.S. pricing. I think our ambition for the non-strategic cost program is that it helps to fund our growth going forward. Exactly what that will look like, I guess it will vary on a month-by-month, year-by-year basis. Absolutely, if it's successful, it gives us the scope to do that.
Just one fun fact on that, John. You heard me refer to the TikTok campaigns with Topshop/Topman. We've done four TikTok campaigns since September. Overall, we've had 15 billion views of our TikTok campaigns, of which a third of those have been in the North American market. We're quite excited about the growth that we think we'll get from the work we've been putting in place for the North American market.
I think that's all of the questions out of the video room, and we're out of time, essentially. All good.
All right, guys. Thank you very much for joining us this morning. Thank you very much for your questions. Mat and Alison will be around with Taryn if you've got any further questions. Thank you very much. Have a good day, everyone.
Thanks, everyone.