H2 20/21

Apr 28, 2021

Good morning. Welcome to our twenty twentytwenty one results presentation. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. It's been an exceptional year for the business, for our people and in everything we've delivered for our customers. First and foremost, I want to recognize the outstanding contribution of my colleagues, of our entire team. They have risen to the huge challenges and have been heroic in how they've looked after our customers and each other every day. I'm really proud of the business and the part we played within the wider industry response as food supply chains really stepped up to feed the nation. My thanks also to our suppliers for all their support and partnership. They have done a fantastic job throughout the last twelve months. Every day, in every part of what we do, we care about what mattered most for our customers, our colleagues and the communities we serve. Safety first, prioritizing the elderly, disabled and vulnerable from day one, protecting availability, supporting shielding colleagues, supporting communities with food donation. Our values really came to the fore. And it's been a time of extraordinary change, learning and agility for the business, too. We have responded and adapted well throughout the pandemic. We've delivered at pace every step of the way. And as a result, we're stronger and fitter for the future. I set out a clear plan and strategy in November to transform our business over the next three years. We're clear on our priorities. We're putting food back at the heart of Sainsbury's. I'm encouraged by all the progress, and I will update you on where we are once we've heard the detail behind the financials from Kevin. Kevin, over to you. Thank you, Simon. Good morning, and thank you for listening into this presentation. I will now cover the financial highlights for the fifty two weeks to March 6 before handing back to Simon to cover our operational performance and update on progress against the plan we set out last November. I'm going to start with the sales line. Grocery sales were up nearly 8%, driven by higher spending on food for in home consumption as a result of the pandemic. The main influence on the movements in grocery growth through the year was the timing of lockdowns. In stores, general merchandise and clothing sales gradually recovered over the year, while August sales were consistently strong throughout the whole year, driving the strong general merchandise number. Simon will cover the strength of the fourth quarter in particular later on. In total, retail sales, excluding fuel, were up just over 7%. Fuel sales were down 39% in the period, so retail sales, including fuel, were broadly flat year on year. Retail operating profits fell 22%, reflecting very strong execution and efficiency across the business and a good level of operational gearing in both our grocery business and Argos, offset by nearly GBP 500,000,000 of direct COVID costs. Financial Services made a loss of GBP 21,000,000, returning to profit in the second half of the year. With some offset from interest costs down GBP 48,000,000 year on year, that resulted in a group underlying profit before tax decline of 39%. At a statutory pretax level, we recorded a loss before tax of GBP $261,000,000 as we booked GBP $617,000,000 of predominantly noncash charges relating to restructuring and impairments. This was in line with the guidance we gave in November, and I'll cover these in a bit more detail later on. Free cash flow was very strong, growing GBP 173,000,000 year on year with a working capital inflow of more than GBP $450,000,000, driven in particular by strong trading in the fourth quarter. Net debt reduced by almost GBP $540,000,000. I'm pleased that we were able to deliver on our commitment of protecting shareholders from the full impact of COVID, effectively paying a flat full year dividend year on year. This waterfall summarizes the UPBT movement year on year with retail profit down GBP $2.00 8,000,000 after the GBP $485,000,000 of direct COVID costs. That GBP $485,000,000 is higher than the estimate we gave in November, having gone through a third lockdown and having paid a third thank you payment to frontline and distribution center colleagues, recognizing the amazing job that they've done for our customers. The table on the right shows the breakdown of retail COVID costs in the year, with higher colleague costs, the largest part of these as we paid wages of vulnerable colleagues who were isolating and unable to work, covered higher than normal absence levels and made the three thank you payments that I mentioned to frontline colleagues. Looking now at Financial Services. The waterfall on this slide shows the main moving parts of the Financial Services underlying profit for the year. We booked GBP 43,000,000 under IFRS nine in the year for estimated future bad debts on our loan book. As expected, in the year, we earned less commission income from ATMs and travel money and reduced interest income due to lower lending activity. This is partially offset by reduced funding costs. The bank's management team have done a great job in a difficult market, taking timely and decisive actions and have delivered a good performance relative to peers. The right hand chart shows the contrast between the H1 loss and the H2 profit. In the first half, we made a significant provision in anticipation of future credit losses, which has remained sufficient to cover our current predictions. Therefore, in H2, we did not book additional IFRS nine COVID provisions, and the bad debt charge was lower than a typical half as we had some impairment benefits from a one off debt sale and a reduction in customer balances. Looking to next year, profits will rebuild slowly as we cautiously grow the lending book while still facing commission headwinds. We are comfortable with the consensus forecast for the bank returning to profit subject to the economy recovering as expected. These charts summarize some of the most important performance drivers for the Financial Services division. First, the reduction in the lending book driven by lower personal loans and credit card lending, earlier customer loan repayments and the runoff of the mortgage book. Second, we have talked many times about the quality of our lending book, and everything we have seen to date reinforces that. We have conservatively provided against losses, and as you can see from the step up in the coverage ratio. And the bank's balance sheet has continued to strengthen. We are in a stronger position than at the prior year end in terms of capital, bad debt coverage and liquidity. Going back now to the group P and L. In order to provide a clear view of our underlying performance, items which, by virtue of their size and or nature, which do not reflect the group's underlying performance, excluded, and these are outlined on this slide. In the period, we incurred a total exceptional cost of GBP $617,000,000, in line with the guidance we gave in November. Our guidance for exceptional costs over the three years to March 2024 is unchanged at £900,000,000 to £1,000,000,000 and we expect to incur the remaining costs of $250,000,000 to £350,000,000 evenly over the next three years. The two biggest drivers of the restructuring charge are the Argos store closure program that we announced in November and the reorganization of our logistics network as we combine our Argos and Sainsbury's networks and reduce our number of depots and stock locations. The costs include asset impairments as well as closure provisions such as dilapidations and redundancies. These programs are progressing at pace, and Simon will talk more about this in a few minutes. In the year, COVID-nineteen and the accelerated structural change led to a full impairment review of all the group's assets. These were almost entirely booked in the first half. And as a reminder, for Retail, this reflects changes in future channel mix and the impact on asset values, while GBP 105,000,000 of the impairment number relates to the write down of intangible assets in the bank. The cash impact in the year of the restructuring charges was GBP 54,000,000. As I noted earlier, we generated very strong cash flow in the year. Most notable is the working capital swing with a significant reduction in stock at Argos and strong trading in quarter four, driving higher payables balances at Argos and Sainsbury's. In the simplest terms, we sold more stock than usual ahead of the year end and didn't pay for that stock until the new financial year. This more than offset the impact of higher Sainsbury's stock and reduced fuel payables. Disposal proceeds reduced versus last year when we were unwinding the British Land joint venture. We therefore generated free cash flow of GBP $784,000,000, an increase of GBP 173,000,000 year on year or closer to a £350,000,000 increase when you exclude the reduced asset disposals, reflecting the net impact of lower profits and the working capital movement. Obviously, as trading normalizes over the course of this year, we expect around half of the working capital benefit to reverse. We therefore expect materially lower free cash flow generation this year as this chart shows. So we need to look at the cash generation over a three year period to March 22 to see the underlying performance. As you can see, the underlying average rate of free cash flow generation is expected to be in line with what we have committed to deliver over time. Looking to the outer years, it's worth remembering that this projection is after we pay increased CapEx and one off costs relating to the key transformation projects. Alongside the cash benefit of strong trading, this year, we continue to see ongoing benefits from the structural changes we've made in the last few years: no bank capital injections, lower interest costs and lower cash pension contributions. Therefore, in addition to the commitment to the dividend this year, we are also able to increase our net debt reduction forecast. We are now expecting to reduce non lease net debt by at least GBP $950,000,000 over the four years to March 2023, '2 hundred million more than our guidance in December, largely due to tight working capital management. In the shorter term, as you can see from this chart, we expect net debt to increase slightly this year as the working capital benefit I discussed reduces. But clearly, very good progress over the two years, particularly in light of this year's lower profit. Looking to this year's p and l, we continue, as you might expect, to take a prudent view on the year ahead. But in line with our commitment to deliver profit inflection, we also continue to expect UPBT to be higher than the £586,000,000 reported in the pre COVID year to March 2020. And we have stated that we are comfortable with consensus forecasts of GBP $620,000,000. Looking at the detail versus that pre COVID comparison year of twenty nineteen-twenty twenty, we expect underlying retail profit at Sainsbury's and August to be higher, and we are guiding to interest costs of around GBP 50,000,000 lower over two years. Against that, we will have some ongoing COVID costs. We're expecting bank profits to be lower than pre COVID levels, and we face a colleague cost headwind against a year when variable compensation was unusually low. So a year of significant COVID costs and a significant one off costs associated with the big and bold decisions we've made this year. But underlying this, we've delivered strong profitable sales growth and a very strong cash performance. We've paid a stable dividend, and we're more confident in the pace of deleverage, reflecting stronger underlying cash generation. Thank you very much for your time, and I'll now hand you over to Simon to take you through some of the operational highlights of the year and provide an update on progress against the plan we set out last November. Thank you, Kevin. So turning to our operational and strategic delivery. I will cover the following in the next forty minutes: first, a reflection on the full year of trading through COVID and our strong operating performance And second, to highlight the strong start we've made towards delivering the priorities we set out in November: food first, brands that deliver and safe to invest and the bold decisions and good momentum that are driving that. You're familiar with how we looked after our customers through this pandemic and kept customers and colleagues safe. This was our top priority. And we were proud to be recognized as the safest supermarket by The U. K. Leading consumer champion. But what I think is key is the momentum we built through the year. We've grown online capacity 2.5x compared to what we were delivering before the pandemic. Our technology and digital capabilities have rapidly scaled, enabling us to serve customers whenever, wherever and however they want to shop. And we redeployed and reskilled 15,000 colleagues whose roles were impacted by COVID. Ultimately, making the right choices for customers and colleagues has meant the business thrived and has become stronger through the pandemic. We've spoken before about the rapid shift to digital. And there is no better illustration of the agility of our platform over the last year than the growth we've delivered across our digital businesses. Online grocery sales have more than doubled to £3,600,000,000 Growth went further and faster than we achieved in the first half. We were the fastest growing of the scale online grocers. We added three percentage points of share over the last twelve months. Argos grew digital participation to over 90%. SmartShop remained a critical part of customers shopping safely and more quickly, with sustained momentum at over 30% of sales in handset stores and over 50,000,000 transactions over the year. Linked to this is a really strong move on in digital nectar, where we have a clear market leading position with 7,400,000 users. The digital platform has been such a fundamental differential for us in serving customers better, faster and more safely through the pandemic. And as a result, delivering leading customer satisfaction is what has and will continue to set us apart. We listened and responded to customers at a level we've never achieved before. We invested in the areas that really matter to customers like safety, store standards and availability. You may remember this chart showing customer satisfaction measures compared to our key competitors in stores and online. We've achieved record levels of customer satisfaction. Availability in our supermarkets went up 3%. Colleague friendliness, up 7%. Easier and faster to checkout, up 13%. We also made progress on quality and value for money. The increase in online capacity brought challenges, too, as exceptional volumes put unprecedented pressure on product availability and timing of slots. We know where we didn't fully meet customer expectations at points in time, and we are very clear on what needs to be done and how we can improve on this. Looking at our performance compared to the market. This chart reflects, for a second year running, our grocery volume growth has been ahead of the market and of most of our key competitors through the whole of the year. And we have a strong story, too, across our general merchandise and clothing business, which has performed well, benefiting from the sustained shift to online. Argos has clearly been the standout over the last year, sustaining very high levels of digital sales. An exceptional fourth quarter in particular with very strong contributions from gaming and some pull forward on seasonal spend, in particular, as customers prepared for Easter and outdoor socializing. We've seen a really strong recovery from the Sainsbury's general merchandise and clothing business through the year. So overall, a good operating performance and growing momentum across the business. But as we look ahead, it's early days, and we've much more to do. I was clear when we set out our new plan six months ago that we can and will do better as a business for all of our stakeholders. And in the rest of my presentation, I will focus on where we are today and our plans for the year ahead. A new, clear galvanizing purpose is at the heart of our plan to be a bolder, better Sainsbury's. Driven by our passion for food, together, we serve and help every customer. Our team feel proud of what they've achieved throughout the last year and what has been delivered for all of our stakeholders. And as a result, there was a strong and growing belief and conviction about what we can now deliver as we look ahead. So turning to our plan and the three value creation priorities we set out in November. These are now driving resource prioritization and will drive improvement in our performance over the next three years. They are centered on putting food back at the heart of our business and making sure that we make the right choices with our other brands and our cost saving programs to cut complexity and support investment in our customer offer. So what's changing? We're putting food back at the heart of our business to do a better job for our customers. We have significantly changed the way we look at costs, the way they are managed and governed in the business, and we are targeting a significant 200 basis points reduction in the cost to sales ratio. We are clear about our commitments to shareholders in the form of profit delivery and cash generation, underpinned by consistent metrics we are targeting. And very importantly, and I know this is not visible on the outside, but as we set course to deliver against our plan, this is underpinned by necessary change we're making in our culture and in how we work. This means more focus on the customer, clearer accountabilities, bold choices and a more responsive, faster, lower cost organization. I have made a number of leadership team changes in our business over the last nine months. These changes have importantly brought new focus and energy in a number of key areas across the business. And I'm really encouraged by how our new team are already working together in leading the change we need to make and in driving our momentum forward. As a reminder, we said we would have seven consistent key metrics to assess performance. We've now added ROCE to this framework, so four operational measures and four financial ones. We will consistently report against these eight measures as we implement our plans to share how we are doing and enable you to assess our progress along the way. So to our first priority, putting food first. We're seeing early progress in improving customers' real and perceived value perception. The pace is building across product innovation and in online capacity and performance. We're also fully integrating how we will deliver sustainability at the heart of our Food First plan, reducing food waste, plastics and at the same time, healthy diets. Value for money has never mattered more for our customers, and we are committed to being better value with more consistent prices across the year, being more competitive in the key categories and on everyday products that matter most to our customers. And we're doing this through three distinct value programs. First, we're building on price lock as our broadest value program. This targets primary customers, giving reassurance on good value and stable pricing day in, day out. As of January, we have delivered this across more than 2,500 products, a clear and strong value commitment across the store and online. Second, we talked in November about the investment we have made in core high volume lines, particularly focused on the center of the plate. Meat, fish and poultry are critical halo driving categories. When we win the center of the plate, we see additional spend and volume that comes with those items. And we've seen customers continue to react positively with higher purchase volumes in these invested areas and growing baskets as a result. Our third value program is Sainsbury's quality, Aldi Price Match, which we launched in February. This is aimed at winning more spend from secondary customers who are Sainsbury's customers but spend less of their grocery budget with us. Over 50% of the products and 80% of the volume included in this are in fresh categories like meat, fish and poultry and dairy. And this focus on fresh is quite different from similar competitor activity. Families can shop with confidence for everyday essentials like milk, cheese, yogurt and mints and core grocery products, too, like pasta, flour and jam. Sainsbury's quality, Aldi Price Match, is already removing price as a barrier to choosing Sainsbury's and is driving real and perceived value, particularly with our secondary shoppers. We are pleased with customer reactions. Here's the latest TV adverts going out from later The savory's quality you expect is now price matched to Aldi. Juicy British chicken breast fillet from Trusted Farmers. Tasty rump steak, expertly matured over twenty one days. And freshly frozen mixed berries, bursting with flavor. Find hundreds of Sainsbury's products now price matched to Aldi. Think both ads are really compelling. I hope you agree. These charts show the impact this has had on our year end price position versus last year. It's encouraging to see such early positive results with a near 300 basis point improvement across the total basket versus ALDI and a near 900 basis point improvement in those key focus categories I talked about earlier. And if we look specifically at one of the main areas of focus, the center of the plate with meat, fish and poultry, we've seen a 15% uplift in volume. But this is the really important chart, which shows exactly what we wanted to see. It shows the depth of the price investment we're making in those key categories. And it shows that, as expected, the volume response in simple terms is not enough to make back that investment. But using nectar data, we can track and measure the total spend from customers buying into these key invested areas, and we are seeing exactly what we wanted to see, which is an uplift in the rest of the basket spend or what we call the halo benefit. The sum of the parts is still a net investment, but clearly a far smaller one, and we benefit from putting higher volumes through the business. Innovation is absolutely essential to our plan to put food first, and there are two key elements of this program as we step up our plan for the year ahead. We will launch 1,900 brand new food products this year, 3x the level of last year. In addition, we will launch about the same number of what we call renovated products, where we'll improve product specification, customer appeal and packaging. New products have to deliver a difference for customers, whether that's giving customers an opportunity to trade up, for improved value or in meeting a need to reduce waste, packaging or offer a healthier or more sustainable option. We've significantly changed our ways of working across the commercial teams to deliver this outcome. And we know that newness is important to customers, and our product plan this year marks a real step change in our commitment to accelerating the pace of innovation. You can see here our extensive range of tasty and delicious products to enjoy at all those barbecues and picnics this year. We are all set for a summer of celebration with a bold pipeline of new innovation launching just as customers prepare to get together with family and friends. Now we talked in November about the feedback we had heard from our suppliers. Put simply, they were telling us to prioritize better, innovate and move faster to unlock value from working in partnership together. And I'm encouraged that we're already working differently together, and our suppliers are recognizing this. We're encouraged by the feedback we're starting to hear, which demonstrates that the change that we're putting in place is now delivering benefits. And that's through stronger partnership, which is increasing supplier investment behind Sainsbury's. In return, our suppliers are seeing higher volumes. And through improved joint responsiveness, we're driving innovation and sustainability. So now turning to online. The rapid acceleration we have seen, as you can see, has driven our market share. We've been the only top three grocer to gain share over the year, and we've seen the biggest share gain of the big five over the last two years. We've been there for our customers when they needed us, and we think this puts us in a good place to retain more of that new online share than our competitors as we look forward. 58% of grocery online customers were new to online shopping with us last year. And as well as growing capacity, we've grown profitability with a pipeline of initiatives to support this. We have changed how we operate across our channels to serve more customers in more ways, more efficiently. And this shows the online grocery proposition we now offer to customers. We've expanded the conventional home delivery model from our existing store base, but we've also substantially ramped up our click and collect presence. We've rolled out Chop Chop to another 16 cities beyond London, and we now partner with Deliveroo and Uber Eats in 200 stores. To help and serve our customers, we introduced extended delivery times and Sabre slots, and Delivery Pass customer numbers have hit a record of nearly 250,000. Our Click and Collect sales are up nearly tenfold and grew to record levels, peaking at 27% of total digital sales as we rapidly expanded our capacity to meet demand. And we continued the expansion of Chop Chop and our unique dual partnership with Deliveroo and Uber Eats, enabling customers to buy over 1,000 products and get delivery within thirty minutes. Now scaled to a £50,000,000 business, these on demand propositions are a great example of us responding to rapidly changing customer habits for these immediate missions and partnering to accelerate our plans. You can see quite clearly in these charts the accelerating online momentum. And as we said in November, this has been profitable growth for us with our online profit contribution growing by a factor of four and the contribution margin doubling. So looking at the drivers of that. Our biggest online cost has been a headwind, with average pick rates down 12% for the year due to COVID restrictions. Now this has recovered over the course of the year and is now back above pre COVID levels. The item pick rate was offset by bigger basket sizes and scale benefits. Importantly, these were not just COVID driven. We continue to refine the operating model and have delivered some big wins on drop density and van utilization in particular. When we look to online economics over this next year, we know we will face some headwinds, But we've already started in a much stronger place on item pick rate, having recovered to pre pandemic levels. This is continuing to step up, and we know we have a lot of cost efficiency benefits to come through. Looking beyond the short term store pick economics, we are taking a good look at the evolution of the online market. And as you can see, we have already gained a better understanding than most of the immediacy market. The economics of the model will change as the balance between automation and labor costs change and as customer expectations around immediacy change, too. So to summarize here, we're confident in the continued profitable evolution of our store pick model. But given the pace of change, and as you would expect, we are bound to be looking at these things across the industry like other grocers. With food at the heart of Sainsbury's and our mission to help and serve every customer, we will soon launch a new brand promise. Later this year, you will see a switch from Live Well for Less to help everyone eat better. This bold new commitment as a brand captures a far wider number of ways in which we can and will help our customers to eat better: affordable, easy, delicious food, cooked at home, enjoyed together. Help everyone eat better is our promise that commits to healthier, tastier, more sustainable food available to all our customers no matter how much time or money they have. And it will also fully integrate our sustainability ambition boldly and clearly within our commercial and customer objectives. This is very important to us and is something we will talk more about at our ESG event in June and through our role as supermarket sponsor of COP26 in Glasgow later this year. We set out our net zero targets last year and promised to update on progress, not just on the Scope one and two net zero targets, but on our wider sustainability goals. Customers continue to tell us that they care and expect us to drive positive change to reduce the impact of their shopping on the planet. We outlined our four key priorities in November: reducing our carbon footprint helping customers make healthier and more sustainable choices reducing food waste and reducing packaging. And we've made progress against three of these four. On plastics, there is lots we are doing. For example, we have removed two fifty five tonnes of plastic from our beef and lamb steaks by replacing our plastic trays with film lined boards. We've also removed over six tonnes by moving to paper straws on our juice cartons. As well as announcing our Scope one and two targets, we've also committed to reduce our Scope three emissions. And we've continued to focus on delivering everyday progress by implementing environmental measures in our new stores, ranging from installing EV charging points to B Hotels to help boost the biodiversity of our sites. Our second priority relates to our brands outside of food and how they support our ability to deliver in food. We've made material changes in how we run these brands. We have three very clear objectives: for each to deliver for their customers, making a return in their own right and supporting our food business. Let's talk first about Nectar. As a unique platform, Nectar is powering our ability to connect with customers through hyper personalization of offers linked to individual shopping habits. It's a profitable business, and we are accelerating performance. Not only do we have 18,000,000 active Nectar collectors, we continue to grow our digital nectar base now with more than 7,000,000 app users. This is market leading by some distance. We have made significant investment in our digital media capability, and we believe we are now industry leading in this space. Our suppliers recognize the value of being able to effectively communicate with these engaged customers, attracted by the strong and measurable ROIs we can deliver by converting customer reach, relevance and engagement into sales. We're showing just one example here of driving conversion through personalized content, but there are many more across all categories, and the possibilities for collaborating much more on this platform with suppliers are significant. We know there's a lot of interest in this area, particularly given the increasing size of our digital customer base. So we will share more on Nectar and particularly Nectar three sixty later in the year at a deep dive event we will plan. The Nectar coalition gives us scale and is a powerful draw for new brand partnerships with earning and redemption opportunities at over 300 retailers. Last year, we bought Argus onto the Nectar platform, and we are already linking more Argus customers with Nectar than expected, giving new and better insights into these customers. They're linked to our other brands and a new, more efficient way to talk to and incentivize them. As expected, we see even higher levels of Argos customers using Nektar where they are collecting from an Argos store inside Sainsbury's. We announced our partnership with British Airways. And the launch of our two way Nectar Avius partnership is a great demonstration of the power of Nectar. It's a meaningful currency for customers and one they're increasingly engaged with through the Nectar app. And you only need to take a look at the social media when the days after the partnership was announced to realize quite how engaged customers are here. Argos has really come of age as a digital business. We are the third most visited retail website in The U. K, with online sales up 69%. Over 3,000,000 customers were new to Argos in the year, and they have used us across our ranges with strong performances in categories like furniture, where we have really stepped up our offer. We've been there for customers when plenty of businesses haven't been able to, and they have experienced our market leading click and collect and home delivery propositions, with nearly 40% of sales delivered to home. We've made great progress in our custom propositions by launching the power of Nectar in Argos with over 2,700,000 linked accounts and strong sales participation. We are well underway with the transformation plans we laid out in November to make the Argos model more competitive and more profitable. The Argos we start this year with is a very different business to the one we started last year. It is already delivering a significant reduction in cost to serve, and this will build, as you can see in these charts. This year, we will open around 70 Argus store in stores inside Sainsbury's. We will open our first new local fulfillment center this summer, and at least seven will be opened by the end of the year, giving shoppers quicker access to a wider range and with improved and more consistent availability. In addition, as we build out our network of local performance centers over the next three years, customers will also see a progressive improvement in availability as we move more stock closer to customers for rapid delivery rather than, as is currently the case, availability being dictated by the range available in the immediate store network. Of course, this also comes with significant working capital benefits as we become more efficient with our stockholding across Argos. So when we look to the Argos profits this year and the changing macro context, we are being cautious on our sales forecast, given the uncertain consumer spending backdrop and the prospect of foregoing some unprofitable sales as we take a more disciplined promotional stance. So we're forecasting sales to be broadly in line with pre COVID twenty nineteen-twenty twenty levels, but with a better gross margin rate and significantly lower costs. As a result, we are expecting higher profits than in the pre COVID-nineteen-twenty twenty base year. There's been something of a quiet revolution happening at Habitat as we have been making it our main home and furnishing brand and maximizing its potential for the first time, significantly increasing its distribution and the quality of our offer across homeware and furniture. At the back end of the business, we've now effectively bought all of the infrastructure in house to Argos, reducing cost and delivering a huge upgrade to the Habitat website. The relaunch of Habitat has made a strong start with home and furniture sales up over 30% in February, which is the first month of the launch. We shouldn't ignore the contribution our clothing business has made this year. We've significantly outperformed the market with a really stellar outperformance in womenswear in particular, and our top line performance in stores has recovered over the course of the year. Customer feedback on our ranges has continued to improve. But importantly, alongside this, we've learned a huge amount about how our customers will trade online, how to manage promotional participation with tighter management of stock levels. And we are now a significantly more profitable and capital efficient business as a result. In Financial Services, Jim and Mike have done a great job managing the impact of COVID with a good performance relative to peers. Costs are lower, risk has been well managed and the balance sheet is strong. So we are well set to deliver the strategic commitments we set out at the Capital Markets Day in September 2019. We said in November that we had received some expressions of interest in our financial services business. We continue to evaluate these and will update the market if and when appropriate. At this moment in time, our clear priority is to continue to deliver our core strategy. With a return to profitability in the second half, we are on track and expect to continue to deliver progress. In doing so, as you can see here, we're delivering a strong and compelling financial services platform, and the link to other Sainsbridge businesses is developing well across Argos, Habitat and Nektar. So now to our third main priority, safe to invest. As I've already said, we're making some really significant investments in our customer proposition. And these are being funded by cost savings elsewhere in the business, and we have a very significant ambition to reduce operating cost of sales by more than 200 basis points over the next three years. The change in our cost ambition is clearly set out here. We've completely changed the way we govern cost management in the business, and this is giving us real confidence that we can deliver the step up in savings that we are targeting this year and beyond. We have created new program management, new ways of working and built a muscle in the business that is stronger than we've seen before with a refreshed ambition for delivering our plan. So looking in some detail at that step up. You can see where these savings are targeted with a number of the programs that we talked about last year, such as supply chain and logistics, now well underway in delivering benefits. Within the retail projects here, this is not just headcount reduction. These are key change programs where we've made big choices about things like our counters and the Argos store network as well as addressing some big opportunity areas like waste and shrink. Overall, we've mobilized a significant cost change effort, and we are making big choices from resourcing our business more effectively to fundamental reorganization of our supply chains. This slide provides more information on some of the big ticket areas over the three year program. Now that we've announced a significant reorganization, we can share some more of the detail on the central cost target of up to £100,000,000 which is part of the cost saving target we gave you last year. We've also shown some of the staging posts on the supply chain and logistics journey where we will see a large amount of change this year. So these aren't just ambitions. These are very significant changes to our ways of working. So in summarizing where we are, we've taken the momentum that we've gained this year and used it to move at pace to change the business. There is no doubt that we have started to put food back to being front and center of our business, but we've only just begun to deliver what we think is possible here. We're transforming Argos and Habitat, and the bank is on track to deliver its targeted return improvement. And we will deliver profit improvement this year on a normalized base and with a stronger net debt reduction target. Our commitment in delivering for shareholders, I hope, is clear. Through an inflection in profit, through high returning transformation projects and through strong free cash flow supporting a consistent dividend and a strong balance sheet. We have reconfirmed our guidance for the year. We remain prudent about top line expectations given the tough comparables, but we have a clear plan to achieve profit growth. Finally, I promise that we will always return to what are now eight key metrics as we move forward with our plans. We will therefore next share progress when we get together for the interims. But for now, let me say I am pleased with the way we are shaping up with our operational measures, having done particularly well in FY 2021. We expect to push forward, too, with our net zero commitments as we launch our integrated plan with helping everyone eat better. In the reported numbers this year, the financial measures have significant distortions from COVID. As confirmed, we expect profit growth this year over pre COVID levels, and we're getting on with delivering our cost savings program. Last year was clearly exceptional in terms of cash generation, while lower profits reduced our return on capital employed. So let me finish by coming back to our three core priorities. You can hopefully see how this is beginning to fit together in driving our performance and momentum. We've made some bold choices to drive forward our priorities, and we're working hard to reduce our operating costs and our cost of goods. And we're reinvesting that money in the core areas of the food proposition that matter most to customers, particularly in value and our customers are noticing. The retail market is so dramatically different to where it was a year ago. We've adapted at pace, and we will continue to do so to be really well placed in a post COVID world. Thank you for listening. I really appreciate your time this morning.