Hello, and welcome to the Pets at Home FY 2024 interim results. I'll now hand over to Lyssa McGowan to begin.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our interim results call. I'm Lyssa McGowan, the CEO, and I'm here with Mike Iddon, our CFO. I hope you've all had a chance to listen to our recorded presentation, which includes our thoughts on what's been an incredibly busy but important period for the business. Before we move to taking your questions, I just wanted to share a few key takeaways with you. The first half has been a critical period for the business, laying the foundations for our new pet care platform as we set out at our strategic update in May. As we stand today, we have a single DC supporting 100% of stores. We're on track to launch our new digital platform this financial year, and we've made great progress refreshing and opening new space and winning vet talent.
The UK pet care market has remained in resilient growth, supported by long-established structural growth trends. Against this backdrop, we were pleased with growth in consumer revenues of 8.6% across H1, with 5.2% growth in retail and 19% growth in vets. In fact, our vets business is firing on all cylinders, supported by our unique joint venture model. High-quality growth was supported by increased visits, strong consumer acquisition, and growth in average transaction value. Vet talent remains a key area of focus, and we're seeing improvements in recruitment and in retention, with the new partner pipeline the healthiest it's been in some time. Our retail performance was a tale of two halves. Q1 was very strong at 7.1% like-for-like growth, but Q2 slowed to 2.7% growth as we experienced some availability challenges as our DC ramped.
This dragged on our like-for-like growth during that period by around 3%. This issue was quickly addressed by our team, and as availability returned to normal levels by the end of Q2, our sales growth normalized, with the early weeks of Q3 showing a 4% retail like-for-like growth. Underlying EBIT of GBP 47.8 million was down from GBP 59 million last year. This was broadly the shape we expected as H1 bore the cost of heavy investment we had been making. We did see some extra costs associated with our DC disruption, but this has been managed within the scope of our current guidance, helped in particular by strong outperformance from the vet group. This means we make no change to our views for underlying EBIT this year of around GBP 136 million.
Lastly, a key development in the industry's first half has been the announcement by the CMA that it was opening a review of the vet sector. We shared our views of the U.K. vet industry and where our business fits today with the CMA, and the key point being that we see our vets business as highly differentiated in the industry, thanks to our unique joint venture model, which frees practice owners to deliver the best possible clinical care for pets and pet owners. We see our growth strategy as pro-competitive and do not expect the review to impact our ambitions. While the first half has not been without challenges, it's been an important period for the business, and we've made progress against the medium-term strategy we set out earlier this year to build the world's best pet care platform.
We've plenty to do in the second half as we launch our new digital platform and begin to transition our online business into the new DC, but we do so with confidence. We are now past the point of peak execution risk. With that, we're ready to take your questions.
If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Please ensure your line is unmuted locally, as you'll be advised when to ask your question. The first question, it comes from the line of Jonathan Pritchard from Peel Hunt. Please go ahead.
Hi, good, good morning. A couple from me, just, on expectations in the second half, like-for-like. Are you expecting accessories...? I know in the presentation you talked about preparing accessories to return to growth. Are you expecting accessories to bounce back from a like-for-like perspective, in the second half? Or is it food that's gonna have to do all the sort of heavy lifting in terms of like-for-like progress? And then secondly, you talk about the pipeline of JV partners. I think you've got about 50, mid-50s of company-owned vets. Would we expect that number therefore to come down quite quickly? And if it did, does that actually have a particularly profound effect on the profitability of the vets side?
Hey, Mike, do you want to take the first one? I'll take the JV vet.
Yeah. Jonathan, you asked a question about accessories in the second half. You may remember, quarter three last year, our accessories business was in growth, and Christmas is a very strong period for us to trade accessories. In our pet care centers today, we've got some great ranges of Christmas, and the sell-throughs are going really well. So naturally, we expect to see a stronger accessories performance in the second half of the year. But you're right, we'll continue to see a really strong food performance. I mean, food in the first half is 10%, accessories in the first half is minus three. We expect accessories to be stronger in the second, but food continuing to be very strong.
... I would also add that, we're launching our new consumer website and app in the new year. And that will give us significant enhanced ability to cross-sell, to promote accessories, and a significantly better consumer experience. So that's something that our current website doesn't really allow us to do, and which will be a tailwind in the second half. On the JVs, yeah, we have about 55 company-owned practices, and we do account for them slightly differently. We are fully committed to the joint venture model. It's unique, it's differentiated, it drives higher productivity as the vets. We have an owner-operator in there with clinical, operational, commercial freedom, driving the productivities and the outcomes of those practices really hard.
We've definitely seen that come through in our performance, 19% like-for-like growth, and also in the 18,000 new pet registrations that we've had in the first half every week. That isn't just puppies and kittens, that is us seeing consumers come from other vets with older puppies or with older dogs and older cats. So we're definitely winning share there. It is our preference, the JV model. We're never gonna get that 55 down to zero. We're always gonna have a few where we take on practices for various reasons. But we've been able to flip actually five of those practices to JV ownership in the first half, and we will continue that. I don't think it will be, you know, a material driver of profit, but it's certainly our preferred model, and we'll continue to do that.
Understood. Thank you very much.
The next question comes from the line of Matthew Abraham from Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Hi all, thanks for taking my question. So just first query is in reference to H2. Obviously, guidance has been held steady. Just looking to unpack, you know, the various levers that you'll be pulling to make up some of the lost ground in H1 and see guidance met. Specifically, I understand that there's a cost element, energy costs that are to drive some of that improvement in the second half. What energy costs are those? So if you could provide some color on that one. The only other query I'd have is in reference to the operational disruption that, as you said, has been resolved. Are there any implications to potential longer-term growth ambitions, given the disruption that's been observed in Q2? Thank you.
Yeah, thanks for those questions, Matthew. I'll talk about the operational disruption, and then Mike can unpack what our confidence in the underlying health of the business and why we're holding guidance. In terms of operational disruption, it was confined to a few weeks of Q2. We gripped it quickly, and actually, as we've come through that and are now delivering 100% of retail stores from that new facility, we actually have availability in our stores better than it's ever been. So structurally lower gaps than we went into, and that was partly the reason to consolidate from the three older DCs into our new state-of-the-art facility. So we've already got better availability out of that. Some of the rest of the upside is still to come.
We've got more automation in there when we move online in there. Clearly, having one distribution center, modern, fresh, with one place for suppliers to come in and one place for suppliers to go out, that will help us take more efficiencies out of our supply chain. And in the future, it opens up opportunities like cold chain, as frozen and fresh become bigger, and potentially more medical distribution. So the business case for Stafford, very much still intact, benefits to flow in the coming years, and the disruption that we experienced was short term and fully boxed away. Mike, do you want to give some more color on why we're confident in reaffirming guidance?
Yeah, Matthew, you're asking about our second half shape, and just to build on Lyssa comments, from a revenue point of view, we're really well set up, both in pet care centers and in vets. But you think about the numbers, you know, first half profit was GBP 48 million. Second half, we need to do GBP 11 million more in effect to get to 136 full year, which we're confident of, you know, we're confirming guidance. Four steps to that. First of all, the vet's performance is really strong. GBP 4.4 million up, profit-wise, year-on-year in the first half. We'd expect that to continue. Vet revenues are very predictable, and the way the model works, that profit is predictable. Second part of that will be energy.
You know, energy costs are lower year-on-year, and we'll get about GBP 3 million benefit out of energy, be it half and half in the second half. The third is we've got a really good handle on our operational cost base. You know, we've got a really well-established productivity program. We expect that to yield benefits, generally second half weighted, so there's a couple of million out of that year-on-year. And the final element of that that makes up the 11 is our SaaS costs. You know, at the start of the year, we planned a level of SaaS costs. As we're working into the detail now on some of those projects, we've probably got GBP 1-2 million saving there as well. So we're pretty confident on that plan.
As you say, today, we are reconfirming full year profit guidance of GBP 136 million.
Great. Thank you. I'll pass it on.
The next question comes from the line of Manjari Dhar from RBC. Please go ahead.
Morning, guys. Thanks for taking my call. I have two, if I may as well, please. The first one, how reflective do you think the early part of Q3 trading will be for the rest of the period?
... I suppose, did you guys see any, any pent-up demand coming through, as availability improved following that disruption? And then secondly, I was just wondering if you could give some color on how we should think about the, the major moving parts for, for gross margin in the second half, please?
No problem. I'll take the first of those, and then Mike will pick up on the second. So as we said in the RNS, early Q3 as up to yesterday, 4% like-for-like. Bit of a tale of two halves there, actually. As we bounced back from Stafford, that was over 5.5% like-for-like, so really fully normalized trading. The last couple of weeks have been slightly choppier. We're not a big Black Friday business. Christmas is much busier for us. So we have seen slightly choppier trading in the last couple of weeks, but as we head into Christmas, we're well set up. Our availability, as I said, is better than ever. Our price position is really strong, and we have some great ranges.
We've already sold over 200,000 doggy advent calendars by the first of December and 500,000 Christmas dog toys. So Christmas trading and Christmas sell-through is exactly where we would have expected it to be. And as we've said a number of times, the vets are firing on all cylinders. So current trading is in decent shape and absolutely no hangover from the period of disruption in Q2. Mike, do you want to unpack the gross margin?
Yeah, Manjari, you're asking about gross margin H2. Let me give a little bit of color on H1, because that will help understand the H2 shape a bit better. So in H1, we are down group level, gross margin percent 158 basis points. That's really all about our retail performance. There's two parts to that. The first is, you know, we flagged back in when we did the update in May, Forex this year will be a GBP 13 million impact. That's broadly split half and half, the same GBP 7 million, H1, GBP 6 million H2. So that's about 70 basis points of impact on gross margin. Should expect that to come through in the second half. The other big part of the gross margin down in the first half is mix. You know, food growth at 10%, accessories decline at 3%.
We've already been talking about accessories this morning. We'd expect a stronger performance of accessories in the second half. So some of that mix element, the 90 basis point should ease in the second half, although we should still see food outperforming accessories. The final point, part of that, gross margin question is, the vets gross margin did dip slightly in the first half. That's all about the, the charge we put into gross margin for the brand advertising we did. That's very much a one-off. Structurally, we always expect our vet gross margin to, to grow because we've got a strong growing revenue on a, on a pretty fixed cost base.
So we'd see our vet margin gross margin step up a bit year-on-year in the second half, and we'll see the retail margin slightly get better than the 166 basis points of decline we saw in the first half.
All very clear. Thank you.
The next question comes from the line of Andrew Wade from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Hello there. Hi, team. Hi, a couple of quick questions from me. I guess first one, what are you seeing in terms of benefit of the brand relaunch, how are customers reacting to it? What are you seeing there? The second one, you sort of... I'm struck by you, Lyssa, you said that, the 5.5%, when you bounced back from the disruption, the 5.5% like-for-like you were running at, you saw that as sort of a fully normalized run rate in the retail business. Should we, you know, last year was +7%, Q1 was sort of +7%. It, should we be looking at a sort of slightly lower like-for-like outlook run rate than we've been seeing?
That's the second question. And then the third one, do you feel a sort of, I don't know, a bit of frustration or pent-up excitement, maybe a better way of thinking about it, as you ahead of being able to launch a sort of full integrated across grooming vets, the improved user interface, all that sort of stuff. I mean, you've talked about it being critical to driving engagement and share of wallet. So is that something you're really looking forward to driving the next leg of like-for-like, I suppose?
Yeah. So I'll take the first and the third around the platform of the brand, because they're somewhat connected, and then Mike will pick up on like-for-like run rate. So, yeah, the brand relaunch has been really successful, but it was never a sort of an overnight thing. Actually, what we did is we relaunched the brand to bring together Vets for Pets, Pets at Home, the Pets Foundation, Pets Grooming under a new modern look and feel, and indicate to consumers start that journey of us being the one-stop shop for their pet care.
So in the future, they will be able to do everything from a postsurgical remote consult, through to booking a grooming room appointment, to changing a nutrition subscription, to booking a kind of flea, tick, and worm consult in store, or just ordering a toy. And all of that will be under the pet brand. So it was really important we brought those elements together. Having said that, our launch campaign was hugely successful in terms of how much consumers loved it. We found out, as doing research for that campaign, that we are the most trusted brand for pet care, seven times more trusted than the nearest competitor, and that runs through to the vets as well.
So as we bring that platform together, our new brand gives us a platform to launch that onto, and certainly, our marketing and advertising under that new brand has really stepped on and been successful. So early days, but delighted, and that really sets the scene for the, your last question, which is this integrated platform. Am I frustrated? No, I'm actually, you know, this is a big undertaking, and there's a lot to do, and I'm actually really pleased with progress. I'm particularly delighted that we're launching our new app and website in the new year. That's going to be a real step on. It's going to have much better UX and UI, much better merchandising, much better integration of offers, VIP, the Pets Club, vouchers, and really importantly, it's going to be a big step on to subscription.
So you're going to be able to order a box of everything you need for your pet, whether that be food, cat litter, puppy pads, a toy, dental sticks, all in one box, all in with one discount across the piece, and so that's going to be really competitive for consumers. We've tested the platform quite a lot with consumers, and got really good feedback. So I'm really excited about that. And then when we've cut over to that, we then start integrating the Vets and grooming, rolling out our PMS into the rest of the Vets estate. So we always knew it was going to be a sort of a two-year journey, and I'm actually really delighted that we're on track with that. It's not easy stuff.
If it was easy, everyone would do it, but we do have the skills and capabilities to get it done. So excitement rather than frustration, I would say. Mike, do you want to talk about run rates?
Yeah, Andy, I asked about run rates and like-for-likes. I think I'll just take us back actually to what we said back in May, when we said our, you know, medium-term customer revenue growth plan is 7%. And you think of that 7%, that breaks down into 9% consumer revenue growth in vet and 6% consumer revenue growth in our retail business. You know, against that, even with the disruption we saw in our Stafford transition, we had like-for-like retail revenues in the first half of over 5%. So, you know, against that 6% target, and by the way, vet was 19%, and the overall total was 8.6. So we ran ahead of those targets in the first half.
So in the first four weeks of the Q3, so that's the four weeks up to the ninth of November, we did see our retail LFL at 5.5%. That was a big pickup from where we've been with the disruption, you know, all the disruption we saw in the second quarter of 2.7%. If anything, on that shape, we did see an easing of inflation, actually, as we came out of Q2. So inflation in our food business has been running sort of 8%-9%, and the rest made up of volume growth. Actually, inflation sort of eased down to sort of 7%-6% over the last few weeks. So that's something we have been seeing in there.
But yeah, we'd expect, you know, we had a couple of weeks where I think consumers are naturally distracted by everything going on in the environment around promotion, high promotional environment getting through Black Friday. But, you know, we'd expect our retail LFL to get back up towards 5%, 6%, which is our target, when we get through the rest of Q3 into Q4.
Great stuff. Very helpful. Thanks.
The next question, it comes from the line of Simon Bowler from Numis. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Two areas I just wanted to touch on, if okay. One was just if you can share any volume numbers, and kind of give any kind of further commentary around your kind of perception of the outlook for inflation within the retail part of the business in particular. And then the second one, if you just kind of talk around the process, timing, and risk or lack thereof for the online transition part of the warehousing project.
Yeah. For the warehousing product project? Yeah.
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'll take the second, and then, Mike, do you want to take the first?
Yeah.
So we are 85% through our transition. We've got 100% of retail being delivered out of the DC. And we are now going to step into the goods to person, which is the online part of the transition. It's only 15% of our volume. And obviously, we've learned some lessons for the transition of our retail part of the business. So the period of peak risk is behind us. I wouldn't want to minimize what we've still got to do. We do have to still transfer online, but we are now doing that with a team who is up operating in Stafford with, you know, goods in and goods out, all operating well.
So this is incremental work, but we are much clearer on how to do it with a team that is now much more experienced. So I'm feeling confident, and we should be through that transition by the summer. We're not going to rush it for obvious reasons. Mike, do you want to talk about-
Yeah, you asked about volume inflation split out, Simon. So, you know, not really going to get into the nitty-gritty of category by category, but you remember, we have seen across the year, volume growth in our food business. In fact, we still had volume growth across the first half, even though we had that disruption in Q2. We sort of seen volume growth in food, 3%-4%, and the rest is inflation. And likewise, very similar shape in our accessories business, it's consumable. That's about a third of our accessories business. You know, we've seen volume growth there of 3, 3%, you know, across the year, across the year.
I commented on that previous question, we have seen inflation easing over the last two or three weeks, you know, from those elevated levels down to about 6%-7%. I think we expect that to really continue through balance of the year. And as we head into next year, it's a brave person that predicts inflation, but our planning assumption will be much more normalized inflation in food, so, you know, 3%-4%.
... and obviously, as we get closer, we'll be making an assessment of that inflation nearer the time. But, yeah, we are seeing inflation ease, particularly, particularly in food.
Okay, great. And actually just one, one more, it's not a follow on with apologies, but on, on one other topic. Just in terms of the, vet ATV progress, I, I guess there's loads of aspects to that in terms of the additional stuff you're able to sell, through your vet businesses, as well as a bit of inflation running through there. Do, do you think you can kind of maintain that double-digit growth in, in ATVs, across your vet practices?
So the growth in vets has been in visits as well as ATV, and about 4% of that growth has been underpinned by visits, and that's because of more clinical talent, better recruitment, better retention. There is a portion of that which is ATV, but that's not all inflation, actually. Some of it's inflation, some of it's pricing. And I should point out that those decisions on pricing are made at a local level by our joint ventures, by our practice owners, in response to local conditions. So they have a choice of how much pricing to put through, and they've been doing that. The balance of it, of course, is vet plans, which are seeing growth still, and a shift into more advanced procedures and curative care.
That's a bit of an inbuilt tailwind for us because we have young practices which have been signing up more puppies and kittens that are now aging over time. So the balance of older animals that need more care is continuing. Actually, as our vets become more established, they are taking certificates, and they're getting into more advanced procedures such as ophthalmic, orthopedic. We're putting in extensions with CT scanners. So the mix, not just of preventative and curative, but the quality and price actually of the curative side of things is increasing as well. So those elements will sustain us.
When we think about the plan that we set out in May that underpins the vet growth, new space, more clinical talent, extensions, and advanced procedures, those are all elements that will fuel the vet business going forward. So we're confident in the growth that we laid out in May, and all of those growth drivers remain intact.
Great. Thank you.
Before we take our next question, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one. The next question comes from the line of Adam Tomlinson from Liberum. Please go ahead.
Morning.
Morning.
Two questions from me, please. The first question is on if you could just talk a little bit about store standards, please, that would be helpful. And really there, I'm interested in how you monitor store standards, perhaps how often they get visited a week and how store managers are held accountable for those. And anything you can say about just how you think store standards have trended over the last couple of years, that would be interesting, please. And the second question is, you've been pretty explicit, I think, in terms of, in terms of guidance for FY 2024. If we look at FY 2025, I think consensus is about GBP 155 million of PBT there, so close to 15% growth.
I'm just wondering how comfortable you are with that and anything you can comment around that in an environment where potentially inflation's easing, you've got some costs still increasing quite significantly. I'm thinking there of wages, others, perhaps more helpful in terms of where they're trending, but useful just to get your thoughts around that as well, please.
Yeah, thanks for the question, Adam. On store standards, I think we are in, we're in really good shape, actually. We have, a really strong field team, with area managers, regional directors that are in store, all the time with, with really clear standards. We've recently relaunched something called One Best Way, which, you know, being very clear on, on standards around cleaning, on around, spacing off, giving space to customers, like, very, very clear standards, which is, I think, been really positive. We also monitor, of course, customer satisfaction, which is really strong. Took a little dip with availability, that, that short period of, of staff and availability, but bounced back and significantly above, most retailers.
Our colleague turnover is significantly down over the last couple of years, and our colleagues, of course, are the lifeblood of our stores. In fact, we recently voted for by our colleagues, won the best in best retail employer. So we've got happy colleagues, happy customers, good store standards. Of course, I think as a pet care retailer, one really important thing is that is how we look after the animals in our care. On that, we have a very significant program of audits, which are done by a completely separate team that will go into the store regularly, and grade the store against very specific standards, particularly on small animal and on fish, to make sure that we're taking care of the pets in our care to very, very high standards.
So actually, I think probably, and I, you know, I go in stores every week, we're looking in great shape. Availability is good, our colleagues are in a good place, our price position is strong, so we're set up really well. In terms of, FY 2025, we've got, you know, ongoing structural growth, a resilient consumer. Macro seems to be improving, and actually, a number of our business investments, which we've been investing in are coming on stream. So we've got the launch of our new, digital platform in the new year, and the new DC, as well as the benefit of the rollout, the physical rollout we've done. So we look forward with confidence, and Mike will just unpack some of the trends there.
Yeah. Yeah, and you asked about FY 2025. Again, that's-
Yeah.
I take us to, you know, the, the financial framework we set out last May, 7% consumer revenue growth, 10% profit growth, and a market growing at 4%. To Lisa's point, we've seen nothing to suggest the pet care customer isn't very resilient. The market continues to be underpinned by humanization and premiumization. So and we're well set up to add, create value out of that market. So Lisa pointed out, you know, the benefits of the new DC, they will start to flow. That's a big investment, and the period of maximum risk all behind us. The benefits of the digital platform are launching post-Christmas. Again, will all flow, and that will help customers shop a broader range of products and services.
The vet business is, is well set up, and we've got a clear plan we're executing to put more space in and retain and recruit the vets and nurses we need. Second thing I would say really is some of the headwinds we've seen over the last couple of years actually now become tailwinds. You know, this year, I commented earlier that, we've been held back by about GBP 13 million of FX year on year. You know, that we're hedging forward now FY 2025, we've hedged about 40% of our requirement, $1.24. So, you know, that becomes a, a tailwind after a couple of years, or certainly one year of a, of a headwind. Energy costs come down year on year, so that's a, that's a tailwind. And, and freight costs have normalized.
So, you know, what has been holding our profit back starts to become more, more helpful. I think the one thing we wouldn't look at, though, that is a change from when we did our, our update back in May, is National Living Wage. Then we talked then about 10% profit growth. Our assumption on wage growth was sort of 4%-5%. You know, the Autumn Statement last week set National Living Wage for next year at 9.7%. For us, you know, that's about total cost of about GBP 15 million-GBP 16 million, so GBP 8 million more than we'd expect before any mitigation. So we're working through that now. We have a lot of productivity levers we can pull, but we're still figuring out what that will be, what that will mean for next year's profits.
So that's one thing to consider that is new since we set out our financial framework last May.
Yeah. Okay, that's, that's very helpful. Thank you for that.
The next question that comes from the line of Kane Slutzkin from Numis. Please go ahead.
Good morning, guys. Just a quick one. On your vet visits, the 4%, could you just remind me how that compares to prior periods, you know, through the cycle, maybe with a reference to pre- and post-pandemic? And you mentioned retention and recruitment of vets is going particularly well. Just would you be able to share your growth in vet employment?
Yeah, no problem. So, yes, we have our turnover of vets is actually 10 full percentage points down year on year. It's gone down from 37%- 27%, which is getting signals. Yeah, which is a really big part of it. But also we've made great strides in recruitment. So, Mike, can you share the absolute numbers of vets and nurses you have there?
Yeah. So we've got 113 vets more year-on-year, this time now compared to this time last year, and 190 more nurses. So the, all the effort we put into both recruitment and retention is really paying off. And that gives us more capacity, and we know straight away that more capacity, 'cause there's demand out there, we grow revenue. And it's a big, big contributor to our 19% growth in the revenues we're seeing in the vet business. So that's gonna continue to be our focus. And I think, our model, Lisa has been talking about our joint venture model, I think is particularly attractive. You know, some of the merits of that model are really now shining through, and, it's helping us attract a lot more, vet and nurse professionals.
Thank you. Just, sorry, just, I don't know if you had a sort of any sort of comment on sort of prior visit growth?
Yeah. This year, the 4% is a significant increase on last year and the year before. We can follow up with those numbers, but it's definitely an increase.
All right. Perfect.
That is due to the talent recruitment.
Yeah. Great, thank you.
The next question, it comes from the line of Paul Rossington from HSBC. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Just a quick one from me. It's on the new vets and the new stores that you're rolling out. You didn't open that many new stores or that many new vets in the first half. I can see you did some extensions and refits, just quite a lot of activity there. But just, are you still on track to hit those medium-term targets in terms of the actual new store and new vet rollouts as well? Thank you.
Yeah, thanks for that question. So we did three new store openings, 24 refits, five vet extensions, opened two new veterinary practices, and flipped five vets from company-owned to joint venture ownership, which was in line with our plan. We've got new openings in the second half, both for vets and for stores. But you will see that accelerate through the plan, just like you've seen visits accelerate in the first half due to better retention and recruitment. Our joint unique joint venture model is gaining a lot of traction, and new partner pipeline is better than it's ever been. And we are not constrained by location. So we have 150 stores that don't have a vet. We've got many greenfield, and we've got a very strong standalone model.
We've got a lot of opportunity within the M25. We're planning to open Tottenham Hale, Sutton, and Whetstone in the second half, having opened Romford in the first half. The constraint, of course, is vet talent and finding the right joint venture partner. We've learned the lessons of the last few years. We'll only go for the right joint venture partners, the ones that have really good clinical expertise, the ability to run a business, the ability to lead a team. But we only need, you know, say, a few tens of those every year, or not even tens, like 10 or 15 every year to manage our growth ambitions. So we're definitely got a lot more resource in that space around recruitment potential.
We were just at the London Vet Show, relaunching our model to the world, and that was very well received around practice ownership. So we're absolutely confident that that will start to grow now over the coming years, and we will, we're in good shape to achieve our long-term ambitions.
Excellent. Thanks very much.
The next question comes from the line of Andrew Whitney from Investec. Please go ahead.
Hi, thanks for taking my questions. Just two from me. One was on advanced capabilities in the vets. I know you flag it up as potential to introduce competition against secondary hospitals and improve competition. Is there any limitation to what you can do in, I guess, what is probably an expanded vet facility versus what you can do at a secondary hospital? Is there anything that can't be done in your broader clinics that can be done in the hospital? That's question one. And then just on the second question is on divisional free cash flow. I know it looks like there's some one-offs in the half. I remember last year, I think the vet business generated about 46% of free cash last year.
Is there a tipping point coming up where the vet business will sustainably generate more than half of the cash for the group? And how soon might that be? Many thanks.
Okay, well, I'm going to let Mike take that second question on free cash flow. But on advanced capabilities, I mean, there is a huge space between kind of general practice as it's sort of traditionally seen, and the very advanced stuff that's going on in specialist hospitals, and it's that gray space that we're opening up into. I think we've got a long way to go before we hit the limitations of what can be done in general practice. For example, we've put a couple of CT scanners into our 24-hour hospitals. In fact, we put one MRI scanner in. We're able to do pretty advanced orthopedics in a number of our advanced practices. We can do ophthalmic soft tissue.
Quite a lot of our vets, and this is the benefit of the joint venture model, really, is that they are with us for a career, for life, for the life of their, of their veterinary career. And, you know, once they've got to the point of what we used to call maturity, where they pay down their loans, they've got a stable practice. They don't want to spend the next, you know, 15 years doing spays. They want to advance their themselves. A lot of them are doing certificates. We've actually setting up a clinical academy, so we've selected some of our top vets to be clinical centers of excellence. So Haley, for example, in Cambridge, is a, is a laparoscopy certificate holder. She has cameras now in her, in her operating theater, so other vets can benefit from seeing her techniques.
So right from the very top end through down to the graduate and nurse schemes, we're investing in clinical development. So there is obviously a kind of a hard border of things you really can't do in general practice, but it's moving ever further away, and we've got a long, long way to go and a lot of space to grow into before we get there. I would just say as well, that quite often it is a bit cheaper to do it in general practice and certainly better for the pet because they're not going and having to travel a long distance and stay away overnight. We can do quite a lot of things as a day case that would otherwise require a long distance. So I just think it's pro-consumer, it's pro-choice, pro-competition, but it's actually pro-pet as well.
Yeah, you're right, Clear. Andrew, just following up on your question on cash flow. I mean, you're right. We're quite proud, we're incredibly proud, actually, of the vet performance in the half. And the cash flow generated is in the RNS, you know, GBP 57 million of cash flow in the half. And I think you're making the comparison there to our retail business, which clearly we've had some one-off impacts on in the retail business. So I don't think you can judge the cash performance of the retail based on its first half performance. We've always said that the vet business on maturity would generate at least GBP 60 million of free cash flow. And you can see from the numbers, we're more than well on our way to achieving that.
So you know, in the future, there may be a time that the vet business generates more than the retail business. I think that actually underlying is some way off yet, but there could be a time, you know, because the growth in our vet business, as Lisa's pointing out, it isn't constrained by location, it's constrained by our availability, the availability of vets. I guess the other point to make when we're talking about cash flow is we have come out of a peak period of investment. If you look back to last year, we invested GBP 75 million in CapEx. This year, we're investing GBP 60 million in CapEx. And as we sort of trade all, we did our update in May, we'd expect CapEx to sort of normalize at GBP 50 million a year.
And our vet business, as you know from the model, is incredibly capital light in terms of growth. So we're gonna enter a period in the next couple of years of lower capital investment, and we'll start to see some of the embedded benefits. You know, we talked briefly about the DC, talked briefly about the digital platform, but a lot of the OpEx to grow and the CapEx to grow our vet business is already embedded in the vet business. So I think as we look ahead, we're going to see our free cash flow across both vet and retail step forward quite significantly.
Thank you very much.
There are no further questions in the queue, so I'll now turn the call back over to your host for some closing remarks.
Great. Well, thank you very much for joining this morning. We're very confident and excited about the future of the business, and look forward to seeing you at the end of the year.