Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Motorpoint's full-year results presentation for the year ending 31 March 2024. I'm joined today by Chris Morgan, our Chief Financial Officer, and I'm Mark Carpenter, our Chief Executive Officer. We'll take you through the results.
We've got a presentation that will cover the financial performance of last year. A nd explain in detail the year that we've just had and also the outlook for the current financial year. I'm going to hand you straight over to Chris for our financial highlights and the ESG update.
Okay, good morning, everybody. So taking last year as a whole to start with, so if we turn to slide 4, you can see. So I think, yeah, as we've been saying for quite some time, a very challenging year driven by predominantly macroeconomic headwinds. And that did lead to an overall loss, as you can see. But a very strong improvement driven mainly by our self-help in Q4. We'll see some of the numbers around that shortly.
So it was a year very much marked by some deflation and a targeted move by us to a more affordable stock mix, which paid dividends ultimately. So we worked hard to improve metal margins, and that helped offset lower finance commissions, which we experienced for much of the year. The business was right-sized, and variable costs, such as light and heat, for example, and CapEx, were very closely managed.
FTEs reduced by 10% and were also supported by automation improvements and our right-sized program. Marketing costs were closely managed and were down year-over-year, with a strong focus on return on investment. As you can see, customer acquisition costs improved year-over-year. So as well as impacting finance attachment rates and hence commissions, high interest rates, which throughout the year resulted in a high finance expense.
So if we look at Q4 on its own, you can see strong profitable recovery in Q4, delivered profit before tax of GBP 3.3 million. And that was really the culmination of our efforts for much of FY24. So for example, retail units were down over 18% in half one, but up roughly 9% in the final quarter. So it's a big turnaround. And we also, which we're pleased to say, returned to market share growth.
We experienced the benefit of, among other things, the planned move to more affordable vehicles, data-driven pricing, which uplifted metal margins, and a cost base more aligned to the market conditions we experienced. Turning to the balance sheet, remains in good health, no structural debt. We can see a strong inventory drop, which reflects the mix and also deflation, supply of vehicles, but also a faster stock turn.
Stock days improved from 51 to 45 days for the year as a whole. Due to the available headroom, both the stocking facility and the RCF were renegotiated with lenders, with no adverse effects. Still have plenty of headroom in both channels. Certain covenants were also renegotiated during the y ear. We look predominantly at cash. You can see that cash started the year at GBP 5.6 million and ended the year at GBP 9.2 million.
That's despite the loss that we made during the year. Working capital was a strong focus, obviously. An efficient use of the working stock finance facility was important to drive the cash improvement. The thing really to take away from this slide is that this provides us with confidence not only to have undertaken the current share buyback, but also that we have firepower available as needs arise in the future.
Finally, turning to ESG, really pleased with progress. We were especially proud of the Financial Times European Climate Leader recognition we received earlier in the year. We managed to markedly reduce controllable Scope 1 and 2 emissions, as well as waste. We also made good progress on our people front. To end on a strong positive, based on a recent survey, 95% of our team are proud to work for Motorpoint. Okay, thank you, i'll hand you back to Mark.
Thanks, Chris. So we'll go now into a lot more detail on the performance in the financial year and the outlook. I think just to summarise, you'll have seen my comment in the RNS that it was our most difficult year in our entire history and probably my most difficult year in over 20 years in the car industry. So it's been very challenging, but I think like always, Motorpoint's agility to respond to whatever the market conditions are has come through and come shining through in the final quarter and obviously into the first quarter of this year as well, which we'll touch on a bit more.
So we've been focused on driving that operational excellence. I think you can look at the macro environment, but you have to respond internally as well as trying to work out what's going to happen externally with the macro environment. Our response to that was Brilliant Basics. In essence, it's making sure that we are doing what we feel makes a difference, so we cannot affect the macro environment, but we can affect our own business internally.
I think once you realize that you've got to take action based on what's happening externally, then you become very laser-focused on making sure that we lower our cost base and then increase our stock turn to lower our stock levels, but still maintain sales to reduce the interest cost. But fundamentally, also when the consumer is having a very challenging time themselves with higher interest rates, high inflation, we need to lower prices. We took action to do that with the mix of vehicles that we sold, which we come to, but also with the prices that we charge for similar vehicles as well.
So we'll cover those areas off in more detail shortly. So in terms of our KPIs, so the macro headwinds we talked about, it's good to make progress on those KPIs, and particularly in the final quarter, as Chris has already alluded to. And our market share in the final quarter actually grew and shrunk a little bit during that first 9-month period. And I think I would describe FY24 as not a game of 2 halves, but a game of 3 quarters and a quarter, because the 3 quarters were dominated by macro events such as supply issues in our own industry, but also high inflation and rising interest rates.
And I think when interest rates are going up every single month, then there is a real feeling among consumers that it's just getting worse and worse and worse. I think that the peaking of those is really helpful for people to point out that they probably have peaked at this point, and are likely now the next movement is going to be down. Obviously, inflation coming down as well. It does change the sentiment in consumers' minds that we are over the mountain and we're coming down the other side now, having climbed very steeply during 2024. So good to grow market share in that final quarter.
As you can see, our revenue is very impacted by the mix of what we sell, but also our volumes coming down as well. So volumes down around 11,000 to 78,000. And although you can see our Stock Turn improving from 51 to 45, that was very much dominated by the performance in the final quarter as we took real actions on our Brilliant Basics program to move costs faster and to price more aggressively to lower our overall stock levels, took action.
And that's something that's been long overdue, frankly, in terms of how we have managed to reduce that. It's been bothering me for a few, well, probably the whole of last year that our stock wasn't moving fast enough, which obviously then you suffer more depreciation on that vehicle. Chris mentioned the overall loss, and it's a pretty big loss for us as Motorpoint, but we did take action through the year.
As Chris has already mentioned, the final quarter was much stronger, and that performance level has continued to be stronger in Q1 of this year as well. In terms of the actions we took, we did reduce our marketing costs through the year. We focused much more on our direct marketing costs, so the online spend to acquire customers, so brand build, still ongoing to an extent, but certainly not spending as much as we were.
Then as a consequence, the acquisition cost per customer comes down from GBP 244 to GBP 190. Good also to see our digital enablement of our consumers' consumer-facing offerings really coming through as well. Increasing as a percentage of orders and a percentage of sales. That's really pleasing because one of the areas where we felt we should still invest was in the digital offering of the business.
So around the search engine optimization, around the website, look and feel, the speed of the website and the underlying infrastructure, really still kept focusing on that and also on content generation, which would be long-term winners for us as a business. And you can see those still paying dividends in terms of the amount of leads coming through digital channels increasing. Chris already mentioned the cash.
However, it is important to point out that this is a cash-generative business, and we have never really required cash to expand the business, and I don't think that will change going forward. So the cash that the business generates will be used to invest in the business and also return to shareholders as we are doing currently with the buyback. NPS took a slight dip from 84 to 82.
Nothing to be concerned about there, but I think as long as we're around 80, then we're happy with that level of NPS. I mentioned earlier the measures that we've taken. So around this Brilliant Basics call to action that we had with our whole team that focusing on what matters is going to be really important in a challenging market. I would describe it as focusing on productive roles and eliminating non-productive roles in the business, but also really focusing on what are we actually measuring, what are we looking at, and how do they impact the business performance.
So one of the headwinds we had, which we all know, is that the market is smaller. So the zero- to-f our market continues to shrink, but it looks like it's bottomed now at around 1.5 million sales per annum. But there remains a shortage of good quality, nearly new vehicles. And through COVID, with vehicles that were sold and used during that time, we're finding issues with service history and various quality issues.
And quality of vehicles generally is lower, I feel, since COVID, as manufacturers probably rushed to use new supply chains to build up production. But also then vehicles being serviced due to capacity constraints has taken a hit as well. So getting good quality vehicles that we believe are suitable for our customers is much harder. We expect that to improve now going forward. But in terms of our reaction last year, it was to increase our criteria vehicles up to 5 years old and 50,000 miles.
So it wouldn't dominate our stock to have 4- to 5-year-old cars and 40,000- to 50,000-mile cars, but certainly they helped with the affordability challenge that we talked about earlier, providing customers with a cheaper means to get from A to B. In terms of our operating expenditure, we talked already about lowering marketing costs, but headcount as well. So from a peak of around 950 roles, we lowered our headcount down to 700, the peak being in the previous financial year, but still shows the amount of action that we've taken to become more efficient, to use the technology to enable our team to be more efficient and focused on what really matters, which is producing and selling and handing over vehicles.
We talked about cash already, but we did continue with that high ROI investment, mainly on the technology area that we talked about, particularly around the website and our own internal technology tools to make us more efficient. Another headwind was higher interest rates. So obviously that leads to higher APRs when customers are borrowing money to buy a vehicle. That lowers the attachment rate for customers. Some customers will choose to just pay cash or not use our financing provider when the APRs have risen from 8.9%-12.9%.
We also then get lower commissions as the cost of money continued to increase. So that's come down a little bit, but it hasn't come down much that we still don't get as much commission per unit as we used to. Obviously, also the lower selling price on average, lowering from around 20,000 in the past couple of years to 14,000 in the average for last year, also had means that the balance financed by customers is lower. On top of that, then you've got going the other way, the increased cost of borrowing money to finance our stock.
On roughly GBP 150 million of stock, then through the year ending at 100, you've got a pretty significant increase in the interest cost in the business as well. In terms of action, we increased our APR in order to try and protect commission, but it was still lower, as I mentioned. But also we did focus on really driving that stock turn, as I mentioned, the use of data to get that selling price correct, whether that's external or internal data. We use a mix of both, but fundamentally, it's about if the car's not selling, it is not the right price or it's not in the right location. We need to take action and take an action a lot earlier than we have historically was certainly something we did towards the end of the year.
We also improved our warranty product, and that was partly due to adding a three-year product for customers, which is based on feedback we felt was something we should do. And that also compensated slightly for the loss of the Asset Protection product, which is the sort of return to invoice insurance that customers could buy, which has been withdrawn by on instruction of the FCA across the industry. In terms of customer affordability, again, customers not feeling very flush during last year with the macro challenges we mentioned.
Obviously, vehicles were sitting quite high relative to long-term averages as well due to the new car shortages, so used cars sitting a bit higher than normal. So affordability really negatively impacted. As we mentioned, we extended our criteria for customers to improve the range of vehicles. At one point, we didn't really have many cars under GBP 15,000. We've now got cars under GBP 10,000 on our forecourts, which really helped customers to have as wide a choice as possible. And we also reduced our exposure around affordability.
We felt that the more lumpy product was the more expensive cars, sort of GBP 40,000, GBP 50,000, GBP 60,000, were really sticking, and we couldn't really find a good market for that product. And the same with electric vehicles. Obviously, the more expensive the vehicle, it doesn't take much for that vehicle to now start losing thousands of pounds unless you've moved it quite quickly. So we took action to reduce our exposure to both of those as well. I think this slide on page 12 really helps to explain some of the actions we took last year.
So remember coming into FY24, April last year, everybody expected interest rates were going up, but I don't think anybody expected them to be going up in quite the rapid pace they did to the high level that they did. So when we realized that that was actually happening and it was going to get worse and worse through the year, we took action to try and recover gross margin. So one of the only things we can do if we don't feel we can sell more cars is to try and put prices up and try and pass that increased cost of operating the business to consumers.
As you can see, that didn't really work. The market is still very competitive, and we probably became a little bit more expensive than we have historically. And I think it shows also that it is an ultra-competitive market. And if you put your prices up even GBP 50-GBP 100 on average, you feel it in terms of the volumes that you sell. So the top graph showing unit sales growth year-on-year, you can see between June and July and August, we were suffering pretty big declines on the previous year in terms of retail sales growth. So down around 20%-25% in those periods.
Clearly, that has a massive impact on our gross profit generation. And obviously, being a highly operating leveraged company, that wasn't a good thing for us. So although the margin, the blue line on the graph underneath the metal margin was increased, you can see that it really had a negative impact on sales. So we realized quite quickly that that wasn't going to work and we needed to focus far more on stock turn and moving costs quickly through the system. We took pricing action to try and drive that then, as you can see, peaking in October, basically clearing out of cars that had sat since maybe April, May, and took the pain on those vehicles.
That coincided with the correction in used car values around October, November as well. So you can see why that happened. That's around the time that we introduced an administration fee for customers of GBP 149, which nets us about GBP 125 with ex VAT. That actually supplemented our margin a little bit, which helped us to cover those losses on vehicles that we were selling at a loss because they'd become overaged. The correction in the market was pretty painful for everybody. Around a 10% reduction on sort of GBP 120 million of stock at the time was a pretty difficult thing to stomach, but we managed to get through it.
I think since then, you can see the real impact of the days in stock. As you can see, the days in stock on the right-hand side coming right down from December. It normally sits high in December because the market goes quieter. But you can see the rapid decline in days in stock from December onwards coinciding with the increase in margin as well on the graph next to it. So retail sales growth, higher metal margin, mainly caused by a much faster days in stock and focusing on price. So selling for as lower prices as we can to create that volume growth actually results in a better margin because you're not suffering depreciation and obviously then reduces days in stock.
So a story of three quarters and a quarter, as I mentioned. In terms of Q4, we're talking a lot about Q4 because come December last year, when we were really at a pretty low ebb in terms of financial performance, Chris would probably attest that I was probably a bit like a zealot with the new message of this year was going to be much different and much better. That's proven to be the case because once we know that the stock is lined up and we're seeing a good level of competitiveness in the market from our stock, then you can actually quite comfortably predict where we're going to be for the rest of the year because the market does tend to reset every December post-Christmas.
We were in good position. We had plenty of stock with good margin, and we knew that if the customer sentiment improved slightly, which it did, then we would be in a very good position going forward. You can see the growth in the used car market up 6%. We outperformed that. We had much better visits to our website up 27% in March versus the previous year. Our affordable vehicles, so the mix of vehicles that we had was improved to basically play into a wider audience.
Also, I mentioned many times the increased stock turn reducing depreciation. So that caused the improvement in metal margin. But the marketing spend also, so we're spending lower amounts on marketing and selling more vehicles. So the direct channels of marketing have proven to be quite responsive. Obviously, brand is a more long-term play and we're not investing as much in that at the moment, but we will return to that at some point.
And our ancillary income, so around the extras that we sell, so the guarantee, the paint protection has more than offset the withdrawal of the asset protection product. Our team are leaner and more engaged. I think stronger together is the mantra that we've used with having, unfortunately, lost some members of the team last year. I think the way we've explained that to our team has gone down very well, that we are protecting the overall company and the 700 roles that remain. So to lose some team members is disappointing, but we are protecting the company and protecting the team that are remaining.
So that message has gone down very well with the team. I think for 95% to be proud working for the company, I mean, just being through the macroeconomic events that we have and the difficult trading events that we have speaks volume for our culture and our retention levels have improved. As I mentioned, the cash generation continues. So to lose money and grow cash is pleasing, of course. We will be buying back those shares, as we said. I think we're about a third of the way through that program as we sit here today.
The value that we offer has always been there, as many of you will know, but making sure that we maintain that has been very important to us. There's a couple of examples there across a cross-section of main dealers. As you can see, that we are usually the leading company in the sector. We launched a Double the Difference price promise to customers. We felt that we were very confident that we could actually double the difference if you find a car cheaper than what we are selling. We haven't paid out once on that.
I like that because it tells me that we are competitive. When I get one of those across my desk, then I'll be very interested to be asking my team why we're not the most competitive offering in the market because we should be, and that's what our business model is. So from our perspective, it makes it very difficult for the competition to live with us. And moving that car quickly, preparing it quickly, buying it aggressively, pricing aggressively, going back to market quickly, and spending the money on another car at a compelling price really does work.
And it works the most effectively in a market where the depreciation is in the market rather than the last couple of years where we've had static prices or even increasing prices. That's not as good an environment for us to demonstrate our value. Just a quick update on our strategic development. So we put out four key pillars. We continue to work to these. Our ambitions haven't particularly changed.
They may take us a lot longer than we thought, given the market decline in 40% from when we launched these. But they are still pillars that we work through. The omnichannel capability is probably the one where we've continued to progress most. As I said, we've continued to invest in that area and upgrades to our website and our product landing page and product detail pages. I think we've got the best of those now in the industry. Gives the customers great imagery, recommendations. You can wishlist cars.
You can compare cars. You can reserve cars. You can do anything on our website that you can do on any other website. We launched Stock Alerts for cars where we've not got in stock. Customers can request alerts that when those vehicles of a certain make model come into stock, they get email alerts. That's incrementally added sales to our business where we probably would have lost those customers in the past.
We've improved our filters on the vehicles to give customers more sort of dynamic filters that they can use. That's dramatically increased the uptake of that facility from customers. Most pleasing for me, being an accountant of the past, the organic traffic, which is our free traffic, dramatically increased. Our improvements in the speed of our site, which is very important for Google rankings from an organic nature, improved. Therefore, our organic levels of traffic continue to improve, which means we can not pay as much going forward to acquire traffic in a competitive environment. In terms of wholesale, our Auction4Cars business continued to grow.
That business is selling less vehicles at the moment because we are using more of those part exchanges to turn to retail vehicles. So there is an element there where that business has got a few less vehicles to sell. But we have increased our purchasing fees. We're still very competitive in the market. But even though we've increased our purchase fees, the average fee has dropped due to the fall in the average selling price of the vehicles on there. So the fee is based on the price of the vehicle the trade customer buys. We've done more on the development of that.
Again, technology driving this integrated with funding partners to make it very easy for trade customers to buy vehicles and automatically finance the vehicle with their stock line, credit line that they have with a funder. And then again, automation around triggering collection alerts to customers to say, "Your payment's received. Your vehicle's ready for collection." That used to be a manually issued process and is now fully automated, again, making us more efficient. In terms of customer acquisition retention, we opened our 20th store in Ipswich last year. We do plan more stores.
There's been a lot of capacity withdrawal in the industry with Sytner closing down CarShop, which was 14 locations, and Pendragon, now part of Lithia, closing down CarStore. Again, multiple locations. And also with Cazoo going into administration and leaving the retail market, 3 big players leaving the market, suggesting that there will be opportunity for us to open new stores and take more market share going forward as that capacity withdrawal is put into action. We continue to push our customer database, very low unsubscribe rates, which is important that we're not reducing our database, but we do email customers more than we used to.
Making sure that we then use our data to target customers and really push the prices based on what our data is telling us around the run rate on those vehicles and what we think those vehicles could sell for in an open market. In terms of efficiency, we have a new transport provider. We've always outsourced that part, but we're dramatically more efficient with that now in terms of the visibility of transport. We can communicate better with customers on an automated basis. We've moved to Open Banking. So customers now don't pay using the PDQ terminals.
They can pay with a link and a deep link into their bank account to reduce the card fees to us. So that can save us hundreds of thousands of GBP going forward, which is very important. And various other projects that we've got there, as you can see, continue to build and integrate APIs into our providers, whether that's the finance company or the product company or even a supplier to us for services that we use from them. Just quickly, and I mentioned earlier, I think these are the best landing pages in the industry. So this is the product landing page on the left.
And then when you click on one of those vehicles at the bottom, it takes you into the more, what we call a product detail page on the right-hand side. So you can see there's multiple options there, very good clarity of offering to the customer. We do lots of different things around this to test it with customers in terms of watching the infrared where the customer's eyes are looking and seeing where they're clicking, where are they hovering, where are they not converting. And that team has done a great job. It's a big part of what we invested in two years ago with our technology team.
Recruited a whole group of people into that team, and they are constantly working to improve this based on customer feedback. And I think the key thing here is that we don't use our opinion here. This is based on the customer data. So whether we think it looks good or not, if customers don't like it, we change it and make sure that we get that feedback on board and improve the business going forward.
I think one of the key things to talk about in terms of outlook is what's going to happen in the next couple of years. So the market is going to increase. We know that new cars have been built. They've been built in bigger numbers than they were in previous years. And therefore, that will ultimately feed through into the used cars. So if we do nothing and we don't grow our share, the market's going to get bigger.
We have no reason to believe that we'll do anything other than grow our share, given the capacity withdrawal we've already mentioned. And as you can see, that improvement in metal margins that we're already experiencing, if we can maintain that supply pressure's ease, which grows the market and interest rates fall, all of these things will really drive our profit going forward. That's what it's all about in terms of us. We want to be here to make a good return for our shareholders and then invest that capital if we think the right time to do that is with a compelling investment or return the money to shareholders as we're doing currently with the buyback.
But a really compelling opportunity going forward. You can see here in terms of how we arrive at that number, you can see the market prediction based on new car volumes and based on what then therefore should happen to the Zero to Four Market. It shows our volume. The black line is that our volume was just going to increase back up to where it was and beyond previously.
Now, bearing in mind the operational gearing of the business with a relatively high percentage of gross profit being utilized to cover the costs, you can see that that volume falling through into the gross profit line, lots and lots and lots of that gross profit falls straight through to the profit for tax line and therefore generates the cash in the business. So we're very excited about that. In addition to that, the lower interest rates is a real cost of the business, and it's almost a dead cost. Interest rates go up and we just have to pay more money without really improving the business.
And a drop in that, you will see there that even that falling down to predicted level puts another GBP 1.5 million into the profit for tax line as interest cost falls based on the interest rates falling. In terms of current trading, as I mentioned already, April and May, both profitable. June looks pretty similar. So we're very happy with that. Double-digit growth in retail volumes and our Metal Margin remains strong. Used car prices at the moment are stable.
The only real difference is that petrol and diesel vehicles are pretty buoyant, actually, and quite robust. And obviously, there's some challenges, certainly in recent months, around electric vehicles. And that 22% target for new cars on electric vehicles is disrupting the market in an unhelpful way. So we don't particularly have many electric vehicles in stock. They are a lot more expensive, as you will know. And therefore, there is quite a bit of volatility around those. But we will ultimately be in that market in a big way when those used car values come down more akin to the petrol and diesel prices.
In terms of outlook, I think Brilliant Basics has been an excellent thing for us. It's really reset the business. It's reset expectations. And it ranges from things like communication to our team, being in stores and understanding what challenges they're facing. Internally at the head office, making sure that people are aware that they're there to support the business and making sure that everybody understands the business. So one of the examples is we've got all of our sort of head office, heads of department, and directors. They're all partnered with the store.
And they have to be in that store each month and understand what those stores are facing. We're passing our communication from head office into stores on a more personal level, but also we're passing the store feedback into the senior management team and the heads of department on a more personal level as well. That has proved to be very successful at really engaging the relationship between the teams in the field and the head office. I've already mentioned our lean and cost-based, our data-driven focus on improving margin. Our faster stock turn is a big part of that, of course.
Those enhanced digital capabilities that we invested a lot in the last three years really coming to the fore. I think that stands us in good stead going forward. I think it's important to distinguish between a tech business and a tech-enabled business. We are tech-enabled. We do not force our customers to buy a certain way because we're calling ourselves a tech business. We are enabling our customers for a better experience, whether it be researching or reserving or buying a vehicle.
And we want the customer to have the best combination in the way that they choose. We will not force customers to buy a certain way using a certain channel. We would always put ourselves in the customer's shoes and make sure that however the customer wants to deal with us, we will make it happen because that's what good customer service is about. Ensuring customer affordability continues to be a priority for us is important because, as I said, we noticed last year when prices had risen that we were becoming more difficult to satisfy the market that we had.
So a lot of our new customers are created below the GBP 12,000 price point. And if you haven't got any GBP 12,000 cars in stock, then that's a problem. So hence the move to go to older vehicles. Since October-November, it last became less of an issue as the value of all cars has fallen by around 10%. So therefore, making the market more competitive, making our stock more accessible to more customers, which is obviously very helpful. We should see an expansion in the used car market, as I mentioned, with new car registrations growing.
That's on that earlier slide, but that should continue. We expect to see new cars continuing to grow. And that will obviously help our market going forward. And we plan to reset and re-energize our strategic goals. As I said, they've not particularly changed. We want to grow the company. We want to be profitable. We want to dominate the used car market as the best operator in the field, giving the best customer service with the most engaged team. That concludes our presentation. I'll hand you back to Alex now.
Many thanks, Mark. To those in the audience, if you'd like to ask Mark and Chris a question, if you can please raise your virtual hand, and we will make that happen. Our first question comes from Darren Shirley at Shore Capital. Darren, if you take yourself off mute, please go ahead.
Yes, morning, gents. Great to see the current trading momentum. Just a couple for me, if you don't mind. First of all, in terms of sort of group profitability, if I look at the business in sort of the 5 years pre-COVID, maybe the last sort of 5 normal years we've had, it was pretty consistently delivering sort of high teens-low GBP 20 million of PBT.
When you look at the structure of Motorpoint now and the marketplace that you're operating in, do you think that's an achievable sort of level of profitability again over the medium term? Then the second one would be you've signalled that, I mean, you've obviously still got growth ambitions, significant growth ambitions, and that you're going to get back on the front foot with new sites in the current year. Could you just give us an idea in terms of what you're looking for in sites now?
I know there was a move to smaller sites post-COVID, but in a sort of what's maybe a more omnichannel world than you were anticipating, are you looking for bigger sites than you were? And what do you think is the right number of sites across the UK over the medium term again? Thanks.
Yeah, thanks, Darren. I think in terms of profitability, there's absolutely no reason that we can't return to those values in the medium term of those levels of profit. And as I mentioned, the operating leverage of the business is very high. And therefore, as you do those additional units, another 1,000 cars puts something like GBP 1.5 million on gross profit.
And it certainly doesn't cost us GBP 1.5 million to facilitate those extra 1,000 cars. So that definitely drops through to the bottom line. I think the question obviously is when. That's the more difficult point, given that the market size continues to grow. But what we don't really know is how this capacity withdrawal will affect the market going forward. How much of that capacity released will we pick up? We're certainly looking to pick that up.
We've got to be in those markets, but obviously, it reduces the competitiveness for supply as well, which is important. Hopefully, we'll see an expansion of supply with lower competition levels, given that the withdrawal has happened. That should speed up our return to those previous profitability levels. But absolutely no reason to consider that we would not return to those profitability levels at all. I think from the second point, you are right that we did move more to the smaller stores.
I think we've discussed that a lot internally as part of our Brilliant Basics program, that those smaller stores are probably too small for what we want. I don't think we ever need a 1,000-car store because omnichannel has probably made that a thing in the past. But for sure, we believe we need stores stocking around 200-300 vehicle spaces on the store. So that gives people enough of a choice when they come. And I don't think we can really showcase our model with 50 cars on display as an example.
I think that proves to be very difficult. And even though they're a lower cost from a rent and a people perspective, they do still take up time in terms of management time and various other things. So I think we are looking for 200-300 capacity stores. We will probably look to relocate some of those smaller stores over time once we've established the brand to a level that we believe we've now got the remit to go into that market in a bigger way.
Thanks for that, Mark. Just to follow up there, just to sort of read across some excess of that capacity reduction, and particularly one noisy sort of chunk of capacity. I mean, you look at your cost of recruitment or cost of sales was down to sort of, I think it was GBP 190 per vehicle, and you reduced your marketing cost in the year.
Looking forward, would you expect marketing to build again or with sort of maybe less noise around the industry? Can you maintain sort of a cost of recruitment less than GBP 200, say, rather than going up back to where it was previously?
Yeah, I think we've got to be very careful not to spend too much on the marketing. I think that you can potentially build a brand quicker, but I think the best marketing you can ever do is investing in price because it is a big ticket item. Customers do care about the cost of the vehicle. It can make a big difference to their personal budget.
So I think I don't see it particularly going much over GBP 200 per unit. I mean, it's difficult to predict because clearly, if the volumes move one way or the other, it could go up or down from there. But I think around GBP 200 would be our sort of upper limit. And obviously, we'd look to make it more efficient from there.
Thanks, Mark.
Just a couple of things there. I think two other points. One is we're back on TV advertising this weekend, so let's look out for that. But also on the marketing side as well, one of the things we do need to look at quite carefully when we start laying out new stores and starting that rollout again is we need to make sure that we market those new stores properly. So we'll manage that as it happens, but that would be important.
Okay, all very clear. I'll give someone else a go. Thank you.
Thanks, Darren.
Our next question comes from Alison Lygo at Deutsche Numis. Please take yourself off mute, Alison, and go ahead.
Hi there. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I was also going to ask about site growth. So I guess kind of following up on that, wondering if you could add any color on sort of where within the country you're looking, perhaps where you're seeing kind of any particular real opportunities in terms of capacity.
And then I guess tied to that, any regions you'd call out as really underpinning that return to volume growth? Others lagging, or has it been kind of pretty broad-based across the country? Second one is around, do you want me to go one at a time or?
No, go on.
Okay. Second one then around expectations for stock turn and holding for the year. Obviously, delivered a big step change there in Q4. Should we be expecting that sort of level of stock holding to continue across the year ahead? I guess that's kind of tied to how we think about interest cost trending for the year if we put any changes in interest rates to one side.
And then final one would just be around, I guess, midterm thinking about the OpEx base. So clearly, you've taken some really decisive action in terms of right-sizing the cost base. Are there any areas where you might like to put some more investment back in where you've had to kind of pull a bit harder than you might have liked on a midterm view, or are you just happy with how lean the OpEx base is at this stage? Thank you.
So in terms of markets, we wouldn't normally talk about which markets we're in, but if you plot our stores, you can see that there are gaps in some pretty big cities regionally, the Southwest, the Southeast. The Southeast obviously has been a lot harder than the Southwest to get into as a market due to cost and various other constraints. But there are still pretty big cities that we don't have any representation in, so we'd be looking to those areas. In terms of the, what was it?
Regions where we're doing better.
It's pretty flat. It's pretty flat across the country. We do tend to perform relatively consistently across the country. So we're not seeing any regional variations in not growing massively in this region and not in others. The newer stores obviously grow faster than the more established stores.
That's to be expected. But no, there's a pretty flat structure across that. In terms of stock turn and stock levels, I think we do need a bit more stock, but we obviously want to do it responsibly and not jeopardize that stock turn. I think the stock turn levels at 43 days is about right. It doesn't really need to be dramatically faster than that, but we wouldn't want it to get dramatically worse than that. It does fluctuate a little bit across the year, obviously, with some seasonality.
But no, about around that level. But I would expect a little bit more stock, but obviously, that needs to be covered by increased sales. Otherwise, that affects the stock turn adversely. And in terms of cost, I mean, that is, sorry, the people. That is linked in terms of OpEx. I'd say the only area is people, maybe a bit more marketing, but again, needs to be linked to volume growth.
The people is also linked to volume growth. So we don't have a gaping hole in the organization where we haven't got a certain department or a certain capability. Maybe more customer-facing people in stores as volumes increase would be the only area. So I think we're in pretty good shape in that regard.
Yeah. And just on that final point, I mean, it's relatively minor, but we did increase our headcount in stores in that January to March period in response to the demand. So we actually were 690-something was our sort of low point from FTEs, and it went up sort of 15 heads, whatever. But we'll continue to monitor that closely because the one thing we don't want to do is damage the customer experience because we're too lean. So we do need to be quite reactive. And so far this year, we've done just that.
Great. That's really clear. Thanks, guys.
Thanks, Alison. Our next question comes from Clive Black at Shore Capital. Clive, please take yourself off mute and go ahead.
Thank you, gentlemen, for your time. And also well done navigating, obviously, a tough year. Again, two or three questions if I may. Firstly, interested in your comments, Mark, about the online element of the business.
Do you sense that there's been a fundamental rebalancing or repositioning of where online sits within your business model? As Darren said, there's been a lot of noisy participants, particularly in the pure-play arena. Do you think we're now in a sort of steady-state market, and you understand where online is in the Motorpoint business model?
Yeah, for sure. I think we could have easily gone and spent tens of millions GBP on technology and actually potentially not sell any more cars. So I think there was a precipice there that we could have stepped into and believed we needed to spend vast amounts of money like some of our competitors. But I think we've actually taken a very pragmatic view of, well, how does it sell us more cars? How does it improve the customer experience? How does it make us more efficient?
And part of the Brilliant Basics project was, if it doesn't sell us any more volume and doesn't make us leaner, we're not doing it from a technology perspective. And that was very much driven from necessity, but also then once you start implementing it, you realize that it's working and you sort of double down on it more. So I think technology is clearly, it's actually always been pretty important with us. We've got no back-office staff in any of our stores.
And I don't think any other retailers can say that. So I think we've always been very efficient, very lean. We've automated systems, using systems, automated manual processes away from the stores. That's been obviously very helpful. I think being technology-enabled means we use technology where we see that it adds value to the business, whether it makes us more efficient or improves the customer experience or sells us more.
I think there is a rebalancing back to a common-sense approach around technology where we are using it where we think it benefits the company, but we're not going to use it at any cost. We're certainly not going to use technology or call ourselves technology-led when actually we're technology-enabled is the reality. We use it a lot. We're very open to new systems, new processes. We've used it to our advantage, I think.
In that respect, just to be, I guess, just a point of detail, do the vast majority of sales start online?
Yes. Yeah. So the vast majority, I'd say over 90% of customers begin their journey online. So even customers, they walk into store, and we may not have had any interaction with them prior to that. When we survey them, they have been on the website. And typically, they've been on our website and not many other websites, which looks good for brand loyalty.
But not many of them have been on Auto Trader, as an example, which was a surprise to me even after being in the industry a long time. So I think customers, they will search retailers as well as aggregators. But a lot of our customers have not used any of the aggregator platforms and have just come straight to our website like the choice we've got and have come into store.
And then just building on your presentation, I want to do the questions. Just maybe characterize a little bit more how you see the competitive environment. I presume you're confident about gaining market share here on maybe even more quickly than you have in the past. Is that fair?
Yeah. I think with the, it's surprising that so many bigger names that have been staples of the industry over the last 5 or 10 years, including Cazoo, have disappeared or decided not to open. What we don't know is we've obviously pushed into their space, so we wouldn't have been in the 3- to 5-year-old space in the past. I've no doubt we make it very hard for people when we go into the older market because of the way our model works, which is that faster stock turn, low price.
It makes us pretty hard to compete against. I don't know whether we've contributed to that decision. Clearly, everybody's fishing in the same pond for stock, and stock is going to get a lot harder in that 3-6 group now because of the COVID shortages are feeding into that market. So it may be that consequence as well that that 3-6 market's going to get smaller, but obviously, we expect the north of 3 to get bigger, which is our heartland. So we're excited for that as well.
And in terms of that supply, when you first came to market, the rental market and fleet were especially important for you. Maybe could you characterize how you see the buckets of supply going forward?
Well, I can't say there's non-existent, but it's not far off non-existent. So for a company that was probably 60% fleet, ex-fleet product in the past, for us to be much, much smaller than that, now a fraction of that, and having to source the vehicles ourselves through customers or buy them in open auctions, which is obviously a more expensive channel for us than the direct market.
We are starting to see some direct supply come back in terms of whether it's a fleet company or a manufacturer offloading some bulk deals. So cars 300 here, 300 there, that's very welcome. But we expect to see more of that going forward, and obviously, that should play to our strengths as well. And of course, you've got the cash to be able to act quickly on that front, I guess.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. We've obviously got the facilities behind us to allow us to do that as well if we need to go even deeper. But we'll do it responsibly. We'll do it profitably. I think the past financial year has given us more confidence than ever on where we should be focusing and how we can be successful.
Yeah. Having that cash, I'm sorry, Clive, having that cash is important because if the fleet companies, the rentals, whoever manufacturers, whoever it might be, they know that we can pay. They know we've got the cash available. So they will look to us rather than somebody else in any event. So we should be first in the queue in that respect. So yeah, fingers crossed, but we're optimistic about that.
Then just thanks for that. The final one is, do you think there's anything happening with customer replacement cycles for cars? Are they lengthening? Are they shortening? Do you think there's anything happening out there that's conditioning your market?
Yeah. It's definitely lengthened since COVID because it got shorter in COVID. I think it's probably gone back to a long-term number now where it was, which is about 3.5 years. So it shortened a bit in that period, but it's definitely gone back out a little bit. And I expect it'll shorten again as interest rates start coming down and people have not decided not to change.
I mean, if you think about what we do, we're effectively traders, buying and selling cars. And for people to not be in the market just because they think it's too expensive, it's not a good time. Electric technology is changing, and I'm going to wait for the next electric vehicle to be good enough. Then people don't trade, which is probably the worst possible scenario for us. So you can't see that getting any worse going forward. It should improve. Hence, the sentiment is we're very confident over the next couple of years, we'll be dramatically more successful.
Well, good luck then , and thank you.
Thank you. Thanks, Clive.
Mark, Chris, we are done with questions. So over to you for any closing comments.
Well, not too much from us, but thank you very much for listening, everybody. As I just said, we are very confident about where we go from here. It's been a very challenging financial year. But since the turn of the year, so the final quarter, and certainly this quarter, we're profitable. That's where we like to be.
We're here to make a return for our shareholders. The market withdrawals of other competitors should be good news for us. The supply increasing should be good news for us. The macro environment improving should be good news for us.
I see only positives going forward after the most challenging year. We should now be on a very good trajectory for success going forward. Thank you for listening, everybody. We'll see you soon. Many thanks. Bye. Thank you.