Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Kingfisher plc full year 2025/26 results presentation. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a Q&A session with research analysts. If you wish to ask a question, we ask that you please use the Raise Hand function at the bottom of your screen. If you have dialed in, please select star nine to raise your hand and star six to unmute. Instructions will also follow at the time of the Q&A. I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded. I will now hand over to Thierry Garnier to start the presentation.
Good morning, and thank you for joining us today for Kingfisher's full year results presentation. Bhavesh and I will take you through our full year results, our outlook for the coming year, and provide an update on our key strategic initiatives. Following this presentation will be the usual Q&A. Let's start with the key messages. 2025 was a strong year for Kingfisher as we continued to execute our strategy at pace, and delivered on all our financial priorities. There are three points I want to highlight. First, our strategic growth initiatives are driving market share gains, a key indicator of our progress. We grew market share across each of our banners in the U.K., France, and Spain, and maintained share in Poland. Our sales growth was high quality, led by growth in volume and transaction.
We delivered double-digit growth in both trade and e-commerce sales during the year. While our 1P commerce sales were strong, I am particularly pleased with our progress in our marketplaces, now reaching GBP 518 million on a GMV basis and up 58% year-over-year. Second, we maintained strong financial discipline amidst significant cost pressure. We grew gross margin by 80 basis points in the year, leveraging Kingfisher scales and sourcing power, and benefited from marketplace and retail media, both of which are gross margin accretive. We delivered strong growth in adjusted profit before tax and in EPS when excluding the business rates refund at B&Q in the prior year. Profit is up 13%. Our profit growth, combined with a sharp focus on working capital management, enabled us to deliver strong free cash flow. Third, we delivered attractive returns to shareholders.
We completed our GBP 300 million share buyback program in March, and today we announced our fifth GBP 300 million share buyback program, reflecting the momentum in the business. We also announced today our dividend of GBP 0.1 24 per share, in line with last year. Let me now hand over to Bhavesh for the financial review and outlook.
Thank you, Thierry, and good morning, everyone. Let me start with an overview of our performance for the year. Total sales for the group were GBP 12.9 billion, with like-for-like sales up +1.4%, excluding a negative calendar impact of -0.3%. Our sales growth was led by strong performance from our U.K. banners. Adjusted profit before tax was GBP 560 million, up 6%. Adjusted EPS wasGBP 0.238 , up 15%, underpinned by our strong earnings growth in the year and supported by a 6% uplift from our share buyback program. Free cash flow generation was GBP 512 million. We delivered this while also increasing CapEx by GBP 71 million as we stepped up our investment in our stores, technology and property.
Net leverage now stands at 1.4x and we maintain a very healthy balance sheet. Turning now to our markets. B&Q reinforced its market-leading position with total sales growth of +3.9% or +5.9% when we include marketplace GMS sales. Like-for-like growth is +3.3%, significantly outperforming a flat market with our market share at record levels. From a product category perspective, core remained resilient with 12 consecutive quarters of underlying like-for-like growth. Big Ticket delivered strong growth of +6% in the year, and Seasonal was +30% in Q1, benefiting from favorable weather which we will lap this quarter. We successfully captured the transference of customers from Homebase to B&Q and acquired 8 of their stores, which our team rapidly opened in time for peak trading.
TradePoint sales grew by +5.2%, fueled by our enhanced loyalty program and an increased investment in trade sales partners. E-commerce sales grew by +21.5%, supported by marketplace growth. B&Q's marketplace is gross margin accretive and generated GBP 15 million of profit in the year. Looking to the year ahead, we will further enhance our trade offering with investment in our people, our offer, and our stores, and scale marketplace as we onboard cross-border vendors. You'll hear more on this from Thierry later on.
Screwfix delivered consistently strong performance throughout the year, with total sales growth of +4.5% and like-for-like growth of +3.2%, significantly outperforming the market. Our Screwfix teams have executed at a high level, enhancing the customer proposition through targeted marketing and promotional campaigns, competitive pricing, range improvements, and deeper engagement with trade customers via app-driven reward initiatives. Screwfix opened 27 stores on a net basis during the year, further growing our footprint and convenience for customers. Looking forward, our focus is on growing our share of the trade wallet. We also see further range and space opportunities. Our U.K. banners generated GBP 575 million in retail operating profit, representing 78% of our group total retail profit.
Profit grew by +2.9% in the year, or +9.4% excluding the impact of last year's B&Q business rates refund. We delivered this profit growth despite the significant increases in wages, higher national insurance contributions, and the impact from EPR packaging fees. In France, against a subdued consumer backdrop and a home improvement market decline of around -3%, we are encouraged to see both of our banners outperforming the market. Castorama like-for-like sales were -2.2% in a year of significant change, particularly from the restructuring of several stores. I'll speak more on the progress of our Castorama plan shortly. From a strategic perspective, Castorama delivered a rapid rollout of its trade proposition across the estate, introduced Casto Pro zones in 50 stores, and implemented a trade loyalty program.
Trade penetration reached 9% by the end of the year, up from below 1% a year ago. Good progress was also made on marketplace with 1.6 million SKUs now available to customers. Brico Dépôt delivered total sales of -1.8% and like-for-like sales of -2.3%. Brico Dépôt improved its price positioning by 2 points over the year and delivered strong progress in its trade proposition, with trade sales up 26% and trade penetration increasing to 17% at the end of the year. This performance was driven by an expanded trade-focused range, investment in dedicated trade colleagues, and enhancements to its loyalty program. Brico Dépôt also successfully opened 1 store transferred from Castorama, doubling sales densities. We feel good about Brico Dépôt, a capital-light model with a clear customer offering of discounted prices and high product availability.
Our French banners delivered GBP 97 million of retail operating profit with a margin of 2.5%, up 10 basis points year-on-year. This was a strong performance as both banners offset sales deleverage from a declining market and higher social charges through gross margin expansion and structural cost reductions. Turning now to an update on our restructuring plan for Castorama. Since the plan was announced in March 2024, the new management team has moved at pace to improve competitiveness and efficiency, delivering good progress despite a weaker market, which declined by over 7% in 2024 and a further 3% in 2025. I've already talked about our progress in trade and digital. In addition, the team undertook a significant number of range reviews, which benefited several core categories, including surface and decor, tools, and tiling.
We took cost price and supplier management actions, streamlining the head office organization and rationalized the distribution network space by 15%. The reduction since 2019 was over 35%. Our store restructuring and modernization program is delivering tangible results. Right-sized stores are seeing much higher sales densities while revamped stores are outperforming the Castorama average. The two franchise stores have returned to profitability. This progress has been delivered against a backdrop of significant people change, including a 50% refresh of store managers and regional directors and a 40% change in category directors. We will continue to drive this agenda apace in 2026, positioning the business to fully benefit when market conditions improve. For France overall, we remain confident in delivering our medium-term margin target of circa 5%-7%, with the timing and trajectory of reaching this target dependent upon the pace of the market recovery.
In Poland, we remain optimistic about the medium-term growth opportunities. Castorama is a market leader with potential to increase base while building on both trade and e-commerce. Poland experienced a slow start to the year with unfavorable weather and political uncertainty weighing on home improvement spending. Like-for-like was -1.1% for the full year, though conditions improved in Q4 with a return to growth in both the market and our business. We continue to make good progress with our strategic initiatives. About GBP 1 in GBP 3 comes from trade customers, supported by the rapid rollout of Casto Pro Zones in more than half of the estate, the recruitment of specialized sales partners, and a new trade loyalty program. E-commerce sales increased 30% year-over-year, benefiting from the launch of marketplace in January 2025.
Poland generated GBP 87 million in retail operating profit, representing around 12% of group retail profit. During the year, we accelerated technology investment, resulting in a one-off circa GBP 5 million impairment of legacy systems. Excluding this charge, Poland retail profit was up and profit margin was broadly flat year-on-year. Iberia had an excellent year, with +8.8% like-for-like growth, outperforming a growing market driven by competitive price positioning and strong progress in trade. Moving now to our profit performance in the year. Adjusted profit before tax rose by 6%, or +13% when excluding last year's GBP 33 million business rates refund at B&Q. A key driver of profit growth was gross margin expansion, which increased by 80 basis points, driven primarily by group buying and sourcing benefits, progress in marketplace and retail media, with FX also providing a tailwind.
We also delivered significant operating cost reductions. Some specific examples include a reduction in our supply and logistics network space of around 10% in France and nearly 30% in Poland. Efficiencies in our stores from the rollout of self-service checkouts and the implementation of new store operating models. Property cost reductions through store right sizing and regears. For the year, we delivered 30 basis points of retail operating margin expansion to 5.7%. An adjusted profit before tax of GBP 560 million. Turning now to our group cash flow, starting on the left of this chart. We generated adjusted EBITDA of GBP 1.3 billion. Working capital delivered a net inflow of GBP 74 million, driven by higher payables and our focus on inventory management.
Tax interest and other items amounted to GBP 13 million, including a GBP 60 million benefit from tax prepayment true-ups, which we will lap in H1 2026, 2027. CapEx spend totaled GBP 388 million, an increase of GBP 71 million as we continue to invest in technology and our stores. Together, these drove free cash flow of GBP 512 million. We returned GBP 474 million to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks, and total net cash inflow for the year was GBP 107 million. Our dividend payments and share buybacks in 2025, 2026 build on our track record of attractive returns to shareholders. Over the past five years, we have returned GBP 2.4 billion, equivalent to around 40% of our market capitalization.
Looking ahead, we'll continue to build on this track record with a proposed dividend of GBP 0.124 per share to be paid in July and the launch of our fifth share buyback program of GBP 300 million commencing shortly. Looking ahead, we see further opportunities across gross margin, costs, and working capital. On gross margin, we expect continued benefit from group buying and sourcing, marketplace, retail media, and logistics efficiencies. On the other hand, we expect mixed effects from our growing trade penetration and from maintaining competitive prices. We see further opportunities through cost action. At store level, we will deliver savings through operating model enhancements and technology. We also see additional opportunities from improving head office efficiency and to further leverage our shared services center. Inventory also continues to be a priority.
Our supply visibility tool is enabling us to reduce lead times and minimum order quantities with our OEB vendors. Coming out of a strong year, we are confident in our ability to capitalize on the attractive growth opportunities in our markets and are well-positioned to continue growing sales ahead of our markets, profit ahead of sales, and to generate strong free cash flow. For the financial year 2026-2027, with a mixed consumer environment, we expect adjusted profit before tax in the range of GBP 565 million-GBP 625 million, and are targeting GBP 450 million-GBP 510 million of free cash flow. We remain mindful of the heightened macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty in recent weeks. Where we stand today, we estimate that the in-year direct impact on energy and freight costs is limited.
As you know, the situation remains fluid. In similar situations, our markets have behaved rationally on pricing and margin. We have a strong track record of maintaining competitive prices, managing gross margin effectively, and flexing our cost base. You can expect us to maintain our disciplined approach. Let me now hand back to Thierry.
Thank you, Bhavesh. I want to start by outlining the strategic growth drivers which underpin our current performance and position us for future growth. You can see these priorities on this page. Let me start with trade. We continue to grow our exposure to trade customers, a segment that shops more frequently, spends more, and exhibits more predictable purchasing patterns. Our trade strategy leverages our existing store footprint and supports both market share growth and higher store sales densities with little to no incremental CapEx. As a result, trade is both revenue and margin accretive at retail operating profit level. Screwfix trade penetration already stands at 75%. Across the rest of the group, trade sales grew by 23%, and trade customers now account for GBP 1 in every GBP 3 of group sales.
With this rapid progress, we are updating our medium-term ambition and now target GBP 5 billion of group sales from trade customers. Looking at some of our initiatives in a little more detail and starting with our stores. We are expanding dedicated trade space within our stores, and now our trade zones lie across all our banners. We made particularly strong progress in Castorama France during the year as we rolled out our trade proposition across the entire estate and opened 50 new Casto Pro zones. We are also excited to announce our first standalone TradePoint store opening in London this week. We also continue to invest heavily in our people. 279 dedicated trade sales partners are enrolled across our banners, circa 3x more than last year.
We are empowering our trade sales partners and see this as a key lever to unlock additional shelf wallet. At Screwfix, our new rewards program provides an industry-leading proposition for our trade customers and is driving strong engagement via the Screwfix app. Customers who sign up to the program receive exclusive and personalized offers, but also surprise perks and gamified engagement. We now have 2.2 million active rewards customers showing higher frequency of visits and higher average order values. Screwfix is also a great example on how we have succeeded with an app-first approach, with 41% of e-commerce sales now coming from the app. Another example of where our trade focus comes to life is Brico Dépôt France, a capital-light model with a strong discounter DNA. Trade customers like the efficient shopping experience, competitive pricing, and high product availability.
We trialed new pro zones during the year and signed up over 210,000 trade customers to a pro loyalty program. We also improved price competitiveness by 2 points and introduced bulk buy discount. These actions enable Brico Dépôt to grow trade sales by 26% and reach a trade penetration of 17% at the end of last year. We will further build on our trade proposition this year with more pro zones and enhance our trade value offering through additional volume discounts. Moving now to the digital ecosystem we are building, and it starts with a strong 1P e-commerce proposition with our stores at the center. In 2020, we made the strategic decision to leverage our store network to fulfill online orders. This enables us to offer market-leading fulfillment speed for click and collect and home delivery, while also driving incremental traffic to our stores.
We continue to improve our core platform by transitioning our e-commerce legacy systems towards modular and agile technology. This enables rapid feature innovation, faster site load times, and market-specific feature deployment. We have developed a digital in-store model to ensure excellent product availability for online orders. 94% of 1P orders are picked in store, and we offer rapid fulfillment options from store through our click and collect and home delivery propositions. All this in turn drives increased traffic, which supports the growth of our 3P marketplace. Our marketplace offers a broad choice with several million SKUs, which in turn generates more traffic to our websites and fuels additional 1P sales. Our stores also play a critical role for our marketplace. All stores accept marketplace returns and B&Q now offers in-store click and collect for marketplace items, driving additional footfall.
Our loyalty programs provide us with rich customer data, enabling personalized offers and targeted promotions. The market is increasingly shifting towards mobile-first and ad-based engagement, which provides us with access to data that allows us to improve and personalize customer interaction. This leads us to monetization. With scale, traffic, and comprehensive data, we can sell and grow retail media. As you know, there is lots of current news flow when it comes to agentic commerce. Our platforms are ready to connect to agentic commerce apps, and I will come back to this topic shortly. To summarize, our digital ecosystem drives a virtuous cycle of value, leveraging our store assets, our web traffic, and is powered by Kingfisher Technology. Moving to slide 22, which highlights our group e-commerce performance this year. Screwfix already generates 60% of sales from e-commerce.
In the other banners, we grew e-commerce by 20%, and you can see progress in every one of our banners. At the group level, GBP 1 out of GBP 5 now come from e-commerce. Our target in the medium term is to reach e-commerce sales penetration of 30%, out of which one-third from marketplaces. Moving to our marketplaces, and I am going to focus here on B&Q, which is most advanced and provides a clear blueprint for scaling across our other banners. We launched our B&Q marketplace in 2022 and have already achieved a cumulative GBP 1 billion of GMV sales since launch. We have scaled our platform significantly over the past four years, adding 2,800 vendors and 3.7 million SKUs, while also improving convenience for our customers with introduction of click and collect, a first for a marketplace in the U.K.
B&Q's marketplace has generated GBP 50 million retail profit contribution last year, and the marketplaces in France and Iberia have now reached breakeven early in their journey. Looking forward, we have ambitious growth plans, including the onboarding of more international cross-border vendors. For context, cross-border accounts for broadly 50% of sales at mature pure play marketplaces and only a few percent for us. An emerging income stream for us is the monetization of our customer data and our traffic. Our insight platform, Core IQ, underpinned by Kingfisher's first-party data, enables us to monetize our data with our corporate vendors. Having successfully built this capability in Castorama France, we plan to roll it out across all banners in 2026. Moving to retail media, we have brought capabilities in-house, built a group center of excellence, and each banner now has a dedicated retail media team.
We have also started piloting advertising on digital screens in stores. While at an early stage, we are very excited about this new income stream as adoption of retail media is strong. We target 3% of our e-commerce sales as additional revenues with a significant drop through to profit. Kingfisher is also a rapid adopter of AI. We see AI as a tailwind for our business and ourselves as leaders in this space. Our in-house AI agent, Hello Casto, was the first agentic agent in the global home improvement industry when we launched it in 2023, followed by Hello B&Q in 2025. Those early investment are paying off. We have seen an increase of over 60% of customers visiting Hello Casto online, with conversion increasing by 95%. Last week, we announced a new strategic partnership with Google Cloud.
Through this, we'll introduce AI-powered search across all our banner websites and apps, helping customers find products more intuitively. We have also done extensive work to enable AI agents to discover our products and to transact autonomously when this functionality becomes available in the U.K. and in Europe. This partnership will expand our capabilities further, allowing customers to complete purchases via Gemini and other AI agents. Underlying our business are strong own exclusive brands, where we provide innovative solutions at affordable prices and which are accretive to our margin. In 2025, within our power tool categories, we launched our next generation Erbauer range with best-in-class performance in power, in control, and durability. Since launched, it has achieved +43% sales growth compared with the previous range, and Erbauer is now our number one tool brand sold across the group.
Our new Ashmead 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. Our new kitchens have been a key driver of our strong big ticket performance in the year. Alongside product innovation, we are developing a growing portfolio of complementary services that support customers with their project, such as kitchen and bathroom design, tool rental, installation service, and project finance. Our banners hold leading positions in their markets, each with a distinct model and clear customer proposition, where attractive space opportunities exist that meet our investment criteria, we continue to complement our existing store estate. Our mid to long-term ambition for store space remains at 1.5%-2.5% sales contribution per annum, and 27 new store openings are planned for the coming year.
We believe compact stores will play a more important role in the future across our markets, allowing us to meet customer needs in high density urban areas and offering convenience and fast fulfillment through click and collect and home delivery. Let me now turn to Screwfix France, which is delivering +49% like-for-like store sales growth in line with our expectation. Momentum continues across all KPIs, with a 52% increase in unique customers year-over-year and growing national brand awareness. We continue to see good growth in our older cohorts after three years, and particularly strong momentum in the north of France, where we observe a network effect. This performance gives us confidence in the future of Screwfix in France. The strategic growth drivers I have outlined underpin Kingfisher's attractive investment story. We have leading positions in our markets, and those markets have attractive structural growth drivers.
We operate a diverse portfolio of banners, each with distinct formats and propositions that address a wide range of customer needs. Our strategic growth drivers are allowing us to grow our market share and give us confidence in our continued delivery against our financial priorities, growing our sales ahead of our markets, increasing our profit rate of sales, and generating strong free cash flow. To summarize, 2025- 2026 was a strong year. We have clear and attractive growth drivers, and we are confident in our continued delivery in 2026- 2027 and beyond. With that, let's move to Q&A. Thank you, everyone.
We will now begin the Q&A session. If you wish to ask a question, please use the raise hand function at the bottom of your screen. If you have dialed in, please select star nine to raise your hand and star six to unmute. I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded. We will take our first question from Richard Chamberlain with RBC. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Thank you. Morning, guys. A couple of questions from me, please, to start. Can you hear me okay?
Yeah, very good.
Excellent. Yeah. First is on the space target you're setting out for the longer term. I think you're talking about 1.5%-2.5% per year net. I wondered if you could just talk through what the key drivers of that space ambition will be and also what would the gross space growth be in that scenario? That's the first question. Thanks.
Thank you, Richard. I think first of all, indeed, that's our medium-term target. We believe that Screwfix first is our. This area where we have a lot of potential in the U.K. with format like Screwfix City, but moreover in France. We know that today we are happy with the store maturity. We go for a large number of store in France. Poland, we have said that we probably cover about 50% of the city where we want to be. We have more store to open. Not only big boxes, as well, medium boxes, around 4,000 sq m is a format we really believe in. As well, smaller format, we call it Castorama Smart, about 2,000 sq m.
A lot of potential in Poland. In France, Brico Dépôt 1000 sq m is a format we are having high expectation upon. We h ave a few stores. We're still looking at the results, but could be an attractive format as well as Iberia. If you see, Richard, expansion is not linear. Sometimes you have opportunity, sometimes you have ups and downs, but clearly that's our medium-term target.
Great. Thanks, Thierry. Very helpful color. My second question is on the marketplace, obviously growth was strong last year. Can you give us a sense of how much that's been driven by new, newer vendors, and how much by a sort of broader range of SKUs from existing vendors on the platform?
I think it's both . Now B&Q, it's a sub year in 2025, will be the fourth year of this year. We keep increasing the number of SKUs, if you compare year-on-year, the number of vendors. In the other countries, you have really a very strong scale up in France, in Poland, in Iberia. We really continue to grow the vendors. I think the big new things that started in 2025, and it will be a bigger thing in 2026, is what we call cross-border vendors. In fact, today, when you look at the B&Q marketplace, we just have a few percent of our vendors that are not legally located in the U.K.
We know countries like Germany, for example, other European countries, you have very strong base of industrial vendors. It took us a while to find the tech solution to onboard and there is VAT and payment challenges. Now we are able to do that. You will see a lot more cross-border vendors in the future. For large marketplaces, I will not give you names, but you can get the names be it in Europe and the U.S., is broadly 50% of their vendors are not local vendors. We feel that's a big opportunity for us looking forward.
Maybe a couple things to add, Richard. Why we like marketplace, it extends our ranges. Lets us play in categories we wouldn't align with our proposition, but wouldn't make sense for us to stock directly.
Mm-hmm.
Things like white goods, bulky things, take a lot of space in stores, maybe lower margin cap products. The other thing is marketplace then gets us to reach new customers, right? We have half of the customers that come to B&Q marketplace are new to diy.com.
Mm-hmm.
They go on to buy 1P product as well. We're attracting more customers onto our website to be able to sell them more 1P.
Sure. Excellent. Okay. Thanks, guys.
Our next question comes from Tim Ramskill with Bank of America. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Thanks. Good morning. I've got a few, so I'll maybe go one at a time. The first couple are kinda cash flow related. I guess you obviously highlighted the benefits delivered on inventory, but at the same time, looking at the balance sheet, that's sort of not immediately obvious numbers-wise. Maybe you can just help me out. I think there may have been some Chinese New Year effects at play there. Maybe you can just sort of help us sort of square the kind of improvement of five days of inventory, please.
Maybe let me start, and then we give you a few intel color. I think we are very happy with our inventory program. You have seen it's not the first year we are decreasing inventory days. I think number of days is really the way we are looking at it. We have multiple programs reducing the space of our DC. If you look at the past five years, we have been consistently reducing the number of DCs and number of square meters. Using better software to have real-time visibility on inventory across the group f rom factories in China, our ships, DCs. Providing real-time data to our vendors that allow us to negotiate lead time, minimum order quantity.
Now we are starting to really work on forecasting with AI and more software. I would say you have seen that the past few years, and we are still very confident looking forward to work hard on our inventories and being able to reduce inventories.
Yeah. Not much to add. It's a key focus area for us. As Thierry said, we took out five days this year, seven days last year. We expect continued steady progress. It's a key driver of our working capital improvement. As Thierry mentioned, you know, we try to focus on structural things, not tactical. For example, we've got this supply chain visibility tool that we know where our stock sits. That means when we work with our factories in China, we can give them better data to better plan their production, and that means that we order less, we have shorter lead times, we order fewer. Our minimum order quantity sizes are lower. We're getting the product we need when we need it. That really helps.
Just one example, but just gives you a bit of color on some of the structural initiatives that we're taking.
Okay. Excellent. That's very helpful. The next sort of cashflow question was just a little bit around CapEx, obviously the guidance for GBP 400 million. What, if anything, is driving a little bit of a step up? Is that just linked to the sort of store opening plans? Maybe just some thoughts on how that sort of trends over the next few years, please.
We spent GBP 388 million in CapEx this year, about 3% of sales, which is in line with our guidance. The way we thought about it this year is as we navigated through, we had a good first half. We're in constant dialogue with our businesses around where can we look for opportunity to deploy and invest more in our business first. That's the first pillar of our capital allocation strategy. We focused on stores. B&Q, for example, bought a freehold store that was opportunistic that came up, wasn't in our plan, but we felt the right thing to do. We also felt continued investment and maintenance of our stores, that's important.
Customer-facing things like LED lighting, entrances, et cetera. We sort of navigated through the year, and as we saw we were having a good first half, we chose to take some of that performance and reinvest it obviously in the right parts of the business that drive good returns and help our customer experience.
Great. Last one from me, if that's okay. Just in terms of marketplace, just help us think about how clearly you've laid out ambition for where that gets to from a revenue contribution perspective. How do you expect to grow the costs to deliver that? When should we start to see perhaps a sort of more dramatic drop through to profitability? Just some parameters around that would be great. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you, Tim. I think first I will remind you that the B&Q marketplace delivered GBP 15 million of retail profit this year. That start to be meaningful. When I start from top line, the take rates, the commercial margin we are taking is around industry average for home improvement between 10%-15%, and we are happy to see this margin across all our different countries. Then you have a bit of tech, but broadly the investment has been done. We are working with Mirakl, so that's relatively, it's a SaaS model, so it's really a small amount. They are small teams. If you take B&Q, we speak about 20 people for over GBP 400 million GMV.
The main variable is the marketing costs. When you start the marketplace, you want to be probably around 8%-10% marketing investment. Then gradually over time, you will decrease this marketing spend. After a few years, you are at let's say a stable and standard level of marketing investment. We are gradually decreasing our marketing investment. Overall, when you do the math, we're seeing very strong flows through to profit. To give you even more colors, we would probably be able in the future to increase the take rates because we'd be able to sell more services to our vendors, retail media, fulfillment option, advisory. A lot of things on the table as well on the take rates in medium term.
That's fantastic. Very helpful. Thank you very much.
Our next question from Adam Cochrane with Deutsche Bank. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Good morning, guys. A couple of questions. First of all, you talked about the compact stores as being an area of growth. Can you just give us an idea of the dynamics on the compact stores? Are they, despite a lower sales base, actually more profitable on a contribution margin than the larger stores? So sort of where I'm going is are they margin accretive across each of the different banners compared to where you currently are?
Maybe I start, and I think Bhavesh will give other views. I think first you remember, we have started this journey a few years ago where we believe compact store format in DIY is an important trend. It's not an obvious format. There are countries it exists. When you look at France, we have in the market companies like Monsieur Bricolage or Weldom that are in fact small format. In the U.K., you have less small format. In the U.K. we have B&Q Locals, and that's really a high street format. We will start to open more B&Q Locals this year, and we have a target in the medium term of about 30 stores.
We have a format that is called B&Q Retail Park, around 2,000 sq m. We have Screwfix City, very successful, and we believe we can open 100. We have Brico Dépôt 1000 sq m in France. I mentioned that is very important format for the future. In Poland, we have a great medium box, around 4,000 sq m, and we are working hard on the 2,000 sq m box that is not fully ready yet. We are still working on our small format for Poland. You see B&Q, we are as well very pleased with the medium box format. I would say on average, our medium box and smaller format are in line or better than the average of their market. There are a few exceptions.
For example, if you tell me the Poland smaller format, we are not happy yet. The Brico Dépôt 1000 sq m, there are still some improvement to do. Overall, what you see is sales on CTN profit in line or slightly better than the average.
Not much to add there, Adam. I think on B&Q Local, we've got 11. Eight of them are working pretty well. The other three are not. Of the eight that are working well, we looked at what are the right ranges? What's the right delivery into a city center location, logistics? How are consumers engaging with us? We're constantly learning as we build and adapt these.
The second question I've got is, if we look at the B&Q performance as the year progressed, there may have been some drivers from Homebase customer transference. Did that make a material difference as each quarter went on? Can you just remind us of maybe when that annualizes? The second part of that question is, if we assume that some of the B&Q like-for-like was from Homebase, and a decent proportion is coming through from the growth in trade, is there a question mark over the core U.K. DIY customer, which appears to be in reasonably, low to mid-single digit decline if you take into account the Homebase and your trade customer growth?
Are you focusing so much on the trade customer that the DIY customer is getting less of a service than they were historically?
Thanks, Adam. Let me start with Homebase, and then I'll get Thierry to answer the second one. So we haven't disclosed specifics on Homebase, but a couple of data points. Firstly, Homebase went to admin in November 2024, and then stores closed in January and February of 2025. The way we sort of modeled and looked at it was said, okay, well, what are the B&Q stores that are within 20 minutes of a Homebase, and how are they performing versus the rest of the portfolio? There, that's where we did see an uplift. Obviously, the teams executed well. The eight stores that we acquired, we made sure were open for peak. We made sure we had the right product availability.
We had a super strong seasonal last quarter one. Homebase was one of a number of drivers of B&Q's performance, right? We had good performance in big ticket, continued growth in our core categories. We've got profitable growth in trade and e-commerce. Obviously the strong seasonal that you saw in H1. Yes, it benefited us, but was one of many levers.
Yeah, Adam, a few more comment. I think first of all, we have to look at B&Q including marketplaces. We have indeed the store, we have trade, we have marketplaces. When we add marketplaces or what we call the GMV, the B&Q sales growth is +5.9% in 2025-2026 versus a flat market. Yes, trade is growing, but you can't say that the rest of the perimeter is having difficulties. It's all based on the same assets. We are leveraging our assets to grow e-commerce and to grow trade. Another data I can give you, services installation. We're on 22% at B&Q. Clearly we see a lot of good news on interaction with a customer.
You really have to keep looking at B&Q altogether, including marketplace.
Just to add, we performed above the market in the U.K., so that gives you a data point.
Okay. Final question is, you talked about growing sales ahead of the markets and profit ahead of sales. Your midpoint of the guidance implies a 6% increase in profits. Given that one number that today surprised me slightly was the OpEx growth, particularly in the U.K., is the implication to get your midpoint that there's a low single-digit like-for-like in order to leverage that up to get to your 6% at the midpoint profit growth? Thanks.
I think maybe to start, Adam, I think , in a mixed consumer environment, we feel good with a 6% increase in the midpoint. We feel it's a good plan. It's predicated on continuous progress in our strategy on trade, on e-commerce, and as well a lot of discipline on gross margin and costs. In the current environment, we rather feel good around this midpoint guidance.
Yeah. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Grace Gilberg with Jefferies. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Hi, you guys. Can you hear me?
Yes. Good morning, Grace.
Perfect. Thank you for taking my questions. First one is around gross margin, actually. I mean, obviously, it was a pretty good year in terms of your gross margin expansion and continuing in the second half, after what was a pretty good first half, and that was quite impressive. You've mentioned that these have to do with primarily better sourcing as well as just getting better deals with your suppliers. How structural are these gains, and what are the things that your suppliers are seeing that are having you to be able to have these better deals, for example? That's the first question. The second one is actually around France. It was a little bit weaker than the other two regions.
Obviously, the market has been down, and it's very difficult to see. That hasn't been very helpful. It seems from your perspective that the model is working, particularly at Brico Dépôt. What are the benefits that we maybe haven't seen yet just because of the market, and what are you expecting to see going forward? I'll start with those two, and then I have one or two others.
Hi, Grace. On gross margin, we're really pleased with the performance in the year, right? We grew by 80 basis points as we flagged. As we look into the year ahead, we have different puts and takes. On one hand, you're gonna continue to see further expansion of marketplace, as Thierry mentioned earlier, as margin-accretive. We continue to look at the store as the heart of our digital ecosystem. A lot of preparation and picking and packing is done in the store. That means we need less logistics space, and so you'll see continued focus on logistics efficiencies.
Buying and sourcing was quite successful in this year that helped drive our margin, and we expect to continue to see that in the year ahead. Particularly the insight that we get from our private label business. We look at something called should cost. We understand the components of all of our products, and that gives us real data to negotiate with our branded suppliers, and that will continue. We expect further FX tailwinds based on our hedging. We hedge 100% of our committed orders into next year, so we have a pretty good read on FX. On the other hand, we have growing trades. Really pleased with what we're doing with trade for all the reasons you heard us talk about.
At a gross margin level, it is dilutive. We always focus on maintaining competitive prices. Then freight is starting to turn into a headwind. Those are some of the pluses and minuses that we think about as we look to the year ahead on gross margin.
No, I think to France, I think overall, I think we feel good about the progress in 2025. Just to tell you where I have been, my first market was around -3%, so pretty difficult market. We need around -2%, so we overperformed the market. In a year where Castorama had significant disruption from store works, a lot of range reviews. We had big headwinds from restructuring. We were changing a lot of the team in the store. You heard in Bhavesh's comment that we changed about 50% of the store managers or 40% of the category managers. As well in France, we have to remember that it's a lot of new taxes and high wages in 2025 like in the U.K.
In this environment, being able to gain market share in all banners, to have a profit up, to see the strategic progress on trade, on e-commerce, to deliver on the Castorama plan, but as well on the Brico Dépôt plan. To answer your question on Brico Dépôt, probably the two biggest progress we made was continue to have an even lower price index because it's a discount discounter banner. We did a lot of progress on the process. You saw that. At the end, the team are in a good place. We see a team engagement in France growing in really in a strong position. Overall, I think it's a very strong year in a very difficult market. Indeed, we need the market to recover.
For me, the market recovery, the French market recovery is a question of time.
Okay. Thank you. All clear. I suppose my last question is around the full year guidance for FY 2027. Obviously, you do have some tough comparatives heading into Q1, given how strong B&Q was last year. Many of your competitors have peers within the home market have cited that it's been pretty wet weather and hasn't been helpful for trading into the beginning of the year. What makes you confident in reaching your full year PBT numbers, given that you're facing some of these headwinds potentially?
Well, Grace, we don't provide current trading, so we don't guide to the quarter. Factually you're right, we had a very strong seasonal. B&Q's Q1 seasonal last year was 30%, so it's a pretty tough comp to lap. As we look ahead to sort of our guidance for the full year, we look at sort of what are the drivers from a top line perspective. We've got a mixed consumer backdrop, but in the U.K. we expect continued momentum from our two banners not withstanding the tough comp in Q1 on Homebase transfers we talked about earlier. Top line in France it's still a weak market. It's improving, but very slowly.
Savings rates are still elevated, 400-500 basis points above the long-term average. Very much in France is focused on what we can control, differentiated proposition, discount proposition at Brico Dépôt. All the heavy lifting we're doing at Castorama, you heard us talk about in prepared remarks. Poland was flat last year. Q4 was good, but I'd say we need to see more quarters of good sustained consistency in Poland. That's sort of how we think about the top line when we set our guidance. We talked about your earlier question, what things that we will continue to manage effectively. Got some puts and takes. Those will be the same things next year as we saw this year. Continued focus on cost.
We've got a track record of managing our costs pretty well. As and when trading environments change, we have the agility to flex our cost base. Those are some of the component parts that sort of set our full year guidance on profit and cash. Hopefully that helps.
Just to add a few other around how we feel, obviously, looking at the Middle East crisis. I think obviously we are very mindful, but we look at our top line first with resilient business.. We are about to serve if our business is repair and maintenance, so less discretionary. We now have reached 30% of the group sales is delivered through trade, so as we are more resilient. We really see the benefit of our strategy on commerce and trade. Looking again at B&Q in 2025, real growth +5.9% in the flat market. So you start to see the benefit of the strategy. As Bhavesh said, we have had a strong track record of discipline, margin management, cost management in all the past years.
Perfect. Thank you.
You're welcome, Grace.
Our next question comes from Yashraj Rajani. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Hi, thank you for taking my questions. I've got three, please. I'll ask them one by one. The first one is on the cross-border vendor e-commerce, which you had fully highlighted. Is that just an element of introducing a different price point, or do you think that you're missing something in the range architecture there, which is now being complemented with this cross-border vendor e-commerce? And how do you think about the right balance so that it doesn't cannibalize your own 1P sales?
Thank you for the question, Yash, first of all. I think it's we really see that more as a range topic, as choice. In fact, we are really selling on our marketplaces. If you take the U.K.-based vendors, so you have a lot of very strong countries in the world with very strong industrial base. Germany, but even and as well China, we'll open gradually our marketplace to Chinese vendors. You see the potential here. But it's not around price competition. To give you more color, we are working on what we call buy box. And I will not enter into the tech detail, but we could do that offline if you want. That will allow us as well to have more price competition between the same SKUs from 2026.
Cross-border is really around choice.
O n what I said earlier, right? Y es, there's probably a little bit of cannibalization, but look at our 1P sales. It's stronger than our store sales. 3P traffic brings new people to diy.com that we wouldn't otherwise get and allow them go on to buy 1P product. That's a benefit of having the choice that Thierry talks about.
Sure. That, that's super helpful. Thank you. The second question is again on France. I appreciate y ou commented that the market's difficult, but there's obviously all the self-help initiatives that you highlighted. Even if you assume that the market stays where it is, what is the absolute margin improvement you can see from all the things that you control, even if like-for-like are negative?
Yeah. I think, Yashraj, we are still confident in our 5%-7% profit margin for France in the medium term. We always said part of it is really our self-help action, and we are progressing on this. To remind you as well that some of the self-help action, you have very short-term impact. When you do a head office restructuring or you have short-term impact. Some other, like range reviews or the store network restructuring, you need a bit of time to realize, to crystallize all the benefits. One, self-help action. Second part is the market improvement. Personally, I'm convinced that we'll see a market improvement. It's a question of time. We need both to achieve those 5%-7%.
Got it. Super helpful. The last one from my end, maybe quite a topical one is the Middle East. Can you just sort of quantify any sort of freight headwinds or more broadly, disruption that you're seeing, which would probably create some availability issues, if any, or just anything else you'd like to highlight on the Middle East? Thank you.
Maybe I should start with supply chain and then Bhavesh will come on the cost side. First, it's obvious that we have no operation in the region. We have nearly two suppliers in the region, so you see it's really very limited direct impact. Before Bhavesh will comment on gross margin and costs. Again, remind you that two-thirds of our business is repair and maintenance, 30% is trade. We are high expectations to deliver on our strategy and trade and commerce in 2026 and beyond. We expect this to give us resilience looking forward.
Yeah, I mean, you heard me mention it in my prepared remarks, but the direct and, impacts based on what we know today, and as things are changing every day. The impact for us is fairly limited. On energy, our quantum energy costs are less than 1% of our sales, and the majority of that is hedged. And our freight, again, a small proportion of our COGS, but 20% of our COGS are sourced from Asia, and we typically lock in annual contracts with the carriers.
Those contracts have what we call, like, a fuel index, so there may be a little bit of headwind, but we've locked in those contracts for the year. We look to previous situations, the markets have behaved pretty rationally on pricing and margin and we continue to stay focused on managing our margin and being super disciplined on cost. That's our focus, right? To continue to do that as we navigate our way through.
Awesome. Thank you so much.
You're welcome, Yash.
Our next question comes from Mia Strauss with BNP Paribas. Please unmute your line and ask your question.
Hi, good morning. I just wanna check. I think last year you talked maybe about doing consumer surveys for your trade sales partners and what sort of pipeline they're seeing over the next few weeks. Maybe if you can just give us a comment on that for the current year.
Yes, absolutely, Mia. By the way, you will see that in the appendix of our the document we released, page 34. Indeed, we do a monthly survey for Screwfix. What you see on the page 34 is that 93% of our trade people are working. It's 2 point share year-on-year. Slightly higher than last year. We have a second category that is working and have more work to come. It's 79% of the survey, and it's 6 points up year-on-year. We do this survey every month for the past few years, so it's pretty reliable. We feel those results remain strong.
All right. Thanks for pointing that out. Maybe just on your share of the trade wallet, what share do you currently have? Essentially, what is the realistic opportunity of what share you could get in future?
I think Screwfix, our estimate is around 15%. So for our trade business, you could say it's still relatively low, and that's why we believe we have a lot of opportunity ahead on Screwfix share wallet, on the range, the size of the range. B2B, we have a plan that will address more of this share wallet growth in the future. You have seen as well in the presentation, the rewards program. For all the big boxes, our estimate, that is a few percent. W e have a share wallet in B&Q, in France, in Poland, it's just a few percent of a very large market. Very often the trade people, they already come to our stores, but mainly for emergencies.
That's why all this plan is finally leveraging your assets to sell more to people that are already in your stores, through your loyalty program, trade sales partners. We really feel that starting from this very low base of share wallet in our other big boxes, there is significant opportunities.
Look, in the U.K., it's a big market, right? It's GBP 30 billion, total trade market. TradePoint sales are close to GBP 1 billion. It's a lot for us to still go after.
That's helpful. Maybe just for you, Bhavesh, on the free cash flow. The guidance is a little bit lower year-over-year, and I think it's last year you also talked about achieving over GBP 500 million over the full current year. I guess the last year you saw about a GBP 91 million increase in payables. What was that from? I guess going forward, why is it a little bit lower?
Look, yeah, pleased with our free cash guidance. We've delivered more than GBP 500 million over the last three years. Our focus this year will be continued on the profit drivers we talked about and working capital, and particularly inventory. Again, some of the stuff we mentioned earlier, some of the structural initiatives. We set a range of GBP 450 million-GBP 510 million, midpoint GBP 480 million. That's about GBP 30 million higher than the midpoint we set last year. C onfident that we'll continue to deliver cash flow well. Yeah, we also spent more on CapEx this year.
T he question somebody asked earlier as we saw and navigated through the year that we were trading well and had a good cash performance, we chose to redeploy some of that, both in buying freehold, but also in our maintenance and tech. We kind of navigate through the year, and then you always get fluctuations, right, and year to year, so sometimes one-offs. Over the medium term we're still guiding to around GBP 500 million per annum free cash and have done that the last three years.
Great. Thanks. Maybe just on the if we look back to 2025, what was the reason for that significant increase in payables maybe?
I think timing largely. We look as you'd expect any retailer, we kind of look at payment terms as well as something we navigate, but also our sales was higher, right? That's a that sort of drives our payables.
Okay, cool. That's clear. Thank you.
Because you buy more.
As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please use the Raise Hand function at the bottom of your screen. If you have dialed in, please select star nine to raise your hand and use star six to unmute. Our next question comes from Georgina Johanan with JP Morgan. Please use star six to unmute.
Hi, everyone. Can you hear me okay?
Yes.
Good morning, Georgina. Yeah. Go ahead.
Good morning. Thank you. I've got three quick ones, please. Really just following up some questions that have already been asked. The first one is I very much appreciate that you prefer not to give current trading trends, but just in the context of maybe the consumer more broadly, particularly in the U.K., I think one of the early surveys that's been done since the start of the crisis and headlines around higher energy prices and so on actually saw an 8-point fall in consumer confidence. So just wondering if you can kind of comment on how you're seeing consumer behavior rather than trading trends necessarily. The second one was, I appreciate you don't provide a like-for-like guidance and that of course there are changes that will be made depending on, trading performance.
If you were to see perhaps only a flat like-for-like this year, can you just confirm that you'd be able to hold profits in that scenario, please? And then finally, you very helpfully at the half year, I think quantified some of the gross margin benefits from buying and sourcing initiatives, if I remember correctly, around 60 basis points. Is it reasonable to assume that you can actually achieve a similar level again in fiscal 2027? And indeed, where did that land for fiscal 2026 overall, please? Thank you.
Thank you, Georgina. Let me start with the first one, and then Bhavesh will cover the two and three. So to be direct, indeed, we don't want to comment on the current trading, but I think as it's an important topic, we have not seen up to now real impact on the customer. We have not seen change of trend following the start of this crisis.
On your second question, look, we have different levers that we pull as we navigate through the year, margin, cost, investment in the business. We've set our guidance range on profit. The range is the same as we set previously, GBP 60 million around that midpoint, and we'll navigate and push and pull levers as trading evolves, as you saw us do this year. On gross margin, I'm not going to quantify it, but I'm referring to my previous response on the various puts and takes. We've got lots of things that are tailwinds, but we also have some things that are headwinds on gross margins.
Okay. Thank you anyway.
At this time, there are no further questions. I will now hand back to Thierry for closing remarks.
Just to thank you for joining us this morning. For your question, again, we are confident in our delivery of this year and our strategic progress. Confident in the fact we stay very disciplined on the thing we can control well as we did in the past. Again, thank you, and we are always available with the team if you have any question. For some of you, I think we'll meet in the coming days. Thank you very much. Thank you, sir.
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