Good morning. I hope you're all safe and well, and welcome to Pets at Home's FY 2022 Preliminary Results Presentation. I'm Peter Pritchard, the Group CEO, and with me today is Mike Iddon, our Group CFO. Despite another period characterized by significant and evolving external challenges, our performance this year has been nothing short of outstanding, delivering record growth in sales, profit, and cash flow. We continue to take share across each segment of the market in which we operate. We welcomed over 1.1 million new pet owners across our business, lengthening the runway of growth ahead of us, and we improved spend per customer with our aggregate share of customer wallet increasing by 600 basis points to 37%. Simply put, our business has never been in a stronger position than it is today.
The ongoing resilience of the pet care market, coupled with our unique omni-channel model and clear strategic priorities to make pet care as affordable, easy and convenient as possible for customers, means that we look into the future with the utmost of confidence. We continue to invest in our business to build capability and to drive future growth, outpacing their own market in which we operate and creating long-term value for all our stakeholders. It has been a year of breaking records. Our new customer acquisition, our Puppy and Kitten Club, increased sign-ups by 48% year-on-year, with club members now accounting for approximately one-fifth of our record 7.3 million VIP customers.
Over 90% of puppy and kitten customers acquired over the past two years remain active today, providing a significant growth opportunity over the next 12-15 years as they engage and shop across our full ecosystem of products and services. We already have 2 million VIPs shopping more than one channel. That's up 40% in two years. We're also successfully retaining these customers, having reduced churn by 400 basis points and maintaining over 95% of active customer spend beyond year one. The output, well, that's a record year of sales, profit, and cash delivery, and growth in our market share to 24% and a record dividend for our shareholders. We have a track record of taking share and demonstrating the advantages of our omni-channel pet care ecosystem are very clear.
With over 60% of our growth over the last five years coming from market share gains, we have a bold, clear plan to achieve at least GBP 2.3 billion of customer revenue in the medium term, supported by the strategic investments that we're making. We continue to digitize the business with Project Polestar helping unlock significant opportunities around data, subscriptions, and loyalty. Customers can now access all our products and services through a frictionless single login, and a new iteration of our mobile app for a much improved shopping experience is scheduled for launch later this year. Our ongoing store transformation program is improving our customer proposition and driving growth in VIP registrations, subscription sign-ups, and service performance improvements. Project Pathfinder is improving practice economics.
Our client productivity is improved and so has our client engagement, and the health of our veterinary estate continues to go from strength to strength, with growth in average practice revenue surpassing GBP 1 million for the first time. That's accompanied by expanding margins and many additional levers for future growth. Development of our new storage and distribution facility in Stafford remains on track, and it's on budget, and it will become fully operational by summer 2023. That will deliver capacity and efficiency benefits, and it will future-proof our operations for many, many years to come. We are well-positioned to accelerate our growth in market share in the year ahead. We have more active customers than ever before.
With prevailing affluent demographic and propensity to prioritize pet care over other categories of spend, anecdotal evidence tells us that over 90% of these customers are not intending to reduce their level of pet care spend in the foreseeable future. We also know these customers better than anyone else, with almost 10 years of proprietary data across our VIP club helping us provide personalized and convenient solutions throughout the full lifetime of the pet. Our broad range of economically resilient products and services, well, over 75% of them are non-discretionary in nature and offers choice, quality, and value to all customers. Through offering full price architecture within food and a very strong private label proposition that can represent up to 30% saving to customers versus their brand equivalent, we're helping owners feed their best diet for their pet through the lifetime of the pet.
Our Pet Care Plans offer further value and convenience for customers providing essential pet care for a low fixed monthly cost while creating an annuity revenue stream for the group. Above all, we have an unwavering commitment to keep pet care affordable for owners, and we'll never let price be a reason for customers not to shop with us. As a business, we are well positioned to navigate the near term, industry-wide inflation pressures, and we continue to work closely with our broad base of suppliers to unlock efficiencies across our supply chain and mitigate volatility in freight rates. We've got a comprehensive program of live initiatives across consumables, packaging, store operations, and energy usage to reduce our overall cost to serve.
With declining lease lengths and average rent reductions of up to 25% on negotiation, we're leveraging our nationwide store network as a flexible and cost-effective distribution network. Our financial strength and resilience enables us to invest in strategically important initiatives that support sustainable long-term growth towards GBP 2.3 billion of customer revenue and beyond, having made better than expected progress this year. I'm now gonna hand you to Mike, who will run you through the financial headlines.
Thanks, Peter. We are today reporting record financial results and strong progress across all of our key strategic measures. These very positive results prove the strength of our business model, the relevance of our strategy, and the resilience of the pet care market. Today, our business has never been stronger.
Just before I run through our headline numbers, it's worth pulling out four standout highlights from our results. We delivered GBP 144.7 million of profit. That's before the change in the IAS 38 accounting policy. This represents year-on-year growth of over 65% and exceeds market expectations. We've gained 1.1 million new customers, a growth of 18%, helping drive our market share from 23%-24%, and these customers will be a source of sustained growth going forward. Group revenues grew by over 15% to GBP 1.32 billion, and that was driven across all product categories and services, including a Vet Group like-for-like revenue growth of over 17%.
We generated cash flow of GBP 95 million, up close to 41% year-on-year, including a step change in the cash results of the Vet Group to over GBP 50 million, helping us exit the year with our strongest ever balance sheet and increase our total dividend by 48%. Turning now to the full year numbers and looking first at our strong revenue performance. Total group like-for-like revenue growth was close to 16% on a one-year basis and just under 26% on a two-year basis. This reflects the sustained strong growth across all channels with 22% more customers shopping across more than one channel, helping increase average customer value. In our retail business, like-for-like revenues grew 15.8%. With this growth coming from both stores with growth of 15% and omni-channel with growth of close to 16%.
We are increasingly using our stores to fulfill online orders with around 20% of orders now picked in store. This gives us a competitive advantage with more delivery options for our customers as well as a better economics driving higher contribution per order. Category-wise, food revenue grew by over 21% and accessories revenue, including consumables such as litter and bedding, grew by nearly 14% as more pets came to the market into our stores, and we saw our Puppy & Kitten Club grow by 23,000 new pets a week, giving us a significant lifetime value opportunity as we retain and deepen the relationships with these new customers. In our Vet Group, full year like-for-like revenue growth was over 17%, driven by a significant step-up in practice revenue, with a number of practices generating more than GBP 1 million in revenues doubling during the year.
Overall, across the whole group, both retail and vet, our customer revenues grew by more than 16% to over GBP 1.67 billion as we continue to make great progress towards our medium-term customer revenue target of GBP 2.3 billion. Turning now to our full year profit result, like many other companies, we have updated our accounting policy in relation to IAS 38 Intangible Assets. As a result, a number of software and related implementation costs which were previously capitalized are now required to be expensed and the associated amortization charge reversed. This applies looking backwards in the current year and looking forwards. This change in policy coincides with our peak investment as we build capabilities to drive future growth, including Project Polestar, supply chain capacity investments, and as we enhance our in-house data capabilities.
Group underlying pre-tax profit of GBP 144.7 million is stated on a previous IAS 38 accounting basis and was driven by strong revenue, an expansion in gross margin, and robust underlying cost control. The net impact of the revised accounting policy on our FY 2022 PBIT is GBP 14.6 million. After taking this into account, under the new policy, our underlying profit is GBP 130.1 million. It's important to understand there is no impact on the group cash position or free cash flow, and overall, there's no net profit impact over the full asset life. More importantly, the accounting change has no impact on our planned investment schedule, future cash generation, or our ambitious growth plans. We continue to be strongly cash generative. Group underlying free cash flow was GBP 95 million.
That includes a year-on-year benefit in working capital of GBP 26.4 million, with better efficiency in retail and a GBP 6.5 million pound reduction in operating loans to our joint venture practices as both profitability and cash generation stepped up across our veterinary estate. Capital investment was GBP 73.1 million, reflecting investment in strategically important areas, including our distribution network, our store transformation program, and data analytics and systems. The impact of the IAS 38 policy change reduces our reported capital investment to GBP 49.1 million, although the cash investment stays the same. We've also successfully refinanced our revolving credit facility on market leading terms and increased the facility to GBP 300 million. This, taken together with our strong ongoing cash generation, gives us significant capacity to invest organically and inorganically to drive future profitable growth.
Taking everything together, we ended the year with a net cash position of GBP 66 million, and that includes nearly GBP 20 million of final proceeds from the disposal of our specialist hospitals which we received ahead of schedule during the year. All of this means that our balance sheet is the strongest it's ever been, with net debt on a post IFRS 16 basis reduced by over GBP 90 million to GBP 317 million, giving us leverage of 1.3 x. That's down from 1.9x in the prior year. The strong cash generation in the year has enabled us to pay a 48% increase in the full year dividend to shareholders. In summary, Pets at Home continues to go from strength to strength, and the prospects for the business are the strongest they have ever been.
We've had a record year of sales, profit, and cash, and made significant progress across all of our strategic measures. The resilience of the pet care sector, taken together with the strong tailwind of over a million more customers and our robust self-help plans, will help us navigate the near-term economic challenges. The investments we are making in the business will help us both build and entrench our competitive advantages and continue to grow our market share. I'll now hand back to Peter.
Thanks, Mike. I'm incredibly proud of what we've achieved in the past year, and that we continue to run a responsible business as well as a successful one. We could not have achieved this success without the support and dedication of all of our colleagues and partners across the group who have helped make Pets at Home a bigger, stronger, and more efficient business. We have a truly unique business, and by leveraging our strengths and continuing to put the customer first, we will continue to grow our share of this resilient market in which we operate. As I hand over the leadership of this great business to Lyssa McGowan, I have the utmost confidence that Pets at Home will continue to deliver sustainable, profitable growth as we build the best pet care business in the world. Thanks for watching. Stay safe, and take care.