Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Motorpoint's half year 2024 results and strategy update presentation. Today, I'm joined by Chris Morgan, our CFO, and I'm Mark Carpenter, CEO of Motorpoint. Today, we'll take you through the half year highlights for the six months to September 30, 2023. I'll then hand over to Chris to do some financial highlights and give an update on our ESG strategy, and then we will return to me for our strategic update and of course, our outlook for the remainder of the year. Just a quick reminder, Motorpoint, our first year and six-month period for FY 2024, one of the key things we've been focusing in the year, and we've much reduced our focus on certain activities to ensure that we are investing in strategic opportunities to the best ROI.
But also focusing on the basics of what has made Motorpoint a great company to be a lean, cost-based business, improve our stock turn to be faster, which both of which allow us to offer the lowest prices in the market. The business remains the same in terms of we have two brands, Motorpoint, which is our retail-facing brand, and Auction4Cars.com, our wholesale channel. We have amended our criteria during the period, which we'll come to, and our retail criteria is now vehicles under five years and 50,000 miles, and then vehicles outside that criteria are disposed of through our wholesale channel, Auction4Cars.com.
We source vehicles for both of those channels direct from consumers via our Sell Your Car, C2B channel, and obviously then part exchanges, where a customer is buying a vehicle from us and sell us their old vehicle. One of the key things about Motorpoint is our operating model, which we use every day to make decisions in the business. We also explain the business in this way to our new starters for the inductions that we do, which is our virtuous circle. It remains at the heart of what we do, and it's very much centered around our team, and we fundamentally believe that if you have the right employees who are engaged, they will deliver a much higher level of customer service, obviously, which creates a longer relationship with customers, and then further repeat purchases from customers and recommendations.
Ultimately leading to increased sales, which pleases our shareholders as we then create more cash flow to invest in growing the business, benefiting our employees as we continue to grow and create employment opportunities and promotion opportunities. In terms of our presence, it continues to grow. We have a U.K. national coverage in the U.K., both for our stores and online. In the year, we opened our 20th store in Ipswich, and we continue to target a 10% market share in the area that we operate in within a 30-minute drive time. Unfortunately, due to the current macroeconomic situation, we have paused that store rollout, so we do not have any more planned currently, but when conditions improve, we expect to continue that rollout journey.
So in FY 2024, the first half, we have seen some headwinds, and it's important to determine how we have then responded to those. So supply has eased during the period, although there does remain a shortage of good quality, nearly new vehicles, due to the limited number of registrations made. So registrations have increased through 2023, but still not to a level that will result in or for long enough, I should say, for a larger 0-2, 0-3 used car market. Although there are signs of life coming through in that growing supply chain. So in the short term, there was a reduction in the amount of vehicles available to us, so a slight reduction to 1.48 million in our market size. That compares to about 2.4 million market size previous to COVID.
In addition to that, some of the macroeconomic challenges of a higher interest rate environment, meaning that we charge our customers a higher cost of borrowing, the APR, which does reduce the attachment of customers to take our finance. The finance commissions are lower due to the increased cost of money, and we also then suffer an increased cost of finance in our vehicles, which are linked to the bank base rate. These higher prices and the APR of used cars does provide challenges for our customers in terms of the affordability, and that is then therefore really negatively affecting demand, as you can see in the market size. One of the things that has happened more recently is that in the past six weeks, since the start of October, we've seen pretty unprecedented falls in used car values.
These are mainly at wholesale, but they are feeding through to retail, as you would expect. In the last six weeks, we've seen a fall of around 6%. To put that into context, the market forward has been between 0 and about 1.5% per month in recent times. So that's a pretty unprecedented fall. In terms of our response to this environment, we've increased our retail and trade margin in the vehicles through a faster stock turn. We've also increased our APR rates to ensure that we do generate some finance commission from the selling of the finance, albeit on a lower attachment rate. And of course, we've reduced our operating expenditure by right-sizing our headcount and lowering marketing spends.
So the two discretionary spends that we can control, which are the biggest items in our P&L and our cost base. So we've conserved cash by continuing that capital investment with higher ROI. So it's important if we are going to invest, it is where we're going to get the quickest return. But we've also broadened our retail criteria now, as I mentioned at the start, to include vehicles up to 5 years old and 50,000 miles. So there's not that many of those, but it does provide an additional price point to our customer base. But our focus on acquiring vehicles at the lower, lower end of the market, so cars mainly between GBP 5,000 to GBP 10,000, and we've also reduced our exposure to very expensive vehicles.
So this is the GBP 30,000 plus, where you will get maybe a, a much bigger chance of some severe depreciation if it was to happen, which, as I just said, that we have started to see signs of that. One of the things we'd like to get across in the presentation today, which this tries to illustrate, is that despite these short-term macroeconomic headwinds, Motorpoint will become a dramatically more profitable business in the future. So trying to reconcile what our profit before tax is today, and how that will be impacted going forward through these building blocks. So we know that we are improving stock turn. That will improve margin, it will increase sales as we become more competitive or increase the gap between us and our nearest competitors. We do envisage supply pressures easing.
As I said, registrations have increased throughout the period, so therefore, that will become used vehicle stock in the near term, and our market size will increase as a consequence of that. The fourth building block of interest rates falling is potentially the most significant, but the three building blocks alone will grow our sales pretty substantially from where we are today, and then the final block will reduce our cost base and increase our financing ability to generate finance attachments from our customers, which will also improve profitability. This does not take into account the big orange arrow, which says that there's more on top of that, which is that we could still grow our market share from our strategic investments that we're making.
So further store rollouts, and some of the other things that we've previously mentioned in terms of how we grow our business. So a substantial opportunity, and Chris and I and the rest of the board feel it is a dramatic opportunity for Motorpoint to become substantially more profitable, than we are currently, of course, but also than what we have been in the past as well. So a great opportunity for us to seize. In the short term, however, there are some hampering of our KPIs, through our right sizing activities. So a small decline in market share. So we've now amended this to the 0 to 5 market. Clearly, we don't do much 4 to 5, so the market share number does come down a little bit.
As you can see, a smaller market share with lower volumes does affect revenue, with the average selling price coming down as well. So, revenue down to GBP 607 million, and our units sold down to just under 40,000. Encouraging that we're accessing supply from more profitable channels, which is our direct consumer channels, rather than through the expensive auction channels, and that resulted in a loss, as previously disclosed, of GBP 3.7 million for the period. Our customer acquisition cost continues to fall, which means our marketing is becoming way more efficient than previously. And of course, pleasingly, as we've said before, our focus is on ensuring the business has cash, and at the end of the period, we had GBP 11.2 million of cash. A small drop in NPS.
I think the benchmark for us on that is around 80. It is actually quite expensive to get that up towards 85, 90. So we're making sure that we are doing the right things well, and that there's not much chasing of a higher number because you end up having to give a lot of customers way more value than when they complain than in order to get that higher score. So we find that that's not really having a positive impact on the business, and we're very comfortable with that score, as long as it's above 80. I mentioned earlier the gross profit improvements. You can see that our focus on using data to increase our pricing position has had a good impact.
So our metal margin, net of the fees that we incur on purchasing those vehicles has gone up dramatically. So that's the bar graph on the left-hand side. The fourth orange block shows the increase versus the previous three periods, and that obviously shows that we're increasing direct supply channels where we don't pay fees, and our preparation efficiency is as good. Which is great given that we are supplying older, higher mileage vehicles. But using that data, augmenting that availability of data with external data and internal data, with the skills of our team has had some real value, and I think there's a lot more to come from that in 2024.
As I mentioned earlier, also, we've reduced our exposure to high-value items, but also volatile products such as electric vehicles, which has been very choppy in pricing recently. So there's those actions there. We've also on the top right, a graph to show how our days in stock has improved. We really want to focus on that. Pre-COVID, we were lower than this point, and we wanna get back to that. What made Motorpoint great, even pre-IPO, was a very fast stock turn with bulk fleet product, as we call it, and making sure that we can get back to that as that product starts to come back to market is very important. And equally, you can see why that is necessary.
On the bottom right, some a negative, which is the lower finance commission being generated due to lower attachment. As the interest rate rises, you do tend to get less takeup from customers, so lower finance per unit sold is achieved. As you'd expect, we contain our cost base as much as we can. I mentioned already the lower marketing cost, but this graph shows how our cost base progressively declined period on period, and that's been very important. And our FTE reduction in the bottom right shows that continuation of a shrinkage of our headcount, almost all of which has been done through attrition, natural attrition. But then some redundancies in the period as we merged roles and took out a layer of management to make us more efficient.
So we are now a leaner, flatter organization with the right capabilities in the right areas, but our decision-making's improved, and we're finding that we're much quicker to make the right actions, to take the right actions and get the business performing at the right level more quickly when something goes wrong. One of the key things a lean cost base allows is you can charge the lowest prices. You can see some examples here of where we are the lowest prices against three different competitors, whether it's an online pure play, a main dealer or another main dealer. Motorpoint will always strive to have the lowest prices. That is made possible by the lean cost base and the fast stock turn, and you can see the price points there on those cars on the left-hand side.
On the right-hand side, some feedback from customers. We do continue to get some very strong feedback from our customers. Making sure that, you know, we provide the right service at the right quality level is important to us, and we get some fabulous feedback from our customers, as you can see. One of the things we have talked about, though, is the affordability challenges for customers, and I think this illustrates it really well. We've got a Hyundai Tucson here, which is GBP 17,000 versus GBP 11,999 just two years ago. So that car has gone up over 50% than in 2021, and as you can see, the monthly payment is equally a much higher number.
I think the challenge for us, when we realize that, you know, this affordability challenge is not gonna go away in the short term due to higher interest rates. The problem is that our customers are coming in, in quite a few numbers, asking for lower, costs of motoring, not higher, and therefore, we listened to the customer base and made sure that we offered lower products. So customers coming in now, if they want a vehicle at a similar price to what they currently pay, they will require a higher mileage or an older vehicle. Because a lot of people don't want to switch to a dramatically smaller vehicle to keep the monthly payment the same. They typically need a similar-sized vehicle, and therefore, you will have to go older or higher mileage.
Historically, we didn't stock that product, so now we do have some range of that product to help our customers meet these requirements. As I mentioned earlier, also, the deflation, which has been very noticeable in recent weeks. These are wholesale values from cap hpi, which is the clean auction price generated at auctions for these vehicles, and as you can see, some pretty sizable drops for a very run-of-the-mill product in terms of Škoda Octavia down 13%. Nissan Qashqai, which is the new shape, that's down almost 15%. These are in about a six-week period, and then the MG HS as well, down about 14%. That's the largest drop the industry's seen in October since 2011. That is a good thing for Motorpoint in the, in the...
In 2024, as values will come down, demand will come back to the market, and people can maybe access younger product as the values of that younger product comes down. Which is mainly down to the increase of new car supply into that younger product market, and also the exhaustion of new car waiting lists, which have been a thing for the last couple of years. As those have now been exhausted, then you'll see drops in used car values, to make sure that that value proposition of used, compared to new resonates with consumers. So good news for us going forward, I believe. And I'll hand you over to Chris for, the financial highlights and to update you on our ESG strategy.
Okay. Hello, everybody. So the real focus for finance in the first half was managing the headwinds and the impact that had on profitability, so trying to protect profit, and I think Mark's already shown you a few good slides demonstrating that and effectively right-sizing the business. And we talked about headcount, which we'll have another look at in a second. The thing I am particularly pleased about, you know, despite some of the profit challenges we've had, is that, you know, we did manage to generate, you know, a good degree of cash in the period. So again, we'll have a quick look. So from financial highlights, we'll touch on the revenue and the loss before tax in a second, when we look at a slightly more detailed profit and loss account.
But you can see there, cash generated from operations, albeit down from last year, but given the profitability, that was to be expected. But still managed to generate cash of GBP 5.8 million, despite the loss of GBP 3.7 million above. And net cash, and again, we'll have a quick look at that in a minute when we look at a summarized cash flow. Actually, GBP 11.2 million in the bank before the GBP 35 million facility we have on top. So yeah, a strong, a strong performance from a cash perspective. So if we look at the operating results, as we've already highlighted, you know, revenue did fall, but what is pleasing is that the drop subsided as we went through the first half.
Actually, as we've moved now into October, November, we're now starting to see elements of growth from a year ago. So I think, yeah, some of that focus is now coming through, but we are pleased that revenue, the declines have seem to have been arrested, and we can now look forward to some growth as we go through Christmas and obviously into the busy seasonal trading period from January onwards. Proactive response to protecting net margins. Worked very hard, both with the team, with data, with people, trying to make sure that we maximize margins where we can, and that's been successful. And that's really to offset the reduction in the finance commissions.
The finance commissions are broadly out of our hands, because the APR rates are pretty much dictated by the market, and the cost of money. So, you know, as cost of money hopefully will start to ease, sometime next year, then we will see an improvement there. So we look forward to that. Pleased that operating expense fell by 16%. That's despite wage inflation of around about 6%, and also new store costs. We opened Ipswich in May, and then we got the full year effect of Coventry, and Edinburgh, which we opened September, October a year ago. So I think to reduce the cost in that way was good.
It wasn't just around people, you know, things like energy costs dropped as we really focused in, you know, with the stores, with, with the prep centres and the offices to reduce energy costs, and a number of other things. But we're working really hard also with suppliers as well, renegotiating where we can, but challenging every pound as if it's your own. And I think that's really paying dividends. So, so really pleased that operating costs have fallen in that way. As Mark highlighted earlier on the slide, FTE employees reduced from 693 to 693 rather, at the period end. If we go back to May 2022, that number was around about 940. So you can see, you know, albeit volumes have fallen, so that's allowed us to drop FTEs.
You know, we have a focus in terms of efficiency, automation, but again, that's really allowed, you know, a much more leaner employee base, which is good. Marketing costs, again, you know, we've fallen. You know, that's in line with what we're seeing the demand in the market, and as we get more targeted as well, and we'll see some more elements in a second from Mark in terms of where we're being more sort of laser focused in terms of our marketing spend and some of the benefits that's getting. Finance, you can see finance costs GBP 5.3. You know, that's most of the increase is due to stocking facilities, where the cost of interest has increased. So interest costs are so important for us.
Not only are we seeing finance commissions coming off, both in the gross margin line, we are seeing the interest costs increase in line with these interest costs. So again, hopefully the tide will turn, so we'll see natural benefits to the P&L. Exceptional items around about GBP 1 million. That relates to restructuring exercise, and we appropriately axed employees as part of that exercise. So from a balance sheet perspective, intangible assets, the increase has slowed down slightly, and that reflects some of the reduced strategic tech investment that we've been doing.
You know, we are going sort of, sort of pausing slightly in terms of some of our activity, but if we think it's got a near-term return, so things like the Auction4Cars website, the main Motorpoint retail website, things like Open Banking platforms, where we're seeing some big benefits, then we're really pushing ahead with those. So we're pleased with those results. Inventory has dropped, and that reflects the right sizing to match customer demand, but we are being a lot more focused with our stock management. And again, yeah, pleased that the improvement down to 47 days. Still more to do, but you know, that's come down from about 50 days a year ago, so that is good news. We're not using our stock facility to the full.
It's GBP 195 million, as a reminder, just over GBP 100 million. That reflects the reduced inventory. And what happened after year end in October, with Black Horse, we reduced their elements to that 195, from GBP 120 million to GBP 100 million, simply because, you know, we weren't using the full quotient of the facility. And again, we've agreed that, you know, if and when things return or in terms of inflation, both from a stock price and also a volume perspective, then we can re-look at increasing that in increments if needs be. But at the moment, we've got plenty of headroom, so no issues there. No net debts, as we saw before. In fact, we've got GBP 11 million.
I think we announced it's year end as well. The GBP 35 million loan facility with Santander Bank has been extended through to June 2026, from May 2024, with an option to extend by both parties for a further two years. So, so we've got the facility in the bank, so to speak, as we as we look forward. And from a cash flow perspective, I think this is quite a simple graph. I mean, what it does show is we opened with GBP 5.6 million of cash at Thursday, April, finished with GBP 11.2 million. And the three main elements there, there are our EBITDA, which is effectively our operating cash, GBP 6.7 million.
We've got working capital improvements coming through inventory management, GBP 7.4, and that's been offset by the high interest cost of GBP 5.3. Those are the three big elements that you can see that, you know, as interest hopefully will start to subside as we go into FY 2024 to 2025, along with good working capital management and hopefully profit improvement, you can see how cash will naturally start to start to increase. And then finally, ESG. I mean, we were really delighted that we were recognized by the Financial Times back in the summer as one of Europe's climate leaders who are most successful in reducing their core greenhouse gas emissions. So, it came as a bit of a surprise. We weren't expecting it, but, but there it was, so really pleased from that perspective.
That was across all businesses across Europe, so it wasn't just the motor industry or particular elements. That was right across the board, so delighted to get that. Touched before, Scope 1 and 2 emissions and business travel dropped by 10% versus the previous period, and that's largely around not just business usage, but mainly energy that we've managed to bring down across the estate. Waste collection costs down by 14%. So again, some good examples of where some of our ESG sustainability strategy is coming through, and so we're very pleased with those results. Continue to focus on the community and our people, whether it be diversity, supporting inclusion. Charity partners, partnered with the Retail Trust, right in wellbeing. So a real focus on our people.
Team retention's improved 11% in the year to date, so again, pleased with that. And we've made further reductions with our gender gap pay reductions, so it's reduced. So lots of good things, I think in that element, and we'll expand on those year-end when we go through our annual reports. Okay, so I'll hand you back to Mark. Thank you.
Thanks, Chris. So back then to the strategic update and giving you some outlook. So as I said earlier, we are delighted with our progress on our strategic objectives, but we are focusing on the ones that offer the best near-term returns. So we'll just go through the four sort of pillars that we previously mentioned. Upscaling our e-commerce capabilities. We're very pleased with the team that we've built and the capability we've built over the past two years to get a very high quality team in that part of the business, and it's all come, started to come through now. Our website is night and day from what it was just eighteen months ago.
Very modern look and feel, lots of new functionality, but importantly from a consumer perspective, the experience is much slicker, and much more professional looking than it has been, prior to the team being built. But specifically, the product detail pages where we showcase the vehicle, we have new vehicle imagery. We take the vehicle out of the environment where it's been shot and position it in another environment, which is a very clean environment. So it eliminates some sort of housekeeping issues that potentially could happen in that on a rainy day or a day when it's very muddy. But that has led to increased views and sessions and lower our bounce rates across the website as a whole. We've introduced lots of new functionality for customers, where customers can now search their favorite vehicles.
We recommend vehicles, so, you know, you may also like that sort of functionality, but also where we don't have a vehicle in place, customers can now set up an alert, which will email them when a vehicle of that make and model comes into stock. So helps us again, to move the cars more quickly through the system by linking the vehicle that's new to stock to a customer who's already said that that's the vehicle they're looking for. So that, all in all, achieves a record level of organic traffic, so a huge focus on SEO and our content team, and building out things like reviews, building our new store pages to increase our searchability on Google.
And that really helps to drive the organic traffic, as well as things like improving the site speed by around 30%. One other thing that we've introduced is where we have vehicles that have been in stock a while, and we've started to reduce the price on those. The vehicles now have a banner on them saying, "Reduced by GBP 1,000 or GBP 500," depending on what that is. In our customer acquisition and retention pillar, we've opened our new store, of course, access a new market in the East of England, in Ipswich, and making sure then that we've got a very single view of the customer.
We use Salesforce for that, to have our CRM platform, but then also our customer experience and the journey they go through, whether it be inbound or outbound, is led by that. We send around three main emails a week, different emails to different customer sets. Very, very low unsubscribe rates, which suggests good interaction with customers and click-through rates. But again, augmenting our data with our people, which I think is important. It doesn't replace the people or the skill, it augments it, where we can drill down and really see what customers are looking for. That was what alerted us to the fact that new customers to our business typically purchased older, higher mileage vehicles at a lower price point when they first interacted with us.
So hence the need to increase the element of that stock, because that is where we tend to gain customers at the highest proportion in that lower price stock, when we first interact with that customer. Our pricing of, as we've mentioned, very much augmented now with the data that we see, and that's internal and external data. But it's all about the run rate, it's all about the days in stock, and you know, making sure we don't have overage stock, which through COVID has been not as much of an issue to carry cars for longer. We feel that, you know, that will be not the case going forward.
There's a lot of reductions in values, as we've mentioned already right now, which in the short term is a bit of pain, but in the long term, I think that's very exciting for Motorpoint, 'cause it suggests the market's beginning to return to a more normalized way of behaving, which is a very strong dynamic for Motorpoint to succeed in. That is where we tend to thrive, in a depreciated vehicle environment. We've also made lots of improvements to our online portal, so customers can check in online before they come to store, and we also then, when they're in store, we've all made lots of changes to augment the customer service handover role and the sales executive roles. So now all sales executives will greet the customer, sell the vehicle, and complete the handover.
That has only been recently available to us from some of the technology changes we've made. So it's a very slick, very quick handover experience for customers, which allows the salesperson to move on to the next customer as quickly as possible. We're under no illusions. We're very nice people in store, but we want the customer to be in and out as quickly as possible, so they can go and enjoy their new vehicle. Just to give you a little illustration on the product detail page, which I mentioned at the start of that slide. This is the before and after. So you can see the image has been ripped out of the photo booth.
The vehicle is positioned in a more generic background, the gray background, and you can see how the vehicle details are presented, the calls to action. We actually highlight the deposit amount to the customers, so there's no misunderstanding on the payment options available, pay monthly or pay in full. And then showcase the ways that the customer can interact with us and show the carousel in greater number of photographs below. So much better, and as I said, getting much better interaction from customers. In terms of our wholesale and supply pillar, less reliance on vehicle purchases that attach a purchasing fee to them. So typically from an auction, fees keep increasing. We're doing the same on our Auction4Cars channel, increasing the fees to buyers.
But the amount that we've purchased through that channel has reduced, which reduces the cost of acquiring that stock. Lots of development, as Chris mentioned earlier, on our Auction4Cars platform, customers have now much better functionality. They have their own dashboard, which gives them a personalized hub of their interactions with us. Also, we've integrated with new funding partners. What that means is the customers on Auction4Cars can link their funding provider through directly to Auction4Cars. So when they secure the vehicle, it all automatically goes onto their funding plan with whoever that funder is. And that means that customers typically will have much better availability of resources to bid more confidently on the vehicles.
And obviously, we hope that they then bid more often and bid stronger on vehicles as they're buying them from Auction4Cars, because it is a live auction, as you'll be aware. Including with that is some more of the efficiency, side of it, is the payments received from Auction4Cars is now everything that previously was manual, whether it be an email alert or somebody contacting the customer. The payment that is now received, the customer gets a trigger for the secure collection being available and a secure code to say you can come to collect your wholesale vehicle you acquired through Auction4Cars. And all of those things mean that we've managed to secure 500 new customers for A4C in the first half.
Obviously, we want to grow as many customers on that channel as possible. It's a very strong channel, very efficient for us, but also for our Auction4Cars customers. And then in terms of operational efficiency, obviously a huge... things about our brilliant basics is if it doesn't make us more efficient and leaner or it doesn't sell us more volume of cars, we need to be challenging why we're actually doing it. So whether that's a role or a project or a strategic initiative, those are the things that really matter right now. So continued automation continues to allow us to make efficiency gains in headcount. As Chris mentioned, the retail days in stock coming down, but Auction4Cars days in stock's also reduced to under 10 in the period.
The Open Banking means that customers can integrate straight through by a deep link into their personal bank account and send us the money, rather than using debit card machines, which attract much higher fees. So that saves us money there. But then also in things like the preparation time, so making sure we're allocating the vehicles to the right preparation site and the right retail location. Again, augmenting data with our decision-making allows us to reduce both the days in stock but also the vehicle preparation time. We continue to look at aftersales. We are implementing MOT bays. So again, an example of where we are investing strategically, where we see a high ROI.
So that will help us further increase the speed of preparation for some older vehicles that require an MOT, and also reduces the costs we incur on an MOT by internalizing that cost rather than sending vehicles externally. And obviously, we'll, we'll speed up that process as well. Further integration with API, whether that be a bank or another sort of provider, supplier. Building in those links to their APIs means that we've got much better data, much quicker decision-making, and much more integrated solutions with those suppliers, meaning we again unlock some further efficiencies. And finally, on our website, we've upgraded our frequently asked questions page.
This allows our customers requiring any assistance, rather than ringing the phone number, they can self-serve a lot more of those, those answers, which obviously results in a lot less calls coming in to our contact center. So again, improving our productivity. In terms of outlook, I think we, as part of our brilliant basics, strategy, currently, it is very, very, very important that we keep our position of a very fast stock turn, a lean cost base, which allows us to then be the price leaders. So I think that's gonna be more important than ever, next year. There is deflation happening right now in the market, which is very well documented, and that will be a good thing in the long term, in the medium term, particularly, I think, for calendar 2024.
A little bit of pain that we're already going through, but we will come out of that the other side. So a lower margin in this quarter, but we expect that to be a high margin next quarter and beyond, as the market returns to a more normal cycle. And probably for the first time, it feels like maybe we're entering a period where the pre-COVID cycles of normality and seasonality will return. So that's very exciting for us, I think. The macro environment is what it is, but those high inflation and elevated interest rates continue to impact on consumers. But our important point for us is to be focused on what we can control. So we can control stock turn, we can control pricing, we can control cash generation, and they are the things that we are focused on.
Our investment in technology has allowed and facilitated a lot of those strategies, but making sure that we focus on non-strategic costs. We are already a much leaner business, as Chris mentioned, in terms of the headcount reductions, but making sure the business is very well positioned for the future is very much our focus. Considerable improvements to the customer journey, whether that be online or in store. Integrating those journeys is a big priority for us right now, to make sure that the customer feels that it's a very seamless journey between the research journey online and the physical journey in store. And that's where our part of our technology is now to, again, ensure that we can sell more cars by joining those experiences in a very efficient manner for the customer that works really well for them.
But we fundamentally believe, more than ever, coming out of the environment of COVID, coming out of a very difficult, macro situation for the past 12 months, that we are now very well positioned to emerge from the current climate, however difficult that is, a very, very profitable, market leader in the used car sector. So we will continue to make those strategic investments, but we fundamentally believe we are very well positioned to seize the significant opportunity ahead. That's the end of the presentation for today. You can contact myself or Chris. Our details are on the RNS, and also you can contact us through FTI as well. Thank you very much for listening.
Thank you.