Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our Capital Markets Day. As you know, the Capital Markets Day is always looking forward. It is about our strategy. We discussed the half-year results and the last six months last week. Today is all about looking forward. Also, just following on from that video, I think when we think about our strategy, we always think about our customers because, actually, we serve 32 million customers a year. Over half of the population shop at M&S. I think it is really important we constantly think about being closer to our customers, closer to our colleagues, because that is one of our key behaviors. Following on from that video and some of that feedback, we are really fortunate because we are inundated with customer feedback.
It doesn't matter if it's an email or a few hundred emails to me every week, or it's through our contact center, or it's through our stores and our store management team. We also have other ways of reaching out to customers. We have something we launched last year called our Customer Collective. Our Customer Collective is a group of people that we just wrote to and said, "Would you sign up so when we ask you questions, you can give us immediate feedback?" When we wrote this out, within a couple of days, we had 42,000 customers that volunteered to be part of our collective.
On Friday, I wrote to a few of those customers and just said, "Could you give us some feedback on what we're doing well, what are the big opportunities, and also the biggest things on your mind?" The great thing about M&S is our customers are just as ambitious as we are, if not more so, and they're very demanding, which is brilliant because they're very passionate about M&S. When we get the feedback, I wrote a few positives, a few opportunities, and then the biggest thing they're telling us that they're concerned about. The positives, they want bigger stores. They very much talk about their area, their catchment. They want the store renewed if it hasn't been renewed. The second thing that comes out is they want more range, especially in food.
If we've opened a food store, they're asking, "When is the next biggest store that also does fashion in particular?" followed by home and beauty. The other thing they raise, even in new stores, they raise parking. They say, "We need more parking." When we talk about opportunities, the biggest things that come out, no surprise to us, the social media really cuts through, but you run out of all the fashion items, especially small sizes. They tell us, "We want better offers, or if not offers, please keep focused on value." They ask us to improve our loyalty program, Sparks. No surprise to anyone in the room, but loyalty is a big thing, and they want more personalization. They want to feel that we know you. We understand you, not just as a group of customers, but individually.
When I ask, "What's top of mind? What are you most worried about?" it's actually quite interesting this year because never have I heard so much about government or budget or value as we are hearing today. At the moment, the majority of our customers are waiting for the 26th of November. They're waiting for whatever the big reveal is. When you ask the biggest thing on their mind, they talk about prices and value. I think that's really important when it comes to our plans for the future, the work we've done on quality, product, and value, but the work we're also continuing to do over the years ahead. I'll touch more on that shortly, as will the team. We also ask for key words. What are the words you think about with M&S? The word trust comes out.
It comes out in various ways because what customers tell us is, "We expect you to do the right thing." The lengths we go to in our stores on product or service is just an expectation because you're M&S. Trust features heavily in our strategy, features in our vision when we spoke about this just three years ago. We talk about wanting to be the most trusted retailer, putting product at the very heart of everything we do. What's different in M&S compared to other retailers we as a team have worked for is we're a product company. We own the product. It's overwhelmingly own label. We're not just selling lots of brands. We own the product we sell. It gives us full control of everything we sell. Trust is important. Under trust, customers want consistency.
They want to know every day we're trying to do the right thing day in and day out. That features very heavily in our strategy. When we think about trust, there are different measures, different reports, different surveys. When we look at the YouGov survey, YouGov asks, "What are the top British brands?" If you go back to 2020, we featured in the top five of the top British brands. If you go to 2021, we featured third in the top British brands. If you go to the last two and a half years, we've been voted number one, the top U.K or British brand. That is a big responsibility because when you commit to being the most trusted retailer, you set the bar very high.
When you do reach that number one spot of being the most trusted brand, you might drop off one or two points every now and again, but you want to be that most trusted brand day in and day out. For us, that gives us that positive pressure to constantly improve and reshape the organization. As I said, when we think about who we want to be, the most trusted brand with own label, M&S at the very heart because we are overwhelmingly own label. As part of that trust, it is working with our brilliant supplier partners, being very much integrated into the organization. It should not be an arm's length relationship. It should be a close relationship. How we work with our farmers or our international suppliers in fashion, of whom we have had relationships for many, many years.
How we nurture those relationships when times get difficult are just as important, if not more so now than they ever were. Protecting our IP of our product is becoming increasingly important. When we think about our purpose and why we exist, we spoke a lot in our previous capital market days about the M&S magic, bringing the magic of M&S through exceptional quality, value, service, and innovation. That is really important because customers expect us to lead on outstanding own label quality. They expect to pay a little bit more for outstanding quality, but not a lot more. They also expect much better service in M&S than other retailers. Expectations are high. We have got to do a better job through our people and serving through better technology and experience.
They expect us to lead in innovation because in 1947, we were the first retailer to sell nylon stockings. In 1960, we were the first retailer to sell the fresh packed whole chicken. In 1980, we were the first retailer to sell pre-packed sandwiches. Innovation is always part of the M&S magic. It does not matter how many times we land a new line and our competitors run into stores and the store managers will email us and say, "So and so has just been in and stripped the shelves of new lines to take it back to their office." We say the same thing. That is okay. Providing we are leading on innovation and we are not copying. Always be the leaders.
Whether it was the nylon stockings or whether it's the Strawberry Sando that sold millions, I think it was 4 million within a matter of weeks. This innovation is incredibly important. The other big thing in our purpose is about this online and multi-channel and omnichannel because we are very aware we have a stores business, an online business, a cargo business, a floral business, an international business. Really, we need to move towards one view of the customer. We need this omnichannel seamless experience. Hopefully, all of you are shopping with us. You know full well, whether it's you or your family or friends, that we've got quite a lot to do to join up this experience. Our strategy has always been in the last three years, therefore, to protect the magic of M&S, but modernize the rest. Our strategy hasn't changed.
We're not really announcing anything new today, but we're announcing a continuation and in many ways an acceleration of the strategy we laid out in my few months in as CEO in October 2022. Protecting the magic means embracing, harnessing, protecting all of the things that made M&S what it is today. At the same time, we've got a huge modernization program, a huge program to transform, change M&S for the future and to enable future growth. When we do an internal communication event like last week after our half-year results, colleagues would normally say to me or the leadership team, "Have we now transformed? Have we finished the transformation?" Of course, we say, "No." I'm normally guilty of saying, "We've only just begun," as the song goes.
Because when you look at the opportunity ahead of us and when you go through the journey with us today, you'll realize, yes, lots has been done, but there's so much more to do and there's so much opportunity ahead for us in future years. We now have this saying that change is constant. Change is not a one-off event. We are constantly going to change the organization. If you're a person that loves fast pace, if you're a person that really wants to make a difference, if you're someone who loves to change and constantly improve, then you're going to enjoy working at M&S. In 2022, we laid out our plan of reshaping M&S for growth. More recently, in the last few months, we've now called this plan Reshaping M&S for Continued Growth.
In the spirit of we said, we've done, when we look at what we laid out in October 2022 for that five-year plan, we said in food, we will grow market share by 1%. We said in fashion, home and beauty, we will grow market share by 1%. In food, that would take us to approximately GBP 10.5 billion. In fashion, to around GBP 4.3 billion. We also said we'll have operating margins in food of around 4%, a question that many of you ask every time we catch up and talk. We talked about in fashion, home and beauty, a margin of 10%. We laid out a plan of restructuring our cost base. We laid the plan out to say to remove GBP 400 million of cost out.
We've raised that recently to GBP 600 million, especially when we had the added surprise of even more cost headwinds coming our way. Increased national insurance, another GBP 55 million a year for us. Increasing living wage, which by the way, we would have done anyway. We class that a good cost. That was already in our plans. Other things like the new taxes on packaging, which is an extra GBP 30 million, or deposit return scheme, an extra GBP 30 million to implement, another GBP 10 million cost every year to run. There is a lot coming our way. I think the good news for us is we also know there is so much to go for, hence why we've increased our cost plans. I will touch on this later, but it is very important we think about restructuring the cost base, not just taking cost out.
We also talked about having disciplined capital allocation, very clear hurdle rates. We laid out our capital envelope of GBP 650 million-GBP 750 million. When we think about progress to date, three years into that plan, in food, as you can see, we've grown from 3.5%- 3.9%. In fact, today, you would have noticed Kantar's results. The market was flat on volume. We have grown in the last four weeks and twelve weeks on volume. We've come out Ocado number one, M&S number two. In fact, our market share as of today is at 4.1%. In fashion, we've already grown our market share from 9.4%, as you can see, to 10.5%. In margins, I expect lots of questions on margins, but hopefully, we'll answer those through today's session.
On margins, you would say, like we would say, you set out your target, but you've delivered those already before the five years. On return on capital employed, we had a much improved result of 16.4%. Obviously, we expect a slight drop-off on that this year, but a strong recovery. Our balance sheet's in good shape. We've been net funds for 18 months. If you summarized all of that, we're heading in the right direction. We talk about positively dissatisfied as this culture. I think, and we think as a leadership team, actually being positively dissatisfied should give us energy. It should always be cheering on the progress, acknowledging the green shoots, but actually never quite happy because one of our behaviors is always aiming higher. When you look at the opportunity ahead of us, we find that incredibly exciting.
On the we've said, we've done, we've got our key pillars in our strategy around product, profitable sales growth, operating margin performance, and building the M&S we need to be, building M&S for the future. When we have a quick scores on the doors, we don't do amber. We've had to try and find a few greens and acknowledge the few reds. When you look through that, you can see where we've made some progress, but really the reds call out where we're just very positively dissatisfied because there's so much to do in the years ahead. Looking at that in more detail, if we start with exceptional product, because as we talk about product is at the very heart of everything we do, and the P&L is in every product we sell. We talk a lot about quality. In fashion, we talk a lot about style.
Actually, for the first time in fashion, home and beauty, just last week, we were number one for style, which for us was a huge motivator. For the team who have been putting so much effort into improving our quality and style, but still maintaining trusted value, it was a big cheer on. Whether we remain number one or two, it does not really matter, but we are well on the way to improving our style credentials. In food, you can see our quality perception continues to improve from a pretty high level at the very start. There are some watch-outs on how that is dropping off, and I will touch on that on value as well. You will hear later from the team quality, your e-products like you had your lunch on arriving. Kathryn is going to join Alex on stage later to talk about quality in food. I'll just pause a moment and let Kathryn talk to you about one specific example for this Christmas when we think about delivering quality for our customers this year.
I'm delighted to be here today at Minor Panettone, 60 km from Turin in the Italian Alps. Let's go inside and find out more. Marco, we're here today to see the collection, Notchelato Panettone being made.
It is an e-Panettone with hazelnut frosting and crunchy almonds on top. Inside, we have orange peel coming from Calabria. The trees of orange in Calabria are plumpy, so the fruit is very juicy. We have sultanas from Turkey. Also, the butter comes from the Alps. It takes more than three days to make this Panettone. The main secret is the sourdough.
How old is your sourdough?
Not less than 6 5 years old. Wow.
I'd love to know why you hang Panettone upside down after it's been baked.
Because we want to maintain the same shape dome of the product. This is the best way to do it.
I hope you'll all agree this isn't just any Panettone.
Questo M&S Panettone.
I laughed because I was a bit worried about showing the 65 number. Kathryn can explain that. She has a very good answer for everything we do on quality. Just as quality is important, I mentioned value at the very start because our customers talk a lot about value. As you know, I talk a lot about trusted value, everyday pricing, first price, right price. In the past, we talked about trusted value driving our volume. We've invested over GBP 165 million in the past few years in food on value.
It is a challenge for the food team because with all of those headwinds coming our way, our suppliers are facing all of those headwinds themselves. Every extra tax they get, how that passes through to us. That is why the work Alex and the team are doing, like John and the team in fashion, home and beauty, working with partners to mitigate those extra costs to make sure we can be as best as we can on value for customers is becoming more important today than ever before. Actually, we did the baseline from December 2023, but I remember joining running the food business in late 2018, and that number was way down here on value. You can see the improvement in our value perception scores, a slight drop-off here that Alex and I are completely paranoid about.
Likewise, in fashion, home and beauty, as customers' expectations on value are getting even higher, you can see that slight drop-off because customers are worried about prices, and we have to be paranoid about value. Two weeks ago, I presented in Northern Ireland at the National Food and Drink Association, and they asked, well, they've been asking every year, but I did agree to do it this year, a keynote speech. Of course, I went and talked about M&S. I even took the Christmas catalog, gave it out to everybody. The video I showed was our first store opening in Belfast in 1967. This video was just tremendous, well before many of us in the room were born. In this video, it talked about the store opening. 230,000 people turned up for that opening, and they did a marketing video.
The video was pretty tremendous because it showed you the store, and the video gave you goosebumps. You saw all of these dresses piled up with a big clear price point. You saw chinos and men's trousers piled up on tables with a very clear price point. Ditto in food. The advert talked about, "Come to M&S Belfast. High-quality provisions, and you do not pay any more." The minute I watched that video, we had a leadership meeting with our top 100 leaders that day. The opening of that meeting was to play the video, just to remind us that actually in M&S, protecting the magic and modernizing the rest is all about quality at the right price. We have never been a premium retailer. We have always aimed to have better quality for the right price.
We have been investing in value, and our performance in our value categories has actually been very strong. There is so much more to go for because in food, whether it is bigger packs and better value or the Remarksable range that the team works so hard on, the top 200 items that our customers buy most at the same price as a big retail competitor, milk at GBP 0.85, for example. Those sales, as you can see, are growing every year and becoming a large proportion of the basket. Alex will talk more about that. In fashion as well, we need to be really conscious of price. When Charlotte joined us running lingerie, we were walking a store together, and we talked about the GBP 10 bra. There was no signage.
You had to look, move the ticket, and go, "Oh, GBP 10 feels a good price." Actually, for the quality and the price, you would say it's the best value bra in the market. We had one color, white. Charlotte has introduced six colors of the GBP 10 bra, and this year, we're going to sell 2 million of the GBP 10 bra. Value has to run throughout every product, every category, and everything we do. Our second pillar is driving profitable sales, and that's all about growth. You would say we're on track. We've grown our customers. When you think about our customer base, which is our first part of this plan, because as I said at the start, we serve 32 million customers a year. Actually, we haven't really cracked this yet.
Because in food, our customers have grown over 9% in the last couple of years, and frequency is up double digits, probably 11% or something. I think it's up on the slide. In fashion, home and beauty, the customer numbers are pretty flat. Frequency has gone up by about 5%. When you really get into that customer base, only 40% of our customers cross-shop across the businesses. Actually, that's really in our four-line stores where there's food and fashion. We haven't really got customers shopping across categories. In fashion, in John's business, half our customers only shop one category. There is a massive opportunity.
To go back to my opening when I say to customers, "What do you really want us to fix?" One of the top three, I should say really one of the top three, is toilets, by the way, but I did not really want to bring that up at the start of the presentation. One of the top three is Sparks. If you think about Sparks, 24 million people on our Sparks program, we have to crack this where we engage more customers to cross-shop more categories. We will be relaunching our Sparks program. It will not be one big bang. We wanted to do it a few months ago. We had a bit of disruption, so things have slowed down. We will relaunch it at the start of next financial year, but it will continue to evolve over the months and years ahead as well.
The second key part of this pillar is online and omnichannel, and really using that competitive advantage of having stores and online. Because we have marked this red by the plan we laid out a couple of years ago, but we know this is a big opportunity. In John's business, we have 10 million customers shopping online, five and a half of those on the app. Actually, we have to improve that experience. We had a plan to do a lot of that experience over the last few months. We will get back on track. Actually, over the next 12 months is a big priority for us because we know we are a bit behind where everyone else is on experience.
When you think about that opportunity, as you can see from the slides, in fashion, home and beauty, we laid out a participation target of 50% of our business to be online. We are more convinced, and John is convinced since he arrived in the business, that this is a really realistic target and important for the years ahead. We need to focus our resources on delivering online. We dropped off slightly from 33% post-COVID, but our participation is at 32%. The market is significantly higher. I think it is 46%, you told me, John, 42%. The market is running at 42%. We see this as a big opportunity. Thinking about omnichannel, thinking about the margin performance, by the way, here at 7.5%, all of you will be telling John and I, "Well, everyone else is 10 percentage points better than that.
What are you going to do about your margin?" John can answer that in his session. That is a big opportunity for us and how we become a more profitable online retailer. We talked about Ocado, and Hannah's in the room with Matt, the finance director for Ocado, because Ocado had a strong performance in the half of 15% up, a strong M&S performance on Ocado as well, around 20% up. Actually, the question you gave me two years ago in this room was, "Stuart, do you really think this year Ocado will make profit?" I answered, "No, but I think it could break even within three years." I think we'd say we're on track, Hannah, with that. The next part of this program on delivering profitable sales growth is also a really important program in store rotation and store renewal.
Because I admitted this last year, I wanted to accelerate this program. I came up and said, "The five-year plan, we're doing it in three." In fact, some of you said to me, "Is that wise?" The truth is we just couldn't do it anyway. We are really back to that plan that was a five-year plan that's really turning into a six-year plan. Let me just talk you through and remind you what we said. We said we had worked out by looking at our network and mapping out the country that we wanted about 180 four-line stores by FY 2028 and probably about 420 food halls because we know where every store is, of course, but we also know the markets we want to be in. That is looking like 200 four-line stores and around 380. Alex is about 40 short for FY 2028.
Now, we're playing catch-up, and it is important to remember that whether it's at our property committee and then we take that to the board, it's important to remember that we debate these stores at length. We're also making sure we're investing in the right stores for the future. We're not really thinking about the next one year, two years, three. We're making decisions for five years, 10 years, 15, and beyond. We say no more to saying yes. Actually, when you look at our catch-up plan, we've got quite a few stores in the pipeline. We know in our food stores in particular, this is working. We've got a proven model. I'll pick one store, which is Dundee, because in this store, we opened this store in July 2024. Some of you may know it.
We had a high-street, old legacy store that was collapsing on a downward spiral. Not a lot we could do. Even if we invested, we did not think it would deliver the right returns in the medium to longer term. We had a four-line store in Dundee on a retail park, but we were not happy with the location. We spent quite a lot of time renegotiating, and we ended up moving that store to a better part of the retail park and closing the high-street food store. Dundee is now a four-line store. In fact, food space in totality reduced, if you think about both stores, by 36%. Sales per square foot went up 80%, and sales went from GBP 22 million to GBP 26 million in Dundee. In fashion, home and beauty, we grew the space 10%. Sales went from GBP 9 million to GBP 14 million. Sales per square foot went up 45%.
Overall, that decision enabled us to grow our sales from GBP 31 million to GBP 40 million and actually be a much bigger, more profitable, more productive store for the future with a payback of this store of just under two years. In our pipeline, we have 67 stores already approved that will open in the next three years. In fact, this year and next year, and Sacha can talk about this and Will is in the room in the breakout sessions, this is actually the most amount of store rotation or renewals or new stores we have ever done in the history of M&S. There has been a lot of activity in the last few months and into the next 12 months. 67 already approved for the next three years.
In fact, if you just go beyond a year, there's actually 94 stores already approved, signed off, and we're very clear. In FY 2028, we will still, even after all of this hard work, only have 53% of our stores either new or renewed. Don't forget, we did the home-based program, 12 home-based stores. All of those will be open, I think, by 2026, Sacha.
It's 7 by July.
7 by July.
You have the long lease one after that. She has to get it right.
Okay. 7 stores out of the 12 by July, the rest by FY 2030, where we've taken the overriding lease. These are going to be terrific food stores, high-trading stores, average size 18,000 sq ft.
Do not forget, we do not have the 35,000 or 50,000 format like a big supermarket, but this will be a very high-trading store, all of these home-based stores. In fashion, home and beauty, we just need a bit more time. We are going to reopen Pantheon in May next year, but Pantheon store at the bottom of Oxford Street is really our first real go at what we think the future format of fashion, home, and beauty should be. To be honest, you cannot blame John. If it goes wrong, you blame me. What John and I are going to do when we open Pantheon is walk the store with the team, talk to customers, look at all of the numbers, and then decide. We should not rush this. What is working? What is not? What is scalable?
Our plan is to have a new blueprint for fashion, home, and beauty by towards the half of next financial year. Then we can start discussing and agreeing rollouts for that format. I know many of you are interested in international and our global growth plan because you've asked me, and Mark in our leadership team is going to do a session on this with Victoria later in the breakout sessions. We've marked this red mainly because we've been doing a lot of work in the background to reset our global plan. Actually, I would say there's a lot done, but now it's about execution, and we've got to really crack on now with executing this plan and delivering growth. We're very clear on that. The old contracts in international were really not win-win contracts.
The contracts were very much us making a certain margin and then leaving it to the franchise partner to decide what to range, how to run the business. It was a very safe way of working. We were not really growing. If you look at 10 years and you strip out the noise like Republic of Ireland, our international business has not really grown. We have talked to all of our partners. I did this in my first few months when they wrote to me, and we have met all of our partners. What Mark has done with his team is reset three of those big five contracts already. It is a share of risk and reward, but really it is focused on growth. It is capital light. Our partners put the capital in. They know the markets. We do not.
It also encourages them to be braver, to go for volume, to go for growth, to sell the full range of fashion, for example. There are other things Mark and the team have done. We have now partnered with Zalando and Amazon and About You. The range is still quite small compared to the competition, but that is a growth opportunity. Something that I think is a good idea is this wholesale partnership I am quite keen on because there are many brands who have knocked on our door to say, "We would like to partner and sell M&S." Many brands in the US now, at the moment, it is just Percy Pigs in Target. By the way, they sell out. They cannot keep up. We need to supply them more.
Actually, this week in Coles, Australia, there's quite a credible M&S range in food being displayed in a few hundred Coles stores. In David Jones, Australia again, we partnered with them. They wanted to sell M&S lingerie. In fact, it's way beyond our expectations, and we can't quite keep up. Now they've asked for women's wear and men's wear. The list goes on. The other thing is we know, as you can see from the stats here, maybe it's on the next slide, that our value perception in these markets is not very good because our partners have just added on prices to protect profit and margin. We have just reduced thousands of prices in the Middle East on food. The volume has gone up about 30%, Mark, or nearly 40%. Actually, we never hardly sold anything.
It's 40% of very small numbers. There's a lot to go for, but it will be medium to longer term. Mark can explain that with the team this afternoon. Our third pillar is operating margins. We've talked about structurally lower costs. We explained that we said by FY 2028, GBP 500 million. We've now increased that to GBP 600 million. When you think about all of the work we have to do, when you listen to Alex and John today, just think about supply chain. I mean, when I became CEO, acquiring GIST was probably the best acquisition we've ever done or ever likely to do. We just needed to acquire the business to own it and decide our future. The hard work then started because now we've got to build a supply chain to really enable significant and big future growth in years to come.
In fact, when John started and did his month in stores, after his month, we caught up, and he said, "I cannot believe how hard it is to work deliveries in our stores. If I was in another retailer, you would reject the delivery and just refuse to do it because half of our hours—and Tinus is living this pain as our new Retail Director—half of the hours in fashion, home, and beauty are behind the store sales floor, sorting out deliveries and unpacking and repacking." There is so much to go for in fashion, home, and beauty on store-friendly deliveries and better supply chain. Same in food. In retail, Tinus has already, in a few months, landed a program called the M&S Way, standardizing all of the rhythms and routines in every store, analyzing where every hour.
Now, we've done a lot of this background work previously, but now we're really getting into the detail of making sure the plans enable a restructured, lower-cost M&S. It wouldn't be fair to really go into the detail of our D&T plans on a cost-out perspective today. Sacha is here doing a brilliant job stabilizing the team, really thinking about Christmas and resilience. We are going to relaunch our evolution plan on D&T at the start of the new financial year. Sacha can discuss that in the breakout. Also under this program, I mentioned supply chain because Alex got a big gift for this Christmas because we approved a GBP 380 million gift so Alex can double the size of his food business. Actually, when you go through our program, there is so much to get after.
We've got a new, more modern DC in Avonmouth in Bristol opening next year at a cost of GBP 40 million, but that will give us more chilled capacity to make sure we can deliver the chill plan in the years ahead. We've got a new automated DC in Daventry that we've already announced, a 1.3 million sq ft DC. Not sure of this. There we go. With proven technology. This is all technology. It's not new. It's already proven. Other retailers have used it, so we've kept it simple. It's a GBP 340 million investment over, I think it's six years, six or thanks, Alison, six years. It gives us a big opportunity because what that site in Daventry gives our food business is an increased capacity in chill by 12% and an increase in ambient.
We need that because we have ambitious plans in our food business. In fashion, home, and beauty, John will present some of this later, but we are going to invest, especially when it comes to Castle Donington, for online and click and collect. Wrapping all of that up, we also spoke in 2022 and last year about building the M&S for the future, the M&S that we want to be. At the very heart of that is our high-performance culture. We would put this red because actually, it feels very different in M&S. When people join, John Haley is our Chief People Officer who is week five. She's done her month in stores, now just kicked off in the last few days. Actually, many people who join say, "It's not at all hierarchical compared to what I thought it could be or would be.
It's a very open culture. We talk about the unvarnished truth. It's all news. There's no such thing as bad and good. It's just news. Get everything on the table. Actually, we think we've got so much to do still. Yes, our leaders do a month in stores, and everyone in the store support center does their seven days a year in stores, listening to customers, coming back to the store support center to drive improvements. We haven't really embedded this restructured cost base, this more efficient way of working. When we think about our behaviors, yes, we talk about positively dissatisfied and aiming higher. It does feel very different a few years on, but we know throughout the organization we have to deliver that.
Being closer to customers, being obsessed with our customer feedback, taking it all as just news and opportunities to improve. When we think about our new behaviors that we outlined, like aiming higher, or we say it, we do it, being quicker on execution. That is really why we would say there is much more to go for when it comes to really changing our culture and making it even faster, empowering our people. Remembering, it is like when my team joined M&S, I say, "You are accountable, and you have accountability, but you do not have whole autonomy because that is where we come together to agree the big decisions, but you are very accountable." We want everyone in M&S to feel accountable: Mary on the checkout, serving her customers, the store manager, or our retail director.
We have quite a bit to do, and Hannah is going to help us, as all of us, as people leaders, rethink this cultural change program. The second program we spoke about under Building the M&S of the Future is, of course, technology because we know we need to make better decisions through technology. Yes, we have been disrupted in the last few months, but we are getting back on track. We have quite a big plan for the next few years. It is interesting how things are starting to change because just in this presentation, when we were going through slides the other day, and I was penning out my slides, I am sure the team did the same.
I said, "Let's play a video." Somebody said, "What do you want?" I said, "I'd love our Christmas candle, which is going to be the Christmas Joy candle. It's going to be the best-selling Christmas candle of the season, so please buy one and don't miss out." I said, "Be great for the Christmas tree, the Christmas candle, lift the spirits of the Capital Markets Day." Within five minutes, someone put a video together, which is the video on my left, just through AI, by taking our properties, no agencies, no setting up a room, no putting our Christmas tree up and then putting lights on it, and then lighting a candle and trying to get a videographer getting it right for the presentation. Ten minutes, I've got a video playing on my slides.
In fact, at the half-year results last week, normally after that day in the evening, the team will give me a very comprehensive summary of everything that's been said. The following day, we have a full roundup of the headlines, the sentiment. Actually, this year was very different because I got home that evening, went on to Copilot, went on to Researcher, and said, "Please give me everything that's been written about the half-year results at M&S in the last 12 hours." I say, "Give me the overall sentiment." The following day, I type in, "Give me a two-page summary of everything I need to know." Everything's becoming much, much quicker, as you know, and we're starting to work very differently.
The third or fourth part of this program is, of course, disciplined capital allocation because building the M&S we want to be means we want to invest in growth. We've got so much opportunity, but we want to make sure we do that with a clear strategy and within a capital envelope. I remember just being a few months in as CEO, and a shareholder asked to come and see me. I remember this as clear as day because the person walked into my room and threw a book on the desk called The Outsiders and said, "You need to learn about that because the history of M&S is no one knows how to manage capital and returns." I said, "Feedback's a gift. Thank you." I read the book.
Now, the shareholder did ask me to write a report, which I did not do, but I said at the Capital Markets Day, "We'll talk about it." Actually, we have improved our return on capital employed. It is something we're conscious of, and it's something Alison will talk about. We have this philosophy as, of course, we want to invest in growth, and as we earn more and generate more profit, then, of course, our shareholders should benefit. We must invest in our future strategies for growth. I have mentioned returns. Alison will talk about CapEx and cash flow, and it is important that we just note that we've been net funds for 18 months. We have a big focus on cash. Just like in our businesses, we have a big focus on volume, cash sales, and cash margin, not just percentages and rates as well.
We have got a strong balance sheet, so we are on track, but lots to do. When you think about the long-term opportunity for M&S, we have got some consistency in our delivery operationally and financially. We have a clear plan. Our strategy, we always dust it down and review it constantly, but we have had a clear plan, and we have got a clear plan for the future. We want to double our food business. We aim to double our fashion, home, and beauty online business, and we want to build a global M&S through disciplined investment and excellent execution. If you just cast your mind back to food, when we laid out this plan, sales of GBP 6.8 billion and now growth of over 30% with sales at GBP 9.1 billion.
Still a big opportunity because when you look at the spread of stores and market share throughout the U.K., a high of 5.6% in Scotland, but actually, we need more profitable sites in affluent areas in the south. That is what we are working on. Food serves 23 million customers every year, but we think there is an even bigger opportunity to get those fashion customers cross-shopping, especially in full-line stores. If you think about our store estate, Alex and the team have more than 1.1 million extra sq ft by fiscal year 2028. On track to enable doubling the size of that business. When you think about our fashion, home, and beauty business, as I said, and we have said before, online is a really important part of that growth strategy because we want to double that business.
If you think about when we laid out this plan at GBP 1.1 billion, we've made progress, a 27% increase at GBP 1.4 billion. As John will tell you, when you look at our market share, if you think about overall market share at 10% and the number one fashion retailer in market share terms, it's still only 10%. If you think about our online market share at only 8% and our store market share at 12.5%, there's a big opportunity to drive online. We have 10 million active customers. We actually only have 32% participation, and as John helped me out earlier, the market's at 42%. Our operating margin at 7.5% gives us good opportunity for growth, and John can explain how we're going to get there. Another reason to be confident about future growth is the plan I've highlighted on international.
In fact, if you look at the markets we already operate in, in our international business, there's a market size opportunity of GBP 600 billion. If you look at the value perception in those markets, it's pretty woeful. We want to invest in value with our partners, drive growth. As I said, we've got new partnerships with Zalando and Amazon, and we've got new wholesale arrangements, David Jones in Australia. We have a very strong leadership team. I am very grateful for my team because we are all in it together. Everybody in M&S is pretty detailed. We're all sleeves rolled up. Alison joined us 10 months ago. Month in stores, bit of disruption in the last few months, but really finding her feet as our CFO, pushing us hard to think about capital returns, store rotation, how we accelerate the pace of change.
Alex, now three years in, and he's had some big Christmas presents of investment to double the size of our food business in the most profitable way, but doing a fantastic job. The team are obsessed every day with the detail. John, eight months in, baptism of fire, thrown in at the deep end, month in stores, but actually, John understands all the big rocks that we need to turn over and solve, mainly sourcing, supply chain, merchandise planning, ranging, and online. We will talk about that in his update today. Mark, 18 months in, running international, has reset the business. Now we are going to execute and get growth.
Tinus, who's only five months in as our Retail Director, has already landed with a thunderclap, looking at standardizing all our ways of working, rethinking colleagues, rethinking store manager engagement and empowerment, one way of working, and definitely representing stores centrally to make sure Store Support Center delivers for stores so they can deliver for customers. Sacha, who not only runs property, and let me tell you, does a lot of things across the company, has been our Chief Recovery Officer, runs now D&T as well, and has really got the team together and has built in the short-term plan around Christmas for resilience, but also making sure we accelerate our property plans with Will and looking at our evolution plan for next year for D&T. Haley just joined us.
Wouldn't it be fair for me to put John Haley on the spot now, but just joined as our Chief People Officer because we think that cultural high-performance plan is at the very heart of our transformation. Nick, who isn't just our legal counsel, but is our wise counsel, who, quite frankly, I would have been lost without Nick in the last six months because he understands the business and is so critical to us as a leadership team around Exco. I would like to embarrass Victoria because Victoria's been with us seven years, and Victoria comes to my desk frequently in the day, giving me her views and opinions. She's instinctive. She's intuitive. She's a joy to work with.
She's off to new pastures in a different part of the world, and she leaves as a long-term, lifelong friend of M&S, so we wish her well, but she wanted to stay for Capital Markets Day. A strong team, deeply rooted in retail and transformation. What is the scope for growth? We believe that M&S is in a unique position. Long-term opportunity for growth. There's so much to go after. The U.K.'s most trusted brand. A distinct competitive advantage. Stores online. Fashion, home, beauty, Ocado. A strong team, experienced and very determined when it comes to this transformation and growth potential. Consistent delivery over the last few years, operationally and financially, and disciplined when it comes to capital allocation and managing our balance sheet. Running through today's agenda, I will hand over to Alex to give you a deeper dive into food.
John will give you his view of the fashion, home, and beauty business and the key things he's going to do to double that online business in the most profitable way possible. Disciplined capital allocation with Alison and that picture that was taken way before the incident a few months ago. Q&A with me and the leadership team to close the day. I'll hand over to Alex.
Afternoon, everyone. I'm Alex, the MD of Food here at M&S, and I've just discovered the proud owner of GBP 340 million of shareholder money as a Christmas present for a new DC. Thanks, Stuart. The reason that's important that I spoke with is that new DC is part of what we call modernizing the rest. Even though I've been here for three years, the strategy is unchanged.
It is about protecting the magic and modernizing the rest, and our aim to grow market share by 1% and deliver operating margins in excess of 4%. As Stuart said, perhaps even more importantly, what drives us every day is this ambition to double the size of the food business. The vision, and I introduced this last year on this stage, is to be what we call a shopping list retailer, focused on families and also with the soul of a market. Being a shopping list retailer, what does that mean in practice? It means to be the kind of retailer you come shopping with with a shopping list. You trust us to have what you want in the store you shop in, on the shelf, the right size, the right packaging, the right quality, and the right price and available when you come shopping.
All of those things are quite different to the old M&S, which was much more of a, "I wonder what M&S has got today" kind of retailer. A shopping list retailer means to be really trusted, not just for all those things, but above all, trusted for quality, of course, and trusted for value and a fair price. Because we've been focused on that, we do have momentum. Here's the chart that shows our value and volume share, the green being value and the gold being volume. Up to 4%, just over that, as Stuart said this morning, based on the Kantar data. We have got momentum, and we're on track to achieve that 1% market share growth ambition. We've also been well ahead of the market.
We started the calendar year, as you can see, on value growth and volume growth at about 8% on volume. Even despite the disruption we had over the summer, we've maintained that gap to the market. As you can see, as we've come out of that disruption, the gap is widening again. The market is challenging, though, so I should really point out, if you look at this volume number here in the market, the U.K. volume number is basically flat. It's slightly better than flat. Consumption is not growing, so it's a challenging market. If you look at the gap we had between the market and us last year, the last financial year this is, we sold 197 million more packs of product than we did the year before.
That is important, not just because it is a big number, but also that means we are more relevant to more customers more often and getting into more shopping occasions. We still have the opportunity to go much bigger. As Stuart showed, this is our growth thermometer. Where are we? We started at GBP 6.8 billion. We are at GBP 9.1 billion as at the end of the last financial year. We will soon be at GBP 10 billion, and we will be at GBP 14 billion. We will have doubled the business within our growth planning horizons. Where is that opportunity? Where does it lie? It really lies in a number of ways, and it gives us both belief and evidence if you look at the market share. Stuart describes our market share to me as piddly, and it is. It is only 4%. We are pretty tiny compared to the competitors.
There's lots of headroom to grow, and this is the Kantar market share of our competitors here. What gives us confidence and evidence is we are already much bigger than 4% in many respects. We know we can get there. If you look at the way Kantar cuts the market by mission type: main shop, top-up shop, dinner for tonight, and on the go, or food on the move, as we call it, we're already much bigger than our market share of 4% if you look at those shopping missions. We know we've got evidence that we can do it. It's the same at category level. You're looking at our category market shares. Coated chicken is a really important category for families. This is breaded crumb chicken, big category in the U.K. Our share is more than 20% in coated chicken.
Soft fruit, which is the category that contains strawberries, blueberries, really important family staples, we're at 8% share. Look how much opportunity we have in groceries, beers, wines, and spirits, frozen, and household and pet, where we're tiny. There's so much headroom to grow still. Those are important because they're also part of that shopping list basket I described. Lots of headroom. I'll come to stores later, but I wanted to point it out here that one of the reasons that we're not yet realizing that potential is because the number of shops customers can find the full range in is actually quite limited. This excludes the full-line stores. This is just the food-only stores. The number of stores in the country where you can get the full range is only 50. We've made progress because that was one five years ago, but it's 50 today.
I'll come on to this later, but there's so much more opportunity when we get more of that range to more customers. From a market perspective, what are customers telling us? What do they want from us, and what does that mean about growth? Being close to customers, absolutely the heart of the business, as you heard from Stuart. Customers are looking for trust in value and in quality. That's an absolute given every day. On top of that, there are three macro trends that they're telling us about, and I'll just let you read those behind me. Here are the three. The first one is more socializing at home. It's expensive to go out. There's lots of inflation. Customers are looking for premium, high-quality food to replace that out-of-home experience. Secondly, health and clean eating. Clean eating is very important here.
I'll come on to that. This is growing in importance. This is about feeling good now, today, and also preventing future illness. The customers are more conscious than ever before about what is going into their food. They're studying the back of packs closely with much greater consideration than ever before. They really, really care about ingredients and processing and what is in their food. The third thing is, even though times are tough, they're still focused on everyday treats and affordable luxuries. They want something that makes them feel good without breaking the bank, but it has to be clean, has to be made properly, and be clean eating and the best possible quality it can be. Those are the three big trends. How do we feel we're positioned versus these today? This is YouGov NPS scores.
As Stuart talked about, quality perception, we have a big gap to the market. Customers really trust us for quality. We are not satisfied with this because it is not growing, and we need to get it growing again. We are focused on investing in quality to make that happen. The gap is material. On innovation, customers see us as the most innovative retailer in the market, 26% NPS, and the gap is growing versus the market. Same in freshness. Freshness is also an indicator of quality, but it really means categories like fresh produce, 33% versus a market that is flat at 13%. In health, they see us as the health leader in the market, and the gap is growing, and health perception of other retailers is declining. We feel well-positioned from what customers are telling us is important to them and how they see us.
Back to this protect the magic, modernize the rest. We talked about the modernizing the rest a little bit in terms of the DC. I'll come back to that. The magic is really about product. What do we mean about protecting the magic? How does that show up in our business and on shelf? Last year, I talked about creating a consistent drumbeat of investment in quality and innovation. Now, in 2024, this was how our innovation was landing in our stores across the country by week. Let me explain this. Each one of these numbers here, where it says one, that does not mean one product. That means one category transformation or one piece of innovation. That might be 20 or 30 products being touched. A big piece of change.
The way we were landing innovation was very much by the seasons, so spring and autumn, as you can see there are big spikes. What we found was that was becoming harder and harder to manage. It was putting a lot of pressure on suppliers, our store colleagues. It was becoming actually a bit overwhelming for customers because we were moving the stores around so much. Practically, it was hard for us to market them to tell customers what was new in their stores because so much was new. What we did last year was we introduced what we call winning choices, which is much more regular drops of newness through the year. This is what the 2026 plan looks like. This is the newness that is launching across the next calendar year.
We think about this operating model, winning choices, as being at the heart of us being much more like an FMCG player than a pure retailer because we create all of our own products. Winning choices is a 48-week program. Every one of these that lands in the store, every single one began 48 weeks before that date, you can see. It starts with a tightly defined, detailed problem statement from listing to customers. It goes through a tightly controlled gate process, includes packaging design, supplier award, awarding business, marketing plan, packaging design, quality specs, numerous tastings, including between Stuart and myself, we taste everything. At the end of that, pops out a product on the shelf.
Now, I could go into a lot of detail about this, but I thought it was much more powerful to have our Product Development Director, Kathryn, join us on stage to take us through probably the best example of the year, which was our Strawberry Sando sandwich Stuart referenced earlier. Before Kathryn comes on stage, in case you missed the Strawberry Sando somehow, let's just play a video to remind you how it went. Kissy face, kissy face, sent to your phone, but I'm trying to kiss your lips for real. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Red hearts, red hearts, that's why. You are kidding me, M&S. You've absolutely slayed again. Oh, don't you want me like I want you, baby? Don't you need me like I need you now? See tomorrow, but tonight go crazy.
All you gotta do is just meet me at the I'll put you up, put you up, put you up, put you up, put you up, put you. Uh-huh, uh-huh. I'll put you up, put you up, put you up, put you up, put you. I'll put you up, put you.
I never thought I'd get the word "slay" into a presentation today. But hello, I'm Kathryn , and thank you for having me today. How did the strawberry sando go from nothing to our number one sandwich? What makes us unique is our team of product developers. Their role is the custodians of quality, both improving our current products but also bringing new products to market to ensure we remain ahead.
This is our point of difference, and it enables us to bring over 1,400 new products and 1,000 new improved recipes to market and to our customers every single year. The process we follow, as Alex said, to launch all our new products is called winning choices. It is a 48-week program that is truly cross-functional. It begins with trend identification. I have a dedicated trend team tracking, monitoring, and interpreting food and lifestyle trends into commercial opportunities. We track trends in many ways through AI, social media, and traditional trend houses. Unique to us is our global network of foodies. Sorry, stood in front of the image, does not help. Made up of chefs, food writers, and health experts, and they are all over the world. We call them our future navigators. They are reporting to us every quarter on their country's food scene.
Thanks to our Japanese contact, we had already responded to the Japanese sandwich trend in 2024 with our first-to-market katsu sando and our Japanese milk buns in bakery using the Tangzong method. The same Japanese contact reported on the growth of fruit sandos, becoming a real destination for foreign tourists and seeing a boom on social media. Was the U.K. now ready for a fruit sandwich? We thought so. Not only to capitalize on Strawberry Fortnite, which is Wimbledon, but also an ideal opportunity for us to celebrate the peak of our strawberry season and the best of the U.K. crop, our incredible Red Diamond Strawberries.
Once we identify a product, we develop a benchmark recipe right here in Waterside with our house chef team, which means we control the ingredients, recipe, and formulation to ensure the quality and the flavor is to the M&S standard, with every ingredient and source of that ingredient scrutinized. We have a team of 74 product developers and chefs working on over 4,000 products at any one time. We spent months working on the Strawberry Sando to achieve the right balance. A soft light shokupan-style bread filled with billows of lightly whisked mascarpone cream, paired with the star of the show, our carefully cut and placed fragrant and perfectly ripe sweet Red Diamond Strawberries. We then scale this up, our benchmark recipe up to our supplier partners and our fortress factories, and they play a really important role enabling production at scale.
The sando was made for us at one of our fortress factories, producing solely for us, so all our IP is protected. We also have a team of over 140 M&S technologists who work alongside our product developers and our supplier partners to protect our quality and safety standards at every single production. The sando was actually only produced for six weeks, and the reason for that was the Red Diamond Strawberries were at their absolute peak perfection. We used two strawberry suppliers to support the production, a process timed precisely to protect strawberry quality, ensuring they arrived at the production unit line just in time. It was imperative the cut face, as you can see, and the visual and perfection of flavor delivered in every sandwich.
The 48 winning choice process enables us to line up both products and value, packaging design, store execution, and marketing. We call these our five vectors of success. For each product launch, we measure ourselves to be superior versus the market against each of these vectors. At all stages of this program, the customer is at the heart of all our thinking and decision-making, and how they discover and engage with the product is absolutely crucial. The outcome, the sando was a truly viral product. It was an instant hit with huge demand, our most liked post ever on social media, our number one sandwich, and our number three product in the food hall. It's not just about the sando. We launch a product like this for 41 weeks of the year. All have exactly the same level of attention.
Last week, we relaunched our in-store bakery croissant and pain au chocolat, hopefully the best in the U.K., we think so. Two years in development, a new supplier, and a factory investment. The week before, we transformed our yogurt category, which is absolutely key for our family mission. And we've got lots more to come. I'll hand you back to Alex. Thank you.
Thank you. Thanks, Kathryn . And Kathryn and the team do a phenomenal job. And the work on the categories, because it is well beyond the Sando, as Kathryn described, is really obvious when you look at the numbers. Just picking a few of the recent transformations, each of these wa one of those little blocks on the bar chart. Italian ready meals were our market leader.
Really big category for us was growing at 1% before Kathryn and the team redesigned and relaunched it, now at 31%. Dried fruit and nut in our produce departments. Hopefully, you've seen those clear pots. Huge upgrade. 13% now, 28% growth. Deli picky bits, as we call them, were the home of picky bits in the U.K. These are the tubs of kind of deli deliciousness you get during the summer, especially. 14% now, 19%. Probably the biggest success of all, cookies, really big family category in the in-store bakery. 19% growth, now 131% growth, and we've become market leader on the back of that Winning Choices program. When we look at what this is doing to our share in these all-important family categories, you can also see what's happening here as well. We talked about the spine of the basket a year ago.
The spine of the basket, the categories like meat, poultry, fish, fresh produce, bakery, that really show how we're building those bigger baskets. In fresh produce, our share has grown by nearly 50 basis points. In fresh poultry, 57, and in bakery, by 61. In the family basket, tiny, piddly, as Stuart will tell me, we've grown a little bit in grocery. We've grown a tiny bit in pet, and we have not grown at all in frozen. No surprise, those are all on the hit list for us for the next year or two in terms of getting great product and more growth. We continue to innovate in the heartland, as we call them, because just because we're growing these new categories for us, we cannot neglect where we had traditional strength.
We're also continuing to upgrade and invest in food on the move, which is the top one, desserts and meals, which were already big categories for us. We've also grown share in those ones at the same time because we can't neglect one at the expense of the other. There's a huge amount to do still because many categories we still need to grow. There's also an enormous amount to do in value perception. Now, as Stuart said, we have gone from negative NPS to positive, but that's still very low. A 6 NPS is still low on value share. We're not happy at the moment that it's not getting better. We've got work to do. We're very focused on that. Items per basket, what an opportunity. This is Kantar data again.
5.5 items per basket in M&S on average versus double digit for the competitors. Let me go back to the store numbers because I brought this up already. The number of food stores in the U.K. where you can buy the full range is only 50. There are full-line stores as well, which carry the full range, but food-only stores, 50. 278 stores that hold a partial range. I'll come on to stores now along with international and online. Stores, this is how we look at the U.K. We call it shopper towns. We break the U.K. into what we call 585 shopper towns. These are urban areas. They might sometimes contain more than one village or more than one town, but that's how we think about it. Our market share, if it's green, is higher. If it's pink, it's lower.
I also remind people, I expect in the room here, we've got quite a strong Southeast bias because most of us tend to live and work around London. M&S is a northern brand. It did start in Leeds in 1884. To me, it's no accident that our strongest market shares in food are in Scotland, the Northeast of England, and Yorkshire, which looks like we've undersized on that circle. That's Yorkshire. London, we do have decent share in London, but there's a lot more still to go for. There are huge parts of the country where our share is low. If you look at the Pareto curve here, it really, really goes from 11.6% at one end to 0.5% at the other. Why is it higher at this end? The shopper town that's up at this end here is Harrogate in Yorkshire.
I mentioned that Yorkshire is the home of M&S. Harrogate is our top market share, 11.6%. Shetland and Orkney, which will be difficult to serve, admittedly, is at the other end. The top 25, let's bring these up. Our top 25 towns for market share because I think this will surprise a lot of you. There are names in here I do not think you'd be that surprised about. Home county towns like Amersham, for example. St. Albans just outside London. There are other towns which are not obvious M&S heartland areas. Llandudno in North Wales, Stirling in Scotland, Alnwick. Why is it that we've got share in these towns? The real reason is it comes down to how good is the M&S store? How good is the M&S store asset in these towns?
The reason Harrogate is here at number one is, yes, there are lots of shoppers who are good targets for us, but it's really because it has a good full-line town centre store. It has a very good out-of-town food-only store at 15,000 sq ft. It has a pretty good 8,000 sq ft food hall in Knaresborough, which is a small town just outside Harrogate in that shopper area. It's a bit of luck, a bit of accident of history. We've got three good assets in that location, and that's why we have good share. Looking at this long, long tail here, this is where the opportunity is. Now, it isn't in Orkney. We're not going to open, I don't think, in those locations, Sacha. However, if you look at the openings that are coming up, I'll call them out on this list.
We're opening a store in Luton soon. Luton is number 549 on this list. Cannock, which is one of our first home-based conversions, actually our first one, number 464. Hull, 455. Abingdon, 427. Hatfield, 387. It's really the availability of good store assets that is going to give us the growth in all of these or most of these shopper towns. Now, we're a bit frustrated because we'd like to be getting a lot faster than we are. As Stuart talked about, we're a little bit behind, but there's lots of headroom. In our defense, I would say the renewal journey for M&S is actually only five years old. This store format that Stuart invented in Clapham is just about just over five years old. It really changed the ambition of the business.
To that point, the business was opening stores at 6,000, 7,000 sq ft. It was Clapham and stores like Hempstead Valley that gave the business the belief, and it showed customers that we could trade at 15,000 sq ft and above, and we could deliver bigger basket shops. It has worked, and the blueprint has evolved to something we are confident in. For the next three years, the pipeline looks like this. At 328, we have 52 stores approved, and it takes us to 380 stores. We have line of sight to the next 40 that takes us to 420. The question we often get asked is, okay, that is the 420, which we will get to. Really, what is the potential given all those shopper towns, and where could the business get to?
Our ambition is it's 600, and actually probably more, but it's 600 locations where you could see, based on the experience of our store blueprint, we could have an M&S food store. Why are we confident in the returns? It's because we've now gone through enough years to see what the returns look like in these stores. These stores I highlight here just because these are the ones that have gone through their 12-month PIR. We do not always get it right. In Clacton and Stockport, they were not quite right. We had to revisit those stores and change a few things. Those stores, I am now confident given their current run rate, will hit their five-year hurdle rate given what they are doing in years two and three.
If you look at the others here, we're well beneath our five-year target in terms of payback. We're always evolving as well. We always say we're about 80% done, 80% right in our blueprint at any one time. We're always trying to evolve the last 20% to get it better and better and better. H2 is a very, very busy opening period for us. These are the new food halls we're opening. I won't list them all out here. You can read them. Just a couple I will call out. Cannock, that's our first home-based conversion. Abingdon is our second home-based conversion. Those are the renewals. I was in Merry Hill a couple of weeks ago. It looks fantastic. It's gone from being an asset we weren't happy with to being one we can now be really proud of.
That will be performing very well. Then two new full-line stores, which of course for John as well. Bristol Cabot Circus opens this week. We are all very, very excited about that, the return to Bristol City Centre. Bath opens after Christmas. That is the store bit. Onto the online bit. Hannah is here in the room with us. Hannah is just here. She will be obviously available for questions during the break. Ocado, we just celebrated our five years of the joint venture with Ocado. As you saw from the market share data today, consistently, M&S physical stores have been the number two growing retailer, and Ocado has been the number one. If you look at Ocado's performance in H1, 14.9%. What makes me really happy, even more happy, is that M&S on Ocado is growing at 19.6%.
Not only is M&S product driving M&S stores to number two in the market, it's helping propel Ocado to be number one and number one in online. Now, M&S actually, in category level, we represent 30%, just over actually, of the volume sold on Ocado. In those all-important family categories, it's significantly higher. 56% of the fresh chicken sold on Ocado is M&S branded, 53% nearly on fish, 52% on fruit, and 51% on salads. We can see that M&S performs really well in those family baskets on Ocado. What we also know is, because we monitor it closely, the volume we get through Ocado is more or less all incremental to the M&S business, which, given our soft vertical integration model with our fortress factories, really helps. On to international. Again, Mark is here. Where's Mark? Mark's here in the break.
Since Mark's been running international, he and I have been working really, really closely on how we can scale food internationally, but in a very capital-light way. Why do I have pictures and videos of Olivia Rodrigo, Kim Kardashian, David Beckham, and Katy Perry on? The reason is just to illustrate the brand potential, because this is all social media that had nothing to do with us. This is all social media that's been posted by the celebrities themselves about M&S product, Percy Pig, Colin the Caterpillar, Colin the Caterpillar, and Percy Pig at the end. Now, we've got a wholesale business, very small in Target, but already we're selling more Percy Pigs in Target in the US than we do in the UK, which is a pretty amazing stat. That shows you the potential if we can be targeted and disciplined in how we do this.
In terms of retailing ourselves, we already have some quite high-density stores in Hong Kong. Also, we've reset recently our value offer in the UAE. We're looking at a capital-light approach to how we can retail under the M&S brand in these markets. We're also looking at the numerous approaches we're getting from overseas retailers about how we wholesale as well, working closely together. Now, on to supply chain and how we're going to get all this volume through the network and through our factories. This is where my Christmas present comes in, Stuart, doesn't it? The DC. Firstly, before I get to the DC, on long-term investments, we talked last year about fortress factory agreements. This is where we, with our suppliers, for them create the environment for them to invest.
We give them certainty, and we lock in that capability and exclusivity for Marks & Spencer. Last year, we had seven fortress contracts signed. We promised this year we'd get up to 13, which we will do. That's 27% of our cost of goods. We see we can get to about 21% seems to be appropriate. It really is creating that environment for investment. Here's a real example. This is Park Cakes, our factory that makes the famous Colin the Caterpillar cake, the U.K.'s number one cake. This is how Colin's face, if you've ever eaten a Colin the Caterpillar face, the delicious white face that my kids fight over, this is how Colin's face was made previously. These are hand-piped. They're so beautiful. They're so intricate, hand-piped.
Now, what the investment they've been able to do has allowed on the back of the fortress factory is this is now how Colin's face is made. This is a bespoke piece of kit to make Colin's face. And you can judge the efficiency by just looking at the pictures. Onto the supply chain. We acquired GIST in 2022 for GBP 145 million. We've delivered GBP 77 million of recurring annualized cost out. We're ahead of the business case. Phase one has been successful. Last year, I talked about beginning the next phase, which is investing for the future. We've announced a couple of things. Those yellow dots are where we've already announced investments in new facilities. This is a quick video of what we're building in Daventry. This is the NDC. 1.3 million sq ft.
It's fully automated inside, and it covers both ambient and chilled. This is the ambient side. This is a 30-meter high bay, which stores palletized stock. Full pallets go in one end, get put away by the robots until they're needed. They're then called off by the computer, and automated robots bring those cases down. They store them into cages ready for store. The stores get the cages and they're up just as they need them. On chilled, it's just the same at the other end of the factory, of the distribution center. Here's the cages being built. The cages get built by the computer, a bit like Tetris, minimizing air gaps and shipping air around the country. When they arrive, they're completely efficient for the stores.
In chilled, there's no storage because the chilled gets picked every day to zero. Again, it will come into store aisle ready to be picked. It looks and it is very impressive, but it's not bleeding edge at all. It's leading in the U.K., but many other retailers have taken this path in other markets. 2029 is when that comes on stream. What's just happened then to our cost per case as we look at it through the network? At constant currency, this is what's happened to the cost per case to move a case of stock through the M&S network since the GIST acquisition. It's come down. This is the sort of 100 index here, and it's dropped.
Now, just to illustrate to you what a huge impact inflation is having on our cost base, if you add inflation in, this is what the actuals have been. We have been fighting very, very hard to mitigate the inflation, but could not mitigate all of it. Thankfully, we have been able to reduce a lot of the cost. What is going to happen in the next couple of years as we build that new DC is this. It is a little bit of a hockey stick. The reason is twofold. One is we are growing faster than we expected. We actually have to put a bit more manual picking in in the next two years. Also, we are starting to pay for the new distribution center and the automation. When that comes on stream, the cost per case starts to fall again back below where we started.
That's the shape. If you look at the shape of the inflation, you can see why automation is going to be so important for our cost base going forward. It's not just about moving the stock. It's also about how you forecast the stock. Our big investment in our modern data science-based, machine learning-based forecasting engine is now complete. This is how we built that up. We're now at 100% of our products in the food hall and also the cafes as well. With Tinus on board, we've been able to really, really focus on the retail end of this, which is the forecasting engine really needs quality data in. You really need really high-quality processes in the stores around stock management and stock file accuracy. I talked about this last year.
Last year, we had put a third of the country on what we call the M&S way. We used to call it One Best Way, now M&S way. As of a few weeks ago, we now have the whole country on the M&S way. The whole country in every food store is operating the same way. We have a measure of our process health in those stores. You can see, as of right now, the spread: we have some stores at 100%. We have the bottom stores at 83% and the average about in the middle, about 90%. A huge progression in only a few weeks. That is really important because that is what enables the software to work to its optimum. Tinnus is here, of course, in the breakout to talk more about that. That is it for food.
Back to what I said at the start, the strategy is exactly the same. To build a remarkable food business by protecting the magic and modernizing the rest. We are going to double the business. We've got good momentum, but there's an awful lot to do. We've got a long list of jobs ahead of us.
Am I getting old? Or is M&S trendy now?
Check it. Check it.
Let's try on some new in from M&S for autumn.
Marks and Spencer have just released their new performance range.
I did not expect to love this fragrance so much. Cool.
Good afternoon, everybody. John Lyttle, in case you hadn't guessed by now. I'm delighted to be here today. It's been a privilege to have joined Marks and Spencer eight months ago to lead fashion, home, and beauty.
We've had good progress over the last five years. Stuart's already mentioned, we're number one for fashion in the U.K. market. We're number one for women's wear, and we're number one for lingerie. We're also number one for style, quality, and value, and purchase consideration in the U.K. That's a huge achievement in the last five years. Today, I'd like to give you my observations in the business over the last eight months. What's really impressed me about the culture of M&S is the unvarnished truth and the openness in terms of, if we don't know a problem, then how can we fix it? Getting everything out on the table. For me, the market has changed in the last five years. Lots of things have happened. We've had COVID, as we all know.
The clothing market has been a little bit more difficult than the previous five years. Since 2019, 500 million less units have been sold in fashion in the U.K. market. GBP 4.5 billion of retail sales in stores have been lost. It is a very different place to what it was five years ago. Customers have changed. Their priorities are changing. They are poor on time. They need ease and convenience. Finances are stretched. We need great value and great quality at a great price more than ever. We have already achieved the 1% market share gain, but we feel very, very confident that we can grow on that again. I am very confident in terms of our operating margin remaining above 10%. How do we keep going after the last five years? A big opportunity we have is to double our online business.
That's really where the growth is going to come from. We're still going to grow in stores, but the major growth is going to come through online. We've had a 27% growth since financial year 2022. I see a significant opportunity, as I say, to double that business. We're going to need to change in how we operate today. Our fulfillment proposition lags the competition. Today, to get a next-day delivery to your home or a click and collect in one of our stores, you've really got to order by 7:00 P.M. in the evening. That's just not good enough in the competition that we face today. We need to be offering 11:00 P.M. or midnight in order to really succeed in this space. Our shopping experience on our website, it's not great, if we're all honest. Anybody who shops it, it's difficult to navigate.
It's difficult to get to your basket. It's difficult to check out. We don't have all of the payment methods that our competitors have. We have to change that as well in what we're doing. We have to think differently in marketing. It's not just about stores now. We have to think more about digital. Our customers are on their phones. How do we communicate with our customers on their phones? How do we get more of our customers onto our app? That's free advertising. That's free marketing in terms of how we get through to them. We lack speed, automation, and personalization on our app. When you go to our app, we should be much more directive in terms of how we direct you towards the product categories that we know you shop and we know that you will like.
Lots to change in this space. Actually, quite exciting in terms of the opportunity that we have ahead. How are we going to do this? We need to lead on product. Maddie's going to get up shortly, and she's going to talk about product and do a deeper dive in here. We've done fantastic on product over the last five years. That needs to remain in terms of part and parcel of just what we do every day. We obsess about product. All of us obsess about product in the business. We need our availability in a better place in store and online. We need more newness, and we need to look more carefully at our range architecture. We need better value. We need better price points, particularly in those opening price points on those core volume items.
We know customers are stretched financially today. We need to really start growing our online business also from a profit point of view. That is really going to come through our volume leverage as we go forward. We need to become and start thinking like an omnichannel retailer. We really need to transform our assortment in terms of what is available to buy online versus what is available to buy in store. We need to think more about our cross-channel sales. Stuart mentioned that earlier today. We have got stores. We have got online. Also, we have got a lot of only food stores. Our Simply Food stores are a great asset for our fashion business in terms of locations around the country. We need to get our proposition, as I say, in terms of delivery. Our competitors, you do not need to think about it.
When you order and if you order for next day, it's just a given that it happens next day. Actually, that's not always the case, as we know, in our proposition. We need to get better at returns. We need to get slicker at returns, and we need to get money back to our customers quicker than what we're currently doing. Stuart talked about relaunching our loyalty scheme next year, Sparks. That is definitely something that we need to do. We need to expand, and we need to invest in our network. We need more capacity, but we need a much more efficient and faster network. To do all of this, we're going to have to win on profit. That is absolutely fundamental to what we're doing. We've got lots of areas in our business that today could be better.
Supply chain is one of those, for example. Our sourcing is another. Our tech is another. Our retail operations is another. We have lots to go after in this space. We have to drive those efficiency gains. We have to build talent for this future world. It is different from the world that we are coming from today. We have to have a high-performance culture, and we have to have very digital-savvy colleagues in our business who are able to operate in this space. We are going to start by digging into how we are going to lead in product. Who better to do that than Maddie, our Women's Wear Director, who will go through this next piece? One, two, three, rock, please. Swing if you want some more. Push it, push it. Watch me work it. I am perfect, perfect, perfect. I am perfect. Check it out now.
Thank you, John.
Hello, everybody. As you can see, we have delivered some sensational product this season already, this autumn. We are really, really proud of the progress we have made. We still know there is massive opportunity for growth in this business across our categories, with our customers, and certainly in our channels. John's going to focus on talking you through channels shortly. I am going to talk to customers and categories and just how we are going to get after them. From a customer perspective, last year, we got really clear on our customer target segment. We are very, very strong with the over-55s, but we are underrepresented with the more style-conscious, younger demographic, the 35-54-year-olds. We are four percentage points behind the market leader. To give you an idea of the scale of that opportunity, it is worth GBP 500 million.
This customer still perceives us as old-fashioned, good for basics, and we are just not on their radar for either style or for value. With an absolute laser focus on product from us and the teams, we have really started to make change there and driving a lot more relevancy. As a result of that, we have improved with those customers our style perceptions by eight points, our value perceptions by five points, and our sales have grown by over 12%. We are really only just getting started here. From a category perspective, we are focused on two key areas of opportunity. The first one, where we underindex in the market, and we have got clear headroom for growth. The second one, really building on those famous four categories at M&S. In women's wear, it is about footwear. It is about bags, and it is about accessories.
Those areas, quite frankly, we just haven't done a good enough job with the product yet. Dresses is incredibly important for women's as well. We know if we win in dresses, we will win in all other categories because the customer will trust us for us. In lingerie, we lead in bras, but we're number two in sleepwear. It's a huge market. It's a growing market. Certainly another opportunity we can get after. In men's wear, we want to be the destinations for suits and for tailoring and continue to build on that incredible momentum we've had in the casual categories. In kids' wear, we sit at number four in the market overall. We'll continue that focus on baby, where we've seen great growth and some really good progress.
Our aim is to be number one for back to school, not just during that traditional peak period, but all year round. Brands, home, and beauty, huge markets. We have tiny share, another sizable opportunity. What's the plan? How are we going to get after this? It's really about continuing to focus on improving that style, quality, value, and volume. In style, we'll be driving more newness. In women's wear and lingerie specifically, we'll be increasing our newness options by 30% when we get to spring next year. Our teams are absolutely obsessed by product, as John just mentioned, and we'll be pushing even more fashion across all of our clothing areas. We'll continue to exit those legacy lines, those pollutants in our business, and we will do that on an ongoing and rolling basis.
We're going to be even bolder and more stylish with our marketing and our social activity to really support that. In quality, we lead in quality across all of our age demographics and across all of our fashion businesses. It is absolutely critical we continue to invest in that innovation and refine our products even further in order to maintain this position. In value, we've heard about it already, but we're focusing on sharpening our opening price points, but also investing in disruptive pricing, particularly in kids' wear, where we know the market is in decline. In kids' wear, we've actually already reduced over 40% of our price points in the last 18 months. In lingerie, you've heard about it before. We've introduced our new GBP 10 bra. It really does showcase that amazing value we've got at M&S, and it's been incredibly successful.
We will continue running new value campaigns through the course of the whole of next year across all of the business units. Our value gains have been really strong, but there is much more opportunity to drive growth in our volume. We are buying a lot bolder to improve our availability. Just to give you one example of that, our women's wear September campaign this year, we invested 30% more. That was a total of 250,000 units. I can really bring this strategy and this approach to life where we have applied this approach to women's wear denim as a category, a fast-growing, younger-skewing, online-heavy category. We were four percentage points behind the market leader in that younger demographic, the 35 to 54-year-old. We got much closer to trends. We sharpened our value, and we invested heavily in those fast-moving lines to really drive that volume growth.
In style, we reduced our legacy lines by 40% this year, and that increases to 60% next year. We have increased our mix of trend-led styles as well. In value, we have introduced new fashion fits at GBP 30, and 40% of our range by spring next year will be GBP 30 and under, rising to 60% by the time you hit autumn next year. With a big focus on profitability, we have taken several more of our core lines and moved them to Bangladesh. What that has allowed us to do is upgrade the product, invest in the lower selling price, and increase our intake margin. A lot more opportunity there. In volume in denim, we doubled our launch quantities to really maximize that demand at the front end.
We have shifted our investment into smaller sizes with 65% of our buy now in those 6 to 12s to meet that new customer demand. As a result of all of those changes that we have played through and applied in the denim category, our overall denim share has grown 4%, and our sales have grown 37%. In that younger demographic, the 35 to 54-year-old, we have grown our market share by 2%, and our sales are up 22%. The really important thing here is we are outgrowing the market in really tough trading conditions as well. This really is the playbook that we are going to apply across all categories in fashion, home, and beauty, identifying and being very clear about those opportunities for growth in those categories, knowing the customer that we are targeting, and winning in style, quality, value, and volume.
I'll pass you back to John now. He's going to tell you about how we're going to leverage all of that incredible product to accelerate omni-growth and drive profitability.
Thanks, Maddie. What makes me so excited about that last piece that Maddie has just presented is that after all the great work and all the great growth over the last five years, we still have so much to go after. Product continues to be our number one focus, but we need to do more than that to really grow and keep our number one place in the U.K. market. How are we going to accelerate omni? Today, we hold 12.4% market share, our stores in the U.K. market, but we only own 8%. Clearly, we have a lot more to do in the online space. Our sales participation, Stuart mentioned, is 32%.
Actually, the industry average in the U.K. is 42%. Again, we've done well, but we're behind the curve in terms of where the market is and what we need to do. Actually, some of our key competitors are at 50%-60% participation in this area. A lot to do and a lot to get after. Again, in that kind of key age group of 35 to 54s, we only have 5.9% market share there. If you think of all of these stats, we have a lot to run after, and we've got a lot to do for our customers. When we look at our customer KPIs against a market leader, we look at our customer numbers. Actually, it's pretty similar in terms of where numbers we have, 9.8 million versus 9.6 million.
When we look at our frequency per annum, actually, this is where we lag behind in terms of the competition. If we look at the average annual customer spend, again, GBP 124 versus GBP 213. These are really good opportunities in terms of what we need to go after. To go after that, we're going to need to make some changes. We talked already about loyalty as an example. The relaunch of Sparks next year and the continuation of that evolution is going to be really, really important to our omnichannel targets. Maybe we need to introduce a credit option. Again, very important in terms of online. Key is going to be really around that delivery and returns proposition. Lots to do in terms of our online customer KPIs here. Equally, we've got to attract and retain our customers.
We need customers coming to the website, and then once they come, we need to retain them. We've got to give them the relevant assortment that they expect when they're shopping online. It's got to be easy, and it's got to be convenient in terms of using our website, using our app, and finding what you want. It's got to be just a given in terms of the delivery proposition that you expect when you're shopping with the U.K.'s number one fashion retailer. If we look here in terms of, again, some of our KPIs, if you looked in terms of retaining customers, we have a 38% lapse rate. That is too high. We do a lot of work to get our customers into our site. We get a lot of them to buy.
Actually, in terms of maintaining and keeping them, I think a lot of this is just around their expectation when shopping online versus what we offer. If we look at our brand's business, for example, Adidas Footwear options, we carry 42 options today. I can tell you also we do not carry the two best sellers that are in the market. Actually, our closest competitor carries 1,300 options today in Adidas Footwear. If we look at our M&S own-label options in dresses, we carry 220 options online today. A pureplay player in the U.K. market today carries 6,500. Now, before Archie jumps up, we are not going to 6,500 options in own-label dresses. The point being, actually, shopping online, the expectation is more options in terms of what you are looking for.
Again, in terms of creating an easy and inspiring experience, we've got a 39% bounce rate. That effectively means somebody either comes onto a product or comes onto a page and leaves immediately, does not do anything. Again, that's way too high. I spoke earlier about the 7:00 P.M. cutoff in the evening in terms of next-day delivery. That is just not the expectation of online shoppers today in the U.K. marketplace. People want that convenience. You've just come home from work. You've just put the kids to bed. You're sitting down maybe to watch a bit of TV. You've got your phone out. Your expectation is, look, you're going, and it's going 24/7. While you're still up and while you're ordering, we're taking those orders for next-day delivery as well. Lots to do, again, in this space.
Stores play a really, really important part in our omnichannel journey. We have, first of all, got to have the right stores. We talked earlier about 226 stores currently and our target being 180. We need the 180 right stores in our estate. We need the right colleagues. We need colleagues front of house engaging with customers as they're coming in. Two-thirds of our online purchasers actually click and collect in store, and 82% of our returns come back in store. Do we maximize those journeys today with the right people? No, we do not. Huge opportunity in terms of as we go forward. Do our store colleagues have the right tools in order to engage with customers coming into the shop? Can I get you another size? Can I show you something different? Click and collect this, and you can get it tomorrow.
Come back in on your way home from school tomorrow. We need to make it much, much easier to shop in our stores today than what it is currently. Further on our stores, we need to look at our tail. In our bottom 50 stores, we generate 5% of our profit contribution. In our top 50 stores, we generate 50%. We have clearly got a job to do to get the right store network as we go forward. We have got a plan. In terms of the 50 stores, we have got an approved closure or rotations already in the pipeline. How are we going to get to that 180 stores? We have got a clear plan over the next number of years to get to where we need to get to. A great example, I think, in terms of where we have done that rotation is Chesterfield.
Chesterfield pre-rotation was number 186 in the chain. Post, it's now in the top 100 at number 94. It's super in terms of performance after the rotation. Obviously, a much better look and feel store, easier store to get to in terms of parking. The really exciting also piece of news here in terms of sales and upside is actually, versus the control group, this store performed 18% better in terms of from an omnichannel shopping. That's basically click and collect or order directly to home. The importance of that store as a marketing tool in the area is really, really important for us going forward. We've got to start winning on profit. Overall, our margin is 11.2%. Our online is 7.5%, and our stores is 13.1%.
Now, it's not going to be good news for any of us if we double our online sales and that profit margin stays at 7.5%. We have to get that up above 10% in terms of where we are. We also know the competition are all operating in the top teams in terms of where we are. This has to improve. It has to change from where it is today. I thought I'd show you our online P&L just so you have some idea in terms of where our cost and our cost structure is built today. Obviously, in terms of our cost of goods sold, our operating cost, and then this gets us to our operating profit at the end of 7.5%. Clearly, work to do in here in terms of how we're going to get that 7.5% higher than where it is today.
We need to be more efficient. We need the tools to be more efficient in terms of operating our business. We're going to look at a few of these parts in terms of what can we do better than where we are today. From a product point of view, we've done some amazing work in the last three years on our sourcing. So we've generated GBP 80 million by consolidating our tier one and tier two supply base. We need to shorten our critical path. It's too long at the moment. Fashion is changing too fast, and we need to be selling more full-price product and more fashion product. Maddie talked about the amount of newness coming in. Customers want that new fashion all the time. We need to really shorten this critical path. That takes risk out of the buy as well in terms of profitability.
We need to cut the tail of our slow-moving lines. Too much of our business is slow-moving, sitting in the stores, not generating cash and a profit. We need to integrate, and we need to start talking about volume and value again. We do not talk enough about volume and value in our business. We really need to grow in this area as well. On our supply chain, I'm going to describe this as it's a spaghetti junction of supply chain. Only what I'm saying on that is we've done a lot of work over the last few years, but it's time to evolve again is what I'm saying. We've got our parent DCs where we have our different categories spread across the country. If it's going to a store, it's got to, well, you can kind of follow the pattern, I hope.
But it has got to get to one of these DCs over here, which is in the locality to deliver to this group of stores. Basically, we are touching product too many times, which costs money, but also is not efficient from a time point of view in getting those goods to stores, protecting our availability in stores. We have got to make this more efficient. It is too complex, and it is too costly today. Equally, when we look at online, some of our stats online, 22% of our products that are sold online come in a multi-parcel. What I mean by that is you order four items. One comes in one pack, and three items come in another pack. Again, that is not great from a customer proposition because it tends to delay you getting the products. Equally, from a cost point of view, again, that is two products.
If you think of it, if you're on free delivery, we've now given you two free deliveries on that order. If we look at click and collect, click and collect in the warehouse in Castle Donington, for example, costs GBP 1.33 per unit. Actually, if we're clicking collect in a store and sending to another store for collection, that's GBP 4.95 end-to-end. We do too much of our volume. We should only be clicking and collecting in a store for pickup in a store. Again, we're going to need to invest in our DCs in order to have that capability going forward. We've already started the investment here in supply chain, and Stuart talked about that. There's a GBP 120 million investment ongoing at the moment in Castle Donington, in Bradford, and in Swindon. It's going to increase our capacity.
It's going to improve our throughput, and it's going to be better from a customer proposition. It'll stretch us a little bit beyond 7:00 P.M., but it's not really going to answer the problem that we need to answer. We have to evolve again. It's time. We really want to be serious in the online market. We've really got to evolve this proposition once more. Stores. Now, I can't say I stand up here being proud when I look at these two photographs in terms of, first of all, this is how our retail colleagues receive their products at the back door. That doesn't look efficient to anybody. I don't think you need to be a logistician to say that doesn't look great and that doesn't look efficient as we are today.
Also, the amount of pre-retailing that our colleagues do before the products get onto the store is just way too high. We spend 40% of our colleague labor budget on pre-retail before it even gets out to the floor. Now, in today's world, that does not make sense to anybody. We have got to look at our factory to floor, and we have got to really look at our supply chain end-to-end. Actually, we can get this work done at source, much better value than spending GBP 13 an hour in the U.K. Again, we are going to look at our whole supply chain end-to-end so we can really begin to drive value and get better operational skills in the store. On tech, we spend GBP 380 million a year in fashion, home, and beauty. Actually, 60% of that spend goes on just keeping the lights on.
In terms of keeping up with innovation and what's happening in the market, first of all, that's way above our closest competitor. We've got to get that down. We're all tech leaders in our business today, by the way. I'm going to work with Sacha, and we're going to really work in terms of how do we get that down, how do we get it more efficient, but how do we invest in terms of what the future is and is going to build our business better, but it's going to maintain our number one market share position. Planning Platform is a great example. A lot of you will have heard about this before. We started the journey on Planning Platform in 2021. When I came into the business at the beginning of this year, we still had three years to run.
Now, that is ridiculous in terms of time that it's taking to implement it. We're now going to run at this in a much different way. We're still going to implement it as we planned previously, but we're going to do it in 12 months. We've already delivered one module, merch financial planning. In the first quarter of next calendar year, we'll deliver assortment planning, again, a huge part of what we're doing there. We've got to become quicker. We've got to make decisions quicker in our business. We've got to get after things quicker. We've got to be more ambitious in terms of what we want out of our business. We've got this one. I feel really confident we can grow on top of that again, with everything hopefully you've seen today.
I'm really confident in terms of keeping our margin above 10%, even with online increasing. When you look at all the opportunities that we have to go after, and I'm very confident that we can double our online business in the years ahead. I'm confident. The teams are confident. Hopefully, you're confident. We're around at the end of today if you need to get us to answer any further questions. I'll now hand you over to Alison.
Finance doesn't get a video. Good afternoon, everybody. You've heard a lot today about the opportunities for us to continue to invest in the business. I'm going to talk to you now about how we're going to fund those opportunities and the returns that we expect them to generate for us.
Before we get into the detail, I wanted to remind you of our capital allocation model and how we use it to create value for shareholders. It's a framework that we set out actually in 2023, and it remains valid today. Starting with a focus on cash generation, then investing for growth and cost out, the returns from which then power top-line growth and enable balance sheet enhancement and returns to shareholders. We've been doing this for a few years now. There are still significant returns to be delivered. The cash generation and increased balance sheet enhancement that we're already seeing will mean that over the coming years, our cash position will enable increased shareholder returns alongside organic investment.
I do want to focus on the future today, but it is worth just looking back briefly at the very strong progress we've made across these four key metrics. Free cash flow from operations, i.e., after capital investments, has exceeded GBP 400 million for the last two financial years. Our structural cost reduction program has delivered repeatable savings of over GBP 330 million in just two years. We've delivered year-on-year improvements to return on capital employed, which has improved by 580 basis points since 2023. Prior to the first half of this year, it stood at 16.4%, up from just 10% two years prior.
As a result, net debt has fallen by GBP 800 million over two years, resulting in a ratings upgrade, a stronger balance sheet, which then, of course, creates a virtuous circle of improved access to liquidity and a greater ability to invest in the growth of the business. The result of all of this is that we're in robust financial health. Now, I've put some of our rating metrics up here because despite the first half bump in the road this year, we remain solidly investment-grade with good headroom to our current rating. I should say that protecting our investment-grade rating is fundamental to our capital allocation approach. Net debt to EBITDA is about two and a half times over the last 12 months, well within our rating parameters. FFO to net debt is at 30% despite the one-off impact to profit of the incident.
Free cash flow from operations post-dividends is over GBP 150 million over the past 12 months. In fact, our net funds position at the first half of this year is three times better than it was this time a year ago. I'd like to be clear about the importance of cash generation for the business because our entire capital allocation model starts with a focus on cash flow generation, maximizing the conversion of profit to cash. On the expectation of GBP 1 billion or more of cash generation pre-CapEx this year and going forward, I've set out here how we are thinking about our capital investment envelope. We've reduced maintenance CapEx by about GBP 50 million as we refresh our estate and renew our technology.
Our aim going forward is to keep this amount as low as possible while ensuring we adequately maintain our stores and our technology estate. This then leaves an envelope of GBP 800 million-GBP 850 million of cash to invest into the programs that will drive growth and, over time, to increase our shareholder returns. We plan to allocate up to GBP 550 million annually to growth and cost-out investments. These investments will be subject to our rigorous returns assessment using the hurdles that we have set out previously and which remain unchanged, all of which leaves a healthy and growing buffer of free cash. I thought it was worth reiterating our minimum hurdle rates. The combination of IRR and payback is designed to manage overall investment risk, ensuring that cash flows are not too far into the future.
As a reminder, these rates are 15% for store rotation and cost-out investments, where we have high visibility of returns and costs and therefore lower relative risk. For growth investments, however, we are looking for higher returns of over 20%. The significant supply chain investments, for example, are expected to deliver these returns. As I set out the detail over the following slides behind the growth investments, there are a couple of things that I would like you to bear in mind. The first and the most important is the discipline we bring to applying our returns criteria to the evaluation of new opportunities and to our PIRs. All of the investments that you will hear about have either been through this process or will be through the process as plans are firmed up and business cases are pulled together.
Secondly, there are a number of estimates in these numbers where business cases are under development, particularly as John starts to build his plans for his supply chain and his distribution network. Focusing then on the GBP 550 million, we plan to allocate it as you see here. Property and supply chain are the two most significant areas, and you have heard a lot from Alex and John today on the contribution that both will make to their businesses. Our store rotation program has continued uninterrupted over the first half this year. Over the next three years, the majority of this will be applied to growing our food store pipeline.
Investment in the supply chain will also increase over the next three years, broadly evenly split between food, where Daventry will take the most significant part of the spend, and FH&B, where John outlined the issues we need to address as we plan to double online. He will develop plans over the next 6-12 months for that, which will take cost out of delivery and returns, and most importantly, to significantly move on our online proposition. This is all supported by D&T investment to improve the online user experience and to modernize our tech foundations. I would like to focus on capital returns now for a few minutes. We are different to many retailers in the extent of organic opportunities open to us, but we also obviously need to ensure that the business benefits do materialize. Store investments to date have been highly, highly returns-generative.
Starting with store rotation, which includes the cost of closures for relocations, not just the economics of the new store. The slide here shows the payback that we have seen on just under GBP 250 million of property CapEx over the last three years. New food stores have paid back in line with our target returns and have generated an estimated return on investment of about 70%. Similarly, in fashion, home, and beauty, new stores, mostly rotations, are also very, very strongly returning. As you can see, the payback period here has been less than three years. This is partly as a result of the former Debenhams stores that we were able to secure. The estimated return on investment here is over 80%. As I said, these numbers include the planned closure program for some of our older full-line stores.
These straight closures, as well as rotating out of the old stores, benefit the business on a number of fronts. They are brand-enhancing. They are less consuming of maintenance and colleague hours. Because we have no unprofitable stores, really, they add to the cost of rotating into a new store. You have heard from John already that plans are in place to address the 50 least performing stores. Now turning to the future. Over the next three years, we expect space to contribute up to 50% of food's growth as we plan to open more than 50 stores. This equates to about GBP 1 billion of incremental food sales over that timeframe. The table also reflects store rotation in full-line stores. Over the next two years, we will open or extend 10 new full-line stores.
As you can see, aggregate payback across both is expected to be in line with our hurdle rates. The full-line payback period, as you can see, is longer than it was on the previous slide, and this is because we are closing a higher number of full-line stores in the period to come than in the period prior. Nonetheless, the returns are still well in line with our returns target of five years or less. The blended return on investment across both is about 40%. About 40% of our growth CapEx is planned to be invested in our supply chains. Across both businesses, as you've heard already, there is significant volume growth in our plan, and therefore there's a greater need for capacity and for more efficient capacity.
Alex talked about this already in the food business and how the investment will, over time, reduce cost to serve. We are showing here what Daventry will facilitate when it is built, adding significant capacity to the categories which are crucial to our growth as a shopping list retailer. These investments are a mixture of growth and cost-out CapEx, hence the blended IRR that you see here in the case of Daventry. It is fair to say that our plans are further along in food than they are in fashion, home, and beauty. As I said earlier, the investment envelope allows for fashion, home, and beauty supply chain transformation across the period. Turning to our online and digital investments, I am setting out the capital allocation here. Of course, anything digital will also involve run costs and licensing fees, which go through OpEx.
We plan to spend about GBP 140 million investing in online capabilities and platforms critical to delivering our plan to grow online to 50% of fashion, home, and beauty. This will work hand in hand with logistics, but the investment in this case here covers the improvements needed to the online user experience that John spoke about earlier, where our biggest challenges are the low frequency of visits, the high customer laps and bounce rates, and the high levels of exit at checkout. These investments here include a redesign of the website and app, initiatives to optimize conversion through improvements to the core experience, reviews and wish lists, size and outfit recommendations, personalization of search results, offers and content, as well as AI-powered search and new selling channels.
Of course, leveraging the massive data bank from our 10 million active customers that we have not been brilliant at leveraging to date. The D&T investments called out here are picking up where our evolution program had to pause, investing in our network, data, security, and platforms. The core purpose of modernizing our tech foundation is to rationalize down our complex setup of applications, increasing stability, scalability, security, and productivity. We will reduce inappropriate customization and the layering of new technologies onto old infrastructure. We'll improve our store network and the applications used every day to trade the business, all improving our colleague and our customer tech experience. Turning now to cost-out. To date, we have saved over GBP 330 million in repeatable structural cost reductions, including GBP 34 million in the first half of this year.
These savings have primarily offset inflationary and cost headwinds that the business has faced in recent years. So far, cost-out delivery has largely come from individual teams, with much of the savings being realized in stores and in logistics. Our increased target of GBP 600 million out by FY 2028 will involve delivering initiatives which cut right across the business in cross-functional efficiencies, with a particular focus on the support center and processes which start here but which frequently drive avoidable cost into our depots and into our stores. One example of ways in which we plan to do this is with RFID, which I know you have heard us speak about in the past, but which is in the plan to start this year.
This is a great example of an initiative which drives both cost-out and facilitates top-line growth, where the benefits include more accurate stockpiles, fewer colleague hours spent stock counting or searching for product in the stores, and benefits to margin through reduced markdown and stock loss. Of the GBP 600 million, today we have line of sight to over GBP 500 million of that cost-out, which brings me then to growing net funds and cash returns. As you saw on the earlier slide, we're aiming for a generation of at least GBP 300 million of annual free cash flow, even with CapEx towards the upper end of the capital envelope. With some of our larger investments, CapEx will be lumpy, but this is all accommodatable within the envelope that I've set out.
Although our first priority is to invest to drive growth, surplus cash flow will build naturally as we grow. I hope you have clearly heard that our plan is to be a growth retailer. We are investing for growth through earnings and through cash while still generating further surplus cash. As profits grow, the headroom between total cash generation and the CapEx envelope also grows, creating additional capacity to invest and to be able to accommodate both investment and dividend growth, all of which will build greater shareholder value. That is it from me. Thank you very much. I will now hand you back to Stuart as we go to Q&A.
Right, just before—we are running on time, but before I close, we will open to Q&A. The leadership team are on the front row.
Last time, we all lined up in a line, but as we ask the questions and answer them, anyone can just pop up. So Alex and I will sort of host the session. We've got mobile mics, so unless we've answered all of your questions today, over the corner. We'll kick off.
Yeah, hi. Jeff Lowry, Ross Childen, Co-Redburn. Is the implication of your top-line ambitions and the value perception charts you showed and the fact that you've not raised your EBIT margin ambitions, is the implication of all of that that the gross margin in both divisions could fall because you need to reinvest more in value relative to history?
Only, well, I'll go and then I'll ask Alex, Alison, and John to chip in, but I'll kick off with this. I'm allergic to managing the business by percentages, and it's a bit of history here.
I remember when I joined, we used to always announce just the food gross margin percent. I said, "I do not understand why we are doing this. We are running the company by a percent, not running the company for volume growth, cash growth." One of the rules we put in place a few years back was we set out those margin targets: 4% food, 10% fashion, home, and beauty. Now, when we set those, at the time, we thought, "That is achievable. They are good guardrails. We will get there three to five years." We always want to really sort of overdeliver and underpromise. Now, of course, we hit those.
There's a risk that if we just increase those, which will be quite high for food, if we put that to 5% or over 5%, I think it will be the wrong thing to do because it does not give an opportunity for Alex and the team to make the right decisions to drive cash. Same for John. The first priority is cash. Now, the reason we say greater than is because we know there is an opportunity to be greater than 4% and greater than 10%, but it will force us to do the right thing. Our real focus is growth. If you look at those slides, it really does indicate a double food business growth story as it does an online story, a much better, hopefully a much better profit rate than 7.5%.
The reason we have not changed that guidance, I just do not think it is the right thing to
do. Do you think you need to reinvest more in gross margin to deal with the value climate that you find around you?
I think we will have to. The thing that offsets that is our cost reduction program. I mean, the team actually in both businesses, I will let Alex stand up and talk about food, but actually they are managing it very tightly now. What is helping us is Alex can invest a bit in gross margin because the volume is coming, and that means the cash is coming. I do not see a big change in gross margin at either business, but I do not want to be held to hostage on a percent. Now, team, have I said anything? You agree, disagree, anything to add? Is my mic up yet? You go first.
I agree with it all. I would just add a couple of bits. One is it all starts with volume. Volume is what gives us the cost leverage to reinvest. It is not just our cost leverage. It is the cost leverage in our supply base as well. It is the volume leverage we get from the Fortress Factory program, for example, in food that allows us to reinvest both in price. It is not just price. It is also quality. We also budget to invest every year in those 1,000 quality upgrades, which also drives the volume. It is that virtuous circle. That is a very good point because it is the same for John. If you look at our COGS in fashion, home, beauty, the more volume we get, the better COGS, which is your plan now. Absolutely. Anything?
I think the earlier thing that I have asked.
Stand up, John.
We still have much more sourcing opportunities that we have to go after. We talked about generating GBP 80 million over the last couple of years. We have to go again in terms of what we can do there. Volume will be a big one there. I think looking at our range architecture in terms of good, better, best, while we might invest in value, there may be some stretch also in the better, best side of our business.
Hannah's growing food volume very well for M&S, a key part of the team. The more volume we get through Ocado, the better cost of goods Alex is going to get in food as well. Next question.
Yes. It's Animal Coffee, Deutsche News.
The question I've got is, I'll try and avoid percentages, but in terms of the return on capital employed or IRR and the payback, can you just explain a little bit more why the future payback is longer than it was before? I think you said it's to do with the store closures. Just some numbers around that just to reassure us that the new sites are as attractive as the previous ones.
Yeah. If you focus on full-line stores, for example, the economics of the new store are always incredibly strong. So payback generally less than three years. Because the majority of new full-line stores also involve rotating out of an old store, we have no non-performing stores. The numbers that you see there factor in the cost of closure of the existing store, and that then is what is driving the longer payback.
Now, the reality is that if you look at the three years to come, we are simply closing more stores than we have done in the three years gone by, and that's what's driving the longer payback. I think the important point is that it's still well within our returns hurdles.
There are some subtleties. Construction costs are going up. We did have some quick wins in prior years. The Debenhams acquisition actually was very helpful, very strong paybacks. There is a slightly higher payback because of some of those things in the future pipeline. The other thing is we've got to face into some of these stores. I mentioned Pantheon because we think that's a direction of where we're going to be, fashion, home, and beauty. It's up for John and I to look at that and analyze that in depth.
Some of these huge, big stores, Kensington, Edinburgh, Princes Street, these are going to be long-term good growth stores that are going to need a lot of investment. I do not want to say we have just done the easy stuff because actually we have not. We have made some big decisions. If you look at the future, we think that payback might be slightly higher, whether it is the costs or facing into the big stores. The other option is we just avoid them, and that is what has happened in the last 25 years. We are facing into it. Should we be thinking about that GBP 500 million-GBP 500 million of growth CapEx attaching a return on capital employed to it, and that should be your profit growth each year before any of the other good stuff that you are doing? You are trying to get us to do your job.
Help me do my job.
I'll do my job. Go on, Alison.
I mean, look, clearly across the life of the plan, all of the investments that we talked about will increase return on capital employed annually as we go through. We're just not calling it out specifically, but I mean, we've given some good guidance about what the food volume growth will do for Alex in particular. New space is a big part of it, but it's not just new space. It's all the efficiencies that will accrue from the supply chain investments as well.
If you think about Daventry, I mean, we opened it in 2029. I mean, I think that's a really good investment. Obviously, we're going to pay that GBP 340 million off over six years, is it? Six?
Six years.
Five or six years. Yeah, six. I was getting it wrong. Five or six years.
This is about big investment now and quite a bit of depreciation, but for the future. That is very much the strategy. Thanks. Next question. Yes.
Thank you. Oswediger from Kepler Chevreux. You insisted on surplus cash flow. I understand that you prioritize investment by. They are already quite significant, enough to double food, to double online sales. What level will be necessary of surplus cash flow to increase seriously your dividend? I do not know if I can have a second one right now or just after.
Let us answer that one first with Alison.
I think we have always been clear that we want to increase the level of the dividend, and we will do so.
Our priority is to invest in the growth of the business, which will deliver greater returns to shareholders through the TSR than simply adding a couple of pence to the dividend. Ultimately, the aim is that we do both. With the level of cash generation that I talked about, that GBP 1 billion, that will allow us within this capital envelope to start to increase returns to shareholders over the life of the plan. We're not focused on a particular number. Clearly, with GBP 300 million, there is room to increase the dividend from the levels that we're
currently doing. We're growing the dividend in line with profit.
Yeah. You know, the ambition is to do both. I would hope that we have been clear about that.
But priority number one is making sure that these investments deliver and turn into the cash generation levels that we're expecting them to.
Thank you. Thank you. Let's move and we'll come back if we've got time. Yes.
Thanks. Anne Critchley from Berenberg.
Hi, Anne.
I think you mentioned considering customer credit for online. So just wondering whether that would be on balance sheet or not.
Oh, no. No. Is it? No. The clock. No. I listen to say no.
So right now, right now, the technology investment for our credit proposition will be funded through our partners, through the third parties that we're working with to develop that proposition.
But if we offered credit like John's plan, does that answer the question?
If you would use your balance sheet to give the money to customers.
For credit facility.
Yeah.
Yeah. Hi, Anne. I think you mentioned considering customer credit for online. So just wondering whether that would be on balance sheet or not.
Oh, no. No. Is it? No. The clock. No. I listen to say no.
So right now, right now, the technology investment for our credit proposition will be funded through our partners, through the third parties that we're working with to develop that proposition
. But if we offered credit like John's plan, does that answer the question?
If you would use your balance sheet to give the money to customers.
For credit facility.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Do you still anticipate that you'll be able to achieve that, or should we actually see that as being pushed back given everything that's happened, please?
I'm slightly unclear. What did we say? The digital estate, say that again.
I think if I remember right, but perhaps I'm wrong, you'd sort of phrase it as in terms of like all of your systems and so on, around two-thirds would be sort of modernized over the five years to either fiscal 2028 or 2029. So I was just wondering if we should assume that had maybe been pushed back a little bit.
Right, I'm clear now. We're slightly behind. So we're really going to start that. Now, some of that work has happened, but minimal in the last six months. So we're running about six to eight months behind.
Sacha's plan and the plan we're all working through, all of us as a leadership team, is trying to catch a bit of that up, but we're going to be kicking that off new financial year.
Should we assume the target was 20?
Probably 12 months, as in delayed another further 12 months. Yeah. It doesn't stop some of the acceleration we're doing online in particular. Actually in John's business, there's quite a lot of that SAP decoupling. We're picking that up really straight after Christmas. There's a few programs a bit behind. Other programs will be on track. Yes. Two questions there.
Hi, thanks.
Hi. Thank you for your questions. It's Monique Boller from Citi. I've just got a couple. The first one was just about the flexibility that you have in your supply chain on the fashion side to respond to those viral moments.
Because obviously you mentioned that you get these brilliant viral moments from social media, but then the feedback is, you know, we run out in the small sizes, etc. I just wondered, you know, what flexibility you have, whether it's open to buy and reorders, and whether actually you want those things to sell out ultimately. You don't want to.
Not as quick as they do. No. I'll let John just prepare some thoughts. I mean, there's a couple of things that there's definitely room for improvement. Whether it's open to buy or actually at the very start, I mean, actually we have fun. Maddie says, yes. I mean, we have quite good fun in our range reviews. Normally we know the hot items, but something surprises us. We're just building our confidence.
I remember looking at the faux fur coat with Maddie in the women's wear review, and we all said, that's going to fly. It's the hottest item there. We thought we were bold. In truth, it also caught us by surprise. We need to build more flexibility in. When John talks about that sourcing time to market, we're way too slow at the moment. That means thinking about sourcing, geography, open to buy. John.
Yeah. That was the piece really around critical path in terms of what we need to improve. We've got open to buy today, but we need more open to buy, and we need it to be quicker. On a recent trip to Istanbul, which is a close sourcing in terms of what we're doing, we have the supplier network to work with.
I'm working with the global players who are looking for faster in terms of turnaround. A great example in terms of how we work today. We go to a quicker turnaround market. We make the goods quickly. We get them turned around quicker. What do we do? We put it on a boat for three weeks. By road, it's three days. There are things that, back to the end to end in terms of how we look at it. I'm looking at tomorrow here. We were in Pakistan just a few weeks ago in terms of a major global denim supplier supplying all of the major global retailers. Just because it's in Pakistan does not mean it's long lead time. We were talking about 30-day turnaround, having fabric on the floor, but able to react very quickly.
Also, in terms of how we get it then from being made into our supply chain very quickly. The key thing to remember about speed is that to make a T-shirt anywhere in the world takes the same amount of time. It's the decision to get it made, and then when it's made to get it back into your supply chain. That's really where you'll really work quite fast on. I am quite happy as we go forward, we'll be building that in to be able to react in time.
I think we're learning so much as well. I do not know if Maddie wants to add, but on some of these lines, we're becoming more confident the size. In fact, we had a few hours on sizing the other day, Maddie, myself, and Helen just going through our proportion of small sizes because that is catching us by surprise.
There is an important thing that got raised with me at the break, which is, are you trying to be a fast fashion retailer like Zara? The answer is no. Because a bulk of our sales, or half of them, are on the everyday essential items. Actually, we want to be more famous for the black trouser or the skirt and the blouse, iconic lines every day. Of course, we constantly improve the style and the fashionability. I think we're on track. We're just learning as we go, but we're catching up. Another question. Did you have another one, Quinn?
Oh, it was just a quick one on the point you made on the Adidas range and it being so much smaller than your nearest competitor. Just interested to understand, is that a supply chain issue? Is that a brand partnership issue?
Like what causes that?
It's a bit of all of the above. The first is when we set our brand strategies out, the team did a good job. They went to brands. Some brands came to us. Of course, what they're really saying is we need to work out how this works because Adidas might be on different marketplaces. It was test some items first, the top 50 lines or something. There is a bit of that. There is another piece. Our supply chain is slow. There's a lot to do, as you heard from John. In fact, when you sit there in the audience and we're all very ambitious and quite excited about the future growth. You do have to remember we've got a lot to do in the years ahead. Supply chain is one.
Dropship works well when it is the suppliers dropshipping. That is easy. When it is through our supply chain, it is complex. I do not want people to get too carried away, though, with the Adidas example because John and I are very clear. Our aim is a curated range. We will never have the full range of Adidas. It will always be curated. Anything?
Yeah, I would say the only thing to add to that is any brand is a journey. You kind of get to level one when you start, and then you move up through the levels in terms of range that you need. I think curation is the key. We do not want everything. We want a curated range that works for us.
I think our overall aim on options, just so we're all clear in the room, in fashion, home, beauty is a reduction of about 20%, by the way. The whole plan is focus on volume value, focus on the key style and fashion items. Overall, we want to reduce options overall. There will be more online than there are in stores, of course, brands included. Yes. Thank you.
Thank you. It's Richard Jonathan from RBC. A couple from me, please. Stuart, I think in your opening remarks, you put up a slide showing that the quality perception on both sides of the business has started to tail off a little bit or sort of flatline. I just wondered why you think that is. Is that anything to do with the cyber incident or just that you've come a long way in a short space of time?
I think, yeah, it's a good question, Richard. I mean, it was sort of flattening. It's the value that was really flattening off. The quality is sort of leveling out. Funnily enough, the last results have got a bit better. I think there's a few things. I mean, when we do specific quality communication and upgrades and people engage, like the work that Alex, Kathryn have been doing on Italian meals, where actually the whole premise of that category upgrade was UPF3, moving towards more products and ingredients that are from your cupboard. And actually, the team have kept that a secret, really, because it's going on in the background, but we're not going out with big messages yet.
When customers engage with those products, they do come back and say, "I can tell the difference, much better quality." Of course, we think, I mean, we benchmark our entry tier to the premium tiers of other retailers, but everybody is going out trying to quote quality messages. When our customers engage with it, the quality perception normally increases. The value is the one we're more worried about. To be honest, quality and style, fashion and fashion home beauty and food, we're not overly worried about because we've got such clear plans to differentiate. As Alex always says, if in doubt, add quality in. Value is something because we really must continue that value investment. Goes back to the margin point. We've got to drive the volume. We've got to be first price, right price.
That remarkable value range this Christmas is critically important to customers and our ambition to be a full shopping list retailer.
Okay, great. Thanks. Maybe just a question for John on the clothing side. As you think about the supply chain configuration, how do you expect the sourcing by geography to change? Will there be a big change there? I mean, I think M&S is quite reliant on Bangladesh at the moment, something like 4%. Is that going to come down now, or should we expect that still to be fairly stable? It will change, John.
Yeah, it will change. Bangladesh, we're probably a little higher than what we'd like to be. We have opportunities, and that's part of the trip to Pakistan, actually, where we're low single digits in terms of mix coming out of there. There's definitely more opportunity to have there.
Equally, Egypt is developing quite well at the moment. Again, very close in terms of market coming in here. We will see some change going on there in terms of what we will need in the future. I would say kind of Bangladesh down a little bit, Pakistan up a little bit. India, if some of the tariffs come down there next year, that could make it quite interesting as well. Egypt is probably the other one. Finally, I would add in North Africa, you have Morocco. Again, in that kind of woven, a little bit faster in terms of turnaround, quicker to react to market trends at the moment.
Okay, great. Thanks.
Thank you, Richard. Other questions? Over to the far left. Thank you.
Thank you very much. John Stevenson, Peel Hunt.
I was surprised in the comment around sort of pre-retailing. I sort of felt like we, as an industry, pushed a lot of that down the supply chain over the last decade or so. The number of 40% of hours on delivery as well just feels like very, very large. I mean, how big is the opportunity and what's missing and what do you see as sort of best in class? I guess, how long does it take to get there?
A lot better than that. That is why we highlighted it, because we are well aware we are way behind. I go back to John, John can add, but I go back to the discussions John and I were having way before he joined when we were saying the big opportunities in fashion, home, and beauty is a reset of our foundations.
Because we've done some good work. The product under Maddie's leadership and the team on product is night and day from where it was, whether it's quality or style and fashionability. The work we've done on everyday essentials is a big step on. There's more to do on that and more to do on value. Really, have we really faced into supply chain? We've closed some redundant sites. We've got a bit better efficiency in Donington. We've done some things that have been incremental improvements. We've never really resolved, as you saw. That is why we wanted to be very transparent on the work ahead, because this is a five-year plan for John and the team, because it's double what any other retailer would do. The beauty of John coming, I said to him, you're going to be quite shocked.
I said, you'll have a month in stores and you'll be ringing me and saying, my gosh, I said, but just remember how exciting when we've done it, because these are legacy ways of running a fashion, home, and beauty business. The reason he put the picture up is just to bring it to life. John said to me, shall I show the picture? I said, definitely explain it, because that means opportunity, it means growth. It's going to be at least. Tinnus, who's at the front here on retail, is working very closely with food as well. I mean, food has moved some way because we've got better shelf-friendly packaging. We've got better systems coming in on how to split different products in trays.
As you saw from the work in the distribution plans, that will really enable much better and quicker food deliveries to store and shorter lead times. The big job is in fashion, home, and beauty, and that's a five-year plan. Anything?
There's one here. I think you've pretty much, yeah, I think you've pretty much explained it all. Just to add to that, I mean, John mentioned things like sort of delivery to Click and Collect, to Simply Food, and all the rest of it. There are some big projects behind a lot of these initiatives. Is it going to be a couple of years till we start seeing some of them land, or are we going to start seeing things in the next 12 or 18 months?
I think it's difficult for me to say.
I mean, we're going to see improvements constantly from now, but some of these projects, I mean, Click and Collect's a little bit easier, but we need to get the investment in Donington. In around 12 months from now, we'll see some better investment in Donington, quicker Click and Collect coming from Donington rather than just the in-store fulfillment. I mean, we've been heavily reliant on in-store fulfillment in the last few months. In the next 12 months, we'll see some improvements on that. The real thing on John's plan, I mean, this is a five-year plan, and it's pretty significant.
Okay, let me just add on that that we already have Click and Collect in Simply Food stores, which is a great benefit. The thing we need to do is educate our customers about that, that they can actually do that today. Yeah.
Stuart, there's a question.
Sorry. Yeah, we've waited. Okay. Yeah, Charles Allen from Bloomberg Intelligence. Just a couple of questions on Ocado Retail. One, is there a timeline for Ocado Retail getting access to the Sparks membership list and/or recruiting customers in M&S stores? Secondly, I mean, it seems that you chose not to do this a couple of months ago, but would there be any sense in consolidating your branded purchases for M&S and Ocado Retail?
I think, Charles, it's a brilliant two questions, two brilliant questions. We haven't really touched much on Ocado. Hannah's here, as you know. I mean, I think the first thing is we're leading a bit of a reset on Ocado. Now, it's early days. We haven't quite kicked it off, but I think the plan that Hannah has got is a brilliant plan to reset the business.
We have spent time at the Ocado Retail board going through that. I am actually very encouraged by that. As part of that plan, I think there is lots of upside for Ocado Retail as well as M&S. Sharing data is one. Now, just to be clear, I got feedback from my presentation that I gave the impression that those 24 million customers on Sparks were all active. They are not. We do have 24 million customers in terms of database. In truth, half of those we can contact, we connect with, we can engage with. We have a big plan and quite a lot to do on loyalty, personalization, and how to use the data. We think there is some real benefit of sharing Ocado and M&S Food customer data, customer insights, and probably loyalty. It is something Hannah has on her pad to consider, loyalty.
In terms of branding, that's already starting. It's a small way at the moment in our advertising. Alex has already been saying, or available on Ocado. It's subtle, but we're starting. Hannah is actually rebranding some of her vans powered by M&S food, which I know our shareholders raise with me constantly and keep asking why we can't get M&S advertised on vans. It's part of Hannah's reset. Actually, I would say we're quietly encouraged. I think under Hannah's leadership, there's been quite a lot of good progress in the last couple of years. The reset is not all finalized. Our side, and we're very supportive of it, Hannah, aren't we? We think there's a lot of upside in the years to come on Ocado, and sharing data is one. Sorry, I meant on the branding.
I meant purchasing branded groceries, which seem to be done in two separate ways at the moment. I mean, Ocado Retail purchases branded groceries. Oh, we're doing this, Charles. Example, Alex? Can I just answer very quickly? Actually, we're doing a lot of this. The biggest thing for joint buying is actually in fresh food, which we're buying together anyway on the M&S brand. Because you think about it, when Ocado's volume goes through our factories, the same fixed cost leverage comes to both businesses. That's the biggest thing. The next biggest thing is actually joint buying of fresh food, whether it's Ocado branded, let's say, melons, and M&S branded ones. We're doing that work. All those opportunities, the smallest one is actually the branded one because we sell so few brands and M&S is such low volume.
There are one or two exceptions like Coca-Cola, but it's fresh food where the big opportunity is, which we're getting on with. There's just a few grocery brands like Coke we're doing now. Exactly. Yeah. Answer, Charles. Yes. Hi, Warwick Oaklands from BNP Paribas. Just another one on fashion. Will the value investment that you've talked about in fashion lead to lower SPs? Is there a risk that your value investment drives cannibalization of your better and better range? I'll let John answer, but there's a couple of key points. The first is actually some of our price points are very strong. We're just not very good at communicating them. That's the first part of the plan. We've been benchmarking our prices. It's harder to do in fashion than it is in food.
Actually, if we look at this Christmas, we've got very strong prices on knitwear, for example. In kidswear, we've invested already quite a lot in kidswear, but we're just not really shouting about it or talking about it. Our in-store execution on value at best is a one out of ten. We're hoping for some big improvements in the next few months on in-store communication. The rest, John, add on. I think adding investment in entry price point, we'll look at that in a good, better, best to make sure that we're not impacting the rest of the range in terms of what we're doing. I think we do that as part of our daily process anyway. I'm not worried about that in terms of where we go going forward.
I think from my point of view, in terms of that investment, it's about where we need to in the market, if that's in menswear in a particular category or whether it's in women's wear. We don't have to do a widespread right across everything. It's just specific targets in different categories where we think we need to be sharper than we are today.
Thank you.
Thank you. Freddie Wild from Jefferies. First of all, could you help us understand with these fashion home and beauty sales doubling, what sort of incremental margin are you making from new orders coming through online in clothing and home?
Second, you talked about the investment on from Warwick's question, really, but on the food side, the gross margin investment in food, can we think of that as being similar to maybe what we've seen over the last year where you've been gently under inflating the market? Is that the right way to think about it? Thank you.
Yes. Good two questions. I'll hand over to John and Alex. Just to start, I mean, there's not a huge difference on newness coming in on margin, to be frank. It's not a big difference. What the team have done is, as they're consolidating more fabrics and learning different ways of sourcing, we do see some margin benefits through that plan over the next 12 months and onwards. I think there's some really good plans.
Not only does the product next year in fashion, home, and beauty look fantastic, some of the margin benefits are good. However, I go back to the first question. Some of the decisions the team and I make is we might look at that margin and say there's some upside there, but where is the market on value? That goes back to driving cash all of the time. We need to be very careful with it's always cash margin. I think that has put us in good stead in fashion, home, and beauty in some categories, more to do. I think it has done on food. I mean, when I look at our dine-in last week, the performance of our dine-in was way above our expectations. We could have bought a bit more, perhaps.
The key thing we're learning is in all of our data, more customers are eating in. That plays to our advantage. I think value plays to our advantage in so many ways, which is why pre-Christmas, but post-Christmas, we're going to go again as well. Alex, what have I missed?
Just think two ways we think about it in food is one is, yes, inflating when there is inflation, and there is at the moment inflating behind the market. That's leveraging our volume growth to allow us to do that. The second piece is we've still got many lines we want to invest in pricing. You think about the family staples around the food hall, reMarkables really successful for us. There's lots of items in that basket where we would like to have a lower price than we do today.
There is also investment in the plan.
Now, before I wrap up, John, have I missed anything for you?
No, I think you got most of it. I think the only other thing I would say is obviously the consolidation with international as we go forward. We have not been great at that to date. There is obviously a good margin opportunity there as we go forward as well.
I mean, the general view as well on how we want to manage value is you're right, we have been inflating behind. That is why, as Alison described, the cost-out program and the opportunity for us to be structurally a lower-cost business is so important because we have been inflating behind the market. Everyone outside, we watch our index to everybody. We are pretty paranoid about it. Value is at the core of the strategy.
I'm going to wrap up. We are all around. We won't leave until you leave. As I close, we'll be here for other questions. Thanks, Alison. I'll just run through a quick summary from today. You've heard quite a bit. Hopefully, it's been useful, and hopefully, the breakouts were useful. If I was just to summarize for takeouts, the scope for growth, a long-term opportunity, the U.K.'s most trusted brand, a distinct competitive advantage, strong, experienced team, ambitious for reshaping this business for future and continued growth, consistent operational delivery and financial delivery, and also, as Alison says, a strong discipline to capital allocation with a strong balance sheet. We're in an okay place. We've made progress. I just want to reemphasize there is so much to do in the years ahead. That's what we find exciting.
The summary of our businesses in food, you've heard us put product at the very heart of everything. Creating exceptional product, great quality, great value every day underpins our food strategy. You've heard us talk about our store pipeline because stores will enable that growth in our food business. Alex has brought to life the big investment on supply chain that enables very strong future growth in years ahead for our food business. We are very clear we can double the size of that business. In fashion, home, beauty, doubling the online part of that business while holding our stores. Again, we talked about product. Maddie brought to life the work we're doing still to improve style, quality, but also trusted value. Product still plays a critical part.
Delivering that omnichannel future that John brought to life, another key opportunity in how we're going to double that business, but also that scope for margin improvement, 10 percentage points behind our competitor. We're at 7.5%. There's big opportunity. We're at 8% market share, should be double. Doing that, especially through a very clear supply chain strategy. Now, that strategy has not been locked down yet. We're giving John the chance for us to spend a bit more time over the coming months scoping all of that out. We've already committed to some, and that was Donington as part of that immediate online opportunity. Third, building a global brand, marking the breakout would have brought this to life as well as my introduction. Obviously, product is at the heart, that curated product.
The most important thing, the enabler for this is working with our franchise partners and making sure there's a win-win partnership, as well as some exciting opportunities with the wholesale model. Doing all of that, investing for growth, putting our money back into the business to make sure we're growing the business for the medium and longer term and focused also on structural cost reduction. That leaves me and my team to say thank you, one, for your support, your time today. Hopefully, all of you will shop with us at Christmas and spread the word to your family and friends. Thank you.