Good morning all. 2025 was a transformational year for THG. The successful demerger of Ingenuity at the start of the period has reshaped the group, creating a more focused and agile consumer brands business, well-positioned for future cash generation. We delivered full year revenue growth of 2.3%, representing a pleasing recovery from the first half, underscoring the positive momentum entering H1 2026. The recovery was led by THG Beauty, which delivered a standout second half performance. Looking at the revenue breakdown by region, the performance reflects a deliberate shift towards our higher margin home territories, where our brand equity and operational leverage are strongest. Now, turning to our businesses in more detail. THG Beauty delivered standout growth in the U.K., where our flagship brand, Lookfantastic, delivered a 16.2% increase in sales during the important cyber trading period.
Within THG Nutrition, we continued to successfully diversify revenue streams with growth largely driven by disciplined pricing actions and strong growth in more margin accretive categories. Moving down the income statement, the gross margin performance reflects two significant factors. Firstly, in THG Nutrition, the market continued to be challenged by well-documented commodity headwinds. Secondly, within THG Beauty, we undertook a strategic repositioning of our own brand portfolio. Operationally, our focus on efficiency continues to yield tangible results. The stronger growth in the U.K., our most highly automated region, has delivered an improvement in distribution costs of 80 basis points. Our relentless focus on efficiency is paying off. We drove a significant 100 basis points improvement in payroll costs, a direct result of both disciplined headcount management and our increasing adoption of AI. The resulting adjusted EBITDA reflects a resilient performance against well-documented external headwinds.
The modest year-on-year reduction was principally driven by challenges within THG Nutrition, which faced sustained record high whey commodity prices alongside persistent weakness of the Japanese yen. These factors impacted margins and prompted a strategic pivot away from the D2C model in Asia. Profitability was also temporarily constrained by the planned lifecycle investment program in THG Beauty's own brand portfolio. Now let's turn to cash flow and the balance sheet, where our disciplined actions have fundamentally strengthened the group's financial position for the future. We saw a working capital outflow of GBP 23 million for the year. This was a direct result of a temporary and strategic investment in beauty inventory, a deliberate choice to ensure high product availability and to capitalize on the strong sales momentum we built following the peak cyber trading period. At the center of our balance sheet strategy was the refinancing of our debt facilities.
This was a transformative transaction. We not only extended our debt maturity profile out to 2029, but more importantly, we materially reduced gross borrowings and net debt. As a result of these decisive actions, the group closed the year with a solid liquidity position of GBP 333 million, comprising GBP 183 million in cash and a revolving credit facility of GBP 150 million. This leaves us with substantial headroom and the financial flexibility to execute our strategic ambitions. Moving to our beauty business, the performance demonstrates a significant in-year recovery. With the business returning to growth in the second half, two key strategic decisions created short-term headwinds but have been instrumental in improving the quality of our earnings.
Firstly, our decision to consciously reduce lower margin sales activity and pull back from territories within Europe and Asia has shifted our focus towards more profitable, sustainable growth. Secondly, our ongoing lifecycle investment to enhance the formulations, range, and product appeal across our own brand portfolio caused a short-term drag on revenue but is a critical investment for maintaining brand equity and long-term market leadership. The resulting adjusted EBITDA margin was a direct and planned consequence of our strategic step up in marketing, a necessary investment to fuel the long-term growth of the business. Now let's walk through the key customer and channel dynamics that drove revenue performance. Our ongoing shift towards acquiring and retaining higher value repeat customers is deliberate and fundamental to retail margin improvement.
While order numbers saw a marginal decline, 89% of our revenue came from higher value returning customers, demonstrating we have built a more sustainable and profitable business. In our largest market, we grew both orders and active customers. Importantly, we outperformed the broader U.K. beauty market across the categories highlighted as we increased overall share. On the channel front, our strategic shift towards more direct and profitable customer channels continues to deliver results. Revenue generated through our app grew to 29% of total sales, highlighting a successful migration of customers to our most loyal platform. Our leadership in social commerce remains a key competitive differentiator. Lookfantastic's creator community on TikTok Shop produced over 90,000 pieces of content, generating more than 200 million impressions.
The combined effect of our planned exit from discontinued trading, adverse foreign exchange movements, and other non-recurring items created a substantial headwind of 560 basis points. These factors have now largely annualized, providing a much cleaner base for our performance going forward. Now the underlying health of the business becomes clear. Growth was achieved despite being partially offset by three short-term factors, the strategic repositioning of our own brands, a temporary softer performance in the U.S. market, and the specific timing of certain manufacturing orders. Ongoing lifecycle investments to enhance formulations, range, and product appeal across our own brand portfolio caused a short-term drag on revenue. A key part of this was the migration of the Perricone MD brand from a first-party to a third-party distribution model on Amazon, which, while impacting short-term sales, positions the brand for greater long-term strength.
Moving to Nutrition, where revenue growth of 6.4% marked the first period of growth in over two years. Notwithstanding this top-line performance, this also reflected changes to the operating model in Asia, where we are mitigating currency fluctuation, in part by moving towards a partnership-led distribution and licensing model. Gross profit margins were broadly in line with the prior year as whey commodity prices, a key input cost, remained elevated throughout the period. The margin performance reflects a disciplined approach to category mix and several strategic decisions made to protect our market share during this period. On the cost side, we continue to realize significant operating efficiencies. Improvements in both distribution and admin costs helped offset the planned step up in marketing investments, which was deployed to support both new customer acquisition and enhance long-term retention.
Additionally, the impact of these factors was partially mitigated by the benefits flowing from our group-wide cost-saving initiatives and an improved channel mix driven by a stronger performance from our B2B and licensing customers. While gross margin pressures on the model changes in Asia impacted EBITDA in the year, the underlying business mix changes we've made position us for a strong recovery as commodity pressures ease. In terms of our customers, our strategy to broaden the reach of Myprotein is delivering impactful results. As we expand our offline footprint through retail and B2B partnerships, we're seeing more consumers interacting with the brand than ever before. The growth during the period was primarily price-led, a necessary and disciplined response to the sustained inflationary pressures on key commodity inputs. This is also reflected in average order value increases.
The brand building investments we have made will benefit us in future through broader awareness and intent to trial. As we've discussed in previous updates, commodity pricing and specifically WPC 80 has seen consistent inflation in recent years. Our strategy for mitigating this position is multifaceted and already well deployed across the business. First, let's look at our procurement strategy. We are operating in a challenging market where global supply for high-value proteins is still struggling to keep pace with growing demand. A situation exacerbated by strong U.S. market growth and the emerging impact of GLP-1 drugs on consumer demand more broadly. While we anticipate more whey capacity coming online in the second half of 2026, our immediate priority has been to secure supply with suitable forward cover in place. Secondly, we are proactively managing our product mix.
We've successfully driven category diversification with strong growth across non-whey categories such as creatine, active wear, and hydration. Protein innovation is also well underway as we leverage a wider range of sources to deliver high quality trend-led products while building a more resilient product portfolio to navigate market fluctuations. Finally, we've worked to ensure disciplined pricing. Throughout the year, we conducted incremental product pricing reviews to ensure we struck the right balance between maintaining margins and protecting our hard-won market share. Furthermore, the continued growth in our product licensing channels has provided an additional effective lever to both mitigate commodity price risk and diversify our overall revenue streams. In summary, through strategic procurement, proactive product diversification, and disciplined pricing, we have a robust multifaceted strategy in place to actively manage whey related risk and to protect our margins.
In closing, we noted last year a significant development regarding our VAT position in the U.K. in respect of protein powders. While we have always applied VAT per HMRC guidance, the now well-documented ruling in the Global by Nature case has now been closed without successful appeal. Consequently, we've submitted a retrospective claim to HMRC, who have committed to providing a substantive update at the end of spring 2026. Although the outcome is subject to a ruling, a successful claim would result in a cash payment of over GBP 60 million. To echo Matt's comments from earlier, our beauty business is in a very stable shape with the outlook for the current year supportive of our growth expectations across the group as a whole.
Margin expansion will primarily be driven by Nutrition as category and channel diversification alongside protein innovation remains well on track to close the gap on our medium-term targets. Thank you.
Good morning, all. Today, I'll be sharing a summary of our THG Beauty 2025 highlights, touching on our strategic progress, enhancements to our customer proposition, and our priorities for the year ahead. We've delivered a strong retail performance with Lookfantastic outperforming the wider beauty commerce market over the course of the year. This performance is underpinned by a healthier and more engaged customer base, bolstered by the success of our loyalty scheme. We also saw meaningful growth in brand awareness for both Lookfantastic and Cult Beauty, with customers increasingly recognizing us for the qualities that matter most to them, an unrivaled brand assortment, genuine convenience, and strong value for money. The U.K. delivered an exceptional performance with key categories all growing at a rate faster than the total U.K. beauty market.
We cemented our position as the number one multi-brand beauty retailer on TikTok Shop in the U.K., and we enhanced our customer proposition by launching same-day delivery with Uber, meeting the high expectations for convenience of today's customer. In the U.S., Dermstore built consistent momentum through H2 with improving average order values and returning customer revenue throughout the period. A standout cyber weekend saw Dermstore rank in the U.S. top 10 online beauty retailers and capped a meaningful recovery in the U.S. contribution overall. We continue to innovate in how customers experience our brands. This year saw the successful opening of our Lookfantastic retail store in Bristol, providing an engaging space for customers to discover and experience high-quality beauty firsthand. Our own brand's portfolio was successfully repositioned for long-term sustainable margin accretive growth with investment to improve formulations, range, and product appeal.
Lastly, in manufacturing, our innovation capabilities were showcased through THG Labs partnership with Clean Food Group. Together, we launched the first sustainable scalable alternative to traditional oil and fat ingredients to be approved for use in the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., demonstrating our leadership in beauty science and sustainability. One of our key focuses in 2025 has been new brand launches, where we added over 80 new and exciting names. The commercial impact of this has been significant, driving a 40% increase in revenue generated from new brands. Adding these established and trending names is part of our strategy to consistently drive traffic and acquire new customers. Securing the right brands at the right moment is a core commercial capability. Our brand relationships along with our platform technology and scale means we can onboard high-demand names faster than competitors, even getting us access to U.K. exclusives.
We have previously talked about the impact of fragrance investment, and during the year, the category delivered significant growth of 11% in the U.K. We introduced exclusive brands and launched new scent edits to aid discovery. Finally, our beauty edits proposition continued to be a powerful tool in helping to attract and retain high-value customers, delivering over 20% revenue growth year-over-year. Turning to the U.S., Dermstore has cemented itself as an authority in the professional skincare market, holding 20% online share. Its identity as the go-to destination for high-spend beauty enthusiasts is reflected in the above-average order values for THG Beauty alongside strong repeat purchase rates. Both of these metrics grew year-over-year.
During Cyber Weekend, Dermstore ranked as a top 10 U.S. online beauty retailer, a real marker of the brand's strength and relevance at the most competitive moment in the retail calendar. We've also been innovating around our customer experience. Through our partnership with by Humankind, customers can now text a qualified skincare expert for personalized product recommendations. It's enhancing the discovery process and creating a more streamlined purchasing journey. When customers use this service, average order values increase by 35%. We were also one of the first major online beauty retailers to partner with Flex, enabling customers to pay using their health savings and flexible spending accounts, effectively letting them access dermatologist-recommended products with pre-tax healthcare dollars.
The Flex customer segment has proven to be particularly high value with significantly higher spending and purchase frequency compared to standard customers. The beauty landscape is becoming redefined by shifts in how consumers discover, shop, and engage with brands. We are adapting our go-to-market strategy to not only meet these changes, but to lead them, effectively broadening and deepening our customer ecosystem. A prime example is our success in social commerce. We are capturing a new generation of customers by integrating our brands into the platforms where they discover and shop. Through TikTok Shop, we convert social engagement directly into sales, the majority of which came from new customers. This strategy proved exceptionally powerful during Cyber, where sales doubled year-on-year alongside record average order values. More broadly, we are marketing more effectively to win at the point of inspiration.
As consumers increasingly turn to social media and AI for product discovery, we are deploying AI-powered advertising and seamless checkout experiences to capture purchase intent. Our YouTube strategy further highlights this sophisticated approach, with YouTube remaining a major center for beauty discovery, attracting 1 billion U.K. beauty-related views in December 2025 alone. THG Beauty now owns a significant 5% share of voice on the platform. We have shifted to an always-on strategy using AI-driven ad formats to consistently reach our target audience. This enhances trust and credibility in our product discovery process, giving customers greater confidence to make a purchase. During the year, we repositioned our own brand portfolio for long-term margin accretive growth, investing in improving formulations, range, and product appeal. Our award-winning brands are now back in growth and securing new retail listings to complement their online presence.
Our newest brand, Biossance, expanded its range of clean, highly effective products, the reformulated Biossance Eye Serum, our biggest own brand launch of the year. Revenue from new products contributed over $6 million, and we took the brand into new markets, including an exclusive launch in Brazil through Sephora, where the brand quickly established itself as top 15 skincare brand. As we near the end of our lifecycle investment, our focus is on building brand affinity and deepening loyalty through our influencer network, as well as widening retail penetration. We enter the current financial year in a very stable place, having exited the categories and territories which were below our target margin and increasing share and presence in our home U.K. and U.S. markets.
In digital leadership, we've deepened consumer engagement across our platforms, and critically, we're now integrating social commerce and AI assistance directly into the shopping journey. Digital partnerships are also broadening accessibility, meeting consumers wherever and whenever they choose to discover and shop. We are leading in product assortment and discovery, achieved by launching a significant number of new high-demand brands while expanding our beauty edits range to improve access to trending and established brands. Looking forward, our priorities are clear. We will defend and extend our position as the number one online prestige beauty retailer, doing so through superior assortment, faster discovery, and broader reach. We will remain the brand partner of choice connecting their innovation and our database of beauty enthusiasts. We'll continue to nurture that community, converting engagement into lasting loyalty through our reward programs and social channels.
Personalization at the front end and adopting the Universal Commerce Protocol will continue to transform and enhance our platform, widening brand awareness, driving higher average order values through discovery tools, and encouraging repeat purchases. Overall, the business is in great shape with the operating model changes across retail and own brands underpinning momentum into 2026.
As we enter 2026, the Myprotein brand is in a solid position to capitalize on the structural marketing trends, notably the increased attention to daily protein consumption. I'll start by walking you through where we stand today across six key dimensions of our business. At a territory level, we're seeing an increasing shift towards U.K. and European participation, which is a really encouraging sign of our strengthening home market presence. In Asia, we're actively redeveloping our operating model to navigate currency headwinds along with major distribution partnerships. We've also launched domestic lines on Amazon to keep momentum going and accelerate our route to market. Moving to category, we're successfully diversifying to meet consumer needs across multiple consumption occasions, and our active wear business continues to scale alongside that. We've grown a capital light licensing model with category partners, and we're looking to take a considered channel approach.
We're creating, for example, deliberately over-indexing on Amazon, where the opportunity is strongest. On channel, we're building a stronger omni-channel business. Our D2C active database is recovering, and we've seen Amazon sales deliver over 100% uplift with our protein category brand share growing meaningfully. We're also increasing our presence through deeper distribution, internationalization, and new retail listings. For the Myprotein brand, our focus is firmly on taste, quality, and education as our point of difference. We're shifting away from traditional sales messaging towards a campaign-led quality focus communication. We're pursuing brand accretive partnerships and our social commerce performance has been outstanding with growth nearly doubling through our TikTok Shop presence, which is now live in the U.K., U.S., and Germany.
Turning to customer experience and personalization, we're directly connecting our new product development to evolving customer needs and category dynamics. Whether that's functionality, convenience, or natural ingredients, we're rewarding customer loyalty through product subscriptions that offer a genuine price advantage. To add to that, we've dedicated new technology to enhance customer relations through personalized tools. Under marketing, we're optimizing spend more than ever before to improve customer lifetime value, operating through a full-funnel measurement model. Finally, the power of protein. We are established category leaders with global demand at an all-time high. While diversification defends our business and broadens our addressable market, we are continuing to innovate with protein, elevating whey through expanded clean label propositions and global licensing. The use of non-whey protein sources to deliver high-quality, trend-led products supports our strategy of building a more resilient product portfolio to navigate market fluctuations.
Taken together, these pillars paint a picture of a business that is recovering, diversifying, and building real momentum. We have a clear strategic direction, and we are executing against it. Starting at home, the U.K. remains our largest and most mature market, and we continue to lead with a true multi-channel approach, spanning direct to consumer, retail, and marketplaces, giving customers access to our widest product range wherever they choose to shop. We're also growing our licensing out strategy, extending Myprotein into a new consumption occasion beyond the core workout moment. Our app and subscription base continue to grow, and we're not standing still either. Further loyalty initiatives are already underway. Moving to Europe, we're seeing strong new customer acquisition through D2C, particularly in Northeast and Southwest Europe, two regions where the sports nutrition category is expanding rapidly. This has been well supported by our influencer community.
Our Amazon Marketplace presence is now well established in five key territories, and we're actively building our retail footprint. In Japan, we're evolving to a more sustainable domestic model. We're transitioning to a marketplace-led approach while we redevelop our D2C offering, and we have a significant retail distribution partner in place through ITOCHU, which gives us meaningful credibility and reach in market. India is a real journey, and we delivered a strong performance in what is one of our most exciting emerging markets. Our customer base is growing, and we have local manufacturing capabilities, which gives us both a cost advantage and agility to serve the Indian consumer effectively. Finally, the U.S., where we're taking a deliberate retail-first approach. Most of our products are sourced and manufactured locally, which is critical for speed and margin.
We're focused on sports nutrition and snacking, categories where we see the greatest consumer demand and where Myprotein can scale rapidly. The common thread is that in every market we are investing, we are building the foundations for sustainable, profitable growth. Activewear is no longer a peripheral category for Myprotein. It is a strategic growth engine and one we are building with clear intent and real commercial ambition. Over the past year, we have redefined our range around higher margin, performance-led core products at an accessible price point that resonates with our customer base. This sharp focus has strengthened brand perception and equity with the improvements in technical quality, fit, durability, supporting more confidence and strategic price increases. Our partnership with HYROX is driving a halo effect beyond nutrition into clothing, strengthening our authority within the performance space. The results speak for themselves.
Activewear is now an accretive category, driving higher order values and expanding gross margins. Customers who purchase clothing and spend more, they return more often. This is a flywheel we are deliberately accelerating. Our ambition is clear. GBP 100 million. That is a target we have set for this category, and we have a focused plan to get there. A significant part of that journey is a partnership with Champion. This is a global collaboration that brings together Champion's iconic sportswear heritage and Myprotein's modern, performance-led style. Both brands exist at the intersection of training and everyday life. Together, we have the reach and credibility to compete in the fast-growing athleisure training market at scale. Myprotein is no longer a sports nutrition brand that sits in one section of the supermarket.
We now have a credible right to play across six distinct aisles: sports nutrition, dairy, frozen, food to go, chilled, and apparel. The logic is simple. We're leveraging strategic partnership with retailers and distributors to place more of our products directly in the consumer hands, meeting them wherever they shop, not just where they come to us online. Each of these categories represent a natural extension of the Myprotein brand. Consumers already trust us for protein and performance nutrition. The step into adjacent formats like chilled snacks, frozen meals, and food to go is intuitive for them to and incremental to us. The six-aisle strategy is about broadening Myprotein's physical presence, driving brand awareness beyond our core D2C audience, and unlocking entirely new revenue streams. In 2025, over 43 million licensed Myprotein products were sold into retail.
To put that into context, that's 43 million additional touch points with consumers in the physical stores, building brand awareness and driving trial without the capital intensity of doing it ourselves. Our existing partnerships continue to strengthen with both range and store space growing. These aren't static relationships. Our partnerships are leaning into us because they are seeing the Selfridges performance. Looking ahead to 2026, we have an exciting pipeline. We're expanding with additional Mars flavor collaborations, launching Vimto ready-to-drink products, and introducing Müller Mixes. Each of these partnerships brings Myprotein into new moments in the consumer's day, whether that's a mid-afternoon snack, a post-workout drink from the fridge, or a grab-and-go option at lunch. That's the real ambition here. We're broadening our roster of partnerships with the goal of creating the Myprotein meal deal, our ownable meal occasion in U.K. retail.
We're on target to sell over 60 million licensed products in 2026, a step change from where we were, and we're doing it in a way that is capital efficient and highly brand accretive. The focus will now be to replicate this model into the wider regions, particularly in Korea and Japan. To bring this together, we're building continued momentum in both customer retention and new customer acquisition across channels, maintaining our promotional discipline while growing full price demand. We are elevating the range which we are well known and respected for, reinforcing our leadership in protein through a continued focus on quality, taste, and clean label innovation. We've strengthened our testing regime across the product portfolio to underpin the superior quality our customers expect, and that commitment is being recognized across the industry. Alongside, we are innovating and scaling beyond protein.
We are expanding Myprotein into new formats, categories, and consumption occasions from activewear to licensing partnerships, building a broader, more resilient business, and this is less reliant on any single channel or product, meeting consumers where their routines already are. By owning the customer relationship through customer relation investments, personalization, and tools to support discovery and education, we are aiming to increase lifetime value and drive more efficient full price growth across channels. Taken together, these priorities position us to scale sustainably while protecting margins, combining strong foundations in our primary category with disciplined expansion and deeper customer engagement, never compromising the product quality and innovation that Myprotein is known for. Thank you.