Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Motorpoint's half-one results for the period to the 30th of September 2025. We are delighted with our performance in the first half of the year, doubling profits almost in the first half versus the prior period, and also continuing to take market share through unit growth and our revenue growth as well, which we will go through later. First of all, I will take you through some operational highlights from the first half. I will then hand over to Chris, our CFO, and then I will come back on and do a bit of an update on strategic progress. As I said, our market share gains continue, and we will cover the numbers in a second, but we continue to look on ways to enhance our customer experience to be able to offer customers fantastic deals and take more market share.
But also, we'll talk a bit also about the technology advancements, particularly around the use of data. That's really leading to a transformation in the way we run the business, which is very exciting for us. Just cover off a few of the key investment highlights of Motorpoint. We are in a very large market. Our market share remains under 2.5% of the under six-year-old vehicles, but it's even smaller share of the total market. As you will see, although we take share in under six-year-olds, 10% of the sales in the quarter to the end of September were actually over six years old. We are not super focused on how old the vehicle is, it's just whether it's a good enough quality vehicle to be sold. Huge opportunity for us in a very large market that is still very fragmented in the U.K.
We continue to work super hard on our operating model. Efficiency is super important to us to make sure that we can continue to offer our customers the lowest possible prices. I think our integrated infrastructure around the country, 21 retail locations, two preparation locations, all working together with national stock levels and making sure we can offer as many products to as many customers as possible is really important. That is becoming more and more efficient, and that is going to be very important going forward. In terms of our customer experience over many, many years, we have been super focused on this. This is continuing to lead to very high levels of customer satisfaction. We measure that through Net Promoter Score, and in the period, we were +83.
Year on year, that's a big improvement, but we always want to be over 80 in that score, and that suggests that our customers will return and they will recommend us going forward, which should lead to longer-term market share growth. In terms of our financial model, the business is and always has been highly cash generative. We are an asset-light business. Most of our locations are rented, and we do not have any structural debt. That will continue to be the case going forward, and we do envisage generating more cash and a lot more cash in future years going forward. In terms of technology I mentioned just now, the continued improvements are mainly around stock at the moment and on customer journey and making sure that the customer A is getting to the point of purchase more quickly.
Using the data to help with that, but also using AI agents to continue customer journeys where we believe the customer may have come to the end of their journey. Sometimes we are still selling cars long after the AI agent took over the journey, and then the customer comes back and buys the car. That is very exciting for us. Also in terms of purchasing and pricing, I think this is the biggest area that we have moved on dramatically from the very old manual way of pricing vehicles. What that has now allowed us to do is determine our market position on price based on the specific vehicle, based on the age on sale of the vehicle.
Therefore, we are able then to determine how much do we think we can pay for that vehicle, which has led to us taking more share of the available cars being offered in the market. As always, our people are very important to us and come first, and it is super, really, really exciting to see that we are in the Sunday Times list of the top companies to work for. That highly engaged team really does generate a strong culture, which customers always comment on when they come into our stores, that they can really feel that everyone's having a good day and enjoying their job, which leads to a higher conversion, we believe. Overall, strong strategic progress, and that continues to demonstrate the strength and obviously the flexibility of our business model. I touched on market share in various different ways of looking at this.
This was very important during the post-COVID era where the overall market was falling, so we needed to ensure we were taking market share, and we absolutely did continue to do that. I think overall now we are more focused on growing our overall sales. We know the market will be flat to slightly up to slightly down over the next couple of years, but we want to grow irrespective of that market. You can see on the left side here our under six-year-old market share continuing to grow to 2.5%, but we have pulled out the 0-2, which was very difficult at one point when under two-year-old cars were in short supply.
Most of those did stay in dealer networks, and we are now seeing more openness in that supply, those cars being offered more on the open market or directly to us, and we're obviously taking advantage of that. That has grown to over 3% in the period. Overall, continue to outperform the market, continue to increase our gains, and obviously in the younger car market, even better performance. Just in terms of these share opportunities, we still believe, as I mentioned, a very big opportunity across the U.K. Our stability of supply going forward, we believe now gives us the opportunity to really expand the business. That is a journey that has been sort of muted in the past few years as supply has been more difficult to come by.
Now that we feel that we've got a much better line of sight on supply in the future, we are more confident that we can now open more stores. Lots of grey space on the U.K. map of where we can open new stores. We did actually open one in Norwich earlier, sorry, in late 2024, which continues to perform to expectations. Our aim is to be 10% market share in that six-year-old bracket within half an hour drive time of our location. The more locations we have within half an hour drive time in the U.K. public, the bigger the opportunity. We know that when we open in these markets, we definitely do take share rapidly. Even within the first year, we can go from under 1% market share to mid-single-digit market share very, very quickly.
Considerable opportunity for further expansion, and ultimately that leads to long-term profitable growth and obviously shareholder value increases. In terms of customer satisfaction, the continuation of that score being above 80%, as you can see, we've been there since before COVID. We continue to focus very hard on this. Super important to listen to what customers are saying. We have lots of feedback loops with the customer. You can see there our Trustpilot score 4.6. That's actually one of the highest now in the industry. Others have fallen away, and it's really evidencing our repeat purchase levels that that customer service really is important. It's a very infrequent transaction every three to four years.
It is very important that customers do understand how good a service we can offer and that they recommend us to other people so we can continue to grow and take market share. Just in terms of some of the verbatim comments from customers, because I think sometimes it does not maybe come across in one number, some of the things customers say, best value, which is obviously something that we focus very hard on. We want to be the best value based on the product that we are selling, the quality of the product and the service we offer.
More importantly, going forward, part exchange is a huge part of the deal for most customers, and particularly if we're buying cars from customers, whether it's a part exchange or it's purchased through our sell your car channel, where the customer doesn't buy a car from us, but we still buy their car, is really important. Giving the best possible price we can for that vehicle is very important to convert customers' vehicles into our own stock. Customers have been impressed by the value we offer. As you can see, price comes up a lot compared with other dealerships and the competitiveness of our pricing as well. Our fundamental car buyer's champion mission of being the best for choice, value, and quality really comes through. Lots of choice, over 35 brands, lots of value. Customers see that we are the cheapest and offer the best value.
In terms of service, we have a very high level of customer service with a score of 83. We could not do this, of course, without our team. Fundamental to me, we have a model called the Virtuous Circle, which starts with our team. An engaged team leads to a very high level of customer satisfaction, and that leads to continued shareholder value growth as we continue to take market share and then reinvest that in growing our store locations and therefore provide opportunities for our team. That Circle continues to go around. It is really pleasing to see that the Sunday Times recognition that I mentioned, 87% of our team are proud to work at Motorpoint, and that is something that I really insist upon that we do not want team members who are not proud to work here.
We want people to be really passionate about selling cars, really passionate about delivering the best possible service. Chris and I both and the rest of the senior team go to our stores a lot to make sure that those levels of engagement are high. We have increased a lot our training development budget during the year to continue to provide that training for the team, but also career progression. Future talent programs have been restarted, which were paused post-COVID when times were a bit more difficult. It is really good to see us being able to offer our team those opportunities and continue to internally promote. We would always look to promote our team internally into supervisory or management positions.
Around three out of four of our managers have been promoted internally, and that leads to a really strong DNA in each of the stores and each of the teams where we want to make sure that that culture remains very strong. In addition to that, our turnover of staff, it's like others. It's never zero, but we want it to be as low as possible. We've increased our recruitment processes to try and make sure that we are providing a higher caliber team member going forward who's going to stay with Motorpoint for a long time and try and reduce our team turnover.
Just in summary, our financial performance, Chris will go into this in a second in a bit more detail, but just to be clear, just under 9% growth in retail units, a slight increase in average selling price led to revenues overall rising by 15%. It is very good to see that that then feeding through the P&L, 22.5% increase in EBITDA. Our return on capital employed of 59% is excellent. That will continue to increase. We have a very low capital employed base, and it is an outstanding return on capital employed at that level. In addition, as you know, we have returned to shareholders through buybacks and dividends, almost GBP 11 million in the last 18 months. Just demonstrating the cash generative nature of the business and our willingness and ability to return that to shareholders where possible. Thank you.
I'll now pass you over to Chris for our financial highlights.
Good. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. So yeah, really pleased, as Mark said, with performance in the first half. If we look at the profit and loss account, I mean, continued good progress, which obviously started in the last year, but some good growth numbers there in double digit across the board pretty much. Really pleased with that. Total revenues up 15%, retails up 9%, wholesales up 11%, and average retail selling price was up close to 6%. That drove the overall 15% top line growth. Metal margin very strong. We talked a little bit about data and we'll come a bit more onto that later, as well as extras benefited from additional products, notably around warranty.
Finance commission actually did increase slightly this year compared to last year, but they're still at relatively low levels compared to where we were historically. Fundamentally, high interest rates have a bearing on that. That probably is an opportunity for us as we go forward and we'll see how interest rates sort of land in the coming years. A bit of growth on that line. We can see that retail gross profit per unit increased to GBP 13.50 from GBP 13.20 last year. Probably just worth pointing out as well that we did have the admin fee, which is about GBP 150 a vehicle, which we stopped exactly a year ago, actually. That would have been in the numbers a year ago. In that half on fiscal year 2025, the admin fee would have been in there.
Obviously, we've covered that now and some with the metal margin strong performance. Operating expenses were up around about 6%. That's mainly people costs. You can see going from GBP 21 million or GBP 20.6 million from GBP 19 million. And that's around team recruitment. Obviously, with the volumes going up in certain areas, particularly in the stores and prep, we have had to deal with the demand by recruiting additional heads. Also, we've got the new store as well at Norwich, which is pretty much coming close now to its one-year anniversary. We've also got some inflation in there, and we know about the minimum wage and national insurance increases and stuff. We won't go through that again. Generally, costs are really tightly managed, so I'm very pleased as CFO in that respect.
There were some notable decreases actually around things like energy and bank card fees as well, where we've made some changes. We have seen a material drop in certain local costs, which is good news. Marketing increased from 4.4 to 4.9. Obviously, that mirrors the demand. We try and aim for about GBP 150 per unit in terms of the customer acquisition cost, and we achieve that, which is pretty much flat with the previous year. We've talked about brilliant basics for probably 18 months now, and I think we've seen the benefits of that in terms of efficiency. Probably just worth pointing out, even though the headcount has risen slightly, we've seen over the past two years almost a 15% increase in number of units sold per FTE. That is quite a fundamental step forward in terms of efficiency. We are pleased in that respect.
Finance costs are up to close to GBP 5 million from GBP 4 million. That is, interest rates have fallen a little bit, so we've had a little bit of benefit. Really, it is because inventory levels now are significantly higher. We were under stock a year ago. We feel now that we've got the right levels of stock to satisfy the demand. We feel we're in a better place. That does have a knock-on effect with the costs of inventory going through the interest line. Mark already touched on sort of capital employed and net asset position. Just look at fixed assets. We have invested in the first half only about GBP 1.3 million. Nothing overly significant despite some of the work that we're doing around the tech, the data, the AI. Some of that is going through the profit and loss account and our IT cost line.
We have invested in the first half, particularly in MOT capability, with now around about 12, I think, of our about 21 stores now being able to conduct an MOT, which is great. Again, we will see the efficiency of that come through as we move forward. We have got an asset held for sale on the balance sheet of GBP 5 million, the GBP 4.9 million. That is the Derby store that we purchased, the three halls and additional land. We have refitted the store, and now it is on market to do a sale and a lease back. Talked about the inventory increase already. Days in stock did increase. It is still below 50, which is good, but it has gone up to 49. This does reflect the fact that stock has built up, and this is deliberate on our side as we look to satisfy the demand in Q3 and especially Q4.
People go on our website, you'll see significantly more stock there than perhaps you would have even six months ago. Payables has gone up, but that's really because the stocking facilities has increased to support the stock. There's a mirror image really with inventory and payables. Another bit of good news. We did have GBP 165 million of sort of firepower, if you like, with stock and facility opportunity with Black Horse and Lombard. We've secured a GBP 40 million seasonal increase. We don't need GBP 165 million all the way through the year, but certainly as we hit peak trading times, it's good to have a bit more in our back pocket. I'm really pleased that the more busy times, that's gone up to GBP 205 million, which is great.
The net assets have fallen, so despite the profit increase, but that's primarily because of the buyback, the share buyback, 3 million shares at GBP 5 million, plus the dividend, which is close to GBP 1 million as well. If we look at the cash flow, we've sort of pretty much flat sort of debt at the year-end, slight net debt position of GBP 500,000. We can see the benefit of EBITDA coming through that we'll see that continue in the second half. The usual sort of lines, relatively small CapEx, actually interest lease. We've got the share buyback in there and the dividends. The net working capital is an outflow of GBP 5.6 million. Five on here, but GBP 5.6 million with a 0.6 for share-based payments. That primarily reflects the stock build-up again as planned. No surprise there. We're happy with the overall cash position.
Return on capital employed, 60%. This is EBIT divided by sort of average net assets. The EBIT's over a trailing 12-month period. At year-end, we'll see the full FY 2026 position, but this goes back 12 months. Again, pleased that we were hitting close to 100% a few years ago. We certainly see the road towards getting back to those elevated levels. Just again, evidence in our capital-light model. Again, pleased with that position. Capital allocation policy. We've talked more and more about this over the past 12 months or so. Obviously, aligned to strategy and shareholders. Just to reemphasize, priority one is to use the cash to invest in organic growth and market expansion. That's why we're here. Really good progress in half one. We've gone through the numbers. Mark's talked about the Nordic Six market and the EBITDA growth as well.
Probably just pointing out, if we look at the overall market, in the last quarter, so that is July to September, the used car market was up 2.8%. We were up 7.4%. Again, a good over-delivery against the market. We feel we are making really good progress on priority one. Of course, priority two, if we have got excess cash, then what are we going to do with it? We are going to return it to shareholders. I think we have proven that. We have returned GBP 10 million in terms of buybacks over the past year and a half. Dividend of GBP 0.9 million at the year-end. Obviously, we have declared another dividend today of another GBP 0.8 million. Roughly GBP 12 million, just below GBP 12 million, that is going back to shareholders. Priority three is M&A if there is good industry logic. That has not been the case.
Really, priority one and two, we focused on, and we're very happy with the progress. Of course, caring for our planet, ESG continues to be important. We continue to deliver good progress, and we are committed to being viewed as one of the most environmentally friendly used car retailers. Snippets here in the first half in terms of progress. We've had EPC uplifts. These are the electricity efficiency, energy efficiency measures that you get, third-party independent views of stores. In a few of our stores, we've improved the rating, and there's some more plans to improve those again. We've made really, really good progress. ESOS, which again is like a government audit in terms of energy efficiency in the estates. Again, we've made good progress on those audit next steps. We're pleased with those. Recycling has gone from 60% to close to 70%.
Again, doing our bit with waste, which is great. Less than 1% of waste does go to landfill. 1% is our target. Again, we're very pleased to have that below 1%. Of course, EVs. We're selling now more and more EV cars, which is important. We are looking about charging methodology. We are looking at solar, and we're looking at opportunities that present on the market. We continue to be sort of inquisitive in this area about how we can move these things forward. Again, really good progress. More to do, but we feel we're on the right road. Okay. Right. I will pass you back to Mark. Thank you.
Thanks, Chris. Okay.
Coming back to our presentation of the strategic progress on our outlook, I mentioned already our data and AI capability that we're investing in, which will continue to drive our profitable growth and obviously a bigger opportunity going forward. This is a slide that we've used a few times now, but in essence, trying to show that the building blocks to much greater profitability in the longer term that Motorpoint can look forward to. Starting on the left side with our current PBT in the first half of GBP 4.1 million. Sorry, last year's PBT for the full year of GBP 4.1 million.
We believe that we continue to be able to get metal margin improvement through using data and, in essence, pricing vehicles at different percentage of market price or proxy for market price to ensure that they sell earlier and therefore at a higher margin because these vehicles do depreciate with the longer that they sit on sale. In terms of supply pressures, as we have seen in the first half and as we saw a bit of improvement last year continues into this year, supply is definitely easing. That has been a real anchor on us in the last couple of years. Being unable to grow or get the supply can be very challenging. We are now seeing that we are seeing a lot more younger stock in the market.
There is still a shortage over three years old between sort of three- and six-year-old, although we've grown our sales in that segment as well because we weren't in that segment historically. The younger cars, no question, they are lower to prepare in terms of cost. They sell at a good pace, but we can also get them on sale quicker. They have lower purchase fees to acquire the stock if they've come from one of our fleet suppliers rather than buying it at an open auction in a competitive environment. We believe that the market size will continue to increase as the new car production feeds through into the used car market. That has already happened sort of up to three years old. New vehicle production increases.
Also, the affordability of our product with offering older vehicles, particularly part exchanges that we decide to sell because of the quality and the history of that vehicle, we would now be more likely to sell that vehicle than in the past. Historically, pre-COVID, we were only selling vehicles under three years old, under about 20,000 mi. Now it is mainly under six years old, and most of that is still under four years old. We do still have, as I said earlier, some seven and eight-year-old vehicles on sale. That increased market gives us an opportunity as well. We do believe over time, interest rates will fall. That will increase affordability for customers as the APR level should fall as well.
We'll have lower borrowing costs on our finance stock and facilities, and potentially we'll have a higher finance penetration as more customers decide to take the finance option at Motorpoint as it becomes cheaper with lower costs of borrowing. They should continue to benefit us as well. Interest rates are probably one of the biggest cyclical factors in selling used cars. Excuse me. In terms of PBT forward-looking projection, you can see that those building blocks, they're all favorable for us. They've actually all been inverted in the past couple of years. We now see that it's only right that they will now become opportunities for us rather than the risks and pressures that they have been on us in the past few years. We talk a lot about where our supply channels come from.
I would also point out that we are pretty agnostic about the supply channel. If we can get the right net margin post-fees from an auction versus from a fleet supplier or from a part exchange from a customer, we're not really that bothered where the car comes from. If the economics are that good, we would buy that car. It is good to see fleet purchases coming through. The fleets have got a lot more new car opportunities now than they have had from manufacturers. Obviously, that just expands our playing field, which is good to see. The data, in essence, by being able to mechanically price vehicles rather than emotionally price vehicles, that has led to us being able to charge slightly more for our vehicles.
More importantly, vehicles where we felt that we could not bid enough on that vehicle to convert it, the data is now telling us to have the confidence to not rely on the emotion of our buying decisions. Actually, the data is telling us you can pay that for that vehicle, and it will sell at a higher price than maybe somebody would emotionally consider it could not fetch for that vehicle in the market. That allows us to convert more of the supply that we are seeing out there. That discipline and transparency of pricing is leading to real improvements in our ability to convert the bids that we make on vehicles to buy them and also our margin, certainly in the first half. We see that continuing into the second half as well.
Intelligent pricing models are being used to support the pricing of the vehicle on sale, but also to support how much we pay for that vehicle on purchase. Our board from consumer sell your car is something that we're looking to continue to grow. It is difficult because sometimes a customer will be on the website looking for maybe a part exchange price, and then maybe we have not got a car that they would like to buy from us. We still want to buy their car, though, and therefore it becomes a sell your car transaction. Clearly, there are people sometimes who are selling a vehicle when they are not buying one, but it does cross over between a part exchange and a sell your car.
The total number of cars bought from customers is the most important thing because it could be a part exchange or it could be a sell your car car where they did not buy from us. However, the important thing is overall, we bought 9,750 vehicles from consumers, and that is up 14.7%. We want to grow that number. We want that percentage of our total stock sold to increase, the ones that we source from consumers as a percentage of our total sales. As Chris mentioned earlier, we have also increased our stocking facility. Our stock sits a lot higher at the end of the half year than the previous half year, but we were very short of stock the previous half year. As I have said throughout, we feel like we have really got a lot of improvement there, and that is continuing to come through.
We talked a lot about data and AI, and I'm sure everybody else does as well. I think it's important to say the car industry probably is quite a long way behind some of the other retailers in terms of their use of data and AI. Vehicles are very unique in terms of their very single transaction, very individually negotiated transaction on purchase, on sale. You've got finance, you've got additional products that we sell. Obviously, the different types of vehicles that we sell as well. It is not an easy thing to use data and AI for. However, over time, we've obviously developed these tools. I think it's important to say that the data technology teams were the teams that were protected during our brilliant basics right-sizing. We kept those teams, and we continue to invest in this area.
I feel like we're now benefiting from that faith that this is the right thing to do. This is the long-term thing to do. We didn't take the short-term savings that would have presented. We continue to invest for the long term. As I mentioned, the vehicle allocation is also being used in data to determine where should we put that vehicle. In the past, if we bought 20 cars and we got 20 locations, we'd probably send one to every location. Now we may sell all 20 to one location based on what the data is telling us to do. That has changed in that sort of allocation. It should lead to a more efficient allocation.
The important thing for that is if we allocate the vehicle to where we think it's going to sell in that market, it reduces the cost of transaction for the customer by the delivery of moving that car into that market. It removes a little bit of friction between us and the customer because the car is in the market where it's going to sell rather than in the wrong market and the customer having to move it into the right market, if that makes sense. We talked a lot about the data-driven pricing strategy. We can pick up any questions on that because we've talked about it a few times. As I mentioned at the start, the agentic AI reactivating, close quote. This is where our own sales team have said, "This inquiry is no longer active. This customer is not buying from us.
They're going to do something else. I'm going to close our interaction." We have then passed this to our AI agent, who we call Lily. Lily follows up these dead leads, as we would call them, with her emails. She can do WhatsApp and whatever other channel and basically has the patience to continue to cajole the customer, to be of assistance to the customer. What we found is we've sold several hundred vehicles through Lily continuing these transactions. These are sales that we thought were not going to happen, that we'd given up on, or the sales team locally has given up on. Therefore, these are genuinely incremental deals because we had given up on this particular customer buying a car from Motorpoint. It is interesting. We do have people asking who Lily is, but she's not real.
She's an AI agent, but she's clearly a very effective one, and we love her. The other thing that we're looking for is the digital discovery assistant. This is looking imminent to be launched on our website. We call it search and merge, where the customer can type in some questions, and then it gives a very useful continued interaction with the customer to help them find what they want. I think this is really important for us to continue to become more efficient. Chris mentioned how more efficient we are with our team. We want to continue to improve that to help us continue to be the lowest cost operator and therefore be the most efficient and therefore offer our customers the best deals because we've got the lowest cost base.
Important to that is helping customers get further along the journey in their own time. When they do decide to interact with Motorpoint, rather than saying, "I'm looking for a car," they say, "I'm looking for a car, and I need the red Fiesta that's in your Newport store." It is a three-year-old one, and it is GBP 14,000 because the AI agent has got them that far along the line by asking pertinent questions and the customer interacting with the AI agent without any of our team having an interaction at all. Getting the customer further down the purchase journey is obviously more efficient for us because when we do interact, the customer is ready to purchase or much closer to being ready to purchase. That is where we see the efficiency gains. One more thing on this.
We've removed pricing off all of our price boards, which are in the vehicles on site. That was not a fun thing to do for our sales team. They'd spend sometimes the first hour of the day going out to every single car, unlocking every single car, printing a new price board, changing the price board. As we've said, with our data-driven pricing, we are changing prices a lot more than we would have done historically based on market movements, based on our own strategy changes. Therefore, that was going to increase very—sorry—by a lot. Therefore, that manual interaction with the vehicle to unlock it, change the price board was going to increase. Therefore, we've removed the need to do that by placing a QR code on the price board and removing the actual price.
Our sales team love it because they do not have to wander out in the rain and unlock 50 cars and change 50 prices. Equally, we then get a lot more data on what customers are browsing on our pitches, how many cars they may interact with on the pitch, how many customers are on the pitch. Therefore, we can resource better at peak periods and maybe adapt our resourcing when we are not at a peak period. We have very, very strong data on this now and it has probably given us answers that we have longed to have for many, many years, and we have had to do manual service for in the past. We see better insight and productivity gains from that. Just a few snapshots as to how we are using that data and AI. As you know, our continued investment in our digital experience is super important.
The website has now been integrated with the PLC website, which gives us an SEO benefit. Obviously, saves on having two websites. Now we only have one. I've mentioned the QR code as an example of it there. You can see that it takes the customer when they scan that QR code, they go straight to the vehicle that they then can capture. They will then be able to have that vehicle sent to them. Rather than looking at a car and then not really remembering which 10 cars that I look at on the pitch when I was wandering around browsing, you then can get the 10 cars that you looked at or scanned sent to you to have you to then peruse at your own leisure when you're at home. Clearly, one of the best things you'd like to do is to compare that vehicle.
Maybe these were my top three. How do I compare their features and benefits, pricing, performance? That facility is then offered to the customer as well. Real strides forward in our digital experience and all based on customer feedback and what we think customers could require, but continually tested to ensure that customers are adopting the features and benefits and obviously then removing features and benefits where we do not see any interaction from the customer or the customer does not place much value on that feature on the website. Continuing with our strategy, the broadening of our brand reach is very important for us to have as big a brand reach, particularly on Google. For the first time, we are the most prominent retailer on Google for the keywords that we consider to be the most important keywords in customer search for used cars.
The top three positions is where we would always like to be on Google in their natural organic results. In terms of the number of keywords that we rank in the top three or four and the size of those keywords, the audience they draw, we are now number one. We are very pleased with that. It has been something we have been working towards for a long time. Our SEO team as part of our marketing team, as well as our website team, are the teams that we did not cut back on during our brilliant basics, continue to invest in those teams and even growing those teams during difficult times. Long-term view, as you would expect, which is best shareholders continue to play a big part there. We are reaping the benefits of that now.
We've launched a YouTube channel a couple of years ago now. We've over 37,000 followers on there, 10 million views. That is where we place all of our car reviews. That has been very successful and continues to do so. We actually get money back from YouTube, which is quite nice to take something back from Google for the amount they take off us. It's good to see us getting a little bit back. In terms of the vehicle listing ads, this is Google's challenge to Autotrader, showing the sort of shopping listings that you would see on any other usual interaction with Google on shopping, using AI in their product usage to get better adverts, better images. We are really pleased with how that's gone. We were in the beta trial initially. That's now fully rolled out.
The leads on the images are about 25% lower in cost than the leads that we would have historically got from clicking on the paid search term. Really pleased with how that's worked. In terms of aggregator diversification, we all know about Autotrader's dominance, but we are diversifying our spend in aggregators to ensure that we're not too reliant on one. We're getting record leads and much, much better ROI on the other platforms that we now engage with a lot more. Very pleased with that as well in terms of reducing our reliance on Autotrader. In terms of our sell your car, I mentioned how important it was to continue to source cars direct from the public. We've got an expanded CRM journey. That will be partly AI-fed as well.
To continue improving that journey to get customers to get over the line and actually sell us their car, again, that is a very patient journey with some customers. Therefore, it is really geared up to a CRM journey that is very much powered by AI. Lily is going to be really busy. Just in terms of further technology development, we have implemented a new finance ERP system. Chris's team are benefiting from that. Again, it is efficiency gains that we are looking for. They apply to head office as well. Our finance team is smaller than it was. We have got real efficiencies coming through by implementing that ERP system. We have also, as part of that, put in a new purchase order system that gives us more control, more understanding, and more accountability for spend, which is important to us. Our cloud environment continues to grow.
We are in a hybrid environment, but we continue to move things into the cloud where we see cost and efficiency benefits. Even things like data storage and usage using tools like Snowflake for some of the data tools that we use is really important because it's a lower-cost platform than some of the other platforms we were using prior to that. Importantly, as you'd expect, we are investing heavily in our security posture. We're never satisfied with where we are, but we have invested a lot, and we implement a lot of training with our team, which is where we consider there to be a risk with people opening links and clicking on links. We do a lot of testing on that and challenges for the team to ensure that they're aware of the importance of this security posture.
That has been much improved over the last six to twelve months. In terms of after-sales, we have talked a bit about this. This is a slower burn for us, but it is something we think that has got legs in the longer term. We need to build more capacity for this to be in every single store. Certainly, as Chris mentioned, in about 60% of our stores now, we have an MOT station. That is not an insignificant investment, but it does give us now the ability initially to do all of our MOT testing internally rather than having to send the car external for MOTs. You may ask, "Why is that being done now?" We did not used to sell cars that required MOTs because we were under three years old. We do need to put that capability in. It is pretty much fully rolled out now.
We'll give us speed advantages in that car not needing to leave site, and we can do the MOT test internally, but also provides progression for our technicians. If they want to become an MOT tester, that job pays more than a normal technician. It provides career progression for those and reduces turnover. In terms of the other things that we're doing, at the moment, we sell warranty products, as you can imagine. That warranty work, if required, would have been done by a third party historically. We sell a car to a customer. We sell them a warranty. If there's a problem with the vehicle resulting in a warranty claim, that warranty work would be done by another dealer or another repairer rather than Motorpoint. We are building and growing our capability to do that work internally.
Therefore, we will benefit from the income that that warranty cost, which is currently third party, would be coming back into Motorpoint. It provides us with higher levels of work and skills required in our team, leading to training and career opportunities for our team, leading to their retention. As you can see, the technical development of our team is very important. Just a few examples there where we've got progression paths with our team. Vehicle preparation assistants, people who look at cosmetic work or move vehicles around the compound, we are upskilling to become technicians, investing in our team, and also then for our technicians to upgrade to become MOT testers or warranty technicians. Continuing to invest in our team, providing that career progression that was not previously there with Motorpoint should lead to a reduction in turnover in this very difficult-to-recruit area.
Just to finish off, in terms of our current trading and outlook, our momentum has continued into October, as we've noted, 8% units up and good profitability. Metal margins are stable. They do get a bit wobbly this time of year because sales go down. Making sure that we go through our first winter period with not too much price volatility is going to be important to protect our margin. It is the first time we've gone through a winter where demand falls off dramatically until after Christmas when it then ramps up dramatically. Making sure that we look at our pricing algorithms to make sure we get those right because it will be the first time we go through that. We do not see significant risk there, but it will be interesting to see how that performs through this winter period. We've got the stock levels, as we talked about.
We have geared up for that. We do not see any issue in gearing up the stock levels to the volumes that we think we require to deliver a successful Q4 for us, which is January to March, our most important quarter. We are in a good position from that. As we mentioned, supply direct from consumers is a focus area. Continuing to put resource and marketing investment into that to continue growing the amount of cars that we source from that channel, as it is our most profitable channel. Macroeconomic pressures are mentioned there, gradually easing. I would say caveat that by what happens in the budget. Fundamentally, we just need some certainty and people can move on with the budget, which I am sure every other business leader would like to see as well.
Just finally, in terms of, as I mentioned, the continued confidence we have in being able to source stock, being able to have a good line of sight of margin and transparency and understanding of margin behavior has been a big change to us in the last 12-18 months. That gives us a lot of confidence now as the stability of supply to open new stores. We are aggressively pursuing opening of new stores. They will be the larger format stores. It probably will involve us buying land and developing some of those stores. We are looking to do that going forward to be in some of the big markets in the U.K. where we are not. If we have got a low market share in those markets and it is a very big market, then clearly they are the ones that we look to attack first.
Strong momentum continues into the second half, and we're very happy with our first half results. We'll turn it over now to questions.
Many thanks, gentlemen. Those in the audience, analysts, if you would like to ask a question, please go ahead and raise your hand. Alison was first out of the bloc, so please take yourself off mute and go ahead.
Thanks. Sorry, excuse me for augmenting that. Thanks. Good morning, guys. I have got three questions, if that's okay. One on data capabilities, one on sell your car, and one on kind of that site pipeline. Shall I go one at a time if that's best? Yep. Grand. Okay. First one, I guess there's been some noise in the press recently about dealers being unhappy with the rollout of a new product from a certain classified platform operator.
I won't ask you to kind of comment on that publicly unless you really want to. I wonder if you could talk a bit about how you're thinking about using classified platforms going forward and how maybe the capabilities you're building internally are sort of changing that.
Yeah. Okay. I'll probably invoke that question because I think some of the platforms are trying to do more of the journey that we currently do rather than the other way around. We get data from various different platforms and different sources. We then basically manipulate that data to either reverse engineer how we think the pricing, as an example, has arrived at from the various platforms. I think the important thing for us is that we want to control the customer. Every other car dealer wants to as well.
Where classifieds try to take more of that journey, I think retailers generally are not going to like that. We have to be very careful as to what parts of that customer journey do we think are not core to what we do. Therefore, if we are quite comfortable with that, that is fine. If we are uncomfortable with it, then it is clearly not fine. We are monitoring that closely.
Grand. Thank you. Just on the Sell Your Car Part -Exchange, I'm interested as to how you're finding the competitive environment in terms of buying cars back from customers, like how you think your offer, when you think about kind of the full customer proposition, kind of stacks up versus other options that the customers maybe got out there, and also how that split is kind of coming through in terms of what can be resold via Motorpoint and what is going through to the wholesale channel.
Yeah. If the car is a car that we think could be retailed by Motorpoint, we will bid more aggressively on that car. We will be typically the highest bidder for that vehicle because obviously we've got the potential future profit generation from that vehicle, whether it just be in the margin of the vehicle or the finance that we could offer or even the other products the customer could buy. The value of that customer to us is dramatically more than the value of that customer to a car buying platform and making sure, therefore, that we are bidding in mind that the car buying platform may secure the car if we don't secure it.
We potentially will then see that vehicle at an auction or on another platform in the future. It gives us confidence to try and say, "Well, we may end up buying this car, so let's try and get the car off the customer before it goes to these car buying platforms." In terms of how many are, let's call it, in criteria for retail, it's a very, very high proportion, 80-90%.
Grand. That's helpful. Thank you. My final one, which I think you actually did kind of touch on there with the outlook statement, was really on the site pipeline. It definitely comes across that you guys are feeling better about being on the front foot in terms of having the stock to expand the sort of site pipeline. Just wondering what you're kind of seeing there in terms of nearer midterm opportunities in terms of site availability, what kind of looks like it could be available nearer term, what needs to be built, those sorts of things, just how we should be thinking about how that might progress over the next few years. Thank you.
Yeah. We think most of them would need to be built. In fairness, we've always thought that, and then we've rarely built our own. Things do come up. We're very open-minded on what we can take, whether it's repurposing a building, even repurposing an old dealer if it's got a big enough external space, which is what's important to us. We don't want large buildings on small plots. We want smaller buildings on large plots.
I think it's important to say that the ones that we've opened recently, the smaller ones, we would look to not open more smaller ones. We're looking to replace the smaller ones with larger ones and to make sure that we've got much more opportunity in those. The markets that we're in, we're working really hard in those existing markets to find alternative accommodation for our brand in that market. We also have areas like Glasgow. Our store in Glasgow is in the east of the city. It's absolutely flat out. We know we need to take the pressure off that store and open in the east of the city. We've already secured land in that area for some time, and we will now look to develop that site out. We're just working on what does the newer footprint of a store look like.
We're in for planning on another location. That would give us two that we need to build immediately. They'd probably be open in 12-24 months. Equally, then we'd want to get a line of sight before that to ensure that we've got one sort of at least in 2026, we'd be opening one, but hopefully we could open two potentially. I'd say two to three is our maximum in a year, but we certainly want to be doing at least one a year.
Grand. That's super helpful. Thank you, guys.
Thank you.
Thanks, Alison. Our next question comes from Clive Back at Shore Capital. Clive, pop yourself off mute. Go ahead, please. Can't hear you, I'm afraid.
You want me to close maybe? Clive just. It's the quietest I've ever heard, Clive.
Yeah. Give me another try, Clive.
Should we come back to Clive?
Yeah, I might have to pick Clive up separately. Darren is number two, is also coming with a question. Darren, why don't you take it? Have a go.
Yeah. Can you hear me, gents?
Yeah.
Yeah. Success. I don't know what Clive was going to ask, but just around sort of your comments around supply improving around sort of the nearly new market. I mean, we do understand that you've got sort of long-standing relationships with sort of the lease businesses, the hire businesses, etc., and sort of the OEMs in Europe. But Chinese manufacturers seem to be increasingly coming to the fore. They seem to be sort of volume-driven in terms of their approach. I mean, how would you characterize your sort of relationship with these guys? Do you think you're getting your fair share of Chinese manufacturers?
Just staying on that supply, how do you see the EV market? I think I sensed it somewhere. You have dipped in and out of in terms of in the past. How comfortable are you getting in terms of increasing your participation in EVs, please?
Yeah. Okay. In terms of Chinese, they are like any other manufacturer. If they are looking to move a lot of product into new, then they will use the fleets. It is very hard to generate retail demand to the scale that they may want to. They will end up pushing more product in. Some of them definitely feel like more of a push manufacturer than a pull. A pull, as an example, would be something like Porsche, where they almost build to order.
A push would be a mass manufacturer like Stellantis, where they build them and then push them into the market. The Chinese feel more like that, which is good for us because they will push the cars into the U.K., and it is an island. Remember, once they are here, they are here. Therefore, we do see that there will be opportunities. We have definitely sold some of those brands. They are relatively new still, so they are not really pushing cars in that are recycling quickly yet. We know some of the fleets are running the product. The product is excellent by and large, which is great. Obviously, some of them are more established. When we say Chinese manufacturers, we think of probably JAC or BYD, but obviously MG and some of the others are already here and have been doing well for some time.
We have great relationships with those guys, and we expect that to continue. I think if you want to move a lot of cars in the U.K., then Motorpoint is nearly always part of that conversation. The point on EVs is we've pushed quite hard on EVs, about 10% of our stock at the moment. That's probably gone up, maybe fivefold in the last 12 months. It is always going to be this. There's going to be a rapidly accelerating adoption because as that growth of EVs pushes into 2026, I think it was 26% so far this year, then we are obviously going to see those quicker than others because we're in primarily zero to three. Those cars are now coming into one, two, three years old. Therefore, we're seeing a lot in the open market.
We've done everything that we can in terms of adapting the website, our preparation teams, the training, and all of those requirements, even down to now customers, which I mentioned, asking for what's the health of the battery in the EV. Therefore, being able to test that and give the customer satisfaction that the battery health and the vehicle is over a certain percentage. It has resulted in some changes in our process. As you know, Darren, we're pretty agile and quick to take decisions, which we have to be. Therefore, it's not a drama for us. We're looking forward to it.
Thanks for that, Mark. Just another one for me. I mean, there's been a lot of volatility in the market post-COVID, oversupply, undersupply, etc. How do you think that has impacted on sort of the replacement cycle? I think pre-COVID, you used to talk about sort of a three-year replacement cycle. Is that still the case? Is that being extended?
Yeah. It let rise up at one point, and then it came straight back. Sorry, it came down and then went up. Sorry. Now it has settled back down. It is about four years at the moment, which is longer. I think one of the reasons why we sell older cars now is because they are being driven less. The average mileage, I think, has gone from our customer base from about 8,000 miles a year to 6,000 miles a year. A four-year-old car has got the same mileage as a three-year-old car used to have. That has definitely impacted customer behavior. Mileage is typically more important than age of a vehicle, particularly now with the manufacturing standards where they are.
Cars do not particularly rust or break down as often anywhere near as they would have done even five years ago. There is a much better sort of three- to six-year-old car pool for us to go at, high-quality cars, which is one of the reasons we pushed into that.
Do you still think you are getting your fair share of that repeat purchase? Is that where it has been historically?
Yeah. Yeah. Similar levels. Yeah.
Okay. Thanks. I will give someone else a go. Thank you.
Cheers, Darren.
Clive has kindly sent his questions through to me, so I will just read them out for you to take on one by one. Linked to one of Darren's questions, are the OEMs more disciplined than in days gone by? Do you foresee improving fleet potential, but also of the rental source where mileage levels seem higher in rented cars?
Yeah. The rentals obviously ran cars longer, resulting in higher mileage. Some of those cars fell out of our criteria because we're probably more disciplined around mileage than age, as I said. That led to some of those cars not being part of what we'd want. You don't really want a 50,000-mi rental car, but you might take a 40,000-mi car from an individual customer that's had the car for three years or so. I think the rental market mileage is coming down. We know that. We can see that their cycles of replenishment are increasing.
I think the European manufacturers, some of them are a bit more disciplined on production, but then that's always being offset by either one not being disciplined or the new entrants coming in and coming in at a lower price than comparable to market with some of their products, whether it be Chinese or others. There is never any shortage of new cars coming in at the moment, and we see that continuing. We are pleased with that.
Thanks. Where are you in the cycle of direct from consumer sourcing? Is this still early days, or could this channel be notably more important, do you think?
We think it absolutely could be notably more important. Most of what we take are in-part exchanges rather than cars bought from consumer. We have not really scratched the surface of the bought from consumer.
We've been making sure our processes work, that the customer interaction is a good one, that the customers are happy with what they get. We are now happy that we can offer customers a very high-quality service where it's trusted, it's reliable, it's fast, it's quick, and it works. That's a really important thing for us to get right before we roll it out. We are now looking to roll that out more. It'll be a gradual rollout in terms of the spend on marketing. We're not going to go into some sort of big bang mode on this. It's a gradual test and learn and try and convert more leads into more purchases.
Thanks. Lastly from Clive, he appreciates similarly early days for sure. What, Chris, is the net profit margin and participation potential from the MOT activity in your view?
At the moment, we need to try it. It's probably the first thing to say. At the moment, the MOTs are done on internal work. That's a saving in terms of both time and obviously cost. From a cost perspective, it's not so much about that. It's much more about the time and the efficiency going forward. From a consumer point of view, I mean, that's probably where it gets really interesting because if you can get the consumer through the door and do external MOTs, then it opens up a whole avenue of other products around things like servicing. It needs new tires. The customer's walking through the showroom. They might see a car they might look at, which they wouldn't have otherwise. The whole thing will hopefully snowball. Early days, we're just doing internal stuff.
It's improving our prep efficiency, but we'll continue to trial that and hopefully have more to report coming up.
Excuse me. Fantastic, gents. Thank you. There's no more questions from the audience. Mark, over to you for any closing comments.
Good. Thanks, Alex. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. Very strong half for us. Hopefully, this will continue into the second half of the year. We are very confident that we're doing that, and it's really great to be talking about no supply challenges, stable margins, and looking forward to opening stores, which is what we're here to do. Our story is a rollout story, and we look forward to rolling out stores and taking share across the country as we go forward. Thank you for listening.
Thanks for joining, everyone. Have a good day.