Hello and welcome to The Card Factory FY 2023 preliminary results presentation. If you'd like to ask a question today and you are watching on Zoom, please use the Q&A button on your screen. If you are in the room, please use the microphones in your seats. I will now hand over to our CEO, Darcy Willson-Rymer. Darcy, over to you.
Thank you. Good morning everyone, and
Welcome to our full year results presentation for FY 2023. Thank you for joining us today, whether you're here in person at UBS's office or joining us online. Let me start with an apology. My sincere apologies that we had to reschedule today's presentation at short notice from last week, but I am really grateful that so many of you are still able to join us both here and online. As you know, I'm Darcy Willson-Rymer, CEO of Card Factory, and joining me today for our interim presentation is Simon Comer, our interim CFO. Following an overview of our highlights from the past year, Simon will provide the financial summary update for FY 2023.
I'll then provide an update on the progress we've made on our Opening Our New Future growth strategy and the outlook for the remainder of the year. I also hope that you'll be able to join us after the presentation of our results for our capital market strategy update, where Simon and I will be joined by a number of our Card Factory senior leadership team to give a more detailed update on our strategic growth plans through to FY 2027, and that'll be at 11:30 today. It's now two years since I joined Card Factory, and I'm proud of the progress that we're making. We have a clear and ambitious plan to transform Card Factory into a market-leading omni-channel retailer of cards and gifts, and we've achieved significant milestones on that journey in FY 2023.
Our progress reflects the hard work and commitment of Card Factory colleagues who have a shared passion about driving our business forward. I just wanna take the moment to personally thank each and every colleague at Card Factory and recognize their outstanding contribution over the past year, which has enabled the growth that we're now enjoying. Thank you, colleagues. I'm pleased to say that we have positive momentum across our business, which along to the shift of customers spend back towards the high street, is driving revenue growth. As a result, our performance in FY 2023 was ahead of expectations with two profit upgrades announced in the year.
Our one year like-for-like revenue growth of +6.7% was underpinned by the strong performance in store-based sales and our everyday card ranges, driven by initiatives around range curation and availability improvement. The strength of our expanding gifting offer was a sales driver throughout FY 2023, as was the successful implementation of targeted price increases, which resulted in minimal impact on customer switching. The key Christmas trading season saw increased store transactions and average basket value, supported by new ranges and a compelling value for money offer, which really resonated with customers. Strikes around the festive period did however impact our online sales.
Like-for-like sales in store were at +7.6%, and they're now slightly ahead of pre-pandemic performance, which proves the value of having a nationwide store estate, which will also become an enabler for our omni-channel ambitions. We've continued to successfully mitigate against the significant inflationary cost pressures, and this is achieved through a combination of proactive measure, efficient management of costs and working capital, improved store efficiencies, targeted price increases alongside benefits from our hedging policy across both energy and foreign exchange. We've continued to strengthen the balance sheet with a significant reduction in net debt versus three years ago, and this was all supported by the successful completion of our refinancing in FY2023. Delivery of our Opening Our New Future growth strategy is now well underway with significant milestones achieved in FY2023.
We now have the right foundations in place to deliver on this strategy. I'm gonna discuss this in more detail later. On that note, I wanna hand over to Simon, who's gonna share with you the detail of our financial performance. Please Simon.
Thank you Darcy and good morning. I have the pleasure of reporting the financial results for the year, the first full year outside of the pandemic. Card Factory has delivered ahead of management expectations for revenue, margin, and net debt in the year. Sales of GBP 463.4 million were GBP 99 million ahead of last year, with Card Factory like-for-like sales of +6.7%. This related to a PBT of GBP 52.4 million, GBP 41.3 million ahead of prior year and increased a position of 42% and ahead of guidance given in the January 2023 trading update of PBT of approximately GBP 48 million. We achieved this despite a challenging backdrop of inflationary pressures from material and freight costs as well as labor.
We have also seen net debt before lease liabilities improved by a further GBP 17 million to GBP 57.2 million, with a new facility agreement delivered in April 2022. Our operating cash flow before tax payments of GBP 107.8 million reflects the cash conversion of 96%. This is down on prior year, where we benefited from the unwind of trade working capital post-pandemic. Moving on to look at sales. Total store sales are now slightly ahead of pre-pandemic levels with like-for-like sales on a three-year basis at -0.3%. 1-year LFLs for stores was +7.6%, with both transactions and average basket values up. This was especially seen in the everyday ranges for both card and gifting, as well as wedding, life moments, and children's categories.
The impact from targeted pricing activities accounted for two-thirds of this total. The LFL performance month-on-month remained positive throughout the year, with the only exception being April 2022 due to the bounce in sales in April 2021 post the lockdown. Trading in the first few weeks of the new financial year has been encouraging and slightly ahead of the board's expectations. Overall, our store estate has seen a net growth of 12 stores to 1,032, with continued focus in under-penetrated markets in particular, with the opening of three trial stores in Central London and continued expansion in the Republic of Ireland. We constantly monitor our store portfolio and maintain a position with less than 1% being loss-making. Moving on to non-store sales. Partnerships delivered a positive 10% growth in sales.
This is in a year where we have started to put in place the foundations to drive the international expansion expected over the coming years. This will be discussed in further detail in the capital market strategy update later today. Sales to The Reject Shop in Australia have grown by 26% on the back of stores being fully reopened post-lockdown, with Aldi down 18% due to space reduction and return to card purchasing to the high street post-lockdowns. Both online businesses were impacted by the Royal Mail strikes over Christmas and the return of customers to the high street. Even with the disruption over Christmas, cardfactory.co.uk sales were 86.4% above pre-pandemic levels. The phased expansion of the product range to include flowers, gift experiences, and alcohol generated an 11% uplift in online gifting sales in the second half of FY 2023.
This sets the online business up well for future growth. The re-platforming of Getting Personal was completed in March 2023, which enables the opportunity for range development and further functionality. Let's have a look at margins and cost. Overall PBT of GBP 52.4 million at 11.3% was 8.1 percentage points ahead of last year. This was achieved through a combination of targeted price increases initiated during the first half of FY 2023, cost control by managing inflationary pressures through efficient currency and utility hedging, labor productivity, and active supply chain management. On a constant currency basis, cost of goods sold improved by 2.4 percentage points, with currency rates achieved in line with prior year. We are also well hedged into FY 2024, with 90% cover in excess of $1.275.
Store wages were held in line as a percentage with prior year on an underlying basis when taking into account the one-off CJRS provision release, with National Living Wage increases of 2 percentage points being offset by price and productivity. The 1.4 percentage points increase seen in property costs is due to the cessation of rate support in Q1 of FY 2023. Other direct expenses have benefited by the energy hedging agreements in place, which saved the company between GBP 4 million-GBP 5 million in the year. We are fully hedged on energy out to September 2024 at similar rates to current year. Operating expenses has improved by 0.2 percentage points. This includes investment in people and infrastructure in support of our Opening Our New Future strategy to provide a platform for future growth.
Depreciation and amortization charges, including impairments, reduced by GBP 5.9 million compared to the prior year. This reflects a reduction in impairments of GBP 2.2 million, reflecting the improved trading performance and our future expectations regarding store performance and cost inflation. The remaining GBP 3.7 million largely reflects a reduction in depreciation charges on right of use assets. Store rents, and therefore the related right of use assets, have continued to fall since the pandemic. Our dynamic, flexible approach to the store portfolio has enabled us to continue to capture these reductions as part of lease renewals or relocations. FY 2023 further includes a GBP 1 million credit associated with the refinancing of debt facilities in April 2022. As we look ahead, we continue to have confidence in our ability to mitigate future cost inflation through a combination of productivity initiatives and targeted price actions.
Let's have a look at net debt. There's been a significant improvement to net debt with a three-year reduction of GBP 86 million. The year delivered GBP 17 million of net debt reduction, which included GBP 10.8 million of agreed rent deferrals from the pandemic period. Cash generated at GBP 59.5 million from EBITDA less rent payments was utilized by increased CapEx financing of GBP 18.2 million, GBP 12.5 million of debt servicing, a return to paying corporation tax of GBP 7.9 million, and working capital increases of GBP 3.9 million in support of the growth delivered in the year. It should be noted that the CapEx was GBP 12 million over the equivalent investment in prior year.
CapEx in the year supported phase two of our ERP implementation, as well as investments in our inventory management system, store expansion, and development of our online platforms. The group leverage calculation on a pre-lease liability basis has also continued to improve and exited the year at 0.5 times. Moving on to cash flow. Operating cash flow before working capital of GBP 104.1 million significantly increased over prior year, which reflects the improved trading performance and includes returning to paying corporation tax at GBP 7.9 million. Working capital movement for FY 2022 includes the impact from the supply chain disruptions that resulted in decreased inventory holdings and the COVID-related government support. Inventory has returned in FY 2023 to a more normalized position, GBP 11 million higher than the prior year. However, stock management has reduced overall net inventories by GBP 9 million since FY 2020.
Lease liabilities includes deferred payments of GBP 10.8 million related to store rents from FY 2021, which is not expected to repeat going forward. Net interest paid has increased by GBP 0.9 million, with the interest hedging policy delivering savings of circa GBP 0.6 million against the current rise in SONIA. Taking into account the increased CapEx associated with the investment cycle for future growth, free cash flow for FY 2023 was GBP 18.5 million. Let's have a look at our liquidity. The company agreed new facilities in April 2022 with a mix of RCF, term loans, and CLBILS. The agreement matures in full by September 2025, with term loan A and the CLBILS being fully repaid by January 2024. As at the year-end, the company had headroom of GBP 75 million.
The repayment of term loan A and the CLBILS allows the company to consider a dividend payment after this point. To summarize, a strong set of financials with a return to pre-pandemic levels of trade and positive one-year like-for-likes. Improved margins with inflationary pressures being managed through targeted pricing, active hedging policies, and productivity savings across the group. The year saw the refinancing of the company's banking facilities on the back of a substantial net debt improvement. All of the above has put in place a foundation for strategic growth and a pathway to recommencing dividends. Thank you for your time, and now I'll hand back to Darcy.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Simon. As I mentioned in my introduction, we'll provide a more detailed update on our strategic plans at the Capital Markets Day. Right now, what I'll do is provide a summary for the progress that we've been making in FY2023. I'll just spend a kind of few minutes on that. FY2023 was the launch year of our business transformation, and we have achieved significant milestones across all our areas of focus. By delivering on our strategy, Card Factory is well-positioned to become the U.K.'s number one destination for all customers seeking unrivaled quality, value, choice, convenience, and experience. We're working to transform Card Factory into the leading omni-channel brand in our space to help customers celebrate life's moments.
We're achieving this by being customer-centric in our thinking and approach and placing customer data at the heart of our decision-making. This customer-centric focus also forms the basis for our refreshed brand strategy that we completed in FY 2023. By placing customers at the heart of our business, we're building our brand and developing our strategic plans from a core customer truth that life needs celebration. Something I'm sure we can all agree and has never been more relevant given the backdrop of all of the recent events that have happened in recent years. Starting with our core cards business, we've continued to build upon our position of strength with focused range development and curation, as well as targeted price increases, which has driven revenue growth in FY 2023.
A permanent three-for-two mechanic on general card has delivered sales growth on the selected lines included within this offer. We've also focused on increasing our diversity across our card ranges to ensure that all of our customers feel included for all of life's moments of celebration. I'd like to turn now to the growth opportunity in gifts and celebration essentials. We previously referred to this under the single complementary categories heading, but we've now split this out partly to conform with industry-recognized market analysis, but it's also easier and enables clear measurement for us internally. By targeting the gifts and the celebration essentials market, we've also been able to recalculate the total addressable U.K. market. The opportunity stands at GBP 13.4 billion.
In FY 2023, we saw total everyday like-for-like growth through our stores of 11.4%, with confectionery being the largest sales growth area at +111%. Tableware saw the largest volume increase at 124%. We've also built upon the success of our extensive in-house design ranges by introducing relevant third-party brands and some licensed ranges. We've broadened our range of soft toys and added boxed and pocket money-focused products. Finally, we've introduced five new categories of flowers, gift experience, alcohol, chocolate, and books, generating an 11% uplift in online gifting sales in the second half of FY 2023. In summary, we're making significant progress on addressing the growth opportunity in gifts and celebration essentials. The delivery of our omni-channel ambitions has begun in earnest in FY 2023.
We successfully trialed, the first of our omni-channel propositions with the launch of Click and Collect. We started the trial in 87 stores. From that trial, we saw average order value 16% higher than the online average, and an indication of in-store basket uplift of 7% purchasing an additional item in store. As a result, we've recently completed the UK nationwide rollout, so we accelerated that, and there's further developments to the service plan in FY 2024. As we look to build upon the milestones achieved in FY 2023 to deliver our omni-channel ambitions, we've focused. We've continued to progress the delivery of phase 2 of our ERP program.
This is due to complete in the first half of FY 2024, and this will provide us with the ability to view stock in all areas of the business and enable integration with future partners, both in the UK and internationally. From a digital-only perspective, we focused on improving the customer experience, and this included launching multi-ship functionality, enabling customers to send cards and gifts to multiple addresses from a single order. Alongside this, we've launched a major app update with additional features and continued our program of continuous improvement to drive online user experience. We also completed the re-platforming of cardfactory.co.uk and Getting Personal. It's now on a new shared platform, and this is vital to enabling the phased expansion of online ranges and further functionality.
As mentioned earlier, the strength of our store estate across the U.K. and Ireland is driving growth and is fundamental for unlocking our omni-channel ambition. Our new model store format trial was launched in 10 stores in FY2023, with a further five stores opening in January, testing an additional capital-light version of the approach. The stores were selected so that the format could be tested in a wide variety of different locations, demographics, and store sizes. Having now concluded the model store trial, we are rolling out the learnings through our store evolution program, and this has three components. Firstly, space realignment, which we will apply to the majority of our stores, reallocating space, so there's slightly more priority for gifts than before. Having identified which stores will benefit, we'll be applying this change across 750 stores this year.
This is a capital-light initiative, and we get paid back within the year. Secondly, display reorganization. This will see us modify how we present cards and gifts in our store, with cards arranged around the perimeter, while gifts will be placed in the central aisles. This layout not only improves customer navigation, it makes it easier for them to locate products, but also ensures that we can get the proper product adjacencies. We plan to complete this adjustment in around 50 stores this year as we continue to fine-tune the costs and the returns associated with that. Finally, the third component, an updated store design, which we will use in new stores and a select number of full refurbishments. The costs of this are in line with our existing refit costs, and there's no impact to kind of our store CapEx forecasts.
In addition, through FY2023, we continued to expand our store footprint into under-penetrated markets. This included the opening of our three trial stores in Central London and 13 new stores in the Republic of Ireland. Assessment of the trial Central London stores is still ongoing. Partly, we experienced disruption due to the train strikes, but partly we continue to adapt the range mix to ensure that we have the right offer to meet the needs of Central London customers. We'll decide on the roadmap for Central London once we've concluded the trial. The final building block of our future growth is partnerships, which represents the opportunity for us to grow both in the U.K. and internationally, and we're making good progress. I'm pleased to say that we've now signed our first master franchise partnership for the Middle East.
Our exclusive franchise partner, Liwa Trading Enterprises, they're an experienced specialist retail franchisee of both premium and value brands throughout the region. Liwa are targeting the opening of 36 Card Factory branded stores in the Middle East over the next five years. Last week, we announced the acquisition of SA Greetings, meaning we now have our first presence within this market, both as a retailer and a wholesaler. The acquisition of SA Greetings supports our partnership strategy by providing access to key wholesale accounts through the company's printing, merchandising, and warehouse capacity. We can also learn how we can deliver similar local capability in our target international markets.
Other notable progress on partnerships over the last year has included the completion of a large-scale piece of research, this has enabled us to identify the opportunity for both card and gifting and validated our seven international markets of interest. The foundations for our partnership model have now been scoped and are in development to support both franchise and wholesale partnership models, which we will discuss in more detail at the Capital Market Strategy update shortly. Finally, the delivery of our Opening Our New Future strategy is underpinned by our commitment to operate sustainably across all areas of the business. Given the extraordinary context of the past 12 months, we've begin work to update our five-year ESG strategy and roadmap.
This started with a refreshed materiality assessment and the assessment of our Scope three greenhouse gas emissions, which will ensure the priorities reflect the changing world around us and remained aligned with those of our stakeholders. As I highlighted at the start of today's presentation, our commitment to the thousands of passionate colleagues who are driving forward the Card Factory business is paramount. We continue to focus on developing a diverse, inclusive, and socially responsible culture at Card Factory, supported through our progressive DE&I strategy. We're delighted to see this commitment and the importance placed on developing our workplace culture is reflected in us being awarded a two-star outstanding accreditation from Best Companies. We're also ranked number one best big retail business in the UK, and third best big company to work for in the UK in their Q1 league tables.
Looking ahead, I want to start by summarizing the highlights of our performance over the last year. As I reflect on that, our value for money proposition is resonating with customers across an increasing range of products and price points, driving our business performance. We've demonstrated our ability to proactively manage significant inflationary headwinds and executed our pricing strategy as part of this with minimal impact on customer switching. We are clear on the strategic priorities that will enable our future growth, and we've invested in the systems and the IT infrastructure required to create a strong foundation from which we can deliver. Delivery of our strategy is now underway, and we've made positive progress in FY 2023 with some significant milestones achieved, which is now starting to show through our financial performance.
Finally, a strengthened balance sheet is now in place, delivering a highly profitable business with strong cash generation and a significant reduction in net debt. As we look ahead to FY 2024, we expect our performance to reflect continued progress on our strategic growth initiatives. Trading in the first weeks of the new financial year have been encouraging and slightly ahead of expectations. Both our everyday and seasonal ranges have performed strongly during this time, underpinned by new ranges, the strength of our expanding gifting offer, and strong value for money proposition. Our FY 2024 Valentine's Day and Mother's Day offer also landed well with our customers, resulting in a robust performance of the spring seasons. Together with our clear growth strategy and the strength of our value-led proposition, gives us confidence that we'll continue to make strategic and financial progress in the year ahead.
Having made a strong start in FY 2023, the board remain confident in the compelling growth opportunity for the business and our ability to use our expertise and the flexibility in our business model to drive profitability and return for shareholders over the long term. As part of our capital market strategy update, I and members of the Card Factory executive team will outline a pathway for revenues of around GBP 650 million, with PBT margins of around 14% in FY 2027. Thanks again for attending our results presentation, and Simon and I will now be happy to take any questions you have. Is that right, Simon?
Yes, it is.
Okay. Good. Any questions? If I could just ask you to, so we can, so the feed can get it and they can hear it online. If I could ask you to use the microphone, that would be great. If you could just tell us, for the benefit of who you are and what you do. Go on, Kate.
I think I hold this in. Yeah, Kate Calvert from Investec. Three from me, please, you may be answering some of these later. The first question is, where has the price investment been? Can you sort of talk about your ability to put through more price rises if necessary, i.e. sort of how much headroom do you think you have? The second question is to do with partnerships. How much investment did you put in partnerships in the current year or in FY 2023 that has perhaps held back, is some of it of a one-off nature in terms of building the infrastructure? The final question is on online. What milestones do we need to think about when thinking about it getting back to profitability?
Let me kick off. I think your first question on prices, where have we made investments in price? and therefore, what's our ability to do pricing? Yeah. I think effectively, we focused on price, looking at the pricing architecture that we have and the value for money in each effectively each stage of the architecture. For 25 years, Card Factory has been selling cards at GBP 0.29 as our opening price point. We continue to preserve that 'cause we think that's very important. Then we basically step up from GBP 0.29 all the way out to we have now stretched the exit price point at GBP 3.99 on a very small number of select but very high-quality cards.
In each component, it's making sure that the value for money. As you pick up the card, if it's GBP 0.99, that feels like a GBP 0.99. Well, for most customers, that GBP 0.99 card at Card Factory will be GBP 1.99 somewhere else. If people pick it up and go, "Wow, that's really good value at that price." It's basically making sure that we have the right architecture and the right value in each price point, moving the exit price. I think in terms of our ability to do pricing going forward, I maintain the commitments I made a couple of years ago about the elimination of productivity and efficiency as a Stand by that. In terms of.
Partnerships?
partnerships, yeah.
In terms of most of the investment has actually been building the internal infrastructure required for the partnerships we have going forward. As we announced last week, we have SA Greetings, which is our first acquisition. Pretty obviously it was a capital acquisition. That I don't think is the intended model for every partnership that we go forward to, but it was a way of entry into the South African market. In terms of new partners and coming aboard with that, I think it is deemed to be a capital light model. I think the acquisition route is something which is opportunistic more than it was planned, if that makes sense.
The final question I think was on the online side is in terms of what needs to happen to get that back to profitability, if I comment. I think a lot of that, I mean, clearly we had a volume impact over the Christmas period, and obviously we need to return those volumes back up to a little bit of normality, I should say. We are heavily investing in our online business. When we go on to the capital markets day a little bit later on, we'll talk about investment, about GBP 3 million per annum over the course of the next three years. We are gonna have to invest, and we will probably expect the next couple of years to be loss-making before it then returns to profitability in year sort of 3 and 4.
Thanks. Tomlinson. There we go. Thanks. Just first question is on the market size. You talked about a GBP 13 billion, I think, market size, and historically I think if my memory is correct, you talked about it was GBP 5 billion. Can you just a little bit of color on the extra categories perhaps that are coming in there to drive that increase in the addressable market. Secondly, on gifting, when you look longer term, given the higher price points in gifting, do you still expect that roughly 50/50 split in terms of... Just one on inventory levels, if that's okay.
Just, with the sort of level you expect to keep there, have you perhaps referenced, the new ERP system coming, have you seen any benefits from that start to flow through yet? I'll leave it there. Thanks.
Very good. Just in terms of the gifting market, it's much more detailed research on a different basis, and we've expanded out, and we'll go into much more detail in the CMD part on how we do that. Do you wanna.
Yeah. If I just leave the split. Currently we're about 50/50 still between cards and gifting and have been for a couple of years. Over the course of the next four years, the expectation is that we'll drift a little bit more towards gifting. I think the numbers in the CMD a little bit later on will talk about a 3% shift towards gifting. A 47%, 53% split, if that makes sense. Apologies, your final question?
It's the inventory levels.
Oh, on the inventory levels.
Inventory.
This year, as I said, although we are significantly improved over FY2020, we're GBP 9 million improved over the same position on the pre-pandemic level. We've seen a more normalized return. Our expectation is there's still areas to target, and we still think we can get inventory reductions. I think they will come from a couple of areas. Clearly I think our buying patterns were shifted a little bit because of the pandemic. In other words, we were buying in early, and obviously there's an element of unwind within that. Secondly, obviously, we've introduced the full stock loop and obviously the new ERP system, which gives us real-time information as to the stock level within stores. That will help drive productivity and hopefully efficiencies within our inventory and therefore improve our inventory terms.
The only thing I would add, Adam, is also when we talked about earlier today about the sales growth and some of it about availability improvements by some of the systems stuff that we have already put in. For example, the work that we've done around store ordering. That is now auto replenished as opposed to store managers. Therefore, we now have the stock much better distributed in the right place. That helps sales, but it also helps inventory as well. Yeah, we continue to see good benefits from some of those investments. Got a couple of questions online I'm just gonna go to. Martin Jenkins asks, "Are the three New London stores performing according to plan?" I'll take that.
I'd say the, we haven't yet in the three stores worked out the formula that gives us the strong returns that we enjoy in the rest of the estate, it would be a much longer payback. We don't think that we've got everything 100% right. There is a bit of impact in train strikes, but there is also, we haven't quite got the range as good as it needs to be for the London customers. There's a lot of work going on behind the scenes, so we've done quite a bit of research and we're making some changes. We remain optimistic about London. There's a lot of people that live in London and work in London that don't have access to value for money cards, and we just continue to progress with the trials.
I would just kind of broaden that out a little bit. The approach that we've taken in the business to test and learn is to test and test quickly. If I take Click and Collect, for example, we did the test and actually that proved to be working really well, we accelerated that. London's taking a little bit longer, just slow down, make sure that we get it right, as opposed to, you know, just stick to your hypothesis and kind of blast. This kind of test and learn approach, you know, fail fast, but optimistic about London. Another question online from Joe Devoy. Hope I pronounced your name right, Joe. One for you, Simon. Your energy costs are hedged until 2024 end.
Do you have any idea of the impact on energy costs after that point? Is there any capacity to start looking into re-hedging from today?
Yes. We're already starting to relay our hedging going into FY2025 after the contract actually exits. We're clearly not seeing the same rates that we did see a few years ago. At the moment, we're anticipating this to be around about sort of three times the levels that we were originally anticipating, of about GBP 150. From an overall cost point of view, although this is obviously only estimated at this point, it's estimated to be between GBP 4 million-GBP 5 million of additional cost coming into the business. When we look at the CMD a little later on, that is mapped into the overall numbers.
Okay.
Could you just use the microphone and press.
Very difficult to eradicate bad habits.
Could you just press the button?
Better now? Better now. Melvin Mehta from Sterling Investments. Two quick ones. In terms of what % of the customers currently-
Please, could you hold the button down?
Is it better now?
Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Sorry. Very sorry. Embarrassing. Two quick questions. First one, Melvin Mehta from Sterling Investments. What percentage of your customers currently are buying a gift when they are buying a card?
Order of magnitude, I think it's about 17%. Let me just check with the team. Is that about right? Yeah. About 17% of customers.
So-
We know the market, so across the market, it's about 70%, so that's part of our gifting opportunity.
Thank you. Another one on franchisee. Is there a minimum commitment where they have committed to put in X cap-capital to, for these 30-odd outlets?
Yeah. So the commitments of the store numbers are reflected in our agreements. And the agreements is, so our franchise partner will build the stores to the standards that we set out, and they have all the blueprints and all of that. It's kind of been signed off. All of the capital investment is made by the partner.
My question was, is there a minimum investment in pounds or dollars from the partner?
The commitment is to build that number of stores over that period of time and the associated CapEx that goes with it. It doesn't specify to say to build that many stores it has to be that amount of money. It does have a standard associated with what we have to build.
Thank you.
With a background of 20 years in franchising, that's pretty standard, so.
Thanks Darcy. Tony Shiret from Panmure. Just some sort of small ones. Can you tell us what your average transaction value was? And I don't know if that's in the pack anywhere and what it's changed by last year. Can you give us your view on, you know, competition within the market and what the dynamics are at the moment? Lastly, really small point, I don't happen to know, sort of, how you clear stuff, what percentage of your sales are not on full price? Thanks.
Do you want to take the first one?
In terms of average unit pricing, we talked about a little bit earlier on about stores having about 7.6% of increase in LFL. Roughly two-thirds of that is driven by price. Our average unit price over the course of the year has actually increased by a very similar amount. I haven't got the exact number to hand, but A large chunk of that has therefore gone on the AUB as well, so we're actually seeing a fair value going onto that number. I haven't got the exact numbers to hand though, I'm afraid.
In terms of competition, I think, we see the card market competition as effectively roughly we're a third of the market. The supermarkets combined are about a third of the market. Everybody else makes up basically the last third. In terms of gifting, it's basically anybody that can sell a birthday gift or whatever the celebration is. It's basically, you know, sort of much broader. It kinda largely depends on whether you mean kind of direct, you know, direct competition. Yeah.
But for us, it's about being really focused on who Card Factory customers are, you know, why they're coming to us, what the need state is, what they want to buy, what occasions we need to fulfill, and then making sure that we, you know, kind of have the kind of, you know, products around it. What was your last question?
Sorry. I guess what I wanna know is, you know, have you seen any sort of events in the last few years when someone has done something in the market that has impacted your sales or obliged you to do something with your pricing, or that just not happened?
No, no. Look, I think, I mean, since my tenure, of course, the two biggest things that happened was we closed the retail stores and all of that business migrated online and to supermarkets. What we've seen with the reopening is that business largely come back. We've seen those two positions, you know, basically, you know, kind of unwind. We think that, you know, there has been, in the specialty market, there has been, there have been changes, so Paperchase exiting the market, for example. Given that was largely, you know, much more premium and a different customer. We haven't seen any significant impact outside of individual, a local store when they were doing fire sale on product. You know, we could see in the data, you know, a tiny blip for a week.
you know, that kind of thing. I think largely I would say the innovations that we are doing is not because of a competitive threat, but it's because of us better running our business and better understanding the market and the customers, you know, basically that we're serving. Couple of good. Just couple of questions online. Wayne Brown, what is the right level of debt for the business, and what could the dividend policy look like?
What's the right level of debt? Depends on who you speak to, I suppose. Obviously at the moment, we've obviously been in a process of obviously reducing our overall debt position. I think we've been clear as to where we think our dividend policy should sit, which is a leverage of 0.5-1.5 times and PBT of two, three times. I should point out, by the way, that's taken looking forward at the net debt position over the overall business, 'cause clearly we actually are a seasonal business, and therefore we tend to have peaks in around about, sort of, July, August type of time. In terms of the overall levels, I mean, clearly we believe that that is the right level of dividend policy. And I think at the moment, that's, I think,
The conditions that need to be in place, particular CLBILS and term loan A, you know, that's due to be repaid in January, and you know, the board, will consider what the right next move is clearly in the course of this year.
Yeah.
And then franchising. You sell wholesale to the franchisee, I assume, but you also earn royalty on revenues, any commitments to marketing in the territory? Again, we'll cover that in, you know, kind of more detail basically in the CMD. Essentially, the... It's not a royalty model that we have gone with initially. It's basically a cost plus model, which is what we're doing. There's no market commitment spends in market on us. Our commitment is to continue to develop our brand, you know, basically in the way we're doing. I think unless there's any other questions, we'll call it there. Very good. Tea. Everybody, thank you very much for attending this section.
I'm hoping that you'll be able to hang around and join us for the capital market strategy update. I think that starts at 11:30, and w e have tea, coffee, biscuits. We've got some of the displays, some of products outside and of course, the Card Factory management team is around as well. Hope to see you again at 11:30. Thank you all.