Hello, good morning, everybody. Thank you for taking the time to join us this morning for our full year 2020 results presentation. I'm sorry we can't meet in person today, but I'm very hopeful that we will meet again soon, now that we have a roadmap out of the third national lockdown. In the meantime, I do hope you and your families are keeping safe and well. I'm joined here this morning at an appropriate distance by Neil Smith, our CFO, Geoff Callow, and Fiona Nolan, who you can't see behind the camera, who are both supporting on investor relations. So let's turn to the agenda on slide two. I'm really excited to be taking you through our new strategic plan. But before we get to that, I will give you a short overview of the year and operational update.
I'll then hand over to Neil, who will talk you through our financials in detail. I'll then take you through our new strategic growth plan before we conclude with Q&A. The Q&A session will work similarly to the one that we had at half year. So you should be able to see a tab on your screen where you can type in any questions you have at any time during our presentation. Please tell us your name, who you work for at the start of the question, and then when we move to the Q&A session, Geoff will read out your questions in turn, and Neil and I will answer them. So let's go to the overview on slide three.
I'm really pleased to say that we responded promptly to the challenges created by COVID-19, prioritizing the safety of our customers and people while ensuring we were able to continue trading throughout the year. We've had strong U.K. and Ireland trading performance, with system sales up 11.4% on a like-for-like basis. We've seen a further penetration in our digital offering, with U.K. online sales up 23.9% and app sales up 26.2%. Online sales now account for 94.3% of delivery sales in the U.K., which demonstrates the strength of our digital offering. We've seen significant changes at board and executive leadership level. I'll talk you through the executive leadership team changes later in the presentation.
However, I think everyone will agree that with Matt Shattock as chair, Ian Bull as SID, and a number of great new NED appointments, the board has been transformed this year with a much more wide-ranging experience and skill set. We have a clear focus to grow our core business in the U.K. and Ireland, so I'm very pleased that we have made progress in exiting our directly operated international operations. The Norway disposal completed in May, and as announced yesterday, contracts have been exchanged on the disposal of our Swedish business. We are excited to be announcing a multi-year strategic plan, which will drive growth across the business. We have stated a firm ambition to deliver GBP 1.6 billion-GBP 1.9 billion of system sales in the medium term.
I know the status of the franchisee negotiations is a topic of great interest, and we have made an attractive offer to Domino's franchisees that we believe is in the best interest of all parties. We are engaged in a constructive dialogue but have not yet reached an agreement. However, we need to continue to move the business forward and strongly believe the strategic plan we will outline can deliver material growth. Reflecting our confidence in the new strategy and the strong performance of the business, we also unveil today a new capital allocation philosophy that Neil will take you through and announce that we will return GBP 88 million to shareholders. In my first year with Domino's, it has been clear to me that we have a great platform to build from, a uniquely powerful brand, high digital participation, and outstanding people and franchisees.
This is a unique, sustainable business model with significant scale economies that deliver a great and consistent experience to customers. This gives me very strong confidence in the new strategy we're unveiling today, enabling us to build upon our proven strengths in both delivery and collection and sharpen our value and quality proposition so that we can continue to drive growth and amplify the edge our proposition has over our competitive set. I'm delighted to see the strong trading we saw at the end of 2020 has continued into the new year, so let's turn to our three priorities. Before I hand over to Neil, I want to share with you how we managed our business over this challenging year, and at this point, I'd like to thank everyone involved within the Domino's system for coming together and doing a fantastic job in trying circumstances over the past year.
We have top-class franchisees, and they did an outstanding job. We've worked successfully in close partnership with our franchisees to continue to operate safely through the various lockdowns and play our part in feeding the nation during the pandemic. The operational changes we made to keep colleagues and customers safe did mean we incurred some additional costs, but we have still been able to report a good set of financial results. Our data and insights team helped us to make the right data-driven decisions at the right time. For instance, reopening contact-free collection, menu rationalization, and stopping cash payments. Our corporate stores provided us with an ability to trial and test operational changes quickly before rolling them out to the rest of the group. We also recognize the need to support our communities and key workers during this time.
For instance, we launched two GBP 4 million pizza giveaways for key workers across the country and have introduced the Domino's Partners Foundation, which will provide grants to colleagues, either working directly for us or for our franchisees in times of hardship. As I said previously, it was, of course, a challenging year, but by pulling together, we were able to come through it in very good shape. Finally, helped by our sustainable business model with economies of scale and vertical integration, we were able to deliver a strong financial performance, and I will now hand over to Neil to walk you through our financials.
Okay, good morning, everybody. Thank you, Dominic. It's a pleasure to be here this morning to present the financial results for the year. Let's start with the income statement. This slide refers to underlying numbers, so it excludes non-underlying items and charges from our discontinuing international activities, which I will cover later on. The underlying U.K. & I EBITDA is GBP 120.8 million, up 6% on last year. And within this number, we have two significant impacts. Firstly, we've adopted IFRS 16 this year with no change to our comparatives. This benefits EBITDA in the year by GBP 7.9 million as we effectively remove lease charges and replace them with incremental depreciation. So just for the IFRS 16 item, EBITDA was actually down year- on- year by around GBP 1 million. And this decline is due to the second significant impact in the year, COVID.
We've charged GBP 9 million of COVID-related costs to underlying EBITDA in the year. And we've received an estimated net benefit to our profits of around GBP 3.6 million from the U.K. VAT rate reduction that's applied since July. At the profit before tax level, the IFRS 16 benefit is much smaller, at only GBP 0.7 million. So if we adjust PBT for IFRS 16, COVID, and VAT, then we would have had normalized PBT of around GBP 105.9 million, up 7.2% year- on- year. Our underlying effective tax rate for the year was 17%, which benefits from some prior adjustments, so that the effective tax rate for the current year is expected to be 18%. The resultant underlying basic EPS of GBP 18.2, up 3.4% on last year, which is a very robust performance. As I mentioned, we've incurred some significant incremental COVID-related costs in the year, totaling GBP 9 million.
A significant investment, but the right thing to do in order to ensure that the business could continue to trade throughout the COVID lockdown periods, protecting our employees, our franchisees, and our customers. In the supply chain, to trade safely, we made a lot of changes, including changes to shift patterns so that deliveries were made to stores when they were closed, moving to single driver deliveries to maintain social distancing, and paid premiums to our teams in recognition of their increased workload. These costs amounted to GBP 4.6 million in the year. And whilst we've reduced the run rate, we do expect these costs to remain in the business throughout 2021. In addition, we provided financial assistance to our franchisees, paying for the significant initial orders of safety equipment, such as masks, contactless boxes, and Perspex screens, at a total cost of GBP 3.7 million.
As you can see, these costs are now largely ceased as the franchisees pay for any additional requirements themselves. We also wanted to look after our people and our communities. We funded the food costs of the pizza giveaway to key workers, and we've established the Partners Foundation to provide financial support to colleagues within the Domino's system. In total, this cost is GBP 0.7 million, and we would expect something similar this year. The U.K. VAT rate cut from 20% to 5% in July has provided us with financial support of around GBP 3.6 million in the year, largely in the form of increased royalties from the franchisees. The recent extension of the VAT rate cut until April 2022 is welcome, and we estimate that for DPG, this benefit will offset the ongoing COVID costs throughout the current financial year.
As you'll be aware, a significant proportion of our EBITDA comes from the supply chain center through procurement, manufacture, and distribution of products to stores. Throughout the COVID period, our supply chain has maintained an excellent service level. Our EBITDA from the supply chain in the year was GBP 99.3 million after incurring both the direct supply chain COVID-related costs and the majority of the franchisee support costs. System sales growth has been strong in the year, up 11.4%, which has driven our net royalty income growth of GBP 3.9 million. The increase in overheads was due to increased investment in our people, investments in IT and data analytics, and investments in franchisee support and some other one-offs. For the coming year, we'd expect total overhead to be a little lower as the one-offs are not expected to recur.
Our investments in joint ventures and corporate stores have also received some benefit from the VAT reduction, although we've passed much of that benefit on to customers in the corporate stores with significantly deeper price promotions. Before I look in more detail at our performance, let's touch on franchisee trading. Historically, we've 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 U.K. franchisees. We aggregate the submissions to derive these averages. On the basis of the submissions, the average profit level has increased materially during the year, with average U.K. EBITDA per store at GBP 229,000, up 58%. This performance has been achieved by the franchisees and our employees, and their employees working tirelessly throughout the COVID period to serve their customers.
We've supported the franchisees with financial contributions to cover the cost of safety equipment, and we agreed a reduction in the contributions to the NAF from 4% to 2% for 10 weeks. In addition, whilst they've passed on some of the VAT rate cut to customers through deeper discounting, the rate reduction has certainly helped their numbers. System sales have grown significantly, up 12% across the U.K., with system sales in Ireland down a little. And I'll provide more color on system sales in a moment. In terms of our reported revenue, we've delivered GBP 505 million in the year, down a little on the GBP 508 million reported last year. This is largely due to the IFRS 16 adjustment, which removes GBP 25 million of property-related rental revenue in the current year. If we adjust for that item, then reported revenue would have grown by around 3.7%.
Our corporate stores have seen revenues largely flat because these 36 stores are all based in London, which has been particularly impacted by lower footfall during the COVID period, and in addition, we were keen to pass on the majority of the VAT reduction to customers through deeper discounts. Looking at EBITDA margin as percentage of system sales, then if we adjust for IFRS 16, VAT, and the COVID cost, the normalized margins would have been around 9.2%. Down a little on last year, have we invested in people, infrastructure, and capabilities to drive the platform for future growth? Let's dig into system sales and orders in a little more detail. During the year, we had a number of factors to contend with, which impact our quarterly profile. In the chart on the top right, you can see total sales and order count profiles quarter by quarter.
In Q1, it was before COVID, and like-for-like sales were up 3.5%, and order count was growing. In Q2, COVID hit, and we suspended our collection business. Order count dropped significantly as collection accounted for 31% of orders in 2019. In Q3, the VAT rate cut was introduced, which is evident in the like-for-like sales performance, and many lockdown restrictions were lifted so that we were able to reintroduce our collection offer, although with much reduced footfall on the high street. And therefore, we've seen collection operating at around 60% of the levels of 2019 throughout the second half, and hence the continued negative order count growth. On the left-hand chart, it's pleasing to report that our delivery business during the year has increased sales by 23.7% and orders by 10.3%.
The increased orders from delivery have not been sufficient to offset the orders lost from collection, so that total order count in the year was down 6%. While orders are down, the average value per order is higher through the delivery channel, which, along with the VAT benefit, meant that total system sales were up 11.4%. As I mentioned earlier, we've so far concentrated on the underlying performance of the business, but we have some significant non-underlying items and discontinued charges. First, we have the trading losses from our international businesses in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. These entities are all classed as discontinued activities as we are in the process of disposing of them. Each of the businesses has suffered some impact from COVID-19, and the Norway results are for the period until its disposal on the 22nd of May.
In total, the drain on group resources is much better than it was a year ago, with losses at GBP 20.8 million halved to GBP 10.1 million. As well as the trading losses, we have accounting loss on disposal. For Norway, the total accounting charge on disposal was GBP 10.8 million. For Iceland and Sweden, we have written down their valuations to the expected disposal value, which means a total impairment of GBP 22.6 million. There's been no impairment for Switzerland, which is held in the books at nil value. Yesterday, we were pleased to announce that we've reached agreement to sell the Swedish business, which is scheduled to complete on the 2nd of May.
This means the two most significant loss-making international businesses have now been sold, so the ongoing drain on group resources will cease, and we can focus all energy on the execution of our strategy to grow the core business in the U.K. & I. We've generated GBP 99 million of free cash flow this year compared to GBP 57 million last year. A large proportion of the increase is a one-off benefit of GBP 21 million arising from the timing of payments around last year-end. Effectively, cash payments were made just before the end of FY 2019 as opposed to the first few days of this financial year, which has resulted in a working capital swing. In addition, as I've just mentioned, we've reduced the cash outflow from the international discontinued operations.
The tax cash outflows are high relative to last year, but in line with our expectations as they arose from the accelerated HMRC quarterly payment requirements. In the year, we've largely used free cash flow to reduce net debt by some GBP 60 million. We've continued to invest in the business with total investment of GBP 19.4 million, largely within our supply chain, where we've increased capacity and resilience with the opening of a new facility in Scotland. And we expect capital investment this current year to be in the region of GBP 15 million. As the COVID pandemic hit, we initially suspended the payment of the FY 2019 final dividend of GBP 25 million to preserve group cash rate. However, as we realized we could continue to trade, we paid that dividend in September. Prior to today, no dividend has been proposed or paid in respect of the 2020 financial year.
As you can see here, we've generated cash flow available for distribution of GBP 91.2 million in a year. And today, we've announced that we plan to distribute GBP 88 million of that cash to shareholders via a dividend of GBP 43 million and a share buyback program of GBP 45 million. By utilizing free cash flow to largely reduce net debt, we've seen net debt decline to GBP 172 million at the year-end, which on a reported EBITDA basis produces leverage at 1.57x . The core U.K. & I businesses generated cash of GBP 106 million, while the international discontinued business consumed GBP 9.6 million plus the GBP 6.4 million of cash outlay on the disposal of Norway.
As we've developed our operational strategy, which Dominic will share in a moment, we've also considered the approach to capital allocation and how an effective capital allocation strategy can amplify the benefits and returns from the cash generated by the business. As we've demonstrated this year, we do 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 1.5-2.5x , and working within these parameters, we will allocate cash in a disciplined way. First and foremost, we want to ensure we continue to invest in the core business and drive long-term sustainable growth and support the strategic ambitions that Dominic will cover. We will also aim to maintain a sustainable dividend with an EPS cover of at least two times .
For the 2020 financial year, this means we are proposing a final dividend of GBP 0.091. 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. For the year gone, our focus has been divesting the subscale international operations that were a drain on group cash. 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, and for the FY 2020 year, this means that we have today announced a share buyback program of GBP 45 million. I summarize here some modeling guidance for the current year.
From an earnings perspective, you should remember that PBT in FY 2020 was impacted by the COVID cost of GBP 9 million and benefited from the VAT rate reduction to the tune of GBP 3.6 million. So a net hit of profit of GBP 5.4 million, which we do not expect to repeat in 2021. In addition to that one-off add-back, we are getting on with executing the new strategy, and we expect this to deliver further growth in underlying profit in the current year. With regard to net debt, we expect this to grow a little as a result of the use of cash to deliver returns to shareholders. Let me now pass you back to Dominic.
Thank you, Neil. And thank you to all those who've submitted questions so far. Before we get to Q&A, I will take you through our new strategy, delivering future growth, starting with slide 19.
On joining Domino's a year ago, we began a wide-ranging program assessing our internal capabilities, digital strategy, growth avenues, and the optimal capital allocation policy for the group. In completing this exercise, it is clear that there are some real strengths within the business, which provide a great platform from which to launch the new strategy and deliver future growth. Domino's is a brand that customers love. We are a leader in a growing delivery market. We're accelerating the pace of digital adoption for collections and delivery. We operate a world-class supply chain, and we have high-quality franchisees achieving best-in-class returns. Let's look at the market backdrop. The market in which we currently operate is evolving, and this has created opportunities that we will seek to capitalize on through the new strategy. On the left-hand side, you can see that the delivered food market is growing.
We are a leading brand within the space, and the opportunities for us in collection, where we are underpenetrated, are compelling. We get asked a lot about aggregators. The aggregators are helping grow the overall delivered food market. We enjoy the fact that we have a clear customer and operational edge versus the aggregators. We control the whole customer experience from manufacturer right through to delivery to a customer's door. If you insert someone else into that chain, then either prices have to rise to deliver the product or margin will fall. Furthermore, delivery times are hard to keep consistent. This gives us a clear advantage. Our delivery times are best in class. Our product quality and value are extremely strong. We have a sustainable, vertically integrated business model, and we have a direct relationship with our customers.
This is particularly powerful now that over 90% of bookings are made digitally, and that digital growth is impressive, with an increase of over five million customers in 2020. In line with this, 90.5% of system sales are now made through the web and app channels, and 94% of total delivery sales are made online. Our customer service performance is exceptional. In 2020, I'm delighted to say that our overall customer satisfaction score has increased by 8 percentage points compared with 2019, from 61% to 69%. The score increase was driven by improvements in four areas: taste, accuracy, time, and appearance. Compared with the average overall satisfaction score for our peers as provided by the third-party agency we work with, our score is 11 percentage points above the average U.K. benchmark, which is a result that we're extremely proud of.
I'm also very happy to say that our average delivery time across the entire network was 24.9 minutes. Freshly made pizza from order to door in less than 25 minutes, despite the peaks we have seen in our business. This truly is a unique business model and customer proposition. And the good news is that we believe we have an important role to play as we come out of this COVID crisis. We played a critical role for the nation and millions of customers during the pandemic. As we come out of the crisis, many millions of people will be meeting up with friends and families. Yes, restaurants will get busy, but people can't afford to eat in restaurants every night. People also want to be sharing food with friends and families at home.
With our strong value proposition and superb consistent quality, what better food to share than Domino's Pizza? And that's an opportunity both for our delivery but also for our collection business. So, as you can see, we have a number of industry-leading strengths, and we operate in a market that is expected to continue expanding and offering opportunities. We'll now look at how we intend to capture the growth opportunity with our new strategic plan. We spent some time debating our purpose, and what we're really passionate about is 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. The five key objectives that will underpin the strategy are: Number one, nobody delivers like Domino's. We are a market leader and can build from a position of strength.
Number two, we will turbocharge our collection business where there is an opportunity to grow market share. Number three, we will amplify our product quality and value through continued innovation and marketing effectiveness. Number four, we will uphold our industry-leading economics by maintaining the world-class profitability of our system. And number five, we will model excellence as a franchisor through increasing capability and attracting the best franchisees. I'll expand on each of these points in more detail in a moment. It is appropriate that as we grow the business, we do so in the right way. And our values are important to us as they underpin everything we stand for as a company. As we look to grow, we will make sure we continue to do the right thing and work as one team. I think we've shown that brilliantly during COVID. We'll put our customers first.
We're bold, and we'll celebrate success together. I know that both I, the board, and the leadership team are hugely excited about the potential of our new strategy. In line with our values, we are boldly setting our ambitions for the medium term. And we firmly believe that in that time horizon, we can grow system sales to GBP 1.6 billion-GBP 1.9 billion and add 200 new stores in the U.K. and Ireland. Neil and I look forward to updating you on our progress on that in the coming years. Underpinning this strategy is a transformation program, which will be managed by our newly established transformation office and delivered by my executive leadership team. Talking of which, let's look at this slide. I mentioned in my opening slide the changes we've made to transform the board.
We've also made significant changes across the executive leadership team, providing enhanced clarity and focus. Our new hires include Neil as our Chief Financial Officer, previously interim CFO, Mark Grimes as our new Chief Information Officer, who brings with him industry experience that is key for our future innovation, and Sarah Bowen, our new Chief Marketing Officer, who will lead our digital team and brings with her deep brand-building, digital, and innovation experience. We've also established a data and insights team to help us really commercialize the data that we hold. Our operations performance and continued innovation in this area is going to be increasingly critical for us. I'm delighted to announce that Nicola Frampton will be joining us as our new Operations Director. Nicola brings deep multi-site experience to us, as she was most recently Managing Director of William Hill Retail with over 2,000 stores.
Scott Bush, our current Operations Director, will be moving into a newly created role of CEO Ireland, where he'll be working with our Republic of Ireland franchisees to accelerate growth in this successful market. Finally, Simon Wallis, who has extensive experience with our business, has been appointed Chief Transformation Officer and is responsible for delivering our strategic transformation program. The new team has a drive, energy, and skill set that I have no doubt will help us to achieve our ambitions. But our new strategy is not limited to financials. It includes conducting business in a sustainable way that not only values financial performance and returns but recognizes the benefits of creating wealth through other forms of capital, including social and environmental capital. Alongside our strategic plan, we'll be working to drive forward our wider sustainability program and credentials.
Important work has been done throughout the year to develop a more systematic understanding of our issues. We're committed to minimizing our environmental impacts, acting on climate change, and providing our colleagues with opportunities so that they can prosper in a diverse, inclusive, and safe workplace. We realize this is very much a journey, and during the course of 2021, we will refine our plans in this area and align our reporting with external frameworks promoted by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board and the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures. These considerations have played an important role in the formation of our new strategy. So let's move to our first objective of the strategy: nobody delivers like Domino's. Delivery is at the very heart of our business, and it's what we are best known for.
We have built a brand that people love, enabling us to hold a leading position in the U.K. delivery market. Growth in the delivery market has accelerated over this past year as consumers flocked to use delivery services during lockdown. Our opportunity is to remain the leading QSR delivery brand. We will maintain our position through being relentless in our approach to improving the customer experience, continuing to build our brand, and building ever closer digital relationships with our customers, and by leveraging our unique scale economies, our best-in-class digital assets, and our supply chain expertise. New initiatives in this area include the launch of new digital platforms that will provide a personalized experience to our customers, such as an upgraded GPS tracking solution to improve the delivery experience.
We already believe we have major strengths versus our competitors, and we plan to continue to build on those strengths by aiming to reduce average delivery time for our customers to below 20 minutes versus the current time of just under 25 minutes. Our second objective is turbocharging our collection business. We are confident that the collection market will bounce back swiftly as we start to emerge from lockdown, and we see this as a strong future growth avenue for Domino's. Our market-leading position in delivery is an indication of what we could aspire to achieve in the currently underpenetrated carry-out business. We also have the opportunity to extend our reach into different collection occasions, such as lunch, as well as different customer segments. In the short term, we are well placed to play a role in helping friends and families come together post-lockdown.
There are a number of evolutions we are planning to make to make our overall customer experience better for collection, such as rolling out targeted collection offers, enhancing our food offer to include products just right for the collection customer. Our measure of success will be to grow our collection business faster than our delivery business and to double our market share in the U.K. collection market over the medium term. This still provides headroom for future growth when we look at other Domino's markets. Moving on to the next objective: amplifying our product quality and value. Our customers love our product, and we see a great opportunity to drive product innovation to stay ahead of our competitors. We know there is an increased number of people demanding plant-based healthy alternatives, and the success of our vegan options over the last year demonstrates this.
We also understand from our customers there is room for us to improve the perceived value for money. Here, we will really be able to use our data and insights team to improve segmentation, understand specific customer demands, and tailor promotions. For example, with our recent Absolute Banger offer, it's much more compelling and results in higher conversion. If we target that product at customers who order meat pizzas and promote vegetarian offers to those that order meat-free pizzas, future segmentation is going to be critical. Our aim is to become the undisputed number one delivery player in terms of net promoter score and make sure that our customers feel they are getting an even better deal than they do today. Turning to the next slide, which is upholding our industry-leading economics.
Over the years, we have built a system which rewards both franchisees and DPG for the great performance of the brand for which we are responsible. We will continue to invest in the system to exploit technology and drive further efficiencies across the value chain. Identified opportunities include dynamic routing of our logistics operations, sophisticated new logistics technologies, and smarter ingredients contracts. In our stores, we can deploy our operational technology to support franchisees' productivity. Tackling both should allow us to maintain our best-in-class profitability for both franchisees and DPG. And moving on to our final objective: modeling excellence as a franchisor. The Domino's system in the U.K. and Ireland has grown to a point where there are now 66 very successful franchisees with over 1,200 stores across our network. But we can do more.
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. We will build on our business review process with our franchisees to make sure they get the personalized support they need to perform at their full potential. We're investing in our franchisor toolkit, including building key capabilities across data science, transformation, and store operations, and continuing to upgrade our supply chain and IT infrastructure. We're also undertaking an exciting project to review future store formats, which will unlock the next wave of growth in the system. All of this will enable us to reach our goal of attracting and retaining the best talent in the industry. Let's look at our capital investment plan, which Neil touched on.
We are confident we can sustain growth of our core business through capital investment in the range of GBP 10 million-GBP 15 million annually. We will operate a rigorous and disciplined approach to assessing additional growth opportunities. In our supply chain, we will utilize our scale to capture efficiency opportunities. Technology is a key to future growth, and we'll be launching our next-generation web platform that will provide a personalized experience for our customers. And finally, our store operations will be transformed. So I thought it was worth just recapping in terms of the current plan and how we intend to enhance it with a new strategy. We are a leader in digital and delivery, but we can't stand still. We intend to revolutionize our digital experience to stay ahead of our competition.
Our focus has been on delivery, but whilst looking to grow in delivery, we will also invest to turbocharge our collection business. Our marketing is very brand-led. We will use customer data and digital insights to tailor offers and focus on marketing that amplifies the edges we have in value and quality. Like everybody, we're under increasing cost pressure, so we will continue to optimize the supply chain to really underpin the advantage we have in value and quality and the best-in-class system profitability. We have a successful but standardized offering, and we intend to accelerate our menu innovation to drive repeat purchase and attract new customers and innovate our store experience. Now, let's talk about the status of the franchisee discussions. As I mentioned at the start of the presentation, we've made our franchisees what we consider to be an attractive offer that aligns our interests.
Specifically, the offer includes a revised food rebate mechanism that would encourage growth, new store incentives that would support accelerated store openings, investment in our capabilities to enhance marketing effectiveness through data and insights, and agreement from franchisees to participate in national deals and a phased increase in marketing funding as marketing effectiveness improves to enhance investment in the brand. Discussions with our franchisees are constructive, and they remain ongoing. We all recognize that the system is even stronger with all of us fully aligned. However, we do believe that our medium-term ambition of GBP 1.6 billion-GBP 1.9 billion worth of system sales can be achieved without franchisee agreement, although an agreement would accelerate that growth. Now, whilst we have set ambitious but achievable medium-term ambitions, there will be many steps along the way, and here we've outlined some of those to help you benchmark our progress.
Some of the key things we will deliver in 2021 are further digital acceleration and personalization, new innovation, and improved marketing effectiveness. And we've also given an early indication of some of our objectives for 2022. We look forward to updating you on the implementation of these initiatives and the next results. So, to wrap up this presentation, let us now go to the summary. I know we've got a lot of questions waiting, so I will keep this brief. As I've mentioned several times, I'm really, really proud of the way the whole Domino's family pulled together during the past 12 months to keep providing our customers with an outstanding experience in challenging and unforeseen circumstances. The strong financial results we announced today are the result of this effort.
We've established a clear capital allocation policy that will provide the investment required to grow the business and deliver material returns to shareholders, as evidenced by the GBP 88 million return announced today. I am proud of the foundation for future growth that we've put into place over the past nine months. We have transformed the PLC board and brought in great talent for the executive leadership team. With the exchange of contracts for our Swedish business, we are making good progress on our international exit. The Domino's business already has many great strengths: a sustainable business model with scale economies, a world-class supply chain, a very powerful brand, a highly digital business, an amazing product and delivery system that has a clear edge over our competitors and a group of top-class franchisees.
Critically, we see great opportunity and have a clear plan of how we will accelerate the growth of this business over the coming years, and we're confident in our ambition of growing store numbers and in growing the system to GBP 1.6 billion-GBP 1.9 billion in the medium term. We have demonstrated we have a flexible and robust business model that has been able to adapt to the uncertain and changing market conditions throughout 2020. The current trends and demand expectations, in addition to the investment and capabilities we have and are making, give us confidence in delivering further operational and financial progress in the coming year, and we have clear building blocks for our growth: strengthening our position in the fast-growing delivery market, turbocharging our collection business, further amplifying our product quality and value, building on our industry-leading economics, and continuing to improve our capabilities as a franchisor.
We have a clear plan, and we are excited to be executing it. So with that, I'm now going to hand over to Geoff for the Q&A session. Thank you.
My first question, and we've had multiple varieties of questions around the same topic, which is the status of franchisee negotiations. They all seem to focus on: can you give any more color on the nature of the offer? Is there a particular sticking point in the negotiations? And if the offer was to be accepted, what's the likely financial impact of that going forwards?
So I think the first thing I outlined was that I think we've all worked really well together as a system during this pandemic. It's been an exceptional situation. I think the franchisees have done an extraordinary job to keep their businesses operating, to keep trading, and to keep serving the nation. Whilst they've been doing that, we've been doing a few things. We've been investing in our own capabilities in DPG. We've been clarifying what the strategy is moving forward, and we've been getting into a set of constructive conversations with the franchisees about how we can help them accelerate growth. I think everyone is aligned on the fact that we all want to grow the overall business and the overall system, and we've been having conversations about how we best do that.
We haven't found a way through to agree a deal at the moment, but we've made really good progress in delivering the business and coming up with a strategy. And I think we've got real clarity now on what that strategy is, and we can go ahead and execute it. If we find a way through the talks and we make an agreement, we would see that what that does is give us an ability to accelerate the medium-term growth goals that we've set out, that we've already set out.
I'd probably just sort of reiterate what Dominic had said in the presentation, which is that the sort of broad outline of the offer is clear in terms of improvement in the food rebate, improvement in new store openings, incentive, investment bias in the system, and investment bias in capability, offset by, if you like, an ask that franchisees participate in national offers with a modest increase in the NAF, all designed to grow the total system profitability, both for the franchisees and for ourselves. We can't, and I don't think people would expect us to give you a quantification of that in terms of impact upon profitability in the near term or long term. We would only do the deal if we think it's the right thing both for franchisees, for DPG, and our shareholders.
A couple of questions now from Wahab at Liberum. First one, as the franchisees have not yet accepted the new proposal and probably not yet bought into the new plan, I was wondering why you've decided to announce the plan before finalizing the dispute.
So I think the thing I think works really well with the strategy is it's an evolution, not a revolution. It's building on the core strengths that we've already got as a business. We know that we've got really strong edges versus our competitive set. We know that there are really clear, unique advantages to the business model versus our competitors. The fact that we've got scale, the fact that we're vertically integrated, I think gives Domino's an enormous advantage in the marketplace. The strategy we've laid out today is actually further amplification of those edges and acceleration of that growth. I think everybody within the system is behind the concept of growing the business and behind the concept of us taking the fight to our competitive set and really amplifying the edges that we've got versus our competitors.
It's also really important that we get on with executing the strategy. We see great growth opportunity for the brand moving forward. We want to get ahead and get ready for that growth. A lot of getting ready for that growth is getting our capabilities right, investing in the product, digital innovation. We're just going to get on and get ready for that growth because we think we've got a great opportunity ahead of us.
And final sort of two-part question from Wahab. How satisfied are you with the delivery order growth rate? And.
Can I take that? Can we take that first part of the question? Yeah, so we've had strong growth in our delivery order growth rate, so it's about 10% in terms of collection and in terms of order count. We've attracted over five million new customers to the system overall, so we've grown the number of new customers into the system. We've grown the number of order count. But within that, customers are ordering more when they make the order. So you'll have probably seen in the data it's up about 10% per order in terms of the size of the order they're making. A lot of that is for reasons because families are buying, and either they've got larger families altogether or they're buying food that's going to last them for maybe dinner for the following night.
So when we look at all of those things together, we think we've had a really strong performance in terms of bringing new customers into the brand and driving new customers into the delivery space. Obviously, that's been offset by a softening of the collect, but we feel we've had success driving that increased delivery volume and bigger orders per customer.
Are you still satisfied given that you're likely to lose significant delivery market share when compared to over 50% order growth at food aggregators such as Just Eat?
So I think that, I mean, the thing that the aggregators have done, of course. I think a couple of things. One, they are growing the size of the overall market. Relatively easier for them, of course, to add restaurants. They're not necessarily building restaurants. They're signing up new restaurants. So relatively easier for them to drive that kind of growth. But they're doing a good job of driving the overall delivered space. Definitely, what we see from customer behavior is once they enjoy food delivery, they will generally use it again. So I think that's growing the overall food delivery market. That's good news for us. What I think is particularly powerful is as that market continues to grow, we have a unique operational and customer edge. You can see that in terms of our delivery times.
We have record customer satisfaction, and customers rate us extraordinarily highly in terms of the freshness and the quality of the product when they get it. So as that delivered market grows, we have an opportunity to continue to grow within that market because we have a clear edge versus the aggregators and versus our competitors.
Moving on to Ross at Investec. So you have a store target which would lead you to five years having around 1,350 stores versus a previous target of around 1,600 stores. It'd be great if you could give us some color on what changed in the group's assumption to lead to this revised number?
What we're saying in terms of the medium term is that we think it's a sensible aspiration to shoot for 200 additional stores, which is a step up from the current run rate of new store openings. We're not distancing ourselves from the 1,600 number. We just don't think that that's probable or likely within the time frame that we're talking about.
And a follow-up question on data disclosure. What can we expect moving forward in terms of data per address or per store in terms of metrics?
So, I mean, we're not as focused, I don't think, on addresses per stores we have done in the past. We're actually much more interested in tighter analytics about not just the number of addresses, but also the financial, the wealth effectively of those addresses. You might have fewer addresses, but it might be in a more wealthy area that therefore has higher orders. So, I think as part of this work, we've got a much tighter analytics program that gives us confidence about that 200 number.
A couple of other questions on the same theme of store openings from Natasha at Citi. How do you think we'll be able to get to 200 store openings a year without a resolution with the franchisees? And does the target include any corporate stores? And maybe second part of that question, assuming we reach an agreement quickly, how many stores do you think we could open in full year 2021? And if there is no agreement, the same question.
So we still believe that there's a pent-up demand. Well, we know that there's a pent-up demand from our franchisees wanting to open stores, even though we've got a so to speak dispute. Franchisees are still keen to open stores, which we've demonstrated by opening the 19 stores we did last year. We think for this current year, we should be able to get to 25-30 with franchisee alignment further than that for sure. So we're confident from our analytics of the data and where we think economically viable stores sit, whether that's a split or a virgin, that the 200 number is a good number. Franchisee alignment will probably deliver that quicker.
A final question from Natasha. Could you talk a bit more about inorganic opportunities you might consider? Would they solely be in the U.K., or would you consider going into new markets?
So I think what we've outlined today is a very clear strategy focused on the Domino's brand in the U.K. and Ireland. You've seen as we're exiting the international markets, we're really doubling down on our focus in the U.K. and Ireland, and I strongly believe that's the right thing for us to do. We've also got an amazing platform for the business, whether that's supply chain, our digital assets, our IT assets, our capabilities, which I think will stand us in very good stead for future growth. At the moment, we are very, very focused on doubling down on the core Domino's business and growing that within the U.K. and Ireland.
As we come out of the pandemic, and Neil just touched on it, we know that a number of our franchisees are very keen to open stores, and they will be, and actually some opportunities will arise coming out of the pandemic to open stores and locations that maybe they wouldn't have had access to. So doubling down and focusing on our core businesses is priority number one. Within that, what we're clearly demonstrating is we have an amazing platform and system for future growth.
Next question from Owen Shirley at Berenberg. You mentioned a strong start to the year. Can you comment on order momentum relative to Q4, please?
Yeah, I can do that. What we've seen was that in Q3, we had delivery order growth of about 11.8%. In Q4, that did come down to about 5.1%, which is, that's what's driving the softening, apparent softening in Q4. So when we looked at that, what happened was that if you look at the performance this year versus last year, is that around the Christmas period, there's a lot of demand, pent-up demand for our product through offices, through Christmas parties, etc. So the December like-for-like number in terms of order count growth was just shy of 2%, I think, so it's 1.5%. So pretty soft December. The encouraging thing is to Owen's question, we've seen that recover quite very strongly through the new year period and through January and February, so that we're tracking more around 8% now in the year to date of 2021.
Final question from Owen. Switzerland, losses improved a lot. Could you comment on what is behind that, please? And you've mentioned you've written down Iceland and Swiss assets to expected disposal value. What is that value, please?
Can we handle the first part?
Sure.
So I'll handle the first part. Just operational focus. The team in Switzerland has done a good job. We've worked with them on tightening up the plan for delivery in Switzerland, and they've done a good job of actually improving the performance there in the Swiss market. We still believe fundamentally it's right for us to focus on the U.K. and Ireland, but whilst doing that, we wanted to make sure we were reducing cash burn. So selling the Norway and Swedish markets are a big move to that, but also improving the core performance in Switzerland has helped us there as well.
I think it was, so there were two remaining territories that we have. There's Switzerland, which is held at nil net value, so there's no write-down to be taken there, and Iceland, we took it down to GBP 13 million.
A couple of questions from Douglas Jack at Peel Hunt. Given the likely exit value of GBP 80 million-GBP 110 million from the German JV and your high free cash flow, is it sensible to assume that share buyback program is repeated at a similar rate in future years?
I think there's two questions in that, really. So is it sensible to assume share buybacks will continue at an ongoing rate? The capital allocation philosophy that we've laid out is one that says, let's look at what cash we generate each year. Let's firstly fund the capital investment required to grow the core business. Let's ensure that we have that sustainable dividend. And what we have left, unless there's other opportunities to invest it for great returns, will probably return to shareholders likely through a share buyback. So there should be an annual review and likely expectation for share buyback. I think that's sort of question one. Question two related is I think what Doug is suggesting is that if we end up selling the German investment, we could see a circa GBP 100 million cash inflow.
That would go into the pot of cash that we've generated in that year to say, okay, what do we do with our surplus cash? So that could be returned to shareholders, absolutely. We're not saying necessarily that we are planning to or expecting to sell the German business, but that's the gist of the philosophy that we would adopt in terms of how we use the cash flow.
A follow-up question from Doug. How does our 55% NPS compare to your peers, both traditional pizza delivery and the aggregator deliverers?
So really strong. I mean, I think I mentioned when I spoke, we have our own customer satisfaction data. We're eight percentage points better in 2020 than previous year. We also benchmark overall satisfaction through, effectively, it's a stable of different leisure and hospitality businesses, most of which are in a similar space to us. And according to that data, we're 11 percentage points better than the average, so very, very, very high. Customers particularly have enjoyed the speed and consistency of delivery, the product quality, and again, our franchisees do an amazing job in this area. And actually, the value proposition as well has driven that high customer satisfaction. So we're super proud of that. And it's all part of the sustainability of the business model moving forward. If you're delivering a product that customers don't like, it won't support your growth.
The fact that we've got such high customer satisfaction is one of the key areas that gives us confidence about the future growth.
Moving on to Richard at Numis. What percentage of collection could curbside get to? And how quickly do you expect collection to recover to pre-COVID levels?
Can we take the first one? You take the second one. We're relatively early on in the in-cars. What Richard's asking about is in-car collection. That's when you're in about 200 stores at the moment where you can order your pizza on the app or online. You then go to your local store. We're doing it in stores that have either their own car park or car park very close by. When you arrive there, it's geo-targeted, and someone will bring your pizza out to your car. We see it as an amazing opportunity to actually take share from some of the drive-through type restaurants. We're in about 200 stores at the moment. The sales are encouraging. We're going to continue to roll it out with franchisees who see that opportunity within their estates.
We don't think in the short term it's going to overtake the number of usual collection business of people coming, but we think it's got good growth potential. But we haven't actually been clear on what the percentage target is. But we see good growth potential. I know the U.S. is having success with that product as well. So it'll be one of the weapons that we will use within our battle to drive the collection business over the next few years.
The speed at which we get to 2019 levels, let's say, is very difficult to determine. It really depends upon the speed at which the economy reopens post-COVID. Hopefully, if the country reopens at the planned time frame outlined by the government, then come June, people will be back on the high street, and we should see, let's say, 78%, 80%, 90% of levels of 2019. I think it might take a little bit longer. It's a bit of a personal view. I think it'll take a little bit of time to get back. Probably the autumn, I would thought we should be targeting for return of the collection business.
Another question from Richard, which has two parts to it. Have you considered, sorry, DPZ discussed the benefits of a loyalty program. Have you considered introducing one in the U.K.? And then over the last 12 months, has there been any change in peaks during the week, seeing more orders midweek or times of day? Do you expect this will revert to pre-COVID patterns?
I think let's take the first one. The biggest opportunity I see in terms of customer data and personalization is that we are pretty unique in the sense that all of our customers are direct to us. So as a system, we get all of those customer details. We've grown by more than five million customers during this pandemic. We've got all of those customer details. That gives us incredible information with which to build a closer relationship with our customers. So we segment that data. We put them into our different customer demographics, and then we can, over time, personalize offers and products and services to those customers. A further iteration of that could, in the future, be some form of loyalty program. I know a number of markets have tried that and have had success. I think loyalty programs, if they're done right, can be very successful.
We will consider that as part of our ongoing rollout, but we don't have a plan to do that right now. Our plan at the moment is really focused on mining that customer data that we have access to. So the second part of the question was it was.
Consumer patterns.
Yeah. Are you seeing different trading patterns during the week?
We've seen consumer patterns change markedly through the pandemic, and again, the franchisees have done a phenomenal job of managing their business through very, very different peaks compared to normal, so what we normally see is business more spread out during the week and more spread out during the day within each of those days. What we've seen during the pandemic is the demand get really concentrated primarily between 4:00 P.M. and 7:00 P.M., particularly at weekends, and I think that plays a lot to the fact that we've been feeding millions of families through the pandemic, so we've really had to change operational procedures within stores, and our franchisees put a lot of effort into changing shift patterns, for example, of drivers and riders to feed those peaks. I'm sure that as we come out of the pandemic, the patterns will start to become more normal.
I think we'll see as pubs open, for example, as friends start getting back together again, more late-night business will start coming in. I imagine freshers later this year will be a pretty turbocharged event. Students will be getting back together face to face. So I think we will see, as Neil says, as we come through the summer into the autumn, I would expect to see patterns normalizing more.
A couple of questions from Wayne at Liberum. Firstly, is it prudent to do a share buyback program in the middle of a franchisee dispute and order counts falling so badly? Surely at some point this will start to threaten the supply chain profits.
I think the order count falling so badly. I think Wayne is talking about the overall order count with collect shop. One of the interesting things that we did in terms of data and analytics during the pandemic is we really got to the bottom of the fact that a collect customer is fundamentally a different customer to delivery customers. The fact that we've seen collect soften but delivery grow is not actually collect customers becoming delivery customers. It's new customers that we've got to go into delivery. We also see as we come out of the pandemic, we think that there will be an opportunity. There'll be an opportunity to continue to grow the collect business and an opportunity to grow the delivery business over time. It's clearly a growing segment of the market.
The franchisee discussions that we're having, the franchisees are generally all interested and focused on profitably growing their businesses. And we want to find a way to support them to profitably grow their business. We are all interested in achieving the same thing. Within that context, we also have to do the right things for our shareholders and our investors. And that's part of the decision about a share buyback program and the capital allocation plan that we've done. But be under no illusion. Priority number one is to successfully and profitably grow this business for the long term. We think we have an amazing opportunity to do that. We want to do that hand in hand with our franchisees. We've shown that during the pandemic we can achieve amazing things by working together.
Whilst we have those constructive conversations, we're going to go ahead, get ahead, and start executing that strategy, which will, we're confident, deliver that long-term successful growth, which will actually boost franchisee profitability over time. It's really important we do that because a healthy system is a growing system.
Next question from Wayne was, have the franchisees agreed to the NAF increase? And if not, why should they? What return would you target from this extra spend, and what would you spend this on?
One of the aspects, I think, of the plan that we think we have an opportunity on is actually to improve our marketing effectiveness overall. The marketing money that we spend, we want to make sure that we spend that optimally. We have an opportunity to do that, for example, what I've just spoken about in terms of the direct relationship we have with our customers. We have an opportunity, I think, to be smart about how we use some aspects of media, and we want to do that in full cooperation with our franchisees. Over time, we'd like to see that marketing fund continue to grow because we think it's an important part of investing in the brand. We also think it's really important that we display to our franchisees that we are serious about driving that improved marketing effectiveness because overall that will improve the returns.
That will improve the returns of the system.
And then this will be the final question. So just to say sorry to everybody who haven't got the answer to all of your questions, but if we haven't, then please email us and we'll try and get back to you. Final one from Wayne. How will you drive system sales without franchisee buy-in?
So I think what we've shown during the crisis is we have driven system sales collectively as a system by working so well together. The franchisee, we have a great group of franchisees. They want to continue to grow their businesses. They understand that growing the business is really important to them, as do we. We want to do that in full cooperation with our franchisees. And the program that we've put on the table, both in terms of strategy but also in terms of future investments, will support that longer-term growth. And longer-term growth is what's going to drive franchisee profitability up. And we're very focused on and happy to support them in doing that because it makes a healthier system. Okay. I think that's all the questions and answers. So thank you very much. I'd like to thank you all for your time today.
It's a bit hard doing these things virtually, but thank you very much for your time and for your questions as well. Thank you.