Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the call. I hope you're keeping safe and well. I'm Pete Pritchard, the Group CEO, and with me today is Mike Iddon, our Group CFO. We're pleased to share with you our interim results for our financial year 2022. The strong performance across our factory and retail operations during the last year has accelerated throughout the past six months. Today, our business has never been stronger. This is reflected in the results we're reporting today. I'm pleased to say that our performance continues to be strong across the group, demonstrating the ongoing success of our pet care strategy. There are four key messages to take away from today. The first, and most importantly, we now see a pathway to GBP 2.3 billion of customer revenues over the medium term, a substantial increase versus our previous assessment.
Sustained and continued growth in new pet over the past 18 months, beyond our previous expectations, is increasing the size of our addressable market and has led to material step up in the growth opportunity ahead. We believe that we are not yet past peak pet. This is reflected in the elevated levels of customer registrations across our loyalty clubs, subscriptions, and new client registrations in our vet practices. Sign-ups to our bespoke Puppy and Kitten Club have more than doubled year-on-year. These customers are incredibly valuable to us. Not only do they spend more with us, they also stay with us for longer. We continue to register nearly 10,000 new clients across our vet practices every week, supported by our in-store referrals and our puppy and kitten program.
The number of subscription plans across the group has grown 45% year-on-year to over 1.4 million plans. These are currently generating GBP 110 million in annualized recurring revenue, now representing 9% of total group revenue. Second, we are continuing to see strong growth across all key categories and channels. Our like-for-like group revenue increased by 22.2% year-on-year and 28.6% on a two-year basis. All parts of the group are growing. In retail, our like-for-like grew by 21.9% year-on-year or 28.9% on a two-year basis. In our vet group, our like-for-like grew by 26.2% year-on-year. That's a 23.8% increase on a two-year basis.
In retail, our sales growth is broad-based with omnichannel revenue growth of 21.5% and like-for-like growth across stores of 21.1%. Strong sales growth translated into strong profit growth, with profit before tax growing by over 77% to GBP 70.2 million. Today, we're also announcing a 72% increase in our interim dividend to GBP 4.3. Third, we are demonstrating the advantages of being a full-service omnichannel pet care business. Through broad offering of pet products and services across all our channels, Pets at Home is well placed to capitalize on the full growth potential of the market. We're leveraging our growth in in-house data capability, integrating analytics into our extensive pet data set to drive unparalleled insights that are increasing our share of wallet.
This is now supporting our day-to-day decision making, because we're using intelligent data to support our decision making across our longer term strategic investments, which will drive sustainable high-quality growth across our business. By combining the best of our unique Pet Care Centers, supported by a best-in-class digital platform, we're giving customers a market-leading pet care proposition. We aim to out-convenience our pure play competitors, building on a base of one-hour click and collect and contactless collection and home delivery services, which are all performing well. We're now using our Pet Care Centers as mini distribution hubs, improving capacity and reducing cost.
Now, the proximity of these centers to the vast majority of the pet-owning population has enabled us to pilot the same-day delivery service, including a two-hour home delivery service, with plans to run nationwide in the second half of the financial year. We're driving practice maturity in our unique veterinary model, where strong sales growth has underpinned a significant uplift in practice profitability and cash flow. Vet operating models across the industry haven't evolved for decades, and we've always been a disruptive player within this industry. We recently launched our new operating model, Pathfinder, into two new Pet Care Centers. Pathfinder is designed to optimize clinical resource and improve client engagement and practice economics. Early results are very positive. We're now fine-tuning, and we plan to roll out to that pace.
Fourth, we continue to execute on our strategic investments, building capacity and capability across our pet care platform. We're now in the build mode of Polestar, our GBP 20 million investment, which is digitizing the pet care experience, making it even easier for our customers. The initial phases will land in early 2022. We'll continue to roll out our next generation of Pet Care Centers through our store transformation project, with five new centers launched so far this year, including one in Balham, as we continue to build our presence within Greater London. Last week, we opened a brand new Pet Care Center in Brighton, which includes a significant number of environmental initiatives, which we plan to incorporate into our Pet Care Centers as part of our Pets, People and Planet initiative.
We continue with the development of our planned new storage and distribution facility in Stafford, which we broke ground on earlier this year, and it remains on target to go live in 2023. In conclusion, our performance in the first half further demonstrates the strength of our unique pet care strategy and the robustness of the U.K. pet care market. We stand here today a far stronger pet care business, and we look to the future with a well-invested plan with much excitement and confidence. We focus on running a successful business, but we also focus on running a good business too. We continue to do the right thing by all our stakeholders as we progress our journey to become the best pet care business in the world.
Finally, I'd like to express my sincere thanks to all our colleagues and partners across the group for their tireless work and dedication. The last six months have been challenging as the country emerges from lockdown, and the strong results we're reporting today would not be possible without them. I'll stop there. I'm sure there's gonna be plenty of questions, and Mike and I are here to answer them. I'll now hand back to our call operator, Tracy.
Thank you, sir. If you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Again, press star one to ask a question. We will now take our first question from Owen Shirley from Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Morning, guys. Thank you for taking the questions. The first was just a straightforward one on your latest thoughts on what you think the pet population is growing at now, and perhaps any thoughts on the outlook for that. Secondly, could you talk a bit about the learnings from the deliver in-store or deliver from store trial that you've carried out. Specifically, you know, have you been charging for it? What's the elasticity like? This is for same-day delivery, if you've been doing that yet. Is it helping conversion rates, and how much cost is it saving on distribution?
The third question was, if we assume that freight costs normalize back down at some point, when that happens, should we expect that to reverse into a gross margin tailwind, or could it get reinvested in price, for example? Thanks.
Great. Thanks, Owen. Okay, look, I'll do the first question on pet population and our learnings from delivering from store, and then I'll hand over to Mike to talk about freight. Well, look, I think the first thing is, we haven't yet seen a slowdown in new pet registrations. We do an exercise once a year where we actually collate all the market information to try and estimate the size of the pet population. We haven't done that yet, but I'll talk to you about what we're seeing. As we said, we are seeing Puppy and Kitten Club registrations year-on-year up by over 100%. Typically that means we're registering between 25,000 and 30,000 new puppy and kitten members into that program every single week.
Within our vet business, we are seeing up to 10,000 new client registrations per week, which typically about 70% of those tend to be brand new pets. You can see actually they're very similar numbers, the ones I talked about when we updated the market six months ago. That might be surprising to some, but I guess when you realize that most people are typically planning 8-12 months ahead to acquire a new pet because they're waiting for a breeder, they're on a waiting list. There is still, you know, a shortage of pets. That, I guess, is not surprising, that that's the case.
Of course, as you hear from us all the time, actually, our market is really driven by one thing only, which is the number of pets in the country. Obviously, if that continues to grow, that provides a really positive outlook for the future. If we think about deliver from store, this for us is we think this is a game changer for lots of different reasons. What it allows us to do is it allows us to use as many stores as we wish to become picking centers for customer orders. There's a whole series of benefits why that would be the case. The starting point is a typical store has over 6,000 SKUs in a store. A lot of, and clearly it has all our best sellers.
They're typically within a 15-minute drive time of their pet population. If you look across the country, that means we're in the sort of 95% of the U.K. population is within access of a Pets at Home store. That gives us proximity to where pet owners are. The benefits are actually on multiple levels. As you mentioned, Owen, you know, one of them is actually cost. If you've got an order where a customer is in your locality to pick, pack, and dispatch from your nearby store, and therefore cutting out some legs on your courier network, there's an advantage in your freight costs. There's one of the reasons why you do it.
The second is, as you're growing your business and obviously your central picking centers have a capacity level, it allows you to overspill that capacity into your store network and spread it, which is really good. The third is if you've got stores in your network that actually are, you know, larger stores and are taking the average revenue, you can actually drive the density to those stores significantly harder because you're putting more product through them. Fixed cost are the same, so you leverage your storage space in a different way. The fourth, and probably the most exciting, is because you're close to customers, you can increase the number of service propositions that you have. As we mentioned, in 35 stores last week, we launched a pilot to same-day delivery, but actually that's a two-hour delivery window.
Because those customers who live within a 2.5-mile radius of those stores, it gives us a different option for those customers to say, "Look, we'll get you that stock within two hours." Ironically, the very first order we had, by the way, which was in our Charlton store, from receiving the order to delivery was 20 minutes, which is incredible, isn't it? Yeah, actually,Owen , what this does for us is actually increases our reach because when a customer shops online with us, and if they were a store-based customer, their spend doesn't shift, their spend just doubles. By offering more convenience options, actually what we do is we come back to our primary goal of we drive share of wallet with customers.
By using the whole network, we can route our orders to be the most commercial and economic we can in line with our customer promise. By opening up more choices to customers, we believe will drive even more revenue. There are all the benefits of what we're seeing. In terms of the premiums and stuff, still quite early days, but again, back to the point, we just see more share of wallet. I think the only thing most people forget about our business is typically we get about 37% share of wallet of our customers. Now, three years ago, that was 33%, so it's grown considerably over that three-year period. The headroom ahead of us is greater than what we've already banked.
The opportunity for us to grow our existing business with existing customers is really, really attractive to get the new pet owners, and I think that puts us in a really strong and compelling position. Mike, do you wanna pick up the freight costs?
Yeah. Owen, you asked a question about freight costs. Overall, our group gross margin expanded actually in the half by over 100 basis points. That's in line with what we expected, driven by the growth in our vet group. You're right to point out, weighing on our margin in our retail business, were the well-publicized increases in freight rates. For us, in the first half, they were around GBP 6 million. In terms of group gross margin, had an impact of about 90 basis points on our group gross margin. We're planning for pretty much the same level in the second half, actually, and that's all in our guidance for the full year.
As we look into next year, you know, we don't see any sign actually of those freight rates actually improving, so maybe they'll be here for a little while to come. You asked the question though, if it did reverse, would we see an improvement in gross margin, and would we then invest that in better pricing? I wouldn't make the connection between our pricing decisions and the requirement for freight rates to reverse. You know, we will remain competitive on prices regardless of what freight rates do. You know, we're not going to give any oxygen to any of our competitors by being out of line on pricing. If the freight rates do go back to normalizing and, you know, we would expect our gross margin to improve in our retail business.
Don't make the connection between that being us putting our prices lower, being dependent upon freight rates getting lower. We look at those two things completely separately.
Very clear. Thank you very much.
Okay.
We will now take our next question from Manjari Dhar from RBC. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. Firstly, on staff training, for sort of the store pick model and the Go-to- store video functionality. What proportion of staff are trained for these? And then secondly, on cross-selling, I appreciate that, I think, in the releases that the 27% of the VIPs shop in more than one channel, but do you have any indication of how that varies by maybe the level of cross-sell online and in store, for the retail business, the vet business, and the groom rooms? Thank you.
Great. Manjari, thanks very much. I'll take the first question on colleague training. You know we have a very unique approach to how we reward our people. That's the more that you know, the more expertise you have, the more that we pay you. That's why 63% of our colleagues actually earn real Living Wage, not National Living Wage, real Living Wage. Because as you complete your training, we pay you more money 'cause you're actually really valuable to us. This is a really interesting point. We actually don't sell anything. We actually don't think selling ever is the right thing to do, but we believe in providing really good advice drives sales.
We ensure that our colleagues when they're on the shop floor, we don't allow colleagues effectively to interact with customers unless they are to what we call our step one standard of colleague knowledge. This means they can have a really sensible conversation with a customer about most pet subjects. Then, our step two, you then specialize in areas like nutrition or reptiles. What we're able to do through our Go Instore technology is we're able to connect a customer query directly to one of our experts in store. The beauty about having so many people who are trained to such a high standard, we can route those calls really effectively through to those people. In our early learning, actually what we're seeing is we're seeing a basket premium on the back of it.
The most popular part of Go Instore, by the way, has been new pet owners, puppy and kitten owners who are seeking advice. What we can see there is, as we can then measure their transactions, we're seeing those customers actually offer a spend premium to us. When we think about cross-selling, you're absolutely right. When we think about, we talk about plus one, and really plus one for us is a store customer who engages in at least one of the services, whether that be a subscription, grooming, vets. That's, it's got a 27% participation of our VIP members engage in at least one of the services. That's grown by 19% year-on-year.
I think that's just really reflective of our approach, which is understand the pet customer's needs, help solve their problems, and direct them in the right place to solve them and actually you'll drive those pieces. Combining it with really good insight, and this is where data really comes into its own. Our ability to segment customers, predict their needs, and then introduce them to other services is really helping us drive very, very effective CRM campaigns and personalization. We don't reveal the detail below those plus ones, but of course, all of our services are value enhancing, which of course grows share of wallet and grows gross margin with our customers. That model is something that will continue.
I think when we get to Polestar next year, that's when I'm sure it gets really exciting because the ability to really start to uber-personalize a customer's experience on a digital platform gives us another route through to make sure that when I'm on my app, we're putting recommendations in front of you that we know are absolutely appropriate for you, your pet, the way you like to receive and engage. Actually, you know, that's one of the benefits I think as we move into next year that is still yet to come.
We will now take our next question from Simon Bowler from Numis. Please go ahead.
Hi. Morning, all. Three questions if I may. First one is on, marketing costs and a bit of the kind of marketing investment into gross margin as well. To, to your mind, is that now a cost line that's gonna be structurally higher given that you understand much more about the opportunity and the returns on marketing spend? Or is it unusually high at the moment just given there's fundamentally a lot more new potential customers out there, given what's happening in the kind of puppy and kitten populations? Lastly, I'll ask
Well, do you want to talk? Okay. If all three questions are asked [crosstalk].
Okay. Fine by me. Second one was on one of your slides, it's quite an interesting, I think it's new, piece of disclosure. It's slide 23, where I think you've used some of your data to kind of look at the components of pet care spend over the lifetime of a pet. I was just wondering if there's, I imagine you've deliberately not given any, vary a lot by pet, but if there's any indication you can give around what sort of absolute numbers might go alongside that chart, I guess particularly as you move through kind of the early years of a pet's life cycle. Slide 23. The final question was just you've obviously upped your customer sales opportunity to date, that kind of +900 on the base.
Your kind of medium term guidance for the vet free cash flow opportunity is unchanged at GBP 60 million. Just looking to understand why that would be the case. Are those two numbers kind of coincident given they're both referred to as medium term or is there something we're missing there?
Yeah. Okay. Well, look, let me take the first question on cost and Mike and I will double handle the questions around pet spend and vet free cash flow. You're absolutely right. I think when you look at gross margin in retail, Mike touched on freight costs, but one of the other components in there is the discount cost associated to puppy and kitten, where we offer customers 10% off their first shop. We treat that as a discount. [audio distortion] . For us, that's just a really sensible approach because it drives significant value creation with our customers because we see that those customers spend a 30% spend premium.
We have seen elevated marketing costs this year for exactly the reasons you know we've just been talking about on this call, which is there are more new pets in this market. For us, that makes perfect sense, doesn't it? To be elevating your marketing costs as long as you can continue to drive a sensible return on that investment. Actually, we're very pleased with the returns that we've seen on that investment. For us, that actually is now a continuation and you're gonna see further bursts as we're doing our puppy and kitten campaign in the second half of the year. I think the question on marketing costs, for us, it always comes back down to actually do they deliver?
The way that we look at all our campaigns, we make sure that as we are investing, that we're getting a sensible cost of acquisition per customer and a sensible level of return, and we continue to modify. A difficult one to answer in this pure sense, but actually we will continue to elevate marketing costs as long as they deliver and as long as they continue to return. If they don't, then we'll adjust them. Mike, do you want to give them the point around free cash flow to the vets?
Yeah. Just to build out on the point of marketing costs, Simon. You're pointing out, I think, the gross margin chart where we've shown 29 basis points of investment in gross margin for investing in new customer acquisition. You know, that actually relates to discounts we offer new customers. For example, Puppy and Kitten Club members get a 10% discount on joining. 29 basis points is about GBP 2 million year-over-year. You put that into context with that, we've doubled the size of the club. You can start to see how efficient actually that marketing actually is. To Peter's point, clearly, you know, that's proven a very, very good mechanic to recruit a lot of new customers. On the free cash flow for the vets, yes, you're quite right.
We've always returned to the fact that on maturity, that is when all our practices have gone up the maturity curve, the free cash flow they'll generate will be GBP 60 million. You know, we still hold to that. I mean, just to context it, last year our practices did GBP 38 million. Well, you know, this year we've gone even quicker actually on maturity as you've seen actually with the numbers we've put in there for profitable practices. You know, we only have, I think 40 loss-making practices now. When you think a practice is planned to be loss-making in its first four years, and we have about 80 practices that are less than four years old. Actually, I think it proves we're ahead of the maturity curve.
That GBP 60 million is obviously in sight. In the context of the growth opportunity, you know, there is growth beyond that free cash flow beyond maturity because the practices continue to grow, even when they are 10 years and older. I guess the key point though, on releasing that cash flow is that the investment to deliver it, either in capital or OpEx, is largely already invested. You know, just driving our practices up that maturity curve will deliver that free cash flow. Clearly beyond the 60, there's still a significant opportunity as those practices continue to grow.
Simon, I'll pick up the question you had about slide 23 in the deck. For those of you who haven't had a chance to look at it, this is a new chart. You're right, this is a new piece of disclosure which shows the share of a customer wallet between retail and veterinary services over the lifespan of a pet. That's based upon 4.1 million records that we've used to basically show what happens is over time, the amount of spend a customer has on veterinary actually grows. That's not a surprise. We've always often talked about the smile of pet ownership, you know, big spend on retail at the start and end of life care, you tend to see more spend into vet. Actually, that really starts to sort of bring that thing to light.
We haven't put any more disclosure around that, Simon, except to say, this is one of the real benefits we now have of really bringing our data in-house, is that we're getting quite sophisticated now in looking at how we look at our customer base. Whilst that represents all pets, I'll just share with you something we've recently done looking at dogs. We've used our entire history within our veterinary business to look at the lifespan, factually by breed within vets. Actually there were some industry numbers that have been previously published. Actually, we now know those industry numbers are actually pretty much rubbish actually, because we've been able to build that based upon every single breed by a dog, and it gives us a lifespan by dog.
By the way, if you want a long living dog, get a Jack Russell. If you don't, get a Great Dane. But what that allows us to do, quite effectively is then build a lifetime value by breed. That's really important because actually as we start to think about our business and we know from our VIP database the mix of breeds that we have, it starts to allow us to more [audio distortion] . It's allowing us to think about the journey of that particular breed, about the things that are gonna happen at certain points in their lives. It allows us to do very targeted, very focused CRM. The data itself is incredibly powerful. How you use it becomes even more powerful.
Therefore, I think it just reinforces our confidence that we have about this growth of this market over time, because we're able to see the mix of dogs that we've got, the breeds of dogs, and have a pretty good indication of how that's gonna play into their lifetime value and then our business. Absolutely right. New disclosure, no more information on top of that. I think as we move forward, I think you'll start to see how we use this to better drive the insights and activities in the business.
Okay, great. One very quick follow-up just on the kind of that GBP 900 million target piece. I think when it had been GBP 600 million, you spoke to a third of that coming from vet. I know there's some bridges within the slides here, but is that in broad terms still the right way to be thinking about the uplift as two-third retail, one-third vet to get to that 900? Or is it slightly shifted?
Absolutely. That's exactly what you think about. A third vet, two-thirds retail.
Great. Thank you.
Thanks, Simon.
As another reminder, to ask a telephone question, please signal by pressing star one. We will now take our next question from Matthew Garland from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thank you for taking my questions. First question, in terms of obviously the second half of the year from a sales perspective, your implied sales number off of the customer opportunity for FY 2022 seems to imply quite a large slowdown. Can you give any color, I guess, around trends that you're seeing in 3Q? Is there concern, like is there any concern, I guess, from an availability perspective? Or is it just some headwinds in terms of demand? In terms of my second question, can you give a bit further breakdown on what logistics, COVID, and other additional one-off costs you're kind of building into the GBP 135 million FY 2022 guidance? Should we think of the kind of additional costs as being somewhere between GBP 20 million- GBP 25 million?
Then finally, I guess in terms of the JVP partners, I can see that there's obviously some reduction in the number of JVPs and some of those have shifted into company managed. I guess, is there anything that we should think about in terms of this shift given the very strong performance in vet practices for the half? How do you think about that in terms of, I guess, this year's space growth and then space growth going forward? Has that changed the number of practices you're expecting to open, or how should we kind of think about that? Thank you.
Great, Matt. Thanks a lot. Let me take the question around how we think about sales in the second half, and I'll talk JVPs, and then Mike, if you want to talk about the cost. I think, I guess one of the realities of life is the last 18 months' worth of like-for-likes have been very bumpy and bouncy, haven't they, as we've had, you know, different factors playing out. When we think about the second half of the year, I think the starting point should remind ourselves that the comps we'll be up against will be stronger comps than they were in the first half of the year. And therefore, the read-through to the two-year like-for-like is probably the most helpful in terms of overall guidance.
Certainly the way that we're thinking about is whilst you'll see lighter one-year like-for-likes in the second half of the year, actually, when you look at the two years, you'll see a real strength in terms of where that is. It just allows you to read through. We'll certainly be helping people read through that when we do future announcements, so you can actually see how all of them has played through. For us, you know, that real strength is in the growth of the overall pet population that we see. Back to the same things we talked about, 13% more new VIPs, growth in Puppy and Kitten Club, they will still resolve through in stronger future growth.
The individual like-for-likes will be a bit bouncy as we annualize. I think the second point on JVPs, in part we've seen a reduction in JVP partners as we've now concluded what we call Project Lite, which is where we address the challenges that we had in our vet business. We naturally always expect to see some practices coming in and out of company ownership, but they tend to come into company ownership for relatively small periods of time until we then put them back out as JVPs. Actually, I wouldn't read anything into that at all, apart from that's just the natural ebb and flow that we see.
If anything, as we move forward, we now have greater confidence in talking about restarting and reopening our vet pipeline in terms of new practices, and we've already opened three new practices in the last three months, being Hampstead, Guildford and Brighton. What's very interesting is we always measure the amount of potential JVPs coming towards us for our future pipeline. Actually this year, that pipeline has continued to strengthen. In part, we put that down to the success that we're seeing in our business. You know, success does breed success. But also our competitors, well, really only offer you the same choice, which is being an employed vet in a corporatized model.
Of course, the real attraction for most JVPs is to having total freedom of clinical independence, as well as being able to be better rewarded for their hard work. That's driving more vets coming to us than ever before. You'll see in our future guidance, we're now talking about reopening that space and our plan for most of those is to open them as JVP practices. Where required and where necessary, we will open company-owned, but we often see them as short-term measures before we put them back into JVP hands. Mike, if I hand you over to talk about availability and logistics costs.
Yeah, of course. Just for context Peter's point on sales, Matt. First half last year, our comp was just over 5%. Second half last year, our comp was over 12%. A real step up in terms of the comparable number that we're gonna lap in the second half. Yes, headline like-for-like will be lower in the second half. But you know, can't emphasize enough the point around looking at two-year like-for-likes as a better indication of the progress we're making. Your question on costs. Yeah, you're about right actually with those numbers. Freight full year, around about GBP 12 million year-on-year increase. Which we've taken half of it in the numbers we're talking to this morning.
In terms of COVID costs, we actually at the start of the year planned around GBP 9 million for our COVID costs, and that's the number we talked externally about. Actually, COVID costs are proving to be better than that. You know, compared to that GBP 9 million, we're probably planning full year on around GBP 5 million. We've probably seen a saving in the first half of about GBP 2 million compared to where we're planning COVID costs, and we expect that. No change in the external environment around COVID to be about the same. Yeah. GBP 5 million for COVID costs, one-off year on year, GBP 12 million for freight. In total they're GBP 17 million of costs.
Great. Thank you for taking my questions.
Thanks, Matt.
As another reminder to ask a telephone question, please signal by pressing star one. We'll pause for just a moment to allow everyone an opportunity to signal for questions. We will now take a follow-up question from Simon Bowler from Numis. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you. I mean, it's just a quick one, follow up on that kind of freight headwind, which is, as you say, is a reasonably big number and not something at this stage you're expecting to change. I understand that your kind of retail pricing is sort of very separately to that, but presumably if that was to become a more permanent fixture or at least part of that was to become a more permanent fixture, is that something that you'd expect to ultimately be able to pass on in pricing? Or, do you think they are best considered as entirely separate?
Inevitably, Simon, if we're suffering those freight costs and they're a part of the industry and how we're managing, you know, there will be price increases for those products that are brought over from overseas because, you know, that's just then sustained increase in the cost of acquisition of those products. It wouldn't be at the expense of being uncompetitive in the marketplace. Clearly those freight rates well publicized, it's not just us who are feeling the impact of those. If they were here to stay, we'd have to think very carefully about the pricing and the sourcing actually of the products that we're bringing in from overseas. Yeah.
I think just to add to that, Simon, actually, we don't just look at pro costs based on that. We actually look at all the costs that are in our business. When we think about goods not for resale, we think about rent. Actually, while we've got some inflation in freight lines, we actually have material reductions in others. We always try and balance those off. Our price position has been really hard won over the last few years. I think we, you know, we do have a real opportunity around driving operational leverage around our business and for us it's about getting that balance right.
I think that's what Mike really alludes to, is we're getting this balance for customers, balance for shareholders, balance for us, and navigating our way through thinking through the medium term of how we continue to grow our share of all of the customers. I think just for anybody else's benefit, you know, 80% of our business is actually domestically sourced, so our exposure to freight is not quite the same sort of level as others. We're not a very seasonal business, so we pretty much bring the same amount of containers into our business every month. Therefore, you know, we're not at the sort of same level of exposure as other business may well be.
Great. I think that links into my kind of second half of the first question, which is the, I know you don't give this, but would it therefore be fair to assume that that kind of freightage cost and the impact on your kind of product gross margin, is almost entirely around the accessories part of your business and food gross margins have been much more stable given the the relative sourcing for those two categories?
Exactly. We import, we only import accessories. Food is pretty much all near sourced.
Great. Thank you.
There are currently no further questions. I would like to turn the conference back to Mr. Pritchard for any additional or closing remarks.
Great. Thank you, Tracy. Well, thank you everybody for your questions and your participation. As always, Greg always gets us great questions, so appreciate that. Let me be the very first to wish you and of course your pets a very merry Christmas, and we'll speak to you hopefully in the coming week or thereabouts on roadshow. Have a good day, everybody. Thank you.