Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our interim results presentation. I'm Ian Burke, Interim CEO, and I'm here today with Mike, our CFO. Mike and I will take you through our H1 results and then take your questions. There is much ground to cover today in what has been a period of significant change for Pets at home. I'll start with the progress we have made against our strategy, the broad aims of which we believe remain the right ones. Then I'll talk about the challenges we have faced and the work we have done in understanding the root causes of our poor retail stores' performance. Since I stepped into the business 10 weeks ago as Interim CEO, I've worked quickly with the team to build a turnaround plan.
We have set four clear priorities for the retail business centered on product, price, execution, and cost, and I'll come back to these. Lastly, I'll talk to you about the strength of the business and why we are convinced that with the right execution, Pets at home will be a great business for customers, colleagues, and shareholders. Let's get started by looking at the core strategy of the business. This strategy is one you will be familiar with now: to build the world's best pet care platform, which is integrated, bringing together product, service, and advice in one place in a way that no other pet care business in the U.K. can. It's omnichannel, making the most of our 459 pet care centres and modernized digital capabilities to offer consumers great choice and convenience.
It is consumer-centric, leveraging our expertise and data to best meet the needs of the nation's pet owners. These three pillars leverage the unique strengths we have to create a compelling offer for consumers, and underpinning this strategy is our purpose, that is, to create a better world for pets and the people that love them. This purpose runs through our business, from our expert store colleagues to our trusted vets and passionate support office colleagues. Against our strategy, we have delivered progress in recent years. We have unified our portfolio of brands under a single, clear master brand, and we have seen positive results in how our brand is perceived. We have built a new digital platform, moving from an end-of-life, web-only retail platform to a modern platform with a transactional app and enhanced user experience.
Significant progress has been made, but there is still more to do integrating our vets and other services. We have consolidated our distribution network to a single site at Stafford. This fulfills both all our store and online sales and has the capacity to support future growth. We have seen further growth in our vets group, underpinning the attractions of our unique joint venture model. We have launched subscriptions. We know the attractions and potential of a subscription model in both the vet and retail sectors, and we have stepped forward our propositions. We have seen good sales growth, and there is more we can do to improve. We have launched Pets Club as our primary mechanic for promotions, and we have embarked on a new pet insurance venture using some of the core strengths we have to establish a position in the GBP 2 billion pet insurance vertical.
While this progress sets us up for the future, we must acknowledge that our retail performance has fallen short of our expectations, leading to group underlying PBT expected to be GBP 90 million-GBP 100 million this year, well below our original expectations. We've seen three main impacts on the business in recent years. First, economic impacts. I'll not spend much time on these as they are well known, out of our control, and we must be prepared to deal with them. Second, changes in the pet sector, including the normalisation impact as those large cohorts of COVID pet owners spent less after the puppy and kitten phase. There have been shifts in consumer preferences to new product ranges like fresh and frozen products, and there has been a lack of general inflation in pet products at a time when costs have increased significantly.
There are issues specific to Pets at home, which we could have dealt with better. We have lacked innovation in branded advanced nutrition ranges to which we are overexposed. We've not been quick enough to adapt our range of products to new consumer tastes. We overindex in premium ranges where inflation has been much lower than those lower value ranges sold in the grocery channel, limiting our ability to mitigate cost inflation pressures. There's been a shift by consumers into fresh and raw ranges, and we are only at an early stage in building our own propositions, and we have lacked innovation in accessories where we're missing out on many opportunities to meet customer needs.
Looking at some of these important dynamics in more detail, the pet market is going through a period of subdued growth, but even then is showing resilience with the long-standing trends of premiumisation and humanisation still evident. In the first half of the year, there has been no growth across the retail pet care sector, well below the historic trend. Against this market context, we are obviously disappointed to have underperformed, although that gap has narrowed since the start of this year. Within this market, we've also seen significant change. Changing consumer preferences have supported growth from a plethora of new direct-to-consumer brands. These brands have grown quickly, mostly expanding the fresh frozen category with premium-priced, high-quality product. In 2019, they represented about 1.5% of the food market, and they now represent about 6.5%.
They've taken share at the expense of branded advanced nutrition products, a key category for us. They now represent over a quarter of premium pet food compared to less than 10% in 2019. Growth in new innovative categories has historically been an area of strength for Pets at home. We have a long track record of bringing new products and brands to market, educating customers and driving growth as a result, and we'll need to do this again. In accessories, a lack of innovation and dynamism in our ranges has also been a problem. Once we have added buying and merchandising capabilities to our existing team, we'll focus on the opportunity for better performance in our accessories business through improved own-brand product innovation, new partnerships with third-party brands, closer relationships with Far East manufacturers, as well as ensuring we have a clear price architecture with enhanced entry price points.
What are we doing about improving our retail business? With the issues we face clear, we're not standing still while the search for a new CEO is underway. We're taking actions to improve short-term momentum as much as possible and lay the foundations for the future. Our retail turnaround plan is based around four priorities: product, price, execution, and cost. I'll look at each of these in turn. Product. We haven't retained our competitive advantage in product and are no longer the primary innovator in the sector. This will take longer to change. However, we understand where the gaps in our ranges exist, and we have clear plans to address them. This will include new own-brand and new third-party brands. These ranges, though, will not impact until FY 2027. In accessories, our recovery plans are currently less advanced.
We are strengthening our team, our processes, and our capabilities, and we'll give you an update in due course on how our product ranges develop. Moving on to price, we need to stay competitive. Overall, our pricing is broadly in the right place. We have good information and have invested where we need to, having lowered the prices on around 1,000 nutrition lines by about 12% across November and into December. We have increased prices in some areas too, all at a second half-year net cost of around GBP 4 million. We will remain price competitive within our guardrails. Turning next to execution. In recent years, the business has done a huge amount of heavy lifting on two major infrastructure projects: the move to a single fulfilment centre at Stafford and the development and launch of our digital platform.
The implementation of these projects was more complex than we originally envisaged, leading to extra costs in some areas and execution issues that have led to lost and dissatisfied customers. Additionally, our store colleagues have been stretched, and our customers are disappointed by more routine business initiatives that have not been executed well. I'll give two examples. First, we have too often poorly executed price and promotional changes in store. Second, we mishandled the launch of Easy Repeat in store earlier this year, with orders fulfilled from Stafford to the stores. Our relaunch in October had orders being picked in store for store SKUs. In light of these and other poorly executed new interventions, we are improving the implementation of new initiatives through better forward planning and simplification of tasks asked of our store managers and colleagues. The fourth component of the plan is cost reduction.
Overall, we have controlled our cost base well in recent years in spite of the sizable headwinds we've faced. This is not true everywhere. Our support office costs have increased significantly. We are taking action to reduce them and have initiated a program to remove GBP 20 million on a full-year basis. This program will be completed by year-end FY 2026, benefiting FY 2027. We will always, though, have a mindset of seeking cost efficiencies. This slide shows you the timelines for our priorities. There is much we're getting on with now: reducing our pricing, reinvigorating our training plan, improving our customer experiences, improving everyday execution, and taking out cost. These are our focus areas for the balance of the current financial year.
There are elements that will take longer, particularly around product as we reset our ranges in advanced nutrition and accessories to make them more relevant for today's pet owners. We intend to reset space within our stores to accommodate new products, but also to cater for growth areas like cat, treats, and click and collect. These space resets will be undertaken at significantly lower capital expenditures per store than the investments we have made in recent years. Our intended capital expenditure on retail stores will stay broadly in line with the current numbers, about GBP 30 million per annum, and the cost per store for these space resets will be around GBP 125,000. We are working through the planning of these product and space reset initiatives now, with a five-store trial launching next week.
The larger space reset programme will commence in the new financial year, coinciding with the new product ranges. My focus as Interim CEO is on the retail turnaround plan, but also to support our vets team continue the good work that has been done in recent years. Our vets remain a unique and attractive strength, bringing together the best of our capabilities with the clinical expertise and entrepreneurial spirit of our independent partners. This model has delivered significant growth in recent years, benefiting our partners and our shareholders by delivering the best outcomes for pet owners. The first half of this year was no exception, with consumer revenue growth of close to 7%, driven by growth in care plans and increased average transaction values.
It is worth noting that it is slower growth than in recent years, driven by a number of factors: the more normal levels of industry inflation and new customer acquisition, the annualisation of the exceptional care plan growth we saw last year, and the fact that many of our customers are moving into a phase where they will naturally visit vets less frequently. This is as expected. Our results, though, are still positive, and our vets continue to deliver. The progress we have delivered in H1 builds on the significant progress of previous years. Since FY 2020, our vet estate has matured, driving average revenues per practice from GBP 750,000 to over GBP 1.5 million a year. We have grown consumer revenues from GBP 330 million to over GBP 650 million. We've grown underlying PBT from GBP 30 million to around GBP 80 million this year, now representing the vast majority of our group profits.
We have grown free cash flow from GBP 17 million to circa GBP 70 million this year, underpinning the resilience of our group free cash flows. We have further to go, applying the proven growth levers we have in the vets business. The opportunities to support our growth in future include new practices, where we are accelerating our rollout, opening five in H1 compared to three in the whole of last year, with extensions with three done in H1 and 15 expected for the full year, and advanced capabilities in clinical care. We have been successful in growing our care plan revenues, and we will continue to improve our offer. We also see opportunities as we rollout our new vet practice property management system and, in future, fully integrate our vets into our digital experience.
While we do not hide away from the disappointment of recent results, Pets at home remains a business with many fundamental strengths and the potential to do much better with the right execution. As the leading specialist pet care retailer, we have expertise, knowledge, and passion amongst our frontline colleagues. This is a critical and winning asset in our battle against others. There are few businesses, if any, where so many colleagues really love the business they work for. We really know our customers with around 8 million already in our Pets Club, so it's about providing customers more of what they want as well as what they need. We have many competitive advantages that set us up for future success. Our 459 pet care centres are an unrivaled asset that gives us leading accessibility for the nation's pet owners and brings together our omnichannel propositions.
These pet care centres have passionate colleagues and expert clinical teams that have a proven track record in connecting with customers, introducing innovation, and growing new categories. They will be at the heart of our turnaround. We have a trusted brand, the most trusted and recognized in the U.K. pet care sector. We have digital data and subscriptions functionality that unlocks potential future growth avenues. We have a unique joint venture vet model that has proven itself in recent years and has growth headroom ahead of us. We are developing an insurance proposition as an added adjacent service. In closing my presentation, I make the following comments: Pets at home has many strengths and a clear purpose. The process to bring on board a new CEO is well underway. We are looking for a skill set that fits with the priorities of the business, a proven retail expert.
In the meantime, we're not standing still. We are taking steps now to ensure we improve. We will be uncompromising on the fundamentals of price, execution, and cost in order to improve the value and experience we give to our customers. We have the opportunity to improve further as we involve our product ranges within reconfigured stores. We know we need to turn around our retail business and deliver better outcomes for our customers, our colleagues, and our shareholders. We have a plan to do so, and we have reasons to be optimistic. Now I'll hand over to Mike to take you through the results in detail.
Thanks, Ian. Good morning, everyone. I'll now take you through the financials for the first half of the year. I'll start with the summary of our financial and our strategic KPIs, and I'll step you through the slide here. You can see group consumer revenue grew by 0.7% to just over GBP 1 billion. Group profit was down by 1/3 to GBP 36.2 million, and group cash flow was up just over 2.5% to GBP 34 million. The Vet Group, as Ian's just been saying, has made good progress across all three key financial measures: revenue, profits, and cash. That's making a very big contribution now to overall group performance. The joint venture model, with its proven growth levers, grew revenue by 6.7% to GBP 376 million, with profits of GBP 44.9 . That's growing faster than sales at 8.3% growth on profits, and delivered over GBP 53 million of cash in the first half.
That's a growth of over 17%. In contrast, the retail business underperformed in what was a very weak pet product market. Sales are down 2%, delivering profits of GBP 3.5 million, and the cash outflow of just over GBP 11 million. We're very clear on the drivers of that retail underperformance, and we're already making progress, as Ian's outlined on the retail turnaround plan. Total retail revenues have been performing in line with our expectations since we gave our profit downgrade back on the 10 weeks ago, on the 18th of September. Progress on the strategy is reflected in the strategic KPIs. Average spend per Pets Club member is up 4% to GBP 185. Subscriptions now account for nearly 15% of our total revenues, and Easy Repeat and care plans have really helped drive that growth now, driving growth of 28% year on year in subscription revenue.
Clinical headcount grew by over 5%, and this is a really critical driver of future Vet Group revenues. It does show the appeal of our joint venture model in attracting new talent. Our strategy is to have an integrated omnichannel customer-centric pet care platform and provide owners with all the products and services they need to take care of their pets. Our pet care centres are at the heart of delivering that strategy, along with our expert and highly knowledgeable store colleagues. A pet care centre with full services will deliver around GBP 4 million of annual sales. We are continuing to improve that customer offer across our 459 pet care centres. That is through several initiatives. That includes introducing new brands, swapping space from lower growing categories to faster growing categories, and improving click and collect services.
70% of our pet care centres already have a vet practice, and we continue to retrofit new vet practices. We have opened some in the first half, and we will open 10 across the full year. Of course, we are extending our existing practices. We are on track to complete 15 extensions this year, and that is part of the overall total medium-term target to open 100 vet extensions. Pet care centres also help grow our online business, which is now around 20% of our total retail sales. Easy Repeat in-store sign-ups have been really successful, and store colleagues have really helped drive that growth. Around 30% of our total online orders are actually collected from our stores. That is convenient for our customers, and it improves our online economics.
We have a really strong network of stores, all well located, mainly on retail parks, and we have significant operational flexibility, as we've successfully kept our rental costs flat across the portfolio, and we have an average unexpired lease length of only 3.2 years. Keeping occupancy costs flat, along with improvements in productivity and implementing a new payroll model earlier on in the year, have helped mitigate the impact of weaker retail sales on store profitability. Let me now turn to revenues and give a bit more detail behind and a bit more color behind our first half performance. Retail revenues declined, but vet revenues continued to grow. Group consumer revenue grew by less than 1% to just over GBP 1 billion. Strong Vet Group revenue of 6.7%, as you can see on the slide, was not enough to offset a decline in retail revenues of just over 2%.
Strong vet revenues translated into equally strong fee income growth of over 7%. We also saw good growth in the revenues of our company-managed practices, like-for-like practices of company-managed cohort. They grew over 7%. Retail revenues declined by 2.2% on a like-for-like basis. Across the first half, as Ian outlined, we have underperformed a subdued retail pet market. However, we have seen a sequential improvement in the retail business. Q1 like-for-like was - 2.8, Q2 was - 1.4, and that has helped narrow the gap to the market. We expect the actions we are now taking to drive further sales improvement. Food sales, as you can see in the chart, were flat, and with volume growth, not enough to offset what we are seeing as continuing deflation of around 1% in food. Own label grew faster than branded food. Own label food grew at around 2%.
Branded declined by around 2%. Discretionary accessories continues to be weak, and we've acknowledged that fixing that category is going to take some time. The performance of consumable accessories, as you see in the chart there, is actually the impact of a very weak flea season this year compared to a very strong flea season last year. Normally, we'd expect consumables to perform in line with sales. Across the second quarter, we've seen double-digit online like-for-like sales growth, outperforming the market. That's been supported by the improved digital platform and the strong growth we've seen in Easy Repeat subscriptions. In contrast, store like-for-like sales were - 4.9% in the first half, and it's here that the retail turnaround plan is more sharply focused. We've invested around GBP 4 million in pricing in the second half.
That's to sharpen our branded advanced nutrition pricing, bringing it to a tighter 2%-3% price difference to our competitors. That compares to an old guide rail of around about 5%. I'll turn now to group profit in the first half. Group profit was GBP 36.2 million. That was a decline year on year of 33%. Within this result, as you can see on the chart, Vet Group profits grew at 8%, but that was more than offset by the decline in retail profits. Group gross margin declined by 80 basis points. Vet group was positive, 29 basis points within that. We'd expect to see that as fee income growth of 7% was on a fairly fixed cost base of providing the services to the vet business.
Retail was down 105 basis points within that 80%, and that was a combination of the price investment, the mix of flat sales in food with a 6.5% decline in core accessories, a lower supplier income, particularly around branded food, as volumes declined. We continue to keep a really strong grip on operating costs, and our programs to mitigate the external headwinds have proved successful, particularly around payroll, national insurance contributions, national living wage. We have managed to limit that growth. As you can see on the slide, operating cost growth there is 2.5%. That is well within the guidance we have previously given to hold costs to within 5%. It is worth noting that cumulatively, over the last three years, the cumulative cost increases through national living wage and NIC are now GBP 48 million.
A key component of our turnaround plan, as Ian has outlined, is costs, and we've already begun a significant support office restructure. Our goal is to complete this by the end of the financial year, and we expect implementation costs of that of around GBP 6 million-GBP 8 million to be accounted for as non-underlying items this year. The full benefit of GBP 20 million from this restructuring will benefit into FY 2027. Turning now to cash flow. Cash flow is underpinned by the Vet Group. Overall cash flow was GBP 34 million. It grew by about GBP 1 million year on year, and the Vet Group delivered close to GBP 54 million of cash. That demonstrates the predictable, high-quality, capital-like nature of the joint venture model. It's worth noting that operating loans to our Vet Group are now less than GBP 2.5 million.
This compares to close to GBP 50 million in the first half of FY 2018. The decisive actions we took then to turn around the Vet Group have since transformed the financial performance across all metrics, and that is what we now need to do in our retail business. Turning now to investment, peak investment is now well behind us, and we have now normalized our investment levels, and these remain fully aligned to our strategic priorities. We have invested just over GBP 23 million in the first half. More than half of that investment was directed towards our pet care centres. We opened a new store in Team Valley, which is up in Gateshead, and we have completed 17 refits. We have also continued to invest in our digital capabilities, and of course, most of that digital investment goes into our SaaS charge through the P&L.
Investment in the Vet Group remains very light at GBP 3.5 million, and that, of course, does include capital contributions we make to support their growth, particularly around rebranding. Most of the investment in the Vet Group is actually funded directly by the joint venture partners out of choice because they benefit themselves from the returns on that investment. Ian made the point, I'll make it again, that all the capital needed to reset the retail business is included in our previously guided GBP 50 million of capital envelope. Disciplined and targeted investment helps us maintain a strong balance sheet, and our balance sheet remains robust whilst, at the same time, we invest in the growth of the business and reward shareholders.
The business remains in strong financial health, net debt of only GBP 12 million at the end of the first half, and that's after paying a total of GBP 50 million in both dividends and share buybacks. We retain a lot of financial capacity. We have very low leverage, even on a lease-adjusted basis, and we're very aware of the importance of capital allocation to our shareholders, and we continue to seek out and listen carefully to regular feedback. We've maintained a very clear policy and consistently and reliably followed that policy for the last five years. We plan to continue with this year's GBP 25 million share buyback. That's well underway, and we'll maintain the interim dividend at 4.7 pence a share.
Our plan is then to return to the very important topic of capital allocation at the full year results in May, and all shareholder feedback is listened to very carefully and shared in full at the board. In summary, our priority and direction is clear. Number one priority is to return the retail business to profit growth. The retail turnaround plan is gaining traction, and we're restructuring our support office costs. The vet business continues to make progress, and that's driven by the proven growth levers. We expect the pet care sector to return to normal levels of growth, and that's driven by the structural growth factors of premiumisation and humanisation, and we at Pets at home are very well placed to benefit from that. Our strategy is clear. We've progressed beyond peak investments, and we have significant benefits to flow from those investments.
We have a robust balance sheet and a strong grip on costs, which gives us good financial capacity. As a result, we are reconfirming our profit guidance for the full year. Thank you for listening, and Ian and I will now take questions. Thank you.
Good morning. It's Alison Lygo from Deutsche Numis here. I've got a few, please. Could we maybe start with one on the retail product proposition? Just wondering if you could add a bit more color on kind of why or how the product range ended up kind of so out of sync with what was happening in terms of the broader market trends and sort of what you're sort of doing to address that. Did I catch that maybe buying and merchandising wasn't a part of the way the teams work?
Just anything you can do to kind of bring that to life a little bit more in terms of what you're focused on and how we can get comfortable that it shouldn't be an issue going forward. The second one is just really around the store estate. Clear, you're happy with the overall shape and locations. Is there anything you think that might need changing in terms of have you got too much density in some locations? Are the stores the right size? Just anything you're looking at on that front would be great. The final one is just on vets. I'm just wondering whether, obviously, we're seeing the kind of normalisation as we move through that kind of peak level of spending and annualize those exceptional care plan revenues we saw last year.
Are you seeing anything from the consumer in terms of deferring treatment or kind of trading down or anything like that in terms of any changes in the kind of vet consumer behaviour that might speak to how the consumer's feeling? Thank you.
Okay, thanks, Alison. Mike, if I take the first and third, and perhaps you could cover the store estate.
Absolutely.
On the product range, I think, frankly, we have underinvested in our buying and merchandising capability. We've filled two very senior buying roles in recent weeks in our accessories team, and it's important to build that so that we can then move forward and look at our own range products, develop better relationships with third-party products. We were out in the biggest pet accessories show in the world last week in China.
One of the encouraging things there is, with the tariff issues in the U.S., a lot of Chinese manufacturers are putting an awful lot of innovation into products that they could sell into the U.K. and the wider European market. Our buying team was out there having conversations with existing suppliers, but also with a host of new suppliers who've not traditionally supplied us in the past. That is not a show we've been to for far too many years, frankly. It does start with getting the capabilities right in our team, particularly on the accessories side. On the advanced nutrition, look, we've been alert to the trends in advanced nutrition for a while. By trends, I'm particularly talking here about raw and fresh frozen. We've taken some actions.
We will have finished another GBP 3 million capital investment program this year to put 1,000 freezers in our stores. That is in addition to the 1,000 we have put in in the last financial year. We will start the new financial year in April with only 75 stores where we have not made that investment, and we will quickly make that investment in the new financial year. We think we have captured over 25% of the raw frozen market through that initiative, and we are seeing that in our sort of like-for-like trends in stores. The fresh frozen market is now a market we think is worth about GBP 220 million a year in the U.K., and that has grown significantly over the past three, four, five years, and these are generally startups.
have got a number of exclusives with those startups in stores, but actually our revenues with those startups in stores is low single millions. You can see the bulk of those revenues are going direct to the consumer. Whilst we have a big direct-to-consumer food business, about 1/3 of the U.K. pet food market is already online, and that is broadly true for our revenues as well. We are already a fairly significant player in the home delivery for food. We have not currently got the capability to do that in fresh frozen. That requires different manufacturing, different distribution, different transport logistics, and we have not built those capabilities. Actually working our way through those challenges is part of the reason why we are talking about the product range resets not really impacting our customers until some point in the middle of 2026.
Mike, if you cover the store estate and question, please.
Yeah, your question, Alison, was around our profitability of our store estate. Yeah, we have, as we've been talking through, 459 pet care centres, mostly on retail parks and mostly on prime retail parks. As we rolled out that network over the last 20, 30 years, it's always been around putting a pet care centre within a 15-minute drive time of the U.K. pet owners. We've done that thoughtfully, so we haven't got a concentration in any particular area. We have some towns, for example, we've got two or three pet care centres, and we look at that very carefully to make sure when those lease breaks come up, we should continue with those three centres or not. We have been improving productivity. We've got a new payroll model in there.
Of course, we have been keeping the occupancy costs down. All of that means that we have only got two loss-making pet care centres, and they are only slightly loss-making. What we are doing, and I put a slide in my presentation, the average pet care centre now is GBP 4 million of revenues. We have got a vet in 307, and we are expanding those vets. Actually, we would like to put a vet in all the ones that do not have a vet. We can clearly see that at least 100 where that is a possibility, and we have opened up, we will open up 10 vets this year. Eight of those will be in store. We are confident we have got the right size. I think the growth of our network is probably coming to an end. We have opened a store in the first half.
We'll probably open two more in the second half, and they'll be fairly opportunistic going forward. The growth of the network is about, it'll be now about putting our services into completing the rollout of services and extending services in our pet care centres. The final point I make on that, of course, is online is such a big part of the business now, and the role of fulfilment, both in picking up orders now in store, but also click and collect can't be overstated. They play a big role as many fulfilment centres support the online business.
Turning to the vet question.
We're not seeing much evidence of what I think you call trading down. We are seeing a shift between what we call paid visits versus care plan visits, and that's not really surprising given the real strength of our Complete Care plans.
We've got now over 950,000 Complete Care customers, and we think that that delivers terrific value to them being part of that program. We are also seeing that peak COVID growth in puppies and kittens. Those puppies and kittens are now typically three or four years old, and we know, and we've spoken to you about this many times in the past, that that coincides with the lowest years of spend in the vet, and it starts to build up again from around five years old, actually, and literally grows at GBP 20-GBP 25 a year on average for a dog every year thereafter till end of life. We watch closely the balance of spend on curative versus preventative and also between paid visits and our care plan visits. I think the trends are pretty evident and overall still resulting in good growth in the vet business.
That's very helpful. Thank you.
Thanks, Jonathan Pritchard from Peel Hunt. Two or three, just on click and collect, you just mentioned it, Mike. What are you doing wrong? What are you not doing right there? What can improve from that perspective? That's obviously something you're looking to improve. I don't know if it's just me, but GBP 20 million feels like a very big number at the support centre. Could you just give us another level of granularity on what sort of roles there are and where that GBP 20 million's coming from? And then just on data, etc., is there an opportunity to perhaps win back some of those lapsed customers or at least prevent those who are lapsing to bring them back into the fold, as it were?
Mike, do you want to take us, Jonathan, direct to the click and collect question to you?
Take that one, and I'll come back on the support office.
It's a great question, Jonathan. One of the challenges we've had on click and collect is keeping up with demand and making sure our stores are set up to help best service customers. And what we're doing now is putting in specific space in stores to store customers' click and collect orders. It's proven successful. I think why customers want to click and collect, of course, is free parking, easy accessible retail parks, and they can come at a time of their choosing rather than having to wait in at home for delivery. So I think we've got to operationalize that. It's been a bit ad hoc, really, how we've executed and talked about the importance of execution.
I think we can get a lot slicker on our click and collect operation in our pet care centres, and we're making good progress. I said it was 30% of online orders are collected. That's at least 1/3 of our online orders are collected. Actually, we see that as a growing opportunity to continue that. We are very encouraged by that. Of course, that is great for our economics as well as being convenient for the customer. What you'll see in our refit programme as we continue to do some investment in stores is just putting a bit more investment into click and collect facilities for customers.
On the support office, we've got something around 1,300 colleagues in our support office, and we're looking at something like 250 roles taken out across the support office in pretty much all areas, although we're protecting the Vet Group for obvious reasons, given the sort of growth and the opportunity still in the Vet Group. And the cuts will fall fairly equally across most of the support functions. We've been briefing our support office colleagues this morning, and clearly, this is a very troubling and unsettling time for 1,300 colleagues in the support office. And we've been trying to articulate why it is we feel we need to take this action. Even after these changes, when we're settled down at around 1,150, sorry, 1,050 colleagues in our support office, we will have about 100 roles more than we had in FY 2021.
That's approximately 50 in our tech services because we brought a lot of our data and software engineering in-house rather than use third parties. We've got about 35 additional heads since FY 2021, even after the restructure in our vet support group, as we've beefed up our partnership teams in order to drive the sort of practice owner growth that Mike referred to in his presentation. Of course, we're putting a team in place to launch insurance next year, and that's added 13, 14, 15 heads. On the third point on data, we're starting to see significantly more personalization in our retail business. I see that as a customer with a six-year-old English pointer. I see the marketing getting more and more targeted at me.
It's not absolutely personalized to me yet in terms of specifically about my product purchasing habits and the breed, but we will get there over time as we refine that. I also, as a vet customer, see the sort of marketing that we direct towards vet customers. And we know we've got to integrate the two, so it's a fairly seamless proposition from the customer's point of view. So progress has been made, but there's still much to do. I don't know whether you want to add anything to that, Mike?
I think it's a great opportunity that we haven't ever really fully realized. 10 million pet owners, 10 years of data broadly. Some of that will be organizational. Some of it we've been obviously on with o ther things as well.
I think the digital platform allows us to unlock the data, and having the digital platform now in place, certainly for our retail business, allows us to unlock the data. I referenced in my presentation all the benefits still to flow. I think one of the big ones is from data. We certainly haven't made the most of that so far.
Morning, Adam Tomlinson from Berenberg. Just two questions from me, please. First, on stores and the performance within stores. Do you have any data or can you provide any comment on footfall into stores? Is it the fact people are coming into stores less, or are they just putting less in their baskets when they're actually in stores? The second question is just Ian's comment upfront about after the brand relaunch, positive results in how the brand is perceived, obviously with the retail performance struggling somewhat.
I wonder if you had any more recent surveys that perhaps show the customer perception currently of the brand. Thanks.
Yeah, on the first point, we roughly have about a thousand, sorry, a million transactions across the entire retail stores a week, a million transactions a week. And over the first half of this year, we lost across that 28-week period about 700,000 transactions. And that's some customers, and it's customer frequency. And I think we can link those losses to the issues we've been talking about, the product issues, the price issues, and the execution issues. And we would expect, as we tackle those issues, that we will stop frustrating our store colleagues, frankly, and stop disappointing our customers. On the brand, we track a number of metrics from awareness, consideration, and particularly important value for money.
And all of those metrics have gone up quite strongly year on year. The value for money metric is up about six percentage points on a year ago. And we have taken even more action in recent weeks to take some fairly significant price cuts on over 1,000 advanced nutrition lines. And I would expect to see that feed through into the value for money metric in time. I think from a customer point of view, we've got three really important propositions. We've got Pets Club. We've been wanting to introduce Pets Club promotional pricing. This is our equivalent, if you like, of a Nectar club card for quite some time, but we've been hampered by our original pet care platform. And now, with this modernised pet care platform, we've been able to launch Pets Club pricing from the summer of this year.
And the second one is our subscriptions model with easy repeat, both for delivery to home, but also for delivery into store through click and collect, as Mike's just been outlining. And then the third is the complete care packages I've already referenced in answer to Alison's question. So I think there are three really strong component parts of the overall proposition for customers, which we intend to keep on building.
Thank you. It's Manjari Dhar from RBC. I also just had three questions, if I may. First, on the club membership declines, I just wondered if you could give us any colour on if that is just solely due to the issues with retail you've outlined or if there's anything else that's going on there, and do you have any sort of reactivation measures planned to target those customers.
Secondly, on online versus stores, I just wondered if you could give us a bit of colour on the sort of margin economics of each of those two channels, and is there anything you can do or are planning to do to bring those close together. And then finally, just on all the work you're doing in retail now, and you've given some helpful colour on what you're doing so far, what you're planning, but I just wondered if you could give maybe just a bit of an idea on the sort of longer-term timeline for the work you're doing and how we should expect the benefits to build from here. Thank you.
Mike, perhaps if you could took the second of those three.
Yeah, we've seen a slight decline in Pets Club members, and I think that's linked to the answer I was giving to Adam's question about losing some customers and losing customer frequency, and inevitably, some of those customers are Pets Club members. We do track, not surprisingly, new customers, lapsed customers, reactivated customers, and we do have specific marketing activity, marketing campaigns targeted at each of those three component parts of the overall customer base. In terms of the point about the longer term, I mean, we're not sort of standing still whilst we develop these product ranges in advanced nutrition and accessories. Last week, we launched a premium advanced nutrition brand called Nulo. It's probably the fastest growing brand in the U.S. It's a U.S. brand. We've got an exclusive deal with them in the U.K. That's in store and online.
This week, we've launched in accessories new health and wellness ranges. And so there are things we can do on a month-to-month basis in both advanced nutrition and accessories. But the work we're doing, particularly in advanced nutrition, to develop a number of new brands, both own brand and third-party brand, combined with the capabilities I was mentioning in connection with Alison's question, means it is going to take us some time, and we're not really expecting to see much progress from a customer point of view until sort of the spring of 2026. And then we will see a fairly consistent drumbeat of activity in the sort of period after that, six, 12 months after that, as each of these new brands comes into the stores. And that's why the store space reset is so important as well, because we need to reconfigure our stores.
I mean, orders of magnitude, this is probably 15 to 20 bays out of a 300-bay store, typically. But nevertheless, quite a significant reset, given that we've got the added complexities of small animals and fish, which requires us to plan for these things quite carefully. So Mike, perhaps on the second question.
Yeah. I mean, there are, as you know, distinct differences in profitability or shape of profitability of stores versus online. There's three big things I've talked to. One is the average order value. One is the gross margin, and one is the cost of fulfilment. We're working on all three. AOV online is higher than the store. So store average transaction value is about GBP 22. Online is about GBP 35. And clearly, we do things to move that up in the way we price up free delivery, for example. Gross margin is lower online.
The reason why gross margin is lower is it's more branded, it's more food. Own label is lower. Accessories are lower. So of our total online sales, only about less than 10% are core accessories. And clearly, that's a big opportunity for us, given that half the accessories market is online. And we know accessing that is about the new digital platform will help with that. So we see those levers of getting that gross margin percent higher, and we're pulling those. And then there's fulfilment. And we've talked a bit about click and collect, but also picking in store that helps with those fulfilment costs and getting our fulfilment costs to be as efficient as possible. So in the first half, we did GBP 136 million of online sales. And after taking into account all the costs, that's fulfilment and marketing, we've made a positive margin in that.
And that's why we've got to keep driving up the AOV, the gross margin, and the fulfilment costs down.
Great. Thank you.
Hi, it's Andrew from Investec. Just one from me, actually, on the vet business, sort of following on from Alison's question. Just on, I think your release highlights average transaction value increasing in the vet business, and that being a key driver of the top-line growth. And that sort of sits with what you're saying, Ian, on sort of that post-pandemic volume not coming through yet. I'm just curious as to the driver of that. I assume with the CMA running, you've not, well, the industry has not been pushing price that hard. And therefore, I would guess it's a mixed thing.
And the only reason I mentioned that is because I know some of your competitors in the vet space are talking about vet confidence through the CMA and their willingness to recommend higher price point procedures just with a semi-negative backdrop. Is that I'm just trying to triangulate those three bits and understand what's driving that average transaction value. Thanks.
Mike, if I start, and perhaps then you can add some comments. Yeah, ATV growth represents lower levels of price inflation inevitably this year because we've come off a period of very high cost inflation affecting the whole sector during recent years, which was a big contributing factor to the sort of price increases we did see across the vet sector. I'm not specifically just talking about our business.
So we've seen some price increases, but we've also seen, as you've suggested, we've seen some mixed changes in terms of the treatments. And this is part of the humanisation and premiumisation. One of the growth areas that we see currently is in dental care. So we're working with our practice owners at the moment, and between them and us, we're making capital investments to improve the dental X-ray capability and offer clients better options for looking after their pets' teeth. So there is a mixed element. On the vet confidence, I mean, the CMA process has been massively draining for a whole group of people across this sector and unsettling for a lot of vets, not surprisingly. And they've seen some reaction from their clients in their reception areas and consult rooms to the whole process of the CMA. But I think they've sort of largely got through that.
We still need to see the full outcome from the CMA process expected next March and then a period of actually complying with the orders, which could be over a year or two. We still haven't got a firm timetable for that.
Yeah, a couple of points just to build on the comments that Ian made. Just as a contextual point, our average transaction value is less than GBP 100. Less than GBP 100. And pricing is set by our joint venture partners. They're independent business owners. They set their own pricing to be competitive in their local markets. We might give them guidance on that and give them some help using our data, but they do set the pricing. And we've made big steps to be very transparent on pricing. So if you go into one of our practices, you'll see a list of prices for standard procedures.
If you compare that with specialist centres, and we used to own our own specialist centres. We sold those a few years ago. The average ticket in a specialist centre was GBP 2,500. And that tells you the difference in terms of the costs of the treatments and the expense of customers. So we've benefited by we're not integrated. Our vets will refer to all sorts of different specialists. They aren't tied to their own specialist centres like some of our competitors are. And we've made big steps on transparency. But it does start with the average transaction value being less than GBP 100 as a contextual point.
That's very helpful. Thanks.
I do want to ask one, but I feel like someone else's first, darling. I'll just crack on. Andy Wade from Jefferies. Three questions from me, sorry. First one on execution. You sort of talked about a lot of things.
I appreciate it, but almost by its nature, it's quite broad-ranging. But you sort of talked price, range, easy repeat, promotions, where there's been issues. So I guess two things on that. The first one, how can we think about what benefit that might be providing to the business? Is there any idea you've got how much you've lost out as a result of that? And the second part is, a bit similar to Alison's question, how did it get to the point where all those things were sort of going wrong? It can't all have been Lisa's fault. Is there more expertise? I know there has been on the buying merchandise and accessories as you talk to, but on the retail side of things, merchandising in the stores, is there change being made there? So that's all sort of part one.
Second question, you're talking to having lost a bit of share in the first half, gaining a bit of share in the second half. Just be really helpful if you could run through what you see as the building blocks to get you from losing a bit to gaining a bit first half to second half. And then actually, I won't ask the third one because it's not that important.
Mike, would you take the share question, please?
Yeah. So Andy, on the execution issues, look, the business has had a lot to contend with in recent years. The two infrastructure projects were once-in-a-generation infrastructure projects. They were incredibly complex, much more complex than we envisaged they would be. They took a lot longer. We encountered problems that we hadn't predicted, both in the Stafford launch and also in the development of the digital platform.
And the team worked really diligently to address those problems such that those problems are now behind us. Of course, I think it's a really valid question as to why alongside that, couldn't we also do all the other things we're trying to do? And all I can say is colleagues were trying their best to do all of those things, but inevitably, some things fell between the cracks. So they are two big execution issues, which undoubtedly led to frustrated and lost customers. Our availability at one point during the Stafford transition was down as low as 80% in store. In the last six months, nine months, it's been regularly up at sort of 99% for what we call A-lines, the top 200 sellers, and 96%, 97% for everything else, which, whilst not 100, is fairly good.
In terms of day-to-day execution, as we've tried to recover our retail performance, inevitably, the teams have put pressure on themselves to try and move quicker. I mean, our business, we ought to be planning product promotion and pricing about 12 weeks out in order to get the right combination of products at the right prices and then brief our store colleagues to make the most of those promotions. We've been compressing that timescale to much less than six weeks, and we've been making far too many changes. And by the time the new initiatives have launched, we've caused too much confusion to our colleagues. They've not been able to get fully behind the new initiatives, and it's led to frustration all around. So the execution issues vary from the really big infrastructure issues down to the day-to-day issues you'd expect in a retail business.
We have six-week promotional phases a year and four-four-week phases. And it's about planning those phases at least 12 weeks out.
Mike, yeah. On the share point,
Andy, yeah. I mean, we have lost market share. I mean, we're pretty open about that. If you look at the market, we get an independent market survey data. And that tells us that the retail pet product market in the first half, it was about - 0.5% decline overall across the first half. Our retail like Lypex have just been talking was - 2.2 across the first half. But we have sequentially seen an improvement. And if you were to extend that into more recent trading, our growth and the market have pretty much gone together now. So we have come from a point of a gap to the market to much, much closer performance to the market over recent weeks.
Online has been driving that for us. We have double-digit online growth. And we know why customers choose online. And we've made great steps to improve our online offer and successfully got there. So we're getting good growth online. Stores, they remain negative, - 4.9% in the first half. And it's that where we've got to get better. Someone asked a question about transactions. It is we need to get more customers into our stores. And that will get us back into growth in the stores because the basket sizes are still holding up. This is a tough market to make money in because there is no inflation. We had deflation last year. In food, we got deflation this year. This is a tough market. We had three, four percentage points of inflation, like in, say, the grocery market.
We'd be looking at a wholly different profit profile than one we've been describing this morning.
Thanks. This is Tim Ramskill from Bank of America. I have a sort of a series of price-related questions, so it's really under one umbrella. But you've obviously indicated the GBP 4 million of price investment, and you referenced a 12% price change. So if I sort of gross that up, that only looks to be covering 30, 35 million of your overall sales. So it looks like a small portion. So just interested to know whether that needs to expand a little further. And then you also referenced the fact that your guide rail on price was historically circa 5%, bringing that down to 2. And again, what might seem like a small change grossed up across the entirety of your food revenues, again, becomes quite a meaningful number.
So again, just interested in thoughts around that, and in particular on that closing the gap to 2, sort of why does that now feel like the right answer? What's changed? Is it just a reflection of price transparency and other considerations? Thank you.
Perhaps, Mike, if I start, and then you could build.
Yeah.
So you're right. We used to operate with a guide rail of around 5% against identified competitors, being the grocers and the online and the specialists. And we felt that that was leaving us too exposed in this environment. And so we determined to narrow that to around 2% to 3%. I mean, it's a little bit of an art as well as a lot of analysis. But we know from past exercises, if we move that to below 100, we see a big reaction from certain competitors using algorithms, for instance, to determine prices.
So we feel that's the right place. And our efforts have been focused on advanced nutrition. We've seen fairly large price increases from the global brand providers during 2023 into 2024. And to some extent, we're seeing a reversal of that with the price changes we're making because our prices were out of line with where they needed to be. So I take your point about if you gross it up across the entire product range, 4 million in 1/2 is not going to cover it. But we're actually not uncompetitive outside of our guide rails across our entire product range, but we have been on 1,000 or more advanced nutrition lines. This is not in grocery lines and not in what we have previously referred to as bridging products between advanced nutrition and the grocery lines.
So we feel that's about right, but we will keep our eye on this on a day-to-day basis. We've got the right tracking systems in place for both food across the food ranges. And we're almost at the point where we've got the same tracking systems in place for branded accessories, remembering that a very high percentage of our accessories business is own brand and much more difficult to get precise price comparables. Mike, do you?
Yeah, a couple of points to add to Ian's comments, of course. Own label food is in volume growth. And of course, own label typically is 15% cheaper than branded. And we've got some very good own labels. Wainwright's, we talk about a lot, AVA. These are products where store colleagues explain the virtues and benefits of those, higher cash margin, higher percentage.
The price investment we've been making has been targeted really on advanced branded nutrition. I talked about our online business growing at double digit. Price is no more transparent anywhere than it is online. That, in a way, is an indicator of the competitiveness of our pricing. It's not something we look at month on month. It's something we look at every day. We've got a team looking at that every day. Getting that gross margin, that percent, we've just got to recognize you can't afford not to be competitive. That's the reason why we're taking the action on the cost base. To get our retail profitability back into where it needs to be, yes, we need to fix our core accessories business, and that's a 6% margin business. Obviously, you saw that in my presentation, it went down by 6.5%.
We've got to get that back into growth. That will be a creative margin. We've got to drive own label growth. That's a creative margin. But we've also got to get our costs into shape. And that's why really we've got to look at gross margin and costs. It's retail profit margin that really matters at the end of the day and having a viable, sustainable profit in the retail business overall.
Yeah, morning. Richard Seder from Barclays. Also, three questions. On the food side, I realize you're trying to get volumes going again, but what are the economics like at the bottom line in light of the price cuts? Clearly, the margin overall in retail is quite slim. So at the lower prices, will you be fully profitable once fully costed there? Secondly, can you just talk a bit more about accessories?
Noted you're taking action in food, and you've said that you need a bit more time to evaluate accessories. Looking at the like-for-likes, accessories are obviously a bit weaker. Does that require price investment as well alongside innovation or a bit of both? A more medium-term question, which I appreciate is going to be hard to answer, but I'll ask it anyway. What do you think a reasonable margin might be in the medium term for the retail business in light of your initiatives? Thank you.
Mike, perhaps you could start with the first question on the margin economics across the food range.
Yeah. I mean, we have a wide range of gross margins across food. If you look at, I mean, grocery gross margins are as low as 30%, some below. Advanced nutrition margins, much higher, 40%.
Obviously, our own label advanced nutrition margins, higher still. We do know that getting our store layout, for example, the right way around our merchandising in store, how we feature product influences how customers buy. Our store colleagues play an enormous role in helping our customers make the right choices. We have lots of levers there to get that into the right place. You asked a question, I think, about the right margin for our retail business. Clearly, profitability is held back when you have no inflation and only a little decline in sales. What people, I guess, sometimes do not take into account is the operational leverage we are going to get when we start to get back into like-for-like growth in our retail business. That is really, really key for us.
That's what's going to help drive a return to strong profitability alongside the cost reductions. If you think about the margins we achieved in our retail business as recently as last year, that was 5.5%, and that was pretty much the same as we achieved in FY 2024. We'll end up this year at sort of 2.5% based on the guidance we've given. Getting the costs in the right place is a building block back there. Distribution and supply chain, if you took our total cost there, about GBP 580 million of operating costs, that's about GBP 120 million of costs. We know we've got opportunities to drive productivity and efficiency there. Of course, getting the growth back into sales will enable volume growth. The work of our commercial team is to go and capture the value that volume growth creates in our supply base.
Pets at home is still a significant scale business. The level of our purchases is proportionately higher than a lot of our competitors. We just need to make sure we're leveraging that scale when we go back to our suppliers and get the right terms from our suppliers because clearly, cost prices, we talked a lot about output prices, selling prices, but the cost prices are fundamental in setting the right gross margins. Key to getting the right cost prices is to get back into volume growth sustainably.
Thanks, Mike. Richard, if I go to your second question about accessories, I mean, accessories covers a really broad range of products from a GBP 3 toy to a GBP 150 cat furniture. 70% of our accessories is own label.
It makes it, therefore, difficult to try and summarize accessories pricing in a very competitive market with a whole range of alternative providers. That is why we are doing more detailed analysis on our accessories price ranges. We have no evidence to date to conclude that we are out of line on branded accessories across that vast range of price points. We need to complete our analysis to fully firm up that conclusion. Okay. That concludes our update on H1 results. Thanks very much for joining us.