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CMD 2021

Nov 4, 2021

Alex Baldock
Group CEO, Currys

Welcome to Staples Corner and welcome to Currys. I have to say it is such a pleasure to be able to do this in person today. I'm sure we've all come to know and love Zoom over the past 18 months, but it's nice to mix it up, isn't it? There's an analogy in there somewhere about the superiority of omnichannel retail over online only, but I won't, you know, I won't labor the point.

Today, we've got a lot in store for you, if you'll forgive the pun. I'm gonna kick off, and I'm gonna start with this. three years ago, we set out to transform this business into something sustainably a lot more valuable for all stakeholders.

We started with some strategic clarity, with a sense of purpose and some strategic clarity that we're here to help everyone enjoy amazing technology. That's because for many people, for many customers, the stuff that this store is full of, amazing technology, is exciting, but it's confusing and it's expensive and they need help.

They need help choosing the right technology, they need help affording it, and they need help throughout its life to get the most out of it. We, as Currys, can help them with all of that by building on our strengths as the number one specialist bricks and mortar retailer, adding online, adding services to become the number one omnichannel retailer and services provider.

The benefit of that to customers is we're more valuable to them, we get our share of that extra value, and we're giving them fewer and fewer reasons to shop anywhere else. Three years on, this is a better business now, firstly because of that strategic clarity and because that strategy, that strategic clarity is provided by a much stronger management team.

You're gonna hear from a few of them today, including Erik Sønsterud, who came to Currys, came to this business as CFO of Elkjøp before stepping up to CEO, and with his background in automotive retail, is well-versed in building the stickier and more valuable customer relationships that we want here. Mark Alsop, as COO, runs our technology and our channels.

If you want to build a digital-first omnichannel customer experience, then it's a good idea to put the channels under a digital-first guy. Mark, with his experience at Merlin of successfully putting together physical and digital experiences, certainly fits that bill.

Ed Connolly, a top-drawer Chief Commercial Officer with 20+ years of experience at Tesco and John Lewis in this category and others, was lured here and has the rare bandwidth to run both product and services here. Bruce Marsh, who came across here from Tesco, where he was Dave Lewis' right-hand man on the transformation of Tesco UK as CFO there. My top pick CFO and who's had 30 years to develop the grip that I wanted at my side.

You've got people like Paula Coughlan, who had a great career at McDonald's, where she was responsible for getting on board for 1.5 million colleagues. But she wanted to come here, and she wanted to lead the people agenda, which is so central to everything that we're doing here and is showing such great progress, not least thanks to her.

Lindsay Haselhurst, who came here from, with a background at Wincanton and Kingfisher to run and to transform our supply chain and service operations. Another top pick talent who, as well as doing that, has the rewarding and grinding role of inching out continual improvements in the customer experience, and she takes the cross-functional lead on that with the results that you'll see later today. There's more.

There's people like Nigel Paterson, who allows me to sleep at night with his attentiveness to all stripes of risk, and Asad Malik, who's well-known to you all. I mean, I've been very fortunate in my career to work with a number of exceptional management teams, and this is by some distance the strongest. The strongest team with some strategic clarity and getting the whole organization aligned behind that strategy as well.

The vision that we're here to help everyone enjoy amazing technology flowing down into a big three priorities that drive everything that we do here from plans to objectives. Very simple big three priorities really. That we want colleagues who know what they're doing and who want to be here, engaged colleagues who know their stuff.

That makes for happier customers, for making it easy to shop for our customers and in turn building Customers for Life. Today we're gonna zoom in on two important aspects of that, becoming a truly omnichannel retailer and becoming a services provider as well as a retailer. Next, three years on, we are now a significantly simpler and more focused business.

No more daydreams here about cracking the U.S. market or becoming a software developer. We're focused on our core. We've taken some difficult decisions, notably the closure of 600 stores, and we've thrown ourselves in each market behind one brand and increasingly one business. A simpler and more focused business. With the hardest yards of our transformation now behind us, the third way in which this is now a better business.

In many ways, the international business, to which we're gonna give greater prominence today, is further ahead than the U.K in its transformation. In the U.K, we've now put some big legacy issues behind us. Carphone, it, as promised, is now integrated. As you see walking around the store here, it's integrated into Currys. We're on track for break even during this financial year.

The cost is out, the cash is in, and we've launched the new offer, which we don't need to be a big success in order to keep our promises, but we certainly intend it to be. Likewise, the pandemic has been more than successfully navigated. It's left us stronger, as we've managed to more than double the size of the online business in U.K Electrical at the same time as stabilized gross margins.

Now, standing here today, three-quarters of our transformation is done, in the sense of three-quarters of the five-year transformation spend is, will have been spent by the end of this financial year. So while we have certainly not seen the full benefits yet of all of that spend, we are past the point of maximum execution risk.

Fourth, we believe that ours is sustainable progress. Sustainable in the sense of happier colleagues making for happier customers. In a business like ours, it is very difficult for the experience of the customer to exceed that of your colleagues. I tell you that we have happier colleagues. You can judge for yourself. I'd encourage you to chat as you spend some time here today. Of course, we have a great deal more work to do.

As you see here, on the left-hand side, we do have significantly more happier colleagues. We're getting up to world-class levels on colleague engagement. I could spend all day talking about everything that we're doing to make that so, from purpose and values to culture, to learning and development, to inclusion and diversity, wellbeing, giving colleagues better tools, reward, recognition.

As I say, I could bang on about that all day. What I'd encourage you to do is to buttonhole Paula, or any of us for that matter, if you want to know more. This is absolutely central, because happier colleagues makes for happier customers. As you see, we have significantly happier customers. That's evidenced by their telling us they're happier in a big jump in NPS in the UK and HappyOrNot in the Nordics.

They're showing us they're happier. They're giving us their money, and that's evidenced by the market share gains and the continued growth in the business. They have reason to be happier, as you'll hear, with the much improved retail basics, with us serving them how they want to be served through omni-channel, and increasingly, helping them do more than choose a product, helping them afford it and enjoy it for life.

Happier colleagues making for happier customers, and of course, the sustainability itself as a reason to believe in the sustainability of our progress. One thing I would say about ESG, this isn't some tiresome obligation or, you know, peripheral tacked on thing here. This is an opportunity for us in the sense that everybody cares more now about environmental sustainability, not least our customers.

We have some big advantages here. Being number one in repair, in recycling, in warranty, in insurance, we're very well-equipped to promise, to keep the promise of giving our customers' technology longer life. Just as we're well-equipped to help them choose new technology that's making greener choices.

Meanwhile, that's for customers. We're also getting our own house in order, and we're on the path to net zero by 2040 with electric vehicles by 2030. You'll hear much more about this from Asad a little later. What I would say as well is that, you know, I say it's not pasted on, that profit and purpose go hand in hand here. We really believe that. That in helping everyone enjoy amazing technology, if we did nothing else than fulfill our commercial strategy, we'd be improving millions of lives.

We can amplify that commercial strategy, and we do, with things like extending access to technology to the young through Digital Access for All, to the old, through Age UK and a bunch of other stuff that you'll hear more about later. Reasons to believe in the sustainability of our progress, happier colleagues making for happier customers and sustainability itself, being central to what we're about here.

Central to our success, and of course that success has to come through financially as well, and the fifth way in which this is a much better business now, than it was three years ago, is the financials are in much, much better shape. We are performing better. We're steadily growing. We have now stabilized gross margins.

We have taken costs out of the business, and there is much more to come on the profitability front. Equally, now we're set to normalize CapEx and exceptionals. We can be confident in generating significantly higher sustainable cash flows.

As you will hear, that will translate into sustainably higher shareholder returns as well, and all of this on the back of a much stronger balance sheet, having taken GBP 1 billion of net indebtedness out of the business over the past couple of years. Finally, the sixth way in which this is a better business is there's a lot more to come. You'll hear today from Mark and from Ed about the progress that we are making in omnichannel and Customers for Life, and how that, the full benefits of that, have yet to flow through.

In omnichannel, serving customers how they want to be served, and in Customers for Life, making stickier and more valuable customer relationships, in this business. Six reasons, then, to believe that this is a significantly better business now. It's all very well for me to say that. It's all very well for me to assert that we have the winning business model and strategy. Don't just take my word for it.

Speaker 12

Hello. Thank you for having me here today. I'm grateful to Alex and Currys for your close collaboration and for the value you drive as an important retail partner to Microsoft. What we have witnessed over the last year and a half is the second wave of digital transformation sweeping every sector across every country.

People in organizations everywhere are accelerating their digital initiatives to build resilience and to transform. That's why the partnership with Currys is so important to us. You've helped us bring the power of technology to millions at a time when it's never been more critical. Together, we are applying the power of Azure Synapse to deliver new personalized omni-channel experiences to shoppers.

We're combining Currys' retail breadth with our products, from Windows 11 to Microsoft 365 and Xbox to support the ways people work, learn and play. This is just the beginning of all that we can accomplish in the years ahead, and I'm looking forward to expanding our opportunities together. Thank you all so very much.

Speaker 11

HP and Currys have shared our trusted partnership for nearly two decades. They know how to bring the value of HP brand and the benefits of technology to life, thanks to their strong network of tech experts and their commitment to building strong relationships. In today's world, both are critical.

That's because our physical and digital worlds are blurring. Customers want seamless in-store and online experiences. Currys delivers through comprehensive omni-channel solutions like their ShopLive video shopping service. Currys is also a purpose-driven brand that is aware of the growing importance of sustainability.

From helping customers make more sustainable choices to offering repair and recycling services, Currys recognizes its role in driving progress for our planet. HP is proud to partner with Currys, and we look forward to continuing to work together to build richer customer experiences for years to come.

Speaker 10

Hi, everyone. I appreciate the chance to share a few words about Google's partnership with Currys. At the heart of it is a shared goal to bring the benefits of technology to more people. We first began working with Currys as part of our ads business, and our partnership grew as we deepened investments in hardware. We look forward to continuing our work together to bring more great devices to people and to expand opportunities through technology. Thank you.

Speaker 9

Currys has managed one of the most successful conversions in our industry globally into omni-channel retail. The in-store expertise solves the pain point of the customer of the touch and feel that they need before they buy a product. The expertise of their colleagues are unparalleled in the industry.

At the same time, they have been able to deliver the cost efficiencies and fulfillment that online capabilities bring. Currys is a true thought partner when it comes to sustainability. Beko leads the household appliance industry in terms of sustainability, and Currys has become our partner in implementing this and bringing it closer to the consumer.

We work extremely well in this regard, and I have seen time and time again, Currys' commitment to the planet as well as the consumer. I would like to thank also all Currys' colleagues and leadership team for taking Beko to the top in terms of market share in the U.K. in household appliances. Thank you.

HS Kim
President and CEO of Consumer Electronics Division, Samsung Electronics

Hello, Alex, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am HS Kim, CEO of Samsung Electronics. Samsung has always had and continues to benefit from our special and strong partnership with Currys across the full array of our product portfolio. Our strong partnership has been a key to our recent and joint success as we have faced into global uncertainties over the past years. It'll become more important as two market-leading companies together can reshape consumer experiences.

At Samsung, we see the true omnichannel model as being the best retail formula for delivering the best customer journey that can elevate our significant investment in relentless innovation. The digital transformation with which Currys is able to pivot the business and deploy digital innovation has certainly opened up new opportunities for us. This is the key to being able to showcase innovative products, excite consumers, and encourage investment.

It ultimately leads to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty. Samsung truly believes that our partnership will continuously build positive momentum towards achieving our mutual vision together. Thank you, and good luck for all.

Alex Baldock
Group CEO, Currys

Warm words, but they're warm words backed up concretely by the fact that we get more support from these suppliers than anybody else. Support you'll be able to see for yourselves, as you go around the store today. That support's because they see us for who we are, which is the growing number one in a bigger market, best able to take advantage of that market because of our winning business model, and the strategy to make the most of that. Let's get into how we're making the most of that and how we're making more and more of it, starting with that market.

Now, I think we've all seen in our own lives over the past 18 months, many people's eyes open to everything that technology can do for them, whether it's staying connected with loved ones, whether it's working from home, whether it's keeping their families fed, clean, healthy, fit, and entertained. People's eyes have opened to everything that technology can do.

Arguably, tech is playing a more central, more essential role in millions of lives now than it ever has done before. What's certainly true is customers are spending more on it, 15%-20% more than pre-pandemic. Very important to note that while we expect a bunch of this growth to stick, this market growth to stick, we are not counting on it. Our plans are prudent and do not assume this is going to take place.

We do expect it to. We do expect some of that growth at least to stick, and the reason for that is multifold. First of all, some trends aren't going away. 48% of white-collar workers in the U.K. are set to continue working hybrid. Gaming is a bigger market than movies and music combined now.

A bigger slice of the consumer's home entertainment dollar is gonna stay in the home. We expect customers to replace their technology faster now, and that happens with greater usage, and it also happens with greater awareness of what new tech can do. Nobody is expecting a return to the old seven-year laptop replacement cycle.

Of course, we have a larger installed base now, which comes from having sold more products, and that gives more products and customers to go back to for add-on sales of products and services. We expect, but do not count on, a bigger market than pre-pandemic. The other driver of that market, you've seen some of the representatives, up on the screen a moment ago.

These big technology hardware manufacturers are some of the world's biggest spenders. In fact, of the ten largest R&D spenders in any sector in the world, seven are our suppliers. They believe in this structurally larger market, and they are investing heavily behind it. That investment fuels new product development, which in turn fuels market growth. They believe it. Now in that bigger market, we of course, are the growing market leader.

We've maintained healthy levels of growth in the Nordics. In the U.K, we've compensated for closed stores last year with six points of market share gain online. We are not just growing number one, but we're healthily diversified, whichever way you cut it. We have limited concentration risk in this business, and we have the winning business model.

The omni-channel specialist model, which wins in every major market worldwide. Now, it's important to note that some of the companies on this slide have done a better job than others at making lots of money out of their market leadership, and we're gonna come on to how we are on the path to doing so.

For now, I would just see this picture as just one reason to believe in the resilience of our top line. It's not just that we've got an omnichannel model, we are building on it. You've seen that in the rapid growth of our online business. Yes, more customers are shopping online, but we're winning online.

You can see that here today in everything that we're doing to get behind the advantages of stores and face-to-face advice and demo, and we're starting to bring them together in some really interesting ways. You'll hear more about this and see it for yourselves. You'll hear more about it from Mark in a moment.

The benefits that we can provide that a monoline cannot of as far as the customer is concerned, we're never out of stock because we can sell from the full online range, even in a store. People are more impatient. Well, you can get a hold of your tech fastest through us. Order online, collect in the store.

The face-to-face expert advice that people like from stores, you can have that online too now, thanks to our 24/7 video shopping service, ShopLive. We're delivering on omni-channel. By the way, it's not just we're delivering omni-channel for customers, we are also delivering it for ourselves. That's evidenced in the stabilized gross margins that we're calling out today, gross margins that we intend to keep stable. We owe that to leveling up.

For those of you who for whom this Borisism will be less to your taste than others, I apologize, but it's a phrase that's got some currency internally, and it's here to stay. That's simply leveling up profitability between channels. Bringing our online channel up to the level of store profitability, and we're gonna talk about how we're doing that, notably in selling more credit and other services online and some supply chain efficiencies.

Finally, we're building Customers for Life. We're moving beyond being a transactional business into having millions of customers who we know very well and who we are more valuable to and can get a share of that ourselves. As you'll hear from Ed a little later, we have a lot of customers here, arguably all we need.

We have many more of them than we used to. We're able to talk to them much more than we have been able to before, and we are doing so to increasingly valuable effect, visible in areas like Club and our rapid growth in CRM-driven sales. We also can measure loyalty now, and we're gonna reveal a measure to you today, LTR it's called, likelihood to return, which you're gonna hear a lot more about in the months and years to come.

A very simple, very intuitive, and a very useful way to measure and manage to a customer's likelihood to come back. The good news is we're doing lots of things that we can demonstrate are driving increased customer loyalty. Notably, but not only Credit and services.

It's important that we're making the progress that we're making, that you're gonna hear about today on credit and services. It's important because they matter. Credit, for example, drives much happier customers, more valuable customers who spend more and are more prone to pay for other services, and who come back much more reliably, 70% more reliably, in fact, 70% higher likelihood to return. It's not just about credit.

Other services too, the customer demand is there. We're best placed to fulfill that demand. We can do so profitably, and we're well underway. You'll hear more about this in a bit. What's the summary from all of this? First of all, we believe, but we're not counting on the fact that our market is bigger.

Second, we're best placed to take advantage of that, with it being a genuinely international business that's everywhere, the growing number one with a winning omni-channel business model and with valuable services. Third, we are doing more and more to take advantage of that position with a clear strategy, a strong management team making sustainable progress.

Fourth, the hardest yards, as it says here, the hardest yards of our transformation, are now behind us, and we've dealt with some legacy issues. We've navigated through the pandemic pretty well, and in fact, it leaves us in a stronger position and here we are. Fifth, all of this is coming through in cash. Important point, and we are confident in that GBP 250 million of sustainable free cash flow by FY 2024 that you'll hear about.

Finally, while we've done a lot of the hard yards, the full benefits have yet to appear. I mentioned cash, and of course, these benefits do have to appear in the financials. You'll hear from Bruce a little later, that there is strong reason to believe that we will continue our track record of steady growth.

Whichever angle you look at it from, whether it's who we sell to, what we sell, how or where, there's more growth in the tank here. Second, we can believe in the 4% EBIT margin target that we're on track towards. We have already stabilized gross margins and the significant further cost to come out of the business, GBP 300 million from a modernized supply chain and service operations from rationalized IT, from more productive stores, and from simplified central costs.

All of this when you add it to normalized CapEx and normalized exceptionals gives us confidence in that GBP 250 million number and gives us confidence to promise the extra shareholder return that we're unveiling today. That's all to come. What we're gonna do next is get into some deep dives on how we're gonna make this cash. We're gonna talk about how we sell omni-channel. Mark's gonna do that.

We're gonna talk about Customers for Life, and Ed's gonna come up to do that. Before and first of all, I'd like you to please welcome to the stage, Erik Sønsterud and his very able Nordics Commercial Officer, Andreas Westergaard, who are gonna talk about perhaps a relatively rare thing in U.K. retail, a large and very successful international business. Erik, over to you guys.

Erik Sønsterud
CEO of Elkjøp Nordic, Elkjøp Nordic

Good morning, everyone.

Andreas Westergaard
Nordics Commercial Officer, Elkjøp Nordic

Morning.

Erik Sønsterud
CEO of Elkjøp Nordic, Elkjøp Nordic

You're well?

Andreas Westergaard
Nordics Commercial Officer, Elkjøp Nordic

Good.

Erik Sønsterud
CEO of Elkjøp Nordic, Elkjøp Nordic

We are really glad to be here to actually be here in London to be able to talk about Elkjøp. Elkjøp, a big and successful part of our group. We are sharing the same great vision. We help everyone enjoy amazing technology, and we benefit from many great group synergies, especially within best practice sharing as we also are following the same group strategy.

We are all about helping our customers all the way into a more circular economy, and we are going to build Customers for Life. With more than 400 stores across the whole Nordics, over 10,000 colleagues, we can help our customers with the tech wherever the customer lives in their local languages. That is a proposition that no one else can match in the whole Nordics.

We have a very strong and experienced management team with a fine balance between newly recruits with new competencies, myself, like Alex said, coming in from the outside, and colleagues actually being in Elkjøp their whole career, moving up from being a salesperson in the store to becoming a managing director in the countries.

That is a really strong combination to have in a retail management team. Elkjøp is the growing market leader and the clear preferred brand in all our markets. We have a market share of more than 25, or more than 36% overall Nordics. This is a highly attractive market to be in. It's 25 million people with high level standard of living and early adopters of technology.

Being here now, it's important to emphasize that the Nordics is four different countries, four different languages, four different currencies, and four different cultures. Elkjøp has a very strong central brand concept led out of Oslo, which is in Norway, by the way, and localized and executed locally in each of the countries. That has seemed and proven to be a very strong winning formula.

As Alex mentioned, we also in the Nordics have a highly diversified business, and for us this is particularly important because we are mainly meeting national competitors and/or niche players in the various categories. Having this balance is very good foundation for competing across all markets. We have done so successfully. We have a really strong track record of revenue growth.

Actually, we have been growing every year since we were founded in 1962. Every year. As seen from the last 20 years, 10% average annual growth in a quite mature market that is really strong. At the foundation and in the genes of Elkjøp is all about innovation.

We have proven that since we introduced the concept of well-known brands at lowest price to being early adopters of the mobile phone business, leading the way into the online revolution, and now into the emerging market of smartphone, which will be so crucial for our industry in the future. We are going to continue to launch new innovation that is benefiting our customers and helping us grow, continue this growth in the future. We are already the clear market leader in all our markets.

By far the biggest market share in Norway, which is our home market. With big potentials in all the other markets to move towards that level. We are also the clear leader in all the other markets, quite long distance down to number two, but big potential, especially in Sweden, which has the double size of the population as the other countries.

You can see we are already more than 3 x bigger than the next competitors, and we are the biggest online, bigger than any one of the pure players. Still there are opportunities here because 50% of the markets are really fragmented by small and niche players in the categories, as I said. That for us as an omnichannel player, we have huge opportunities still to continue this journey on gaining market share.

A strong market position is all about being relevant for the customer. We are working really hard every day to become the only one you need within electronics. Aren't we, Alex? Andreas, sorry.

Andreas Westergaard
Nordics Commercial Officer, Elkjøp Nordic

Thank you very much. I remember a few years ago, I had a meeting with HS Kim, the guy from Samsung that you saw on the screen, and I said to him, we were negotiating, I said, "Remember, we only represent 25 million people." He leaned across the table and said, "Yes, but you have the buying power that surpasses more than 100 million Italians."

There is something good about the Nordic market as well. I'm gonna talk to you through a few slides. First, I'm gonna talk to you about range. As we said, initially, you'll not become the destination in our market unless you're relevant for the customer. As the shopping journey has shifted from a store-first to online-first experience, it's been very important for us to increase the range.

We've done that gradually, and a few years ago we had around 60,000 products buyable. We now have surpassed 100,000 buyable products in our range. We're going to continue to grow that range as well. The way we do it is that we are looking into what our customers is actually searching for on our site.

Then we're gradually building to keep that focus and that facet of relevance in everything we do. This is a good thing. If you want to, it's basically not about the number. This is a very important point. Because you can sometimes get caught up about how many SKUs do you have.

The most important thing is actually what the number does to your business. You can actually, if you have 10,000 products, you can easily do it manually. If you do have 100,000 products across 4 markets, you can't do it manually.

You have to automate your processes. Price management, range management, master data management, onboarding, off-boarding, all these things, they need to be automated and we've done it, and we have a very good and robust setup to manage and to scale this also going forward. Because if you want to win, you basically need to have what the customer is searching for, and we're going to offer them that, and we're not going to get beaten on price.

Another very important point is that this also requires a very good and active sourcing strategy because you don't wanna lose sight of your inventory management. What we are doing is that we are combining marketplace, third-party distribution in on top of our own locations, like central warehouses, hubs, and store availability, and we are funneling that into one customer experience. Internally we call it the only source.

The customer doesn't really care where the product is kept in stock. The only relevant thing is when do I actually get it? Is it in stock and when do I get it? This we have done seamlessly. We have this capability also to expand the range without jeopardizing the stock turn and the cash.

I think if there's any group in the world who would appreciate that, I hope this is the group. I believe so. Good. Next on to the services. As Alex said, in his introductions, our customers find electronics very, very exciting, very high interest products. Sometimes expensive and sometimes confusing. What we see is that, this is a mega trend.

Services attached to products is a mega trend. We built the business on recommending the best products from the best brand at the lowest price. Today this is not enough. Today, our industry is always about the perfect combination between a hardware product, a software product, and a service. We are well positioned to grow in this area because we have been advising the Nordic customer for so many years.

This is one of the areas where it really plays to our strength to have knowledgeable staff, a vast network of stores who is already operational, and we know the customer. It's very good for us that this is happening. Good. Finally, this is where it's getting really interesting, our loyalty club. We have been gradually building our loyalty club since 2016. We now have more than 6.3 million customers who have actively opted in, and that's the equivalent of half of all the Nordic households. It's a great number.

It's quite easy to attract customers into the loyalty club, and it's quite easy to keep them there by giving them some good and tangible benefits. The true magic is basically when you can combine what you know about the customer with a targeted information channel, so you can market very specifically to the customers based on what they want and what they need. This is where we don't need to rely on third-party players to tell us anything about our customers. We know who they are. We know where they live. We know what they have, and we know what they want.

With combining all these elements into a great marketing message very specifically targeted to that customer, that's when it's getting really, really interesting, and doing that across channels is what we define as omnichannel. That's over to you again, Erik.

Erik Sønsterud
CEO of Elkjøp Nordic, Elkjøp Nordic

Thank you, Andreas. Yes, also the Nordic consumer likes to shop omnichannel. Mark will tell us more about, you know, our offerings in there. We also know that most customers start their journey online, and with more than 369 million website visitors last year, we were actually the most visited web shop across any industry in the Nordics.

That gives us a really strong foundation. With also more than 60 million visitors in our stores, we are already truly living the omnichannel. Our online business is growing fast, 39% over the last three, four years. Click and collect is growing the fastest, by 47%.

By utilizing our store colleagues in online, which Mark is going to tell us more about, through ShopLive, helping the customers in the store when they come and pick up their goods after click and collect, utilizing our sales staff to sell the whole online range and never being out of stock, that is a really strong proposition that we're going to build on further, that already are quite successful on.

We are already well invested in our infrastructure. We have a very central centralized logistics system with a central warehouse, very modern, in Enköping, distributing the goods to all our stores and also for our home deliveries. With more than 70 hubs and more than 400 stores across the whole Nordics, we can deliver faster than anyone else in the Nordics.

We also have continuously been developing our stores. Hopefully, we'll be in Oslo next time, and you can see the store for yourself in the Nordics. They are inspirational and exciting, as you will see here as well. Lastly, most important, we have invested a lot in our IT platform over the last years.

We have done a huge IT transformation, changing the whole front-end system for our store colleagues and now also introducing the web shop for all our customers, fully integrated into our omnichannel platform. We have called it the next generation retail, and we are really now in the forefront in the omnichannel technology in the world, actually. That is giving us the opportunity to really accelerate our omnichannel offering to our customers going forward.

At the heart of the omnichannel business is our colleagues, and that is why we are investing more than 100 billion NOK every year to build the competence into our colleagues and to become trusted advisors for our customers. Actually, our colleagues completed 23,000 e-learnings last year. That's an impressive number, and that's absolutely necessary for us to know more than our customers for our products.

This also pays off. Last year, we were also awarded the employer of the year in Sweden, so that's good to have with us. We know happy colleagues makes happy customer, and it is also good for business, as you will see. Because we are really happy about our performance, we have had a really strong performance over the last years. We have grown our...

For the last five years, growing our top line by an average 10%, again, in a very mature market, growing the EBIT even further by 14% and improving our EBIT margin every year, setting record results. We have done so by gaining market share every year and bringing more happy customers. We are really happy and also very proud about this performance. We are never satisfied. Of course, we're going to continue this journey, and we have so many opportunities to continue to do that. Right, Andreas?

Andreas Westergaard
Nordics Commercial Officer, Elkjøp Nordic

Yeah.

Erik Sønsterud
CEO of Elkjøp Nordic, Elkjøp Nordic

You can talk about it.

Andreas Westergaard
Nordics Commercial Officer, Elkjøp Nordic

I think we have, you know, we touched a few of the points already, so I'm just gonna quickly summarize. I mean, omnichannel represents a huge opportunity for us. By making it much easier for people to shop, I think that's the core guidance around all the omnichannel work that we do.

Continuing to build on that range expansion, but we have to do it wisely, and we have to do it with relevance. Because if you don't do it cautiously and you do it with intelligence, you're gonna water down your own concept. You have to keep your eyes on this. It's not about the number. For us, it's about how scalable is the business once you pass that threshold.

Continuing to work on the combination between hardware, software, and services, utilizing that megatrend and using our knowledgeable staff to make it much better for them to buy with us. Actually, now we see that customers are coming to our stores because we offer services.

A few years ago, the services was kind of the oddity, but now it's becoming a reason by itself for people to come and buy with us, shop products with us. Lastly but not least, B2B. We haven't talked much about B2B, but that is a tremendous opportunity for us. The SMB market in the Nordics is the same size as the B2C market, and we're just scratching the surface of this potential.

A massive opportunity, again, where we can utilize what we have already now in terms of infrastructure, store staff, and the capabilities to really take a big part of this segment going forward, and we are going to. Great opportunities.

Erik Sønsterud
CEO of Elkjøp Nordic, Elkjøp Nordic

Thank you, Andreas. Hopefully you have now some more insight into Nordics, and we can welcome you back here next time. We will give the word to Mark to give a deep dive into the omni-channel, what we actually are doing.

Andreas Westergaard
Nordics Commercial Officer, Elkjøp Nordic

Thank you.

Erik Sønsterud
CEO of Elkjøp Nordic, Elkjøp Nordic

Thank you.

Mark Alsop
COO, Currys

Thank you, Erik. Thank you, Andreas. Good morning, and welcome to our fantastic Staples Corner store. We're very excited to have you here. I'm Mark Alsop, Chief Operating Officer, and I'm here to talk to you about how we make it easy to shop for our customers however, whenever, and wherever they choose to shop with us.

The key way we do that is through omni-channel, bringing the best of both online and stores together to give our customers a better experience than they would ever get through a single standalone channel. That's what makes us uniquely Currys, the ability to bring both online and stores together for our customers. As Alex said, omni-channel is the proven winning model. The good news is it's not just Alex that's telling us that.

Our customers are also supporting that, with over 60% of our customers wanting to shop in both stores and online, a truly omni-channel shopping experience. An omni-channel gives us huge amounts of flexibility. It allows us to amend when the customer demands change based on the environment or customer behavior.

For example, it was our omni-channel strength that allowed us to power through the pandemic, being able to flex to online when we had to close our stores, being able to support millions of customers when they were forced to work and stay at home. The pandemic also allowed us to innovate quickly. It's allowed us to bring the best of omni-channel to our customers, whether that was our new shopping platform, ShopLive, or whether it was through our contactless order and collect. We delivered all of those initiatives in a matter of weeks.

As our stores have reopened, we've been there to welcome our customers back with fantastic demos and thousands of expert colleagues ready to help our customers. Thousands of expert colleagues that only Currys can provide, a uniquely Currys element. Omni-channel starts with a strong online business, and the good news is that we're already winning online. We are twice as big as our rivals.

We've doubled the size of our online business in the last year, and we are growing faster than the competition. As you heard from Erik and Andreas, the same picture is true in the Nordics, where we have all of the largest online platforms in all four markets. We've been delivering this growth by focusing on just good retail basics. We now have a larger range. In the last two years, we've more than doubled the amount of SKUs that we have.

The good news is there's even more headroom, as Erik's just shown us. We have 100,000 SKUs in the Nordics, so there's more to go after. We are bang on the money in terms of price. We are committed to our price commitment of you won't find it cheaper, whether that's in the U.K., in Ireland, or the Nordics.

What gets us most excited is our focus on customer experience. Making sure that we remove customer pain points, that we improve the end-to-end customer journey. The good news is our customers are noticing. We're seeing record CSAT scores following improvements that we've done to our delivery and our collection services.

We're also improving gross margin performance, both online and in store, by leveling up, which essentially means taking the best practice and the best learnings from across our organization and applying it to our organization, whether that's best practice from our colleagues, best practice across our channels, or indeed best practice across our group-wide organization.

The key point being is we're making it easier for our customers to understand either online or in store the benefits of things like credit, understanding how they can upgrade to the tech that they truly want. The same is true with care and repair, where we've taken the best learnings from Nordics about how do we best communicate the benefits of care and repair online so that our customers are more willing to protect the tech that they buy from us. There is yet more to come.

We are well on our journey to becoming a best-in-class, digital first, omni-channel retailer. We are able to meet customer demands, provide personalized end-to-end journeys, powered by robust technology, enabled by customer data. We're delivering a digital first omni-channel future, starting with a brand new website, powered by a new commerce engine. We're also delivering a colleague hub and an easy-to-use customer app. We've already started, as you can see, by introducing a cleaner and more intuitive design for currys.co.uk just ahead of peak trading.

We'll launch our new scalable super-fast commerce platform early in the new year, which will unlock growth and margin improvements through upselling, through cross-selling, through the ability to bundle, delivering personalized recommendations to our customers, all while driving an intuitive adoption of credit and services. Exciting times ahead.

As I said at the start, we are an omni-channel business, and we love our stores and the thousands of colleagues that work in them. It's our colleagues who are the beating heart of this organization. They're the ones that add the magic ingredient to every customer interaction.

That's why we're investing in both our stores and our colleagues at a time when others are perhaps walking away, especially as the sales mix normalizes to a 50/50 split between online and stores. We've already moved to a single brand to make it easier for our customers to understand who we are. Now we're looking at ways to create more theater, more experience in our stores, make our stores the home of the demo. You'll hopefully see that as you walk around our stores a little later.

Essentially, allowing our customers to see, touch, and play with amazing technology. Then also making it easier for our customers to understand our products and our solutions by talking tech with tech experts. I encourage you to talk to all of our colleagues who are brilliant tech experts. All of this, of course, means that we have happier customers, resulting in record NPS scores across our store network.

We're investing in our colleagues, too. We're working hard to motivate and excite them. We're building skills for life through our new Life Selling framework, essentially being proud to sell, finding the right products, the right solutions, tailored specifically to a customer's requirements. It's good for the customers, it's good for us, it drives higher sales, higher gross margin.

We're also giving our colleagues the right tools and a focus on providing the right data to allow them to give our customers an amazing experience, better help our customers. Whether that's through something we call Store Mode, which allows colleagues to access the full range of products, whether that's online or in store.

Also our aim is to bring all of the colleague tools and all of the colleagues' data together so that we can better support a customer need. We're also improving pay and reward, ensuring that our colleagues are rewarded the most when our customers are the happiest. Of course, our colleagues are also shareholders in our business. As a result, we're seeing big employee satisfaction improvements, which is translating, of course, to happier customers. We're gonna keep on investing in our stores and our colleagues.

We'll provide more tools, more and more data, and more and more training, focusing on improving productivity and utilizing downtime so that we get more and more time in front of our customers being able to serve and support them. We're also making sure we have the right number of stores. We now have about 300 stores across the U.K., all under a single brand of Currys. Everything that a customer wants, all under a single roof.

Fantastic technology, fantastic products, brilliant solutions, the ability to do a repair, a return, a recycle, all supported by thousands of expert colleagues. We're not sentimental about stores. We've demonstrated, as Alex said at the start, that we can take tough decisions on stores if we need to. The fact is that our stores are in good health. About 97% of our stores are now profitable.

We'll of course work really hard to make sure that all of our stores are profitable, but we now have reduced rents and more flexible lease terms so that we have the ability to respond quickly if we need to. We're winning online, and we're winning in stores. It's bringing the best of both together, best of online and best of stores together, which creates a truly omni-channel experience.

An omni-channel gives us three big benefits that will drive both growth and gross margin. First of all, we'll never be out of stock. Followed by immediacy, the need to get my products right now. Then our ability to provide 24/7 expert help and advice. Never out of stock. Using Store Mode, our colleagues now have access to the full and bigger range of products, whether it's stocked in store or not.

Meaning that we'll have the right product for the right customer somewhere in our network, essentially being much better at keeping our customer promises. It also means that we can optimize our stock holding across our stores, therefore providing more space for experience and for demo, of course driving further efficiencies into our supply chain.

It's stores and online working together that also allows our customers to get their products right now. We've made really good foundational changes as a result of order and collect, including contactless order and collect, which allows a customer to get their technology delivered to the boot of their car all within 30 minutes of placing the order. In the U.K., as of today, we've also launched our trial with Uber to test super fast delivery across 15 London stores.

Imagine being able to get the product from the store to the customer's door all within 30 minutes at a price of GBP 5. Exciting times ahead. If that's not enough, our customers are also responding really positively to our new ShopLive solution. It means that they can speak to an expert store colleague and get expert help and advice all from the comfort of their own sofa. When compared to unassisted online, customers are more likely to buy.

They spend more money. They're twice as likely to protect their product, and they are far more satisfied as a result. We like ShopLive because it means that more customers get to speak to our expert colleagues. It also improves our colleague and our store utilization and allows us to drive productivity.

For example, a colleague here in Staples Corner can one moment be serving a customer on the shop floor, the next moment be hopping onto ShopLive and supporting a customer in Aberdeen buy a laptop through ShopLive, obviously with credit and care and repair attached to it as well. It's great for our customers, it's great for our colleagues, and it's great for our business.

We're going to keep on investing in our ShopLive platform, meaning more and more colleagues being able to transact on behalf of our customers and also being able to co-create baskets with our customers. We're also extending the platform out to something called RepairLive, which will enable customers to get real-time fixes for their laptops, or book a repair, or even arrange a return, all via video call. We love omnichannel. We're already winning online.

We're big, but we are not resting. We've got a new website, a new commerce engine with the ability to upsell, cross-sell, bundle sell, provide specific tailored recommendations to our customers, increasing sales, increasing margin. We believe in our stores, which are profitable and ever more flexible. The home of the demo, with thousands of expert colleagues ready to support and provide our customers a great experience.

Omni-channel brings the best of both of those elements together, the best of online and the best of stores, whether that's through ShopLive, through order and collect, through Uber trials, through RepairLive, or through Store Mode. As I said, there is so much more yet to come. All with the aim of making it easier for our customers to shop however, whenever, and wherever they choose to shop with us. Thank you. I'm now handing over to Ed.

Ed Connolly
Group Chief Commercial Officer, Currys

Thank you, Mark. Good morning, everyone. I'm gonna talk to you about Customers for Life, and this is all about how we are building those stickier and more valuable customers that Alex alluded to earlier on. It's really also about our evolution as a business and how we're evolving from a business which was about selling boxes repeatedly to strangers focused predominantly on in-year numbers, to one that builds and maintains deep and durable customer relationships over many years.

We're gonna do this in two primary ways. Firstly, using rich data to personalize customer shopping journeys, customer engagement in ways we've never been able to before. This is using much richer data than we've ever had access to before. Secondly, it's about developing our services proposition.

This is because we know that these are the two levers that we need to pull to create more customer loyalty. It's these levers which will build upon our core strategy and creates that stickiness of customers. It will make them more valuable to us over a longer period of time. That's what Customers for Life is really all about. It's also all about opportunity. Opportunity in the services market, but opportunity, of course, in the product market too. Now, first, in that product market. This is a large market indeed now, GBP 23 billion in the U.K. The real opportunity is this.

Of course, you know that we are the market leader and 80% of this market's customers, well, of U.K. households, that means that they've shopped with Currys, we've served them, we've helped them over the last three years. Here's the really exciting thing, we only capture about one in the three, average three purchases that they make in the market today. This is our opportunity really.

This is our headroom, and this is one of the most exciting things through all of this work, 'cause it means that do you know what? We've got access to many of the customers that we realistically need already, though of course, all newcomers are equally welcome. We don't need a hugely expensive acquisition drive here.

It's our task now to use the tools that are at hand to do two things, increase the share of our customers' wallets and also to increase the size of those wallets. We'll do that through better CRM and from credit and by accessing more of the services market. All well and good you might say, but what business is not trying to use big data to increase loyalty at this moment?

It's no easy task to build a customer book, which makes this really interesting. Our great advantage here, as Alex showed us, is that we already have a very large installed customer base and a growing customer base it is too. The post-pandemic year, of course, has boosted this, but as you can see, it is an enduringly bigger customer base that we have. Two key stats.

We now have a third more active shoppers than we have, than we had just four years back. These are a much more engaged set of customers too. As you can see from the bottom bar chart, we can talk to three times as many as we could just two years ago, and that number of customers is now just tantalizingly a whisker below 10 million.

Very big book indeed. Do you know what? On this topic, we're effectively on an exponential curve. We're getting more and more data into the top of the funnel, and we're getting smarter and smarter about what we do with that data. You can see this coming through on our comms conversion metric. Of course, this is translating through into the sales line already.

As you can see, our CRM attributable sales have grown by 170%, year to date. What are we really gonna do with all of this data and this new capability? Well, we heard from Erik and Andreas about the tremendous success of the customer club in the Nordics and the benefits to customers, but the benefits to this part of our business too, to both frequency and our margins. Having this in another part of our group has actually really helped us to design, to build, and to launch just last month our own free club, and we've called this Currys Perks. We've really modeled this on the very best of the Nordics model, the Nordics Club.

The things you can expect to see in Perks are exclusive discounts, monthly surprises, VIP shopping events, and partner benefits. We can really use each other in this way to find out what works well and to emulate it in our other markets. It's only one month in, so really very early days indeed, but it's showing great promise already. We've got a third of U.K. households already enrolled in this program.

We have great vendor support. Apple were with us for launch, and of course, a brand of that power, that magnitude, will really encourage the rest of our supply base to get on board with this. Very early signals, though they may be, customer sentiment is really positive here already on things like frequency, average transaction value, and other engagement measures.

These are all the signals that we would want at this stage of the program's evolution. Expect to hear much more from Currys Perks over the coming months. Really, Perks is just the beginning and we have much more to do to harmonize our large customer data sets and many more powerful data groups of really engaged customers are yet to be synthesized into our master database.

This will continue to fuel this dynamic that we have for the next 18 months or so as we bring all of those data sets on stream. We're gonna do three key things with all of this data, continue to personalize all experiences for as many customers as we possibly can. Second, this is all about learning for us. You know, we've got to treat this as gold dust.

This insight is so powerful for us, and we can really continue to shape our propositions with this gold dust, with this insight that comes back from customers to refine our propositions right across the board, really understand what our customers value, what they want from us, and we'll continue to shape and refine our propositions as a result of all of this insight. Then we're gonna use this services customer data in combination with the wider data set.

This is really important because it keeps the dialogue going with customers for longer. This is really important in a sector which is relatively infrequently shopped, like ours. It keeps us top of mind. It keeps us relevant throughout the year. This is a key advantage to us. All of this, of course, is geared around maximizing customer loyalty.

To help us in our aim of driving increased customer loyalty, Alex teed this one up for us. We developed this measure LTR, likelihood to return, a really simple measure that we can use right across the organization and, very simply put how likely is a customer or a set of customers to come back to us in the next 12 months.

Something we can use right across the business. It enables us to track our, all of our activity in this space, gauge what's working, gauge what isn't working so well, and that's gonna help us when we think about where we want to put our emphasis as we develop our capability in this space. Already this is kicking out some really interesting and really valuable insights.

Well, firstly, it's actually helped us to validate our core strategy because it shows that customers who shop across channels are over a quarter more likely to return than those who just shopped the one channel. That customers who shop in multiple categories in any given year are 20% more likely to come back to us than customers who've only shopped in the one category. For us to capture a second basket of any category for our customers within the year produces an incremental LTR of over 50%.

All of this, of course, is totally consistent with our strategy and totally consistent with all of the investments that we've made, whether that's across the new online platforms that Mark was talking about earlier on, whether it's about those investments in our colleagues and in colleagues' training, whether it's about expanding our ranges or entering new markets, or whether it's about the investments that we've made in our CRM capability.

All of these things have been designed to help customers to shop omni-channel, to encourage customers to consider us for other categories, and all of it has been designed with the aim of improving frequency too. As if all that wasn't exciting enough, what this analysis has done for us is shine a light on the power of our services business to improve loyalty as well.

Now, in and of themselves, these are significant drivers of profits upside for us, but the additional benefits to loyalty are now clear. As you can see from the bar chart, pay-for services drives an incremental 20%, LTR, likelihood to return, and it's repeat credit spend that really gets LTR pinging.

Repeat credit customers being over 70% more likely to come back to us than those who are not using credit. I'm gonna come on to our plans to drive these two areas harder in just a moment, but just at a headline level, look, all points are ticking north on these things. I mean, on credit in particular, higher incremental sales, and we can attribute 30% of credit sales to be truly incremental.

Credit customers spend more because they're able to reach up to a higher standard of tech, and so therefore our average transaction value comes across in both channels with a clear, significant improvement. Credit customers also rate us more highly than non-credit customers. We can see that come through from our NPS scores.

Finally, credit customers are 20% more likely to take out one of our paid services than non-credit customers. You can see how these things really interconnect. As for paid-for services, well, we're big already in this area, 8.5 million active service customers in the U.K. alone, and 30% of our product sales are attached to a service already.

Lots of headroom here, you know, for sure, but we are building on strengths across all four stages of our customer journey within services. In terms of helping customers afford amazing tech, as mentioned, we have an installed base now of 1.5 million customers today and 11% sales penetration and growing fast. In terms of getting customers started, well, we help many millions of customers with deliveries, installations, collections of old tech, and we have a booming business in product setup too.

Giving your tech longer life, obviously of real significance and real relevance at this moment in time, we, of course, offer our own airtime to over 1 million installed customers on our ID platform, and a very engaged bunch of customers they are too, and a base which continues to grow.

Then crucially, we know customers enjoy their tech even more if they have disposed of their old unit responsibly. As we are the clear leaders in this market, we recycle over 100 million tons of electrical waste every year. We know this can be a really significant source of competitive advantage in the coming period of time. I'm gonna come back to this in just a moment.

The overall message is, look, we're big and we're growing here, but there remains significant headroom to go further, faster. Let's have a look at credit first. Again, momentum here is really strong. We have 50% more active accounts than we had just three years back, and we're driving up the credit penetration of our sales up to our target in FY 2024. Basically doubling it from our base line in FY 2019.

We're looking at ways that we can, indeed, go further than that. What we've done is to bring in some world-class talent into this area of our business as well, and you will meet David Buxton later on, who we've brought in into our business. What David and the team have done is set out a new growth strategy for us with four very clear pillars.

The first one is about innovation, innovating in our proposition, and this is ideas like flexible pricing getting us away from our fixed price today of 24.9% APR, which doesn't appeal to everyone. Pay in 3, which is in our business already in MVP status, but the reaction from customers has been really, really positive and has huge potential for us.

Those early signals are extremely strong. Second, and consistent with the rest of this story, is about tapping in to repeat spend through using CRM. Now, this is really important to us and a really clearly delineated opportunity here. You can see from this ring in the bottom left-hand corner, we have GBP 5 billion of pre-approved credit sat on our customers' accounts today, and only 12% of that is being utilized.

We see this as a huge opportunity, a huge pool of revenue that we can tap into, and we know that better CRM is the key to unlocking that door. Third is about improving our credit platforms, so maximizing conversion, improving customer outcome, and this is about giving a customer just a better journey, a slicker journey, a more digitized journey than the one that we have today.

Fourthly, we are going to introduce a second lender in NewDay, and this is all about improving acceptance rates from today's level, being able to write more credit, and support more customers with credit across the base. Look, in summary, we're hugely important to customers here in credit already.

You can see that we have a really successful business already, but you can see how it's about to get massively more successful over the coming months. I think a similar picture emerges actually in paid-for services. A large market in its own right, roughly GBP 2.5 billion, and where margins can be more attractive than they are on the product side. Customers consistently demonstrate their appetite for these paid-for services. They value them, they need them.

A few stats to sort of back this up. 25 million customers have bought a service in the market in just the last three years. 44% of customers pay for premium delivery, even though they would get it for free if they just waited a little bit longer. Almost a quarter of customers have multiple product protection with a care service on the tech in their home.

In computing, which is a core generator of services, almost half of customers who we polled would be willing to pay for a setup service. I think the exciting thing here, again, is that we have headroom. We are actually underweight in this market when you compare it to our share of the product market. Exciting room to grow, and this is what we're doing about it.

Again, we've recruited fresh, world-class leadership in this space, and you'll meet Dean Kramer presently on the store tours. Dean and the team have established our strategy for growth in two key areas. First is about building a bigger and better value range of services.

Now, you might call this fixing the basics. It's about filling the gaps that we have still in our offer today and introducing some new insight-led innovation into the range, which we actually haven't done for some little while. It's about zoning in on a more transparent and a more competitive pricing model, and there's some little significance that we can place on that. All of this is with the goal of increasing that wallet, the size of that wallet that we talked about earlier on. The second is thinking about an easier customer journey.

Putting all of our services available in all channels across a seamless customer journey, and that's not the case today. We have significant upside there too. That's gonna include things like CRM within services, so a tailored post-purchase and renewals set of communications. Then it's about building a suite of services that can be purchased with product or standalone.

At present, we are not playing into around 1/7 of that GBP 2.5 billion market 'cause we don't offer standalone services, and that's something we're gonna fix. All of that is upside from today. We're also zoned in this area, getting it right for customers first time, again, because this is a key determinant of LTR in this space, and it moves us towards the lifetime relationship model that we're seeking and away from that more transactional one-off mentality.

When we think about how we're gonna win our fair share and go beyond in this area, these are the ways in which we are going to do it. There's one more thing I wanted to touch on in this space, and that's that services allow us that reach into enabling customers to make more sustainable choices, so really tapping into the zeitgeist.

For us, this is all about our repairs and our recycling capability. Because of the expertise and because of the facilities that we have built up over a number of years, we can do this on a scale that nobody else can. Not without massive investment anyway. Therefore, we see this as a really clear and a potentially very significant competitive advantage.

You'll start to see this come through in our propositions, in our communications clearly as we develop this over the course of the next 12 months. You may already be seeing it in actual fact, as we've launched our new Go Greener campaign, which points customers towards a more eco-friendly product, but it also encourages customers to recycle their old product at the same time. It's this capability that competitors just can't match that gives this business a real opportunity to show leadership in the market on this really important topic, and Asad will come back to talk about this in more detail a little later on.

By way of summary, Customers for Life builds on the stronger foundations that you've heard about in our strategy of happier colleagues making for happier customers, of better retail basics, whether that's across range, availability, pricing, or an easy customer journey, and of helping customers to shop how they want to shop, omni-channel, developing online, developing stores with total commitment to offer the best of both worlds to every single customer.

Everything that I presented on Customers for Life, it builds on top of this, and it helps customers to access, and it's gonna help access more of the services market. It's gonna help us to access a bigger share of bigger wallets across a longer period of time. It's all about us talking to that large and that growing number of customers that we know increasingly well.

It's all about us developing more credit options and a wider range of services, and all this fueled by a step change in our CRM capability. It's these things that will create those stickier, those more valuable customers that are better engaged with us than ever before and with whom we've got more reasons for ongoing dialogue, customers who have fewer reasons to look elsewhere and therefore customers that will become our Customers for Life. Okay. Thank you for your attention. We now have a brief video to help to bring this to life. Thank you.

Speaker 13

We're accelerating our transformation from bricks and mortar into a world-class omni-channel retailer. What changes will the customer see? It used to be that if a customer needed to buy a product, they'd come in store where they'd be helped by a colleague, then they'd leave, and we wouldn't see them again until they needed something new when they may decide to shop with us. If they came back, it would be as a stranger to us. If they did decide to shop with us, we didn't get the credit for everything we did.

They'd buy their washing machine from Currys, have it installed by Team Knowhow, or upgrade their mobile at Carphone Warehouse. It was always us, but customers saw different brands. All that's changing, and fast. Improved data means we're getting to know our customers far better.

We're there for them at the right time and connecting with them in the right way, so they can rely on us during the big moments in their life, like moving, working from home, or going to college. As we connect more, we're using our new CRM capabilities to better understand and help our customers.

Our new membership club, Currys Perks, offers even greater opportunities to gather and act on customer insights. We're not waiting for them to come back to us, we're giving them reason to. When they do, it may still be to a store, to us online, or a mix of both. However they want to shop, we're more ready than we've ever been to help our customers every step of the way. We've always had capable and committed colleagues, but now they're even better.

They're more engaged as Currys becomes an ever better place to work. We're doing more to help our colleagues help our customers, whether that's putting our knowledge of the customer in their hands, increasingly available at the touch of a button, or giving them the skills, tools, and incentives to do everything they can to help them choose the right, amazing technology.

Our customers have more choice than ever before because our range is the best it's ever been. It's bigger and will never be beaten on price. Choosing the amazing technology through expert advice is just the start. We help customers afford that amazing technology through credit, get started delivering, installing, or setting up tech, give tech longer life.

We'll keep it protected with our care and protection services that make sure tech lasts for longer, and we'll also help recycle it when it's done. Get the most out of tech through twenty-four seven help and support, tutorials or subscription services. Meanwhile, we're continuously taking friction out of every step of the customer experience. After all, we're building Customers for Life.

We're making it easy for them to find and buy what they need with the best range and unbeatably priced, as well as making it easy after the sale. Then, as we know our customers ever better, we use that data to help them choose, afford and enjoy this tech for life. We're giving customers fewer and fewer reasons to shop elsewhere.

Now, as one united brand, customers will know it's us who's with them every step of the way, whether they're in store or online, shopping for electrical or mobile, for products or services. Not just any brand. Currys, by far the best-known brand in tech and one that customers will more and more see as the natural choice for all things tech.

We're helping tens of millions of people enjoy amazing technology to the full and lead better lives. We've come a long way, but we're just getting started. After all, with the experience we're creating, why would customers go anywhere else?

Asad Malik
Director of Investor Relations, Currys

Good morning, everyone. I'll just wait for you to take your seats. We're obviously running slightly over. Come on, Nick. I hope you've all had a chance to walk around the live stations and get a feel for actually some of the elements that Mark and Ed have been talking about in terms of really bringing some of those investments we're making in terms of some of the customer-facing initiatives to life.

I know a lot of you have had a lot of fun with the gaming zone. But I want to bring it back in this session and just really start with the vision. Because our vision has a powerful purpose at its heart, and there are many businesses that are working to define, refine, or better articulate their purpose.

We've all seen and talked about today in this store the power of technology to improve people's lives. How we make money has a powerful societal benefit baked in, and it's a huge opportunity for us, as Alex said. That's why today you've heard across our business and in store talk about new service offerings that Ed was talking about, that will help more customers care about the planet as well as their pocket.

That Currys being a leader, not just in recycling, but also reusing that unwanted technology to help everyone enjoy amazing technology. From Mark, that our estate isn't just right sized, but we're also investing in it too, such as all of these, energy-efficient LED lighting that you can see in this store. Yes, it helps control costs, but it's also good for the environment.

Lastly, how we're learning from each other as a diverse group. We're delivering across a wide range of environmental, and social issues with the right governance. I want to start with what we've already achieved, because we're really proud of what we've done, and here are just some of the highlights.

Whether it's helping customers reduce their environmental impact, with 104,000 tons of e-waste collected for reuse and recycling, whether it's taking action to reduce our own environmental impact, or working in communities where we've donated GBP 1 million to the Learning Foundation to help eradicate digital poverty. We're proud of what we've achieved, but there's much, much more to come. Earlier, we heard Ed talk about the competitive advantage that we have when it comes to creating Customers for Life and helping them make more sustainable choices.

We're making it even easier for our customers to reduce their impact on the environment, to care about the planet as well as their pockets. They don't have to compromise through our propositions, such as Go Greener. That helps customers to make informed choices about their purchases, helps them save energy, reduce waste, and save water. We're doing much, much more than this.

Choosing the right tech is just the start. We're also leading the way in giving technology longer life through repair, reuse, and recycling. This isn't just us capitalizing on a new fad. Let me tell you, it's something we've been working on for decades. We've been collecting over half of all e-waste from U.K. retailers since 2008. We've been offering repairs, and some of you will remember this going back to the 1980s. We're now doing over 2 million a year.

That's a scale that none of our competitors can match. We're operating the largest electrical repairs facility in Europe. We're also making progress on reducing our own environmental impact from being the U.K.'s number one retail recycler of electrical goods to committing to net zero emissions by 2040. We've smashed previous targets. We've reduced operating emissions, and those comprise Scope 1 and Scope 2, which are the direct ones that we generate, by 80% since 2014-2015.

We're already delivering a 4% reduction last year against our new target to reduce Scope 1 and Scope 2 operating emissions by 50% by 2030. This continues the long-term trend of actually reducing our operational emissions. It's not something new, it's something that's embedded in our model, but there's a lot more to come.

Crucially, our net zero ambition focuses not just on the remaining operational emissions, but more importantly on the indirect ones, the Scope 3 ones. These account for the vast majority of our total emissions, the largest element of which is in the use of sold products. We can't do this alone, and working with our suppliers is resulting in some fantastic outcomes, and you would have seen the video showing all of the support that we get from our biggest partners.

46% of revenue in the Nordics is from suppliers with an EcoVadis rating, one of the leading providers of business sustainability ratings, which helps us measure supplier performance across a wide range of metrics and identify further improvements. You can go onto the Elkjøp website and get a feel for how EcoVadis works for customers as well.

We've taken out 3 million individual pieces of plastic packaging, a topic that our customers and we know our colleagues also care about deeply. It's our amazing colleagues, our capable and committed colleagues that you've heard everyone talk about, which are key to helping not just customers, but everyone enjoy amazing technology, including those who might otherwise be excluded from the benefits that technology brings.

Our primary focus is on eradicating digital poverty across all the regions we operate in. Using our expertise, our scale, our reach, we believe a collective effort can make sure everyone can enjoy equal access to the benefits that technology brings. Actually, again, we started this in 2016 with the Elkjøp Foundation, which was set up to fight digital exclusion in the Nordics.

We followed that up last year as we were one of the three founding members of the Digital Poverty Alliance who want to eradicate digital poverty once and for all in the U.K. by 2030. We're operating this across all of the regions, and our approach is tailored to meet the needs of each specific region. For example, in the U.K., where we have an aging population, we're working specifically with Age UK to target older persons to help them access digital tech.

Our capable and committed colleagues are our biggest advantage. We're one team with one shared passion, and hopefully that's come through as you've walked around and talked to our colleagues, and that's technology. As you've heard and seen today, expert face-to-face help is at the heart of why customers shop with us across all of our regions.

Every voice has a space at our table. The well-being of our colleagues continues to be a core priority too across all the regions. As part of the investments that we've made, that's included investing in training and accreditation for 765 mental health first aiders and mental health champions. In Greece, our Stay Together initiative is designed to share tips for boosting morale.

In the Nordics, the team has provided thousands of colleagues with weekly online mental health training. Because we've taken steps for all of our colleagues to be shareholders in our business, they're truly invested in our future. Like we said, don't just take our word for it. We're being rated favorably too. Looking at the FTSE4Good, we've had a repeated inclusion in the FTSE4Good U.K index.

We've got a score of 3.7, so that's above the specialty retailer sub-sector. We've received a rating of B for our CDP in terms of climate change questionnaire, and we're awaiting a new result on that in the next couple of months. In Sustainalytics, we're rated as low risk with a score of 13.3, which actually puts us in the top 5% of their global universe in terms of ESG rating.

Good progress, but more to come. We're not standing still, and there is much more to come. To make the most of our global scale and expertise, we're gonna be focusing on three areas where we can make the most impact. Creating social impact by eradicating the digital divide.

Moving to circular business models that improve the use of resources, so making it even easier for customers to make informed choices about purchases. As you've heard from Ed today, and a great example of that has been RepairLive. Taking climate action and achieving net zero emissions by 2040, ten years ahead of the current government target of 2050.

Through all of the above that we've talked about, as well as our EV100 commitment to get to full use of alternative electric vehicles by 2030 and a material reduction in gas use across our sites in the U.K. These aren't three distinct areas. These are interconnected issues that are actually deep within our business model in terms of how we make money, focused on sourcing responsibly, being an employer of choice, and good governance.

As a result, we've linked rewards to progress on all of our ESG goals. ESG metrics, including colleague engagement, customer satisfaction, make up 40% of our annual bonus scorecard. This year, we introduced two new environmental metrics, e-waste collection for recycling and reuse, and reduction in emissions, showing customers we're really serious about what we're doing and knowing that this inspires more super engaged colleagues.

In summary, we're making strong progress. In delivering our commercial results that you've seen today, we're also delivering meaningful societal impact and environmental change. They all go hand in hand. With that, I'll hand over to Bruce for the financial profile.

Bruce Marsh
Group CFO, Currys

Thank you. Hi, good morning, everybody. My name is Bruce Marsh. I'm the new CFO within the business. It's a pleasure to meet you. My job today is to translate the narrative that you've heard so far in terms of what it means for our financial numbers. Before I do that, I'd just like to spend a few moments focusing on the trading statement that we issued this morning.

As you will have seen, and you'll see on the slide, the headline metric that we're using to judge our performance is year-on-two-year like-for-like, and we think that's the fairest way to judge performance given the store closures that took place last year. In terms of headlines, as you will have seen, our group two-year like-for-like was 15%. Within that, U.K. 11% and international 19%.

In terms of, I guess, just drawing out one of the key points, our Currys electrical two-year like-for-like was 21%. Elkjøp 19% and Kotsovolos also 19%, so very, very strong growth. We're also highlighting this morning that our average cash during the first half of the year has been strong and up on last year at an average of GBP 280 million.

We're also giving guidance on a full year basis that our capital expenditure will be roughly GBP 170 million, which is lower than we said previously. Similarly, our exceptional cash costs will be around GBP 70 million. The final point is that we expect our year-end cash to be around GBP 100 million. Let's now focus more on the medium term.

As I say, I want to put into context what you've heard from the executive team in terms of how we're planning on driving the business forward and what that means for our financial projections and our balance sheets. In terms of driving cash flow, we're focused on five key levers for sustainable cash flow.

Steady revenue growth, which allows us to drive the top line, stable gross margins, and also reductions within operating costs, which will allow us to get to our target of 4% EBIT margins. From a cash flow perspective, controlled capital expenditure and controlled cash exceptionals. By FY 2024, our ambition is to get to a sustainable free cash flow of GBP 250 million. Now, how do we get there?

You can see from the graph that the biggest single element of that is going to be from driving UK profitability. Our international business is already super strong and the focus here is about driving steps forward. Then the final component, as I've said, is about controllable CapEx and controllable exceptionals. Starting off with steady revenue growth.

As you've seen through the presentations, particularly the slides that Erik shared, we have already got a very clear, demonstrable track record of growing our top line. Slightly different axis, but over the last 10 years, our Nordic business has grown sales by a 9% compound annual growth rate. Our U.K business, not quite as successful, but nevertheless, very, very healthy, 3% compound annual growth rate over the course of the last 10 years.

Even when our stores were closed last year in FY 2021, we still were able to generate significant growth. As we look ahead, as you've heard, we've got a very wide portfolio of initiatives that will allow us to continue to deliver steady growth, and we're grouping them into four headings. What we sell, who we sell to, how we sell it, and also where we sell it. Let me step through each one of these and remind you what you've heard.

First of all, in terms of what we sell, amazing technology is now even more important in customers' lives as we've come through the pandemic, and we expect the market to remain bigger. We're perfectly positioned to take advantage of that. As Alex said, we're not relying on it, so our financial plans assume that the market does return to pre-pandemic levels.

We're also expecting to see an exciting range of new products, and I think you've seen some of them in the store today. We will stock those, and we will stock a series of new ranges. Again, those will help us grow our top line. It's not just about products.

You've heard through the sessions that we're growing the range of services that we have within the business, and our new credit offer will allow us to make those products and services available to even more customers. In terms of who we sell to, we're already in a very strong position. As you've seen, we've got lots of customers, we know them well, and we're making them more loyal. As we look to the future, we want to continue to drive all of those elements. We've got a plan to increase our customer base.

You saw that over the last three years, we've grown by 3 million more customers in the U.K. Erik reflected on B2B, a growth engine within Nordics, something that isn't in our plan in the U.K., but absolutely could be. We also want to increase the number of customers we can talk to. Over the last three years in the U.K., we've grown that by 6 million, and in the Nordics by 5 million.

Through the investments that we've made in the customer club in Nordics and Currys Perks, we will continue to grow that base. Also through the work we're doing with data, so we've got a single view of the customer, we can really drive value through CRM. Finally, we'll provide an easier and richer shopping experience, both through our stores and online.

Easier will mean we can sell more, and richer will mean we can increase our average transaction value and drive add-ons. In terms of how we sell, obviously, the hygiene factor is being trusted on price with our clear price promise. That protects us against new entrants who might be trying to operate a price play.

We're very strong already. At the heart of our opportunity is a true omni-channel proposition. You heard all about that from Mark. Clearly, our stores remain our core competitive advantage with our locations and our wonderful colleagues. In addition to that, we've seen that when our stores were closed, we can still grow our business through online. The key is our omni-channel offer, our ability to bring the best of both stores and online together.

We know that over 60% of our customers want to shop that way. The final component is the single brand. Again, you've heard about the work we've been doing across now all of our markets to have one single brand. That means we get credit for everything we do. It means we can leverage every pound of marketing spend, and we can drive our brand preference. Finally, we benefit from market diversity.

By having such successful businesses across different geographies, it means we're not reliant on one market, and we're protected against shock. When you bring that all together, the what, the who, the how, and the where, you've got some real reasons to believe that as an absolute minimum, we should be able to deliver steady sales growth. Moving on to profitability.

Our goal in the UK and across the group is to deliver continued growth in EBIT. That will come through in two ways, stabilizing our gross margin and operating cost reductions. Let me drill into both of those. In terms of gross margins, as you can see on the left-hand side, over the last four years, we've seen declines within our gross margin.

The key news, though, is that we really understand why. Clearly, growing online share was a component of it. Some of the legacy mobile issues, particularly some of the onerous network contracts and volume targets that we had impacted our margin over time. Also the closure of, for example, our travel business that did operate with higher margins has caused some of our margins to dilute. As we look ahead, we're very confident our margins will be stable.

Indeed, during the first half of this year, our margins are already stable. Looking ahead, why do we believe they will stay stable or grow? Well, we think that channel mix will stabilize within the U.K. Even if it doesn't, we're still perfectly positioned to be able to grow our margin. Our new website, as you've seen, allows us to offer services, credit, upsell, cross-sell, and bundles.

Our wonderful colleagues in store are trained through Life Selling to be able to sell products and services in store, but also through omni-channel, through order and collect, and ShopLive. They're perfectly positioned to be able to help our customers make better choices. Our credit offer, and particularly our new strategic credit offer, will put products into the hands of more customers through broader access to credit. Finally, our services.

With a much broader range of services, again, we will have something for everybody. Driving margin isn't just around the top line elements. It's also going to come through managing our cost base. Some of the great work that Lindsay and the supply chain team are doing across supply chain, service operations, and our customer contact centers will really help us stabilize and grow our margin. In terms of cost, clearly, one of the key elements of driving and progressing our EBIT will come through reducing costs.

Over the course of the last three years, we've seen our cost base reduced by around GBP 300 million. Now, a big chunk of that has come through the closure of the Carphone Warehouse stores. What you don't see on the chart is the fact that the cost saving work has also allowed us to offset inflation.

As we look ahead, our plan is to take a further GBP 300 million out. We will do that by modernizing our supply chain and our service operations, by making our stores more productive and efficient, by rationalizing our IT systems, simplifying our central costs, and underpinning it all will be significant savings within our procurement space.

It's critical we do this not just so that we can drive our EBIT, but also that we can offset inflationary headwinds. As we put our plans together, we can see that as a business, we're likely to face into circa GBP 200 million of inflation over the next three years. It's critical we're able to offset that. Returning to stable margins, as I've said, efficiency is critical across our supply chain, service operations, and customer contact centers.

Let me walk you through each of those, starting with supply chain. The focus is to streamline our processes to innovate and automate, and also to partner with leading companies in this space. Our supply chain team have partnered with a company called GXO, who are experts in warehouse operations. They've brought world-class, best-in-class cost efficiency.

As we've moved 1,500 colleagues across to GXO, so we're able to improve customer service and reduce our cost. We're also investing in systems. We've recently gone live with new warehouse management systems within our supply chain. Next, we're putting in new order management systems. That will give us much better end-to-end visibility of stock, which will allow us to better manage working capital. It will allow us to drive efficiency and also drive a flexibility within our operation.

We're also working on, for example, a new route planning system that will allow us to take a lot of manual effort out of the business and drive the productivity of our delivery drivers. In terms of our service operations, we've got the U.K.'s biggest service provider. We handle over 4 million returns and 2 million repairs every year.

That, of course, is a massive competitive advantage. Historically, the challenge with it have been old and unsupported systems. Again, the team are working hard to transform both our repair and return parts of the organization and systems. We're looking to consolidate 13 different systems across the group into a single service platform. That will give us real-time field repair scheduling. It will allow us to have a new returns self-service portal so we can make better commercial decisions.

You will have seen our RepairLive proposition that's recently gone live to emulate the success of ShopLive and putting our engineers virtually into customers' homes. Moving on to customer contact centers. We've got a substantial asset. We handle over 11 million calls with customers every year. The focus on, I guess, the challenge is how do we do that so that we're delivering better service to our customers, but at a lower cost?

We're doing that through investments in both colleagues and technology. We're optimizing our contact management so that we can encourage customers to move from voice to self-service and digital. We're looking to consolidate our outsource activity into a single partner, Webhelp. We're rightshoring activities, so we can operate at the lowest possible cost, all while leveraging our expert U.K. colleagues.

When you bring all that together, all of the components I described in terms of supporting margin, along with the cost work that's underway across supply chain, service operations, and our customer contact centers, you can see why we feel confident that at the very least, our margins should be stable. Moving on to reducing operating cost.

As I described to you, there's lots of areas for opportunity, and one place to go looking immediately is within our stores. We've got the opportunity to reconfigure our operating model, and there are two core elements to this. The first is to remove non-value-added services that today take place within the store. The second is to develop the skills of our team so that they are able to support customers.

Even the people who are working in the back office of our stores, when required, can come out and support customers. Both of those will allow us to redeploy millions of hours to be customer-facing within our store. You can see our target is a 30% increase. A significant component of our cost out work is within our IT infrastructure, and this work is well underway. We're accelerating the decommissioning of our legacy IT estate, and over the next three years, we'll consolidate 60% of our IT networks.

The key thing that we're doing is moving away from two largely independent sets of systems that manage Dixons and Carphone Warehouse and creating one integrated business. We're decommissioning redundant applications, and we're simplifying our IT landscape, and that will allow us to run at lower cost. Finally, a rich opportunity is within our central costs.

We've already reduced our central costs since over the last three years by about 15%. As we move to one brand and a simpler business, that opportunity can grow. We're going to leverage offshore locations, and already a significant proportion of our colleagues are already working in offshore locations.

Secondly, we will look to automate and improve our processes and through the business, improve efficiency. Pulling all that cost work together, it isn't just about reducing what we do, it's also about changing the way that we buy through procurements. We're on plan to deliver around GBP 25 million of procurement savings this year. Over the next three years, we have a vision of GBP 100 million worth of savings. We'll do that through re-tendering contracts, rationalizing the tail of our suppliers, and centralizing our procurements.

I've talked a lot about the UK, and because to be frank, that's where a lot of our heavy lifting is required. Our international business is already very strong. As you've heard, what is required there is growth and continuous improvements. Across our international business, we expect gross margins to decline slightly due to the impact of shift online, where the Nordic business is slightly behind where we are in the U.K.

At the same time, we'll offset that through operational leverage. As the Nordic business and our Greek business grows, we won't be investing the same level of cost growth. Turning focus briefly onto cash flow, and capital expenditure in particular. As you've heard, we're a long way through our transformation journey. By the end of this year, 75% of the way through.

Over the course of the last two years, with a bit of a blip, during the pandemic year, we saw the peak investment in CapEx. As we look ahead, our plan is to reduce CapEx to 1.5% of turnover, a more normalized level. Finally, we've seen a high level of cash flow that has gone through the exceptional line over recent years.

Our plan is by FY 2024 to reduce and indeed plan to have almost zero exceptionals through the business by the end of our plan. I've stepped through the components of the plan. Within the U.K., it's a focus on steady growth, stable margin, and reducing costs. Within International, it's about continued strong performance. From a cash perspective, it's about normalizing the level of CapEx and exceptionals.

With that strong plan, it allows us to consider both the shape of our balance sheet and our capital allocation policy going forward. Let me step you through that. As you've already heard from Alex, we've already done an awful lot of great work. Over the last three years, we've put the business in much better shape, where we've seen total indebtedness fall from GBP 2.5 billion to GBP 1.5 billion.

Looking forward, we will manage down the pension deficit as we continue to contribute, and our lease liabilities will also reduce as we continue to shorten our lease periods and reduce our rental expense. We've created a very flexible balance sheet. We've moved from net debt to net cash, and we've done that through the material unwind of our network debtor and the one-year cessation of our dividend.

Looking ahead, our view is that both our average cash position and our year-end cash position will begin to normalize, although, of course, there will still be movements during the year. Of course, we've still got our GBP 550 million revolving credit facility. We're in a place that we're comfortably within our covenants.

Going forward, we aim to maintain a prudent balance sheet, considering both net debt and also total indebtedness levels. Why? Well, first of all, of course, we want to make sure we've got flexibility should there be any changes in circumstance or indeed opportunity. Secondly, we want to make sure that we've got the economic strength to react to any downturn. We're going to manage total indebtedness as well as net debt, and we'll do that by managing fixed charge cover above 1.5 times.

We're already in that space. Reducing our total indebtedness leverage to below 2.5 times. Year-end of FY 2021, we were just above that. As we continue to tackle our pension deficits and our IFRS 16 lease liability, so we will come in line and continue to manage to those metrics.

Within the context of those targets, we want to work with clear allocation priorities. We're going to maintain a prudent balance sheet paying our agreed pension contributions. Beyond that, we've got the following priorities. The first is that we will continue to invest in the business. We will continue to invest in new transformation as opportunities come along, but within a constraint that they must be returning within an acceptable period. Our headline benchmark is 24 months. Secondly, we will pay and grow our dividend.

You're all aware that we've got a GBP 0.03 dividend at the moment, and our policy will be to grow that dividend by above inflation. Finally, any surplus capital that is available after those two tranches will be returned to our shareholders and to our pension scheme. Let me hand over to Alex to wrap up.

Alex Baldock
Group CEO, Currys

Thanks, Bruce. What that means, as you will have seen today in terms of shareholder return, is the announcement of the GBP 75 million buyback over the next 12 months, which we'll get cracking on as soon as we're out from underneath the current close period.

When you add that to the GBP 35 million we expect to pay in dividend, that makes a total shareholder return of GBP 110 million over the next 12 months, which at current market value is circa 7.5x market cap. That's what we're pleased to do. Before we move to Q&A, I just want to hammer home some of the key messages that I hope you've all taken from today. That we expect our larger market to stay bigger, but we're not counting on it.

In that bigger market, we're very well placed, as we should be, given we're a truly international business and everywhere, the growing market leader with the winning omni-channel model and valuable services.

We are making more and more of that privileged position that we occupy with a clear strategy, a strong management team working in a much better business than we were in a few years ago, and that strategy visibly working in a way that we can be confident will deliver some sustainable results. The heaviest lifting and the lifting with the highest cost and execution risk is behind us.

Though clearly much hard work remains ahead, and clearly we have yet to see the full benefits of all of that investment, as I say, the period of biggest risk and cost is behind us, and all of this is showing up in the cash with the full benefits still to come.

As you just heard from Bruce, what's still to come financially is lots of reasons to believe in continuing our track record of steady growth. We've done it for 10 years. Whichever angle you look at future growth through, who we sell to, what we sell, how and where, there are growth opportunities whichever way you cut it.

There's reason to believe in that 4% gross margin target in that we've already stabilized our gross margins, and you heard today about our plans to sell more credits and services and our plans to achieve significant efficiencies in the supply chain, both of which will serve to at least stabilize gross margins.

Plus, you've been given some detail on the GBP 300 million of sustainable cost reduction that we can see coming out of the business from supply chain, service operations, IT, stores, and central costs. You add all of that up to normalizing, not stinting, but normalizing levels of CapEx and a normalizing, hopefully very minimal levels of exceptionals.

I hope you can see why we're confident in that GBP 250 million of sustainable cash flow that we see as our prize by FY 2024 at the latest, and all of which obviously will allow us to continue with those capital allocation policies, including, we hope and expect, very strong shareholder returns.

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