I'll hand over to the team to take you through the presentation.
Thanks very much, Hannah, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Kingfisher's retail investor presentation. My name is Richard Joyce. I am Kingfisher's interim head of investor relations, and I am here today with Shaun Curtis , our investor relations manager.
Together, we are going to take you through our H1 results, our Q3 trading update, our outlook for the year, and provide you an update on our key strategic initiatives. Following this presentation, we will have a Q&A session to answer any questions that you might have. Let me start with why we are here. We believe that a better world starts with better homes, and we strive to make this happen for our customers through our market-leading banners as we seek to deliver on our purpose of better homes, better lives for everyone.
Turning now to an overview of Kingfisher's attractive investment story, which drives our medium-term financial priorities and our outlook. We have number one or number two leading positions in our markets, and those markets are large. They are worth GBP 160 billion combined and have attractive and structural growth drivers. Secondly, our Powered by Kingfisher model provides us with clear competitive advantages.
We operate a diverse portfolio of banners, each with distinct formats and propositions that address a wide range of customer needs. Across these banners, we maintain a well-balanced mix of trade and retail customers. Our own exclusive brands are industry-leading and a powerful competitive advantage. Combined with our advanced technology and e-commerce proposition, we offer customers both speed and choice. As a group, our scale enables us to unlock synergies in buying and sourcing while also supporting continued investment in technology.
On the right-hand side here, you'll see that our strategic growth initiatives are driving market share gains. A key part of this is expanding our reach across our trade customers with compelling propositions firmly established across all of our banners. Our trade strategy is now very much proven and delivers results. Our online 1P and marketplace platforms significantly increase product choice for our customers and offer fast fulfillment times. We also see exciting potential in retail media.
Finally, we continue to expand on our store footprint, primarily through expansion of Screwfix and growth opportunities that we see in Poland. Bringing all of these elements together, we're committed to our medium-term financial priorities, which is to grow our sales ahead of our markets, to grow our adjusted profit before tax ahead of our sales, and to generate strong free cash flows.
We have a disciplined capital allocation framework, prioritizing investment in organic growth, maintaining a strong balance sheet, and returning surplus cash to our shareholders. Let me now move to our half-year results, where we delivered a strong half. I think there are three key messages that we highlighted at the time. First, our strategic growth initiatives are driving market share gains, and we're particularly pleased with the strong contribution from these initiatives.
We delivered double-digit growth in both trade and e-commerce sales during the half, and importantly, they offer a substantial runway for future expansion. Secondly, we're seeing some healthy growth indicators across our business. Growth in the half was of high quality and driven by increased volumes and transactions rather than inflation.
In our core categories, we saw a 10th consecutive quarter of underlying growth in the U.K., and Q2 marked our third consecutive quarter of underlying growth in big ticket sales. Our banners in France and Poland showed improving sequential trends despite operating in more subdued markets.
Third, we raised our profit and free cash flow guidance for the full year and said that we'd accelerate our share buyback program due to the combination of our strong free cash flow generation and some positive one-off cash inflows. Let's dig a little deeper now into our H1 performance. I'm going to start with the top line. We're pleased with the relative outperformance of our banners in the half and our sales growing ahead of our markets.
Total sales for the group in the half was GBP 6.8 billion, with like-for-like sales up 1.9%, excluding a negative calendar impact of minus 0.6%. Adjusted profit before tax was up 10.2% in the half, and adjusted earnings per share of GBP 15.3 was up 16.5%. Free cash flow generation in the half was GBP 478 million, an increase of 13.5%, and our net leverage at the end of July stood at 1.3 times.
Turning now to our sales growth and starting with a view by our different categories in which we operate. All of our categories delivered growth in H1. Core products, which represents around two-thirds of our portfolio, we are pleased to see improving sequential growth trends there with underlying like-for-like flat in Q1 and rising to 1.2% in Q2. Key subcategories which performed well in the half included tools and hardware and indoor paint.
Big ticket delivered a third consecutive quarter of underlying growth, like I mentioned before. This growth has been largely driven by group-led innovation in our kitchen ranges and some improvement in the kitchen and bathroom market, but mainly through our innovations. Seasonal sales benefited from record warm weather in the U.K. over the spring months. It is worth noting that we will be lapping this strong seasonal performance in Q1 next year.
If we now look at our sales by geography on the next slide, in the U.K., B&Q delivered a really excellent first half, significantly outperforming the market and driving growth across multiple fronts. These include TradePoint, which is our sales to our trade customers. They performed very well in the first half. We had e-commerce growth of 23.8% in the half. Our 1P and 3P operations worked together to enhance conversion, increase customer traffic, and drive mutual growth.
We got benefits from the closure of Homebase and transference of their customers to B&Q, as well as the opening of eight stores that we acquired, which our team rapidly opened in order to be ready for peak trading. Of course, like I mentioned before, seasonal product sales, which benefited from good weather in Q1. Screwfix also delivered a very strong performance across both quarters.
In France, against a subdued consumer backdrop, we are encouraged to see improving sequential trends in our like-for-like performance. In Poland, where we remain very excited about the medium-term growth opportunities, Castorama, which is a market-leading banner with the opportunity to increase space whilst building in both trade and e-commerce. We had a slow start to the year with poor weather, high interest rates, and political uncertainty weighing on the economic backdrop.
We do have a slide in the appendix to this presentation covering our other international markets. To summarize very briefly, our Screwfix France business had strong like-for-like growth of 52% at a store level, which was in line with expectations. We completed the sale of our Romanian business in May, a few months ahead of plan, and Iberia had an excellent H1 with 10.2% like-for-like growth, outperforming a growing market.
Just turn to the next slide, and we said in March that we will continue to drive opportunities on cost and gross margin, which have been an important driver of our profit and free cash flow delivery in the first half. Let me give you a few examples. At a gross margin level, we've seen benefits from group buying and sourcing efficiencies, which contributed meaningfully to our margin expansion in the half.
Our marketplace platform, which is gross margin accretive, added 10 basis points to group margin growth. Our operational cost initiatives are also delivering tangible results. At the store level, we've achieved savings through contact center efficiencies and the rollout of more self-service checkouts. We've also driven head office efficiencies, particularly at Castorama France, where we are on track to reduce headcount by 12%.
Cost discipline will continue to be a key focus for us as we create the room in our P&L to invest for future growth and profitability. Let me turn now to our profit performance in the half. One of the main drivers of our first half profit growth is the 100 basis points of gross margin expansion, which is driven by the positive top line growth and our margin initiatives, some of which I outlined earlier.
In March, we said we faced around GBP 145 million of cost headwinds from higher wages, inflation, and taxes. In H1, our teams have done an excellent job in mitigating these headwinds. The gross margin drivers, combined with our structural cost reduction programs, enabled us to deliver 40 basis points of adjusted retail operating margin expansion to 6.6% and adjusted operating profit before tax of GBP 368 million.
EPS growth in the half was up 16.5%, and our profit delivery drove around two-thirds of this EPS growth, while our share buybacks contributed one-third. In March, we announced our fourth share buyback program of GBP 300 million, and we had repurchased about GBP 100 million worth of shares under this program in the half. Turning now to our group cash flow, and starting on the left-hand side of this chart, we generated EBITDA of GBP 744 million.
The change in net working capital that you can see here was a net inflow of GBP 100 million, driven primarily by an increase in payables reflecting normal buying seasonality. We continue to focus on inventory management, reducing year-on-year same store stock by six days in the half. Net rent paid was GBP 261 million. We saw GBP 40 million of inflows from tax, interest, and other as we benefited from tax prepayment true-ups.
CapEx totaled GBP 145 million. Together, these drove free cash flow of GBP 478 million in the half, as I said before, a 13.5% improvement year-on-year. Our free cash flow generation of GBP 478 million is towards the upper end of our initial full-year guidance. This reflects both our profit delivery in H1 and the timing of marketing, technology, and CapEx investments, which are going to be more second-half weighted versus the prior year.
We also benefited from two exceptional non-recurring cash inflows in the half, which sits outside of our free cash flow. First, there was the net proceeds of GBP 33 million from the sale of our Romanian business in May. Second, we got proceeds of GBP 64 million from the successful resolution of an historic tax issue in relation to EU state aid. Net cash inflow in the half was GBP 277 million, therefore, an increase of 128% year-on-year, driven by free cash flow growth and these one-off items.
We returned GBP 271 million to shareholders in the half through dividends and share buybacks, which is an increase of 8% year-on-year. That was a summary of H1. Turning quickly now to our Q3 trading update, which we published just yesterday. We delivered 0.9% like-for-like growth in Q3.
I would say it was high-quality growth because it was another quarter of double-digit growth in our strategic initiatives of trade and e-commerce. It was volume and transaction-driven rather than price-led. It was driven by our core and big ticket categories rather than just seasonal sales.
We did see our markets in the U.K. and Poland soften slightly in the quarter, but our strong H1 performance, plus what we delivered in Q3, has given us the confidence to upgrade our full-year profit target, with the middle of our new profit range being around 2%-3% higher than what we guided to at H1. That was a financial update and our latest guidance to the market. Let's turn quickly now to the strategy update that we gave at the half-year.
I want to start by sharing some of our strategic actions that are supporting our current performance and also setting us up for the future. We continue to progress at pace with all of our strategic pillars, which we outlined in our half-year R&S. For today, I'll go deeper into trade and our digital ecosystem, a group strategy that we applied in the U.K. first and serves as a successful blueprint that we've now rolled out across our other markets. Let me start with trade.
We continue to expand our exposure to trade customers, a segment that shops more frequently, spends more, and follows more predictable purchase patterns. Our trade business is both revenue and margin accretive at a retail operating level. Our online e-commerce and marketplace platforms significantly expand product choice for our customers. Marketplace leverages technology built by Kingfisher and is a high-margin growth driver.
Retail media also represents a compelling opportunity, and with minimum capital employed, it is a highly margin-accretive driver. Digging a bit more into trade, trade now represents almost 30% of our group sales, reflecting continued development of our trade proposition across our banners. If you just want to move the slide on one more, that would be great. We are expanding dedicated trade space within our stores and improving our product range.
We continue to rapidly develop our loyalty programs dedicated to trade as we sign up new members and offer enhanced price benefits tailored for each of our markets. Based on feedback from our customers, we have also improved our service offering, including enhancements to our Pro app, our direct-to-site delivery options, our tool rental services, and we have launched new trade financing solutions. None of this is possible, obviously, without having the right people.
We have significantly increased the number of dedicated trade colleagues and have enhanced our training programs and data to better understand, serve, and grow our trade customers. As a consequence, in the half, like I said earlier, our trade sales grew by 11.9%. Look at our banners on the next slide. TradePoint at B&Q now represents 22.4% of total B&Q sales, with 6.9% growth in H1.
This is supported by a strong increase in sign-ups for our loyalty program, and our successful trade app accounts for around 25% of its online sales. We continue to leverage the learnings from the U.K. and France, Iberia, and Poland. As you can see, we have now dedicated loyalty schemes in every banner. Turning now to the broader digital ecosystem that we are building. It starts with a strong first-party e-commerce proposition, with our stores at the center.
We strategically decided since 2020 to leverage our assets and to rely on our stores rather than on large fulfillment centers as our primary option to prepare online orders. This enables us to offer unbeatable fulfillment times for Click and Collect as for stores to home. In parallel, Click and Collect generates more traffic to our stores. We developed a digital hub store model, which ensures excellent availability of products to e-commerce orders. We keep investing in agile technology to improve our online conversion.
All of this, in turn, drives increased traffic, which supports our third-party marketplace offering. On Marketplace, we're offering a large choice with several million SKUs. This large choice, in turn, generates more traffic to our websites, all of which fuels additional first-party sales. Our stores play an important role for our marketplace, too.
Our stores accept marketplace returns, and B&Q is now offering marketplace in-store Click and Collect, driving increased footfall in store. Moving to our loyalty programs, they provide us with comprehensive customer data and enable us to deliver personalized offerings and targeted promotions. The market is increasingly shifting towards mobile-first and app-based engagement. This allows us to get access to data to improve and personalize customer interaction.
This leads us to monetization. Because we have traffic and comprehensive data, we can sell retail media. To summarize, our digital ecosystem drives a virtuous cycle of value, leveraging our store assets and powered by Kingfisher technology. This supports growth, but also value across our business. Our one-payer e-commerce with stores at the center is profitable, and this profitability is enhanced by our marketplace, our retail media, and the monetization of our data.
Moving quickly to Screwfix France, where we see strong like-for-like growth in stores. We're happy with the progress, with 52% store like-for-like growth in H1 and 74,000 unique customers, a 30% increase year-on-year. Moving now to the competitive advantage that we generate from our own exclusive brands. Our own product development provides simple and innovative solutions to our customers at affordable prices.
While cheaper for customers, our scale and sourcing of these OEB products enables us to make higher gross margins than a branded equivalent. This affordable innovation has driven a large part of big ticket category growth in the half. Slide 24 provides an illustration of these new ranges. Our Ashmead new kitchen range delivers standout style at entry-level pricing, while our Pragma lowest price kitchen range retails for less than EUR 200 and is 15% cheaper than branded alternatives.
We're all very proud of the strong work that our teams have done in this area across the group. Now to an update on our plan for France. In March 2024, we announced a strong plan to take France to the next level, simplifying the organization and significantly improving the performance and profitability of Castorama.
We've made excellent progress in our plan since its announcement, but this is against a weaker market backdrop than expected, with continued low consumer confidence and record household savings rates in a political environment that remains very uncertain. Against this backdrop, we've focused our energy on delivering against our plans, gaining market share, and managing effectively our gross margin and costs. In H1 specifically, we grew our market share in France and improved our retail operating profit margin by 20 basis points to 3.5%.
While we're pleased with the delivery of our plan since the announcement in March 2024 of our medium-term target of circa 5%-7%, the French home improvement market declined by over 7% in 2024 and by a further 3% in the first half of 2025. We remain confident in delivering this target of circa 5%-7%, with the timing and trajectory of reaching this target dependent on the pace of the market recovery.
Despite current headwinds, we remain optimistic on the outlook for the market in the medium term. Finally, to summarize here on slide 26, we operate in large and attractive markets with our leading banners. We had a strong first six months where we delivered on our financial priorities. We've grown sales ahead or in line of our markets. Our performance is underpinned by strategic growth initiatives.
We drove profitable growth and strong, high free cash generation. In Q3, we delivered another quarter of high-quality growth. This performance to date has enabled us to raise our full-year profit targets twice this year and to accelerate our share buyback program. Kingfisher is in its best operational shape for years.
While we continue to navigate a challenging environment characterized by consumer caution and political uncertainty, we remain focused on executing our strategic growth priorities, maintaining discipline on margin and costs, and driving shareholder returns. Thank you very much for listening, and I'll now open it up to Q&A, and I'll turn our lights back on.
Lovely. Thank you to you both for that helpful counter through. Right. We have just had a budget from Rachel Reeves. I do not think it is going to make anyone any richer. Are you seeing on that basis a stronger drive for your own brands and people seeking out better value-for-money options?
Yeah, thank you for the question. Yes, definitely our customers are looking for value. You can particularly see that we talked about it on the innovation on our big ticket, where we focused on kitchens and our lower-tier offering. You would have seen Richard refer to Pragma and Ashmead, where we've seen particularly strong growth. Our innovation allows us to look at improving efficiency for our products and to help customers save. We also benefit on the OEB side from better efficiencies on electrical products and areas like that. Definitely we see that.
Okay, thanks. AI is on the lips of everyone at the moment. How are you better deploying this within your business to provide a better experience for your customers?
AI has obviously got a lot of areas where you can improve the business, but I think the focus has got to be where you can actually make a big financial difference. If we look at where Kingfisher is focusing, I'd say it's across three main pillars.
It'll be around Markdown and Promo, where we've successfully rolled out across our banners. We called out in H1 across Castorama France, where we've seen about a 15% saving around those Markdown and Promo tools. The other side would be around our supply chain visibility tool. This enables us to have better understanding of where our stock is, how better to manage the stock across our stores, look for slow-moving stock, and be more efficient with how we manage it. Lastly, we look at personalization and recommendation.
If we're looking at this, where we called it out around Hello Castorama and Hello B&Q, this is sort of like a chat service where customers can get inspiration and help on how to form a project. It also helps drive some interaction with our customers. If you look at sort of what we called out, we said we're delivering around GBP 80 million of group sales in H1 from these personalization and recommendation interactions.
Lastly, I'd say one of the areas where AI plays quite a big role is around our customer service. Particularly in sort of Screwfix, where we've got a sort of WhatsApp channel where people can directly message WhatsApp to get information on how to solve a problem or where to go to resolve an order query. There's definitely opportunity there to be more efficient and provide better service.
Okay, we stick with the theme of remaining competitive. Obviously, you've seen good growth. How much of that do you think is down to Homebase exiting? Perhaps you could also give us a little color on what you're doing to gain market share in terms of perhaps pricing and promotion.
We won't comment on any sort of pricing or promotion. What we do say is we remain very focused on our price indexes across our markets. That has sort of always been a key area. I'd say the DIY market has remained quite price rational. We haven't seen any sort of irrational pricing to date. For the half, you would have seen we've driven our sales through volume, and then through the quarter, that was continued for Q3. In terms of Homebase transference, we don't quantify it, but we have said we are benefiting from it.
This should continue into Q4 as the stores closed in November last year, and there was a sort of marketing and promo done by the Homebase stores as they sort of wound out. In terms of market share, I'd say where we're looking to target it is across our sort of strategic pillars. Where Richard's outlined on sort of trade and e-commerce, I'd say that's where it's been a key area for us.
Particularly with Thierry coming in, there's been a massive focus on sort of driving the trade sales, particularly with sort of rolling out dedicated trade personnel, our dedicated trade areas in stores. We've now rolled out the loyalty proposition across Castorama France. Yeah, it's very exciting there. On e-commerce, we've now got a marketplace live in France, in Iberia, and in the U.K. That's definitely helping us with our digital ecosystem, which Richard touched on extensively in the presentation. Definitely gaining share in those areas.
You've covered off a little bit of a question here that we have on trade sales, which obviously you majored on in the presentation. Is it as much a strong underlying market, or is it very much a question of market share wins?
If you look at our performance on trade sales, it's definitely been very resilient. If you look at our performance versus DIY for Q3, it outperformed our DIY, particularly in the U.K. I'd say that is very resilient. Where we've sort of had a lot of focus, particularly on the trade interaction, for instance, in Castorama France, we had limited trade proposition last year, and we've now rolled it out to all our stores.
We're definitely seeing some uplift there as we start to capture and understand our trade personnel. If we look at sort of our pipeline of what's in the work from our Screwfix survey, that gives us confidence in terms of the resilience of the trade market. We can see active and pipelines remain high. 80% of tradesmen are expecting more work to come, and 93% of them are currently working.
The proportion of trade sales not working has remained fairly stable. That gives us a bit of confidence in terms of the resilience in the trade market. Yeah, I'd say that sort of covers mainly our area in trade. Yeah, trade, I mean, trade is hugely exciting for us, right? Because it's a different group of customers. You know, they shop much more often. They spend more when they come in store.
They've got more regular purchasing patterns and habits, so we can plan a bit better for them. What's great for us is that it's actually, there's very little capital employed around this because we're actually utilizing our stores better now. If you go into a big B&Q store, you know, there's just a separate space that's allocated for what we call TradePoint. It's a separate entrance.
There's separate parking with bigger bays for people to park their vans and all that sort of thing. You're not actually incurring a lot more fixed costs on this, but you're getting a whole new income and revenue stream, if you like. This is why we're excited about it, because, as I said, it's a new, it's a fast-growing revenue stream for us, but it's also margin accretive from a P&L perspective.
I might use that then to segue into France. Obviously, you've rolled out trade within the Castorama, and the turnaround plan seems to be going well. You know, what have you learned from rolling out the trade proposition there?
If we look at France, I'd say it's fairly early in the process of trade, particularly in Castorama. If you look at our group strategy, wherever we apply, we start in the U.K. and take those learnings and roll them out to France and Poland and other markets. As you say, in terms of the U.K., we're probably the most evolved trade point. It's been around a long time. We've taken those learnings. We're now rolling them out to France. If we look at Castorama France, we've got the loyalty program rolled out across our stores.
We need to understand what customers are shopping at our stores before we can understand them and then grow them. We always say, find them, know them, grow them. It's sort of like the motto for trade. I'd say in that sense, you've got to do that first before you can really start seeing the same sort of initiatives we're doing in the U.K.
Whereas Brico France is a bit more targeted to the trade proposition already. It's already low-price discounter, high availability. You can walk in with a kitchen, walk in, find your kitchen, and walk out, which is more service to a trade customer. You'll see the trade proposition there is slightly higher in penetration, whereas in Castorama, it's fairly recent that we've rolled out this trade loyalty proposition. There is lots of runway for us to go, and we will keep taking the learnings from the U.K., where we have seen consistent growth over the last few years in trade. It is exciting to see how that rolls out in France.
Yeah, it has been quite impressive in Castorama, actually, because, yeah, like Shaun said, at the beginning of the year, it was very early days. I think we had done eight test stores or something. We took the decision at the beginning of the year to roll it out across the whole Castorama estate, which is what we have done now. For any of those of you that might have gone into a Castorama store, I mean, Shaun and I were over there in June, were we not? We went into a few stores. It is very, very visible. You know, the Castor Pro sign and the signing up to the loyalty scheme and all that sort of thing. No, it's been good progress this year on trade in France.
Okay, sticking with France, what do you think it'll take for a macroeconomic recovery in France to get you back to like-for-like positive growth? I guess, how much do you think the strikes have cost you?
Yeah, if you look at the consumer environment in France, the macros are all very positive. Interest rates are low, inflation's low, savings rates are particularly high, about four percentage points higher than the long-term average. If you look at the macro level, the consumer's got money in France.
It's just, we think that political uncertainty in France, where they haven't had a budget, they've had the national strikes, as you said, during the quarter, which didn't help. We didn't quantify it, but it did have a small impact, obviously negative. In terms of what we said, we've got our medium-term target of circa 5%-7%. We're very clear in sort of our presentation that we're doing everything we can in terms of our plan, but we are dependent on the pace of the market recovery before we see that sort of reaction. It doesn't help that your market's gone back 7% and 3% this year. It's continuing to sort of show lack of that sort of inflection yet.
Okay. Got another question here that expresses, I guess, some frustration in the ongoing share price, despite obviously some recent wins over the last few days. A question about how realistic it is to unlock value with the spin-off of Screwfix, as that's where the big proportion of the growth is, and whether better value for shareholders could be recognized by some activities in that area.
Yeah, look, I think, I mean, I've only come in recently, but I know that the share price has been a little bit stagnant over recent years, and we've gone through strategic changes and that sort of thing. I think Kingfisher is quite an interesting juncture at the moment because I think Thierry's come in. He's been very clear about the strategy, a move from a one Kingfisher strategy to a sort of a powered by Kingfisher. We've got these very clear strategic growth drivers, which are also margin accretive.
Okay. The benefit of Kingfisher is obviously the benefits we're getting in sourcing and scaling and owning exclusive brands and that sort of thing. I think you can start seeing that coming through in the strong gross margin that we saw in the first half, right? We had 100 basis points of gross margin expansion, of which a good proportion of that was brought from our sourcing and buying synergies and that sort of thing.
Okay. We have now started growing EPS. You saw the 16.5% growth in EPS in the first half. We have gone through two profit upgrades this year. There is some very good momentum in the business as we benefit from the difference and the strength of our banners with the powered by Kingfisher group benefits that we're getting. The board will always look at portfolio and all that sort of thing.
You see they're not afraid to do things. I mean, they sold off Romania, but I think there's a lot of interesting organic opportunities that we've got in the business, as you've seen from this year, and the share price is reacting accordingly.
What you would have also seen is we've used Screwfix to roll out in Screwfix France. It always helps to have an established business there where you've got relationships with your suppliers. You understand the customer. You know the market. That's particularly where you can leverage the group experience along with sort of the IT side. If we had to look at rolling out Screwfix into another geolocation, the strength of the banners that we've got in our current locations, that helps to see for future opportunities.
Okay. In terms of sort of sticking to the theme of shareholder value, obviously, they've had a buyback program in place now for a little while. Do you think that that is delivering value for money for shareholders, or are there any plans to accelerate dividends?
Yeah, sure. Let me deal with that. First and foremost, the first priority is to invest in the business. Okay. We will always make sure we're investing appropriately. We invest around 3% of revenue in CapEx. You've seen we're pushing up CapEx more this year. We will keep making sure that we invest in the business first. Look, we generate a lot of free cash flow. Because of the strength of our balance sheet and no need to deleverage, it means a lot of our free cash flow can then be returned to shareholders. Okay.
We've got an established and progressive dividend policy. I know the board looks at it every year, so we will keep looking at that. Any excess cash after that, we can use to buy back shares. You can see that it's actually making quite a difference to our earnings per share. At the half year, I think of the 16.5% that we grew, 4% came from share buybacks. I quite like it with sort of EPS.
If you can grow your earnings and increase the numerator and the share buybacks that decrease in the denominator, you're getting that good double whammy benefit. The board will always look at how to distribute surplus cash to shareholders. Happy to take any views from people if you want to just email us. Invest in the business and then return surplus cash to shareholders.
Okay. Thank you. Back to the U.K. Big ticket sales have grown so far this year. Can you talk about the changes made to your kitchen ranges that have helped this growth? Any other plans for range reviews? Sure. We touched on it briefly already in the earlier question.
We have really focused on the value proposition offering, so the lower tier. You can sort of see that the customer values us because if you look at our average order value year on year, it has basically remained flat. That means that customers are looking for value, but quality. I think we have done a really good job of addressing our lower tier kitchens. In terms of next steps, we would be looking to the next tiers in terms of how we can refresh those ranges and drive some more customer interaction there and see better value.
There is also a focus on sort of bathroom and storage, where we're looking at a number of options there towards Q4 and next year in terms of range review refreshes and marketing and engaging our teams. Obviously, the main focus has been on kitchens, but we're definitely also looking at bathroom and storage.
Okay. Thank you. Going to Poland. Obviously, the consumer confidence there is recovering, but some of the home markets are a little slower. How much of this do you think is down to the political environment, and what do you think it's going to take to turn around sentiment there?
Yeah, sure. Let me deal with this one. I mean, we remain very excited about Poland. First of all, from our positioning in the market, right? We're the market leader, and we only cover about 50% of Poland. There is significant space opportunity in the medium term. It is also, we think, a very attractive market. If you look at the OECD guidelines or expectations around future GDP growth, it is quite attractive.
You are seeing real wage growth in Poland. Interest rates have been high over the past number of years, but we have seen something like five interest rate cuts this year. With most people's, or almost everybody's, mortgage actually being variable rates, they are seeing a real increase in their disposable income as these rates come down. I think they have had presidential elections during the year, so there is a bit less political instability.
Inflation has also come down this year. There are some very good positive macro drivers. We are not yet seeing that reflect in DIY sales. We think it is because of the geopolitical environment. I mean, unfortunately, there is a war happening on their border.
When you see sort of Russian drones coming into their airspace during the quarter and stuff, it can be a bit unsettling. I think it would be good to see this geopolitical situation resolved. I suspect that will probably be a decent unlock. Again, look, we're positioned well in the market, and I think there's some really good positive long-term macro drivers in Poland.
Perhaps a follow-on from the earlier question is if there's no appetite for spinning out Screwfix and seeing value that way, and you talk about the potential opportunities there yourselves and Poland and France, where are there further opportunities for expansion on the continent or beyond?
Yeah, look, I would say that we've got plenty of organic opportunities. I think there's further geographies we can potentially roll Screwfix out in. Again, it's a job of the CEO and the board to look at other opportunities as well. They will look at M&A opportunities, but be very disciplined about it. As I said, I think the first priority is very much focused on the organic opportunities. I don't know if you'd add anything to that.
No, just in terms of Poland, obviously, if we look at Poland, we do see there's space opportunity there, but it's never a linear opening. Last year, we opened five. We said we'll open up to two. This year, probably only one. We've said previously we had up to 75 store openings because we only cover 50% of the geography. It all sort of comes down to the right site, having the right return, the right opportunity presents itself.
It will not be that we just see this sort of accelerated opening. It will be sort of non-linear as we have seen in the past. Okay, thanks. What initiatives are driving the inventory reduction? I could take this one. There are a couple of things on the inventory that we are looking at. I mentioned earlier the supply chain visibility tool. This enables us to understand where our sort of stock is, how much stock we have at each store, where it is in terms of its distribution. Is it in the warehouse? Is it on the water?
This enables us to better manage our stock. We have done simple things as well, like where we are stopping stores from ordering slow-moving stock. If one store is low on inventory and another store has slow-moving stock, it sounds very simple, but these are the sort of initiatives we are doing.
We've also used our sort of OEB extensive offering that we've got, which is always 45% of our sales. We're starting to share that sales data and inventory data with our suppliers. That enables them to see what our levels are and better manage their distribution and ordering system so we can be more efficient and manage minimum order quantities.
That's helped us drive a lot. We've got this initiative sort of buying for growth that we've mentioned on the margin side of the business, which enabled us to sort of release some cost savings on our supplier negotiations through actually having a complete understanding of how much our product takes to manufacture. For instance, if we take a drill, we can take that drill and disassemble it and see exactly how much it could cost us for energy wires, for raw materials, commodities, etc.
When we go to negotiate with our branded vendors, we can take that and say, as a starting point, we're expecting circa 2% decrease in price instead of their normal increase of inflation. It enables us to sort of be better prepared for negotiations. We're seeing that come through not in just our margin, but in our inventory costs. I'd say those are sort of the three areas, I'd say, where we're seeing the biggest cost savings. All cost savings are inventory reductions. I don't know if there's anything else you'd add.
No, look, we've got a relatively new CFO. It's something that he's very focused on. He ensures that it's a standing agenda item in our monthly business reviews or performance reviews with all the banners. Obviously, where you focus, you're going to start doing a better job.
The combination of the tools and the focus, I think we feel good about the long-term opportunity and inventory reduction when we're coming from a fairly low level, to be honest. Obviously, we've also got to weigh that up with availability, right? I wouldn't expect to see massive changes, but just good progress year on year as we focus on just getting much more focused and much better at managing our inventory.
Okay. A question on margins. Obviously, you found that the target in France, for example, is 5%-7%, which we're still some way off. I mean, looking at a holistic group margin, what do you think is a realistic PBT margin for the group for the medium term?
Yeah, look, we haven't given any specific medium-term targets. What we have said is one of our medium-term financial priorities is to grow our profits ahead of sales, which obviously implies margin expansion. I think what gives me the confidence around it is you've obviously, okay, yes, you've got France, and that's partly going to be helped by, well, there's our own initiatives, but then there's also the improving markets.
What gives me a lot of comfort is just the other initiatives that we've got, like the strategic growth initiatives like trade and e-commerce and retail media are all operating margin accretive. We've got the benefit that the Kingfisher buying synergies get for us, which Shaun is alluding to. We've got a number of different drivers that we've got that all contribute to be able to grow margins. Yeah, sorry, I don't mean to frustrate you. No specific target there, but I certainly see a long-term runway for us being able to grow our profit ahead of our sales.
That's a good news story and well dodged. Super. You're investing in rolling out Screwfix in France, but it is still losing quite a lot of money. Is this sustainable, and how many stores do you need to get to a profit?
I can take this one, Richard. I think on Screwfix France, we've been quite clear to say we see sort of opportunity for up to 600 stores here. The most important thing is not so much the rollout; it's more around the maturity curve. You would have heard Thierry talk about it extensively to say we track a lot of sort of, we'd say, industry KPIs that we look at.
Basket size, repeat order, and in terms of the like-for-like sales of store like-for-like sales. I'd say repeat order is one of the things we look at extensively because it tells if our trade customer's coming back. They shop with us, they understand the offering, and then they're coming back. That's a key focus. The second is obviously the store like-for-likes and the maturity profile.
We need to make sure that the stores that we've opened now are working towards that maturity profile we showed a couple of years ago in a presentation to say when the stores break even. Once we're happy with that and we've got sort of a number of stores that have hit that maturity profile, then we can talk about expansion.
The expansion, we can if we wanted to roll out more, but the main focus is making sure that our stores are in line with that maturity profile. I'd say that we're very happy and pleased with the progress to date. We've called out that at H1, our like-for-like stores were 52%, and at Q3, it was 51%. We're still very happy with what we're seeing so far in Screwfix France. When it's time to accelerate, you'll see that. At the time, we're focusing more on the maturity profile.
Okay. Back to the U.K. Do you think both B&Q and Screwfix can grow 3%-4% next year, or has the one-off benefit of Homebase been a real boost and therefore these numbers can't be annualized?
Right. We're not giving any guidance on next year yet, as you can imagine. Apologies on being a bit vague. Sure, we're going to start lapping the benefit from Homebase, but we've obviously got a much larger customer base now because of that. Also, if you want to throw in some of the negatives, you've also got the strong seasonal lap in H1 that we need to compare against, which is fine.
Again, what gives me some comfort about the future growth of places like B&Q is, again, the strategic initiatives, right? I mean, we're very, very focused on growing TradePoint, which has been growing well. I think we've got further runway to go on our trade sales partners and grabbing a bigger share of wallet of the trade. And then e-commerce, we've got a very strong 1P platform. I think we're at early days in our marketplace, which is already a profitable business and margin accretive.
I mean, we've only just recently cracked cross-border vendors, haven't we? Yeah. Right? Most of our marketplace sales are through local vendors. Whereas if we compare to an Amazon, I think 50% of their vendors are cross-border. There is a long way to go in marketplace. With the stores at the center of all this, I mean, you're driving better sales densities through your stores.
I think there's a bit of space opportunity in B&Q still. There are a number of different drivers there, which is good. Then Screwfix as well, you've got a bit more opportunity in space. Having said that, we're going to get to maturity at some stage, but I think there are other opportunities to grow sales there. I think I probably shouldn't go into them at the moment.
We'll come back with some more detail on that at the appropriate juncture. But Screwfix is such a great business. I mean, when I first got here, actually, they said that Screwfix is almost a verb with the trade. I need a part of Screwfix it. I think that's phenomenal. Look, I think we feel very good about our U.K. businesses, the future runway for growth. Obviously, it's the U.K. businesses that generate 75% of our group profits. Obviously, an extremely important part of our portfolio.
Brilliant. If we can just Screwfix the U.K. economy, that would be marvelous. Yeah. I'll send you around to see Rachel later. Listen, that is it for our questions today. Good luck with those strategic initiatives. We look forward to an update on them perhaps after the March numbers. Just a thank you to our audience for attending and to you both for presenting today.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, everyone, for attending. And Hannah, thanks for coordinating.
Thanks.
Have a good rest of the day.