Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our Capital Markets Day. There's 80-plus people in the room today, so we're very much looking forward to the conversation. We have shareholders here, prospective shareholders, analysts, and we've got some of our board members, of which, obviously, chaired by Archie. We appreciate our board work very hard, challenge us, hold us to account, but also provide massive support to me and the leadership team, and we appreciate it. Also my leadership team, the ExCo here, and we hardly recognize everyone because everyone seems to have a jacket or some shoes on. In fact, there's only Sacha at the back that's kept true to himself with the half-zip jumper on today. Anyway, Rich has even got a tie on. Anyway, hopefully you'll recognize people as we present throughout today.
I am reminded, Gist as I watched that video of the progress made, that we also do really focus on what we call positive dissatisfaction, and the reason I think we should open today's session talking about the opportunities, and the theme of today's conversation is about the opportunities, is because, of course, we've made progress, but I'm very conscious that over history, just like Ian referred to in the video, we've had a history of one or two good years and then a fall away in performance, and that's why our plan has to be very different. It has to be a plan where we have the unvarnished truth, where we're facing into the most challenging issues, and building a much bigger, better M&S for now, but also for the future.
I was reminded just last week because I had an email sent to a group of us on Friday evening, and it was from one of our customer insights team. The headline in this email update was, "Really strong performance, lots of things to be really pleased about. In fact, very hard to find some of the issues and opportunities in this data." The reason I start with that is, what's the first thing I do? I open the email, trawl through all the data, thinking, "I definitely know there's going to be some issues and opportunities in this customer insights." Then I reply to the email, listing out all the things that actually recognize progress, but more importantly, highlighting the things that we still have to go after.
And we shouldn't be persuaded to just focus on the momentum and the good things, but keep really grounded on the big issues and the transformation that we still have to implement today and in the years ahead. Because in truth, there is so much to do, but also so much to go after. And that's where, as part of the cultural change in M&S, that's for me and the leadership team, that's what's really important to us, that we stay grounded and we think about the opportunities. This year, M&S was 140 years old or young. And what we're thinking about is, so how do we build a bigger, better M&S for another 100-plus years from now?
140 years ago, when I talk about the heritage of M&S, the magic of M&S, it was always the things that made M&S so great then, the quality, value, the leadership on innovation, the service it gave to customers in a very personal way. And that's something we call the magic of M&S. And I think those key words for today are just as relevant as they were 140 years ago. But likewise, we need to think about what modernizing the rest is, the transformation plan that we're a few years in, but we've got many years ahead of us to implement more transformation so we build sustainable growth. So this plan has to be a different plan to previous years. And we're two years in to the five-year plan we set out when I became CEO two and a half years ago.
So the plan is very much geared to long-term sustainable growth, not making short-term decisions just for today, and there are four things that we laid out at the start of this financial year. The first was accelerating the pace of transformation. The second was to get even closer to our customers. The third was to build a high-performance culture, and the fourth was growth, in brackets, not at any cost. And they were the first four things we laid out, and what we've been trying to think about is not just deliver one-off changes, but how do we hardwire all of those transformation programs into the organization, into our ways of working, into everything we do. And of course, we announced our half-year results last week, and whether it's externally or internally, I get asked the same question every six months. Is the transformation over?
Are you close to the end? And I always answer the same thing, which is we will never stop transforming M&S. And I think it's a very dangerous place to be if we even think we're halfway through. So this energy of transformation, I think, is positive. It keeps us realizing that we've got so much to do and so much ahead of us. And when I spoke at the year-end results about it feels like the beginnings of a new M&S, when I read some of the media reports the following few days after the results, I think some people misinterpreted that as it's a new Marks & Spencer, the transformation is complete, and we're far, far from that. But we are seeing the very beginnings of a new M&S and what we could be in the years ahead.
So we're very clear-eyed on the plan, and I will touch on that in this introduction. We're clear on our vision for the organization, for the company. We want to be the most trusted retailer. Because going back to the heritage of M&S, it was seen as a brand that really was the most trusted, with quality products at the heart of everything we do, doing the right thing for customers. And one thing that is different, I feel it's very different in M&S, and I've been here six years now, because we're very much a product company. We are obsessive about every product we sell. And it's something that I've put much more at the heart of everything we do.
The leadership team role models that because we're obsessed about our Food, we're obsessed about our Clothing, and the quality and the value and the P&L is in every product we sell. So we are really proud to be a product-led business. If you think about what that means for customers or for colleagues or for shareholders, we want our customers to say that, actually, I trust M&S to give me the best quality product for the best price. We want customers to say, "We trust M&S to do the right thing. We trust M&S every day for great value." We also want our customers to say, "It feels like M&S gets me. They know me. It feels personal." In Food, we want our customers to say, "It's unbeatable quality and value.
And I may pay a little bit more, but it's worth it." We also want customers in clothing to say, "Well, we trust the clothing to be good quality, sustainable, and we also trust it to be great overall value." And in Home and Beauty, we want our customers to say, "It's the same. It's the M&S magic. You can only get this at M&S." We also want our customers more broadly to say, "I can shop in store, I can shop online, I can shop wherever, however, and whenever I want to shop, and the experience is consistent, and it's the same M&S." We want customers in our stores to say, "It's a great environment to shop in." If you're in a store and you're a store manager, we want our store managers to say, "I feel equipped, supported, enabled to really serve my customers.
I know my job is to serve, to sell, to fill. I know my customers. I know my colleagues." And we want our stores to say, "The Store Support Centre supports me to do the very best I can and to deliver the best store for customers day in and day out." And if you're in the Store Support Centre, we want everyone in the Store Support Centre here to say, "I know my job. I know the part I play in delivering the transformation. I know what I'm accountable in delivering. I'm here to support stores online, but I keep close to our customers." We also want more broadly our colleagues across the whole organization to say, "Working in M&S helps me be the very best I can be.
And I can have an extraordinary career, and my contribution absolutely counts." And if you're a shareholder, very conscious of the feedback we've just heard from Ian and Dominic, this is what we have as a vision for our shareholders to play back to us. The leadership team have a clear plan, and they're executing on that plan. They're facing into the big issues. They're not ducking the issues. They're transparent. They're honest. They tell it as it is. They're making progress on clearing up the legacy issues, the legacy drags on their cost base, old stores, old outdated logistics, old technology infrastructure. We want our shareholders to say, "I can see the cultural change. Each of the businesses are performing well individually, but collectively, M&S is performing.
They've demonstrated discipline in their capital allocation, and they have a clear path for sustainable growth." I talked about the behaviors last time we came together on our Capital Markets Day, and I think the most important to highlight for today is just a couple of these. The first is we will tell it as it is. That's really important because two and a half years ago, I heard that we weren't as transparent as we could have been, and sometimes our history is littered with over-promising, and we're very conscious of that, which means we have to be true, transparent, and share with you what's on track and what's not on track and what we're going to do about it, but the other behavior is about aiming higher because we should be restless and energized and excited and positively dissatisfied.
That's a good thing because we always want better. We always want to aim higher. When we talked about our strategy last time we were together, we talked about protecting the magic, modernizing the rest. When I joined M&S in mid-2018, it was a phrase I used that actually internally everybody latched onto because they understood what it meant. This means for the whole organization, we've adopted this as our strategy headline. Protecting the magic is not losing all of the things that made M&S such a great brand and retail business. The words I've used before, like quality, innovation, service, value. M&S was never a premium retailer. We're a retailer that we're focused on selling volume, value, great quality at great value, stylish clothes at a great price, unbeatable quality food for the price that you pay.
And when we think about modernizing the rest, the key strategies that we've highlighted already that we'll talk through today, store rotation, online, supply chain enabled by much better technology, that is the big part of our transformation. They're the big thorny issues that we still need to work on, improve and fix over the years ahead, and then we pull together all of our transformation programs. Some of you said there's a lot on the page. I got the feedback. There's so much to do, but that is right because there is a lot to do, so we break all of these programs down, and we make sure we've got clear plans, clear milestones, investment, return on investment for all of these programs.
And if you look at the key headings, we've talked about exceptional products as one of our pillars, driving profitable sales growth, delivering target operating margins where we set out 4% Food, 10% for Clothing & Home, and also the enablers building the M&S that we need to be. So to kick off today, I'm just going to talk through where we are on each of those programs. When it comes to exceptional product, last year, we said we will reset and upgrade our key categories, investing more quality in our Food product. We said we will drive perceptions of quality in food and style in clothing, Home and Beauty. And if we think about a year on, we're definitely on track with many of these product programs.
In F ood, Alex has a saying, "If in doubt, add quality in." And we're absolutely upping our game when it comes to investing in quality at the same time as investing in value and price. Alex will give some color, no doubt, on this later, but just when it comes to category resets, fresh pizzas, a complete overhaul of the whole pizza category that actually increased our sales by 17%, freshly prepared meals, Indian Gastro that since the relaunch in India, we saw a 16% increase in sales just from a few months ago by investing in quality. And in our Gastro relaunch, sales increased of 42%. And that's all because we added more quality and keep reviewing the product specifications. We've improved our style perception in clothing, now number two on style, Womenswear, up 16% since 2021, Menswear up 12% since 2021.
We're definitely seen as market-leading for quality. Quality has improved in clothing, overall 6% on last year. But we know there's still so much to go after on our product strategies and therefore, in the next 12 months, you'll hear from the team today, but Alex has a Winning Choices program for food, really focused on spine of the basket, core categories. In fact, even this Christmas, normally we will reduce our core range, delete some items to make space for seasonal product. This year, we're not doing that. The phrase "core is more" is really true because we still make more money and sell more of our core product than seasonal product at Christmas and that's because we are becoming, especially in our bigger stores, a core shop, a shopping list retailer, as we call it but we've got some big launches coming up.
Last January, we did gut health. The range around brain health and other innovation for this January is another step on again when it comes to innovation and quality. When we talk about core range, we're making sure in all of our categories we have all of the need states. So customers on their shopping list, anything missing, we want to make sure we range. But availability is critically important because something like my shopping trip this weekend where I couldn't buy dishwasher salt, we only do one. Every other supermarket will do six, seven, eight different brands. We do one. It's M&S. So we have to be in stock. So quality, availability is even more important in M&S than anywhere else. And we want to become that trusted shopping list retailer. But there's also so much opportunity in Womenswear, in kids, in brands, in Home and Beauty.
And some of the team will talk about this in their breakout sessions. We're still under index in categories like footwear and accessories. We know we've got a bigger opportunity in Kidswear, especially day wear. In home, we exited what we call bulky furniture. But actually, we think there's a bigger opportunity in home to drive more volume and value at the entry tier and stylish homewares in that better, best tier. So we know we've got some opportunities still in our product categories over the next 12 plus months. On trusted value to drive volume, we laid out a few things last year. First, invest in price to absolutely establish this trusted value in food, lock in key prices in key categories across Clothing & Home, but also work hard to continue to improve our value perception.
And some good progress has been made in that investment in quality and value, growing food volume now for over four years consecutively. In fact, this morning, just as we entered the room, the latest Kantar results have come out, and it's the first time food has delivered a 4% market share, and that excludes Ocado outside of Christmas. So we're definitely on track, and we're seeing the results in food by investing in quality and value. The team have invested GBP 70 million of price investment in the past 16 months. Our volume in the first half grew 6%. And in Clothing & Home, we've held our prices across clothing, especially with a big focus on schoolwear four years in a row, keeping our prices the same. So our value perception is improving. We're number one in clothing. We're getting better every year in food on value perception.
But we're just reminded last week we had our ExCo, our leadership meeting. And before we have a meeting, we now do customer listening groups where we have a group of customers, and we talk and we listen to the customers, and we all sit there and we get all the feedback. And last week, what really hit us was still customers recognized some investment in quality. They recognized more stylish Womenswear, but there was still a perception where premium, a bit too expensive. And as the conversation unfolded, for us as a leadership team listening, we were thinking, "Well, have you seen the price of milk?
It's just the same as a supermarket." And all these stories coming out, and some customers recognized on some products the value, but overall, majority people in the room said, "It's still quite expensive at M&S." One customer called out the price of some key basket items and said, "I don't shop every day, but I have noticed the prices seem more in line with a big supermarket." Then another customer responded, "Oh, is that true? Yes, I think I've noticed that, but I'm not sure. Surely M&S will not price on milk or bread the same as a supermarket." So we've still got this perception issue, and in many ways, it's a reality because we still want to invest in value to grow volume. So what's next?
We're going to go again on value investment, continue investing in quality, continue investing in value, holding our Remarksable range in food to the same price or within a very small percent to all the key leading supermarkets. We're focusing again on bigger packs, better value. In Clothing & Home, we're targeting our investment. We think there's a big opportunity to invest in more value for kids, for example. It's a session Richard and I have with the team this afternoon. In home, actually, value perception isn't where it needs to be. There's an opportunity to go again in home and drive more volume and value as well. When we think about driving profitable sales growth, the next pillar in our strategic plan, one of the big things here is around customers and driving a bigger shop or a more frequent shop.
We said last year we will grow customers and frequency across Food and Clothing & Home, drive the spine of the basket in food, and also reset our personalization, and that's where we briefly mentioned Loyalty and Sparks, and there's been some progress here and obviously much more to do. One year on, we've grown our customer base by 1.2 million customers, serving in the role in 12 months 32.4 million customers, over 63% of the U.K. population shop in M&S, but actually still when it comes to cross-shopping only 40% of our customers shop across clothing, home, and food, so I still think that's an opportunity. We've discussed the spine of the basket, and as you can see from the slide what's really good is some of those key categories, center of the plate categories like fruit and veg, protein. We've demonstrated good growth by quality and value investment.
And on Sparks, we have reset the program. Sharry is here today, who runs our Food marketing, but also has taken on the responsibility of loyalty. And Sharry can talk about this in the breakout. But we're in the very early days of resetting Sparks as a loyalty program, and I can touch on that shortly. Last year, when it comes to online and omnichannel, we said we would drive online participation towards 40%. We said we will improve and have a seamless omnichannel experience for our customers. And we also said we will drive M&S through Ocado Retail. And if you think about one year on, actually, we remain not even positively dissatisfied on all three of these areas. Let's start with online because pre the pandemic, our online participation in Clothing & Home was 22%. And of course, it's increased now to 33%.
And that has been an increase year on year. But the big challenge is we're not going fast enough in completely rethinking online. And the reason we say online is we're not really omnichannel. We're multichannel still. The journey to omnichannel requires something different to what we're doing today. So we still are sticking to our plan that 50% of our clothing, home, and beauty business will be online. But we know we've got a big job to do. And I'll touch on some of the opportunities, and Richard, no doubt, will build on this in some of the sessions today. The other thing on Ocado, we've increased the M&S participation on Ocado. 5,000 M&S products are now on Ocado. That's 30% of the basket week in and week out. And actually, in fresh categories, what's really encouraging is 50% of the fresh basket is M&S.
It's M&S products that's really growing the Ocado business and outperforming other brands. So that's good news. But of course, as a shareholder, as M&S, as a shareholder in Ocado, we want to see a route to profitable growth. And that isn't EBITDA. That's net profit growth. So we want to see that over the coming years. So of course, what's next in clothing, home, and beauty? The team have worked hard. And what I really do appreciate with Richard, Stephen, and they'll talk about this in the breakout sessions is we're very clear-eyed on the issues online. We know we've made progress, but we've got so much to do. Menswear in our stores, our Menswear market share is 12.7%. But online, it's 6.5%. We've got a lot to do in improving availability, running around today 89%.
We know we're behind when it comes to our proposition, our availability, our delivery service failures. And of course, as you will know in the room, you'll be asking the question, "What are you doing around your online margin at 7%?" Because if you're aiming for 10% Clothing & Home, what are you going to do to address the online margin? And we'll talk about that as well. But the good thing, we're absolutely clear-eyed and focused on our journey towards 50%. And we are really going to face into online and investing, especially in D&T this year, in driving that online performance and improving the proposition and availability and service to customers.
Alex came up with an idea that I was very suspicious about a year ago because he said, "We're going to put all of our products, the whole M&S range, on the M&S website." And I said, "Why?" And he said, "Because we want to give customers the opportunity to appraise the whole of the range, but also see the whole range, decide what to shop in advance, and also see if that range is in their local store." In fact, what I didn't realize, the little benefit of this program is I could go on it every day and start quizzing why the range is so different between our stores. So we have quite a lot of fun with this new system. But the good thing about this is it's given visibility to customers, given visibility of the whole M&S, fresh and ambient food range online.
On Ocado, like I said, we still think we've got a big job to do over the years ahead on Ocado. The cost base is high. We want to see a path to profitability, operating profit. And of course, from a shareholder perspective, we're not going to put more capital into that business until we see not just volume, but also some cost efficiencies coming through. On store rotation and store renewal, last year, we said we will accelerate the plan five years into three, I said. I then said we would drive the economics in renewals and improve our return on investment. I also said we would deliver asset management proceeds. One year on, the scores on the doors have been pretty mixed. The first thing, I was way too ambitious holding us up for the five years into three.
I don't really regret it because what's really happened is focused our mind, but the truth is we're still really five years in five. So we're on track for the 180 full-line stores. We're on track to the 420 food stores, but still by FY 2028. And the pace on this, Sacha, we would agree, has been slower than we would have liked, but we've got some renewed momentum in the last couple of months. We've announced 10 new stores because the key thing here is to make sure we have high-quality, high-productivity stores in the right location. And some of these stores we have in the pipeline, and there's 70 stores in the pipeline now, are not really just for the next one or two or three years. Some of these are for future years.
I can honestly tell you as well, we reject more stores than we say yes to because we have a rigorous process around capital allocation and investment when it comes to property and store rotation. It's about quality, not quantity. We'll meet the five-year plan, and there's a breakout session at coffee break with Sacha and Will on property and store renewal. The good news is the payback is better than we planned for. In renewals, the payback meets our hurdle rates. It's more encouraging when you look at these new stores, especially in years one, two, and three. We're very encouraged by the results. We do want to pick up the pace. We want to find new sites. We want to make sure by FY 2028 there isn't a store we're not proud of.
Of course, within the mix, we're also very focused on those one or two stores that aren't quite meeting the expectations. We're clear on the lessons learned, especially around cost management, wages, labor, wastage, etc. Every store we critique every week, every month, and we'll give you more insights in the breakout on this program. On disposal activity, it's slower than we would like. Will is now leading this, and we can talk about that in the breakout session as well. Of course, there's a lot going on in store rotation. It's one of our biggest programs. It's where a lot of our focus and our capital goes. If we think about the next 12 months, we've got a pipeline of 70 stores. We've got a strong balance sheet, and that gives us the flexibility to maximize any opportunities that come to us.
We continue to be very disciplined when it comes to lease lengths. But of course, we need to go faster. In fact, just yesterday morning, early morning, we had another review of the pipeline for the next five years. We will be really focused on store renewal, making sure it's the right capital allocation for every single store. By the end of this financial year, 25% of our stores will be new or renewed. And the performance in those stores is very good. But you just have to remember, and we see this when we talk to customers, 75% of our customers have not seen a new M&S store. Those that do talk about a very different experience. So we're very focused on driving that program. And we're feeling sort of a bit more positive when it comes to the asset disposal plan for the next 12 months.
Now, global growth is one of the other plans under this pillar. And last year, we touched on some of the challenges on International. But we still laid out a plan two years ago that said we will grow partner sales by more than GBP 500 million by FY 2028. We said we would drive omnichannel growth through capital-light franchise partnerships. And we said we would double the International profit by FY 2028. And Mark is in the room today and will be in the breakout sessions. Mark's just taken over as the MD of International. But this is red all the way through. Where we are with International, if you remove the Republic of Ireland, we've actually had eight years of zero growth. We've actually had eight years of zero growth in sales and profit.
And some of the things we've been unraveling in the past 12 months, and it really came to light for me when I traveled to meet all of our International partners, because the truth is there is no win-win partnership with our franchise partners. They take really all of the risk, and what we've been talking about with our franchise partners, who, by the way, are incredibly committed to M&S, who really want to have M&S in their portfolio, who are really committed to investing in M&S stores and online, but they just want us to be quicker, help them with their plans to accelerate growth, but also, what's very evident to me traveling, and this was 12 months ago, in food, we survive internationally in food by not selling a lot. Because we're way out of kilter on price.
The store that hits me is the store in Singapore where literally the turnover is so low, the shop looks immaculate because we just don't sell anything. And we're 30% more expensive than any other retailer because we're way out of kilter on value. Why? Because when we send goods to our International partners, cost price with a plus is where we make our margin. And then the International franchise partners price everything individually to make their margin. So there really isn't truly better value. And the value equation doesn't work, whether it's food or clothing. The other thing is the International partners just don't want to take a risk because the risk is all on them. So they buy safe, which is why when you go to many of our stores internationally, you'll see the same everyday range, year in, year out. So our franchise partners are excited.
They're looking at M&S as a growth opportunity, but we need to recontract with those partners, reset the expectations, be closer to our partners, quite frankly, because the days of the past of when I used to say to people, "Have you been to this market? Have you been to that market?" and people would come back and say, "Yes, my last trip was," and I say, "It wasn't a trip. It's part of the business. We have to completely rethink international." It's still capital-light. We have a couple of owned markets. That's under review, and we have a challenge in India with the JV. As you may recall, a year ago, I stopped really rolling out stores in India, and we put a foot on the brake.
We have quite an ambitious partner in Reliance in India who, of course, wants to open more stores, but we want to make sure we open the right stores in the right location, and they have to meet some kind of targets and hurdle rates. So we need to rethink the JV and rethink our International business. When it comes to online, we want to rethink the marketplace. So, of course, online profit is down. We've cleared the stock in India. We're through the worst part when it comes to the India JV of management of stock flow, but there's so much more to do. And I said to Mark when he took this role on six months ago, "Take your time. We need to do this in the right way for the long term." So we've got medium to long-term growth potential on International.
So we want to restore the competitiveness. We want to rebuild our franchise partnership models with our partners. We want it to be very, very capital-light. We want to really focus on clothing more than food, but we see food as an opportunity, especially in some markets in wholesaling food. A classic example is a couple of years ago, Brian, the CEO of Target, visited us and said, "Could we do something with M&S Food at Christmas in Target stores?" And we, of course, said yes. Yesterday, I received an email from a customer from the U.S. who wrote to me with all of these pictures and said, "We are so thrilled to have M&S product, but nothing's on the shelf. It's just these big displays. Can you please send them stock?" So I replied saying, "It's really brilliant to hear from our U.S. customers.
Thank you," copied Brian, the CEO, and said, "We'll make sure we fill up the shop very quickly." So I think there are some opportunities, but it shouldn't distract us on Food. Clothing is the big opportunity, and we can take questions on that throughout the day. Our next pillar is to deliver target operating margins. We set out a year ago the 4% in Food, the 10% in Clothing & Home, and of course, we increased that to greater than. We said last year we will take out GBP 400 million of structural cost reduction, more efficiencies in logistics in Clothing & Home in food, and we will simplify our Store Support Centre, and some of this is on track. Of course, some of it is still opportunities, so we're on track with our cost. We increased the ambition to GBP 500 million.
We're making good progress, 50% of the GBP 400 million delivered in the last 20 months. I think that's even more important now, especially considering some of the cost headwinds with National Insurance contribution, etc. If I'm honest, the thing that keeps me up at night is the question, are we restructuring our cost base permanently? That's something for the leadership team and I that still worries me. I think we're good at finding cost and taking out inefficiencies, but is it a restructured cost base? That's on the what's next. Our cost to serve in both our businesses has improved. Last year in Food, 4.2% from 4.8%. In Clothing & Home, 13.2% from 15.2% in FY 2022. In the Store Support Centre, in truth, we're quite hard when it comes to headcount management, but we aren't really restructuring the cost base in our Store Support Centre.
We still do have a culture where if there's more to do, we find a way of wanting more people to do it. And there are some big enablers of that. One is the investment in technology to help us be more efficient. Obviously, within the next few months, we would have finished the rollout of RELEX in food. That means we should have less people worrying about everyday supply chain forecasts, ordering, and allocation. And it might be that resource is then put into other areas of the food business where we're going to drive even more growth programs. In Clothing & Home, we're just at the very start. So we know, and Dan is here who leads all of our Clothing & Home planning systems, but we know we've got more to do to make this a more efficient cost base and more efficient Store Support Centre.
Of course, there's lots to do over the next 12 months. In Food, we've got a program called One Best Way. It's actually building on the previous programs of how we run our store operations, championed and led by Alex and Sacha jointly. In these stores, we're seeing much improved availability, stock accuracy, productivity. And we think that is a big win for us in the next 12 months. In D&T, we are very appreciative that Rachel has joined us. It's like night and day because now we have a plan. And the plan is a detailed plan laid out over the next three years. And the D&T plan has been embedded within the businesses. And Rachel will talk about this, but Rachel will also highlight the GBP 40 million opportunity in D&T.
Of course, in terms of culture, we still have to embed this high-performance culture in the Store Support Centre. To be honest, I always find it interesting. We do engagement surveys. I'm not a big fan of them because I think it's a tick-box exercise in many ways, but you get some richness of information that comes out. In stores, in the survey, people talk about customers, can you resolve availability, improve the heating, the refrigeration is breaking, the lights are going off, or whatever the operational issues are. In the Store Support Centre, it's normally about ways of working. Why do we have to come in on a Friday? We still have this element of self-entitlement in a few. It's not widespread, but there's much more to do in the Store Support Centre to put stores and customers at the heart of everything.
And there's much more to do for every single person to take clear accountability for the plan that we have in place. On supply chain, we said we will execute our investment plans to improve our end-to-end supply chain in Clothing & Home. We will develop long-term plans for a more efficient food logistics network. And if you look at the scores on the doors, the reason for us this is red is because we're at the very start of a multi-year transformation when it comes to supply chain. Our work has really only just begun in Clothing & Home, and Kevin, who runs logistics in Clothing & Home, is here today for the breakout sessions. But for Clothing & Home, we've done some good work, but we've only just started when it comes to implementing our planning platform, and that first module goes live in Q4.
In food, of course, we've acquired the logistics business, and we've integrated that very well. We've had the benefits of that integration, but actually, the hard work now starts because the hard work is rebuilding all of our network. So we have a higher productivity, less DCs in the right place, and we make sure that we have a better cost to serve over the medium and longer term in food supply chain. So in Clothing & Home, we have four omnichannel DCs, but we've got so much to do to get ahead and make sure we improve our customer proposition, especially when we're focusing online. In Food, so many of our stores are still served by the wrong DC. So this program in food is a 10-year program of change when it comes to our supply chain network. So it's pretty significant.
Finally, when we think about the M&S we need to be, building the M&S, which we focus very much around the culture, the data, technology, and the capital allocation, we said we want a culture that's closer to our customers, closer to our colleagues, and we want to raise the bar on talent. Everyone now has to do seven days a year working in a store. What's quite interesting when we get our engagement survey back is in the Store Support Centre, people still say, "Well, I don't really know what that means." What we really want is the Store Support Centre to be really on the ground, understanding how they can improve the experience for customers. How are we implementing our change programs, our transformation in our stores or online?
In fact, we now have a program that all new leaders who join our business work in a store for a whole month. And I've got to be honest, Rachel and the team in D&T have led the way on this. 24 new leaders in the last two years have all done a month in stores. Adam, who's just joined our public affairs, external affairs, a month in stores. Andrew in legal, a month in stores. Rachel and all her D&T leadership team have done a month in stores. But what's been more encouraging actually for Rachel and your team is in that store experience, every one of those leaders has already implemented an improvement based on their four weeks. And Sarah, our Chief People Officer, actually spent three months recently running a store.
She gets closer to our colleagues and helps us with those colleague debates around the leadership table. We're doing a lot around changing that closer to customer, closer to colleague culture. On talent, we're raising the bar, but we know we've got so much more to do. We still want to free up our store managers to serve, to sell, to feel, to be on the shop floor with our customers. We've reset a lot of our ways of working in the past few months. I've mentioned the Store Support Centre as well. On talent, we're doing a good job of attracting talent in M&S into our business. Actually, we've got to do an even better job at fast-tracking talent within the business and moving people across the organization. We think that's a bigger opportunity.
On D&T, we wanted to improve the app experience for our customers, use data to drive our decision-making, and really get behind personalization because we've been talking about personalization for the six years I've been here at M&S and invest in our core systems to improve efficiency and effectiveness across the whole of the organization. And there has been some progress, but still so much to do across D&T. When it comes to the app, we have improved that customer experience, better photography, really showcasing our style and value in a better way than 12 months ago. We have an easier checkout option now on the app specifically. But actually, our personalization is too limited to the very few. So we've got so much to do in how we collect the data, use the data, and deliver a more personal shopping experience that's relevant to you as a customer.
We're investing in D&T. Six months ago, or probably 12 months ago, we paused some of that spend to make sure we were crystal clear on what we were doing and what returns on that investment we were going to get over time. So this, for me, is we're at the very start of this. It's the clearest D&T plan I've seen in my time at M&S. And what's been positive about this is what Rachel has done with all of us as a leadership team. All of this change program has been mapped out over three years, like I said, and each of the ExCo leadership team know their part of the D&T plan, what's happening when, where the investment is going, and what returns on that investment we should be getting.
But I don't want us to get too carried away because, as I said to Rachel, you're six months in. It's not all on your shoulders. We've still got to fix Wi-Fi in every store across the country. So we've got to get some basics right before some of these other big transformation programs. And finally, on disciplined capital investment, we said we will focus on cash. We wanted to focus on having a strong balance sheet. We wanted to be ready to invest in growth and have a structural cost reduction program. And we wanted to achieve investment-grade credit rating. And there's been some good progress on this, progress on driving free cash flow, reducing our gross debt via bond buybacks.
We've made sure we've got a stronger balance sheet because we know we need to invest in our big strategies, our big transformation programs, store rotation, supply chain, digital, and technology investment, the three big things that we need to invest in. We're going to deliver over GBP 300 million of annual free cash flow. And when it comes to discipline on capital, we know our return on capital employed is improving 15% at the half year. And we are sharing our hurdle rates and our payback information with you on a regular basis. We know when it comes to investment-grade metrics, our friends in S&P have given us the upgrade last year. We're hoping for some good news from Moody's in the future. So what's next? Well, obviously, like I said, we need to continue the investment in our transformation. That is priority number one for our cash.
We've got a significant job to do in store rotation, a significant job to do in supply chain across both businesses, and a significant job to update our technology, invest in digital and data capabilities. We want to retain our investment-grade metrics, and we want to increase shareholder returns as the opportunities arise. As I said, first priority, invest in the transformation. Second priority, grow our dividend over time. And we'll consider other shareholder returns over time, but only under the right circumstances. So two years in, three years left. Our five-year ambition has been laid out: 1% growth in market share in food and in Clothing & Home. We laid out our greater than 4% target in food for operating margin, a greater than 10% in Clothing & Home.
GBP 400 million cost reduction, we increased to GBP 500 million, and we committed to be disciplined when it comes to our capital investments. In Food, as I've said, the market share growth has been 30 basis points, 80 basis points in clothing. We're on track. Again, some good news today on Kantar. We've got to deliver a good Christmas. In our operating margins, we've delivered our operating margins, but I don't want us to be obsessed with the percent. We are in this virtuous circle of investing in quality, investing in value, and that is driving the volume growth and driving more customers into M&S. It's the cash that we're focused on. The percent is the guardrail, the framework, but we should constantly invest in quality and value to drive the volume and to drive more customers shopping in M&S over the short, medium, and long term.
Our cost-out program is on track. Our returns are improving, and we're laser-focused on the capital and the returns we expect on each of our programs. So there's no big change in the targets we set out last year. I do want to. Jeremy will talk about this in his session, by the way. I do also, just as I close, want to say that actually we've got momentum. We want to build on that momentum, but we don't want to be just preoccupied with the short term. Of course, we've got to deliver a strong Christmas. I think we're on track to deliver a strong Christmas. But more importantly, we have to deliver the transformation program that we laid out two and a half years ago. And there's so much to do. And that means it's not down to just one person like myself.
In fact, we have a brilliant ExCo, but it's not just down to the leadership team on the screen. It's down to also the people in the room in the broader leadership team, but it has to be down to 65,000 people across the whole business, and our job is to drive that clarity so everybody knows the part they play in constantly improving M&S for the short, medium, and long term, so you'll meet a lot of the leadership team in the coffee break. Our food team, we have Catherine, who does all of our product development, Sharry, food marketing and loyalty, Nick in Gist supply chain, and Kara, who has just joined us as our Food Chief Commercial Officer, previously 15 years in Aldi.
In Clothing & Home, Richard will do a session this morning, but we've got the leadership team, Maddy, our director of Womenswear, Mitch on Menswear , Stephen online, Kevin and Danny, supply chain and merchandise planning. In the breakout, Sacha will be there with Will to talk about property and store rotation. Mark and Julie will be there for International to talk about what we're thinking about when it comes to our International reset, and we've got Victoria, Monique, and Andrew Clappen from food there to talk about our plans around ESG. In terms of the agenda, Alex will follow me. Alex has been our Food MD for two years. I would say he's got a harder job than I had because now we've got so much to do around processes, ways of working, and supply chain in food.
Richard, who's been with us now just over four years as our MD of Clothing & Home, Richard will take over, and then we will go to the coffee break and have a wider group discussion. Rachel, six months in after coffee, will talk about the D&T plan. And finally, the grand finale, the highlight, Jeremy's update. He doesn't get off doing his last CMD, and by the way, he doesn't escape until May next year. So he's on the hook. He has to present the results with me at the end of year. So Jeremy will talk to you about finance, capital allocation, etc. We will then go to Q&A with myself and the whole of the leadership team, but now I will hand over to Alex.
I'm Alex. I'm the MD of food here at M&S. This is my two-year anniversary in the business this week.
So looking forward to bringing you up to speed with what we've been up to in the past 12 months since I last stood on this stage, and also what's ahead, which is really about becoming that shopping list retailer as Stuart described it. So let me start by taking a look back. Our strategy firstly remains the same, as Stuart said, so to build a remarkable food business by protecting the magic and modernizing the rest. And the slide over to the right here is the slide that I showed you last year, which clarified our objectives in terms of market share and our operating margin. And as Stuart talked about, we're on track for those. And there's three blocks of activity or what I talked about last year.
And those blocks were really about product, about category transformation, and about leveraging fixed cost and fixing our backbone in our supply chain and our operating model. And in doing that, we'd seen last year the start of a virtuous circle, a virtuous circle really being driven by quality investments and value investments. We also talked last year about how M&S Food is unusual because in some ways we're like an FMCG company because we're product-focused and we're own label, and we're a retailer all rolled into one. So what's happened to that virtuous circle I talked about last year? Last year, I said it was the beginning. And here are the charts I showed you last year. So starting with quality perception, the gold bar there being M&S and the gray being the market, and value perception, the difference to the market here being the gold bar.
This is where it was when I stood on this stage last year. That had led to volume growth, and that had also led to market share. Let's just bring these charts up to date. On quality perception, as you can see, the growth has continued and the gap has widened further. We're now 16% higher than we were in 2018. On value perception, we're now 40%. It's grown by 40% versus 2018, and it's actually got steeper in the last 12 months. What that's meant is that the volume growth has continued. The outperformance versus the market is the gold-shaded area, and that's continued. The market share has continued to grow, so 3.8%. As you've heard this morning, Stuart mentioned it. Kantar has just announced that we've hit 4% for the first time ever outside of Christmas this morning.
So why do I just reemphasize this? It's because it is the investments in quality, the investments in value that are leading to the volume growth. And that's not just leading to market share growth. It's also feeding our fixed cost leverage, which is driving the operating margin to shareholders. And also, we don't point it out here in order as Kantar, but those numbers don't include Ocado. And we are driving Ocado's sales and volume growth in the last 12 months. So why have we grown and what have we been up to in the last 12 months? So a few things. Let me start on product. And we talk about the spine of the basket. And the spine of the basket is the areas like fresh produce, meat, fresh poultry, seafood, bakery.
We've worked very, very hard to make the spine of the basket in M&S more relevant to more customers. So by the end of this year, we'll have delivered 1,500 new product launches and 1,000 quality upgrades. And across the spine, there's been a lot of activity and also across the rest of the store. And let me explain about what that means. So the spine, let me start with that. This has not been a traditional area of strength for M&S. So M&S Food, the real heartland areas of strength traditionally have been dinner for tonight, so ready meals, and lunch, so food on the move, sandwiches and wraps, and so on. The spine, so fresh meat, fresh produce, bakery and seafood, and dairy, very, very important to customers, but not traditionally areas of strength for us. So what have we done? So we've really focused on availability.
We've focused on value, so very, very strong investments in remarkable value in this area. And we've made our quality better. So just one of many quality examples, we've recently upgraded all of our fresh pork. So our fresh pork is now Heritage Gold pork standard. So it's a different breed of pork than we've had previously. And that means pork has now joined Oakham Gold Chicken and our DNA traceable beef as examples where we lead the whole market on quality. And in bakery, our 30-hour sourdough goes from strength to strength. And we've recently upgraded our cookies, very important family line for customers. And we've more than doubled the volume of our cookies since we upgraded that product. And in produce, we've focused on unique varieties and best-in-season quality, which has driven growth. And that has played through into growth, as you see here.
So 5.3% growth in bakery and market share up there by 65 basis points, meat, fish, and poultry, and produce also with strong growth there and market share gains as well. Onto those heartland areas. Now, last year, I talked about the heartland as being areas that we had strength in, but we could not neglect because these areas are ready meals, dinner for tonight, the famous Dine-Ins, sandwiches, and lunch. These are areas that the competitors always try and copy us on. They try and copy us so quickly as soon as we do an innovation. So we have to defend and constantly innovate in this area. So what have we done in the last 12 months? So we've upgraded our quality. So our quality has been upgraded across our sandwich range.
As Stuart mentioned, our iconic gastro pub range, Indian meals range, and pizzas that I'll come on to. And we've also launched lots of new Dine-Ins to the market, which have broken records. So even though we've got a high market share in this area, we've also managed to grow. So meals, 2.2% with a market share gain and food on the move in a market which has been quite flat, actually. We've seen really encouraging growth. And our meals share, I should say, is actually 13%. So that's growth on a big baseline there. So we're well positioned, but we cannot be complacent because the market constantly tries to copy us. And what about the family basket? So this is areas outside of the spine, outside of those heartland categories, the family basket.
And in here, we've really focused on increasing credibility by closing our range gaps in categories and areas customers and families in particular have said that we're missing. So some examples on the screen here. So we've launched family shampoo and shower gel. In confectionery, we had a big category already, but we didn't have family block chocolate. So we've launched that. In areas like pasta sauce, we didn't have a jarred Bolognese sauce. So we've launched that. And in ice cream, though, we had a good range. We didn't have those kind of family favorite on the sofa watching Netflix type ice cream. So we've launched those. And accordingly, we've seen some encouraging progress here too. So in grocery, we've grown by 10.7%, frozen 9.5%, and home and personal care 10.2%. But the upside here in these categories for us is huge because the gains have been encouraging.
Our market share in grocery is 2.2%. In frozen, it's 1.4%. And in personal care, it's 0.8%. So we've made progress. We are absolutely positively dissatisfied with an awful lot more to do in these categories. So that's a bit of a look back and kind of what we've done. So what is the look ahead? And Stuart talked about this earlier on. So this is the phrase we use about being a shopping list retailer. Let me have a look at this. So it sounds simple, but what does it really mean? And it means a transformation. And it means that because customers trust and love this brand, but what they say to us in customer groups, and they always say this: they're not always confident that we'll stock what they need for a shopping list.
Being a shopping list retailer means being trusted for so many things. But to go through them, it means being trusted that we have the product you want. We have it at the price you want. We have it at the quality you want and the pack size you want. And we have it in your local store ranged, and it's on the shelf when you choose to go shopping with us. And those are not things that M&S has been famous for historically. That's really what if we get to that place, that's a true transformation. How do we get there? Well, actually, it means changing everything, which is why we talk about modernizing the rest. It really means transforming everything.
So it means transforming how we land our innovation, how we deliver new products, how our supplier partnerships work, how our Gist network moves and delivers stock to our stores, and also means how our stores operate, particularly in how they manage stock accuracy. And if we transform all of that, what does it mean for customers and shareholders? Well, it's quite logical. It means there's even more products customers love. We'll have lower cost of goods and secure future supply, reduced cost to serve with a supply chain that can really enable our growth and improved on-shelf availability. So this is the meat of the discussion in food. So let me talk about all of that stuff. So the first thing to talk about is this program we call Winning Choices.
Winning Choices is really about delivering products customers love, but it's doing it in quite a different way. This time last year, we had just launched this program. What is Winning Choices? It's a calendar and detailed process about how we bring products to market. It's really the FMCG part of our business in food. It's a 48-week process. It involves agile teams to find customer problems and agreed targets. It's multiple gates and no-goes. We agree supplier strategy, quality, packaging, ingredients, cost of goods, price, store distribution. We bring everyone together in the business. Product developers, technical managers, buyers, suppliers, marketing, retail, supply chain working together on the same problem. What it means is we're defining the problems better, and we're finding that we're more likely to succeed.
I'll come on to some of the categories that have been through this process in a moment. But from a store and customer perspective, it means a far smoother set of activity through the year. So if I show you, this is 2023, and each of these numbers here represents an activity we landed as food into our stores. So a range change, a range review, a set of product launches if you like. And no surprise, our heritage is as a fashion retailer, of course. So in food, traditionally, we've launched lots of innovation in spring and in autumn and at Christmas. And lots of innovation customers love, by the way. But what we discovered with this process was actually it was too much at once. It was too much at once for our customers because actually they were confused because we were moving the stores around constantly.
Not good if you're coming with a shopping list. It was too much for our stores because the amount of change was overwhelming in these periods, and also it was very difficult for our suppliers and very difficult for our supply chain, so Winning Choices has allowed us to smooth the activity, so this is the shape for next year. I'm already living this now, I should say, but this just shows you what next year looks like, and the pale bars is the 2023 shape, and the darker bars the shape for 2025, so a much smoother activity. Now, this doesn't mean there's less newness or less innovation launching because each of these is actually very big, so in July, for example, where it says number two, we did this in the year just gone as well. That was a complete transformation of our confectionery category.
So a massive change for customers and for stores and great innovation. So we're not reducing the change. We're just making it smoother and more easy to manage. And a few categories have been through this program already. So here's some of the results behind me. And this feels like a weather map now. I've got to explain to you. So if I start with confectionery over here, so confectionery, a big category for us. So that was growing at 11% before we put it through this process. And it's now growing at 38%. And that really is because we solved those family problems that families said we weren't solving for them. Gastropub, we've done recently over here. So Gastropub, actually the biggest brand in M&S Food. We were very dissatisfied with this because Gastropub was declining. It was actually flat to declining most of the time.
So we've upgraded every product in that range. We've partnered with Tom Kerridge. We've ripped the whole thing apart and started again. And we're now growing at 42%. And the last one is pizza, which I'll talk about more in a moment. So pizza, again, very dissatisfied. The market had largely copied everything we'd done in this area. We were declining. We've reset that category through Winning Choices, and we're now growing at 17%. I'll talk a bit about suppliers now because none of this is possible without suppliers. So I'll come back to that pizza example in a moment to explain this. But the supply base is a real opportunity and a real focus for us. So the supply base in the U.K., and I talked a bit about this last year, has faced so many headwinds in the last few years.
So, energy prices, labor shortages, commodity inflation, loss of markets from Brexit, avian flu last year as well. And also, having been away from the U.K., I worked overseas for 13 years. The supply base is underinvested now. It's got reduced capacity and reduced capacity to innovate compared to what it had 15 years ago. And also, on top of all of that, we're giving them volume growth, from our point of view, unprecedented volume growth, which is putting more strain on the whole system. So, our answer in part to that problem is what we call our Fortress Factory program. So, a year ago, we just announced this when I stood on this stage. And what are Fortress Factories? So, these are our largest factories that give us specialized capabilities and supply us solely or nearly solely. And these are big facilities.
These include our biggest sandwich maker, our biggest cake factory, and our biggest ready meals factories, for example. We estimate about a third of our volume is what we call strategic that we really need to have under these Fortress-type arrangements. By FY 2028, we want a third of our volume under these Fortress arrangements. Where are we today? We have five today, but these are big factories that I talked about. These are big suppliers. We tend to have nine by FY 2025. We want to get up to 25% in FY 2026 and then up to a third beyond that. Now, these don't just secure for us supply. They also give us actually more commerciality because these Fortress arrangements are based on commodity pass-through models and also a recapture of fixed cost leverage that we get passed back from the suppliers as we grow volume.
But actually, more importantly than all of that, what it's done for the suppliers is it's creating an environment for capacity and capability investment that they didn't have before. As I talked about, the capability to innovate in this market is not what it was 15 years ago. So through these long-term commitments, we're creating the ability for these suppliers to invest. Now, here's an example on the screen now, which is our pizza factory. So you saw the results from our pizza reset. So in pizzas, we set the ambition to have the best pizzas in the market, as you would expect, because we're Marks & Spencer. Now, to have the best pizzas in the market, we needed to upgrade our bases. So we sent our team to Naples to work with chefs in Naples to work out how Italians actually make their bases.
Proper Italian bases are airy. They'll have a light open texture and a stunning leopard spot finish, as it's called, with that kind of crispy crust. Now, to achieve this means we had to ferment our bases using an Italian biga and a proper Italian resting fermentation process. All great in the kitchen, but that means a completely different production process, completely different than this factory was designed to do. So given we had a long-term program with the supplier because this is Winning Choices, we had 47 weeks to work with them, and we were willing to sign a long-term commitment, which we did. The supplier rebuilt a lot of this factory to enable these bases to be made. So as a result of this, we've got a better factory. We've got the best products in the market, which others will find very hard to replicate.
And because we signed a long-term commitment, not only did the supplier invest, but our cost of goods has gone down. So we're buying them more cheaply than we were before, and it's a far superior product. So this is Winning Choices in action. So what about the network? So we talked a bit about Gist already, and Stuart talked about it. So this is our Gist network today across the U.K. and Ireland. Every one of these dots represents a distribution center in Gist. There's 22 in total. And we acquired the business two years ago, and we were aiming for GBP 50 million of cost savings annualized by FY 2028. As you've seen in FY 2023, we took out GBP 29 million and FY 2024, GBP 77 million. So the good news on that is we're ahead of the business case, and we're expecting to pay back that investment within four years.
But the big question and the hard work is, what do we do next? So this network of DCs has to support this network of stores. And there's more than 1,000 stores in the U.K. and Ireland that Gist delivers to every day. And it delivers to them twice a day, sometimes three times a day. And the estate is aging. So it's 48 years old on average, the Gist estate. And it's nearly all fully manual. So it's not efficient compared to what it could be. And it's not efficient for stores because it can't deliver to stores in a way that makes picking in store easy. So these are all our stores. If I just highlight these stores here in red, these are all the stores in Great Britain that are delivered from what we would call the wrong DC.
So they're delivered from a Gist DC, but they're not delivered to from a Gist DC, which is their closest DC. So in essence, we're already operating this network inefficiently because of our growth. We're having to move product around the country in a way that's not the most productive. So we have to take steps on the future of the Gist network. So we've started already. We've started consolidating products from the EU differently. We now have an EU consolidation hub in Zeebrugge. So we don't store EU-based products in the U.K. anymore, which has freed up capacity. We're already consolidating some of our capacity in Scotland from four DCs to three. And we're working really hard culturally with tactical changes to make our existing sites more productive.
But the next step now is to finalize our plan for the future, which will be a 10-year journey, as Stuart talked about, and work is underway on that. Now, on shelf availability, all of the stuff I've talked about, landing innovation in a more measured, more reliable way, working with suppliers under fortress agreements and a modernized Gist network, that all helps shelf availability. But there's one other piece that we need to fix as well, which is the way the stores handle stock. And this is where One Best Way comes in. Now, One Best Way is a massive change for stores, an absolutely massive change for our stores. It changes completely the way our shops fill, count, and manage stock in store. And the reason it's so important to change it is because we need to get our stock file accuracy better. Why is that important?
And when I say stock file accuracy, I mean what the system thinks is in the store versus what is actually in the store. And that is so important because, like any database system, poor data in means poor data out. If the store doesn't have what the system thinks it does, the system can't forecast accurately. So the One Best Way program rewrites and relaunches how we manage stock in store. And here's some of our colleagues here working the process behind me. It's a capital light. It's almost capital zero, in fact, this program, because it's about culture and process. But it's also we have to go slow because embedding culture changes is difficult. So we've started this One Best Way rollout in Leeds. It's now live across the north division in M&S, and it's going live in the east and west divisions in January.
We don't have a south division, by the way. We have north, east, and west. So we're live in about a third of the country, and the rest to go live from January. And it also helps us enable FOA, our forecasting, ordering, and allocation system. And we call it FOA. It's based on RELEX, which is a Finnish-based software company. And the FOA investment has been about GBP 30 million. It's 95% complete now to date. It's on time. It's on budget. And why is it important? It's because it employs modern data science and machine learning in our forecasting. Our old system, for example, couldn't respond to changes in demand at item store level, whereas FOA can. But it really, really needs quality data. It needs accurate stock holding in store to work most effectively. So let me talk about stock file accuracy.
Now, this is a very big chart, which I'll explain briefly. So the way we measure stock file accuracy is there's a measure in the industry called stock file error, which basically compares over time all the little adjustments that happen in the stock file that stores change when they're counting stock versus what the actual stock is. So it's got a harsh number. It's a gross number of all the ins and outs added together over what the stock file, what the stock actually is in the store when you come to stock take. Industry leading, and we've benchmarked this with external help, is about 20% on this measure, 20%. So where were we when we started measuring this? We were up here at 35%. So we've been focused on this across the country, and we've got better at it over time. So this is the shape of it.
The reason it kind of peaks and troughs slightly, those are stock take events, by the way. We've got better over time, but still quite a long way away from the market benchmark. Now, we started this program in Leeds, One Best Way. I bring Leeds up now because it's got the most data because we've been doing this for the longest. Here's what's happened in Leeds. Leeds is on One Best Way, and this, better than anything else, shows you the value of that program. Because the stock file accuracy is better in Leeds, it has better availability, lower waste, happier customers, and higher volume growth. That's why we're so focused on One Best Way from a store perspective. It's the last kind of big piece of the puzzle we have to land as well to be a shopping list retailer.
Okay, so that's my presentation. So in summary, as I said, our strategy and financial targets remain the same. We've got encouraging momentum, but an awful lot to do. So we have much further to go still, investing in quality and in value. And we are going to be relentlessly focused on availability, not just day to day, but through these big transformation programs. And we have a lot of work to do to future-proof both our supplier base and our network capacity in Gist. And doing all of that is what leads us to become that shopping list retailer we're aiming for. So next up is Richard on Clothing and Home. But before he steps up, let's watch a short film about the progress in Clothing & Home. Thanks very much.
Good morning, all. You do not know how unusual it is for me to wear a tie.
I thought it would bring back some memories for you guys. I thought, so it's really interesting. I just checked with Mitch. Our tie sales for the last 10 weeks are 18% up on the year. That's the first time we've had tie growth since pre-COVID. Maybe there's a headline for tomorrow. Maybe the tie is back. This morning, I just want to update you on where we are on our transformation journey, the progress we've made so far, and obviously, more importantly, where there is still much more to do. We'll outline some of the opportunities for growth across our categories and through our omnichannel and how we're making structural changes to deliver this across our end-to-end supply chain. Our strategy remains the same. It's to be the most trusted, convenient, and most personal Clothing & Home retailer.
As Stuart outlined, to deliver 1% market share and margins of over 10%. And the good news is we're on track for this. You saw earlier the first half results. We have 80 basis points of growth from a market share perspective, and our margin at the half was at 12%. So we're on track. But we still have massive opportunities still, and I'll come on to that in a second. So a year ago, we spoke about what had changed in Clothing & Home at M&S. We got real clarity of who our customer is. We call them the Modern Mainstream. That still remains. We talked about the team. I believe I've got the best team in the business. Most of them are sat at the back. I don't tell them that often enough, probably. But we've promoted from within, and we brought in external talent into the business.
And if anything, I think that team's got stronger, and we've built on that team. So that still is a real positive. And we are obsessed with product. Our focus on style, engineering in quality, and offering great value for money will always be in all of our DNAs. And I've got massive confidence that every member of my team believes that. And the good news is customers are really starting to notice this. And we have been number one for quality and value for quite some time, and we've been obsessed with improving our star perceptions. I think the really great news is along the way, our quality and value has really strengthened. So not only are we still number one, but we've really strengthened that position. And our star perception has gone up by an incredible eight points over the last couple of years.
And we've gone from number six in the market to hovering around two and three, depending on which month you read it. And our full price market share and remember, we are obsessed with full price. We've removed mass discounting from this business, and our full price sell-through is a significant target for us. But our full price has increased in share by two and a half points since pre-COVID. And that product obsession, we are obsessed, whether it's modernizing fits, focusing on our fabrics and materials, getting closer to the market, being more on trend, and building our style credentials through our collaborations. And I'm particularly proud of the Bella Freud collaboration that we've just done through Womenswear. I think in particular because Bella was so delighted to be working with M&S. I mean, we were pretty delighted to be working with her.
And we bought a fairly confident amount on that, and it sold out in a morning. We were just blown away. So that was a real success story. And last year, we identified key growth opportunities in our heartland categories. We said that we would sustain our leading Womenswear and would strengthen lingerie. And you can see here our starting positions on last year. So we've delivered sales growth across both, but there is still loads more to do. We've seen really strong gains in denim, where we're really ahead of the market. I think we've got about a 17% market share here in knitwear and in tops, all up by over 100 basis points. But there is more to do. In footwear, we've talked about this being a real focus.
We are a little bit dissatisfied with our footwear progress, but we're starting to see some real green shoots now. And we have every confidence as we move into 2025 that our footwear business will really start to grow. We've seen fantastic growth in jewelry and accessories, and we think footwear is next. In lingerie, we've really focused on value. Our GBP 10 bra has really resonated, and our share has gone up 200 basis points to almost 40% in bras. But again, sleepwear, we again are disappointed with our sleepwear performance. And we've recently, talking about the team, recruited a new business unit director, Charlotte Davies, who's come from Hunkemöller, and a new head of buying, Heidi, who's joined us from Primark. And both have come in and said, "We're going to fix that sleepwear." So really excited about that opportunity.
Turning to Menswear and Kidswear, this was our position last year. We said we would drive to number one in Menswear, and we highlighted the growth opportunity in kids, and Stuart confirmed that again this morning. In men's, we had a real focus on formal. We were very disappointed with how we'd let our formal business slip, and Mitch and the team have really focused on this, particularly online. And our formal business is up by 1.6% market share, and there's still more to go here, and we've seen incredible performance in Autograph in Menswear, and this has really come through in market share. But again, more to do, particularly in our essentials business, where we have high share, but we know there's more, and again, in footwear. In Kidswear, the Kidswear market is really tough at the moment. We're really seeing the changing dynamic.
It's definitely, definitely a big focus for us, but we can see the headwinds in the market as a whole, but we have achieved our highest ever market share in kids. We've got strong schoolwear growth at plus 2%, but our opportunity remains in daywear. The market is a really interesting one in Kidswear. We are seeing definitely, definitely the value players being more successful. We know that we have to focus more on value, and we will fix that, and as Stuart said, we've got a session to talk about that this afternoon. We're also seeing an increase in resale affecting the Kidswear market, so we know that this market is tough, but we also know that that's where our share opportunity is. Our partner brands business goes from strength to strength. We've got sales growth of over 40% so far, and we expect to outturn over GBP 200 million.
The conversations we're having now and the quality of brands that we're in discussion with has gone from strength to strength, and we're really excited about the brands that are coming over the next weeks and months. But we're investing here. We're investing in our systems and our onboarding process. We have to make ourselves easier to work with for our partner brands. And then finally, Home and Beauty. I make no apologies that since coming back to this business, we started with a focus on clothing. We had to change the perceptions, and we had to fix our clothing business. But now we recognize that Home and Beauty represent a huge opportunity, and we are starting to get some traction in home, particularly in our core business.
As Stuart said, we exited bulky furniture in the last year, and now we're refocusing all of our efforts, all of our space, and all of our teams on really driving our core departments like bedding and bath and home accessories and kitchens. And again, we are seeing some green shoots. We've launched a couple of bold collaborations here with Kelly Hoppen and The National Gallery, both of which have resonated really well with our customers and much to build on. On beauty, again, good growth, but in a growth market. We've seen some success, particularly in our own label, Beauty. Our own label, skincare and perfumes, have resonated well, and we've had some fantastic social media coverage. But we know there is much, much more to do. We have launched Clinique and Estée Lauder over the last year.
We're in advanced conversations with some really, really exciting brands that will strengthen our offer even more in the beauty area. Now I'm going to talk to omnichannel. As Stuart said, a large part of our growth and our market share opportunity is online. Our online has moved. Our online percentage participation has moved from 22% pre-COVID to over 33%. This is a good achievement, but we know there is much more to do, as Stuart outlined. We anticipate a GBP 2 billion business online by full year 2028. Our objectives are to bring in a new generation of customers, to offer curated, compelling products that keep customers coming back and give them no reason to shop elsewhere, and to create a seamless, personalized shopping experience to ensure that they come back to us time and time again.
Our half one gains are really encouraging, and we do see fantastic progress, but we remain positively dissatisfied, and we know there is much more to do. I'm going to talk you through three key areas for growth. Attracting a new generation of customers. We've really shifted our focus from a media strategy to a much more always-on brand and social media process, and we're reshaping the perceptions of M&S through this. We're adopting a more agile, innovative approach. Our next tranche of customer is this 35 to 50-year-old fashion-led occasional shopper that we have identified. Internally, we call them the Subtle Stylists, but they want more choice. They want a mixture of third-party brands and own label, and they definitely want an elevated look and feel. The results so far have been really, really encouraging. We've seen an overall frequency of 11% increase from our existing customers.
We've seen 7% growth in new customers in the last year, and the exciting thing is the average age of these new customers is five years younger, based on recent testing. So really encouraging signs, and I want to just show you a short video which just highlights quite a simple but really great example of how social media is driving this perception change.
Hello, everyone. I'm Mark. Hold up, hold up. Why don't you sit there? This bit doesn't work otherwise. What do you mean? Hello, I'm Spencer. And together we are. Mark and Spencer. Now I get it. Mark and Spencer. For Marks & Spencer. It's the brand takeover partnership, whatever you want to call it, that you didn't know you needed, but now it's here. What you do need to know is that you will now look no further than M&S.
Because we wear it well, we chose it well, and this is for you. Prepare for your head to spin clean off your body when you see all of the clothes that we have to show you. Since the day I met you, I've been thinking, we should do an M&S campaign. Makes sense. And here we are. Enjoy.
So really simple, but we love that. And the reaction that we've had, and we're really seeing Autograph in particular, which the guys were wearing, resonate with young customers. That video had 2.5 million views almost overnight, 25,000 clicks through to our website, and was trending massively across all the social media channels. So really exciting. And there is more to come from the pair of them. So once we've got the customers to our site, the challenge is keeping them.
This means improving the way we work and our processes. We know that our size availability has not been good enough. One thing we have seen is new customers have bought a new size ratio, and they have demanded more smaller sizes. In Womenswear, for example, on our campaign lines, on sizes six to 12, we've seen an 8% increase since 2002. We've probably been a little bit slow to get after that. We also have to give customers no reason to shop elsewhere. This is where the role of partner brands come in. We've added 72 brands over the last year. As I said, we've got loads of exciting brands lined up for the next few months. Once a customer has bought brands, they typically spend about 10% more with M&S in the following 12 months as we become more relevant to them.
But again, opportunities for improvement, our Womenswear availability, partly driven by the popularity of our product, has been lower than we would have liked, around 86%. And we know there's much more work to do here. The experience and the delivery proposition has to improve. We are dissatisfied with this. We want to retain customers through engaging, personal, easy ways to shop. We've done a huge amount of work on our user experience over the last six months, investing in elevated imagery, particularly in Womenswear, but now we're starting to follow suit in other categories. And this has really started to work well. In our latest autumn campaign, our weekly sales were up 77% online. And this, we believe, was just driven by fantastic product, but also much improved imagery.
Personalizing our homepages so that you arrive on the product you expect to see, this has delivered a 5% higher click rate. And we're also moving to having delivery date availability, which will allow customers to see exactly by product when their product is going to be available. Again, we do have some challenges. We are out of delivery proposition far too often, and our customer failure rate is higher than we would like. And there is much more work to do here. And I'll come on to what we're doing within our logistics and supply chain to fix some of this. So the growth we've delivered in half one is just a start. And our end-to-end supply chain is going to be transformational in building on that.
Over the next 10 minutes, I just want to outline the plans to revolutionize and move forward how we bring our products to market and consistently deliver that great offer to customers. We are reshaping our supply chain for growth. We're moving from outdated systems with limited flexibility and efficiency to a fully integrated system delivering seamless range planning and factory-to-customer flows. From tactical sourcing, driving up costs and not allowing us to leverage our scale and reducing our supply chain resilience, to strategic sourcing where we have strong partnerships focused on supply capability and trusted relationships, again, reducing our costs. From an uncompetitive end-to-end logistics, reducing profitability to an efficient omnichannel network which flows stock rather than holds stock.
This will deliver better customer availability and much more targeted assortment, a lower cost of goods, allowing us to reinvest in quality and value, and a reduced cost to serve, particularly online where we know we've got to improve our profitability. But before we talk to this, I'll just give you a flavor of where we are with our current systems. So in the 2000s, we moved from a full-service vendor business to one where we source direct. And our systems didn't move with that decision, which led to separate applications for design, sourcing, and order planning. We're disconnected across planning, design, sourcing, forecasting, and ordering. And this leads to massive duplication of tasks for the teams. Our range planning is separate from our sales and our stock planning. Our range planner is outdated. I think it's about 20 years old. It's not fit for purpose.
It still treats online like a large store. We are not omni. Our stock and intake planning is separate, and we can't track materials and commitment and our production plans in the way that we need to. In forecasting, ordering, replenishment, these are all systems that are separate, and there is much more to do. We're a year into this transformational process. In the coming years, we will definitely bring these capabilities together into a single integrated planning platform. Our new planning platform, which is a GBP 80 million investment, will change the way our teams work so we can implement it progressively in a modular way. We're implementing an off-the-shelf, we believe, best-in-class solution.
One of the things that's really important, in the past, we've really customized and tailored systems that we've bought and introduced into M&S because we think we have a unique way of working. This time, we are adopting best-in-practice systems and processes, and we will change how we work to make sure that we are truly moving in a different direction this time. I honestly believe, and the teams believe, this will be a game changer, enabling us to drive better availability, a significant improvement in our customer assortment, particularly tailored to individual stores and, more importantly, channels. It will reduce unproductive stock, and it really will leverage our scale. In the meantime, we're not waiting for these new systems to arrive. We have a system called Blue Yonder, which is our allocation and replenishment system, which we don't fully utilize.
And we are now utilizing that in a much more efficient way. And we are acting now to make sure that we can improve our availability further. So we're using this existing engine to improve our availability by shifting from manual stock allocation to a systems-driven replenishment model. We're already seeing this driving sales and stock efficiency in a number of our departments, and we'll roll this out in early 2025 to most of our core areas. And Rachel will talk a little bit more about this later. The next part of end-to-end is lowering the cost of goods. I spoke last year about our strategic supplier relationships and how we were moving from tactical to strategic, reducing our costs by GBP 30 million. We're reducing the number of our tier one suppliers and giving partners more business in a single category.
We did this first in denim, where we moved our men's, our women's, and our kids' denim into the same suppliers. And we've now added a further nine categories, and we're seeing fantastic efficiencies from this. We're consolidating our fabrics across categories. Last year, we introduced core areas like poplin and Oxfords. And this year, we're moving that into a much broader list of fabrics, reducing the number of mills, reducing the costs, and enabling better material traceability, which is super important as we move forward with our ESG agenda. So we set out with an ambition to reduce our number of suppliers down from 200 to 120, and we're already down to 135, so good progress. And with our tier two suppliers from 1,040 to 750, and we're already well on track with that.
We expect further savings of another GBP 28 million in 2024, 2025, and we're slightly ahead of our initial targets, which is really helpful. We are seeing higher labor costs and challenges from a currency perspective, so this will really enable us to offset those. And as we implement the planning platform, we expect to see further savings as we get much greater visibility of customer demand. And through fabric and factory commitments, it will enable us to trade much more agile. So I'm now just going to show you one of our strategic suppliers. So on your screen, you can see this is one of our suppliers in Sri Lanka. We chose this particular supplier because of their world-class capabilities. It's an eco factory. They've become a real strategic partner for our schoolwear business, and they are giving us world-class product development, innovation, and manufacturing.
They've partnered with us on capacity planning and driving operational efficiency so we can, as Stuart said earlier, hold and maintain our schoolwear prices and grow our market share. Then finally, reducing our cost to serve. Mark spoke to you last year about our ambition to move from a network which holds stock to one which flows stock. We set out an ambition to save over GBP 50 million through this process. We've had modular investments in capacity and automation in Castle Donington, in our Bradford DC, and in Swindon. This will increase our online capacity by over 65%, as well as making us more efficient. This is an investment of over GBP 120 million, but these are critical in our plans to deliver our online margin north of 10%.
I was actually in Swindon with Kevin just a couple of weeks ago, and really exciting and fantastic to see all of the robotics and the automation already being implemented, and that will start to go live early in the new year, and Mark also outlined the work to unlock capacity in our existing operations through low-cost omnichannel capabilities. It would allow us to rationalize our network and reduce lead times. We used to have what we called a single point of failure in Donington. We now fulfill our e-com business from four sites. We've recently lit up Stoke and Ollerton, and Ollerton is really important because that's our returns warehouse, so now we can dispatch our returns much quicker and much more efficiently, not only utilizing the stock more efficiently, but also getting customer refunds back much, much quicker.
In terms of cost savings, overall, we're slightly ahead of plan. We had to rephase some of our hanging garment consolidation into Castle Donington, but everything else overall is on track. So just to recap before I finish, our overall strategy and financial targets remain the same, and we are reshaping the business for growth. As I said at the start, we have made good progress through market share and through margin. And we've actually delivered 47 consecutive periods where we've grown ahead of the market, according to Kantar. So really, really delighted with the progress so far, but lots more to do. We'll continue our obsession around product, whether that's our quality, our value, and continue to push on style. We've outlined categories that we still see significant share growth across clothing, home, and beauty.
Our omnichannel is critically important, building towards that target of GBP 2 billion of sales through improving our online offer, our customer experience, and our delivery proposition. I'm making structural changes to our end-to-end supply chain, increasing availability, reducing our cost to goods, and lowering our end-to-end cost to serve. So we have achieved a lot over the last few years, but as you've heard today, there is lots more to go after. So thank you.
So I spent my month in store in Leeds. And the learning for me was we're landing lots of newness in September and October. We need to do a better job of being able to smooth that out and to make sure that we can support stores and customers during that process.
One of the best things that I was able to do in store was to work on the till in the bank holiday weekend in August and actually ask customers, "Was there anything you couldn't find today? Is there anything that we don't sell that you need for your family basket?" And that gave me extraordinary insight into where our opportunities are. And the lines that we're putting in week on week, our new products are really aiming to close those gaps. I followed some of the colleagues on a Monday morning as they looked at the weekend reporting, and there was a lot of reports. And we need to make their lives easier, simpler, more data-driven. We're looking at how we can create an AI assistant that's in all the store colleagues' pocket, that's telling them what they need to know when they need to know it.
One of the things which really struck me was we're obviously synonymous with quality and value, but we have such a massive opportunity in terms of driving style. We're going to be doing that by targeting the newest trends, integrating and implementing feedback from our customers and store teams. From listening to stores and experiencing what our customers are experiencing, we have an opportunity to develop a passion for our processes that our stores can deliver every day and removing all of the barriers, and into peak, we'll be doing that more than we've ever done before. The support center is there to support our stores. We need to listen, and we need to respond. For me, sort of spending that time a month was a great opportunity, but actually, how do we live and breathe that every single week?
It is crucial that we really work shoulder to shoulder, understanding what our colleagues in stores have to deal with day in and day out to serve our customers. If we're out in stores, we can understand those opportunities to make that easier. I felt like I was in the midst of the M&S magic, and I'm better in my job because of that experience.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Rachel Higham, and I'm delighted to be here. I joined the business four and a half months ago. It might feel like six to Stuart. We've been talking a lot about D&T, but I'm here to build the new digital and technology organization that M&S needs to reshape for growth. I've spent the last 25 years building high-performing tech teams in great brands such as HSBC, Chubb, BT, and WPP, all in service of driving growth.
Now, the reason we showed that video on culture is that we've welcomed lots of fabulous new joiners and talent into our business recently. And they're bringing in a really important new perspective on our products, our ways of working, and our culture. The four weeks I spent in store were incredibly valuable. They gave me great insight into the lived experience of our colleagues and customers as they interact with our technology. And it was very, very clear the job we have to do now in D&T. I'll share that plan in a moment, but first of all, Stuart's asked me to share some joining reflections. Now, 17 years ago, I was launching products into stores for a small financial services company called M&S Bank. The business I've joined today is very, very different from that one of 2007.
The wonderful passion for customers and colleagues is absolutely still here. Unfortunately, so are many of the systems. But I've seen a real change in the culture. There's a real lift in restlessness to improve every single day. There's definitely a sleeves-rolled-up mentality in getting all the details right. And most importantly, I've seen that we're breaking down the silos between our different businesses and improving collaboration. The plan I'll share in a moment for technology is one that we've really built together as a whole ExCo, an ExCo that's now driving change at pace in their individual areas, but first and foremost is making decisions for the whole of M&S. And I also want to address Stuart's comment on outfits. I do often wear velvet jackets, and I very carefully paired mine with a beautiful photograph of broccoli that Stuart then stole.
Richard doesn't have a colorway that matches leek and potato soup. So one to note for the range next year, I think, Richard. Now, over the next 20 minutes, we are going to talk about tech. I do believe there is a significant opportunity for M&S to transform using digital data and technology. An opportunity to standardize, automate, and connect our processes through a new digital spine that will unlock business growth, margin, and agility. An opportunity to transform the experience of our customers and the productivity of our colleagues as we unleash the power of data and AI. And an opportunity to simplify and reduce the annual run costs of our technology estate by at least GBP 40 million, with additional CapEx reductions as we invest in future-ready tech foundations over the next three years. We spent the past few years layering new technology onto an aged, fragmented estate.
As a result, we've not only increased the cost of running our estate, we've actually made some of our processes more complex and less efficient. We're now stepping back and taking a strategic view of our whole technology estate, developing a new five-year roadmap, bringing the organization with us to ensure we unlock the biggest opportunities. As we fix our foundations, we'll be introducing proven technologies at scale to transform how we make, move, and sell our product and serve our customers. I'll share in a little bit how we're getting ready to deploy technologies such as RFID, ESLs, AI stylists, and digital product creation tools, and the impact they're going to have on each of our businesses.
But first, let's spend a few moments talking about the size and shape of the digital and tech organization today, what we do, and what we need to solve for as we go forward. Let's start with our technology cost base. Today, we spend GBP 460 million of OpEx and GBP 115 million of CapEx on an annual basis on technology across the group. That represents 3.4% of revenue. A high-performing retailer will be sub 3%, and that's what we're aiming for. Just over half, or 56%, of our spend is on running an inefficient, aged estate that has seen a decade or so of underinvestment. Run costs benchmark at 45% across the retail industry, so we have an 11-point opportunity to free up run spend, to invest in change, to drive growth. Alongside this, we absolutely expect to reduce our CapEx requirements as we become more efficient at delivering change.
To give you a sense of the size of our team and our estate, we have a team of 2,700 technologists today, but we're over-reliant on third parties who make up 80% of our team. That gives us a critical internal knowledge gap. Our team size is higher than you would expect because we have 30% too many applications and infrastructure devices for our size and what we do. There are over 170,000 devices across our store and support center estate, our distribution centers, and our data centers. Everything from network equipment to servers, laptops, Honeywells, and tills. We have 600 applications that support our critical journeys for Food, Clothing & Home and International, for retail stores and online, for M&S Bank and the Store Support Centre.
Over an average month, those systems support over 50 million in-store till transactions, 1 million app purchases online, 2 million click-and-collect parcels, and 60,000 food deliveries to stores. At peak, these numbers increase up to three times over, so we see real scaling. Moving on to explain what we do as a team. Well, our D&T team is centralized. It has a layer of business partnering that we're now re-embedding in the business to shape the strategy and demand of each area. Strategy, architecture, and governance teams ensure we're building for the future in the right way. Service management and cyber teams ensure our technology services are supported, stable, and secure. Our engineering teams maintain our applications and configure, build, and integrate core business journeys.
They support the applications that we use to plan, buy, and make our products, those in supply chain that move the product, those in store and online that sell the product, and those that help our store and support center colleagues manage our operations and serve our customers. All supported by our data and AI team who deliver insight, personalization, and automation for our colleague and customer journeys, and our infrastructure and network teams to provide the connectivity and the hosting for everything that we do. So that's the team. My induction into the business allowed me to stand back and evaluate the digital experience that our team and those systems provide today.
While we've made lots of progress online, and as Alex said, in modernizing some of the platforms in our Foods business, here are some of the problems we still face and must solve for to drive future growth, margin, and agility. For the customer, there are very few truly digital touchpoints as they transition from discovery online or on the app into finding and buying product in store. For colleagues, their productivity is affected as they use clunky apps on the Honeywells that don't support the end-to-end tasks they need to do. Shareholders have seen a suboptimal return from recent tech investments because they've been built on top of technology foundations that haven't been modernized or simplified to reduce run costs. It takes too long to onboard suppliers due to complex and aged systems. Richard called this out in relation to brands, but it goes much broader.
Our distribution centers are running on outdated tech, making it challenging to build a real-time picture of stock movement through our end-to-end supply chain. Many of our stores are operating on less network bandwidth than you have in your own homes, meaning we often frustrate customers and colleagues with Wi-Fi outages. And online, we have invested significantly over the past four years, but we've yet to streamline the underlying availability, fulfillment, and return flows, making it difficult for us always to meet our customer delivery promises. So in summary, we've got a critical set of opportunities ahead of us to standardize process, automate process, integrate end-to-end journeys so that we can deliver the M&S experience we want for this set of stakeholders.
As we get ready for future growth, now is the time to double down and make sure we take advantage of these opportunities so we can scale cost-effectively. It's time for a reset. A reset of our technology, vision, and strategy, a reset of how we design and deploy technology, and a reset of the team we need to deliver it. Now, you've heard a few technology leaders before me stand on this stage and probably promise something similar. Hopefully, over the next few minutes, you'll see why this is going to be different. It has been co-created and co-designed with the whole exco for the first time. We've prioritized together across the whole business. We've secured the investment in the systems, but also the people we need to deliver the future I'm about to show you.
I've appointed a new leadership team, bringing in expertise in digital transformation, architecture and engineering, data and AI, and service management to close critical capability gaps we have. We're resetting our ways of working to modernize and automate many of our working practices, embedding our teams back into the business, bringing them closer to the lived experience of customers and colleagues. We're reducing our reliance on third-party contractors who are expensive and rebuilding critical knowledge back inside M&S of the areas we know will differentiate us and drive growth. We're improving the way we prioritize demand across the whole business and ensuring that we're aligned with our new tech roadmaps and we're meeting our important investment hurdle rates. We've already made our first wave of changes to bring the team closer to the business, and we'll be moving to our new target operating model from April.
Now, moving on to the technology. Over the past few years, we've been building tech on weak technology foundations. We're now investing at pace to enable right-sized, always-on network connectivity for our stores and cost-effective, scalable hosting that grows with us as the business grows. We're investing to enable real-time integration and curated insight, automation, and personalization through data and AI. And we're investing to enable an end-to-end view of our operations so we can fix service issues before they impact a customer. Today, we have too many outdated, duplicative business applications with very little sharing across our different business areas. You can see our assessment in red and amber here of how well current applications support each part of our value chain. Lots of reds and amber.
That's because we have a history of deploying point solutions for each of these areas rather than thinking about how we support end-to-end journeys and have data flow through the business. We've done what many do. We've filled gaps between these systems with human manual effort, and that's where the productivity opportunity lies. Now's the time to step back and define a new technology strategy. If we redesign for end-to-end processes across areas such as labor planning, stock management, supplier integration, and managing store performance, we'll unlock material productivity savings. We're currently co-creating roadmaps with each of our business areas to deliver the optimization opportunities that we see, and we're maximizing the sharing of technology across them for the first time. Over the next five years, we will be decommissioning 35%, or about 270 applications from our estate that are no longer fit for purpose.
We'll be modernizing another 30% that are hard to change at the speed the business needs or are no longer cost-effective. Our new five-year roadmap will build the new digital spine of M&S, helping the business standardize, automate, and connect end-to-end processes through the value chain. We'll be optimizing how we plan, design, buy, and make our products, how we move them from supplier to store and customer, how we support colleagues to serve, sell, and fill brilliantly, injecting insight and next best actions into a digitized One Best Way, how we provide new digital touchpoints to serve and sell to our customer online and in store, how we underpin international growth with Mark, and how we transform the way the business is being run, how we manage our partners, our people, and our through-connected group systems.
Now, with 65% of our systems estate being modernized over the next five years, we've got a significant opportunity to design and build for those connected journeys. We'll be unlocking growth through new capability and capacity, unlocking margins through automation and productivity uplifts, and unlocking business agility with a faster and more cost-effective speed of change. We've already done a huge amount of heavy lifting to bring all of our operational data into a single data lake platform. We now have the opportunity to rapidly build out data and AI solutions on top, embed insight and next best actions into our colleague and customer journeys to drive improved service experience, to power personalization and automate away manual tasks. Our first priority in our technology roadmap is to deliver a complete overhaul of our network.
We have to put the base foundation in that our systems and our digitized processes can sit on top of. We're designing a blueprint for that right now, and we'll start deploying it in the new year. It's a critical enabler for modernizing our store tech and for delivering a new omnichannel vision. So those are the foundations. Let's take a look at what some of our priorities are in the roadmap in each of our business areas over the next 12 to 18 months. Now, starting with food, with Alex and team, we're layering automation and intelligence into price, range, and availability. In pricing, we're moving away from a largely manual, competitor-focused price-setting approach to using AI-based decision models. This allows us to plan price, range, and availability down to store level for the first time.
And it allows us to make data-backed decisions about what we sell, where we sell it, to ensure we're always meeting customer expectations. We're bringing external data in for the first time, such as weather and local event information, bringing those into our models to allow us to improve forecast accuracy and help our stores trade locally. We'll also be deploying electronic shelf edge labels to remove the need for manual price and promotion ticketing. That's going to free up around 160,000 hours of valuable store colleague time. In the middle, we've launched our online food catalog last month. This is the first big step in digitizing our food experience for customers. You can now explore the best of M&S Food for inspiration, see what's available in your local store, build a shopping list, and check for nutrition and allergy information.
This builds the foundational layer for a range of personalized experiences that we'll be delivering over the next year, features such as recipe builders, product reviews, and meal planners, health insights to inspire our customers even further. In our Food supply chain, we've got a lot of work to do. We'll be investing over the next three to five years to completely modernize our warehouse management systems, bringing our three aged existing platforms across Food and Clothing & Home into a single shared modern platform. A platform that will capture more data points than ever before, allowing us to continually optimize product flow and accuracy from supplier to store, maximizing product availability and dramatically reducing our waste. We're also investing in our transport systems.
Drivers will shortly receive daily optimized store delivery routes and real-time traffic information on their cab tablets, reducing miles, but also improving the accuracy of arrival times in stores so stores can better plan their staffing levels. Next year, we'll be introducing rich supply chain diagnostics, providing our team insights into why stockouts, spoilage, and excess inventory are happening real-time so they can take proactive action before that happens. So moving on to Clothing & Home. With Richard and team, we're deploying our new integrated planning platform. Next year, we'll roll out our merchandise financial planning tool that works for all BUs or geographies and channels and rolls up to give us a company-wide view. We'll have a way to manage our core and our seasonal plans separately for the first time.
As merchandisers build our ranges, they'll be using embedded AI modeling to plan the optimum number of products to range and the depth and size ratios to buy them in with really strong feedback loops. Capacity planners will be able to develop long-term views of production requirements in collaboration with suppliers so we can better manage upstream material and trim supply. In the middle, we've been trialing a new form of RFID in our Bracknell store, and we'll be rolling this out across stores next year. We're putting ceiling beacons in, these little white puck things, they're about this big, into our stores, and they're replacing hand scanners. Our trial has shown that we can reduce the time taken to scan a department from two hours to 12 seconds while increasing scan accuracy to 98%.
So not only does that deliver a brilliant productivity gain for our store colleagues, we're already exploring how the data it provides us can unlock other valuable insight. We now know where every piece of stock is in the store, so we can use that to optimize in-store pick routes for click and collect. If we know that stock is building up outside of a fitting room, it means we can dynamically reallocate store time to getting that stock back out on the floor to improve availability and sales. We're building both of those solutions right now for launch next year. On the right-hand side, we started using 3D modeling and generative AI to modernize the way we design, develop, and approve our product. Let's show you what that looks like in action.
What you can see here is one of our Kidswear product teams conducting a range review in our new digital product suite upstairs on the second floor. We've built virtual 3D sets of our mock shop so our teams can see how a range will come together and be displayed on the shop floor weeks earlier in the design process. Here you can see our recent Kidswear drop for autumn/winter laid out in a 3D digital shop. Our teams can walk around the display, change equipment, and move items with just a few clicks. They can also make design adjustments in a collaborative environment with our suppliers. While the goal is to reduce end-to-end design times, we're taking care to balance both the human and machine involvement, making sure the models free up designers' time to focus on the style and fashion.
To take this a step further, we're now deploying generative AI into front-end sketching. A designer will take one sketch and use the GenAI model to create iterations for them to consider in the design process and take forward in a fraction of the time it used to take. Moving on to what this looks like in our stores with Sacha. The big shift here is to change the approach we use to modernize our store technology. We've got a lot of legacy to remove over the next few years. We're creating a new tech blueprint and business case for each of our store formats, and we'll deploy a bundle of technology all at once in a far more efficient way than we have done before as we renew and rotate our stores.
Early in the financial year, we'll start rolling out an integrated package of technology: new core network and Wi-Fi, new colleague devices and headsets, RFID, electronic shelf edge labels, and we'll start experimenting with computer vision technology to help us prevent theft and monitor store variables such as temperature and footfall real-time. Next, we have a number of initiatives to optimize labor productivity. We'll be redesigning our store colleagues' apps on the Honeywell to support our end-to-end tasks, effectively digitizing One Best Way and embedding next best actions into our journeys to guide colleagues as they serve, sell, and fill. Over the past year, we've also deployed 100 self-checkout tills into Clothing & Home and have seen two-thirds of all our Clothing & Home transactions move across to self-serve in the stores where that's available. We're now experimenting with an RFID self-checkout in our working store.
This is where you place your whole basket onto the scanner, and you no longer need to scan individual items. Customer take-up has been really strong, and we've seen a 40% reduction in average transaction time versus standard self-checkout tills. That's a significant colleague and customer benefit. Moving on to the right-hand side, we'll talk about AI Ops. This is what Di referred to in the first video. When Di and I did our store induction, we met several of our store managers who told us they spend hours every week poring over 20 reports to get a clear understanding of store performance and what actions they should take with their team. We started to imagine what a day might look like if we put an AI assistant in every store manager's pocket. Let's take a look. So imagine one of our store managers is out on the floor.
He gets an alert that there's a food item in stock that's had no sales over the last few hours. He gets a prompt containing a next best action. He checks availability and gets a colleague to check backstage and bring forward that stock onto the shop floor. He's prompted to record the action and the outcome so we have a feedback loop to optimize future action recommendations. At his desk, he asks our store performance model in natural language what the top action he could take would be to improve his customer experience scores. After comparing the performance of other stores, the model suggests he should look at his customer acknowledgment scores, so he heads out on the floor to train his colleagues and remind them to greet every customer. While on the floor, he's able to ask a conversational chatbot what's currently trending online.
He briefs his Womenswear team to keep the availability of the Sienna range high because it's featuring particularly prominently on social channels at the moment. Now, as we modernize our solutions we provide our store colleagues, we're focusing on delivering real-time insights to our store managers and store colleagues so that we can dynamically change what they're focused on and continuously optimize store performance, eliminating hundreds of reports. So moving on to online, we've got lots of work underway to optimize order management. One of the biggest drivers we have of basket abandonment is a delivery date being shown at checkout that is too late for our customer. We can now show real-time availability on the search page, and customers can even search for products based on the delivery dates they're looking for.
We launched this product for flowers last month and have already seen a 3% uplift in conversion. That's worth around 9,000 extra orders if you look at March for Mother's Day. This feature will be live for hampers this month, followed by all categories over the next nine months. Moving on to personalization, we've made some starts. Now, the last four years, we've built out a range of personalization capabilities with nearly all our app users and over half our known web users now getting personalized journeys. We've also continued to enrich our outfit personalization journeys following our acquisition of the Thread's business in December 2022. Our new personalized outfits feature on the product description page has been viewed by over 4 million customers, and 540,000 of those have given us detailed style preferences.
That's enabled us to deliver seasonal engagement journeys for continuous activation of those customers throughout the year. The features have delivered over GBP 24 million in incremental annual revenue in less than two years since we acquired the Thread's business. Now, moving on to the right, let's talk a little bit about how we've been automating the personalization of online content. Here you can see one of our online product listing pages for a pair of women's Goodmove leggings. On the right, you can see the manually created product description, which until now has been the same for every single customer. Here we're loading what we know about one of our Sparks customers, Anna, from her previous browsing and purchasing habits and the data she's given us through her loyalty journey. She loves holidays, playing hockey, and going to the gym.
Our AI model preserves the M&S tone of voice but tailors the product description text, creating new text explaining how this particular product will fit her lifestyle preferences, driving greater engagement and conversion by increasing relevance. We could never achieve this kind of personalization at scale without using an AI model. Now we can speak to our customers individually at scale every day. So the next step here is to build an AI stylist, and we're going to be looking to launch that early next year. That will automate the process of creating not only single clothing recommendations but outfit combinations for our customers. It'll replace a 10-step questionnaire customers currently fill in with a conversational shopping assistant built on Thread's proprietary models to transform the way customers find clothing and build their outfits.
To close, over the next three years, we're investing to build the future-ready technology foundations we need to underpin our growth. We're designing the new Digital Spine of M&S to transform the digital experiences of customers and the colleagues that serve them. Building on our data platform, we'll be embedding insight and next best actions into journeys to drive revenue and improve productivity and customer service. And as we simplify and automate our landscape, we'll reduce our annual run costs by at least GBP 40 million over the next three years, rising to GBP 70 million of cost out in five years' time. That will bring our technology run costs in line with industry benchmarks. Hopefully, that's painted a picture that we have lots to do to modernize our disconnected systems and technology foundations. These are all things I and the new team I'm building have done before.
We're taking a measured, strategic approach to introducing proven technologies at scale at the same time as rebuilding our foundations. The complexity in our plan in the five years ahead comes from unpicking today's overly customized and fragmented estate. While we do that, though, we're finding opportunities to innovate in areas that will help us personalize our customer experiences and improve the productivity of our colleagues. Thank you. I'll now hand you over to Jeremy.
Thank you, Rachel. And it really is hard to overstate how much of an impact Rachel has had. It feels like a lot more than four months, but it's been brilliant. I did think this was going to be my last presentation for M&S, but it turns out I've got one more.
I'll finish up by wrapping up the sessions, bringing it together to summarize how we create value for shareholders using our capital allocation model as a framework. As we said this time last year, our capital allocation model starts with a focus on free cash flow generation. Our priorities are to use this cash to firm up the balance sheet and to invest in the reshaping M&S strategy. Last year, we generated around GBP 850 million in cash flow pre-CapEx. I'm going to use this figure to illustrate how we are thinking about our investment envelopes going forward. We just completed our three-year planning process. This indicates we'll be spending around GBP 200 million-GBP 250 million on maintenance and infrastructure CapEx per annum.
And this leaves a hypothetical GBP 600 million-GBP 650 million of annual cash flow around which we have choices to invest or return the money to shareholders. Given the opportunities to grow the business that we've talked about today, our strong preference is to spend this money on high-returning investments at an estimated level of GBP 300 million-GBP 350 million per year. Let me now flesh these numbers out in a bit more detail. Maintenance and infrastructure CapEx reflects the investments that we think we need to make to keep the business running. In the stores, it's replacing old kit or maintaining buildings, i.e., broken fridges or leaking roofs. In the supply chain, it's replacing trucks and vans. And in IT, it will be replacing and updating the backbone technology that Rachel's just talked about. This is non-negotiable spend.
It's required to ensure the business maintains its high brand standards and basically keeps running. We'll manage and monitor this expenditure very closely. It is, however, almost impossible to measure returns on the spend, and we don't intend to attempt to do so. I note as well that we assume this spend can be partially funded by around GBP 50 million of asset disposals per year. As Stuart said earlier, we didn't achieve this last year, but we have got a reasonable sight to achieving this over the next three years at least. In contrast, growth CapEx is investment where we expect to be able to measure returns. This may not always be straightforward, especially with some of our IT investments.
However, as we increase our envelope of spend, we are committed to doing as much as possible to share returns information with shareholders, including in-year profit impacts of growth capital investments. The majority of our growth CapEx will be invested in our Rotate the Estate program, investing in new stores and renewals. As Rachel said earlier, we'll also be creating the capability to develop digital assets to grow our business, most obviously in the online channel and with a renewed Sparks offer, but also helping to deliver improved productivity through better technology in our stores and our supply chain. And as Richard and Alex have both noted, more broadly, we have significant opportunities to improve the efficiency of our Clothing & Home and Food supply chains, as well as providing capacity for future growth.
This expenditure is somewhat lumpy, especially when new depots are required, and there'll need to be some flexibility in the annual growth CapEx envelope to accommodate such investments when they come up. All of this investment will be subject to rigorous investment cases and minimum hurdle rates, which I'll come back to in a moment. But before I do that, I thought it would be useful just to provide a little bit more color on how we'll be investing this growth CapEx going forward. As you have seen in our half-year results, our investment in new stores and renewals is delivering strong returns. Full-line stores are trading particularly well, but all investment classes are trading in line or ahead of their target hurdle rates.
As I've just said, we intend to get much more granular about our reporting in this area, showing performance against original payback targets, as well as identifying in-year impacts, for example, as shown on this table on the left. For the moment, honing in on a specific example, our new store in Birmingham is an ex-Debenhams store and also reflects the closure of a legacy M&S store. The table shows that with 24% less Clothing & Home space and 32% less food space, we have increased sales in the store by 38% and sales per sq ft by 88%. As well, we have delivered a better customer experience and a more productive environment for our colleagues.
Moving to the supply chain, taking Clothing & Home as an example, we've taken a large multi-year strategy, as Richard talked about earlier, to deliver significant improvement in the effectiveness and efficiency of our Clothing & Home deliveries. We are monitoring the impact very closely, ensuring that we track both the hard cost-out measures as well as the key operating improvements, such as online pick capacity. Looking more broadly at costs, it is worth noting that we think capital investment to drive improved productivity has an increasing role to play in our business model, given the above inflationary increases in living wage and national insurance that we are anticipating over the next few years. As a reminder, and Stuart said this earlier, we set ourselves a target of delivering GBP 500 million of cost savings by 2028, and we have delivered GBP 240 million of this to date.
And while we'll not be formally increasing our target for structural cost savings today, I can assure you that as we head into our budget for the next financial year, I'll be working very closely with my colleagues to look for further opportunities to drive efficiencies beyond those already identified. As I said earlier, all of our growth CapEx will be subject to minimum required return hurdle rates. As a reminder, these rates are 15% for store rotation and cost-out investments, where we have high visibility and lower relative risk. Visibility on revenue-driving digital investments is more difficult to monitor, but we are working closely with Rachel and her team to make sure we are all over these. And as I said last year, M&A is a relatively low priority for the business at the moment, given our opportunities to invest in the reshaping M&S strategy.
As I said when I started, our priorities for the use of free cash flow is to invest in the reshaping M&S strategy and to firm up the balance sheet. We've made good progress on this since COVID, with net debt reducing by GBP 800 million over the last couple of years, and with the group now being in a net funds position. The strengthening of the balance sheet now gives us options around capital allocation, with the freedom to increase our investment in high-returning projects, as well as to consider an increase in returns to shareholders over time. To summarize, we set out ambitious targets at our Capital Markets Day two years ago to drive significant growth in market share in Food and Clothing & Home, and to deliver operating margins of at least 4% and 10% in the respective businesses.
We also said we'd deliver GBP 500 million in structural cost savings to help our investments in quality and value, as well as to help deliver our margin targets. We've made good progress against these targets, with the cash flows generated from our performance enabling us to strengthen our balance sheet and increase investments in our strategic projects. This investment has been made in a very disciplined way, with clear minimum hurdle rate requirements, and the returns on the investments have been strong, and we intend to upweight our CapEx programs over the next three years to further accelerate our reshaping M&S strategy. This should deliver increased shareholder value and increased shareholder returns over time. I'd now like to hand back over to Stuart, and we'll do a Q&A with the speakers on the stage.
If I could ask if you could just say your name, hands up, we'll bring a microphone to you, where you're from, and we'll go from there, and then I will close today. Right. Yes. Who's got the mics? Here we go. I saw Izabel's hand up. Hi.
It's Izabel Dobreva from Morgan Stanley. So my first question is, from everything we have heard today, it sounds like you have the right products, but the main issue is that the customers cannot get them easily enough, whether that's the number of stores or the omnichannel or the availability, and so my question is, how should we think about the upside to your market share goal, given that you're already on track despite these constraints? So that's my first question, and then I had another one.
Well, let's do that one first, Izabel, and I think we'll let Richard and Alex chip in. But I think the first thing is, let's just think about store rotation, because we've got a very big plan to rotate the store space, as you heard. I mean, that plan is now, in fact, someone said to me at the breakout, "We're relieved you didn't achieve the three-year plan." And they said, "We were worried you might spend too much money to get to the three years." But I don't think we have a constraint around space. I just think we have an opportunity to get in better store locations and higher quality space to deliver more growth. So that's the first thing. I don't think it's necessarily constraining, but I do think there's an opportunity. So we're talking about store rotation.
I think availability more generally. I'll let Alex and Richard chip in. But I think in food, for me and for Alex and I, how do we get ahead of the volume growth? And for Richard, we have had some disruption. In fact, Red Sea in some way has been a benefit as well, because that disruption has actually helped us have more new stock more frequently. But there has been some disruption around availability, and I'm sure Maddy and Mitch will agree. Sometimes some of our new ranges have sold out quicker than we anticipated. So when we get this availability right, I think that also gives us a growth opportunity. Let's kick off with store rotation, and let's go to Richard and Alex for their thoughts of that sort of capacity constraint or growth opportunity in the two businesses.
Yeah, so on store rotation, I think sort of it's been covered at one point or another in this morning's presentation, but we set out that we had an endpoint position of 180 full-line stores and 420 Simply Food halls. We've got a line of sight at the moment by FY 2028 to 180-190 full-line stores and about 395 food stores with a 70-store pipeline, and we announced 10, of which have just recently been signed. So we are confident that we'll hit the numbers that we set out last year by FY 2028, which will give us the space that we'd spoken about. And it's worth noting, since the program started in 2018, we're down about 1.5 million sq ft on Clothing & Home sq ft and up by just over 1.1 million on food sq ft.
Although the store numbers don't necessarily reflect it, there's been a lot of rotation within the number already.
Richard, any comments on Clothing & Home?
Yeah, I think what you'll see over the next few years is, as we've fixed our product over the first three or four years of the transformation journey, that's delivered the growth. I think as the rate of change slows down in terms of that improvement, we will see more of our growth coming from improved operational efficiencies and availability. So we do think that it'll be a shift in the type of growth that we're getting, and we do think that that's built into some of our plans. So always the most difficult thing to measure is the impact of availability on sales, because it's as much about the quality of the product as it is about the availability of it. I always say to my teams that you're better off having 50% availability of a brilliant product than 100% availability of product that nobody wants.
But that's the nature of a fashion business. But we do think that's built into some of our growth plans.
I think, Izabel, Richard and I would say the only thing where we feel a bit constrained is still online, because we just know, Richard outlined this in the presentation, but if we really work hard on this proposition, which means a lot of work in supply chain, really work hard on the availability and the chart Richard explained on how we buy range for online as well as stores. I think that's the only area where we would feel at the moment there's some upside, even today, as well as the growth plans in the next few years.
Yeah, I think three quick things on availability, critically important, not just because it's important anyway for a food business, but also back to my shopping list retailer point earlier on, is customers historically often described us in customer groups as being a bit like a lucky dip retailer. I love it, but I'm not quite sure what I'm going to find. And that's actually good, because that's exciting and it's emotionally engaged. But we also want them to come to us for their missions, whether it's buying lunch for them and their workmates, whether it's buying dinner for me and my family, whether it's buying gifts or events, whatever it might be, and they can fulfill their whole shopping list. So really, really important. And the stores that have got the best availability have got the best growth. So there's a pretty clear correlation.
We need the suppliers to come with us on that journey. So we obviously need the supplier resilience and the availability of stock and the capacities, which is why that partnership piece is so important, and just how big can we get? How high can we go? Look, I don't know, but I would say this: if you look at our categories, we've got lots of categories. We operate with double-digit market share, and we've got parts of the country we operate with double-digit market share, so the 1 percentage point of share improvement is our immediate goal, but beyond that, we've shown we can go higher, so that's the opportunity.
Spot on. Another quick one, Izabel.
This one is quick. I just wanted to know, why is 180 full-line stores still the right number? Is it because the tail is still not achieving the IRR that you would like to see? Is it a capital allocation decision? I guess the question is, why is that number higher given the strong performance?
It's only slightly higher. I'll let Jeremy and Sacha chip in. I think what we set out on the 180, whether it's 180, 185, we've mapped out the whole country where we think we need bigger, better, highly productive stores. We mapped that out based on where we are today, where we see the growth opportunities around the country. We were working out what's a full-line store with clothing, especially with our view of driving 50% of Clothing & Home online. We've learned a lot as well by the stores we've done in the last few years. In fact, the Birmingham story in Richard's area, having a store with 70,000 sq ft Clothing & Home, not 100, not 110, is working very well. It's high productivity space. We know it's around 180, 185.
It will also be around sites that might come up, that might be opportunistic, and we think, actually, this could be an opportunity for us if we are really convinced we will get the paybacks, so whether it's one or two, more or less, in food, we mapped out across the country a format that we know already works. What Alex has been doing is actually reworking that format. In food, we know we've got a 3,000, a 7,000, a 15,000, and a 25,000 store blueprint, so convenience, top-up, main shop, and again, we've worked out that about 420 food stores is about right, but we will be really critiquing store by store, and there are some sites that come up. If we think they're overpriced or we can't get the deal we want, we won't take the site.
We're really looking at stores for growth three years, five years, 10 years. I mean, that would be my summary.
Yeah, I think, Stuart, you've summed it up perfectly. I mean, the 180 was based on the 90% population within the drive time we'd specified. And the only other thing I'd add to what Stuart said is every single food hall also has click and collect, and therefore customers are able to collect their clothing purchases in all those food stores as well, which really reduces the drive time.
And just on returns, that's what we've had on returns. So if we're relocating a full-line to new store, like we saw with the Debenhams stores, fantastic returns. But overall, the plan is to rotate out of clothing space. So we're not going to be looking for that many new full-line stores in new areas, because we're trying to drive the online growth and get the returns that way.
We know in the map of the country where we underindex. I mean, London, we know, is still a big opportunity for us. We've just opened a store in Sidcup. We had hardly any share in that part of London. Now, our market share in that London is just with Sidcup store is 7% of the region. So we've got so many gaps, but we know where we want to be. It's about making sure it's the right site. Let's open up for more questions. Clive.
Thank you, Stuart. I'll just ask one. You've beaten your margin targets by some margin in both camps, and you're not changing your guidance today. Where would you see the priority to reinvest that surplus on an ongoing basis? Thank you.
If I kick off, I mean, one thing that worried me, to be candid, when I joined M&S was actually in those days, all we reported was percentages. I remember my first Capital Markets Day. I'd been in about six months, and we only talked about gross margin, by the way. And I remember sitting there saying, "We're only talking about gross margin rate." And I remember talking in my first few months, I'm going back six years, "Actually, don't hold me to account on the percent. Hold me to account on the cash, because that percent will drop." And Fraser will remember this, because everybody got spooked, because everyone said, "You're dropping the rate." I said, "Yes, but we need to report differently. We've held ourselves hostage to a percentage." So the thing that does worry me is I want us to have the flexibility to invest.
So again, go back to the presentations on where we all think we are, which is about selling more value, more volume, and that's what's working so far. And we shouldn't forget that. So I don't want us to play the margin rate game. I want us to play the selling game, driving profitable sales. And if we set a target, which to impress people or to please everyone in the room, I could say 5%, 6% on food, 11%, 12% on clothing, I don't think that would be the right thing to do. I think the right thing to do is invest in the things we've outlined and have that as a guardrail.
We saw it at half year, Clive. I'm going to spare Alex's blushes. But price inflation in food was 1.2%. We had significant cost inflation in the half. But with the level of volume increase, we had 6.5% volume increase. We get that leverage through the P&L, and the margin drops out. So we don't see them, as Stuart said, we don't see the margin as input. It's an output. And so we need to deliver at a certain level, but beyond that, it's all about the cash profit and the volume growth.
Exactly. We're ambitious for growth and cash growth. Alex, anything to add, or Richard? Have I missed? Any other questions? Yes. I can't quite see, but I know there's hands up. There we go. Yeah.
Good morning. It's Richard Chamberlain from RBC. Maybe I can ask the question on International. That's all right. So I think earlier, Stuart, you talked about trying to you would like to be closer to the customer, having maybe sharper pricing proposition and so on, but keeping a kind of quite a capital light model in general. So I guess the broader question is, how can you sort of justify or have more sort of mass market pricing and improve that price perception without a significant capital requirement? What kind of infrastructure do you need to put down to improve the commerciality and the price perception of the International business? Thanks.
I'll touch on that and give Mark a couple of seconds to get his thoughts. He's only a few months in. But I think if you just go back to the presentation and the work Mark's been doing and identifying the opportunities and the problem, I said we've actually had over eight years of no growth if you exclude Republic of Ireland. And the reason we're out of kilter on value is the whole contract model we have with our franchise partners and the fact all the risk is on them and the fact we're not geared up with our supply chain, the fact that everything goes from Donington to International when we're selling online. So we've got to rethink it. And what Mark's been doing is thinking, how do I reset the agreement with partners so we can value and price better in markets?
That means for those franchise partners who are close to their customers, who are close to their market, they're the experts. We should be really relying on them and then having a joint strategy around range, value, pricing. One of the best things, and Richard might want to chip in, that Mark's been leading is actually making sure both Mark and Richard and the clothing team are joined up on that international strategy as well. That means, hopefully, with a better contract setup, as we're rethinking supply chain and getting better value through the supply chain and passing that on to customers internationally. I mean, just to I'm not expecting a lot in the next six months. We're stabilizing the business. Mark's got time. I want us to really think our franchise partners are very, very passionate about M&S.
I've met all of them, and they're very ambitious for M&S. I'm the one slowing it down a bit, saying, "I understand. We're all ambitious. Time and place. Let's build the plan in market from the ground up and think about this over the medium and long term and not throw a lot of money at it." So Mark.
Yeah, Stuart's covered a lot of it. It's similar to the U.K. It's driving volume. It's getting the right value in that market. It's putting product back at the heart of it, leveraging Richard and the team, and then finding a different commercial model by partner, by territory. That means we can reset that, and we can both do well out of it. I think the question on the infrastructure is there's no plans to build big infrastructure. The reason I use partners is because a partner could be wholesale, it could be franchise, it could be marketplace, is to leverage their infrastructure. So once we agree the range of the commercials is get stocked to them, and the benefit of partners is leverage their infrastructure rather than build our own. And that's some of the things that we're working on and going to be testing over the next six.
Even the partner DCs, you've been doing some new work using their DCs.
Yeah, that's right. Yep. So we have an ambition to drive our online business in Europe harder than it is today. You can see what others are doing, and we really underindex. There's no need for us to build a DC in Europe to fulfill ourselves. There are lots of examples out there who we can partner with who want our product with the right mix, and we'll leverage their infrastructure, put our stock to them, and then they'll manage it to the end consumer. There's no need for us to do that ourselves. And that's what we mean by sort of capital light, I guess.
I think the other thing that hit me, Rachel, was the need for D&T investment in International as well, just behind the scenes. Not significant, but quite a bit to do.
No, we're absolutely going to reuse the new platforms we're building for Clothing & Home and for food to some extent. The material investment for International is really around the dropship capability for third-party suppliers.
Plans.
Yeah, which is the same requirement as Richard has for our third-party brands, of course, that are in the UK. So we're looking at how to maximize that reuse around that single requirement of docking in and docking out suppliers quickly and easily.
Yeah.
Richard, is that answered?
Yeah, it kind of is. Yeah, it's helpful color. Yeah.
Okay. Yes.
Thanks. It's Anne Critchlow from Berenberg. I wonder if you could give us, please, an idea of the market value of your freeholds and leaseholds that you still have, and to what extent would you recycle that into store renewal?
Good qeuestion, Ann. Thank you. I'll hand over to Jeremy, then Sasha.
The market value, I don't have that figure to hand. I think the market value of our freeholds and leaseholds, it's a little bit illusory because actually we're going to trade those assets. We are continuously looking around to say, does the market value of an asset, is it greater than the tradable value? But in general, most of our assets are creating cash contributions and are worth more than they are to a third party. So I see this more as recycling our cash flow into renewals and seeing them as independent decisions, really. We do have some disposals where we've got assets that aren't trading, where we can generate cash, and that's what I'm talking about in the GBP 50 million. But really, the key issue is to separate decisions, I think. Look at the cash we've got and work out where's the best use to spend it.
And that's how we appraise every renewal. Is it generating a return within the five-year payback? I separate those two out. Can we unlock money from the estate, and then should we give it back to shareholders, or should we reinvest it?
There's about 63 freehold stores. So what's that about 11%-12%?
Yeah, I mean, I think we have a value and use, but I don't think, as Jeremy said, that's particularly useful. The only thing I'd say is, as Jeremy said, we have a line of sight, whereas we're a bit slow, as Stuart said, getting off the mark on the asset disposal and reuse program. We do have a good line of sight for this year and at least the next two over some asset disposals and reuses, which will generate the required returns we've published. And then I think we're waiting on Marble Arch, obviously, in the next month or so, hopefully.
5th of December.
I'm counting.
Yes.
It's Adam Cochrane, Deutsche Bank. Question on technology and supply chain, if I can. In terms of what you're laying out there, how much of this is Marks and Spencer catching up with industry best practice? How much are you starting to push the envelope in terms of market-leading practice, whether that's U.K. specifically, but potentially internationally? And then on the supply chain, you talked about 10 years to change the food supply chain. What sort of decisions take 10 years?
Let me start and give the team a couple of moments to collect their thoughts, because it's a good question, Adam. I'll start with on D&T, and let Rachel chip in. I'm not necessarily obsessed with being market-leading. I think catching up and getting ourselves in a really good place is where we should be. And that's on technology, old infrastructure to new. That's on digital experiences, just making sure we're in a good place. So nothing we're doing at the moment is going to leapfrog, but let Rachel talk about that. The other thing I'm obsessed, slightly paranoid about, but actually we all are. We don't want gold plating. We don't want to add to things. I've learned some very good lessons over the past few years. I never realized we were developing our digital cafés. I thought we were just buying the kit.
It's only when you get into the detail you realize we were overcomplicating. We had teams building, developing our digital screens. We could have just gone to market and bought something. So this is a complete reset. We don't want to gold plate. We don't want high expense. We want to be in a really good place to deliver all the transformation programs. I'll let Alex talk about supply chain, but it's not about decision-making taking 10 years. We could throw a lot of money at this and try and rush it, but we have to move with the business. We're in a good place on supply chain in the integration of Gist. I think all credit to the food team, how Nick and Alex, how they've embedded that. Most of our acquisitions, there hasn't been many, we don't normally cover ourselves in glory.
This is one that was a very good acquisition. We've integrated it well. We've got good, strong discipline, ways of working. We've got the benefits out. And now it's given us a platform to think about the volume we need and the capacity we need to drive the volume. And instead of going, "Well, to drive the volume in three years or five years," we're mapping out, "What does this look like over 10 years?" And therefore, opening some of these very big distribution centers, that's a big thing to do. And many retailers have got that wrong. So we're not rushing it. I'm not doing what I did with property. Five years into three, thinking we can do it. Actually, it's five years into five, and I think this is a 10-year plan to get this network right. And we have to do it.
And Alex is very responsible and very detailed. Nick and the team are. We've got to do it right. It's a big capital expense. So Rachel, D&T, and Alex on food, why are you going so slow over 10 years? Rachel, you go first.
I'm also going to go slow. Yeah, look, the next three years are really about catch-up. We've got a lot to do to build the foundations in our network and the way we host our systems, the way we secure those systems and operate them every single day. I think in year two to three, we'll start to be able to unlock some of the really interesting AI use cases. But I'm not looking at standing on stage here talking about a grand AI strategy for M&S. It's really about where can we unlock additional insight and better next best actions for our colleagues to take that will improve customer service. So it's very much a use case-based approach around AI. I think we have got opportunities as we reset loyalty. You may have seen with Sharry upstairs on the trade stand.
We're thinking about loyalty in terms of building a new data flywheel for M&S. We collect more data with our customers so we can personalize experiences, increase relevance, and drive growth through that. So I think year two to three, we'll start to see some really interesting uses of the new data we've captured that may well take us beyond what other retailers are doing because we've got a good, strong data platform to build from. But everything else is very much catch-up.
I think just on D&T, I mean, I'm slightly anxious about this. I mean, I sort of listen to Rachel, and I become more confident every day. But even if we deliver half or three-quarters of what Rachel's outlined, I think we're being a good place. I'm slightly burnt by history before me, but also history since I've been here. And although Rachel and the team are very ambitious, I have to be honest, I keep saying, "Slow down a bit. Don't rush this. It doesn't matter. A few months of extra thinking, let's get this right." So it is an ambitious plan, but it's not a gold-plated plan. It's not about accelerating better than anyone else. What I do want to make sure, and I think Rachel's done this with the team, is invest in the right areas.
So if we're investing in improving Clothing & Home online, then brilliant, because we need to improve that proposition, service, brands, etc. So being really careful about where the spend is going. Alex, anything to add on why you're slow?
Well, the bad news is it's actually longer than 10 years because it never ends doing network development because, well, the game in the network plan is you've always got to be developing your capacity, resilience, and productivity ahead of where the business needs it. So the 10-year plan is the plan we're developing for what we do in the next 10 years. It's not a decision-making process.
Stuart and I were both working with a retailer that had seven-in-three supply chain strategy back in the day.
Gosh, that was many years ago.
That wasn't very successful, so I think you do need to plan it out and do it properly.
Yeah. Okay, other questions? We've still got a few minutes. Yes, now I'll come to you.
Thanks. It's Georgina Johanan from JP Morgan. Just two, please. One very quick one, and sorry to ask such a basic one, but just on the CapEx, I just wanted to confirm around the guidance. Should we be expecting sort of therefore GBP 500 million-GBP 600 million sort of on a three to five-year view, please? And then the second one was when we've sort of been at capital markets days before, you guys have talked so much about product in clothing and particularly Womenswear and sort of really gone into a lot of detail around the price points and really specific detail. And I felt like there was less of that today. Is that because the product across the range is now in the right place? And as you talked about earlier, it's now about sort of getting the product, communicating that, making the online offer better.
Or is it about commercial sensitivity as we're seeing others recognize you as an improving player? And I guess, where are the incremental market share gains coming from? Is it frequency in women's spend? Is it Kidswear? And what are you really doing in Kidswear?
Well, I think we've answered some of that, but we can also answer more of it later. I think there are a couple of important points, and the team can chip in. The first is we've got to really focus on these big opportunities and how we need to re-hardwire all these new ways of working and how we're going to reshape M&S. So we could stand here, and all of us are obsessed with product. All of us can talk about Womenswear or Menswear or food. That's what our passion really is. But actually, we need to move on from that as well because what we need to fix is the hardwiring of the business, store rotation, supply chain, D&T. Because actually, the work that's going into product, Georgina, has been brilliant. We're not there yet.
We will constantly keep improving our quality style, investment in value in clothing, constantly keep looking at our range in food. I don't think there's a day, Richard and Alex, where we're not talking about a product. We all live and breathe it. We're a product organization. I'm proud of my GBP 110 suit. But I didn't think that was a good use of time for people in the audience today because I actually think if you buy our product, you engage with us, you know where we're winning. We have outlined some of those underperforming categories. Kidswear, we want to do more online towards 50%, and we're more than happy. It isn't really about competitive sensitivity because all of our competitors go into our stores every day. They buy everything.
Our store managers tell me and say, "Stuart, X, Y, and Z have been in, bought the whole shop." And we have people who have worked for the competition who tell me, "We used to be obsessed with M&S. It was a daily conversation." And I think we should just focus on what we're doing, not what everyone else is doing. So it's not about that. But I think in the past, we've talked too much product and not about those big hardwiring of the business. That's really the answer.
On the CapEx, Georgina, you're absolutely right. The thing I'm trying to get across is GBP 200-GBP 250 maintenance is hardlined in. The growth will depend on the opportunities, but you're right. If you add that together, it's probably GBP 500-GBP 600. It may be impacted a bit by disposals if Sacha can sort himself out, and it depends on Alex's pace on the depots in terms of how that flows through, and that may change it as well.
If you had to pick just a couple of categories for the audience, Richard, Alex, just highlight those couple of categories we're going to really focus on for growth.
Yeah, when your question around Kidswear, we're probably a couple of years behind the Womenswear journey in terms of shifting that style perception. We always used to say we had a kids' business for grannies buying for grandkids. Now we want it to be for kids buying for themselves and moms. So we think that's a massive opportunity. And there are subcategories, as I outlined earlier. And as Stuart also said, we think now is the time to really drive our home and our beauty business a little bit harder.
They're dry. Alex?
I mean, there's many, but two specifics. I'd say fresh seafood, so not salmon so much, but fresh fish. You can see we're literally losing share, so we've got a lot of work to do, and families tell us our options for kids snacking are poor, which they are.
That's a very good point, and even the categories where we're gaining share, like Womenswear, Maddy is somewhere at the back there. Let me tell you, Maddy's always positively dissatisfied and very ambitious for our Womenswear growth as well, so even the categories we're winning, we're not resting on our laurels. There's a lot of work ahead of us. Right, yes, I was over this side. Thank you.
Yeah, hi, Geoff Lowery at Redburn. Just one question on your financial aspiration. I totally hear your comments about percentage margin rate and that it's not a focus. But directionally, should we think about it as core profits flat from here and you drop through the return on your investment? Or do you think you can grow the core and drop through that rate of return on the incremental growth CapEx?
Gosh, Geoff, you're a hard man.
I answer that by.
Go on, you go, Jeremy.
I'd say if you look at the last two years, Geoff, we've managed to grow the profits without a significant increase in CapEx. So we should be able to do both if we can continue to maintain our momentum.
Understood. Thank you. And a quick follow-up. You referenced Ocado, and we don't need to go into all the sort of gory detail today. Do you think there is a path towards it making a meaningful level of net income without you deploying more capital into sorting out the arrangements, particularly the service fees that the JV is paying away? Or does there have to be a change in structure for it to be a meaningful contributor?
Well, I'll let Jeremy follow on for my quick because you've really answered it in the question. Because look, I think it's very easy to get carried away because we've got growth on the Ocado. And actually, what it has highlighted is customers resonate with M&S online. And we said that in the participation of the basket. And although our losses have narrowed, we're never going to be saying we think we're set up for success because you've already said it, Geoff. There's a high cost base here. Do I see a more profitable business in its current structure? I've got a question mark about that. The five-year plan outlines. Hannah's plan does give you a path to profit. I refuse to talk about EBITDA. I keep pushing everyone, and Jeremy now sorted it out. I want net profit after everything. The costs are high.
I think it needs different thinking, to be honest. Last year, I said maybe three to five years. I'm still uncertain today if we're going to see in its current structure a profitable online business. We will make our synergies. And actually, for us as a shareholder, making the synergies is going well, but we want this to be a really successful, the most successful food online business in the country. Did you have your hand up, Archie? Or was you stretching?
Oh, Archie gave a thumbs up. I thought he might have chipped in.
I'll flip your question the way around, Geoff, and I'll say, and we said this in our half-year results, we're not going to commit to any significant level of CapEx until we see the profit and cash flows coming through. So that's the way we're looking at it. And that means we're working very closely with the team to try and drive cost out and improve the performance.
Thank you, Jeremy. We're out of time, but we'll do one last one. But we will all stay around if you want more questions at the end.
Brilliant. Thank you. John Stevenson at Peel Hunt, a couple of questions. One on availability. Just wondering what's happening to the in-store food availability. Chatting to Alex before, but my local stores in South Manchester are stripped of fresh by sort of mid-afternoon. So just interested how those scores have actually moved in absolute terms, and second question just on Sparks. I think we're going to be on Sparks 3.0. How do you rate the engagement now? What's not working and what are you going to do to kind of get it?
Let me tackle Sparks and Alex can think about availability because I can assure you every day we talk about this, and that's seven days a week. In fact, even this morning with the downstairs small store, we had something like 70 out of stock. Let Alex talk about how he needs to get ahead of the volume because he's flat out trying to do that, Kara and the team as well. When it comes to Sparks, look, we've had some errors along the way because we got so preoccupied with building our Sparks customer base. In fact, at every meeting, we'd celebrate another 500,000 customers signing up to Sparks. Then all we would have is constant promotions.
To be frank, it was this time last year I just had enough because the satisfaction from our customers was better than it was, but they were really asking, "What is the purpose of this Sparks?" The other thing, I admit I didn't realize this, we wasn't capturing the data of new customers signing up. That's really important as we want to be the most trusted retailer and therefore drive the most personal shopping experience personal to you. Therefore, we got too carried away on the wrong things. Sparks is also quite costly. To be frank, we even went back to base and said, "Do we need it? Could this investment be spent anywhere else or give a better return if we did something else with this money?" We ripped it all apart. What we've come back with is the start of a new plan.
I will go back. Sharry's in the audience. I know we've discussed this at coffee break, but I don't want this rush. There's a lot of fixing in the back room on technology, how we're collecting our data, how we're going to make it a better digital experience. We've prioritized that. It's not huge spend, but it is time-consuming. We want to clean up the data we have, really make sure we understand our customer and how we're going to use that in decision-making and how we're going to use it to help our customers, 20-plus million on Sparks. How also, by the way, we had credit card over here with two and a half million customers and nothing joined up. And again, to be honest, I had enough of that because I was saying, "This is ridiculous.
We're still not joining this up together," and we are doing that now. So there's a rethink. We're not going to do what I call tricksy pricing. It's now GBP 5, but if you're Sparks, it's GBP 2. No. We're going to do honest, transparent pricing in our stores and continue that work on trusted value. But there will be other things. It might be you see the Bella collection, the Bella Freud collection, or the Sienna Miller before anyone else. And we'll think of other creative ways of how we can really give you a more personal shopping experience. So early days, from April, we'll see some changes, and this will be a rolling plan over the next 18 months. Availability, Alex.
Okay, well, let me split into kind of the bad news and the kind of the less bad news.
Which store in Manchester?
Yeah. It was Trafford and Handforth Dean.
Yeah, Handforth Dean, Hale, Trafford, Mansfield.
So firstly, the way we measure availability, so we're deliberately our toughest critic on it. The only number we care about, actually, and this is the whole food leadership team as well, not just me, is what is our availability at 4:00 P.M. on a Saturday? Because that is when we're under our most pressure, and that's when we show up our absolute worst, as you've seen, and I'm sure you've all seen it as well. That really shows up in the fresh categories where we're seeing, as you've seen on the charts, big increases in demand. Now, there's a transformation agenda, which I won't go through again. I've talked about it. We've got to get all that stuff better. And that is the reason availability is actually getting better year on year on year, which is driving the growth.
The problem is it's still nowhere near where we want it to be. So the transformation has to continue. And the second bit is it's just a sleeves rolled up approach with us. It's us, our suppliers, our store colleagues every day filling every gap, chasing down every supplier short. And that's what we have to do. But it's opportunity for growth, but it's not where it needs to be.
Okay, so the 4:00 P.M. scores are actually getting better.
Yeah, it's about a point better versus last year, and last year was a point better than the year before, but it's still nowhere near where I want it to be.
I mean, we should be not even positively dissatisfied.
Permanently dissatisfied.
Because it's just not good enough. And to be honest, I've never been to Handforth Dean, and it's been good enough. So let's hope it gets better because that's never been great on availability. There's lots to do to get ahead of the volume. And it's a critical part, especially now at Christmas, because these lines that sell one or two a week, the minute we get into end of November, bang, we can't keep things on the shelf. So we've got a lot. In the bigger stores, it's easier, but a lot of our stores overtrade. So.
Sir, can I just?
Yes, you can jump in. Last word.
Just jump in as well. We've got something coming called PM Gap Scan. At the moment, we scan our gaps in the morning. We're just trialing it on Leeds. We'll be scanning our gaps in the evening, which will give us a full read on the stock file. When Alex says it's accurate, that will mean we'll be able to more accurately reflect what's needed at the back end of the day. That's rolling out sort of imminently.
Drop us an email every time you're in there. Tell us if we're getting better. Yeah. Keep re-emailing us. Thank you. We appreciate it. Right, I will close. Thank you, everyone. Conscious of the time, I'll just say a few things for us to wrap up. So we will stay behind after if you've got other questions. The leadership team are at the back as well, so we can answer any more questions you've got. I think how we would summarize today, what we would like you to take away is, of course, we're on track and we've made progress. So I say progress made.
But what we have tried to do today, we haven't really focused on the new dress collection for winter or spring, but we have tried to focus on the big strategic issues where we need to really put our attention and invest our capital: store rotation, supply chain, D&T. So lots still to do. And actually, when you listen to Rachel, we become very confident that we've got a good plan on D&T. But as I say to Rachel, don't underestimate. There will be bumps in the road over the course of the next 12 months to two years, and some things may go off track. Don't worry. We just want transparency. So we've made progress, but lots to do. I think the other thing, what we really want you to take away is there's just so much opportunity.
When you think about the momentum we have got, but you hear the issues that you know just as well as we do, the availability in Handforth, empty shelves after 4:00 P.M. When you hear about the supply chain, now we have to rebuild the supply chain in food just to get that volume and get the capacity to drive the volume so we're doubling our food business, which we're on the way to do in Clothing & Home, the whole central range and planning platform, so when you hear about supply chain, when you hear about all of those other investments, only at the end of April, 25% of our stores will be new or renewed, so you imagine when half of the estate and then all of the estate over the years ahead is new and renewed.
Imagine a future of M&S when we are 50% online and it's not at 7% margin, it's at 10% margin. So the summary is progress made, lots to do, but so much opportunity ahead for future growth. So our job at the moment is to continue the momentum, accelerate the pace of change in transformation, get even closer to customers, drive a high performance culture, and be obsessed about growth, but not at any cost. And as Ian, I can't see Ian now. I think he's moved, but I saw him there. As Ian said, maybe Ian's gone. As Ian said in the video when we did the shareholder note and the shareholder video, it's all about sustainable growth. And that's what we need to focus on: sustainable change, hardwiring the change into the business and sustainable growth. So thank you for your time. Hope you got something from today.
But more importantly, thank you to my team for what they've done and what they're about to do because we've got a very busy few months ahead delivering Christmas as well as delivering the transformation. And please, please shop with M&S at Christmas and spread the word to all your family and friends. I don't mind begging. Please shop with us. Thank you very much.