Good morning to everybody. Before I hand it over to Simon, just a few comments. Two long-serving board members, Jane Shields and Jonathan Bewes, will be stepping down from our Board of Directors in May. Jane has worked for NEXT plc more than 40 years. You don't see that much anymore, do you? More than 40 years and been on the board of directors since 2013. Jane's contribution to the success of the company has been substantial, both at the operational level and certainly at the board level. I would just say, I think Jane represents the best qualities of what we have at NEXT plc. Jonathan Bewes has been a board member for 9.5 years, and he has been Senior Independent Director and Chairman of the Audit Committee, and he's made significant contribution.
I'd say, Jonathan, many thanks for your work and your service on the board. I would like to welcome two new board members, Annette Court and Jeni Mundy, who will be joining the board. Annette started on March first, and Jeni will be starting on April first, and both will stand for election at the May AGM. As you've seen, the results for the year ended 2026 are very good, and it certainly reflects the broad strength of the group as we outperform in all areas, be it retail or online U.K., and certainly in the international markets. Before I turn over to Simon, I would like to recognize and thank our more than 40,000 employees globally for their daily decision-making and basically making things happen for Next throughout the world. Simon.
Thank you very much, Chairman. Right. Good morning, everybody. Slight change of order to things today 'cause I know some people like to slip away early, so I'm gonna give you the punchline at the beginning. Punchline is about next year rather than all the stuff about last year. In terms of next year, the big news today was that there was no news. We've held our targets, and you could look at that 4.5%, in fact, I think most people did look at it in January and think that it was pessimistic. If you had only looked at our U.K. sales in the eight weeks in the run-up to our announcement, then you would definitely agree that that was a pessimistic assessment.
However, if you were to look at what's going on in the Middle East and the potential knock-on effects in the U.K., you could argue that it was optimistic. Just in terms of the Middle East, I suppose the first thing to say, in terms of the U.K., the numbers those first eight weeks did not include the really big numbers we hit as the weather improved this time last year. We got significant benefit from an early summer, and we're just about to hit those numbers now. In terms of the Middle East, it represents 6% of our total sales. For the first week of the conflict, we lost virtually all the sales because our operations stopped working. We are now serving all of the territories in the Middle East.
A few of them are on slightly longer lead times. Because we've got a hub in the Middle East, we are able to service them directly from stock based in the Middle East, which means we're not dependent on air freight for anything other than replenishment. We are shipping stock to the Middle East in replenishment runs at the moment, but that comes at a cost. In terms of the cost of the conflict, we've quantified that at GBP 15 million, and that's GBP 15 million for three months, assuming that the current levels of surcharges, disruption, oil prices last for three months. That could be wildly optimistic or it could be pessimistic. We don't know.
In terms of the breakdown of that cost, GBP 8 million of it comes from the outbound stock from the U.K. to our customers overseas. Of the GBP 8 million, GBP 5 million of it is Middle East costs. The rest are air freight surcharges to the rest of the world. We've then got inbound cost. This is mainly the surcharge on container rates as a result of fuel price increases. That's around GBP 4 million. Then U.K. energy costs, we anticipate incurring additional costs of around GBP 3 million. What I should stress is that those numbers are very volatile, first of all. They're just rolling forward the costs we have today.
The second thing I should say is that we've offset all of them by cost savings or margin gains that we've identified since January, around GBP 8 million-GBP 9 million from margin gains and the balance from lower revenue expenditure, mainly systems. The biggest difference between now and January is that we've brought our systems budget down by around GBP 6 million. Don't take that number and multiply it by three to get to the cost for the rest of the year because if it looks like this is going to persist, we will begin to pass through those costs to consumers, specifically in the affected regions but also in the U.K.
In terms of U.K. prices, that would mean prices going up between 1% and 2% from where they are today, in probably June, July, if things persist. In the much bigger worry, if you want things to worry about, which obviously you do, is the cost of goods because things like polyester and energy costs are a huge percentage. Energy costs are a big percentage of fabric, as is obviously polyester. I think you could see significantly larger increases in cost of goods coming through probably October, November is when those will begin to hit down again if the conflict persists. That's sort of business affected costs and the potential impact on selling prices covered.
The one thing I should say about that 4.5% is just a reminder that at this time last year our guidance was at 5%. The 4.5% guidance does not limit our ability to outperform that number. I think, you know, with things that are in the world as they are, I think that's unlikely. What I want to stress is a cautious approach to a sales budget because we're always buying marked down stock, and we can ease into it. A cautious approach to a sales budget always leaves us with the potential to beat budget if the demand is there. Moving on to last year and starting with the P&L, just remind you this is all on a 52-week basis and not consolidated.
Total group sales up 10.8%. Total full price Next sales up 10.9%. In terms of the breakdown, retail stores up 3.5%. In many ways, that's the most remarkable number here, and we think that number is the one that is most flattered by the good weather in summer and the disruption to a major competitor. We'll talk about each one of those as we go through. In terms of profit up 13.9%, and the vast majority of the difference between the growth in sales and the growth in profit is about leverage over fixed overheads and some margin gains as a result of improved clearance of drop stock through directory online. Profit before tax up 14.5%.
The drop in interest charge here is all about the fact that we didn't buy back shares during the year. The cash that we accumulated during the year had interest on it that came to around GBP 8 million. That reverses out in the year ahead. Obviously you get back in earnings enhancement what you lose by way of P&L, more than what you lose from the P&L cost. In terms of the quality of earnings, good quality of earnings. There was a very big non-cash gain from a GBP 20 million release of a bad debt provision. That meant that our finance department worked even harder than usual looking every little nook and cranny of the business to check that all of our provisions were where they should be and that we had enough impairments for our small businesses.
We've taken another GBP 14 million of impairment costs there to offset that GBP 20 million. It has offset it, not to offset it, obviously. Some foreign exchange gains just on the instruments that carry over from one side of the year to the other. Earnings per share up 17%. The main difference between last year's profit before tax and EPS is the boost from the previous year's share buybacks. We didn't buy many shares back last year. Ordinary dividend up by 15%. That gets us back to cover of around 2.8x , which is where we want to be. GBP 3.60 return to shareholders by way of capital via B Share Scheme, and that is in place of the buyback 'cause we were out of the market.
We're now back in the market. Thank you very much for your help with that. All of the numbers that we'll tell you today will be on the basis that we can continue to buy shares throughout the year. In terms of the cash flow, on a consolidated basis. This is looking at a 53-week year. GBP 147 million from profits, another GBP 24 million from the 53rd week of cash. Not much change in depreciation. That's gone up much less than sales. CapEx up by GBP 17 million, slightly less than we forecast in the half year, and that's all about the timing of store CapEx. GBP 168 million last year.
The really interesting number is the number this year because we've significantly increased our estimate of what we'll spend this year, and all of the increase is in warehousing. We think we'll spend GBP 237 million this year. It's all about our Elmsall 3 warehouse. I'm going to go into lots of detail later on, which is something to look forward to. Just to say this is a good thing. This is because we're growing our sales faster than we expected. In terms of rolling that forward, because this is a sort of three-year investment program in warehousing, we're looking at CapEx at around the GBP 250 million level for the next three years, we think.
You might look at that and worry that Next has become fundamentally more capital consumptive, your business is entering a phase of strong capital consumption. This is our history of CapEx over the last 20 years. If you look at CapEx as a percentage of profit, which is the right measure, what you can see is that the 19.6% we're at this year is just below the last 20-year average. Fundamentally, the business is not more capital consumptive, it's just that in periods of strong growth you have to invest more. In the periods, following years, you invest less. I think the other really important thing that this graph demonstrates is that if you look at the data for long enough and hard enough, you can always find the number you want. Working capital up GBP 46 million.
The real difference here is the GBP 19 million increase that our aggregator partners owe us. That is all as a result of our sales increasing on their website. They take the sales, take their commission, hand over a month later the sales, so there is a debt there. The faster that grows, the bigger that debt grows. All the other movements in working capital were one-off. There was a one-off movement in the timing of aggregator payments. We got a benefit last year. From that, we get disbenefit this year. Cash in transit, this is a new accounting standard that we have rushed to embrace, and it is actually very sensible.
It means in previous accounts, we had accounted for credit card sales as if they were cash and not accounted for the three days that the credit card companies take to pay us. This accounts for that, conforms with new accounting standards, and also, I think for me, in the last 25 years, a bit of a landmark moment as well because this is the first change in accounting standards that I really agree with. In terms of surplus cash, GBP 129 million of surplus cash, distribution to shareholders, GBP 221 million. The difference between that, the GBP 93 million difference, is that last year or previously, year before last, we were accumulating cash on the balance sheet, GBP 40 million of cash accumulation, in anticipation of paying down the bond.
This year, we got the bond away, and we've returned our leverage to its historic norms at around 0.63, and so there is cash of about GBP 53 million more debt funding that difference. In terms of stock up 8.8%. The Next stock as at week 52 was up 7%, so broadly in line with our sales increase. You'll notice for the last, I think, three or four sets of results, we've shown stock increases much greater than sales. What you can see from this is that those increases have stopped, but we haven't reversed them out. We're going to keep a little bit of extra cover in the business in anticipation of the sort of disruptions that we've seen over the last few years potentially happening again.
We think it's better to have a little bit more cover, and we didn't suffer from it last year. In terms of customer receivables, customer receivables up 2%. You would expect those to be up much more than 2% given the growth in our credit sales at 5.8%. The reason that we haven't got that growth is because our debtor days continue to reduce. They've reduced by about 3.6%, which accounts for the difference in those two numbers. The reduction in debtor days is reflected in much lower rates of default. What you can see, if you take a sort of pre-COVID to now view, you can see that our default rates have dropped to 2.2%. That is lower than the company's ever had.
Certainly as long as I've worked for the business, we've never seen default rates that low. That 51% reduction is a little bit deceptive. It's not because 51% fewer customers are defaulting. Actually, the numbers of customers defaulting is around 8%. The big difference is the balance they're defaulting at, and this is the result of much tighter and better credit controls that we've implemented over the last few years and one of the sort of advantages of some of the machine learning algorithms we've had and just greater vigilance. In terms of provisions, we're still comfortably but not over-provided, 6.9% as against default rate of 2.2%, so we've still got room for that to move the other way if it does.
In terms of other debtors, I've talked about international aggregators, talked about cash in transit. The GBP 20 million of interest-free credit is because last year we switched to funding our own interest-free credit for furniture in stores. That didn't fully annualize until last year, so the tail end of that cash outflow is what you're seeing in that GBP 20 million. In terms of creditors, up 9%, broadly in line with sales, what you'd expect. In terms of net debt, net debt up 8%. I'm gonna talk in a lot more detail about that in a moment. Then in terms of net assets, increase to GBP 26 million. Only GBP 26 million, and that's what you'd expect because the vast majority of surplus cash we have, rightly given back to shareholders.
In terms of debt, the GBP 713 million was lower than where we targeted year-end debt. That's all about timing of payments. We targeted GBP 739 million of year-end debt and leverage of 0.63, which is where we think is a good place for a retailer of our type to be. In terms of inflows in the year, we expect GBP 978 million of cash inflow, CapEx and dividends of GBP 237 million and GBP 300 million, respectively. GBP 500 million returned to shareholders through buybacks or other means, and that would get us back to the 0.63 leverage at GBP 790 million.
In terms of buybacks, we've bought GBP 196 million to date, and our plan is to continue that evenly through the rest of the year. In terms of funding, we started the year with GBP 1.2 billion of funding. This year, GBP 114 million of 2026 bond is repaid. That leaves us at peak with GBP 205 million of headroom. We think that's sufficient for the business. If market conditions are right, which they're not at the moment, but if market conditions are right, we will almost certainly issue another bond between GBP 200 million and GBP 300 million or look to increase our RCF to give us a little bit more headroom. Moving on to retail. We still had a good year. Total sales up 2.4%.
Full price sales up 3.5%. The difference was the fact that we pushed more of our clearance sales through online and out of retail. New space gave us 1.2%. Underlying like-for-likes are 2.3% up, which is, in context of the last ten years, a very good number. Profit down 5%, which is, given how strong the sales were, a very disappointing number. When you look at the change in margin of 0.8%, that all is down to one factor and one factor alone. If you look at the cost of national insurance and the increase in National Living Wage and the numbers of the young people who moved onto the higher rate, the total cost of that was 1.4%.
Had wages risen in line with sales, then we would've seen flat margins. Positive margins, actually. In terms of new space, there's a little bit of a story here. I softened you up for this six months ago, so this should be no surprise. We missed our sales targets on the stores that we opened by 12%, and this is not because we had one big store that missed it. This was, I think, 12 out of 15 stores missed their target. What that meant was that although we were comfortably within our profitability target, we missed our payback target. I don't think the miss on target and the missing 24 months are entirely unrelated.
I think in reality, our sales team, who put the estimates on the stores, pushed the sales as far as they felt comfortable in order to hit those criteria to get the shops open. In hindsight, that was a mistake. As it turns out, it was a very profitable mistake because if we look at the amount of profit those stores are making at GBP 6 million of profit, over 30% internal rate of return, and if the landlords came back to us and said, "I'll tell you what, you can have the shops back, and we'll give you all your capital back. Do you want it?" My answer to that would be no.
I think we've come to a bit of a big decision in that either we say that we're just in an environment where like-for-likes sales per sq ft over the last 10 years down 30%, a shop that costs up 70%. We either have to say we won't take advantage of any opportunities to open new space or we'll change our criteria, and we've opted to move the goalposts. We don't think these are crazy levels of risk. We said internal rates of return at 27%, which equates to a payback around 30 months, and we think that's enough to get the sort of returns you need from stores to pay for the risk, but not so much as to prevent us opening any shops going forward.
In terms of the year ahead, we're expecting the one-off gain that we got in stores from a very good summer and competitive disruption to reverse out in the first half. We're expecting total retail sales to be down 1.5%, with 1.5% coming from space. Profit down 6%. That's around a GBP 12 million hit to profit. Margins at 9.7%. Still comfortable retail margins. In terms of U.K. online, and just to remind you, I'm gonna show you our U.K. online sales separately from the international sales because the dynamics of the business are very different. In terms of U.K. sales, total sales are up 10.2%. Full price sales are at 8.7%.
The difference was all driven by the increased warehouse capacity. Because we had more warehouse capacity, we were able to put more of our clearance stock online, both in the U.K. and overseas. That was more profitable than putting it through the retail stores, but that's what accounts for the difference. In terms of the balance of trade, just over half our business online is now Next brands and wholly owned brands, which are a full margin or another 9%, and then third party is around a third. In terms of the growth of those areas, what you can see is wholly owned brands and licenses had an exceptional year, and I'm gonna talk a lot more about that later.
I think the exciting thing for us was the fact that the Next brand, despite the increased competition from brands that we own, the Next brand still managed to move forward, which for us is confirmation to some degree that we're not just competing with ourselves as we add new brands to the website. In terms of margin moved forward to 18.2%. In terms of where the margin gain was made, what these lines show is the difference between what's happened to the Next brand margin and the non-Next brand margin. You can see pretty much all the gain has come in the non-Next brands. Doing mental gymnastics where we sort of change the axes and just walk forward the U.K. online Next brand profitability, you can see there's a no score draw on gross margin.
Warehouse and distribution is flat, but there are a lot of things going on there. Wage inflation would have eroded margin by 0.8%, but leverage over fixed overheads and some of the efficiencies that we're seeing from the new warehouse paid for that. Marketing and technology, slight leverage here. The technology, we're now beginning to get to the point where our sales, our costs are not rising anything like as fast as sales. That's good news. Marketing's a surprise there. We have significantly increased our marketing budget, but not by as much as sales. In terms of the Next, the non-Next brands, two things in gross margin, a gain of 0.5% on gross margin.
Two things going on there, the elimination of unprofitable brands where the commission rate was too low and weeding out some of the, less profitable lines. There we said to our partners, basically, there's a choice, either we can't sell your product or we might have to put the commission up a bit. On the whole, they opt for the latter. Then because our wholly owned brands are growing much faster than the third-party brands and we make more margin on them, that pushes the mix, the margin mix up. Big gain on warehousing and distribution here. That's because wage inflation costs are lower on the branded goods 'cause they're more expensive, so the labor content is lower. They're growing faster, so the leverage over fixed overheads and the efficiencies are higher.
Because we've weeded out some of the high returning low average selling price items, as a result of that, we see another 0.4% improvement in margin. Non-Next brands still a long way behind Next brand in terms of profitability, but they have moved forward significantly. In terms of the year ahead, we expect U.K. online growth to be 4.6%. Margin nudged forward to 18.8%. That's mainly about reversing out large staff incentive payments for this year as a result of having such a good year. It's not a cost. It's not an operational saving. In terms of our international business, sales up 35% at full price, 39% in total. Again, that's a reflection of increased capacity to sell markdown through the online channel.
I'm gonna do a bit of a grand old Duke of York story here and talk you up the hill and then back down. What I would have said before the Middle East conflict is beware of the first half numbers, 'cause the first half numbers are likely to be much better than the second half in the year ahead. Because last year, we dramatically increased the amount of particularly WOBL brands we were selling on our overseas websites, and we got a big step change increase in sales through Zalando as a result of consolidating our warehouse there. That reverses out, that annualizes in the second half.
All things being equal, you would expect the first half to be stronger than the second, but obviously we've been hit by Middle East disruption just before Eid, so that pretty much wipes that out, which you'll see later. In terms of third-party versus Next websites, third-party is around a third of the business. In terms of the growth on the Next direct business, that was 29%, of which we estimate 22% was driven by increased marketing. Third-party aggregation up 46%, of which 10% came from the addition of new aggregators and the existing aggregator business boosted by the consolidation in Zalando. In terms of distribution of the business across the world, Middle East still around 28%. That distribution hasn't changed dramatically.
What is encouraging is that pre-conflict, we were growing pretty much in every territory. In terms of profit, dramatic increase in profit, partly driven by the sales and also an improvement in margin. In terms of bought-in margin, the increase here is about product mix and duty savings. Surprisingly, although we put a lot more markdown on our website, we actually improved the rate at which we clear it. I think that is testament to the improvement that we've made in our online operations in terms of how we handle the clearance sites and the number of countries that we have pushed clearance stock to. A lot going on in warehousing. The same erosion of margin from wage inflation.
Although because overseas selling prices are on average higher than the U.K., not as much as the 0.8% erosion that you saw in the U.K. We get leverage over fixed overheads from sales growth. Slight increase in handling charge income. Well, in some countries where we weren't making enough margin, we pushed that handling charge up a little bit. The same benefit on average selling price and returns rate through sort of forensically going through and removing high returning low average selling price items. Marketing, big adverse movement here, but that is kind of the whole point. Leverage over technology, cost centers, and central overheads. The central overhead gain is a little bit of a one-off. It's not a one-off this year. It was a one-off cost last year, and that was the cost of closing the German hubs.
I think the exciting thing about the margin walk forward is the fact that the significant increase in marketing has been paid for by the cost savings we've achieved elsewhere. In terms of the year ahead, we're anticipating sales of 14.3% on a marketing spend increase of 25%. Margin forecast broadly flat. In terms of customer analysis, and this is across all of our channels, U.K. and overseas, U.K. credit customers were up 6%. That number should be a surprise because that number has for the last 10, 15 years been 1% or 2%. The big difference here has been the growth in the uptake of our pay in 3 offer.
Pay in 3 is where it's a Klarna type offer where if you pay off all of the balance in 3 installments, you pay no interest. If you don't pay it off and you choose to extend it, then you pay a higher interest than you would have done on a revolving credit. That means a credit is growing much faster. It's not as profitable in terms of interest income as a traditional credit account, but it does significantly improve the amount of sales that we can make through those customers. That's more of a sales benefit. That's driving more of a sales benefit than it is a credit income benefit. U.K. Cash up 10%, and then overseas, 31%.
should say that this doesn't include any customers that we get from aggregator businesses because obviously we don't have visibility of that. The other surprising number here is the growth in the average sales per customer overseas. With so many new customers coming in, you would normally expect that number to move backwards. That's what we expected at the beginning of the year. It hasn't. Largely, we think, as a result of the improvements we've made on our website in terms of improving conversion and average order value, which I'll come onto later. In terms of Total Platform and equity partners, total profit GBP 90 million, up GBP 13 million on last year.
At the beginning of the year, I think we estimated that'd be GBP 5 million or GBP 6 million, so we have done significantly better in pretty much all the partner businesses than we were expecting. Equity profit up GBP 9 million. Service profit up GBP 4 million. The big increase in service profit comes from the fact that the previous year we hadn't fully annualized the onboarding of FatFace from whom we get a big service income. In terms of that service income from Total Platform, very healthy margins. Just around 20% profit on what we charge the clients and around 6% profit on their sales, on their online sales. Which is kind of where we set out to be.
Although the Total Platform is looking very exciting at the moment in terms of its numbers, you shouldn't expect any big acquisitions or transactions this year for the simple reason we haven't got the warehouse space to accommodate a big transaction this year, which I'll talk about later. In terms of return on capital, very healthy return on capital moved forward from 17% to 23%. Largely that is a result of the return to profitability of Joules and growth elsewhere. Tom Sheridan in the audience, so thank you, Tom, for that. GBP 95 million profit forecast for the year ahead, an increase of GBP 5 million. Moving on to guidance for the full year. We've already talked about the 4.5%, so I won't talk more about that.
Retail sales, we're expecting all the pain in the first half, 'cause that was the period where we had the exceptional weather and gained the most from competitive disruption. U.K. online, we think, will be a more even performance throughout the year. That's largely as a result of the performance. The reason we are as confident on the H1 number is because of the sales we've seen to date online in the U.K. In terms of total U.K., 1.3% in the first half, 2.9% in the second. International, 14.7% in the first half, 14% in the second.
If we look at the two-year growth, which removes any distortion from the timing of the Zalando transaction and the increase in WOBL brands on the website, what you can see there is that we're anticipating 47% in the first half, and that is a reflection of the significant disruption we're getting in our Middle Eastern trade, and then a return to more normality in the second half. Obviously, big health warning there. If the war carries on at its current rate, we won't see the recovery in those sales that we're in the Middle East that we're expecting. Total full price sales up 4.5%. In terms of what that means for profit in the year ahead, online profit driving GBP 76 million of profit increase.
GBP 11 million decline in retail profit as a result of negative like-for-likes. Total Platform and partners adding GBP 5 million. Cost increases, wage inflation's still the biggest cost increase here, but around two-thirds of what it was this time last year. The reason that is quite as high as it is actually, it would be around. If it was just wage inflation, it'd be nearer GBP 35. There's still two months of the NIC that haven't annualized in the current year. Middle East conflict, GBP 15 million of costs coming in there. Higher interest costs, which I mentioned earlier, that's all about the accumulation of cash last year in lieu of share buybacks. We're anticipating that our marketing spend grows GBP 8 million faster than sales.
In terms of cost savings, employee incentives, that's reversing out of large incentive payment this year for a great year. The margin gains are where we have already in our, in the costings we've got, we already can see around 0.2% gain in margin for both spring/summer and autumn/winter. Normally, we'd give that back and reinvest it, but given the circumstances, we're not going to do that. That'd be GBP 10 million. Other versus last year, the difference of GBP 8 million is warehousing and distribution efficiencies and stores versus our January estimate, the GBP 7 million, GBP 8 million is technology. That's why those. That gives us GBP 1.2 billion of profit year-end. In terms of earnings per share, we're expecting a smaller enhancement than last year. Dividend yield of 2.2%.
If you compare this year's expectations to last year's expectations, while the biggest difference is the delta in profit, you can see that the enhancement is significantly lower. The enhancement from dividends and buybacks is significantly lower this year than last year, and that's 'cause last year, in effect, we got a double benefit. The shares that we would have bought back last year would have enhanced earnings this year. We didn't buy back shares, and we gave all the money back last year. Actually, dividends and share buybacks together, we would expect to give returns of around 5%-5.5% in a normal year. That's what we expect it to be, sort of going forward next year and beyond. That's all to say on the numbers and guidance.
In terms of the business itself, it's difficult to keep a handle on this because with everything going on in the world, everyone's more worried about Middle East than they are about the business. When you look at the business itself, it's actually very exciting because all the avenues of growth we had last year, we think are still there for the year ahead. There's more to do. If we look at the GBP 550 million of growth and divide it, U.K., overseas, what you can see is that actually despite all the excitement coming from overseas, the U.K. delivered not a lot less in terms of actual growth. Same is true between Next product and non-Next branded product. You can see they're exactly the same. It's patterns in reverse. The Next...
Although the growth percentages are very exciting on non-Next brand, the Next brand still delivered the lion's share of growth. If you divide that into sort of four different businesses, Next, non-Next, U.K., and overseas, you can see that those numbers are remarkably similar. I think the message here is that, the low growth in the big established businesses is delivering pretty much the same amount of the growth as the very dramatic growth, 79%, in our smallest, in the non-Next brands overseas. We think that each one of those quadrants will be positive in the year ahead, and there's more to do. In terms of what's driving that growth, it comes down to two things. Overseas, it's about improved functionality, services and, most importantly, marketing.
Across the whole business, non-Next and Next, it's about better product ranges and broader product ranges. I'm gonna start by talking about what we're doing to improve the most important part of the business, which is the Next brand. That comes down to what I've mentioned before in terms of newness, quality, and choice. This is a drive that we've talked about, I think now for two years. It's one of those things that I'm reluctant to talk to analysts about because there are no numbers and graphs that I can give you, percentage newness and all that stuff because, you know, if I ask the product teams for what percentage of their range is new, they will give me whatever percentage I ask for, because who's to say what's really new and what's not.
I think the key here is that where the buying teams have scoured the world, found the best trends, and then most importantly, backed those trends with conviction and in depth, that is where we've seen by far the biggest sales growth. Where we haven't done that, where we've relied on last year's bestsellers, a little bit of a tweak here and there, change the neckline, change the color, those areas are the ones that have done worst. That's pretty much universally true across not just the Next brand, but other brands as well. The customer wants newness, and gone are the days where you can say, you know, "We'll trial this new style this year, and then next year we might do it in three colorways and really maximize the opportunity." If you wait and see, you've waited too long.
You're dead in the water. That's sort of newness. In terms of quality, there's a lot going on here, and the big thrust on quality is about fabric. That is the thing that, in terms of customer perception, actually upgrading the fabric and the base materials, the yarns in knitwear, that is where we've had the most success in increasing our fabric. This represents a change in the way we work, not in all areas, but more and more of the areas at NEXT are now pushing further upstream and talking to mills, spinners, wash houses and developing yarns and techniques and fabrics long before they decide which garments they go into and what those garments will look like.
That process of pushing further upstream, I think it's got a long way to go at Next. I think it's very exciting for us. Other retailers do it, so it's not rocket science, but I think it's exciting for us. I think the other sort of unintended benefit of this is that obviously the mills have to see the fashion trends first, because if they don't produce the fabric, you can't produce the trend. So the mills and the print houses are often also a good indicator of which trends are coming and which ones are going to be strongest. I think this is also a very good time for us to be investing in quality because we can see a distinct trend over the last three years.
This is a gradual thing, it's not dramatic, of customers buying slightly fewer, slightly better things. It's not that they're spending more on clothing, it's that they are choosing to spend that money on better products. This bit, I can give you some numbers. This is analyst delight here. What these numbers show is the underlying inflation in like-for-like goods. If you produce the same T-shirt last year as this year, and obviously we're doing less of that because it's all about newness, but if you look at those garments, then the price inflation we've seen over the last three years is negative or very modest. If you look at the sold mix, the total amount of cash we've taken versus the units that we've sold, the sold mix actually has moved forward.
We think that the difference represents the shift in consumer preference. If any one year, that doesn't look like very much. I should say that the estimate for the year ahead is based on what we've bought, obviously not what we've sold, 'cause we haven't sold it yet. If you add those all together, you get to numbers that do show a meaningful shift. There are two things I should stress here. This isn't about just adding more expensive product to our ranges. Although we have increased, we have looked to stretch our price architecture and to sell some more expensive garments.
This is—that's not been the main driver on this, and in fact, the biggest success we've had on improved quality is where we've significantly upgraded entry-level products to make them much better yarns or fabrics, and that's where we've had the most success without increasing price or by increasing price just a modest amount. In terms of non-Next product, first of all, same messages about newness, choice, quality are coming through in all the brands that we can see that coming through in all the brands that we manage. The bigger increase was the less exciting percentage. Our third-party branded profit was up, and that is all about one thing, which is better ranges of our best brands.
This is not about adding brands to the website, it's about getting much better selection and better depth on bestsellers from the top 20 or 30 brands that we sell. In terms of the wholly owned brands and licenses is very exciting numbers at nearly 50% growth in the year. I think there are a number of encouraging things that I kind of would like to share with you today about this relatively new business. What this shows, this bar shows, is the brands that we were already trading, the wholly owned brands that we had in 2022, 2023. It's about GBP 177 million at that point. If we look at just those brands today, they are 53% up. That is an encouraging number in itself.
The really encouraging number is the fact that last year, those brands, those existing brands that we've owned for more than five years, grew by 24%. I think they'll grow again in the year ahead. For us, this was the acid test, because it's relatively easy to come up with a new label and stick it in the clothing, give it a bit of marketing. Actually having brands that are not flashes in the pan, that can be developed and continue to grow in the long term is kind of what we're trying to achieve. That looks like what we've delivered.
That number, in a way, is all the more impressive when you bear in mind that over the last five years, we've added another 29 wholly owned brands and licenses, which have themselves that last year delivered GBP 116 million of margin on top. Again, the fact that those are growing in parallel with the NEXT brand is evidence we think that the brands we are providing are genuinely giving our customers something different and new. We're estimating that the wholly owned brands and license business grows by 22% in the year ahead. What this all comes down to is, you know, bit of apologies for the cheesy analogy. We use these slides for staff later as well, so, you know, it's multipurpose.
We really think that NEXT is an amazing place to start a new brand or to, you know, to take an old brand and relaunch it. Because when you look at it, what you need to start a new brand on NEXT is very different from what you needed to start a new brands 20, 30, even 10 years ago in terms of resources. What you need is a great product team, a good idea, and a sourcing base. The investment, the total cost that you need to invest to launch a brand, is around GBP 3 million, and that's the cost of the people and the stock that you have to buy before you put anything on sale. The sort of money at risk is around GBP 3 million.
The reason that is so low is because those brands can straightaway take advantage of the GBP billions that we've invested over the last 20 or 30 years in building 16 million customer base that those brands have instant access to, all the websites, technology, data security, product systems, warehousing, contact centers and relatively inexpensive funding. In terms of an environment in which we can begin to develop new fashion brands, we think this is very exciting. All the more exciting if we can sell those brands overseas. What you can see from the international numbers is that we are getting good traction now with those brands overseas. We're launching 2, 3 new brands this year. I say new. Russell & Bromley obviously isn't a new brand, but it's new to us.
We've got BHOĒM, which is more of a sort of continental style of brand, and we'll be launching another womenswear brand, so top-end womenswear brand, towards the end of the year. In terms of overseas, 35% growth, and the driver here is functionality and marketing. Start with functionality. Now, there's a detailed table with lots of complex numbers that are hard to understand, so you can read through that at your leisure. But the overall message is that we have significantly improved pretty much every part of the customer experience, both on the website when they pay and delivery and returns in most of the areas. There's still more to do. The results, again, here we've got some numbers.
If you look at the organic conversion rate, that's the conversion rate of non-new, of customers coming to the website, not through marketing, the average order value and the frequency of orders, those numbers have significantly increased year on year last year, and we think that's as a result of the improvements that we're making. The nice thing about those numbers is that they are cumulative. That if you get, you know, for every person who lands on the website, if 9% more of them order, they each order 3% more in that order, and they then visit you 17% more times, the individual value of that customer visit significantly increases. That is what has driven the growth in marketing.
The fact that these two things work hand in hand, it's not just about spending more money, but the more effective you can make your website, the more effective your marketing becomes. One of the things that has driven the marketing, and one of the things that has allowed our returns to remain constant despite the dramatic increase in the amount we're spending, is the fact that the website is, and services are so much better. Just to sort of dwell on those numbers a little bit, the return that we measure here, and just to be clear, we don't talk about ROAS, this is not a sales, these are, this is profit. This is the incremental profit on the incremental sales that we think we deliver from each and every campaign.
They have to hit at least GBP 1.50, and you can see the returns last year actually, despite the enormous increase in spend, were slightly higher than the previous year. That's not just about functionality and services, it's also about the improvements we've made to our marketing and we continue to make to the marketing. There's a long list, and you can read it in the report. We have invested a lot of time, money, and people in improving the way in which we market, and we can see that paying dividends. Next year, I've mentioned already, we plan to grow marketing overseas by 25%. Now you might look at that number, at GBP 1.50, and say, "Ooh, why do they need to be, you know, NEXT are being very greedy, 50% return." You'd be right.
If we believe that number, we would be being greedy. There are two reasons to be cautious about it. The first is that it is based on incrementality, the incremental sales, and that requires an estimate. We've got to estimate how many of the customers who saw that advert, who then bought, actually were stimulated by the advert and wouldn't have bought anyway. What you'll find when you look at these incrementality tests that we do is that the incrementality is surprisingly low. It's a very important thing that we're unsure of, and we think we need fat margins to absorb that risk. The second and more important reason is that the profit we're talking about here is the marginal profit.
I always assume that if we spend on marketing, that the increase in sales doesn't result in any increase in HR costs, finance costs, product cost. It all goes into profit. If you said, "Oh, well, actually, our fixed overheads are gonna grow as fast as sales," that GBP 1.50 drops to GBP 1.01. I think what this does is it brings home a fundamental truth about which will affect our growth going forward, and that is our ability to control our costs and our fixed costs to make sure that they don't rise, that they actually fall as a percentage of sales. Doesn't mean fall in absolute terms, but they fall as a percentage of sales. Our ability to control those costs will drive our ability to do marketing, which will drive growth.
That, actually, as a message for people in the business is very positive. Normally, cost control is seen as a bit of a sigh. Cost control meeting that we have with all of our directors once every quarter is not their favorite meeting. Because people think it's all just about squeezing more out of the sponge. Once people see that actually no, this is not just about squeezing more profit out of the business, this is about driving growth, it's much easier to get that message across because people are more excited about growth than they are about cost saving. The assumption that you might make about fixed overheads, by the way, being fixed, is not necessarily correct.
I remember my dad saying to me years and years and years ago that fixed costs are only ever fixed on the way down. There's a little bit of truth there. If you look at technology, product, finance, legal, HR, add them all together as a percentage of sales in 2006, and look at them today, not only have they not declined as a percentage of sales, they've actually overperformed. They've grown faster than sales. Now, don't you know, don't panic about that. The overall business, the margins of the business have moved forward by 2% in that time, so there is none of that investment, I say investment, spending, there's none of that spending that I would regret.
You know, if we hadn't spent much more on technology, we wouldn't have websites, call centers, marketing campaigns. Our technology spend meant that we could stop producing GBP 65 million worth of catalog every year if we're going to grow our product ranges. Next, in terms of the ranges we offer online today, they're probably about five or six times the size of the ranges we offer just in stores. You need more product people for that. We're gonna have new WOBL. We need new people. We're gonna have extra third-party brands. You need someone to manage those relationships. It's not that those investments were wrong, it's that going forward, we need to grow them by less than sales if our marketing is gonna be successful.
Fortunately, we are at, I think, the perfect time for saving money in those areas, because the combination of the fact that we've modernized pretty much all of our software platforms, with the exception of finance, over the last six years, the fact that we have transformed the way the company handles data, we've made sure that it's sort of universally accessible across the group, that it's consistent across the group. The combination of modern software, high-quality data means that we are well-placed to adopt AI. You know, I know that there's gonna be a groan. I can't actually hear it, but a groan when chief executives start talking about AI 'cause so I'm gonna apologize in advance, but I am gonna talk about AI a little bit and our approach to what we're doing with AI.
I think the first thing to say is that the degree of adoption that we're getting across the business is very different. The areas that have adopted it the most aggressively are technology, contact centers, and e-commerce. Products on the sort of use of AI to envisage product and forecasting has made some progress. The other areas, really, I've put a little blue bar here, but that blue bar could be smaller if I wasn't so generous. Where we have invested, we are definitely seeing AI resulting in productivity gains that is translating directly into not just better software and better service in the call centers, but also lower costs. These are what these show this graph shows is the percentage of sales represented by technology and call centers.
I think in both these areas, there's farther to go, and I've written about that. In terms of our approach to AI, I think I thought it would be useful to share a little bit as to, sort of how we're approaching the whole issue of AI. I think the most important thing for us is what we're not doing. We don't have a central AI department or a chief AI officer, a CAO, I think it would be called. It sounds like goodbye in Italian. We don't have that. The reason we don't have that is because the nature of what we do across the different functions of business is so different that to have one department trying to service all of those would be extremely unproductive.
Because ultimately, the value of AI is not in the technology, it's in the applications it supports. The design of those applications, what it does for the business, can only be understood by the people who are running the business, not people who have access to the technology. You know, the best comparison I've heard is that it would be like having a central spreadsheet department and, you know, a chief spreadsheet officer. You know, spreadsheets are used by everyone in very different ways across the business. Same with AI. It's got to be application led. That's not to say we're doing nothing centrally. We do talk a lot about it. We encourage people, help them. Our IT department provides access to technologies.
It ensures that the technologies we use are secure, most importantly, and it also monitors the cost of the AI tools that various departments are adopting. We haven't adopted a one size fits all approach to this, and each director is very much gonna have to be their own chief AI officer, if they want their part of the business to succeed. What I wouldn't underestimate here is the power of collaboration, and it is just the way that NEXT works, is that pretty much all of our directors see each other every week at our trading meeting, at least once a week, if not more.
The directors who are most advanced are actively working, not just in their department, but to help the other departments and show them the sort of things that AI can do for them and share people and technology providers with them. In terms of how far ahead we are on this, you sort of. That graph looked quite impressive, but my. You know, even in the areas that we are the furthest ahead, my guess is that we haven't, we're scratching the surface. There is so much more to go at, not just in terms of cost effectiveness, but also, productivity in terms of what people can do. I think this is a huge opportunity.
In terms of the areas that really haven't moved forward much, I'm not singling out warehouse because they've done anything wrong and/or because AI isn't applicable to warehousing. I actually think AI could be brilliant for warehousing in terms of handling all the operational management of the warehouse, reforecasting, scenario planning, optimization. There are a lot of variables that AI could really turbocharge the management of our warehouses. But they haven't had time, quite rightly, to worry about AI because the thing they've been most worried about is ensuring that we've got the capacity in warehousing that we need to grow. That provides a slightly artificial but neat segue into the next subject, which is the last subject, you'll be pleased to hear, the investment in our warehousing.
This is where we were two years ago when we started to invest in Elmsall 3. We were at 94% full in our old warehouses in 2023. Where we thought we would be on 5% compound growth in sales was 80% full of the new extended complex. Sales have actually grown by 28%. We were expecting 8%-10%. We've actually grown at 28%. In addition to that, we've put more clearance into our online operation, and we've increased our cover. That pushes up the stock in peak week, and this is only talking peak weeks here to 84%. We've decommissioned some of the oldest picking. Actually, it turned out when we decommissioned it, we realized just how inaccurate and expensive it was, so we don't want to recommission it.
We've had a slight drop in box fill, which means that last year we got to 87% full. If we look at this year, with the 8% planned growth in online business overall, we'll be at 94%. Now, 94% sounds okay. It's not. At 94%, you begin to get a lot of congestion, things slow down. One small breakage, a conveyor belt breaking, can hold up the whole operation, so that's uncomfortable. We're going to manage this year by taking some of our reserve stock. This is the high bay stock that can't be picked out of high bay in Elmsall 3 and move it into other warehouses owned by the groups. That will be replenished in a day, so it shouldn't affect stock availability for customers.
There will be a slight increase in costs as a result of that, but that'll be more than offset by leverage over the fixed overheads from using so much of the capacity. In terms of the year after, that's where we really get into trouble. If we grow at another 8% next year online, then we wouldn't have the capacity to do that. We need to invest, and we need to start investing now. In terms of what we're doing, those of you who've been to the warehouse, you remember that we only occupy half of the new Elmsall 3 complex, chamber one, and we don't occupy all of it, all of chamber one. There's a little bit left. Phase 1, which will be on stream in 2027, will give us 10% more capacity at a cost of GBP 48 million.
Phase 2, which is the first half of the second chamber, that's more expensive because that chamber is a shell, so it's more expensive per percentage of capacity. It's GBP 134 million. The final chamber, which will come on the following year, 2029, is another 17% capacity at GBP 125 million. In terms of the P&L impact to that, you could look at that and begin to worry about what is it, are we gonna see a big P&L impact as all this CapEx goes through. The answer is you shouldn't, because although the additional depreciation in 2027 and January 2028, and overheads will be in the order of GBP 5.4 million, we think the cost savings from moving from the old to new capacity will give us at least GBP 5.1 million in savings.
That's broadly cost neutral in that year. In terms of the full program, the GBP 307 million of CapEx, that will add around GBP 30 million of operating costs. But we get GBP 22.6 million, it's too precise, around GBP 22 million of savings, we think, from using that new capacity. That means that the net cost of all that new capacity is around GBP 7.3 million. That's if, obviously, if sales don't grow at all. The capacity that all of those projects together will give us is around GBP 1.5 billion worth of turnover.
What you can see is that the cost of the increased space, once it's at full capacity or even once it gets to three-quarters full or even half full, the cost of that capacity is very small as a percentage of sales. Over time, these investments should result in our fixed costs in warehousing coming down as a percentage of sales. In terms of where it leaves us in terms of capacity for growth, that's the 8% trajectory with the new space added on. The maximum we could get to is compound growth of around 12% online. I think, you know, if we have that problem, I'll be delighted, but I don't think we will. We think that this program gives us comfortable capacity for the next three to five years.
Next question you're gonna say, I can see it instantly on your minds, is like what do you do next? Here's a field. We've bought the field. The field, that's the warehouse that we have already got planning permission for. We have contracted for the land. We'll complete, I think, in two or three days. We'll start work on that, getting foundations laid. We'll start work on that sometime over the next 18 months. We could have floor space available, if needed, maybe early 2028, late 2028. So we've got contingency. I think the important point there is that our model of centralized stock control, stock holding for the UK has got legs beyond Elmsall 3. That mercifully is it almost.
Just in terms of summary, hopefully what you can see is that the avenues of growth that we had last year, all of them still have legs in terms of overseas, in terms of NEXT product, in terms of non-NEXT product. We've still got an awful lot that we can do, and that the business feels can push sales forward. We have got the means to control costs through the introduction of new software, AI, mechanization. Got the means to do it, doesn't mean we guarantee that we will, but we have got the means to do it, and we've got the capacity available, planned to accommodate the growth if and when it comes. If things go well, I think the business is really well-positioned.
What is, I think, really interesting when you stand back from what we do day-to-day, and I think about the sorts of things that cross my desk and my colleagues' desks, in terms of your overseas, new brands, new AI-driven marketing technologies with Google, all the things that are driving the business are completely different to the sort of things I was doing 25 years ago. 25 years ago, it was still very exciting, but it was about stores and, believe it or not, catalogs. Getting more catalogs printed and printing those catalogs was central. What the business does today is unrecognizably different from what it was doing 25 years ago. The thing that really has not changed at all are the principles upon which that growth and the ethos of the business.
Those two things are, first of all, that absolutely everything we do, we have to hand on heart believe that it is giving good value to our customers. You know, the test there is, would you recommend this product to your customers? Now, not everybody is in the market for a mesh dress. I'm not. But if you wanted a mesh dress, could you recommend one from the NEXT website and say, "Yep, that is the service you want. It's fantastic. Delivered next day, return to any store." You have to hand on heart believe that. If you genuinely believe all of that and you're delivering something that's great for the customers, then you can't go too far wrong, whether you're dealing with NEXT brands or others.
The second principle is that that's fine to be doing things that are great for the customer, but they've got to make money. The two things there is, first of all, we have to get a return on capital. Capital is the fuel that drives the business forward, and the better return we get on the capital we have in the business, the faster we can grow, the more benefit we can share with our shareholders. The second thing is margin. This is the easy one to overlook, particularly when things are good. Every single business we do, it doesn't matter if we're selling Love & Roses brand in Peru, that brand in that country has to make a margin that is commensurate with the sort of risks involved in a fast-moving consumer and fashion business.
As long as we stick to those principles of do great stuff for your customers, get high return on capital, and make healthy margins, then, you know, regardless of the environment you're in, you're going to be well-placed to handle it. You know, we're making a trading statement in six weeks' time. The one thing I'm pretty sure is that it's gonna move. The guide is gonna move. I just don't know which way. But I think the point is that whichever way it moves, if, you know, the war peters out and things become more positive, then we are really well-positioned to take advantage of continued growth in the U.K. economy, continued growth overseas.
If things don't turn out, and this will not be our first gig when things go wrong, COVID, financial crisis, cost of living crisis. If things don't turn out as we expect, then actually the business is well-placed to cope with that well, and it's well-placed to cope with it because of those margins. Because kind of there are two lessons about retail that are enduring, and you can, you know, this is sharing the wisdom. There are two lessons. One is like in the good years, don't get cocky. In the bad years, don't go bust. You know, I think those two principles are really important. That's why the reason why when we've had a great year, we're not going into the next year with a huge estimate of what we can achieve.
We're going with conservative budgets. Whichever way things go, we've set the business up to cope with it. On that cliffhanger, I think that leaves you just waiting for the next trading statement. We'll go over to questions.
Thanks. It's Anne Critchlow from Berenberg. I've got two questions, please. The first one is about the store payback targets and extension of that. Have you considered taking into account the benefit of a new store in terms of providing a free pickup and returns point for online customers? And then secondly, on aggregator websites, you say you don't have visibility on the customer numbers there, but what insights do you receive from aggregators to help you make decisions about marketing, for example?
First of all, on the store benefit to online. We don't account for that. We don't in any way put any benefit in for the online business on stores. There's actually a good reason for that. That is that although the store does definitely help the online business, it also hinders it because it's a competitor. There's only one store where we've shut and had no other stores anywhere near to pick up the business. There we actually saw the online business move forward because the GBP 2 million or so that we lost in the store, some of that went online. We don't, and we shouldn't account for online benefit of stores.
In terms of customer insights into aggregation sites, we don't get very much insight and quite rightly, they don't share that with us, and we don't share it with our brands either. What they do share with us is the returns on the marketing we do on their sites. On somewhere like Zalando, we'll spend around 2% of our sales on marketing. We still have the same hurdles. We still have to get a return on that money. We can profitably spend money on aggregation sites, and we do. The insights we get are not about who's buying it, but the returns we get on the marketing that we spend with them.
Thanks, Simon. Morning. Richard Chamberlain from RBC. A couple more related to the Middle East, if that's all right. The cost savings you talked about that you've identified since the start of the year, GBP 15 million. How many of those or how much of that do you think might come back if demand is a little bit better or the war ends earlier than you're budgeting for? The second one. Can you just give us an idea of how the franchise stores in the Middle East have been holding up or not compared to the online offer there? Has there been any sort of big difference in trends? Thanks.
Yeah, two good questions. First of all, how much of the GBP 15 million will come back? I think very little. In all honesty, I think there's a much bigger downside risk to that number than there is an upside risk. Yeah, it could come back. It might be that GBP 7 million of it doesn't materialize, so we haven't yet incurred it. But I'm not getting excited about that. I think the downsides are much bigger, and they will have to go into cost. In terms of franchise business, I don't want to talk about that because it's not our business, but they have definitely been impacted.
It's Adam Cochrane from Deutsche Bank. First of all on the Middle East. Just a question in terms of logistics, how is it working? Are you able to fly your product to your warehouse in Dubai?
In terms of the Dubai hub. The Dubai hub traditionally we would have air freighted out of Dubai to other countries like Saudi Arabia and Oman. At the moment, we're going by truck, and that's what's increasing the lead times to places like Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Kuwait. Intermittently, we have seen that service come back on, and I think things are changing daily. We're hoping to have air freight back on available for Saudi Arabia soon, but it does depend what happens in the war. The answer is to Dubai. From the U.K., we are shipping by air, and we're getting replenishment in at the moment, albeit at a very high premium. That's a big chunk of that increased operating costs.
From the Dubai hub to territory, we've switched from air to trucks, which is adding two to three days to the lead time in most territories.
The second question, in terms of international, are you progressing with or how are you progressing with other non-WOBL brands, so third-party brands on your international site? Is that an area that you're still seeing more growth and more opportunity as brands would like to sell via the NEXT platform?
Yes, we have. Actually it's detailed in the pack. There is detail on that in the pack. In that there's one page of brilliant tables on it which it does show you that I think the overseas growth in third party brands overseas is around 22%. Most of that is driven by what's driving the growth in third party brands anyway, which is a better selection of our key brands. In some areas, partner brands have agreed to allow us to put their product on our overseas websites where they haven't in the past, and that's driven some growth as well.
Hello, it's Freddie Wild from Jefferies. Apologies, this is gonna be quite a broad question, but it was on a reasonably important topic or was important till about three weeks ago. You seem on AI to be talking a lot about cost savings and the ability to run the business more efficiently. I suspect where the debate or has been in the market is more about the risks of disintermediation versus the potential benefits to your consumer proposition. I'd love to get your sort of thoughts on outlook on almost the demand side of the AI proposition.
It's a big question. I think the first thing to say is, rightly or wrongly, it's not something that we're overly concerned about at the moment. I think the disintermediation that we're talking about would be the disintermediation of the website rather than any other parts. At the moment. You know, it'd be relatively easy, they could switch just a fraction of their data centers into beautiful clothing warehouses, and ChatGPT would have the infrastructure. But at the moment they don't. You're really talking about the disintermediation of the shopping bag and the selection process. There's an economic and operational problem with that that is yet to be solved.
The economic problem is that if you look at our average order value, net of returns, is around GBP 70. Cost of delivery to the consumer is around GBP 5. Because that's about 6%. If your virtual shopping bag takes things from five different retailers, whoever, wherever the shopping, wherever that intermediate website goes, it's got to go to a number of retailers. If it comes to us, then fine, it's just another form of advertising. If it goes to more than one retailer, then let's say you go to four retailers rather than one, you end up with that 6% being multiplied by four. The economics, someone somewhere's got to pay for that additional 18% of cost that you'll get from splitting the order across multiple websites.
I think the operational problem, which in many ways is more of a challenge and applies specifically to clothing, is how you handle returns. Because if all of your online order goes to John Lewis or to Marks & Spencer or to NEXT or to Very, you know exactly you can take the whole order back to any one of their shops, scan the items, and you're credited instantly in the way in which you paid. For an intermediary to do that, you've got to know where to take the item back to. If there's a Nike trainer or which of the sub-vendors do I take it back to? How do I return it to them? And then how do they communicate with the intermediary that the intermediary's got to repay me? There are big customer service issues with it.
At the moment, it doesn't look to. It feels to me very much like what people were saying about marketplaces versus stocked retailers, because the real asset in trading online clothing is the logistics infrastructure and the product, not the website. I think that is a direction they're unlikely to go in. Certainly if you look at the difference in Google approach and ChatGPT approach, Google is still taking the approach of passing the consumer straight through from their AI engine to one or other retailer. It becomes an enhanced form of advertising. I think to that extent it's very exciting. I think basically the better search engines can find what customers are looking for, the more they'll buy, which has got to be good for the industry overall.
It was a long answer to a broad question, but I hope it covered all those. Okay, good.
Yeah. Hi. Geoff Lowery at Rothschild & Co Redburn. You had a great year for customer acquisition in the U.K., both credits and cash. There was obviously some competitor disruption, et cetera, sitting behind that, weather, all of those things. Can you talk a little bit about the behavior? Is this gross adds? Is this better retention of existing? What is actually driving that? What measures do you have to sort of keep them active as, you know, some of your competitors normalize, et cetera, around you? I suppose, look, the reality is, this comes back to this philosophy that everything's got to make a profit. You know, I think the risk here is saying the objective is to hold on to those customers, not to make sure that all of our retention programs are profitable.
The amount we invest in a retention program is, makes a good return on the money we invest. Our objective is not to hang on to customers, it's to continue to invest profitably in retention. Our retention programs are performing in line with last year. There's no significant difference at this point, although we've yet to annualize the very strong weather last year, which may affect it, and the competitive disruption. The answer is we don't really know how they will perform. I think the key takeaway for shareholders is that we're not gonna throw money at trying to hang on to customers that aren't profitable to keep.
Morning. Warwick Okines from BNP Paribas. Two questions about warehouse capacity, please, Simon. Firstly, does the level of utilization that you're sort of running up against reduce the ability for the business to reduce the proportion of products not delivered in full and on time, which is something that you've been bringing down? Secondly, are there any options to reduce the proportion of products that are shipped from the U.K. out to international that could reduce the amount of capacity that you might need for the U.K. business?
Yeah. Good really good questions. In terms of not on time delivered in full statistics, I didn't put it in a slide because I you know I'm superstitious 'cause they only just got better. Basically, since Christmas, we have seen that dropping from around 8%-6%, which is a sort of. In fact, I think the lowest we got to was around 5%. Warehouse have made significant progress in terms of reducing the not delivered in full on time rates, and we are happy with that for the moment, but I'm gonna talk about it in six months' time if we can hold it, 'cause it's only been a few weeks, but the signs on that are encouraging.
I don't think there's anything I can see in this year's numbers that suggest that we won't be able to hold that, but it will depend on the effectiveness with which we fill the new mechanization and the effectiveness with which we can serve the main forward locations in the warehouse from the offsite reserve warehouses, which again, we haven't started doing in earnest. Obviously, the risk there is that you've got something in reserve that you don't have in forward if you don't get it exactly right. I think there is a small risk to that, but it's not something that I'm hugely concerned about, and I'm pretty sure that we'll see year-on-year improvements. Certainly, that's what we're seeing at the moment. In terms of delivery to hub direct, we're not doing that to Germany.
The main reason for that is that actually it's very expensive because it's third party, so we're trying to keep that on six weeks cover. We would normally have 12-14 weeks cover. At the moment, we're not delivering direct to Germany, but it will be an option if we begin to hit capacity issues. I think the other issue with direct delivery is that it's very hard to deliver much more than 20%-25% of anticipated demand without getting it wrong because you never quite know what's going to sell in which territory.
We are delivering direct to the Middle East, which obviously looks like a brilliant plan, and our first cargo ships set off from the Far East four or five weeks ago, and have recently been turned back from Dubai. That turned out to be a great plan implemented at exactly the wrong time. Going forward, we would plan to deliver, I think it's around 20%. I'm looking at Richard about about 20% of Middle East requirement direct from manufacturer.
Morning. It's Andrew Hollingworth from Holland Advisors. NEXT historically has been very good at the whole sort of mentality of sort of try stuff and do more of what works, the cost of coffees years ago and all the rest of it. Wholly owned brands is obviously working extremely well, and I think in the statement or your presentation, you described it as still a small business. What you've done up to now is sort of buy, I don't wanna say the wrong thing, but sort of troubled U.K. businesses and you've sort of re-energized them and helped them and all the rest of it. You've wanted them, I think in past Q&A, to sort of prove their worth in terms of return on capital in the U.K. alone.
We've now got a really powerful sort of wholly owned business internationally. What could this look like three, four, five years from now in terms of could we be buying Spanish brands or French brands or Italian brands, or is it just gonna be U.K. homegrown and see what we can do with it globally?
You know what? Looking even a year ahead is difficult in fashion. Three, four years out is absolutely impossible. You know, would we buy a French, Italian brand? I don't think at the moment, no, because our business in those territories just isn't anywhere near big enough. Our business in Southern Europe generally isn't big enough to warrant the investment. The big advantage we provide for Northern European and U.K. brands is that we can give instant access to a huge market. Actually, our penetration in Southern Europe is very low. I think those countries that you mentioned, and France, although it is sort of in the middle, in sort of fashion wise, is quite southern. I think it is unlikely.
I would never say no because you know, even just through access through Zalando to those countries might one day give us enough volume to justify it.
I'd like to ask a follow-up. Do you think with obviously without mentioning any names in terms of how you think about this part of the business, that there's still lots of brands that can be added to the portfolio within the sort of your sweet spot of the sort of things you want to buy?
What we're looking for is great brands, preferably with good management or with our ability to provide good management for it, to it. We're looking for things that we can add value to through our customer base and platform and at the right price. I can't predict the fourth one. You know, I think there are lots of brands that I would buy for GBP 1 that I wouldn't buy for GBP 100 million. Where the price is in between will drive pretty much what we do, I think. Sorry.
Thanks. It's Georgina Johanan from J.P. Morgan. Two from me as well, please. Just first of all, sorry if I missed it, but what actually is the Middle East trading at the moment, like down at the moment, please?
Good spot. You didn't miss it.
The second one was just a bit of a broader question on GLP-1s. If you could share anything that you're seeing in terms of how, like, the sizing mix is changing in the business or not, as the case may be. Also just thinking about it longer term, like any insights from particular customer cohorts, if they are sort of materially changing the sizes of what they're buying, like is their spend increasing or is it steady? Just really any insights you can share would be great. Thank you.
Yeah. On the Middle East numbers, the reality is it's very, very hard to read. The reason it's hard to read is because the timing of Eid ul-Fitr. Because we are still in a period now where last year people were ordering in their Eid ul-Fitr treat. Eid ul-Fitr was on Sunday this time last year. This year it was last Friday. If we take the same day's post- Eid that we are today, that number is changing every day in terms of growth. In terms of GLP-1s, we have seen some subtle change in mix in sizing on women's wear. But where we've seen the most dramatic change is actually on the very large outsize. That's where you can see a change.
In terms of reduction in participation, these participations are tiny, but participations on the sort of 22+ are definitely falling. Oh, Sree, sorry. One last one.
I had two. Marketing expenses, you're still talking to plus 25% or more. Are you repurposing some of the Middle East marketing into faster-growing Europe or rest of the world? Is something like that an option for you? The second one, again, international. Within the rest of the world, are there a couple of markets that you really are excited about and you see significant potential for them to be meaningful-
Within the-
...for next-
... Where?
...within the rest of the world in international.
Okay, the answer to the second question is yes. The answer to the first question, I think the premise of the question is that we've got a marketing pot, and if it doesn't work in the Middle East, we'll move it somewhere else, and that's just not how we work. We don't have a marketing pot. We have a hurdle rate of £1.50 return, and whichever territories give us more return than that, we will continue to invest money in, and those that don't, we'll reduce. The answer to your question is, if I sort of stood back from it, do I think we will still be 25% up on what I've seen so far in marketing? Yes.
I think a lot will depend on the cost of air freight to some of our most expensive territories. Because if the price of air freight goes up, the return on the marketing comes down, which constricts our ability to spend it. Overall, we've brought down our sales by around 2% overseas at the moment. That's our best guess is the full impact, but who knows? We've kept the marketing budget where it is. On that note, we really will finish. Thank you very much.