Well, good morning, and welcome to all. Before I turn over to Simon for the presentation, just wanted to make a few brief comments. As you'll see during the presentation, there's been a lot of change in the retail sector over the past five years. I, as chairman, am really pleased how all of our employees, top management, and the board has responded to the changes in this very dynamic and exciting environment of retail fashion. We have a new board member, Jeremy Stakol. Jeremy is in the back there. Jeremy came to the group in 2004 with Lipsy, and he has been taking on more responsibilities over the years. Jeremy's new title in the group is our Director of Group Investments, Acquisitions, and Third Party Brands.
Jeremy, in recent years, has been really successfully driving some of our new investments and our Total Platform opportunities. Jeremy, welcome to the board. Now I'll turn it over to Simon for the presentation.
Great. Okay, thank you, Chairman. Morning, everybody. Welcome. Thank you for making the effort to be here in person. It's the only way to see the presentation actually at the moment, there we go. Before I begin, just to stress that pretty much all of the figures we're going to be talking about in this presentation are comparisons to three years previously. The year before was distorted by closures and to a degree, particularly retail was flattered by them. We'll be talking about three-year comparisons for most of the presentation. In terms of total sales up 24%, that is flattered by the gross transaction value going through Total Platform.
Strip those out, excluding the Total Platform, total sales up 20.8%. Full price sales up very close to that amount, 20.5%. In terms of the growth in markdown and full price, against three years ago, pretty much in line. Compound annual growth over the period of 6.5%, which my colleagues wanted me to stress up front because talking about all these big double-digit numbers sounds like we've done much better than we actually have. You need to sort of mentally divide everything by three. Nonetheless, 6.5% in the period, we're not unhappy with that in the circumstances. All driven by Online. Online up 41%. Retail, surprisingly broadly flat.
Finance edging forward on three years ago, as a result of the big drop in balances we had during the crisis, coming back more recently. In terms of operating profit. Operating profit after accounting for lease interest up 13%. Operating margins down 1.6%. We're gonna go into a lot of detail later on, you'll be pleased to hear, about all the margin movements in the various businesses. Big picture, warehouse and distribution, and technology are the two things that are really pushing our cost base up. Warehousing and distribution, it's not so much the cost of wages, although they have gone up as a percentage of sales. It's more about the new space and mechanization that we're now depreciating and paying rent on.
Those have been offset by the reductions in our retail rents. What we're seeing now is that the rent reductions that really were in the system sort of from 2017 onwards, are beginning to flow through as leases come to the end of their life. In terms of financial interest, big reduction there against three years ago. That's because we've got much less debt. Part of the reported number of finance interest is the preference dividend income, which is really part of the profit that we're making on Reiss, but it's expressed as a preference share income rather than an equity profit. Profit before tax up 16%. Tax charge broadly in line with three years ago.
Actually, if you account for the fact that some of the equity profits in our accounts have already paid tax, if you true up for that, you get to pretty much exactly in line with three years ago. Earnings per share up 21.4% as a result of share buybacks. Dividends GBP 2.06. 36% of our profits covered 2.8 x, dividends very comfortable. Just a quick comparison to last year. The only thing to note here is the big difference in the sales increase and the profit increase.
That is all about two things, inflation in our cost base, mainly warehousing and technology, and wages, and also the fact that the previous year, returns rates online dropped to a very low level during the pandemic, and they returned to normal levels last year, and that added a lot of cost back in. Moving on to cash flow, starting with capital expenditure. Capital expenditure up GBP 67 million on three years ago. The lion's share of this coming from warehousing, and within that, GBP 77 million coming from the construction of our new Elmsall 3 boxed warehouse. This is where we've had the big blocker for us over the last three years. The big capacity constraint has been in boxed warehousing. This warehouse is now open. We are doing conventional picking out of it. That's really not making full use of it.
In this sort of third quarter this year, we'll be opening the automated picking within the warehouse, and that will significantly move the capacities of the business forward again. Automated packing will come the following year. In terms of systems, big increase in CapEx on systems. Broadly two-thirds, or about a quarter of that is hardware. Of the software, GBP 20 million of it is the modernization program that I talked at great length about either six months ago or a year ago. I'm not gonna do that again. That continues to go well, and we're sort of working our way through all of our proprietary systems, modernizing them as the years go on. That program will continue for at least another two, three years.
Total Platform and the enabling of new warehouse systems for the new boxed warehouse, and GBP 5 million on security. Stores down on three years ago as the churn in our stores begins to slow. The rate at which we take on new space continues to slow. Looking forward, we are expecting CapEx to diminish next year and the year after. The big drop next year comes in warehousing. We're expecting another drop the year after, both in warehousing and a small drop in CapEx as our modernization program begins to get to its tail end. We're looking at reverting within two or three years, assuming no new sort of big unforeseen business initiatives. We're assuming CapEx returning to between GBP 130-GBP 140 within a couple of years.
Investments, this list, these are the investments that you will have seen us make over the last over the last year. In terms of Joules, that GBP 36 million is broken down into three parts. GBP 15.7 million of equity, GBP 13 million of debt to the acquiring company, and we separately bought the head office building. At some point this year or next year, we plan to lease back that building so that cash will flow back into the business and become just an operating cost of the acquired company. Customer receivables, an outflow of GBP 65 million more than three years ago. That is all about the rebuilding of balances rather than the growth in credit sales, which I'll come onto later. Working capital, a big swing in working capital, a GBP 100 million outflow.
Of that outflow, more than all of it is accounted for by two exceptionally large flows. The first is a much larger cash flow into the employee share option trust. This is not as a result of us increasing our cover, although we did increase our cover by around GBP 5 million. This is all about the fact that with the share price having dipped significantly last year, we got very few people exercising their options, so there was much less inflow. We would not expect that GBP 62 million to repeat in future years, so that should not be a drain on cash flow in the year ahead. Equally, we paid a much larger head office bonus last year. We had a very good year, much better than we were expecting, resulting in a big head office bonus.
That was in last year's accounts, but the cash went out in the current year. Again, that won't recur in the year ahead. Cash flow before distribution, GBP 268 million. It's worth just sort of pausing at this stage and looking at the cash flow in the context of three years ago. On the face of it looks quite worrying. The business is making GBP 121 million more profit, but GBP 230 million less cash flow. That can be broken down into two elements. The first element are those the cash flow for the running of the business.
Here we've got two exceptionally large numbers which the exceptional increase in CapEx, which will work its way out of the system over the next 2 years, and the increase in working capital, which will work its way out of the system this year. We're not expecting to see the same sort of outflows into sort of running the business in the year ahead. The balance, the GBP 150 million, was all about investment, whether that investment be in customer receivables or other businesses, that was investing in businesses that actually have a yield on it. It's not cash required for the ongoing running of the business. We don't think there is a fundamental erosion of the quality of earnings in the business as a result of what's happened this year. Moving on to the balance sheet.
Goodwill, GBP 122 million more than last year's goodwill investments. That's all about the equity investments we've made over the last three years. Stock up 26% on three years ago, and that compares to total sales up 20.5%. It looks like we're increasing the amount of stock we have in the business relative to a normal year. Just to explain that, this is what happened last year. You can see the solid blue bar was the big inflow of stock we had as a result of pandemic. We didn't over-order, but we did order a lot of stock early because we assumed that it would continue to be late. What happened is not only was the stock not late, it was actually delivered early.
As capacities began to free up in the supplier base, they started to pull their production forward and actually ship the stock earlier. As a result of that, we had a lot more stock in the business than we planned, but it wasn't a lot more stock than we planned to sell. You can see that We've worked our way through that stock without exceptional levels of markdown. We're currently 5.6% up on last year. As at today, because we continue to work our way through that stock mountain, we're currently 1% up on last year, which is pretty much in line or just ahead of our sales forecast. We're now very comfortable with the levels of stock that we have in the business. In terms of debtors, GBP 21 million increase in receivables.
Some of you know, the sharp ones amongst you, which of course is the vast majority I'm sure, will be interesting and think, "Hold on a second. Didn't you just say GBP 65 million more cash going into the debtor book? How do those square?" One is a year-on-year number. This is a three-year on three-year number. Just to sort of put that in context, if we look at our total customer receivables over the last three years, you can see that as at January, our debt is up GBP 21 million. Pretty much in line with where it was three years ago.
In the interim, we've seen this big pay down of balances, and then as the pandemic begun to ease, people have started to build their balances back up, and that's what accounts for the increase that we've seen last year in balances, and we expect that to continue in the year ahead. Just to put that in context, pre-pandemic, on average, people were paying down their balances over 7.4 months. During the pandemic, that dropped to six months. Last year, it was 6.4, and the reason we expect the cash outflow into receivables next year is cause we expect that 6.4 to nudge up.
I think the critical thing about it is, sort of contrary to what I read every day in the newspapers, there doesn't appear to be an enormous financial crisis as far as consumers are concerned, with their Next Pay debt at any rate, because they're not. They're still comfortably below the level of payments they were pre-pandemic. If we look at defaults, same story. Default rates last year were at 3.3. Now, we are acutely aware of the current economic climate, we have made very realistic and reasonable provisions for bad debt. We're currently providing around 8.4% in terms of bad debt. We are ready for a deterioration, we don't, we haven't seen any yet. We think the reason for that is all about employment.
Our experience says that actually a squeeze on consumer spending will push a very small number of customers over the edge, but not many. It's when people start to lose their jobs that you really see a big deterioration in bad debt levels, and as yet, we have seen no letup in employment, and that situation looks set to persist. I don't think you should expect to see bad debts rising in the year ahead. Net debt's down GBP 300 million on three years ago, and this is because during the pandemic, we suspended our dividends. The cash flows we had, we used to pay down debt. The debt we have today by historic standards is low.
We're not anticipating that we will increase our debt levels in the current year because we are forecasting for our profits to come down. Just to give you a sort of flavor of what we think will happen to cash flow this year, we think assuming we hit our guidance, GBP 170 out for CapEx, GBP 90 out for continued investment in online receivables, GBP 250 million of dividends, and then GBP 220 million either of share buybacks or investments. What I should say, because our debt levels are relatively conservative, and if you look at them in the context of the lending that we make, it's less than 60% of the lending we make, which would be very comfortable level of gearing for the finance business alone.
The whole group has relatively low gearing. If we see sales improve in the year, and if the quality of investments we make gives particularly strong cash flows, we may well nudge that debt up. GBP 800 million isn't set in stone. As it stands today, with what we know about the future, what we think about the future, we don't intend to increase debt in the current year. Moving on to the divisional analysis of the business, starting with retail. Retail total sales up 1%, including markdown. Full price sales down 0.4%. Surprisingly, like-for-like sales over the period, taking the stores that were open in both periods, were up 2.6%. And that is surprising. We think there's a reason for that.
To put it in context, we were expecting compound annual growth of around -6% sort of from 2017 onwards. I think there's a reason for that. If we look at what has happened this year, this year, we've seen a big swing back into city centers. You can see big growth in like-for-like sales in city centers. Declines in regional shopping centers and retail parks. If you look at the same numbers over three years, you can see it's the regional shopping centers and city centers that have gained. The retail parks, although still positive, not nearly as much as regional shopping centers and city centers. The reason for that, we think, is all about the competition that's gone out of business. There was very little...
If you look at all the retailers who have exited the high street from Debenhams through to Arcadia or big, some of the big department stores, some of the very big closures, the vast majority of those have been in regional shopping centers and city centers rather than retail parks. We think that that accounts for not only the strength of these locations, but also the relative strength of our total retail sales over the three-year period. That should moderate your expectations, and it certainly moderates our expectations of what retail can achieve going forward because we've had that gain now. Just in terms of the sort of lay of the land, we're doing about 63% of our sales out of retail parks at the moment. Operating profit, after accounting for lease interest, up 16%.
Margin moved forward by 1.5%. Just walking through the margin changes. Grossing gross margin against three years ago, adverse movement of 0.5%. This was about freight. There's a quirk in the freight market that means you can contract for all your freight, you get wonderful prices. If the ship doesn't turn up, which during the pandemic a lot didn't, then not only do you lose that ship, but you also use the price at which the price guarantee, and you then have to buy a spot. That meant we had a lot of unplanned freight costs that came into last year, and that sort of eroded margin by 0.5%. Markdown, adverse movement of 0.5% on three years ago.
This is all about the increase in the effectiveness and breadth of our online sale, we think. Achieved margin down 1%, warehouse distribution and technology 1.4%. Technology is a big chunk of that, but about 0.3%, 0.4% of that. Retail, unlike online, a lot of the retail costs are driven by the cost of getting vans to and from stores. The increase in average selling price doesn't reduce the number of deliveries we make. It reduces the number of items we pick, but not the number of deliveries we make to stores. Whereas we got some economies of scale online from rising average selling prices, we didn't see them in the retail business and fuel prices and the cost of drivers, as you'll remember, went up dramatically during that year.
Branch payroll, energy, costs, all adverse movements as you'd expect. You might have expected more than the 0.2 that you're seeing. Actually, that would have been 0.7 had we not got productivity and productivity improvements. Just wage increases alone would have eroded wages by around 0.7, but we recovered a lot of that through productivity improvements that we made in managing staff man-hours in the branches, and then a big improvement in store occupancy costs, as I alluded to earlier. Breaking that down, three factors. Store closures. The stores we closed, by definition, had very large rent and rates as a percentage of sales. That's why we closed them. Lower lease cost was 2.3%. This is the renegotiation of leases as and when they come up for renewal.
Because we're spending less cash moving stores and refitting them, the depreciation on our existing assets has also come down. Just sort of focusing on store occupancy for a moment and looking at the number of branches we renegotiated during the year. 62 stores were renegotiated. The weighted average lease term we signed was five years. We haven't been able to get the very short leases that we were able to get during the pandemic, the sort of two-year or six-month rolling leases that we got during the pandemic. That number has nudged up since I last talked to you about lease renewals. Occupancy saving of 30%, still very significant savings on occupancy, which is an annualized saving around GBP 11 million.
In terms of the different types of deals we're doing, there are two very different types of deals we're doing. What we call TOC deals, total occupancy cost deals. This is where we pay a percentage of our turnover to the landlord to cover rent, rate, and service charge. In those stores, we haven't achieved quite as much saving as we would have done, but we've got flexibility, and it means that we derisk the store. Because we've derisked the store, we're able to sign much longer leases. One of the reason that our average lease term has gone back to five years is because on turnover deals, we feel very comfortable signing seven, eight, nine, ten-year deals in good trading locations, whereas when we've got a fixed rent, we're not so comfortable.
Just to put that in context, if we index rent rates and service charge back to 2016 at 100, where we are today is at 85, with retail sales at around 77. You can see that actually and we expect that gap to narrow in the year ahead as well if we fulfill our guidance and achieve the sort of rent reductions that we're expecting in this year's rent renewals. You can see that we've kind of worked our way through the crisis, the structural shift, had this wide gap that opened up that eroded margin, and now that's closing. It's beginning to rebuild the retail margins. Moving to online. Online sales in the period up 40%. Full price sales up 42%.
To put that in context, in the three years in the run-up to the pandemic, compound annual growth of 13%. Since the pandemic, compound annual growth around 12.3%. We are seeing, we think, a slowdown in the rate of online sales growth, but not by perhaps as much as we assumed at the beginning of the year, or sort of beginning of the two-year period. We're not expecting that to continue for the year ahead, obviously, but that's mainly because of the cost of living squeeze we're expecting. In terms of the breakdown of that growth, Next brand in the U.K., excluding overseas, grew by 19% in the period. Obviously in our stores, we were broadly flat.
That means the Next brand over the three-year period, Next brand of clothing in the U.K. has increased by around compound 6% in the period. Label drove a lot of growth, 100% growth in Label. Of that growth, 44% of it came from getting better sales from existing clients. A lot of that was about the fact that we have launched them on what we call Label Plus, which enables us to take an order on our website for stock that is in our partners' warehouses and deliver it to our customers, not on a next day promise, but on a two-day promise. It comes into our warehouse, gets consolidated with the rest of the order, goes out in two days. New brands have driven a lot of the growth.
Of that growth of 56%, 15 of it comes from either licenses, where we are the licensee for people like Baker by Ted Baker or from new wholly owned brands that we've started ourselves, women's brands like Friends Like These and Love & Roses, which we have created within the last three years. Moving to overseas, 35% overall growth in overseas. Again, two stories here. 16% growth in nextdirect.com, aggregators up 230%. The vast majority of this is coming from European aggregators, I should stress. If you look at aggregators now are around 20% of our total overseas business, and we would expect them to continue to increase their participation of our online overseas business as we progress through the next few years.
Just focusing on the nextdirect.com numbers, this is the on our own website, 16% increase over three years ago. Obviously, that is very significantly affected by the closure of Russia and Ukraine in the last year. If we strip that out, the growth was 27%. We still are seeing strong growth in our own website on sort of like-for-like website basis. We're still seeing strong growth alongside the growth in aggregators, which is encouraging. In terms of sales per customer, we're seeing significant growth in customers overseas, 37% growth in customers and a 7% decline in average sales per customer. That is what you would expect in the normal course of events. Your new customers, by definition, take a lot less money than your more established customers.
The faster you grow your customer base, the lower you would expect your average sales per customer to be, even if each cohort by year was increasing or maintaining their sales. What's interesting is when you look at the U.K., it's a similar picture in terms of growth, in terms of cash and credit customers, significant growth in both, but much more significant growth in people choosing not to take an account. When you look at average sales per customer, this is surprising because in both cases, despite very large growth in customer numbers, we've also seen growth in sales per customer. We think that is all about Label. It's all about the increased offer on our website and it also gives us a degree of confidence that the growth that we're getting from Label is truly incremental.
Margins, big change over the last, over the last 3 years, 4% adverse movement. Some of that for good reasons, some of it for bad reasons. The good reasons are the change in mix. If Label's growing very fast, you'd expect us to make lower margins on that. We've got to share the profit with our clients. The shift in the growth in Label and overseas undermining margin by 2.5%, unplanned freight costs still affecting the online business. That's a sort of justifiable margin erosion. The markdown, actually an improvement, and this is again the inverse of what's happened in retail. In retail, we had it is less able to clear its stock. The markdown was a bigger percentage of sales as a cost.
Here online has become more effective at selling stock and has become more effective at selling it. Warehouse and distribution, a lot of inflation going through here. Just in terms of wages, were nothing else to have happened, the increase in wages and fuel and other de-inflationary costs would have pushed costs up by 1.8% of sales. The vast majority of that was offset, particularly the vast majority of the wage increases were offset by higher average selling prices meant we picked fewer units. Whilst our cost per unit went up by 1.8%, in order to do the same amount of money, we needed to pick fewer units. You sort of get the benefit of average selling prices helping efficiency in the warehouses.
On top of that, you got the new space we opened, and the depreciation of the new equipment that we've bought eroding margins by 0.6% and international eroding margin by 0.3%. Big improvement as a result of not printing catalogs. We're not spending nearly as much more on digital marketing as we've saved on catalogs and print. Technology across the whole group, a big increase in cost as we modernize our systems and move our technology forward. Just looking at that margin by business type. Next brand, as you'd expect, is the most profitable. We do all the, you know, we own the brand, we invest in the design work, take the risk, 19.9%. Label, less profit. We share the profit with our client brands. Overseas, much lower margin.
Of those numbers, the one I'm most worried about is the overseas number. That's the one where to a degree we dropped the ball. If you put that in the context of three years ago, you can see Next brand and Label because of where inflation costs in warehousing and technology mainly eroding their margin, but a big drop in overseas margin. The reasons for that are, during the pandemic, there were increases in duty and import levels in some of our key countries. Delivery costs went up, and we didn't put prices up to adjust for that. We took the view during the pandemic that we were better to keep the business going and retain the customers than we were to put prices up.
It was a different view from that which we took everywhere else, and in hindsight, I'm not sure it was the right one. It was the one we took, and we will be correcting that going forward in two ways. We'll be delivery costs, we are renegotiating back towards pre-pandemic levels, and prices will rise naturally next year anyway in GBP terms because the devaluation of the GBP. Actually our prices relative to the U.K. will increase without us having to increase local prices in local currency. We'll recover some of that in the year ahead. Aggregator participation, we would expect to make less money on an aggregator than we make on our own site. That accounts for some of the erosion, the huge growth in aggregation.
We've got the technology and marketing increases that you'd expect. Technology you'd expect the marketing increases because we are becoming much more effective at marketing overseas and have spent more money as a result. Looking forward to next year, we're still expecting inflation and technology costs to erode margins by around 2% in the brand. Label less so, this is because we've done an enormous amount of work to improve the profitability of Label. The vast majority of which has been about eliminating unprofitable items from unprofitable brands. Basically, online, you get to the point where the average selling price drops enough. If you've got a low enough average selling price and a high enough returns rate, you don't make a profit.
Brand by brand, territory by territory, country by country, channel by channel, we've gone through to identify all of those items and eliminated them. We think we can add at least 1% to margin from doing that. Overseas, we're expecting to see a significant recovery as we make corrective, correct some of the issues that we talked about earlier. Mercifully or sadly, we're not gonna talk about the finance business at this point because we just didn't have. We could have kept you for another 20 minutes, but I thought, yeah, on balance, I took a straw poll and people said they'd rather I didn't do that. All the detail is in the pack. Other than what we've said about the balances and bad debt and payment rates, there's nothing new to add there.
We're gonna instead just focus on Total Platform, which is a very small part of the business. As it grows, we think it's important that we give you an insight into the economics of the business. Starting with total sales, now this is GTV. That consists of two elements. The vast majority of it are our clients' business on their Total Platform websites, and we charge a commission on that, on those sales. For other services, like retail distribution, retail systems, shipping to commission partners, all of the other services we provide on a cost- plus basis. The value of that cost plus income also goes into sales, including the profit we make from it, and that was around GBP 15 million. That's the sort of breakdown of the sales of the business.
In terms of continuing business, GBP 19 million of business that we've dropped by mutual consent. We worked out that actually, and we mentioned this six months ago, for very small clients, Total Platform in its current incarnation is not appropriate. It's like trying to deliver a bunch of flowers in an articulated lorry. It's just too big a solution for very low volume retailers. We've dropped two of those. Looking at our continuing business, the profit we made on that from the services was GBP 5.4 million, 4.3%. Our target is to be somewhere between 5% and 6% of our clients' turnover as a profit. Looking ahead to the year ahead, we expect that margin to nudge up.
One of the big reasons for the drop in margin this year was that we had some unforeseen start-up costs that we hadn't costed in and that we've been able to eliminate going forward. That's why we think we'll get the margin improvement in the year ahead. In terms of the equity profit, equity profit of GBP 16.8 million, obviously much more than we're making on the trading profit from Total Platform. It's worth just breaking down, getting into the detail of that because although the underlying profit is similar at GBP 16.3, there are a couple of big movements in there that you need to know about. Deferred tax asset gave us a benefit of GBP 3.5 million.
Joules, a lot of the stock that we were expecting on board as part of the transaction was delivered very late, and therefore was much less valuable by the time it got to us, and we've written that off. There was a GBP 3 million cost there to offset the deferred tax asset. Looking forward to next year, underlying profit of GBP 19 million, significant increase in the underlying profit of our old businesses. I do need to mention that Joules, we now think that weaning them off the discounts that they had got used to is going to take us much longer than we expected. I mean, actually, we have seen exactly the same pattern in Gap and Victoria's Secret, both of which were distressed when we bought them. We're deeply discounting for over a year.
It took us much longer to build back full price sales there. We have built back full price sales, but the period of time it's taken is more like a year rather than the sort of three or four months you might hope for. The cost of that we think is gonna be about GBP 7 million in the year ahead. We still think even accounting for that cost, we still think Joules was a very good buy. It's not quite as good as we thought it was at the time. We're expecting Total Platform to contribute around the same amount next year as it has done this year. Moving on to guidance for the year ahead. Very difficult year to forecast.
In our statement, we make the point, and I would re-emphasize it here, that we don't have a crystal ball, and we don't have a big, complex economic model, neither of which, as you know, work anyway. Our guidance is very much about intuition, and our intuition is that in the H1 will be significantly worse against last year than the H2 . You might think that was about the revision in our average selling price that we've given now. It's not. In January, we said average selling prices we expected to go up by 8% and 6% respectively for summer and winter. We now think that number's gonna be nearer 7% and 3%.
We've managed to capture some of the freight benefits straight away, that's filtered through into spring/summer prices and autumn/winter prices. It's all about factory gate prices coming down combined with lower freight costs and new sources of supply. You might think that kind of justifies the imbalance, but that's not the reason for it. The reason for it is that, if you look at what will then be four years ago, which is a much more normal year, actually the growth in both halves is even. The reason we think last year might be abnormal is all to do with the fact that in the H1 we saw, first of all, an exceptionally warm summer, and secondly, huge amount of restocking for events, Jubilee, weddings.
All of those stored up events that people hadn't done during the pandemic took place last year, and people were looking at their sort of party gear being three years out of date and replaced it. We think that that means that the H1 is going to be challenging, particularly the second quarter. If I... You know, and this is getting down to the very dangerous micromanagement of our trading statement guidance, you know, this comes with huge caveats and only to no decimal places as well. We think roughly first quarter will be down 2%, second quarter down 4%. Full year, -1.5%.
In terms of how that breaks down, we expect retail to be down 4%, online to be down 1%, finance, driven by the rebuilding of balances, up 8%. In terms of what that means for profit, the loss of retail sales we're expecting to cost us GBP 39 million. That's before any inflationary costs. That's assuming sort of a inflation neutral environment. Just the margin would be GBP 39 million. Online, loss of GBP 9 million, but we'll be able to more than reverse that out, we think, by the profitability work we're doing in overseas. That will give us, overall, you know, GBP 5 million increase in online, GBP 2 million from finance. The finance business in the year ahead, and there's a very good paragraph explaining exactly what this is about.
The finance business, because it borrows its money from Group and because the rate at which it borrows money from Group has gone up, isn't gonna increase its profits by much. Because Group has not had to increase its borrowings to fund that, it will make a profit on the lending. That co-amounts to GBP 5 million. The consumer lending taken as a whole will contribute, we think, around GBP 7 million towards profit. All that seems as nothing when compared to the cost increases that we're facing in the year ahead, GBP 116 million, of which GBP 67 million is wages in one way or another.
In terms of the one way, one way is our own wages, which will go up by GBP 52. Then we've got the indirect wages that we incur as a result of our U.K. supply base, and these are, you know, mainly our couriers. The GBP 15 million of wage inflation that is coming is passing straight through to us from people like our distribution, our courier network. Energy still a headwind in the year ahead. Technology continuing to increase. Offset against that, continued benefit from average selling prices. This is the efficiency we get from higher average selling prices drives warehousing efficiency. That number is not as big as we thought it was going to be when we thought inflation was gonna be 7% in the H2 .
If you're wondering, as I'm sure you all are, what has happened to the extra GBP 10 million we made last year, we increased our guidance, our profits for last year by GBP 10 million, but didn't increase our forecast. The main reason we haven't is the reduction in average selling price means that we are not getting an efficiency that we were expecting. We've kind of... In some ways, we've taken the bad news for that. We have taken the inefficiency we'll get from prices not going up by as much as we thought they would, but we haven't put anything into sales because we think it's too early to gamble on that at this point. That gives us overall profits GBP 795 million, which is exactly what we forecast in January.
In terms of what that means in terms of earnings per share, earnings per share down 6.4%, marginally less than PBT as a result of share buybacks. It's a 12.5% drop as a result of increased corporation tax. I thought this would be a good time to sort of take a step back from the business. Internally, at any rate, Next feels a very, very different business from how it felt when we were talking to you sort of in 2017 in the run-up to the structural change we knew was on the horizon.
In many ways, it feels like we're sort of at a pivot point, and I wanted to just sort of explain how we're thinking about the business going forward, because the way we're thinking about the business today is very different from how we were thinking about it seven, eight years ago. First thing to reiterate is that our sole measure of success is the sustained growth in earnings per share. The reason for that is because long term, regardless of what rating we're on, which I know a lot of people get very hung up about their rating and all your recommendations and all that stuff, which obviously are very important, but ultimately, 10, 15 years' time, people will not remember the rating from yesterday, today, tomorrow, in a year's time.
It's the earnings per share that count. That is what we focus on. If you look at the earnings per share of the group over the last 20 years, including accounting for the value of dividends through reinvesting them, that would have given you a compound annual growth of around 14.1%, which we think is a very, very good return. If we were just looking at that, we could feel quite pleased with ourselves. However, last eight years, that has diminished significantly to 5.4%. I think that sort of ought to beg the question, and certainly in our own minds it begs the question, is the nature of this slowdown, because we're shifting from being a growth business to a mature business?
I should say first of all that I got a lot of grief internally for using the word mature. We're going to use the word established going forward just for sort of PR effect. We are, you know, are we established or a growth business? There are all sorts of excuses we can come up with or very good reasons, however you like to look at it, for the lower growth rates over the last three years, structural shift, COVID, cost of living. Of those, obviously by far the biggest has been the structural shift. Just to kind of reemphasize how problematic that's been for a group whose turnover has slowly notched up, obviously underneath the bonnet, the online business has gone up by 98% with all the operational costs, CapEx, inefficiency, that has involved.
Sort of one business growing very fast with great difficulty and pressure and cost, and the other business moving backwards with its cost base not moving back half as much as its sales, at least in the short term. That's kind of what we've had to cope with. I don't think just looking at those three things on their own is enough to say, "Well, don't worry, we're gonna go back to 14%," because we are a much more established business than we were 10, 15 years ago. We've now got you know, nearly a quarter of the households in Britain. If we assume we've got one account per household, we've got nearly a quarter of the households in Britain have a Next Directory account, Next online account.
We've got stores pretty much everywhere we want them with pretty much the space we want them to have. Our ranges now are much, much broader than they were in the past. You know, we stretch everything from sports shoes to upholstery. Our room to increase customer base or gross store space or broaden our offer, the engines of growth of the past are not as big as they have been in the past. I should stress that doesn't mean we think that the Next brand has got nowhere to go in the U.K. If you look at our market share, in virtually all of our categories, we're below 10%. I don't think we are big enough in any one of our markets, with maybe the exception of childrenswear, maybe not.
I don't think we're big enough in any one of our markets to say we just can't grow faster than the market. We think we can grow faster than the market, and we think the market is likely to grow, but we can grow faster than the market, but that will be about execution, whether we're good enough to do it. There's nothing structural that will, that is going to constrain our growth in those areas, albeit we're unlikely to get the exceptional growth that we've got in the past. The advantage of being an established business, though, is that it does give us a number of very effective, retail, in the broadest sense of the word, retail and online assets.
If you look at those assets from the warehousing to the thousands of bespoke systems applications we have written for our business, the retail applications we've written for our business, through to our call centers and our store network as a distribution point for stock, we think that we can use those to build new businesses, and that's really what Total Platform is all about. In terms of the advantages Total Platform gives to its clients, we think and what we're seeing from our, the experience of our clients is very significant. First and foremost, overnight, they get a better service. Very few retailers, particularly smaller online operators with their own direct-to-consumer offer, have next day delivery by 11:00 PM. It's much, what we offer is much more than that.
For example, Reiss that's now on our Total Platform, in any one of their stores can order any item in stock. If they haven't got an item in stock, customer asks for a size, they can order any item in stock available in any store or any warehouse or indeed our Next Label. They can order any one of those items in stock for delivery to that customer, to their home or back to the store for the next day. That has put at least 5% on their retail sales since we launched that service for them. We think that the service improvements we can offer our clients are significant. It offers them frictionless growth. It offers them the type of growth we weren't able to get over the last...
When we grew our sales by 98%, it was extremely painful. For most of our clients, growing at 50%, 100% in a year would eat up 0.2%, 0.3% of our capacity, so they can get that growth without all the pain of moving warehouse and the costs involved, which are lower anyway. They get lower costs and of course all their growth going forward is CapEx free and variable, which means that if they have a downturn in sales, which all retailers at some point have a fashion accident, hopefully not too often, but they do, and that's what tends to kill them. It kills them because they've got a big fixed cost base that wipes out their sales. Well, on Total Platform, all of your costs relate to your sales. They're variable. Certainly for online.
The final thing, you know, this is hard to measure, is that it gives our clients focus. I've said this before, no one starts a fashion business because they love warehousing and system security. It's an enormous distraction for people whose, actually, where they're adding the value is in designing the product, creating the brand, the photography, the marketing, the tone of voice, the DNA. That's where they can add value. Total Platform allows them to focus 100% on that. The things that have stopped us growing the business faster than we have have not been demand for the business. It has been warehouse capacity and the time it was taking us to write new web systems, we've taken action to dramatically improve the position of both of those.
First of all, in October, when we got the new automated picking and Elmsall, capacity will no longer be a constraint to taking on new clients. Secondly, our technology, by the time we get to March next year, the timescales for onboarding new customers in terms of writing the new software will be dramatically reduced. I want to spend a little bit of time talking that through because I find it fascinating. You may not, but I think it's really, really interesting. When we started with Total Platform, the fastest way of getting new clients up and running was to take our software and make a separate copy of the software for each and every client, which is what we've done.
Making a new version of our software, adapting it for each individual client, getting their colors, menu structures, all the things we need to change to get that customer live, that is extremely expensive and very slow. It was actually the fastest way of getting the business up and running and proving the point. It has another problem, and this problem is one that grows exponentially as you increase the number of clients you have, and that is about updating their website. Our promise to our clients is that any improvement we deliver in our functionality will automatically flow through to you. At the moment, any improvement we make to our own website, we then have to go separately update and test each of our client websites to put that improvement through. It becomes like painting the Forth Bridge.
The more clients you have, by the time you get to the last client, you've already got the next improvement live. Going forward, we are writing our code in such a way as to structure Total Platform in a completely different way, the way that most people write software, and that is to have one master, one code base and to hang off that code base, lots of templates of the same code base. Now, what I should stress is this does not involve any detraction from the client's ability to have the website looking and feeling like they want it to look. It have their colors, their menu structures, their navigation, their picture sizes.
We have made those into templates that you can change for new clients, which means a bit like with your Word document, you can all build it to have it looking like you want it to look with your template, your headers, your footers, your menus. When Word upgrade their software, everyone gets the same upgrade, and that will be the case going forward with this software. This new approach has dramatically already changed our timescales. To give you a sense of that, I've got a complicated graph that attempts to show timescales and cost. The horizontal axis here is time, is timescales.
It took us 11 months, this is just for the development, not for the spec or the, or for the bedding in, but for this development of Reiss, it took us 11 months elapsed time and indexing that to 100. If you imagine what we've done here on the chart, that is equivalent of 100 people working every month. It was slightly more than that in reality, 100 heads developing that website. That's what it cost us over the period to develop Reiss. By the time we got to JoJo, we'd written enough of our code in reusable format to significantly reduce that. The timescales didn't come down dramatically.
They went from 11 to eight, but the numbers of people we required to be working on the project for those, eight months dropped to around 1/2 the level they were before. With Made.com that we are currently coding, we have, we have increased the amount of reusable code that we've got, but we've also increased the concurrency with which we can write the software. What that means is that we can halve the timescales. The development time will come down to four months. Slightly more people working for those four months, but overall, still a reduction in the total cost in terms of development time to 24%.
By the time we've launched Joules, and we've completed the process of building all of our templates, new clients from March next year onwards, we think the development time will drop to three months, with a cost at around 15% of the cost of what we spent to launch Reiss. A very different world from the one that we've been living in and one that allows us to take on far more clients. I should stress that doesn't mean that if a client turns up, you know, 1st of January, we can deliver it end of March, 'cause obviously, you spend a couple of months specifying, negotiating, a couple of months bedding in. Realistically, it's still 6 months from client saying go to delivering it, but a dramatic reduction in both the cost and timescales of Total Platform.
What that means is that our relatively slow delivery rate that we've had over the, you know, this year, and previous years will accelerate going forward. We think in addition to Joules, we can take on another four clients Next year, the year after that, at least eight. What I'm not going to do, and please don't do this, is say Next plans to take on four clients Next year and eight the year after. Whether or not we get those clients is, you know, it's a bit like marriage. It's not just one person's decision. We are not going to, we're not gonna set ourselves a target of the number of clients we take on, because if we do, what will happen is we'll end up taking on clients that we shouldn't, underpricing the product.
What I guess what I'm saying is that going forward, from March next year onwards, it will be demand for our service that will limit the growth, not our ability to deliver it. That's Total Platform. Equity investments. This was a sort of unforeseen consequence of doing Total Platform. When we started Total Platform, we had dreams of becoming a vast service provider and, you know, those dreams, deeply buried, still exist. What we realized, you know, particularly when we were talking with Reiss actually is that kind of for our client, for every 1 GBP we could accelerate their growth by, we might make GBP 0.04 or GBP 0.05. When you look at their margin structure online and what we would charge them, they would make GBP 0.30 to GBP 0.40.
We sort of thought, actually, if we're gonna do all this work, and we've got very few clients that we can onboard, we should really focus on the ones that are prepared to have and let us invest in them, which is what we've done. As it stands today, we're obviously making 3 x as much money from our investments as we're making from the trading on the platform. There are two important facts to this. The first is that we get a share of the upside of Total Platform.
The second, and it's very difficult to quantify this, but what I can tell you is that in working with clients in whom we have a share, the collaboration is so much better at every level of the organization because people at Next know, well, if these guys are arguing over 0.5% of commission, and I have to give up that 0.5%, I'm gonna get a quarter back 'cause we own 50% of them. It just makes all of those conversations much, much more productive. We think that that has been a sort of unforeseen benefit of taking a stake, as well as the foreseen benefit of the profits. That doesn't mean we're going to invest in anything. We have four criteria for investing in Total Platform clients. The first is they've got to be great brands.
By that we really mean it has to be very clear what they stand for, both in terms of their minds, their customers' minds, their buyers' minds, their suppliers. Has to have a very clear market position 'cause that is what having a great brand is all about. They have to have the potential, we have to have the potential in one way or another to add value to those clients. There's no point in us just becoming another sort of venture capitalist picking up bits and bobs here and there. We have to see a way that we can add value, either through Total Platform or in other cases through some, you know, licensing the product within our, within our own group.
The businesses either have to have great management in place, or we have to know the people that we're gonna parachute in to run the business. The final thing is that they have to be the right price. By that, I mean we have to make a good return, we have to expect to make a good return on the investment that we're making in the business, which means somewhere sort of probably north of 20% internal rate of return is the most of the appraisals we're looking at, and we're looking at that, so those sorts of return. Of those rules, obviously, rules are, it's very important that you have the ability to break them. The one rule that we don't plan to break is the last one. We don't make strategic investments, we make investments.
I will repeat, some of you may have heard my dad's joke about this, but I'll say it anyway. Dad used to say, "If a company makes an investment, you say, 'That's brilliant. I love companies that invest.' If they make what they call a long-term investment, what they're really telling you is that they're making a low return investment, and if they make a strategic investment, sell the shares." That was his view. We're not, you know, this is not part of a grand plan. The only reason to buy shares in a company ultimately is to make money out of them. In terms of managing those businesses, in many ways we are going to act like a venture capitalist. We don't intend to micromanage these businesses.
The reason we want them to have good management is 'cause we want them to be managed independently and we think that if the chief executives of these businesses don't feel like chief executives, we will end up with a company getting basically absorbed into the corporate blob. The very thing we've bought is the sort of unique DNA, look, feel, attitude of the company. If we start to try and manage that ourselves, it will just end up looking exactly like Next. That said, it's very different from a financial investor in that with Total Platform, we are managing, directly managing all of the operations of the business. We are managing a very large part of the risk of that investment in our business as usual, warehousing, call center, retail distribution network, platforms, online security, all the things that we normally do.
We are, we're more than a venture capitalist, but we don't aim to create a huge sprawling retail conglomerate that sort of controls everything from the center. Our product skills are another asset that we're looking at leveraging partly through licensing. This is where, for example, at Baker by Ted Baker, they do the design work. They do everything involves a piece of paper or a card. We turn that piece of paper into reality using our sourcing, quality, technology expertise, fabric expertise. We buy the stock, we take the risk. We make, because we're taking the risk on the stock, we make a good margin, and we pay the licensor a royalty fee. That business in the year ahead, we expect to contribute GBP 85 million to group's turnover. Of that, perhaps surprisingly, GBP 20 million of it is home.
We've got some very exciting home licenses coming up in the year ahead that we're planning to launch. Then layered on top of that, we're also using our product skills to launch new brands where we see gaps in the market. That between Next and Lipsy, we don't feel those two brands can service, and we expect them to contribute around 55 million GBP in the year ahead. That would include something like Made, where we bought the brand, but we bought 100% of it, and it will have its own buying team, but everything else will be finance, HR, systems, all be managed by Next. Final asset that we've got that we think has more potential is the Next brand overseas. Next brand overseas has been hugely successful.
It's a GBP 750 million business we didn't really have 10 years ago. It is, it's very uneven in terms of our reach. If you look at the world's consumer spending, this is the world's consumer spending on everything, around 26% of it is in Europe and the Middle East. If you look at Next, the share of Next's overseas business, this is all excluding the U.K., it's more like we're doing about 87% of our overseas business in Europe and the Middle East. We're doing a lot to reinforce that business and make it feel more and more like a local business. We already have a big hub in Germany serving most of our EU markets, and in the Middle East, we will be opening a hub within the next year.
The question is: Is there more that we can do to address the parts of the world's markets that we are not in? Here I think the reason that we are failing in these areas, not failing, but just not succeeding, is because the direct-to-consumer model doesn't work. When you think about it, manufacturing stock in Bangladesh, shipping it by container freight to the U.K., putting it away in the U.K., and then air freighting it back customer by customer, item by item to someone in India doesn't make a lot of economic sense. We think that there are other ways of addressing these markets, and without necessarily being confident that we will be successful in any of them, we will try them.
The challenges are, you know, people in those parts of the world may just not like our stock, the local competition may be just too strong, and if that's the case, there's nothing we can do. There are lots of other barriers that we can do something about. Tariffs and admin, delivery times, strong local operators. All of those we can address through doing business in a slightly different way. Will involve lower margins and sharing the profit in one way or another with local operators, whether that be a franchisee, a wholesaler, a local aggregator, or a licensee.
We think that there may be an opportunity for the brands to have a presence in these countries, as other brands have done, through a different type of relationship, where the stock is manufactured at source, shipped directly to the country in which we're going to sell it, with, in some cases, the risk on that stock being taken by the vendor rather than by us. If I look at these new opportunities, that's the one that's least advanced, and therefore we have to, you know, we don't know it'll be successful. What I can absolutely guarantee you is we will do everything we can to experiment with lots of different models to see what can be achieved over there.
We know from some of our competitors that they are more successful at this than us, and there is an opportunity. How big it is, we can't say. Those are the new opportunities about which I spent a long time talking. The profit that they're expected to make in the year ahead, and on the overseas profit, by the way, that's not our website, that is just the small number of retail franchises we have at the moment, is only GBP 39 million, and it is the froth, I don't I would hate for the people in this room to think all Next and Simon are thinking about over the next year are going to be all these new wizzy businesses and the old business will just be left to sort of tootle along.
Actually, you know, 80%, 90% of my time is gonna be spent on existing business. These new businesses, we are going to accelerate and, to a degree, insulate from the rest of the business through creating a new division, which we have done. We now have a Group Investments, Acquisitions, and Third-Party Division. Part of the beer has gone into this division, and that's the Label business. The reason for that is because so much of what this business is about is relationships with third-party brands, and Label already has very good relationships with all of its clients. All of our sort of non-Next business will go into this new division. You'll see the RNS, Jeremy Stakol, who's at the back. Jeremy's going to run that. There are two purposes of this new division.
The first, and by far the most important, is to maximize the growth of these businesses. I should use the word maximize, not control. There will be other people in the group who have ideas. There'll be people in our e-commerce team who initiate conversations about Total Platform. There will be people in our home department who initiate licenses. Jeremy is not there to stop those people taking the initiative. He's there to make those initiatives work harder to push them forward that other people can't do in their day-to-day job. The second is to make sure that the rest of us are all focused as much as we can on our core business 'cause there's an awful lot there to sort of love and protect.
GBP 795 million or GBP 750 million of that profit that we're hoping to make comes from the Next brand, and to a degree Label. We're very clear about our priorities for the year ahead. For the year ahead, we need to focus on three things. The first is product. Really this is all about maximizing the opportunities that we now have through the opening up of travel. As we've taken more brands on our website and begun to expand our customer base, I think we have the opportunity to broaden our ranges as well, particularly at the top end of the price architecture.
If you were to go into Next buying, and one of the Next buying teams to sit down and say, "Well, you know, how's the sort of established business been?" It would not feel to you like an established business. You would see a huge amount of energy, new sources of supply being brought on, lots of new travel, whether that be inspiration travel or travel into the manufacturing base, lots of new designs just stretching the breadth of our handwriting and the breadth of our price architecture. Service. Now, this is an area that during the pandemic. Obviously, during the pandemic, our service slipped, and as we have raced to keep up with that 98% growth, we have managed to operate the business. We managed to get 20% more production out of the space than we thought was possible.
The space that we had has delivered 20% more sales than we thought was possible five years ago. That has come at a cost. By industry standards, we still have some of the best online service in our sector. Things like delivery on time, the no picks in the warehouse, items that are picked but not packed, all of those measures have deteriorated over the pandemic. This year, if sales are gonna slow down and we have got all this new space, that is the time that we really need to get all of those service metrics, not just back up to where they were during the pre-pandemic, but ahead of where they were in the pan-pandemic. That is our very clear ambition.
From picking, packing, the new automation we're putting in, working with our courier network to make sure their service is better, the pickups and returns we execute in stores, the speed at which we get returns back into stock, and the quality and speed with which we resolve the complaints that happen. All of those, we have already done quite a lot to improve, but we think there's a big program of improvement we can get in the year ahead. That will not just improve service, it will also reduce cost. Of course, cost is our other big focus for the year ahead. Whether that be cost of goods, and you can see the progress that we've made there.
Our cost of our operations, we really have got to make sure that all of the additional space and overhead we've taken on opening Elmsall 3 translates into every cost saving that is available from that opportunity, and there are lots. Profitability, I've already alluded to this. This is about making sure that we do what we didn't do in some of the headier periods of growth, and that is make sure that every new brand, every new item that we're putting on our website, every territory that we trade in, that every single one of those is profitable. That means taking some tough decisions about taking some brands and some items from some brands out of some channels. We're very clear about the opportunity for doing that and that will become a core part of the business going forward.
The final thing that we can focus on is getting better value from our technology. We have delivered an enormous amount in terms of technology. We've doubled the size of our technology team in three or four years, doubled the cost of it. I'm not looking to save that money because actually I think we need that investment, but I think we can get much better value out of it. I think our users can be much clearer about the sort of software that they're specifying and where the benefits lie. From a technology point of view, we can deliver it much more efficiently. I'm not expecting that technology costs to go up beyond this year.
Those are our priorities for the year ahead, and that is what 90% of our time and people are focusing on. If we can do all of those and at the same time, put in the foundations, lay the foundations of these new businesses and begin to grow them, then as difficult as the year ahead looks, I think the company feels like it's in a much better place than it was in 2017. Those of you who are here, most of you, I think in 2017 will remember our first 15-year scenario was there in order to reassure you that we weren't going to go bust as a result of the decline in retail. We didn't have any of these new businesses at that point in time.
The kind of the mountain we had to climb at that point was huge, and we didn't have a lot of valves to provide the extra growth. Where we're standing today, we've got a difficult year ahead of us. Our view is that the recovery, for what it's worth, is likely to be in the following year. When that happens, the company is very well-positioned to take advantage of growth opportunities that it didn't have as it stood 5, 6 years ago. On that note of almost optimism, and I only said it 'cause last year Tony said he was more depressed walking out of the meeting than he was walking into it, and I wanted to leave you on a vague high. With that, we will move on to questions. Who would like to go first?
Yeah. Warwick.
Good morning. It's Warwick Okines from BNP Paribas Exane. I've got one question about the beer and one the froth.
Mm.
On the core business, the retail division has performed, I think, better than you'd expected. Obviously, better than your 15-year stress test. You said that some of that is one-off with competition shifting. But what would it take for you to reassess the opportunity in the retail business, be that more investment in city center or opportunity for third-party brands, et cetera, in store? My second question on Total Platform, what sort of clients do you think you'll be signing up over the next few years? Because a number of your deals so far have come from distressed retailers or overseas retailers. What sort of mix would you expect?
I'll answer the easy question first. We don't know what to expect. We didn't know what to expect when we started the business, and the only, you know, our only hurdle is going to be that it's profitable to engage. We would as many as we can that are profitable will do, and those that aren't profitable, we won't do. The mix is not really within our control, and I've got no idea how it'll pan out. When we started the business, we didn't even expect to take stakes in our clients, so we're kind of feeling our way forward on that business. In terms of retail, what would it take? I think another year of like-for-like growth to convince me that retail has stabilized.
I wouldn't want you to think that we're passing up all opportunities to relocate stores. You know, we have continued to, you know, in Watford, we opened a very big new store as a result of the closure of John Lewis. We, you know, we haven't said, "Don't spend any more on retail." We're still spending GBP 40 million a year on CapEx on retail, but it's just actually when you look at our current pounds per square foot, in most locations, it's not enough to justify growth in the store. This is not a global decision. It's not us sitting in the boardroom thinking, "Well, shall we or shan't we expand retail?" It's us looking at Nottingham thinking, "Well, we're taking GBP 302 a square foot.
We could double our space, but at GBP 300 a sq ft, it's not screaming out for new space. We've got all the products that we want in Nottingham. Why would we take a new shop or should we take a new shop? It'll be a location-by-location decision rather than a sort of global how do we feel about retail conversation anyway. In answer to the question about third parties, we have tried putting third-party brands in retail. There is one significant problem we've encountered with it, and that is we can't make any money out of it. And we don't think it's coincidence that so many of the casualties were in effect mass market brands sold through retailers that didn't own them, because I'm not sure there's enough profit.
If you look at the net margins of our retail business, I'm not sure there's enough profit there for two brands. What we found when we introduced brands into it, we did a big trial in our Metro Centre shop, quietly, obviously, put lots of brands in there. We found that they did take enough money just about to justify the space they were taking, but 80% of that, of those sales came off our own sales. Once you looked at the margin diminution necessary to pay the brand something, it just wasn't worth it. I wouldn't hold out a lot of hope on that other than where we've got a license. Where we've got a license and we're making decent margins, then we can put it in.
We already do have, you know, Joules, and Victoria's Secret, where we own half the U.K. franchise. We are putting those into our stores. Good questions. Yep.
Yes, Adam Cochrane from Deutsche Bank. On pricing, you've had the opportunity to maybe take a bit more pricing. You clearly decided to pass it back to the consumer. Was that a decision that you thought the consumer needs the pricing? You don't think that you get the volume uplift. What's the sort of rationale on, you know, having outlined already some price increases that you're gonna take to make them a bit lower? Secondly, when you talk about the lower and quicker development costs on Total Platform, again, is that something that makes your business more profitable, or is that something that you just pass it through to the end client? Thanks.
Yeah, good question. First on prices. Look, I mean, as you know, we're simple folk at Next. When our over the last 20 years, the vast majority of our prices have come down, and we have always passed on the benefit to our customers. Our view is make your margin, and if you wanna improve your margin, do it through your operating costs, not through the gross margin you make on cost of selling. The reason for that is we want to make, remain competitive. Again, you know, you can see this in countless retailers that each year they've added 0.5% to their bought-in gross margin, 0.5%, 0.5%, until one day they become very uncompetitive. We never want to get to that position.
Our view is prices go up, we have to charge our customers more. If they go back down, we certainly don't want to undermine the future competitiveness of the company by what might at the time be opportunistic but would be sort of long-term unwise. In terms of TP profit, Total Platform profitability, I think service provision is an area where it's very hard to make fat margins. I think it will, I think it will contribute to the competitiveness of our pricing rather than the margins we're likely to make. I think what it will mean is that we're much more likely to make the margin we think we're going to make at the beginning of the project.
We didn't make as much margin out of Reiss as we thought we were gonna make, largely because those development costs were much bigger than we thought they were gonna be. Yeah, Simon.
Guilty as charged, by the way. Two questions. Firstly, for Total Platform, is there a concern that people use you simply as a, as a kind of an incubator while they grow, and then eventually as they become mature, they kind of decide to take back control, and you've done an awful lot of work over, say, a three or four-year period, and then they kinda take all those learnings? Is that an argument for taking an equity holding to kind of stop them walking away because you now control it?
Secondly, in terms of the 1.6% reduction in EBIT margins you talked about, I know you gave us lots of the kind of whys and wherefores at the various points, but maybe if you could just focus that down into those elements which you think are structural and likely to stay or maybe get worse, and those elements which you think are down to kind of you know, areas of execution, or timing which you think you can improve.
Yeah. Okay. you know, a question, are we worried about customers growing with us enormously and then walking away? not really. The main reason for that is twofold, is that the day we worry about that is the day we haven't got a very good service. If a customer wants to walk away 'cause they think they can do it better or faster or cheaper themselves, it means that we haven't got the right service, and we're not as efficient and excellent as we thought we were. Secondly, and much more importantly, any capital we invest and we hypothecate some of the capital. We do account for the capital we have to invest in warehousing when we're doing a Total Platform appraisal, and we depreciate it.
Even if we've got a big empty warehouse, we'll allocate some of it to the Total Platform client. That has to deliver its target internal rate of return over the course of the contract. Any capital we invest in that client has to pay back over the course of the contract. If they leave at the end of it, the worst that's happened is that we've had a profit stream that we wouldn't otherwise have had. I think, you know, if you go into a marriage worrying about the divorce, you're never going to have a very happy time, and you're going in on the wrong basis, as my wife reminds me regularly.
sort of, can I go through the EBITDA margins and talk to you in detail about which ones we think are structural and which ones aren't? I could do, but I don't think everyone else would thank me for it. I think that's a conversation you can have with Amanda going forward. I think the big structural ones, I think, are the technology where I think we are looking at a permanent step change in the amount we spend on technology. I think a lot of the other ones, like, for example, warehousing inflation, I think over time, we would aim to get efficiencies out of our new warehouse that would begin to pay for that.
We're looking for those, the sort of margin reversal we suffered last year and this year to reverse out over the coming years. What we would hope as well is that our fixed cost base as a business would not grow as fast as our turnover, you know, certainly over the next five, six years 'cause we've had this big fixed cost. Once we get back to growth, we'd hope that would naturally lead to improving margins, but that does depend on getting back to growth. Yeah.
Richard Chamberlain, RBC. Couple from me, please, Simon. The first one's on cash flow. I guess the working capital outflow we saw, was that more than you expected late last year, and do you expect to get most of that back over the next couple of years? I think you mentioned GBP 100 million or something as a likely sort of reversal. Just the second one is on Reiss. I just wondered why you're not fully consolidating it now you've got 51% 'cause I guess effectively, you've got a controlling financial interest at least now. Why is that still being accounted for as a JV? Thanks.
Okay. Well, I'm gonna hand over the accounting question to Amanda.
Yeah. We do have 51%. We don't actually have control of some of the decisions within the business. That is the distinction. While it is technically 51%, we don't actually have control.
What, sort of operating decisions or?
Exactly. Exactly that.
Written into the shareholder agreement.
Yeah. Yeah.
Got it.
It's done in such a way that actually we don't have to consolidate it. I mean, it makes our accounts hugely confusing if we do.
Right. Okay.
Then do you wanna answer the working capital one as well, Amanda?
Yes
... as I've got you.
Exactly. There's some fairly big one-off outflows last year. ESOP is one of them.
Mm-hmm.
We will have an outflow this year with ESOP, but it won't be anywhere near as big. Last year it was about GBP 90 million. I expect this year it'll be GBP 50 million. We saw less of our employees exercising their share options because of the, where the share price was. We also saw a fairly big outflow from stock. Again, we don't think we'll see that. We've laid out our cash flow. We've given actually an estimate for working capital. Last year, in total, it was GBP 200 million. This year, we think it's gonna be a less than GBP 20 million outflow, and that's the outflow really will just be the ESOP. There's nothing unusual in there this year.
Okay. Great. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks. It's Anne Critchlow from SG. In overseas, what's the EBIT margin difference, please, between the aggregators and your own website? Then secondly, just a quick update on how Home performed versus Apparel, in the H2 and also into the current trading period. Thank you.
Aggregators and Home performance. Yeah. Aggregator margin, it varies by aggregator, and obviously it's extremely commercially sensitive. It's not sort of something I'd like to share necessarily, but it's at least 2% less. And then in terms of Home has had a really torrid year, both against last year and 3 years ago. We are beginning to see that pain is easing. Literally week by week as we get into this year, the comps begin to get much softer. But it's been a very difficult year for Home sales. Sorry, right at the back there, you had a... Tony.
Yeah. Tony Shiret, Panmure Gordon. Just a couple of things. First of all, I just wondered whether in terms of the tech, you've always done everything in a very bespoke fashion. This year, you know, with the Total Platform, you've sort of had to revisit how you've done it. The business is getting more complex clearly. I wondered whether there are any thoughts about how much of the tech you wanna keep in-house and whether, you know, there is anything truly special about what you do with your tech that someone else couldn't do for less outside. That's the first question. The second one's on automation at our Elmsall.
When you kindly took us up to see another warehouse, in that sort of vicinity a few years ago, there was a automation experiment going on, which I think involved a sort of robotic things sort of doing a bit of a sort of strictly thing around a massive floor.
Yeah.
Next to it, there was a bloke throwing things into a hopper, doing the same thing in about 1 millionth of the space. I just wondered, you know, exactly how much automation is going into Elmsall 3 or whether it's just a bit of automation.
Yeah. Okay. It's a really good question. I'm gonna start with the technology question. I think first of all there are some cases where we are going outside, and we've had good and bad experience of going outside on technology. We had a very bad experience, you might have read about it, with our payroll system, sending it outside. I think we would still go outside with that, but we would delegate. We wouldn't go outside with as much of the functionality. We would only go outside the business for the functionality that was generic, not the special functionality we wanted, and which they had to adapt, and which sort of caused a lot of problems.
We've had a very good experience in our call center, where we've brought in some third-party software and layered it on top of our bespoke software. It does a lot of the sort of call handling and data management, but the underlying applications, the functionality, the way we deal with customers, the sorts of the way the returns are dealt with, all the underlying code applications are our own, but the code that presents it to the user, which, yeah, is generic and the same in every call center, we have contracted out. We're not theological about technology.
In the vast majority of cases, what we want from our retail technology are things that other people aren't doing, and therefore to get in a consultant to build those applications is sort of, A, literally it triples the cost, and, B, the first thing they do is they regularly ring me up and say, "Oh, hello, Simon. I just want you to know that I work for X, Y, and Z, your big competitors, and we've just done a big system for them. We'd like to do the same for you." Well, actually, if we see technology and systems as being part of our advantage, contracting it out, A, doesn't make sense financially, and, B, it's part of the competitive advantage we want to build. It's not an article of faith, and where we can contract things out, we do.
Where we think we're creating value, we should be able to do that ourselves. I can see no reason why we shouldn't be a good retail technology business. Secondly, on automation, the robots you saw, unsurprisingly perhaps failed. We're they didn't work. We have got other similar robots that are called Geek+ that look like R2-D2 whizzing around carrying things. They have worked. The new warehouse is very highly automated, and the big difference between the new warehouse and our existing warehouse is that all of the items are picked into a pouch. At the moment, in our normal warehouse, our items are picked into a tub and then sorted on a big automated sortation system.
In the new warehouse, essentially items are picked, many of them automatically from bulk, into a pouch. That pouch is then delivered to an individual packer with its other partners readily available. That eliminates the sortation that the packer has to do at the moment, and it also means, for example, you can have different packaging for different clients, because once the packer has packed the item, the parcel is then resorted to destination. At the moment, the sortation to packer is also the sortation to destination. Each packer is in effect packing for a courier rather than just packing generally. The new warehouse, both in terms of picking and packing, is much more automated. To give you a flavor of that, in terms of the actual labor cost in the new warehouse versus the old one, it's about-
About 40% less.
about 40%-
Yeah
... more automated than the existing warehouse, which is already, has a lot of automation in it. Okay. Yeah. Sorry, second row back, yeah. Not you, Simon. No, behind you. You're next, Simon. Oh, yeah.
Hi, it's Georgina Johanan, and from JPMorgan. three questions, please.
Oh, no. It must be your first time. We only have two here.
Two. Okay, fine.
No room for inflation in this room here.
I'll stick to two.
Yeah.
Two questions, please. First one, just in terms of online penetration from here, where do you see that going in the U.K., please? Particularly where some retailers are actually rolling back the convenience or increasing the cost to consumers to shop online. Second question, we've all sort of read a lot about elevated inventories in the market. Just to understand what you're seeing and hearing from your brand partners on that in the U.K.. Is it sort of a less of an issue in the U.K., please? Thanks.
Yes. Okay. The second question is very relevant. Firstly, I think that graph that we showed of our own stocks is pretty representative of everything we're hearing from the rest of the industry, that everyone bought in, ended up with far too much stock last year, and they're all working their way through their stocks. I don't sense that we've got anything. Certainly Next hasn't got a, you know, our stocks are where we want them to be. I don't get the sense that the industry is very different. People don't necessarily share with you. It's a bit like stock pickers, they don't necessarily share with you the ones that have gone down. You know, I think if people are overstocked, it's not necessarily something they're going to share with us readily.
I certainly am not hearing that. In terms of U.K. penetration online, we obviously just don't know. We think that we have this extraordinary resource of all these highly intelligent analysts who make their own predictions and have a much better idea of these sorts of things than we do. We'd much rather rely on your general sense of the market than our own in that sense. We don't need to predict general market penetration, so we don't. Simon.
Thank you. Simon Bowler from NUMIS. For two questions. First one, at the interim, you spoke quite a bit around kind of tightening ranges and how you felt kind of breadth had gone too far. Just wondering, A, what learnings you've had from reversing that, and also how to then contrast that with a bit of the messaging today, which seems to be around broadening ranges or choice again. Secondly, just regards to kind of Total Platform, there's a few references around kind of integration costs being a bit higher, clearance costs and reestablishing full price sales being a bit harder and not working for smaller clients.
Just in terms of where you think about the visibility you've got on that proposition and business going forwards here, are you confident there's no more, skeletons would be a harsh word to use, but no more kind of unforeseen challenges around how you model and think about that business going forwards?
We're not confident about any other business, obviously. I think, sure... I think we have kitchen sink tip, but who knows? You know, it's in our nature to try and kitchen sink these things. I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to fine-tune it. I think the other thing is, in the context of the GBP 800 million, whether that's seven or eight or six , it's not something we're spending an awful lot of time on. It's a big amount of their profit, but it's a very small amount of our profit. It is, as I sort of stated, it's really down to the managers of those businesses, chief executive of that business to manage that profitability. I've got no reason to think that that number isn't right at this point in time.
Less around kind of this year's numbers per se.
Yeah
Just in terms of some of the challenges that you've been, you know, operational as much as anything, that it sounds like you've potentially had kind of launching over, I guess, teething problems with that as a new proposition.
No, I think the... Sorry. You're talking about the Joules one?
Yeah. well, and the
Joules was all about-
integration costs across some of the others as well.
Joules was all about their stock coming in via the administration process. I think we have learned a lesson there about stock at administration, how much of it turns up on time and how you should value it. I don't think, I don't think it's a big lesson. Far, if I look at the successes we've had on the acquisitions out of things like Made, on balance, I think we've bought things that are much more valuable than the money we paid for them rather than not. I think we wanted to highlight the fact that in Joules, that wasn't the case.
Simon, are you referring to Joules' website? Sorry, the Reiss website that took longer than we thought. Is that the point you were...
Well, it wasn't on any kind of specific point. It was more just like the aggregation of some of those challenges that you've had and the extent to which you think you're kind of through those.
No, I think in terms of, I don't think the issues have been operational. I think they have been all about actually it took longer to code.
Yeah
... some of the things than we thought it would take. We're very confident, 'cause we're well into the Made project now. We're very confident that it's gonna be much more efficient going forward. It's not something we're overly worried about or worried about at all in terms of onboarding new clients.
Sorry, just on the ranges.
Yeah. I think the key here is there is a world of difference between broadening your offer and duplicating it. We were very clear at the time, we wanted to continue to broaden the real choice for our customers, but offering them seven different versions of blue stretch chino in the same fit isn't a broader choice, it's just more of the same. We wanted to cut out the duplication but continue to push the breadth of offer.
Yeah.
Hi, Jeff Lowery at Redburn. Just one question. Your Next brand U.K. online margin, 22% pre-COVID, 19.9% last year, 17.5% this. Which of those three numbers do you think's a closer approximation to where you think you go medium term? Within that, is the cost of the new warehousing effectively in this fiscal year, or is there another step change next year, given what you've said about Q3 onwards, automation, step-ups, et cetera?
I think most of the cost is in this year and very few of the benefits. There is some cost to come through next year, 2024, 2025. All of the lion's share of the efficiencies we'll get from the automated picking, which doesn't come on stream till October, and the packing, which comes on stream next March, we won't feel until next year. I kinda think it's the other way around, actually. I think this year we take the lion's share of the pain, and next year, all being well, we'll get the benefits. In terms of long term, I'm not going to try and give you a forecast for our long-term profitability. I think what I would say is that I would not expect Next brand's margin to decline in any of the years that we grow going forwards.
If it is 7.5% this year and next year online grows, I would expect that to grow going forward, Next brand.
Yeah.
Go on.
Hi, Nick Coulter from Citi. Perhaps a follow-up to Jeff's question, if I can ask something about the big picture section. I guess beyond this year, what sort of earnings growth or CAGR do you aspire to if the 5% or 6% that you showed on screen is disappointing? Thank you.
Yeah. It's a big mistake to give CAGR aspirations. It's very easy to deliver CAGR through increasing risk. It's very hard for shareholders to see that risk. You know, we're certainly not going to make that mistake. The mistake starts with setting yourself glorious ambitions. What I can say is I would definitely want it to be more than 5.5%.
Great. Thank you. Perhaps I can ask a granular follow-up on freight. I think you said it peaked at around 6.5% of COGS. Where do you think that goes to this year, and do you expect any movement thereafter? Thank you.
Amanda, you wanna...
I think it's, it's certainly halving. It's come down significantly.
Historically, it would've been two.
Yeah.
So I think-
probably not that-
... somewhere between two and three .
Yeah.
Long term, this year, three.
Brilliant. Thank you.
Morning, Andrew Hollingworth from Holland Advisors. Just one question. It's great to hear you talk in more detail about Total Platform, and obviously it sounds like it's a pretty compelling prospect, the GBP 0.05 saving, the GBP 0.30 saving. Sorry, the GBP 0.05 benefit to you, the GBP 0.30 benefit to Reiss and so on. The only question I've got is it sounds like it's, right now, from what I'm hearing, appealing to a sort of narrow range of brand in the sense that a business is obviously in trouble, that you're taking an equity stake in, that you're hugely improving the efficiency of the business and benefiting via the equity stake. Is that right, or is there a much broader range of customers that can benefit from this that you might charge a different price for, but you maybe don't take an equity stake in?
Yeah, look, this is a very good question. At the moment, because we are so limited on capacity, we're only really talking to clients where we think we've got the opportunity to get both benefits. Once we're taking on eight clients a year, we'll be very happy with the 4%, 5% of their turnover, I think that does broaden the sort of funnel of businesses that we'll talk to.
Okay. Thank you.
Hi, Simon. David Roux from Bank of America. I've just got two questions.
Mm-hmm.
On the Total Platform. Once you've worked through all the warehousing capacity constraints and the automation, what will the GTV capacity be for Total Platform? My second question is just on current trading. It's good to see some commentary back in the release. The full price sales in January, if I recall correctly, were flat year-on-year, and that went down to minus 2%, I think, in the last eight weeks. I appreciate there's some variance in the base, et cetera. Are you perhaps able to add some color on what that was on a three-year basis? Thank you.
Yeah. We've actually put in the three-year number in the pack.
Yeah. Just over 21%.
We're in for rather odd situation where against last year, we're bang in line with the quarter's target, but against three years ago, we're beating it.
Yeah. I should say that's four years.
Four years.
Yeah.
Yeah, four years.
Four years.
Three years it was last year.
Yeah.
This year,three years, four years.
Okay. Sequentially from January to the last eight weeks, there's no slowdown on a three- or four-year basis?
No.
No.
Great.
No. You know, take what encouragement you will from that because who knows which comparative year is the right one. In terms of what GTV we could take on, obviously, it will depend very much on our clients' average selling price because our constraints are units. Our warehouse capacity is units rather than value, I wouldn't wanna put a value on it. I think what we can say is that it will give Next, at Next's average selling prices, the new warehouse will give us an increase in boxed around 40%-45% in capacity for Next. Bear in mind that our turnover in our own brand is in the order of two and a half-
Yeah
... billion.
Yeah.
In Next money, it's a sort of, it's over GBP 1 billion.
Thank you.
We've also, we have got the capacity to expand that warehouse further, the existing shell, and we've got planning permission on the site next door. We're not going to get, we're not planning to get in the same pickle that we got into, this time and sort of end up chasing capacity, that we need. Yeah. James.
Morning, James Grzinic from Jefferies. I guess two quick ones. The first one is can you perhaps share a little bit more the experience of conversions, how they developed in Powered by Total Platform businesses? I'm just trying to get a little bit more of a sense of the KPIs of just how superior the economics are when you plumb those into Total Platform.
No, we can't. It varies hugely by client. What you'll see in the first month is a drop in conversion because any big change you make to a customer's website people aren't used to, you'll see a bit of a drop. Generally, yeah I think Reiss is probably the best example 'cause it was only one that wasn't in distress of any type. They did experience a step forward in their total sales growth as a result of moving onto Total Platform. Do you wanna add anything to that, Anna?
I'm trying to think what the number was now, but it was double digits.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Secondly, do you sense you need to remap a little bit, your sourcing by geography? Some of your peers seem to be thinking that post-COVID. Is that something you're thinking much about?
yes, but it's not... The way we think about it is not in the boardroom, you'll be pleased to hear. you know, so we're not big fans of sort of clever people sitting in the boardroom going, "You know what? We need to be more in China and less in Taiwan" because what do they know? What do we know? The reality is that the, all of the movements, over the years we've gone from 50% of our stock made in China to, you know, 10%, 15% of it made. A lot of that's moved into Bangladesh. At no point has that been driven by the people at the top of the company.
The way that our sourcing business moves is partly, mainly through our buyers and quality assures who go out, source new factories, compare prices, compare capabilities, and if they can find a better factory in a new territory, than the one they've got in an existing territory, they will move the stock. At no point do we try and manage it top-top down. We help that process by making sure that in every major area of production, whether that be Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, Hong Kong, Shanghai, we have local feet on the ground and a local office so that our buyer going there is very easy for our buyers. They turn up, ring the local office saying I'm turning up, they get picked up in a car, taken to different factories.
We are actively looking in all of these areas, but that is to create the opportunity for our buyers to move their production, not in order to point them in one direction or another.
Thank you. Sreedhar Mahamkali from UBS. Just picking up on James's question there, please. You've also referred to improving factory gate prices in the release, and you've discussed it quite a bit, increasing capacity in your own efforts. Is there anything structural you're able to identify there in the efforts that you're putting through that actually you can see better prices or better margins in the medium term, or is that just a comp effect effectively?
It's not structural. It is that, you know, well, why not? I went to Bangladesh just before Christmas. Every factory I went to. All the factories work, you know, normally they work, they're obliged to give their workers eight hours, but they can give them 10. Custom practice is to give 10. That's what people want. They want the extras. All of them pretty much are cut down to the minimum. Every factory I visited, they'd cut down to the minimum. This is a fact that as average selling prices have risen, consumers haven't spent any more money. If anything, they spent a little bit less. The number of units being produced in those factories has fallen dramatically.
Layer on top of that, the fact that everyone had over-ordered, they'd accelerated their order, they pushed their order book further forward than they would normally do. When they start to decelerate, When they start to buy to more normal lead times, that leaves a hole in the factory. There is a loss of capacity at the moment. That's If you want to look at what's really driving prices back to where they were, it is the availability of capacity. What drove them up in the first place was there wasn't any capacity. What's driving it now is that there is.
A quick one, second one, closer to home. In terms of retail occupancy costs have clearly been a very big driver the last five,six years. Do you have a view on where we might go on a kinda on a three-year view? Do you think we have much more to go? I think there was an interesting chart you presented there in terms of cost versus-
Yeah. I'm very confident that we have room to go, largely because we've still got leases that were written before 2017 that haven't yet expired, and those ones we know are over-rented. We're still getting the tail-end effect of the downturn that began in 2017. We will continue to get that downturn feeding through into rents, we think, over the next two, three years. What happens beyond there, I think, will depend on two things. One is alternative use, and the other is retail sales. The second of those is by far the most important.
I think what this downturn has proven, though, is that in the long run, in the absence of alternative use, ultimately, retail rents do adjust back to where they need to get to in order to allow retailers to trade profitably. I think that the interest, a sort of bit of color on that is retail parks. In retail parks, where there seems to be a floor between GBP 11-GBP 14 a sq ft, and that's where there is alternative use from people like the value food retailers, B&M, all those sort of, that value sector, they provide a floor. We're not seeing the drops. The lower the rent, the less likely it is we'll see a big percentage drop in it. Good. I think, 10:34 AM., you've all had enough.
Those who haven't had enough, we're here to answer questions for the next-
10 minutes.
Ten minutes. Okay, thanks very much, everyone. Have a good day.