Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our interim results presentation. I would like to draw your attention to this disclaimer before I introduce you to the team and outline our agenda. I'm joined by Lucas Paravicini, our CFO, and Peter Durman, our head of investor relations. First, I will highlight some key points from today's strong set of results. Lucas will then discuss our first half financials in more detail and confirm our outlook for the full year. I will then return with some more color on how we are continuing to drive operational improvements to support our strategic transformation. And finally, we'll look forward to taking your questions. Now, this has been a six-month period characterized by a range of external pressures: continued high inflation in some markets, a squeeze on consumer wallets, supply chain disruptions, and fast-evolving regulation.
Amidst these very challenges, our teams have performed well and delivered a consistent, broad-based set of results. In tobacco, we've driven robust pricing with price mix up 9%. At the same time, we've consolidated the strong aggregate market share gains achieved in priority markets over the past two years. In next-generation products, we've continued to scale up with revenue growth of 17%, while at the same time, we have driven increased gross margins and reduced losses. Looking at our broader transformation, as you can see from today's figures, we're succeeding at a day-to-day operational level. We're also making good progress on our long-term ambitions to become more consumer-centric and to drive more efficient and effective ways of working. The future is always uncertain, and we know this is a competitive industry prone to disruptive change, so we never take anything for granted.
All of that said, today's results are another set of data points evidencing that we are a stronger business than we were three years ago. We're now better able to deliver consistent and broad-based performances with positive price and share in combustible and in NGP, growth, and improved margins. This is the sixth half-year period when I've showed you this dashboard. And for the sixth time in a row, there's a tick in every box, and all the lights are green. When we launched our strategy in January 2021, we divided the five-year period into an initial foundation-building phase, followed by a phase of accelerating returns. We're now 18 months into the acceleration phase, and there are two metrics which most clearly highlight our success in stepping up performance. First is the 2.8% growth in net revenue.
This is the strongest organic growth Imperial Brands has reported for at least 10 years, and it has been driven by strong performance in both tobacco and NGP. The second metric to focus on is the 7.7% growth in earnings per share, highlighting the accelerated profit growth and the powerful year-on-year compounding effect of our ongoing share buyback. Since starting the buyback in 2022, we have retired 9% of our share capital. Taking the longer view, over three years, we're on course to make cumulative capital returns to shareholders of GBP 6 billion through buybacks and dividends. Underpinning this operational and financial progress is a steady transformation of Imperial Brands into the strong challenger business for our industry. Being a challenger is about getting super close to consumers. It's about a strong culture focused on performance. It's also about agile ways of working supported by tech and data.
Now, in previous presentations, I've spoken about how we have invested in consumer insights, innovation, and brand building. And I've spoken about how we're upskilling our leaders to coach stronger performances from their team. Later in this presentation, I will shine the spotlight on the strategic long-term improvements we're making to business data, supply chain management, and our enabling functions. Taken together, while there's still much more work to do, this transformation is already making us more agile and better able to deliver consistent growth. I've always believed that it's in times when a business faces external headwinds that its agility becomes most apparent. And in the first half, it's fair to say we successfully navigated through some pretty stormy conditions.
We managed inflationary pressures and the squeeze on consumer wallets in some key markets, thanks to how we have strengthened our brands and a more rigorous approach to revenue growth management. We've so far responded well to the challenge of the Red Sea crisis, thanks to the ability of our supply chain teams to respond at pace. It is this improving agility, our evolution into a stronger challenger, that gives us the confidence in our ability to continue to deliver in the second half and beyond. I will now hand over to Lucas to take you through the financial results and outlook in more detail.
Thanks, Stefan, and good morning, everyone. Once again, I'm pleased to show you a positive financial dashboard. As Stefan mentioned, we delivered strong pricing while consolidating the aggregate share gains in our five priority markets achieved in recent years. In NGP, revenue growth is translating into gross margin improvement. This operational success has supported the improvement in group-adjusted operating profit growth of 2.8%. Cash conversion was strong at 97% on a 12-month basis. Leverage at 2.5x is higher than the full year for the usual seasonal reasons, but remains within our target range. This performance has meant that at half-year, we're on track to deliver against plan as well as meet our capital allocation priorities. Our results offer a good illustration of the tobacco value model in action.
Strong pricing across our footprint, in orange, has more than offset volume declines to deliver an acceleration in tobacco net revenue growth. In Europe, our largest region, strong and broad-based pricing has significantly outpaced volume declines. In the U.S., price mix increased 12.9%, driven mainly by pricing gains in our cigarette portfolio. This more than compensated for the volume declines, which also reflect some temporary wholesale destocking in cigarettes. In our ACE region, volume has been affected by shipment timings in the Middle East due to higher border controls and the Red Sea crisis. There have also been market-sized declines in Australia. Group operating profit growth was driven by all three parts of the business: tobacco, NGP, and Logista. In tobacco, the strong pricing has dropped through to higher profit. In NGP, we reduced our losses by building scale in our existing footprint and improving gross margins.
Logista also made a strong contribution with robust underlying performance helped by pricing in its tobacco-related business. Our adjusted EPS reflects our adjusted operating profit growth and the reduced share count due to our ongoing buyback. You can really see the year-on-year effect on the buyback coming through. As Stefan said, we have already repurchased 9% of our share capital since the start of our buyback program just 18 months ago. This offsets the small increase in interest and tax. The net finance costs reflect a slightly higher all-in cost of debt as we refinanced at higher rates. This was offset by a currency switch to minimize the overall rate increase. Our adjusted effective tax rate was at 23%, in line with our full-year guidance. Turning to cash and capital allocation, we remain focused on cash generation and disciplined in how we allocate capital.
Operating cash conversion was 97% on a 12-month basis. The strong operating cash conversion is driven by improved working capital at Imperial, partially offset by higher working capital at Logista and higher cash tax. Disciplined capital allocation remains a key part of our value creation model. Our first priority is to invest in the business. Leverage at the half-year is broadly flat year-on-year, and our year-end leverage will be around the lower end of our 2%-2.5% range. Our progress on strengthening the balance sheet is being recognized externally, with Moody's upgrade to their outlook from stable to positive in December 2023. We have announced an interim dividend increase of 4%, retaining the increase in growth rate from fiscal year 2023. The GBP 1.1 billion buyback will be largely complete by the end of September.
Together, this means we are on track to have returned GBP 6 billion to shareholders over a three-year period. The strength of our strategy and the performance in the first half means we are confident we can further improve adjusted operating profit growth in the second half, in line with guidance. This step up will be partly underpinned by pricing already taken in the first half and improved operational gearing. And over the second half, we see an improvement in NGP profit trends as we grow into our newly expanded footprint. As previously guided, we continue to expect full-year constant currency tobacco and NGP net revenue to grow in the low single digits. Constant currency adjusted operating profit is expected to grow close to the middle of our mid-single digit range. At current rates, we expect foreign exchange translation to be a 3%-3.5% headwind to profit.
As usual, there is a slide in the appendices with guidance on specific items. Our strategic transformation and disciplined capital allocation means we are well placed to generate a long-term value for shareholders. Thank you. I now hand back to Stefan, who will provide an update on operational progress.
Thank you, Lucas. Most of you will now be well familiar with this slide, our strategy, and how it links to our purpose, our vision, and our behaviors. In every element, we're making good progress. Starting with the strategic priorities, the top half of the wheel on the left. In our priority tobacco markets, we're simultaneously delivering share, price, and value. In NGP, we're building both scale and margins. And as you've just heard from Lucas, Logista, our distribution business, is contributing strongly. Now, success in these strategic priorities is underpinned by our critical enablers, the bottom three segments of the wheel. Our consumer and innovation capabilities are maturing. Our three Sense Hubs in Liverpool, Hamburg, and Shenzhen, which bring together our consumers, partners, and our own product developers, are now fully up and running. We're making measurable progress on our performance culture.
During the first half, a further 200 leaders participated in our intensive seven-day Connected Leadership course. This enables them to become better coaches to their teams and drive stronger performance. Investments like these in our people are enabling us to embed our five behaviors, shown along the bottom of the slide. The way our people are becoming more collaborative, accountable, and future-focused is a key reason for our growing success. I spoke earlier to you about the importance of our vision of being a strong challenger. In a moment, I will flag a few further examples of this mindset in action during the first half. Turning to our purpose, as our NGP business develops and as we deliver on our wider ESG commitments, we're steadily moving along the path to a healthier future.
I'm going to spend a few moments focusing on how we're building a more simplified and efficient organization, one of the three critical enablers for our strategic wheel. We are transforming the business across key functions: finance, procurement, people and culture, and IT, to enable our people to provide more insightful advice and make smarter, faster decisions. As I've said before, being a challenger is not just about mindsets. It's also about equipping our people with good data and efficient processes. Over the past two years, we have created an all-new Global Business Services function with 300 colleagues sitting in sites in Poland, Philippines, and Bulgaria. This centralizes key processes and operations, freeing up our business partners in the markets to become more commercially focused.
Now, I recently visited our GBS site in Kraków and saw firsthand the visible transformation the team are supporting, which is on track to deliver a 10% productivity improvement in year one. We're also progressing well with the global upgrade to our technology and data architecture through the creation of a single ERP platform replacing 60 legacy systems. In the first half, we moved from the planning and design phase to preparing for our early adopter markets to go live at the end of this year. Alongside and integrated to these major programs, we're moving ahead with technology initiatives which will empower colleagues in the supply chain, people and culture, and finance functions. While the benefits of these transformations are already flowing through, the step change in our effectiveness and efficiency will come in future years.
This is one of the things which gives me confidence about this company's headroom for future growth. We continue to make good progress with our ESG agenda, or People and Planet, as we call it internally. As usual, we will publish our full ESG update at the year end. Today, I will just highlight a few achievements from the last six months. Looking first at our net zero ambition, we were awarded an A rating for climate from CDP for the fifth successive year. In addition, our transition plans have now been validated by a Science Based Targets initiative. Turning to waste and recycling, I'm pleased to report we achieved zero landfill across our factories' operations 18 months ahead of our 2025 target. In health and safety, we've been focused on analyzing the root causes of accidents and then mitigating them through education and awareness.
Over the past six months, more than 100 leaders have been trained on behavioral safety. I look forward to reporting further progress in future presentations. Over the past three years, we've achieved our objective of stabilizing market share across our five priority markets. We can now report 3.5 years of stable or growing share after years of decline. As a reminder, our objective is to maintain our share. Our top five markets are highly competitive, and we manage them as a portfolio. Therefore, some markets may be up and some down within the period. We've gained share in the United States, Spain, and Australia with declines in the UK and Germany. Now, let me take you through our performance in our priority markets, starting with the US. Our tobacco portfolio has continued to perform strongly.
Despite the volume pressures, strong pricing mix means we've once again both grown revenue and profits. This is within the market that saw industry volumes decline around 8.5%. We delivered further growth in cigarette share up 12 basis points. Underpinning this consistent success has been a long-term focus on upskilling our sales force, targeted brand equity investments, and careful management of our portfolio. The breadth of our offering means we're well placed to capitalize on evolving consumer preferences. Turning to mass market cigars, last year was marked by transition, with our performance affected by post-pandemic changes to consumer behavior as well as wholesaler destocking caused by Hurricane Ian. As we said, these factors are now behind us. And while market size remains under pressure, we have delivered an improved performance, most notably in Backwoods, our premium brand. Our other four priority markets continue to perform well.
In terms of share trends, all delivered an improvement over the same period last year. Like other years, we've made clear choices around balancing market share with the delivery of pricing. In Germany, many of you will know that this has been a tougher market to turn around. However, after a sustained period of share losses, we're now seeing an improvement in the trend. I was in the market recently, and I could see how new sales force initiatives are starting to build stronger relationships with key customers. But at the same time, there's still much to do before we can declare victory. In the UK, we chose to increase prices in February with the clear expectation that this would have a short-term impact on share. But we're confident this was the correct decision for long-term value creation.
In Spain, we delivered strong market share growth through initiatives focused on local jewel brands such as Nobel. This share improvement was accompanied by price increases for the third consecutive year following a period of price stability. In Australia, the high excise environment has driven an increase in the illicit trade. And this means the size of the legal market is under pressure. That said, our team in Australia has done a great job in optimizing value from the portfolio while also delivering share gains. Each of these top five businesses are operating in very different environments with different challenges and different opportunities. But what unites them all is that they're all delivering strongly against their individual strategies. And this is enabling us to meet our overarching objective of delivering value with stable aggregate share.
Now, turning to NGP, both the market environment and our capabilities continue to evolve at pace. Consumer preferences and regulatory environments are changing rapidly. All of this means it is important for us to be able to offer consumer choices across multiple categories and remain targeted and agile in our execution. The first three years were about building the foundations for a sustainable NGP business. We followed and continue to follow our test and learn methodology using consumer trials to validate our approach. We recognize that we have to play differently to our competitors and are mindful of the needs to be smart with our investments. Following a period of new market and product launches in fiscal year 2023, our focus this year is about building scale in our existing footprint.
We've continued to grow both NGP net revenue year over year and to improve the cross margin, early evidence, I would suggest, of the sustainability of the NGP platform we're building. Our focus has continued to be revenue growth in Europe. This is the world's largest NGP region. It's even bigger than the US. NGP now makes up more than 7% of net revenue of European markets, up from 2% four years ago. We showed the market-by-market bar chart on the left at our full year results in November. Even since, we've made some considerable progress. In six markets, NGP now accounts for a quarter or more of total revenue. Looking at the financials, group-wide, we delivered 17% net revenue growth in the first half and 24% in Europe, including Central and Eastern European markets. In vapor, we're building scale.
Encouragingly, we're seeing growth in our larger European markets, including the UK and Germany. I've spoken before about how our consumer-centric partnership approach was helping us make us more competitive. What's new in the past six months is that we have proven we can not only be fast followers, but sometimes we can also lead the pack with new product features. Consumers have told us they wanted to see a longer-lasting disposable vape. We've responded by becoming the first tobacco player to offer a product with 1,000 puffs in a single device. This all-new blu bar also contains a removable battery to enable more of the product to be recycled. It is now available in the United Kingdom. Early consumer feedback is extremely positive.
While growth in vaping continues to be driven by disposables, our blu 2.0 pod-based product continues to appeal to consumers in some key markets such as Spain, where we lead the pod category. Now, turning to heated products, as a reminder, Pulze 2.0 is now present in 7 European markets, which represent more than 60% of the addressable European market. The device, with its 25 or more sessions from a single charge, appeals to consumers who like consecutive sessions and appreciate its convenience. Our proposition has been supported by the introduction of the flavored non-tobacco heat sticks under the new iSenzia brand. Now, this is a competitive market. Our competitors are also innovating fast. However, we continue to remain highly focused on our target consumers so we can secure our fair share in this category.
In modern oral nicotine, the exciting news is that we've now entered the fast-growing U.S. market with our own brand, Zone, in February of this year. The product has been introduced across 12 metropolitan areas in the U.S. To maximize consumer appeal, the portfolio includes 14 SKUs across two different strengths. We've taken a challenging approach by offering a very clearly differentiated product. Zone pouches are more moist than others on the market. Our testing suggests this makes for a better mouthfeel. Now, I was in the U.S. recently. It was great to see what our sales teams have implemented at the point of sale to achieve an eye-catching profile in stores. While it is too early to get a read on consumer uptake, we're now on track with the planned rollout. We have received an encouraging initial reaction from consumers and the trade.
Turning to Europe, we've continued to deliver strong growth through Zone X, driven by new flavor launches shown here. Overall, our European modern oral business grew by more than 30% from last year. So to summarize, the first half represents another period of improved operational and financial delivery. We've landed in line with our commitments and in some areas, for example, on net revenue, delivered beyond expectations. These good results are more data points, more evidence that our strategy is working. Investments in consumer capabilities, culture, and ways of working mean that it's now a stronger business, better able to deliver consistent growth. Our vision to be the industry challenger is being realized. We're always going to be smaller. But we can be more focused on operational performance and more focused on creating value for you, our shareholders.
As Lucas said, we expect to deliver a full-year performance in line with our guidance. Despite the varied challenges we're continuing to face in the external environment, we're also confident about our ability to grow sustainably in the years to come. Now, thank you again for joining us today. We'd now like to take your questions. I will hand back to the operator to start the Q&A session. Thank you.
Thank you. To ask a question, you will need to press star 1 and 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced to withdraw your question. Please press star 1 and 1 again. That is star 1 and 1 to ask a question. We will now go to our first question. One moment, please. Your first question comes from the line of Rashad Kawan from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thanks, Stefan, Lucas, and Peter for taking my questions. A couple from me, please. So the first one on Germany, a nice sequential narrowing of the share losses there. What's your outlook for the market there over the next two years? I know, Stefan, you said that it's too early to declare victory. But are you finally seeing a path to neutral or even share gains from here? And then my second question on the price mix in the U.S., clearly very strong at 13%. Can you break down how much of that was price versus mix? And should we expect that strength to kind of continue into the second half of the year? Thank you very much.
Sure. Good morning, Rashad. I will take your first question. Lucas will answer the second question. On Germany, as you rightly say, I mean, we are encouraged by the progress we're making in Germany, which has been of our top five markets, the one where turning around share performance is taking the longest. I think what is important also to remind our strategy was about the combination of our top five markets together, that we would hold share or gain share, but with the key line being the holding share. We've achieved that in the three and a half years, despite the German share movement. I think what is exciting to see is that the must-win battles that we've put into place in Germany are now starting to bear fruit. I think, look, I think for this year, for sure, we will still stay in negative territory.
I think you do see now a movement in the right direction in our German share number. Let us remind you, Germany is a very attractive market. The market size declines in Germany are noticeably smaller than some of the other markets. Getting to a better share position in this market will bode well for Imperial in the years to come. I wouldn't want to predict at this point in time, in a highly competitive marketplace, what our share performance will be in the years to come.
Thank you. Just on the price mix, Rashad, indeed, we had a very strong price mix of 12.9% in the Americas. That is mainly pricing. I would catalog the mix as neutral. Yes, as we said in the presentation, the outlook for the second half, we obviously confirmed the guidance. Part of that delivery is because we have taken the pricing. As you pointed out, it will roll over into the second half. So you could continue to see a strong pricing in the second half in the US. Pricing is equally in cigarettes as it is in mass market cigars, by the way.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. We will now go to our next question. Your next question comes from the line of Faham Baig from UBS. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thank you for the questions. I've got three, if that's OK. I'll start with the U.S. as well. So I guess your overall group strategy to accelerate growth towards the mid-single digit range relies on the U.S. delivering at that or slightly above. Could you maybe discuss how you expect the volume environment in the U.S. to improve from here? And in a competitive market, how sustainable it would be for you to continue to deliver double-digit pricing in order to try and hit the mid-single digit operating profit growth?
OK. Yeah. Let me answer this question. I think, number one, I think the U.S. is around 35% of our business. So I think, as you know, we play a total portfolio of the three regions and a lot of markets. So I wouldn't go to the assumption that to hit mid-single digit at operating profit, that's exactly the performance the U.S. needs to deliver. The U.S. does need to make a contribution to it. But you see, for example, in these half-year results that our European region, which is a larger region, has made a contribution well ahead of that. So we are playing our global mix in this context as well. Yeah? That would be point number one.
Point number two, I think when we look at the half one results, I think what you can see is that we have the right product portfolio, the right strategy for the U.S. Because what you can see here, we took pricing to more than compensate for the market size decline in the U.S., but at the same time, have continued to gain market share, yeah, and improved our profitability. So I feel very confident that in a U.S. market where we will continue to see market size decline in the years to come, we have the right portfolio and the right strategy to deliver the set of numbers that we rely on for our U.S. business and our global business. And then on the question of market size declines, you're absolutely right.
Now, what we are seeing in many of our markets globally, market size declines have started to more normalize now. The U.S. is one of the exceptions to that. There are two effects that we're seeing in the U.S. market that, for the time being, lead to an elevated level. Number one, the macroeconomic factors, the overall cost inflation for consumers in the U.S. remains elevated versus historical terms. Now, we see it improving. But we're still not back to a normal. So that's definitely one factor. And the second factor that we're clearly seeing is the growth of illicit, specifically in vapes at this point in time is impacting the FMC volumes. But again, here, encouraging, we are now seeing the regulator actually going more aggressively after it.
It will be difficult to predict from our side as the smallest of the big three players what the outlook will be. We do forecast that in the next 1-2 years, we should see a reduction of these two special factors in the US.
If I may, Stefan, just add to that. As you know, the U.S. remains one of our most affordable markets still. So if you combine that affordability with what Stefan just said, that the macroeconomics will improve and hopefully also trickle into the consumer's pockets, then not only can we sustain that double-digit pricing, but the pricing will probably be required to be less than it is currently because volumes will normalize again.
Thank you. So secondly, I just want to move on to growth in vapor. It seems to have slowed in the first half. If I take into account the entire category, I think it's slightly underperforming the category as well. Could you maybe discuss some of the drivers behind this outside of the U.S., any sort of planned innovations or launches or changes in approach?
Sure. I mean, number one, we're not seeing a slowdown in our growth in vaping, just to be clear, yeah. I think what you see, you see the run rate has slightly reduced overall for NGP business versus last year. We were at 24% growth. We're at 17% growth. But don't forget last year saw, for example, some new market entries and launches specifically in the heated tobacco business. So that is one of the key drivers. We're not seeing a slowdown in our NGP business overall. We're not seeing a slowdown in our vaping business. So we're very encouraged by the performance that we're seeing across our vaping business. Where you're right, some markets, the extraordinary growth that vaping has seen from a market size perspective has become more normal. But it is still the fastest-growing category in many of the markets that we're seeing.
On the innovation, I think, look, as you probably understand, we cannot share our forward innovation plans. But I think what you should take courage from is what I referred to earlier. It's about we launched in the disposable vaping category, the blu bar with 1,000 puffs and a removable battery, which were among the established tobacco players the first one to launch such a high puff count and also the first one to launch a removable battery, which should give you a sense of what the challenger mindset and also the cooperation with outside partners is capable of delivering into the business.
Thanks for that. Then just finally, again, good performance in the top five markets again. I recognize the rest of the markets. There are a number of them. I noted in the appendix that your group market share in the first half actually declined by 80 basis points, which I believe is a deceleration compared to last year. Could you maybe discuss what markets are driving a dip in which markets in the overall performance and maybe what you can do to try and replicate the strategy in the top five markets in some of the other notable markets as well, please?
Absolutely. And I think what you rightly picked up, I mean, we made some portfolio choices outside the top five from a market share and pricing perspective. And those were very deliberate choices. And just a reminder, more than 70% of our profits come from the top five of the company. So we're talking about a relatively small part of the company. But the biggest movement, in reality, was in the ACE region, where we made, as you know, after two outstanding years, where profits grew 16% last year and 6% before. And we had a very strong market performance. As you know, in the ACE regions, we also have Africa in there. We have some of the lower-income markets like in Central and Eastern Europe, where in some markets, we made a choice to not participate in certain price actions of our competitors. And that was a very deliberate choice.
That is reflected in the share performance here.
Cool. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 and 1 on your telephone keypad. We will now go to the next question. Your next question comes from the line of Philip Spain from J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead. Hello, Philip. Is your line muted? One more try. Philip, are you muted? OK, there's no response on Philip's line.
Hello.
Oh, hello, Philip. Your line is open.
Sorry about that. Sorry about that. Thank you for taking my questions. I had a couple on the US, please. You mentioned in the presentation that you're seeing some destocking in the US. I just wanted to understand what kind of the factors that are driving that and if we should expect any further destocking in the second half of the year. The second question I had on the US was on the modern oral rollout. If you could give us kind of an update on the rollout plan there that you have and, I suppose, what the timeline is over the next few months in terms of the geographical rollout. Thank you.
Sure. Absolutely. Philip, good morning. On the destocking in FMC in the U.S. of 2%, I don't read anything specific into this one for a simple reason. As you know, in the U.S., against price increases that, as you know, happen in our industry three-to-four times a year, wholesalers in the U.S. actually will speculate against these price increases and build up stocks in anticipation of price increases, which allows them to take stock profits, yeah? So what we have seen in this half year and this has more to do with the timing of our price increases in the U.S. and our trade partners taking advantage of that. So don't read anything major into it. It's our usual up and down that you have, especially when you look at the half-year number, yeah?
On the launch of Zone now, we're rolling out Zone as of February of this year across a number of metropolitan centers. So it is very early days. We're very encouraged with the trade reaction we have received and the initial consumer reaction. But you know, as the prudent management team now, look, we want to see the repurchase of consumers. So we're absolutely on track with what we want to deliver. We're very encouraged by the early reactions of our trade partners and consumers. But it's too early to tell what the long-term and mid-term success of the business will be. We'll give you an update at the full-year results because then we should have the data from consumer tracking. And we should have the data also from market share from all the places we've launched. But so far, we're very encouraged with what we're seeing there.
OK, great. That's really helpful. Thank you. Actually, maybe could I just follow up with one more question? You obviously are targeting on the leverage to be at the low end of the range by the end of the year. How would you think about, I suppose, that target developing if you were? Would you be willing to go below 2x? Or I'm just trying to think how should we be thinking about further cash returns to shareholders in that context?
Yeah, thanks, Philip. This is Lucas. You know, this takes us always back to the capital allocation policy that we have, which is very clear in terms of our guidance in what we want to do. In the US, our second priority was having a strong balance sheet, which was always defined as the lower end of 2-2.5 leverage or range of leverage. We've achieved that, obviously. We have always been very clear that our goal is to remain at that position. We have no intent to go much further down. You will see, perhaps at the end of the year or at any given time, some fluctuation for effects. Our target remains the lower end of 2-2.5.
OK, thank you very much.
Thank you. We will now take the next question. Your next question comes from the line of Richard Felton, Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Just one from me, please, on the U.S. cigars business. So I appreciate that there's been quite a lot of moving parts for that business over the last couple of years. So I'd be interested just to hear your thoughts on a couple of things. Firstly, the sort of overall trajectory for that category and what you think a more kind of normalized category growth might look like. And then secondly, for Imperial's relative performance I know you call out better performance of Backwoods. But from an overall U.S. cigar portfolio perspective, are you back into sort of stable market share territory? Any thoughts around that would be very helpful. Thank you.
Absolutely. Good morning. Overall, we're very encouraged by the results of our U.S. mass market cigar business. But as you asked the question of market size, what we are still seeing—I mean, what we're still seeing in the market size is an elevated level of market size decline. That's the market. That's not us, which is around 9%, yeah? And it goes back to what we talked earlier about, is about kind of the consumer pressure from a disposable income that has impacted the mass market cigar business. We are clearly outperforming the market very significantly, yeah? But we see, as some of that pressure will ease, we think there will be a better market size development of the mass market cigar market, which we will benefit from as well.
When it comes to our performance, we clearly see the very encouraging sign we've always had in fiscal year 2023. Last fiscal year was a transition year. The good news is that we see our business much more back on its normal track record. Specifically, as you mentioned, Backwoods. We're clearly seeing Backwoods as the most premium brand in the market and the one that is the biggest profit contributor to our mass market cigar business, well back on track, yeah, also driven by innovations that we've brought to the market. So we see we're very happy with that performance.
Great. Thank you, Stefan.
Yeah?
Thank you. There are currently no further questions. I will hand back to Stefan for closing remarks.
Well, I mean, from my side, I mean, first, thank you to all of you for joining today and for your questions. I hope you can see how today's results are really further evidence of how we have strengthened the business in the last three and a half years and how we've improved our agility so we can deliver consistently, even if there are headwinds in the macroeconomic world. I'm pleased with the continued operation progress that we're making. We've delivered strong pricing, several of you referred to it, while maintaining the share performance in our top five markets, yeah? We are, at the same time, gaining momentum in our NGP business through our consumer-focused and the differentiated challenger approach that we have there. At the same time, we haven't talked about it in the questions.
But I think it's also important that we continue to build our capabilities and embrace the new ways of working to support our strategy. So if I may, I do believe that Imperial Brands provides a truly interesting investment case at a very attractive valuation because, as we drive growth in both tobacco and NGP, we generate very strong cash flows and coupled with a clear capital allocation framework that you asked Lucas about again, which underpins growing returns for shareholders through the dividend and an ongoing buyback. So Lucas and me are very much looking forward to updating you on our progress in our next call, yeah? Thank you very much for listening to us this morning. Thank you.
Goodbye.