Hello. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for taking the time to join us this morning for our half year 2022 results presentation. I'm joined today by Matt Shattock, our Chair, David Surdeau, our Interim CFO, and Will MacLaren, our Head of Investor Relations. Let us turn to the agenda on slide two. I will give you a short overview of the half before handing over to David, who will talk you through our financials in detail. I will then take you through the strategic progress we have made before we conclude with Q&A. If you have questions for Matt, David, or me, please do enter them into the appropriate section on the webcast and Will will read them out. You will be aware that this will be my last set of results before I leave Domino's in December.
I am hugely proud of the strategic progress that we have made in the past two years. This is testament to the hard work of our world-class franchisees and our colleagues who have worked tirelessly to produce excellent results. I'm leaving behind a refreshed, outstanding executive team, supported by a high caliber board who will continue executing the strategy and delivering value for our shareholders. Let's turn to slide three. In the first half, we grew order count, attracted more customers, and increased underlying sales despite unusually challenging market conditions. We continued to gain market share, our value for money scores improved, and we are well-placed with a strong value proposition and strong operating model.
Following our franchisee resolution, we successfully restarted national price campaigns, and we are working with franchisees to build on the learnings from these campaigns as we accelerate our media spend in the second half. We launched a trial with Just Eat, which is showing encouraging early signs that is giving us access to a new customer base. We are now extending this trial to approximately one-third of the store estate across the UK and Ireland. Underlying like-for-like system sales grew 2.4% in the half, and our asset light cash generative model has allowed us to return GBP 76 million to shareholders. Today, we have announced a 6.7% increase in the interim dividend and an incremental GBP 20 million share buyback program.
Our resilient business model gives us confidence that we are well-placed to navigate the current conditions, and our full-year guidance is unchanged. With that, I'll hand over to David to talk you through the financials.
Thank you, Dominic, and good morning everybody. It's a pleasure to speak with you this morning and to present the financial results for the half. As expected, driven by the change in the VAT rate in the UK, system sales declined 5.6%, with a 5.9% decline in the UK being offset by 1.8% growth in Ireland. Importantly, when we adjust total system sales for the impact of the change in VAT, they grew 3.4%. It is worth noting that system sales excluding the impact of VAT in the half were 15.4% higher than the comparable period in 2019, pre-pandemic. Reported revenue was GBP 278.3 million, a 0.2% increase on the first half of last year.
This was driven by 4.2% growth in the supply chain revenue offset by lower royalties on system sales and lower national advertising fund and e-commerce expenditure. We expect an increase in NAF expenditure in the second half. Looking at EBITDA margin as a percentage of system sales, this remained healthy at 8.7%, though down 50 basis points from the prior period last year due to inflation in the supply chain. As a standard practice, we pass through food cost inflation to our franchisees on a lagged basis. We began passing on these increases during the first half of the year, but will not see the full impact until the second half. As a result, this year's profitability is expected to be second half weighted. Let's go into system sales and order count in a little more detail.
Starting on the left-hand side, we've split out the impact of sales and orders between collection and delivery. Overall, total orders were up 2.1% on the prior year, with the decline in delivery orders more than offset by the recovery of our collection business. Collection orders were up 39.6% in the half as they continued their recovery from lockdown restrictions, and in Q2 this year, they were 102% of 2019 levels. Delivery order count was down 8.3% in the half. Q1 was against a strong comparative quarter last year when there were strict lockdown restrictions in the UK. As expected, given the lockdown comparator, delivery orders were 4.5% lower than the prior year.
Delivery orders declined 12.1% in Q2 due to softness in the wider delivery market and a tough comparative quarter last year, which had three different lockdown restrictions. Furthermore, in March 2022, as previously announced, we launched the delivery charge nationally. In the chart on the right-hand side, you can see the quarterly profiles of total system sales performance in blue and order count in red. However, the most important indicator of the underlying performance of our business are the green bars, which represent a like-for-like performance excluding the impact of VAT. Here you can see that our underlying sales grew 2.4% in the half. A significant proportion of our EBITDA comes from the supply chain center through procurement, manufacturing, and distribution of products to stores.
Our supply chain continues to maintain outstanding service levels, and many thanks to all our colleagues who helped to deliver this outstanding performance. Our EBITDA from the supply chain in the half year was GBP 50.4 million, a decline of GBP 2.2 million compared to the prior half year. This largely reflects the level of inflation we have seen, particularly in respect of labor costs, alongside increased support to franchisees. Lower system sales resulted in a GBP 1.2 million decline in net royalties. Net overheads increased due to increased investments of our people and franchisee events and new store incentives. This resulted in UK and Ireland EBITDA declining by GBP 7.8 million to GBP 61.7 million in the half. We've given guidance based on underlying group EBITDA, so let's turn to the next slide to walk you through the movements in the half.
Last year, we reported underlying EBITDA of GBP 71.7 million. This year, we invested an additional GBP 2.3 million as part of the resolution with our franchisees. Not all these costs will recur in the second half. We experienced labor and food cost inflation of GBP 3.7 million within our supply chain, and as is standard practice, there is a timing lag in passing the food costs through to our franchisees. Some of these costs will be passed through in half two. In half one last year, we incurred GBP 1.5 million of COVID costs and enjoyed a VAT benefit of GBP 3.7 million. This gave us a net benefit of GBP 2.2 million. This year, we have incurred GBP 0.2 million of COVID costs and a smaller VAT benefit of GBP 1.2 million.
This means that there is a GBP 1.2 million reduction in the net benefit to EBITDA in this half. The revaluation of Shorecal JV has a GBP 1.1 million impact on EBITDA. When all this is combined, it results in underlying EBITDA declining GBP 8.2 million to GBP 63.5 million. We are expecting improved second half profitability performance, largely due to the recovery of costs incurred in the first half. Moving to the income statement, this slide refers to underlying numbers, so excludes non-underlying items and charges from our discontinued international activities, which I will cover later on. As mentioned, the underlying UK and Ireland EBITDA is GBP 61.7 million. There was also a lower contribution from the German associate and finance costs were GBP 0.8 million higher in the period.
This resulted in a GBP 9.9 million reduction in underlying profit before tax in the period, with underlying EPS down 11.2% to GBP 0.095. Let me touch on franchisee trading. As in the past, on this slide, we have shared franchisee trading estimates in order to provide a view of the health of the entire system. The numbers are extracted from submissions from our UK franchisees. We aggregate the submissions to derive these averages. Our franchisees continue to work tremendously hard in challenging market conditions, and their trading performance has been impressive. Average store EBITDA for all UK stores for the year was approximately GBP 94,000, equivalent to a 16% EBITDA margin. The reduction compared to the prior year reflects the net benefit of VAT in the prior year half as well as the impact of higher food and labor costs.
It's worth noting that franchisee profitability in 2019, pre the pandemic, was GBP 68.7 thousand per store, equivalent to a 13.4% EBITDA margin. We have a business model that generates strong and consistent free cash flow. Trading from operations produced EBITDA of GBP 63.5 million, and let me walk through how this flows through to free cash flow. The working capital outflow of GBP 11.2 million primarily relates to the timing of cash receipts and receipts for e-commerce sales of GBP 6 million and changing of timing of supplier payments of GBP 5 million. We expect the GBP 6 million will largely reverse by the end of the year, and of the supplier payments timing around GBP 2 million will reverse, with the remainder being a consistent difference for the year.
Overall, with other movements, we are not expecting a significant working capital movement for the full-year. Dividends received of GBP 3.9 million represent payment from our investments in Full House, West Country and Shorecal. Net interest was broadly comparable with the prior half year. Overall, this resulted in GBP 36.8 million of free cash flow in the first half. Let me explain how we use this given our disciplined approach to capital allocation. You will be now familiar with this slide. When we announced our strategy in March 2021, we also updated our capital allocation framework to ensure that effective capital allocation can amplify the benefits and returns from the cash generated by the business. We have an asset-light, high returns business which is strongly cash generative.
We want to retain a sensible level of leverage, which we believe to be around 1.5x to 2.5 x. Working within these parameters, we will allocate cash in a disciplined way. First, we want to ensure we continue to invest in the core business and drive long-term sustainable growth and support our strategic ambitions. To that end, we invested GBP 7.5 million in capital expenditure in the year- to- date. There is no change to our guidance of GBP 24 million capital expenditure this year. We will maintain a sustainable dividend with an EPS cover of at least 2 x. For the first half, we will pay an interim dividend of GBP 0.032, which is approximately one third of the final dividend paid last year, and a 6.7% increase on last year's interim dividend.
We also want to remain open to additional growth opportunities where we will assess, in a disciplined way, the potential to enhance returns and drive future cash flow. Our investment in the Northern Ireland JV at the end of last year is performing well and generated GBP 0.6 million profit after tax in the period. Finally, we will look to return surplus cash to shareholders, not as a one-off exercise, but as a sustained program whereby we will regularly assess the optimal use of cash generated by the business. We returned GBP 80 million in 2021. An additional GBP 46 million buyback was completed in July this year. Today, we are announcing an incremental GBP 20 million buyback program which will commence with immediate effect. On this slide, I've shown how our net debt has moved in the half.
The sources of our cash inflows and our capital allocation framework in action. We started the year with GBP 199.7 million net debt. As I've already explained, we generated GBP 36.8 million of free cash flow in the half. We received a combined GBP 9.4 million from the German associate, which comprised GBP 8.6 million in relation to deferred consideration paid with respect to the market access fee and GBP 0.8 million of loan repayments. Here you can see the cash outflows in the half. CapEx of GBP 7.5 million, GBP 30 million paid out in dividends, and GBP 45.8 million in share buybacks and some purchases on behalf of the employee benefit trust. The outstanding amount of the GBP 46 million buyback was completed after the period end.
This resulted in half-year end net debt in line with guidance of GBP 236.4 million, giving leverage at the end of the period of 1.95 x, well within our target range of 1.5x to 2.5 x. We also successfully refinanced our banking facility in the period and now have a GBP 200 million RCF and a GBP 200 million sterling-denominated private placement facility in place until July 2027. In the first half of the year, we increased our market share. Order count was positive. Collections grew past 2019 levels. We attracted more customers despite challenging market conditions.
As we move into the second half of the year, we expect to continue this momentum and grow our market share, given our strong value message, planned second half marketing activity, the FIFA World Cup, and our dynamic national price campaigns. As during prior periods and in line with our agreement, we pass through costs inflation to our franchisees on a lagged basis. Due to the rapidly changing inflationary environment this year, we began passing through these increases during the first half of the year but will not recognize the full benefit until the second half. Profitability this year is therefore expected to be weighted towards the second half, and as we have previously guided, we expect 2022 underlying EBITDA and EPS to be in line with current market expectations. Here, I have summarized some modeling guidance for this year. CapEx of around £24 million.
We expect underlying depreciation and amortization to be between GBP 18 million and GBP 20 million. Underlying interest costs of between GBP 9 million and GBP 11 million. This represents an increase to previous guidance due to the rise in interest rates. Our underlying effective tax rates is still expected to be around 17% for the year. With regard to net debt, we expect this to be around GBP 235 million as a result of the use of cash to deliver return to shareholders. Now let me pass you back to Dominic.
Thank you, David. Before I update on the current market environment and our continued strategic progress, I'd like to remind you why Domino's has a resilient, sustainable business model, and why we are well placed to succeed in all conditions. We have a world-class brand recognized globally and in the U.K. as the number one pizza brand. We have highly experienced and world-class franchisees, and following the resolution we reached at the end of last year, our system is now aligned and poised to accelerate. We have significant scale, which brings benefits in the current operating environment. We own the process from dough to door. Our supply chain is vertically integrated and consistently achieves exceptional results, whatever market conditions we face. We are a digital business.
Well over 90% of our sales come from digital channels, and we continue to make great progress, which I will talk about shortly. As a result of our leading delivery times and our great tasting product, our NPS remains strong at +48. We are absolutely focused on maintaining and improving our leading service standards. Finally, the model is highly cash generative. Since we launched a new strategy and capital allocation framework in March 2021, we have returned GBP 212 million to shareholders. Let's turn to the competition in the pizza market. You'll recall that we started showing market share data at our full-year results in March. Now, following our investment in data and insights, we have partnered with Kantar to give a robust and data-led view of market share.
Using this data, you can see from the chart on the left that we have increased our share of the U.K. takeaway market from 6% in the second quarter of 2021 to 6.6% in the second quarter of this year. We increased our share of both the collection and delivery market in this period. We've also grown our share of the U.K. pizza market, which has gone from 42% to 48%. You can see from the chart on the right that our share is significantly more than our nearest pizza competitor. I'll now turn to our franchisees and the progress we have made since we reached resolution at the end of last year. Let me walk through the considerable progress we have made since the start of the year.
First, we've been able to launch our first national price pointed offer for over two years, giving customers 50% off when they spend more than GBP 30 on pizza. Subsequently, we've rolled out additional campaigns on collection and other bundled promotions. We've learned from what went well and where we see further potential, and we are accelerating media spend in the second half as we focus on sharpening our message and ensuring that we offer customers compelling value. Last year, our media spend was focused on the quarter two launch of the yodeling campaign as lockdown restrictions ended and the Men's Euro football tournament kicked off. This year is the opposite, as quarter two will be our lowest spend.
We are ramping up our marketing activity towards the end of quarter three, and quarter four will be our biggest quarter of the year, leading into key events such as the FIFA World Cup. In the last few weeks, we have trialed an innovative GBP 8, GBP 10, GBP 12 offer, which is extremely well-received and performed well above our expectations. We've opened 17 stores so far this year, compared to 14 at this point last year, and remain on target to open at least 45 new stores this year, a material improvement on the 31 opened last year and 19 in the prior year. We have seen enhanced collaboration on operations technology, and the innovations we introduced have been embraced across the system. Finally, we rolled out a national delivery charge and launched a trial on Just Eat, both done within the space of two months.
This is testament to the new era of collaboration, and I'll talk more about these initiatives shortly. We've supported our franchisees throughout the period with an enhanced food rebate mechanism, the national rollout of the delivery charge, and we were delighted to hold our first franchisee and store manager rally in over three years. Over 1,400 of our store managers and franchise partners from around the UK and Ireland traveled to Harrogate to celebrate all things Domino's. We heard key updates from the leadership on focus areas for the rest of 2022, held our fastest pizza maker competition, and Global CEO Russell Weiner gave a keynote speech. Our teams also had a chance to meet and speak with suppliers and Domino's experts in digital, sustainability, and operations in a learning space designed to encourage our teams to engage, learn, upskill, and network with each other.
Over the weekend, we raised almost GBP 30,000 for our charity partner, Teenage Cancer Trust, and our own Partners Foundation. It was a fantastic event, and thank you to all our franchise partners who came and participated. Let's turn to slide 20, delivering a better future through food people love. I hope you're now familiar with this slide. We are really passionate about our purpose to deliver a better future through food people love. This is supported by our vision to be the favorite food delivery and collection brand with pizza at our heart. As a reminder, the five key objectives which underpin the strategy are. Nobody delivers like Domino's. We are a market leader and can build from a position of strength. We will turbocharge our collection business, which is where we see an opportunity to grow market share.
We will amplify our product quality and value through continued innovation and marketing effectiveness. We will uphold our industry-leading economics by maintaining the world-class profitability of our system. We will model excellence as a franchisor through increasing capability and attracting the best franchisees. Let me tell you now what we have achieved in the past six months. Let's look at objective one. Nobody delivers like Domino's. Delivery is at the very heart of our business, and it's what we are best known for. We are a digital business, and we continue to demonstrate our digital-first approach in the period. Over 9% of system sales are through digital channels, and the app now accounts for 43.9% of system sales, an increase of 3.1 percentage points compared to the same period last year.
We now have 5.3 million active app customers, an increase of 5% over the past 6 months. Our app customers have a higher lifetime value than other customers, primarily due to high levels of ordering frequency. We are now providing local franchisees with app-based metrics at a store level to accelerate penetration as we push our app to be our dominant order platform. This means that our franchisees can now see percentage of app users and app order frequency at store level. We've continued to use Braze, our customer engagement platform, to develop our personalization initiatives this year. Our customer churn rate has improved versus the same period last year, and we have seen a continued downward trend in this important metric.
Where we've started implementing personalization logic into our CRM communications, such as meat versus veggie preference, we are seeing enhanced customer engagement rate improvements of up to 60%. We've continued to trial personalization to upsell opportunities in areas such as dip upsell and additional add-on cheese, both of which have delivered incremental value. The team has more exciting initiatives landing in quarter three and quarter four. In March, we introduced a delivery charge. As a reminder, all our key competitors, including aggregators, levy a delivery charge. The charge allows our franchisees to offset some of the food and labor cost inflation which they are experiencing and is at the sole discretion of the franchisee whether they choose to use it.
The delivery charge ranges between GBP 0.99 and GBP 2.50, and each franchisee decides which pricing level to use based on a range of factors, including local competition. The benefit flows through to our franchisees as it represents an increase in system sales, but DPG enjoys a small benefit as a delivery charge incurs a standard royalty fee. Uptake has been widespread, and in quarter two, 90% of delivered orders incurred a delivery charge. In May, we commenced a trial with Just Eat to see whether this channel can attract incremental customers to Domino's. We started the trial with 136 Domino's stores across the UK and Ireland. Following early encouraging results that suggest we are gaining new incremental customers, we are extending the trial to approximately one-third of the store estate. We believe that this can be a tailwind for future growth.
GPS 2.0 has now been rolled out to 728 stores, and we are targeting to complete the rollout by the end of the year. This will help store managers manage labor through more efficient driver route planning and better integration with the store, as well as allowing drivers to use their own device. Let's turn to our next slide, turbocharging our collection business. Collections have continued to recover well. In quarter one, volumes were 95% of 2019 levels, and we are very pleased that in quarter two they were 102% of 2019 levels. Our share of the collection market is small but increasing, and our market-leading position in delivery is an indication of what we could aspire to achieve in the currently under-penetrated carryout business.
I said in March that the key to unlocking this opportunity is to drive customer awareness, and in April, we launched a national collection deal with a strong value message promoting awareness of the collection channel. In a year where the cost of living for customers is increasing, our value message is now resonating well. Another lever to drive incremental sales is in-car collection, a service we launched in 2021 and have now rolled out to 444 stores. Customer feedback continues to be excellent, and we will continue to promote awareness of this new channel. We continue to see a significant opportunity to drive an increase in collections to accelerate our growth. Let's turn to the next slide, amplifying our product quality and value. Our customers love our product, and we have reignited product innovation over the past year.
Our value for money scores continue to improve this year, demonstrating our focus on giving customers value for money at a time when this is becoming ever more important for customers. Following the introduction of a vegan pizza, the Chick Ain't in 2021, this year we launched vegan pepperoni and a new grilled veggie pesto pizza. Both of these have received strong customer feedback. As we enter the important second half of the year with events such as the Freshers' Season and the FIFA World Cup, we will introduce further innovations to excite our customers. Following the resolution with our franchisees, we were able to launch our first national price campaign in January and amplify our value message to the whole country with a 50% discount for spending more than 30 GBP on pizza.
In the period when we ran our initial national campaign, we grew order count, increased our market share, our brand awareness and value for money scores improved, and we grew our active customer base. These are positive signs ahead of campaigns in the second half. Alignment with our franchisees has also enabled us to market collection promotions, which contributed to the strong collection performance in quarter two. We also undertook tactical events around Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Easter, and the Jubilee celebrations, as well as specific app-only deals to target customers with a high lifetime value.
We are learning alongside our franchisees on the optimal approach to national campaigns, and we will apply these learnings to our campaigns in the second half of the year as we increase our media spend around key events such as the Men's Football World Cup to amplify our great value proposition to customers. We are spending circa 40% more on marketing in quarter four than we did in quarter two this year, a significant increase. Let's turn to the next slide, upholding our industry-leading scale and economics. Over the years, we've built a system which rewards both franchisees and us for the great performance of the brand for which we are responsible. Our world-class supply chain delivered another year of exceptional operational performance in a challenging half.
Again, we maintained 99.9% availability and 99.8% accuracy, which is testament to the skill and hard work of our colleagues in the supply chain. In line with our capital allocation framework, we will continue to invest in our supply chain to enhance capacity, drive efficiency, and maintain availability for our customers. A new cross-dock facility was opened in Avonmouth, which allows us to warehouse product there for more efficient distribution across the south west. This will be particularly important to maintain our availability for quarter four. We also commenced redevelopment of our Naas Supply Chain Centre in the Republic of Ireland. In our commitment to health and safety within our supply chain operations, we have now rolled out cages and dollies to 85% of stores, and with full rollout expected to be completed by the end of 2022.
The benefits which these deliver include improved health and safety, reduction in loading and delivery times, and potential to further reduce cardboard being delivered into our stores. Let's move to the next slide, Modeling Excellence of Franchisor. We will work even harder to reinforce our industry-leading capabilities to better position all franchisees for success and attract new franchisees into the system. Following the introduction of the new store incentive scheme last year, we have made good progress with our new store openings, with 17 new stores from 10 different franchisees compared to 14 in the comparable period last year. We continue to expect at least 45 new stores by the end of the year. We were also delighted that two new stores have been opened by Homegrown Heroes, a new franchisee who has come up through the Domino's system. This year, we've also launched the Franchisee Performance Management Framework.
This framework has been designed to assess store and franchisee performance across the system and identify areas for improvement. In the first half, we rolled out the Domino's Training Academy, which provides management training to team members using a balance of e-learning and classroom exercises. We also rolled out a new inventory Android app across the system, which is now being widely used within stores for their counts on a day-to-day basis. Let's now turn to the summary slide. I'm incredibly proud of the significant progress which we have made over the past two years. In a challenging market, we've made strong market share gains and continued our strategic progress. A strong value message and great product is crucial, given the cost of living crisis which consumers in the UK are facing.
Our value proposition is strong, and our message will be amplified in the second half, which we significantly increase our marketing activity. Our business model is extremely resilient, and we remain focused on accelerating the sustainable growth of the system and delivering improved second half performance. Thank you for watching. I'd now like to turn the call over to Q&A. Will, can we please have the first question?
Thanks, Dominic. Start with a couple of questions from Wayne Brown at Liberum. There's a couple here, so I'll read them out one by one. The first one is why heading into a global downturn, a company that has negative order count for quite some time, now in a cycle of downgrades and profits declining, franchisee margins under incredible pressure and only going to get worse, is it appropriate timing to leverage up even further?
Thanks, Will. Thank you, Wayne. I guess the first point to make is we're holding guidance. I think we've, you know, we put that in the RNS, and we've just reiterated that in the presentation. The second point is our order count is actually up in the half. We're growing by 2.1% overall. We're also growing market share, which I think is really encouraging. It shows the momentum that the brand is building. The other thing that we should probably reflect on is that quarter two last year was quite an unusual quarter for two reasons. One, the U.K. was still in and out of lockdown. Remember that? It was only 12 months ago. The U.K. was in and out of lockdown.
The second thing is we were lapping the Men's Euros last year, which was a really significant sales tailwind for us. Actually to have positive 2.1% order count growth in the first half and take market share, we think is really encouraging. The other thing is the year is a bit back to front this year. We've had relatively reduced marketing spending in quarter two, because we're building into the back end of quarter three and quarter four, where we see the real opportunities this year. That's primarily driven by the World Cup season, which will be November, December this year. What we call prime the pump for sales towards the end of the summer period, building into quarter four, which builds into the World Cup.
We up our marketing investment there. We're holding the guidance. We've had positive order count growth in the first half. We have increased marketing spend in the second half leading into quarter four in the World Cup. We have other activities and actions in place like new innovation coming in to drive incremental customer numbers and sales, and then extending the Just Eat trial to further stores, which we think will also benefit us from a sales perspective. That's, I think probably the first part of the question. David, do you want to handle the second part of the question, which is more around the capital allocation?
Yep. Thanks, Dominic. Well, we have previously guided on our range of leverage, which we think to be prudent and appropriate, and that's 1.5x to 2.5x. At the end of the half, we were 1.95x, so in the middle of that range. We're comfortable with that. As Dominic mentioned, you know, we have now an established capital allocation framework. We launched it in March 2021. It was well received. I think what we've proved through the prelims and now the interims is that it's not a one-off, it's a consistent program. We look at our cash flow and our profitability.
We obviously look for opportunities to invest in our core business, and we had a capital expenditure program during the first half to improve our long-term prospects. We look to reward shareholders through a dividend, which we've announced is sustainable and progressive. At this time, our interim dividend of 3.2% is a 6.7% increase. We're comfortable with that. We also look for opportunities to invest outside the core business, which we don't currently see. That leaves us with the fourth element of our capital allocation framework, which is to return cash to shareholders in the form of a buyback.
The GBP 20 million we've announced now, you know, follows the GBP 46 million, which we announced with the prelims, which is executed and actually, you know, offers shareholders a very strong incentive to invest with us through the help that gives to earnings per share growth. We're comfortable with both the leverage range and very comfortable with our capital allocation framework.
Thanks, David. The second question from Wayne is increasing the bank facilities, is this to fund M&A or further buybacks? If M&A, what are you looking at?
No, we had a GBP 350 million revolving credit facility. That expires next year. We've prudently, I believe, taken the opportunity to line the replacement for that up. We needed that in place before our financial year end at the end of the calendar. We've been very successful in appealing to U.S. private placement investors, and we've raised GBP 200 million there, and we replaced the RCF with another GBP 200 million. We have GBP 400 million locked and loaded for the next five years, which I think is a source of long-term financial strength for the business.
One more on the franchisee margins. Franchisee margins seem, as they include the benefit from VAT from the start of the year, does this mean they are mid-single-digit on an underlying basis or the exit rate?
Well, franchisees' margins would have had some benefit from the residual VAT change in the first quarter, but equally they also would have benefited in the second quarter from the introduction of the delivery charge. That will be, you know, part of the franchisee P&L going forward. We have a spirit of a collaboration, a much improved, mutual working with our franchisees, and we're working together to deliver good profitability for both sides, of the system in the second half of the year.
Thanks, David. The next question comes from Owen Shirley at Berenberg, and there are a couple of questions here, so I'll split them up. The first one is, are you expecting Domino's Australia to utilize their call option on the German JV in January? And what is your latest thinking on its value? And then the second question is linked, so I'll ask it as well. Does the weaker performance of Germany in the last half impact the valuation or likelihood of a transaction?
Well, I think DPE have been public in stating that they would be interested to exercise their call option at the appropriate time. We're very close to the performance of the German joint venture, and we monitor it very closely, and we'll keep the situation under review. We've guided in the RNS to the potential valuation range. You know, at some point in the future, that will be a great opportunity to realize a substantial cash sum, which we will pass through our capital allocation framework in exactly the same way as we do for our earnings from our core business.
Thank you. The next question is what like-for-like sales do you need in H2 to meet your guidance, and is there any color on performance so far in H2?
Well, we guide on EBITDA and on EPS, so we don't guide on sales. You'll have seen, you know, in the presentation and in the RNS, the nature of our financial year, which is slightly the reverse of the previous year. There's some very good opportunities to drive sales in the second half of the year, and we've mentioned some of them, notably around the alignment of our marketing and promotional spend with the peak trading time, especially in Q4 with the World Cup. There's lots of opportunities to go for.
Thank you. Next question is from Ivor Jones at Peel Hunt, and it's around the Just Eat trial. Is Just Eat at one-third of the estate a ceiling, or could the proportion of stores increase further?
When we kicked off the trial a few months ago, we said we were gonna do a proper data-led trial. We were gonna focus on what it did to overall sales, but critically look at the incrementality. Our thesis going into the trial was, or our question going into the trial was, have the aggregators grown their businesses to such an extent that they are now an interesting customer acquisition opportunity for us as a brand, despite being incredibly well known and powerful as a brand? The aggregators have got very large. They've invested vast amounts of money in marketing over the last three to four years. When we did the trial a few years ago, I'm not sure, it wasn't as data-led as I would have liked it to have been, looking back at it, the first thing.
The second thing is the aggregators were relatively quite a lot smaller then when we did that trial. That has changed now. We've done the trial with about approximately 140 stores. The early indications are promising and positive, both from an overall sales point of view, but also from an incrementality point of view. It's suggesting that we are getting incremental customers into the brand by using the Just Eat platform. Remember, our people always do the delivery, so we still own the experience from what we call door to door. Because of the early positive signs, we have decided to extend the trial to more stores. We're going to go to circa a third of the estate, over the next four to six weeks. That trial will then continue.
If we see the signs that we'll need to see to roll it out to a larger part of the estate, then we would roll that out to the entire estate. We'll only do that when we've seen enough of a frequency cycle to for sure answer the question about incrementality and additional growth opportunities. The early indications are good, which is why we're extending the trial, but I think we're doing it in a really calm, considered way. You know, if the early indications continue as we go through the trial, then it will be an interesting and good sales opportunity for us as we head into 2023.
Thanks, Dominic. The next question is from Richard Taylor at Barclays, and it's on delivery. There's two parts to the question. The first one is, please, can you help us understand how the delivery charge affects your like-for-likes? And the second part is, please, can you help us understand why delivery volumes were down 12% in Q2? And what weighting would you put between the softer overall market, the tough comparator, and the delivery charge? And on the delivery charge, do you think that consumers are switching between delivery and collection to save, and how does that affect your overall economics if that's happening?
There were a couple of things on the delivery charge. We introduced it in the middle of March. Remember, all of our key competitors have now got a delivery charge. A number of our competitors rolled delivery charges out relatively quickly after we introduced it. The aggregators already had a delivery charge. Our delivery charge is also at the lower end of the cost spectrum, so our delivery charge range is currently between GBP 0.99 and GBP 2.50. The first thing is it is a market norm to have a delivery charge. The second thing is our delivery charge is on the low end, and the third point is we always have collection, which obviously doesn't have a delivery charge attached to it.
There were a lot of moving parts in the second quarter. You know, as we talked already, the country was in and out of lockdown. We had the men's Euro final, which was a huge period of sales for us. There were a lot of moving parts when we look at that quarter. The other learning I would say I think we've got is, as you roll out the delivery charge, it's really important that it's anchored to a very strong, compelling national promotion, and we're learning with that. I mean, we haven't done national promotions for nearly four years, and we've just started again this year, and we learned some really interesting things. We learned 50% off resonates really well with customers.
The 8, 10, 12 pound small, medium, large tactical week that we did a couple of weeks ago resonates really well with customers. Those actually resonate better than a slightly higher price point or a bundled price point. We're learning what works well, particularly when it's aligned to a delivery charge. That's one of the things I think that gives us confidence as we go through the back end of quarter three into quarter four, that we can align behind a strong value message with increased marketing spend with a delivery charge will still drive, you know, we believe, great opportunity to continue to drive market share and customer numbers. The delivery charge is also a really important mechanism for our franchisees. You know, everybody is seeing extra cost at the moment.
The delivery charge helps the franchisees manage that. In terms of the second part of the question between delivery and collection, we did a lot of work during COVID on looking at the segmentation of our customer base, and the conclusion very clearly was that a delivery customer is fundamentally different to a collect customer. In the majority of cases, it's a different customer. Of course, there is some overlap, and on the edges you have people who move between delivery and collection. In the majority of cases, a customer is either a delivery customer or a collect customer. That data, we refresh it regularly. That remains true today. We do see some blurring around the edges. Of course, you'll have some customers who've gone into collection, and you'll have some customers who've gone into delivery.
Maybe slightly more have gone into collection, but it's on the edges. Fundamentally, it's a different occasion, and that's why we've effectively got a very clear collect strategy, which is buy one, get one free with a very strong value message, and then a different set of promotions and offers for delivery because it's a different mindset and therefore should be a different offer.
Thanks, Dominic. I've got one question from Anubhav Malhotra at Liberum. Could you please split the price impact on like-for-like sales in Q2 of -5.6% between the impact of that price increases taken and the delivery charge impact?
We think it's too early to start giving information about the delivery charge. You know, as Dominic mentioned, it was only introduced at the end of March, and it rolled out in the second quarter. Its implementation was different between different franchisees and between different regions. The level of the delivery charge and the circumstances around it were also different. There were an awful lot of things happening in the second quarter, as we've indicated. There were three lockdowns in the comparator period in the previous year. There was a big change in the deployment of our marketing and promotional support. Then we had, you know, the delivery charge as well.
You know, we'll keep it under review, but at the moment, there's a substantial amount of information in the deck, you know, talking about volumes, talking about pricing, talking about the underlying like-for-like ex-VAT, which is 2.4% for the half one. There's plenty in there I think to understand a like-for-like performance and it's really rather early to start sharing information about the delivery charge.
Thanks, David. We've now got a couple of questions from Richard Stuber at Numis. The first one is, why is CapEx doubling in H2, and what does this relate to? The second question is the increase in H2 marketing spend wholly financed by the National Advertising Fund, or will this partly be funded by DPG too?
I'll take the first part then, which is the CapEx question. Well, we guided for CapEx for the full-year of GBP 24 million, and we're holding that guidance. CapEx tends to be second half weighted as the programs ramp up. We've talked about the work we're doing to upgrade our facility at Basingstoke and Republic of Ireland to make that really fit for purpose and to help us support future growth of which there are many prospects in that country. We also have a lot of investment in our infrastructure, you know, e-commerce capability in particular, all of which are ramping up. Those have been in the design stage, and now we're into the development and deployment stage in the second half.
It is naturally second half weighted, but as we've advised in the presentation, we retain our guidance of GBP 24 million for the year.
Thanks, David. There's one final one.
Well, there was another part to the question, which was the media spend, wasn't it?
Is the increase in H2 marketing spend wholly financed by the NAF?
It's mainly funded by the NAF. DPG makes a small contribution to the marketing as well, which we announced when we did the resolution last year, which we're really happy to do 'cause it's an investment in growth. A reminder, we are back-end loading the marketing investment this year as we lead into the World Cup. We have innovation products coming in, increased marketing spend, accelerating the Just Eat trial that then leads into the World Cup. We think the timing for that investment is spot on.
Great. Rich has got one final question, which is probably best directed at Matt. What has changed at Domino's during Dominic's tenure, and what are you looking for in his successor?
Thank you. I think there are three areas of accomplishment I'd highlight during Dominic's tenure. The first is, and most importantly, he's built a really strong team, and that's a team rooted in incumbents. People like Pete Trundley, who has continued to lead our world-class supply chain. It's reflective of new talent coming in. Sarah Barron, who leads our marketing and demand creation efforts. Nicola Frampton, who heads up operations. That's our key operational interface with our franchisees. Indeed, that's continued this year. We've had our new People Director arrive, Kirsty Pitcher, and obviously you've heard now we will welcome Edward Jamieson as our CFO in October. Secondly, he's worked with that team to deliver, and craft and execute, a powerful long-term integrated growth strategy that's rooted in the capabilities manifested in that team.
Operational excellence, demand creation, our approach towards data analytics and our whole digital platform have taken significant steps forward in the context of that strategy. Thirdly, and I think very importantly, he's built an excellent relationship with our world-class franchisees. That's manifested in the agreement that we announced at the beginning of this year, and we've seen execution, for example, through the national deals and other areas that Dominic spoke about, and I think that will drive sustainable profitable growth for us all well into the long term. What I would say is those accomplishments, for which I'm very grateful, will continue to propel this business for some time after Dominic moves on. The second part of your question is what are we looking for in Dominic's successor?
I would say, firstly, somebody who has some of the same characteristics. Someone who has got the growth appetite, the passion, the dynamic energy to lead our business because that's what it takes to lead this great business forward and unlock its true potential. I think that is something that we will look to that new successor to deliver. The second is a balance between strategic and operational capabilities. Somebody who can really balance the operating mandate of this business, but also have an eye to the long term and the growth opportunities. Finally, somebody who will nurture and continue to grow and develop our culture. I think that's a culture that's rooted in a growth mindset, but also one, very importantly, that's rooted in a spirit of collaboration among everybody in the system.
Because when we are together, we win together, and that is the essence of what Domino's is about. As I said, I'm very grateful to Dominic, and I'm very hopeful that we will find somebody who manifests and takes those characteristics forward.
Thanks, Matt. No further questions at this stage, Dominic.
Okay. Thank you, Will. Thank you, Matt. Thank you, David. Thank you all for listening today. Here ends the session today. Thank you all very much for your time. Thank you.