Hello, and welcome to THG's 2023 interim results presentation. We will start with the presentation, followed by a Q&A session. Participants on the conference call will be able to ask a question later by pressing star one on their telephone keypads. But first, let's begin the presentation.
We operate a resilient, vertically integrated business with significant growth opportunities across the beauty, nutrition, and technology markets.
In the first half of the year, we continued to evolve our business model, while also delivering significantly improved profitability and cash generation over the last 12 months, delivered through operational efficiencies with a dedicated focus on enhancing the customer proposition.
We continue to expand our diverse offering and are focused on delivering a leading digital beauty experience. LOOKFANTASTIC recently launched its new Foundation Finder, utilizing sophisticated matching technology to personalize the experience. We also expanded our Retail Media proposition, providing beauty brands with an increased range of solutions to support discovery on site.
Our leading nutrition and wellness brands empower customers to live healthier lives and deliver on their personal nutritional goals. As the next stage in brand development, we have launched a transformative rebrand to elevate Myprotein into a global lifestyle brand, where we'll continue to break down barriers and to help make health and wellness more inclusive.
Through Ingenuity, we deliver transformative e-commerce solutions for brands and retailers looking to scale their online operations. Ongoing platform enhancements are critical to our success, and as an innovator in technology, we were thrilled to be recognized on Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce.
We continue to improve the customer experience through strategic investments in our operations. Following our success in the U.K., we launched automation in our U.S. New Jersey distribution center, delivering efficiencies, increased network capacity, and an enhanced customer experience with accelerated click-to-delivery speeds.
Through THG Eco, we support our clients, partners, and suppliers in navigating the changing sustainability environment. Our soon-to-be-launched social impact strategy will amplify our efforts to support local communities, starting in the north of England.
Our focus on operational efficiencies, profitability, and cash generation leaves the business well-placed for sustainable growth. We are THG.
Good morning, and thank you for joining us today as we announce the group's half year results for 2023. In April, we talked in depth about our strategy in supporting consumers through the cost of living crisis, absorbing much of the inflationary pressures during 2022, and limiting price increases across our beauty and nutrition divisions. The short-term margin impact from this strategy was mitigated through the delivery of GBP 100 million of cost savings in 2022, with further savings identified and delivered in H1 this year. We are pleased to report that this strategy is bearing fruit throughout 2023 to date. Inflationary pressures have been consistently easing during 2023 and are set to ease further still. This has led to steady margin growth through 2023, while our beauty and nutrition divisions continue to build market share in key markets.
The group is well on track in rebuilding margins back to historical levels with a stronger and leaner cost base, further compounding our competitive advantage. I'm also delighted to say that our beauty division has returned to growth since August, with particular strength across our largest own brands, Perricone MD and ESPA, as well as in our Cult Beauty business. The beauty division, as a whole, is well-positioned for strong margin recovery as we progress through half two. Our strategy of pivoting Ingenuity away from mass market clients towards larger enterprise clients is also paying dividends. EBITDA from external clients was broadly flat in half one, despite reducing sales by 10% through the repositioning.
The principal reason overall Ingenuity EBITDA was lower in half one was due to a reduction in spend from internal clients, namely our beauty and nutrition divisions, as those divisions looked for efficiencies to support their consumers. In addition, we were thrilled to be listed recently in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce for the first time, with Ingenuity being recognized for its completeness of vision and ability to execute. Turning to cash, the group's half one free cash flow performance was especially pleasing, delivering a GBP 193 million improvement versus half one last year. Free cash flow performance over the past 12 months now sits at around a GBP 20 million outflow, which is a massive year-on-year improvement of GBP 350 million.
The GBP 20 million outflow is after the group made CapEx investments of around GBP 160 million, mainly into technology and infrastructure within Ingenuity. The group maintains a strong balance sheet with over GBP 560 million of cash and facilities available to the group at the end of half one, with peak trading ahead. I'm delighted that THG is making such solid progress on executing our strategy of building a leading digital-first consumer brands group, powered by our own technology and global fulfillment operations. I'll now take you through some divisional strategic highlights before handing over to Damian for a deeper dive into our financial performance. Starting with our largest division, Beauty. During half one, we focused on maximizing orders, delivering immediate returns, pulling away from near-term loss-making customer acquisition.
This typically involved reducing sales to territories furthest away from our global distribution hubs, given the higher cost of serving these orders, in addition to first order acquisition costs. This led to us reducing volumes within some parts of Europe and Asia, while maximizing our competitive actions across core markets. The success of this strategy is reflected in more new customers shopping with us in the second quarter, and an improving sales trend throughout the half, with the division as a whole returning to growth in mid Q3. As a division, we continue to see encouraging purchase behavior, with order frequency stepping up and average order values increasing year on year. Our active customer base remains highly engaged.
More than 7 million people have now downloaded the LOOKFANTASTIC or Cult Beauty app, with our loyalty program, LF Beauty Plus, now boasting over 1.2 million members in the first year since launch. As we continue to focus on key strategic markets where we have a localized offering, emerging markets such as the Middle East and North Africa have delivered both revenue and customer growth. THG Beauty prides itself on being able to provide customers with an expansive premium beauty offering, and it's that brand and category expansion that will act as a key driver in long-term customer growth. In the first half, we launched many new brands across our retail platform, including KVD Beauty on LOOKFANTASTIC, The Outset on Cult Beauty, and Sarah Chapman on Dermstore, reflecting the evolution of our brand partnerships.
Looking in-house, our own brand portfolio performed strongly in half one, with our two largest brands, Perricone MD and ESPA, delivering double-digit growth. Our own prestige brand portfolio is set to achieve further international recognition through a global licensing agreement with luxury hotel amenity supplier, Vanity Group, launching in 2024. Many of the world's finest hotels will be featuring our haircare and body care brands throughout their global portfolio. Finally, we were proud to launch our Can't Retouch This campaign, with Cult Beauty championing authenticity and ensuring diversity and inclusivity sits at the forefront of our branding. Our Nutrition division, centered around our own brand portfolio, including Myprotein, continues to rebuild margins rapidly.
The strategy of Myprotein, supporting its customers through the cost of living crisis in 2022 and early 2023, is paying dividends, with near record margins now being delivered. The active customer base and order frequency remains stable year on year, while average order values increased, indicating healthy customer stickiness in a higher pricing environment. The success of our apps continues at pace, with almost 7 million global downloads since launching early 2020. The app is becoming an incredibly powerful channel, driving strong first-party data advantages and helping to maximize marketing spend efficiency.
Profitable global expansion continues at pace, and we are really pleased to be accelerating our ambitions in Australia and the Middle East in particular. As we've highlighted before, strategic partnerships are important to our growth as a group, and we were excited to enter a five-year partnership with Iceland Foods earlier this year, launching a bespoke range of frozen products in over 1,000 Iceland stores, as well as online.
We are well progressed in launching several other offline partnerships, focusing on new categories which don't naturally lend themselves to online sales. We have successfully expanded Myprotein's category breadth throughout product innovation, as well as building out collaborations with many major global brands. These include brands such as Vimto, Jelly Belly, and soon to launch, Chupa Chups. Partnerships such as this underline the huge global appeal and reach of Myprotein and highlight the significant growth opportunities in licensed brand extensions. They offer opportunities to selectively extend into new categories, increase brand touch points, and engage consumers in new ways. As well as partnerships, we continue rapidly to expand Myprotein brand equity through targeted traditional retail channels. We have launched in many new global markets since 2020 and rapidly grown our doors presence to around 20,000 grocers, supermarkets, and specialist stores.
A store's presence maximizes brand visibility to new customers, a vital tool in D2C acquisition. In the U.K., Myprotein holds prominent listings in all the major grocers, and our protein bars, snacks, and drinks are strategically placed in the largest gyms in the U.K. and Europe, with marketplaces another key channel for visibility through selected SKUs.
Rise up and do it for you. Again and again. Demand more. You're already ready.
... Recently, we have undertaken a global rebrand, further elevating Myprotein as a global lifestyle brand, materially enhancing the future growth opportunity. This is supported by the large and growing markets in which we operate, underpinned with significant localized infrastructure now present in all key markets. Our flagship brand is built on high-quality products across multiple formats with a global reach, and we will continue to break down barriers and make health inclusive. In terms of Ingenuity, in June last year, we appointed Vivek Ganotra as CEO, and he was given the task of repositioning the division to focus on higher value and higher margin enterprise customers. This pivot came at the cost of initially softer sales due to a naturally longer onboarding cycle of larger, more complex enterprise clients.
While the quicker process of strategically exiting smaller clients led to a top-line reduction of around 10% in H1, EBITDA from external clients remained broadly flat year-on-year. As enterprise sales momentum quickens, this pivot will ultimately lead to a more profitable business. Through this strategy, we are targeting Ingenuity being self-funded within a five-year time frame. We remain confident in this strategic shift as customer conversations increasingly center around the experienced intricacies of integrating complex, composable solutions, which require heavy lifting from systems integrators or large in-house development teams. Gartner, a leading research firm, have observed a notable uptick towards end-to-end platforms such as Ingenuity, which enable customers to benefit from pre-built applications alongside operational and marketing support.
Our growth strategy, therefore, remains focused on, one, new customer growth within beauty, FMCG, food and beverage, and retail categories, where we believe we have a clear right to win. Two, expanded share of commerce spend from existing clients. Three, deployment of new products and solutions across fulfillment, fraud detection, and digital media and content. Our pipeline is high quality and building strongly, reflecting the strength of our proposition, which continues to be endorsed by our existing clients, deploying more of their digital spend through Ingenuity.
Today, we announced a selection of key client wins, one of which is with L'Oréal, the world's beauty leader. We have entered into an agreement with L'Oréal, which will see Ingenuity power D2C for two of L'Oréal's luxury division brands in the USA and Canada, further bolstering our presence in this market. L'Oréal will take advantage of Ingenuity's complete commerce solution of technology, operations, and marketing services, alongside some of our core platform features, built first and foremost for beauty brands, including sampling, loyalty, and subscriptions.
This is the kind of meaningful client win that Ingenuity can land by virtue of our expanded infrastructure capability, expertise in major markets, and notably in the beauty space. Turning to our existing relationships, Asda is a real success story which demonstrates the strength of our customer partnerships. Over the past year, we have doubled the scope of our services, from food packaging to social media, digital content, and performance marketing services. We are now supporting new parts of the Asda Business, including Asda Money, where we will manage their social media, and more recently, Asda Mobile, where Ingenuity has been appointed to handle all of its digital creative services. Again, this just shows how once we are embedded with a client, we can grow our share of customer wallet in respect to their e-commerce spend.
Our technology underpins the success of both our own brands and our customers' digital businesses. As a thought leader for digital commerce, ongoing platform enhancement is imperative to success. We have a dynamic team of over 800 technology specialists, obsessed with continuous innovation, implementing thousands of platform enhancements annually, delivering optimization, security, and protection to our customers. Through in-house development of Machine Learning models, our ability to hyper-personalize how we segment customers and tailor their site experience is constantly evolving. As a First-Party Data collector across a broad set of sectors and locales, Ingenuity is uniquely positioned to deliver AI solutions to drive cost efficiencies, create innovative customer experiences, and develop incremental revenue opportunities, including the use of Generative AI technology infused directly into the Ingenuity platform.
This relentless innovation, along with the depth and breadth of our commerce applications, global operational infrastructure, and digital marketing services, is what was evaluated when Ingenuity was listed for the first time in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce. Over the last three years, we have spoken at length on our strategy to build out a global fulfillment network, localizing our operational and distribution hubs in key markets. This phase of expansionary investment was concluded with the activation of automation in our New Jersey warehouse in the U.S. in April. Across all our distribution centers, our checkout to delivery speed is half a day quicker year-over-year, as we focus on efforts in continuing to enhance the customer proposition, so customers receive their products as soon as possible.
We provide even greater flexibility through extended next-day delivery cutoffs in the U.K., substantially ahead of many of our peers. Our internal measure of sentiment, THGX, combines public Trustpilot scores with customer satisfaction KPIs, and I am delighted that these sit at record highs with an over 20% improvement year-on-year. Customer contact rates continue to reduce year-on-year, and consistently performed at record lows in Q2 2023. Through optimizing more straightforward tasks through machine learning, we have delivered cost savings in addition to accelerated customer contact response times.
These tasks include, for example, the use of smart templates for consistency of customer service response and automated fraud detection. The use of AI and machine learning is an opportunity to augment customer service colleagues' focus onto more value-add areas, enabling us to do more with existing resource, more effectively and quicker. Our agility, combined with our use of data, allows us to continually look across all aspects of our operations to optimize service in a cost-efficient way.
In turn, aiding customer retention and elevating lifetime values, ultimately supporting our own brands and Ingenuity clients in winning more customers.
Good morning, and thank you for joining us for our 2023 interim results. As Matt has presented a selection of key strategic business highlights, I'll be focusing on financial performance for the first half of the year and the outlook for the remainder of the year. As we now turn to our revenue performance, the early part of the year continued to see many well-documented macroeconomic factors impacting the markets in which we operate. We are therefore very pleased with the performance we've delivered across our core consumer and technology divisions, alongside the strategic exits of non-core divisions and discontinued categories. On lower, better quality sales, we've been encouraged by demand normalizing post-COVID lockdowns in a higher pricing environment, with strong repeat purchase rates from our loyal customer base continuing at above 80%.
Beauty saw some specific challenges, notably within beauty manufacturing, due to the impact of industry-wide destocking. In an inflationary environment, certain international territories became less justifiable to serve from a commercial perspective. As a result, in the final quarter of 2022, we began to pull back investment in lower margin markets, and this has continued into the first half of 2023. While not exiting any territory specifically, the consequence of this strategy has been a near-term reduction in sales, but to the benefit of online retail profitability as the period has progressed.
Within nutrition, the input cost environment in 2022 was one of the most challenging we've ever faced, and therefore, maintaining revenue growth in the first half, alongside stable customer KPIs, is an outstanding result. Ingenuity continues to make substantial progress on its strategy to partner with larger, higher value and higher margin clients with high-quality recurring revenues. As expected, the strategic exit of lower margin partnerships has resulted in a temporary revenue shift, as pipeline conversion for new, larger enterprise clients is typically longer. This is alongside lower volumes from our internal beauty and nutrition clients.
Later in the presentation, I'll go into further detail on the progress of our strategic review and areas of the business which have been discontinued. From a gross margin perspective, our average procurement prices during 2023 have been meaningfully down on the prior year. As you can see from the graph, the Sweet Whey Index prices are currently tracking at more normalized levels. Distribution costs continue to reduce as a percentage of revenue, as the global infrastructure and automation we've built enables us to deliver more efficiently with a lower level of headcount.
Implementing automation in our warehouse in New Jersey has accelerated the operational efficiencies, further improving our U.S. proposition, and significantly improving our dispatch to delivery speeds. In short, getting our products to our customers much quicker. Significant substantive actions have been taken across the business to both right size the cost base and to simplify the business model. We are seeing this come through strongly in continuing Adjusted EBITDA of over £50 million. As a result of the cost reduction program, a reduction in headcount has been delivered through technology investment, automation, and the simplification of operations. This benefit continues to annualize throughout the year across both distribution and admin costs. Within admin costs, the main increases have been experienced within marketing due to general inflation in paid channels.
Greater app participation has partially mitigated rising marketing costs, with customers acquired through this channel, typically ordering more frequently with higher average order values due to regular engagement. Adjustment items have reduced in the period, with cash adjustment items substantially reducing to just GBP 5 million from GBP 23 million in 2022. Operating losses increased by GBP 11 million this half, solely driven by management's decisive actions to dispose of non-core freehold assets and the exit of loss-making discontinued categories. Together, these generated a one-off non-cash cost of GBP 26.1 million. For the year ending 2022, we broadened our reporting to give a more detailed view of the cost base, including the corporate costs, which we anticipate remaining at around 1% of revenue. I'll now walk through our segmental reporting for the divisions.
As discussed earlier, beauty revenue in the first half mainly reflects the strategy to reduce low-margin sales in specific territories. We have scope to enhance international margins through market prioritization. However, to reiterate, this is at the expense of sales growth during the year, as we focus on sustainable, profitable growth medium term. The sales decline was also partly due to the economic backdrop. However, we are seeing sequential quarterly improvements. Beauty EBITDA margin was significantly impacted due to lower manufacturing sales, resulting from the well-documented one-off destocking across the beauty industry. As a management team, we have taken decisive actions to right size operations to reflect current demand, mainly through driving operational efficiencies, such as reviewing shift patterns in our manufacturing facilities. Excluding this result, adjusted EBITDA margin would have improved by 60 basis points relative to the comparable period.
As we enter the third quarter, cost-saving initiatives implemented in the first half are supporting profitability improvements, and we strongly remain of the view that the volume reductions experienced are short-term in nature. Together, these factors support our expectations for the beauty margin to be in excess of 6% over the medium term, which is in line with historical delivery. Our nutrition division had a very strong half, delivering both an increase in revenue and adjusted EBITDA margin. Sales growth was delivered largely through pricing, with emerging regions such as Australia and the Middle East in double-digit growth. Adjusted EBITDA margins increased substantially, reflecting the unwind of a period of unusually high whey commodity prices. While overall sales trends are fluctuating month-on-month, the same factors that benefited margins in the first half remain into the second.
There's been significant progress within Ingenuity as we continue to reposition to focus on larger, higher revenue and higher margin clients with high-quality, recurring revenues. This pivot initially came at the cost of softer sales, as Matt described earlier. Following a more subdued level in 2022, where the pace of growth was half that of 2021, tech analysts anticipate software revenue to accelerate this year. This sector trend is reflected in the quality of our pipeline and our existing clients spending more with us. Following a deliberate phase of investment in headcount and expertise to deliver the repositioned strategy, I'm pleased to say that new enterprise client wins have been secured and onboarding is progressing well. Internally, Ingenuity revenue declined in the period, predominantly due to the wider group exiting the loss-making categories and territories, along with lower group-wide sales.
Due to the combination of the pivoting strategy, upfront investment, and lower group-wide volumes, as expected, Adjusted EBITDA and margin was back on the prior period. Looking forward, there continues to be a strategic exit of smaller accounts, which will continue throughout 2023. As revenue scales and the revenue mix evolves towards the technology product offering, we anticipate margins will increase towards the Group's five-year aspirational target. In H2-2022, the Group commenced a detailed strategic review of operations outside of beauty, nutrition, and Ingenuity. This has enabled us to look at the business through a more granular lens to assure ourselves that we are focusing our efforts on areas that will deliver optimal returns for our shareholders and accelerate our journey to positive free cash flow generation.
For the assets where we couldn't see a robust path to profitability and positive free cash flow, we made the difficult but necessary decision to discontinue these revenue channels, eliminating the losses across the Group. The exits of these loss-making categories has led to cash proceeds of around GBP 4 million. In July 2023, we sold the trading assets of THG OnDemand. These exits and the pullback of investment in lower-margin markets mentioned earlier, generated a one-off loss on disposal of GBP 11 million, recognized in the first half within adjusting items. The full exit of the discontinued areas is expected to be complete by the end of this month. Seasonally, we experience a working capital outflow in the first half of the year that reverses with peak trading in the second half.
This profile was, however, elevated in the prior year, with a significant cash investment in H1 2022, principally from new warehouse launches, which require a one-off investment in stock. CapEx is as anticipated, with the Group well advanced on its program of expenditure, with guidance for the year unchanged at approximately GBP 135 million. Our global warehouse expansion program is now largely complete, with substantial capacity for growth. Adjusting items and financing costs were also in line with expectations. We have a strong balance sheet, and closed the period with cash and available facilities of over GBP 560 million. As a reminder, our TLB is long dated, and the RCF remains undrawn.
As we move towards the final quarter of the year, we have clearer visibility and greater confidence of the margin recovery opportunity, in addition to the key drivers for divisional sales returning to growth. Overall sales trends are gradually improving into the second half, with Q3 continuing revenue anticipated to be marginally ahead of Q2, before a return to growth in the final quarter. Decisive management actions to prioritize profitable sales is expected to result in continuing revenue growth for the full year of between 0% to -5%. That said, we expect margin wins to continue, and therefore, positively, we are reiterating our expectations to deliver Adjusted EBITDA full to full year, in line with company consensus.
Improving profitability into the second half of 2023, and again into 2024, from automation efficiencies and return to sales growth, will be balanced with a proportion of cost savings reinvested in demand generation and offsetting general inflationary pressures. For FY 2024, operational leverage and margin recovery, supported by commodity prices, underpin the path to positive free cash flow. Beyond this year, as I described in April, we expect long-term channel shift across our consumer markets to continue, supported by a strong Ingenuity pipeline and further endorsement of the proposition. In closing, I'd like to take this opportunity to reinforce our continued focus on profitable sales across our three divisions, where the market opportunity for long-term growth remains significant.
Measuring and managing the impact our business and operations have globally is critical for our future success and sustainable growth. There is a lot of progress still to be made on our sustainability strategy, and importantly, how we can influence best practice for our clients and throughout our supply chain.
At THG, sustainability is a commitment at the core of our mission. We understand the impact our business has on the planet, and we're dedicated to making the impact positive, no exceptions.
Two years ago, we boldly launched THG Planet Earth. Our ambitious sustainability strategy focused on three core elements: climate and nature, supply chain and circularity, and people and communities.
We're already making exciting progress towards our goals, with 63% towards our target of using 100% renewable energy for our own operations by 2030. 11 of our brands now offer eco delivery, with the last mile completed on foot, by bike, or by electric vehicle. We've significantly progressed towards 100% of own brand packaging being recyclable or reusable by 2025.
Thanks to our people, we participated in Change100, and provided work placements to talented students with any disability or long-term health condition.
In 2023, we're launching our exciting social impact strategy and sustainability ambassador network.
Through THG Eco, we're helping other businesses formulate their sustainability strategy and reduce their carbon footprint.
At THG, we embed sustainability in everything we do, from reducing our protein waste by upcycling it into sustainable fish feed pellets, or turning broken plastic totes into a recycled polymer ready to be made into new products.
To reducing the packaging emissions of our LOOKFANTASTIC Beauty Box by 72%, and expanding Recycle Me, our beauty product recycling scheme, now across three brands.
Sustainability is at the heart of THG, and we're not done yet. We're creating a legacy that will leave the world in a better place than we found it.
Before we summarize the key points of today's release, let's take a moment to reflect on the shape of our business versus the one we brought to market almost exactly 3 years ago. We have scaled both our beauty and nutrition divisions meaningfully, with growth in revenue, active customers, orders, and average order values. Whilst we have seen a pullback in Adjusted EBITDA, rebuilding towards historical margins is our expectation, with distribution costs already very stable, following investment in automation and rationalization across our business, helping to mitigate inflationary pressures in certain areas of the cost base. For the last 12 months to June, our cash outflow was around GBP 20 million, and over the next 12-18 months, normalized capital expenditure, lower adjusting items, and EBITDA accretion underpin the building blocks to positive free cash flow.
We are well capitalized and substantially invested with a simpler business from which we continue to scale selectively, while retaining strategic balance sheet optionality. Today, we have emphasized our clear focus and progress on growing profitability and cash generation over near-term sales growth against a challenging global consumer spending backdrop. We have already captured the margin rebuild within THG Nutrition, and the rebrand provides a strong foundation to access the next level of exciting growth. The return to growth of our beauty division since August is huge progress.
... This strong market share performance is testament to the actions taken by the team in supporting consumers through the cost of living crisis. The margin rebuild within beauty is well advanced and steadily returning to historical levels. This is further supported within our beauty manufacturing division, where management took decisive action to address the cost base while supporting brand partners in their global destocking plans. We are confident of a strong recovery in manufacturing through H2 and into 2024. Finally, the repositioning of Ingenuity is nearing completion, with new contract wins delivered and strategic alliances signed. Our strongest ever enterprise pipeline, alongside Gartner recognition, provides us with increasing momentum.
Other strategic milestones this year have included the successful exit of the OnDemand division through a management buyout, and the completion of the global fulfillment expansionary investment, underpinning additional capacity for efficiency improvements and operating leverage. This is all while delivering free cash generation ahead of guidance and maintaining a strong balance sheet. In closing, we remain confident that our long-term growth opportunity is supported by structural growth in digital activity at a global level, together with continued product and tech innovation. Thank you for joining us today. We look forward to taking your questions.
As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question on today's call, please signal by pressing star one. And our first question today comes from Nicolas Katsapas, from BNP Paribas Exane. Please go ahead.
Hi, everyone. Thank you for taking my questions. I just had a couple on nutrition, please. Firstly, could you walk us through the decision-making behind your rebranding of Myprotein, and what, you know, were the precise intended benefits or the expectations you have from that rebranding? And over what timeframe could we expect to see those benefits? And then also, on nutrition, my second question is just around margins. So, you've overshot your medium-term guidance in this first half for EBITDA margins in nutrition. Could you lay out what your expectations are in the near term? You know, should we expect higher margins now in nutrition to persist, or are you going to reinvest in price, and then that possibly will reduce margins over the next 18 months?
Yeah, that'd be really helpful. Thank you, very much.
Hi, Nicholas. It's Matthew Moulding here. It'll be me that answers, otherwise, unless you hear otherwise from someone introducing themselves. But, so I'll pick up those two points. In terms of the rebranding of Myprotein, it's just the constant evolution of the brand. You know, we did this maybe five years ago, where we moved the brand on. And, you know, it's worth just reminding people what we're seeking to achieve here with Myprotein. We're very serious about it not just being the world's number one, you know, sports nutrition brand. You know, this is about building a true lifestyle brand, you know, across all territories.
And so we're always premiumizing the proposition for it and making it more attractive, so that when we move into other markets and other categories, that we get real traction in doing so. And you can see that as we've moved into bars and snacks and drinks and various other categories. So it's really around building that desirability, the premium nature to the product, and moving it along all the time, really. So you know, you should expect to see much more progress on that as well, because at the moment, yes, there's a lot of rebranding that's out there, but the full extent of the rebrand is not visible to everybody yet. So we're quite excited about that piece.
In terms of the margin side of it, then, you know, that's true, right? So we guided you to around 12%-13%, something like that, and we've come in at 14%-15% margins, that's after it paying its Ingenuity fees, in that regard. You know, look, we've over-delivered on the EBITDA performance against our guidance and any consensus. And so, it's clear that that's come out of the nutrition division. But, you know, we've been managing that nutrition division quite carefully in terms of, yes, we've delivered some growth, and then we've delivered very strong margins at the same time. But prior to that, we have made some significant investments around vertical integration in the division.
So we've bought into drinks manufacturing, bars manufacturing, flavoring businesses, all with the intention of being able to build a, you know, much higher margin stack for the long term. And the reality is, we've seen the benefit of that alongside the commodity pricing, coming back to a much more normalized level from the peaks that we saw last year. So it's fair to say that the margin stack is fully intended to be at these kind of levels. I do think in the past, we have guided to a normalized position here, of being about 15% EBITDA margins for this business. And, you know, we will be bringing prices down across nutrition, you know, because we have got this market-leading position and aggressive pricing policy.
But we're doing that as well, supported by the vertical integration which we've made. So the margin stacks are just much more normalized at these levels.
Thank you.
Thank you. Now we're moving on to our next questioner, which is Andrew Ross from Barclays. Please go ahead.
... Great. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. I've got two, if that's okay. First, I wanted to ask you about, growth, and I guess as we come out of this year, would you expect to be growing the business on a continuing basis in Q4? And as you start to think about next year, and maybe help us understand the drivers you have to get this business back to good growth, whilst also, continuing to improve EBITDA and, free cash flow. It would help to understand how you're thinking about that and the levers that you have. And then the second question is, I guess, a structural one around some of the parts.
Now that the legal separation is complete and the nutrition business is kind of rebuilding extremely well, just kind of wondering how you're thinking about strategic action for that division specifically. I guess anything you can kind of share around how you see the portfolio and what you're thinking would be quite helpful. Thank you.
So the question in terms of growth, I mean, it's fair to say, as I'm sat here now, the group's in growth. So, you know, and I think in the detail of the RNS, we try and break that down for people, but it does take a bit of... 'Cause, you know, there's a lot of divisions and moving parts in our group. So yes, in answer to 2024, Andrew, we are expecting the group to be in growth and all three divisions to be driving that growth at the same time. Beauty has returned to growth, as we said in the RNS, as a whole division.
The manufacturing division, which was a drag on it, as we've supported the brands in their destocking plans, you know, that's back in growth and actually on a much lower cost base as well. So we're expecting to see beauty being an especially strong performer on the go forward. And then, you know, you've obviously got the momentum and progress we've had in nutrition, certainly at the bottom line, and then Ingenuity coming into next year as well. You know, having made that pivot, we should have much less, you know, churn of those smaller accounts. So yes, we are expecting 2024 to be in growth. We're expecting Q4 to be in growth, to the other question that you asked there as well.
Coming to the strategic position that you talk about in terms of our divisions, we obviously did all of the work, a very hefty project. I think we spent about GBP 8 million in restructuring, all in the fees, the legal work and the replumbing that you have to do in your systems to get all of our divisions into a separate state that they're in today. And actually, that also helped us to exit OnDemand to the management buyout at the same time. Now, you know, look, we, that work is done, and we sit there, always considering what's the right options for THG.
You know, you'd only need to go back to, you know, even last year, all of the bid approaches that we've had towards the group obviously recognize the intrinsic value of the separate divisions versus, say, the market cap today. You know, that was reflected in, you know, we've had bids for various divisions. You know, nutrition in particular, just being the simplest one, is something that we've had people, you know, step forward and make bids at, you know, in the end of last year and this year as well. But we just, you know, we've got a very strong balance sheet. We know what we're doing. We've got a very, very clear focus. We'll always maintain our strategic optionality. Nothing is for sale. We're not selling anything.
But what we, you know, we're obviously looking at partnerships and how we grow each of our divisions and drive them forward. So we're only ever focused on what's best for THG, what's best for our stakeholders and the individual divisions. We continue to invest through our own balance sheet in there. If other strategic options come that will benefit us, then, of course, we'll go forward and do that. And we have already stated in the past that, you know, sure, there may be a time when, in the not-too-distant future, where one of our divisions is better served on a separate listing, where we would look to grow that division further as a majority-owned business from THG.
So all of those options are on the table. If we had something to say on it, we'd obviously put an RNS out there immediately. We haven't got anything to say on it at the moment, but obviously, you know, we're not short of people stepping forward with ideas.
Thanks, that was helpful.
Thank you. Up next, we have Marcus Diebel from JP Morgan with our next question. Please go ahead.
Hi, everyone. Just one question on THG and Ingenuity. The revenue decline has been at least partly explained with obviously focusing on higher margin clients, except accepting more loss-making categories. At the same time, your EBITDA margins are still down compared to last year. Is that the scale effect of being bigger or could you maybe explain this a little bit more detail? It's not entirely clear to me.
So, which division are you talking about there? Sorry.
Ingenuity.
Ingenuity. Sorry about that.
Ingenuity.
Yeah, yeah. No, so, so I understand that. So just to be clear, the group's EBITDA margins are obviously up, and, and, nutritions are up, hugely. So it is the Ingenuity one you're talking about. So, so it's real simple, in that regard. If you look at the third-party business, all the external clients, the big names and the rest of it, that you would hear about, actually, EBITDA, EBITDA profit is flat. And what that means is EBITDA margins are up.
... because sales on external sales, as we've churned those smaller accounts, you're taking revenue away, and it takes a lot longer to onboard the higher margins, more complex accounts. So actually, EBITDA margins in Ingenuity are up as well. The actual reason that the group's showing, that the Ingenuity group is showing as EBITDA margins being down is, it's actually the internal spend. So the likes of So how do you spell the look fantastic product of this company? Because in the transcription it's all capital letters but in one it's just capital letter L so which one is right? , LOOKFANTASTIC in the other parts of the group that spend with Ingenuity. As we've obviously been driving cost savings throughout the group, we've delivered some huge cost savings, which have contributed to our EBITDA profitability improvements.
As a result of that, obviously, Ingenuity is one of those providers, so it's been better for the group, so the group's EBITDA margins have gone up, but on the internal spend aspect, Ingenuity has suffered to a degree the benefit of the other divisions. But actually, EBITDA margins in Ingenuity with external clients is higher.
Okay, did you disclose this somewhere, or I couldn't find it?
I think, well, I put something on my LinkedIn about it-
I mean, you can-
10 minutes ago.
Okay.
But no, it is in the video, the reason being. If anyone that watched the video, it was certainly in the video, and I think it's in the RNS as well.
It is in the RNS.
It's in the RNS.
If you wanna pick up with the IR team after the call, we're happy to run you through that.
Great. Okay.
Thank you. And now we move to Anubhav Malhotra from Liberum. Please go ahead.
Hi, team. I have a couple of questions, firstly, on the nutrition division. Can I just ask you, had a lot of wins in terms of retail clients and nutrition, so how big are the retail sales at the moment as a percentage of your total nutrition sales? And how should we think about the contribution to EBITDA margin from that business? Is it, at the moment, at low scale and a lower contribution to overall EBITDA, or is it around the group average? And then the second question is on the beauty business. You talked about improvements in the retail media proposition that you offer to the beauty brands. How big is that proposition in terms of sales, and what sort of ambitions do you have for that business?
Any clues around the profitability of that business, and if that is a part of your plans of getting to that 6% EBITDA margin aspiration for the beauty division? Thank you.
Okay. So if I've heard that correct, then the... We're talking about the retail sales in Myprotein, are we, in particular, and how important that is-
Yeah
to the brand, et cetera? I mean, look, I have a very simplistic view on the retail aspect of the business. You know, we've got a super powerful D2C platform where, you know, we have millions and millions of people shopping all over the world, engaging with our apps and, you know, in our ecosystem. So I look at offline sales in a slightly different way, which is it's fantastic brand marketing and reaches a different consumer, maybe, that hasn't come across the brand before. And so I don't see that as suddenly becoming 50%-60% of our revenue.
You know, taking a step back, I'm sure a major, CPG would see it that way because it wouldn't, you know, it wouldn't take much to put Myprotein into all of the major retailers in the world, and you could, you could explode the sales of the business overnight. But, but, but, you know, we're, we're D2C-focused and believe there's real, you know, long, long, long-term value in keeping it, online to, to a vast majority. So, so the kind of things you've seen in retail, we've done licensing deals all over the world. We've done one in the U.K. with Iceland on frozen foods, which has gone well, but that's. We don't recognize the sales on that. Naturally, we just get a, a royalty on that. And, and, and out of...
Yeah, I don't mind saying, really, you know, it's not gonna move THG's needle at a profitability level. You know, it's probably gonna make GBP 1 million plus GBP 2 million a year, those kind of things that you do there. But what it does do is it just makes the brand a little bit more exciting in certain areas and gives people different touch points. And actually, it's transformative quite often for the retailer that we're working with because, you know, Myprotein, in particular, has got a real army of fans that will walk into stores to get the product if they can, because they want it there and now. So, you know, look, we... In the US, we're with Costco now.
There's product going in there, Vitamin Shoppe, and all those things, where U.S. actually, as an offline model, is way more important, right? So, so if we want to seriously scale in the U.S., we do need a slightly different approach there, where we are going to need to have more offline sales, and you will see that in there. We will recognize the sales on that. That will be, you know, quite profitable as well because offline sales don't have all of the marketing and all the, all the complexity with it. So, so it, it is by territory, but it will never be while, you know, your, I'm driving it.
I, I, I don't, I don't want to see it being a, becoming an offline brand in, in, in, in the majority. But we're doing things all over the world. Japan, you know, we've had some great success in Japan with licensing the brand, and you'll see much more of that in other territories, too. Then, you asked about beauty, what... Sorry, on beauty?
Beauty and brand ambition and view on the margins then.
Retail media, wasn't it? And the importance of retail media in beauty. So what do you mean by that? Is it where we're providing ad services to the beauty business? Is that correct?
Yeah.
Yeah, look, I mean-
That's correct.
It's super powerful, right? And this is where, you know, the Ingenuity team have really delivered for beauty. If everybody knows that Amazon is the biggest advertising giant in the world right now. I think the last time we checked, they do $30 billion a year of ad revenue that goes through their platform. And so as a result of that, you can imagine that's 90-odd% contribution when they do that. So, you know, for ourselves in beauty as well, what we're seeing is as we do sponsored ads and all of the advertising that brands can now do on LOOKFANTASTIC, Cult Beauty, Dermstore, et cetera, they're seeing phenomenal success.
And so, for ourselves, the best way of looking at would be, I think we're around—we're looking at a run rate of around maybe GBP 10 million for this year, give or take. You know, it might be a little bit less than that at the moment, of which that's, you know, almost pure contribution, right? Because we're selling, we're selling ad space on our, on our platform. But that's scaling super fast. I think last year it would have just been a couple of million, maybe GBP 3 million, something like that, GBP 4 million. It wasn't, you know, not massive. So you're seeing that step up, and we're—what we're always doing there is we've got huge potential to open up more real estate on the website.
You've got to do it through the tech and be very careful about how you do it, and so you don't break things. But, yeah, I mean, that's a real contributing factor, and I do think it's super important for any reseller to be able to offer brands the ability to push their products to consumers, you know, across your retail estate. So it will... In terms of that comment you say, around the 6% EBITDA margin, you know, it will be a key contributing factor because once you get to £20 million of ad revenue on, say, £1.2 billion of sales, you're already moving that. You know, what is that? About 1.5%-1.7% EBITDA margin just on that alone.
But let's not forget that beauty manufacturing is a huge contributor as well, that's back to normal, as it is now. So, those two factors combined should see beauty EBITDA margins very much normalized.
Excellent. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Up next, we have Adi Arya from HPS. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Can you hear me okay?
You're fine, yes, very clear.
Good. Thank you. I think maybe just taking a step back, it's obviously clear that you've got some initiatives going in terms of disposing of loss-making operations, and nutrition's doing well, slightly offset by beauty and Ingenuity. But if you could firstly help me understand. You've—I think your CapEx falls into two big buckets over the last, call it, 3-4 years. One is in production facilities to support capacity growth of all your brands and also your partners through Ingenuity. But then also, you've got very—half of your CapEx every year is on intangible assets, which I think relates to Ingenuity. But if anything, Ingenuity, I think, reached its peak in 2021 and has been declining, even after you strip out the kind of non-core and contracts you're trying to exit.
So could you help me firstly understand how you spend, over kind of 240, about 600-700 million of CapEx without any obvious EBITDA benefit, from Ingenuity and, and kind of other growth? And then my second question is, I think your peak margin was in 2019 and 2020, around 10%, and you're seeing this, input costs normalize, but, even on kind of H1, margins, you're, you're at 5%. It, it suggests that you're structurally at a lower margin, and honestly, it's, it's tough to see how you reach a 15% adjusted EBITDA margin. And finally, even in the y...
And relating to that margin, even in the years where you did generate kind of high single digits, you had kind of quite a lot of exceptional costs being added back to that related to restructuring, COVID, M&A, professional fees. So I guess, yeah, the first question, just can you really explain where the growth will come from on all that CapEx you spent? And then secondly, the real margin of the business does seem to be quite low. How are you actually gonna drive profitability, please?
Sure. So, in terms of CapEx, I'm not sure where the GBP 600 million comes from, but your point in terms of, you know, what we're doing each year in Ingenuity. So, I think you've probably got about GBP 100 million of intangible-type CapEx across Ingenuity, which is basically around web development and tech and expansion, et cetera. Now, you know, it's also worth taking a step back and seeing, of any other business out there, of any scale that's digital facing, is anyone spending less CapEx than us? Now, I don't think there's many, if any. And then you've got to ask the question: Do any of them actually own their technology stack? And I think the answer would be none.
And so as a result, I think, you know, the one thing I'm actually super proud of, I'm glad you've raised it actually, is the incredible level of efficiency of our tech spend in terms of what we deliver as well. I mean, it's an incredible return relative to anybody else. If you were to pick up... and, you know, I don't like calling companies out, so, but, but everyone knows what the peer set is, UK and US, and, and, and go and have a look at their tech spend relative to us, and then, and then consider the level of onboarding of clients with complexity that we do. Just look at the Matalan complexity that happened in there.
The fact that we onboarded Allbeauty within, you know, a short matter of weeks, which is, you know, big GMVs, that would typically for many people be, you know, 12 months to three-year projects. Yet we chew through these through that tech team. So I'm super proud of that tech spend. But then that comes to the question that you say around, well, you know, where's the deliverability gonna come then from that tech spend? You know, so put that quite simply, I mean, for Ingenuity itself, the, you know, the pivot is really clear, right? So if you, if you're gonna make that level of tech spend that we do, then what we want to do is we want to get a proper ROI on it.
And for us to go into Shopify, BigCommerce territory, where there's very high churn of accounts and, you know, you've got to take long-term views, initial losses on some of those accounts, then, you know, that's one model. But where we've seen great success and where we believe there's a huge gap in the market, which is recognized as well by the Gartner Magic Quadrant as well, is for someone that does way more complex end-to-end solutions. And so that's why we've been pivoting the business to that, and that's why you're seeing the EBITDA margin progression come through for Ingenuity, as, despite the fall in sales of, of us churning those smaller accounts.
And what you're doing is if you do a more complex transaction, you're likely to have that contract for 10, 20, 30 years, versus doing things that, you know, working with brands that might be successful for 2 years, 3 years, and then less successful. So that's why we, you know, we make those investments more generally and why we see a return. Coming back to the wider question around your margin stacks, you know, where have you been? What about your exceptionals? So you're right. You know, we've been high single digits for a decade, I guess, if not close to 10%. Then you point to the fact, well, you've had some exceptionals in there as well.
So are those exceptionals, really, should they-- are they exceptional, and have you just always been a lower EBITDA margin business? The best example I can give you of that is, say, Myprotein, which if you were to look at Myprotein during what was its peak, trading during COVID, it had, you know, we had to charter planes to keep that business trading when all planes were grounded to Asia. So we just had big jumbo jets taking product into Asia. Now, that was costing GBP millions a month of exceptional costs above and beyond what our normal fulfillment was. If you now look forward to where we are with that business, it's making the same, if not more, EBITDA margin than, gross profit margin on those same sales. But actually, we don't use private jets anymore.
We don't need to cargo planes because there's a normalized... And actually, our freight costs are the same, if not lower, than where they were pre-COVID. And that's why, you know, if you look at where all those exceptional costs sat, the vast majority during that period actually sat with Myprotein, and the very reason they are exceptional is they're not there today. You've then got to take into account as well what we've done as a group. You know, we've bought and expanded in vertical integration, we've opened distribution centers all over the world, and we've bought into the beauty model and changed, you know, businesses around, which creates costs, right?
Our job as a management team is to say, "Here's a bunch of costs we're going to incur as a result of doing this." They will be gone when it's complete, and people will see that as it comes through onto the EBITDA margin. What you're now seeing is, in our results, there are practically no exceptionals that are in there. The only exceptionals we've had in the half year are GBP 5 million, which is tiny relative to the changes we've put the group through in the first half of the year. Yet the EBITDA margin is still, you know, operating right back, you know, it's starting to come right back up, and it's well upon last year, where we had way more exceptionals than that.
And so when you see the second half performance, you'll see again, the EBITDA margin improves. So when we come into 2024, it will be a much more normalized EBITDA margin, but the exceptionals will be gone unless we, unless there's a new COVID, and we need to start chartering cargo planes all over the world again. But then you might argue, well, that's not exceptional anymore. Cargo is, you know, COVID's here every year, and we're gonna be in lockdown forever. So that's why the EBITDA margins, you know, we've got total confidence. But... And then you look at the tech spend, the CapEx spend we make is a tiny fraction of any of our peers.
I mean, it's just, you know, I'm super proud of that, and I think, you know, the finance team, the CTO, are pretty heroic in terms of what they deliver on that budget.
Understood. Maybe if I could just have one follow-up then. Clearly, I think it makes sense that you feel that such a heavy spend on Ingenuity and kind of scaling your capabilities is efficient. And I can see that point of view as you set yourself up for growth, and agreed, you kept. It was an investment in Myprotein brand to charter those planes, and similarly, you've grown the beauty division. But if you look at kind of the amount of cash you're burning, which is fine because you have kind of you're well capitalized in terms of the capital you have to invest, I guess all I'm saying is, when do you think... Is it fair to say that you're viewing this as a kind of a 20-year horizon in terms of really getting that benefit?
Because, for example, you've, you've got state-of-the-art facilities, and in the UK, you probably have distribution centers capable of supporting a much greater level of activity than currently. So are you able to quantify the level of utilization of your asset base that you're using right now versus where you actually think it could be? Because that's one of the ways I would be able to understand that your EBITDA is low relative to the amount you've invested. So if you could talk about that kind of utilization, that would be helpful.
Yeah, sure. So, you're absolutely right. We've got huge capacity across the entire network, partly driven by the robotics that we have. You know, in Q1 this year, we opened up the robotics in New Jersey as well. So what you're seeing with that is, even though we've got hugely more capacity than we've ever had, capable of delivering multiple times the scale of the group today, our cost to serve is falling fast, and it's at its lowest level, probably since we were doing CDs and DVDs 10, 15 years ago. So, and that actually ties into your exceptional cost point as well, which is, you know, when you're opening all these facilities, et cetera, you do incur exceptional costs.
And then people say, "Well, actually, those exceptional costs are bringing your cost to serve down." If you were to look at our historic cost to serve, take off the exceptional costs, we are still now running the new facilities with huge capacity at a far cheaper cost to serve than at any point that we've had, even when you take exceptional costs off historically of old. So that's despite the fact we've got multiple times capacity in the group to be able to onboard. And that's why when someone like Allbeauty come to you and say, "Can you help us?" We can do it in a matter of weeks, end to end, rather than years, because it just slots in.
The benefit of that is, it then starts to bring our cost to serve down even further because we've just got excess capacity. That excess capacity, when you come to peak trading, like Black Friday week and all those kind of things, it runs at 100%, if not 150%, right? Because we can't get everything out of the door on day one. There are times of the year where the capacity, but it's only small times of the year, is full. I mean, the daily capacity, we've got huge, huge capacity available to do it, but it's incredibly efficient as a result of the investment we've made. That's why we sit there going, those investments have been well worth doing.
The final point that's missing as well is, not only of all that capacity we've got, but we serve customers now far faster all over the world than we've ever done, because we've got that global distribution network. We're doing it cheaper and faster than, than freighting it all over the world than, than we would have done. So that investment that we've had, the ROI on it, is delivering now. It's not a 20-year view, it's not a 10-year view, or a 5-year view. It's a today view, where it's every day, and it's in these numbers as well. For anyone that wants to take a look, there's a slide in there that will show you distribution costs as an example. There's the, you know, the size of these presentations, there's a slide in for bloody everything.
But, you know, maybe it's worth having a look at that.
I mean, look, we can call those numbers out very easy. It's, it's-
This is Steve Whitehead speaking, by the way.
Sorry, Steve Whitehead. It's a 280 basis points improvement on fulfillment costs over the three years since we implemented the warehouse rollout program with automation. So that's 280 basis points on a GBP 2 billion+ business, which when you are looking at investing, yeah, GBP 100-200 million in that rollout, that then drives a really efficient payback period, which is delivering to consumers today, as Matt said, but gives a, you know, a two-year payback on the spend that we're looking at.
This is Matthew Moulding, just wrapping this point up. You mentioned a line in there saying cash burn, which is obviously not something that I can relate to because I think, I think the one thing we've just shown is, is cash performance is super strong at the group. You talk about how well capitalized we are. We're beyond well capitalized. We're, we're, you know, we're, in terms of the cash performance of the business, there is no cash burn. You know, we, we delivered GBP 50 million of free cash flow in, in H2 last year.
In our seasonal outflow this year, we had a GBP 70 million outflow, which we, we would always have an outflow, but over the 12 months. So that gives us net GBP 20 million with peak to come, our, our free cash flow period to come. So we don't. It wouldn't correlate to me on that, and that is a GBP 350 million improvement on the prior twelve months once all the investment had ended.
Okay, no, so I mean, maybe finally, before I jump back in the queue, just to kind of clarify my cash flow point. You referenced the free cash flow, GBP 50 million generated in H2 last year. I agree with that because you have the net working capital inflow, but if you just take 100 million EBITDA, which is kind of your target, adjusted EBITDA, which is your target. I know your CapEx is, you're investing for growth. Basically, you would say something below GBP 60 million for maintenance of all your facilities, that leaves you GBP 40 million. And then before you even get into interest, taxes, and anything else, your lease costs are about GBP 50 million.
So that's kind of where I'm getting at in terms of asking about the scale you need to really utilize those facilities and have EBITDA at a level that's kind of positive free cash flow generating.
Yes.
If you take just, like, as I said, £100 million EBITDA, even call it £50-60 million of CapEx on a maintenance level, that leaves you £50 million. That's your leases, and then you've got £30-40 million of interest based on where the rates are, and that's before kind of taxes and any working capital swings. Would you agree with that?
No. So, the GBP 100 million of EBITDA is not a number that I don't know where you've got that from, so I don't think that's in any of the consensus numbers or in anything we've guided to, but I'll, you know.
I mean, the Adjusted EBITDA in 2022, and the consensus is maybe GBP 120 million of Adjusted EBITDA. You've got GBP 47 million of Adjusted EBITDA in H1, and if I annualize that, it gets to about 100, but call it 100, 110, whichever of Adjusted EBITDA. The point, my point is just querying the line that your cash flow seems quite, quite tight when you, when you take your Adjusted EBITDA figures.
What do you mean, cash flow tight, rather?
Would you agree that you generated 47—you're reporting GBP 47 million of Adjusted EBITDA in H1 2023?
Yes, I do.
Then, if you annualize that, let's say, and maybe give a credit for some Christmas trading, call it GBP 100-110 of Adjusted EBITDA for 2023.
Well, that's not a number that I'd recognize, but it was the cash flow point. I mean, just picking up on your cash flow point, right? We're all aware what consensus would be, which isn't the GBP 100 million you were referring to. But coming back to your point, that you turn around and say, "Well, what about, you know, how do you end up with not being free cash outflow, say, GBP 50 million or GBP 100 million, or whatever you're pointing to?" Obviously, when we've made our investments and opened up all the distribution centers over the world, we filled those warehouses with stock, right? Everywhere. As a result, it takes a period of normalization.
You don't need stock in every warehouse all over the world to that extent, but you can't part fill a warehouse, otherwise, the service breaks, and you end up still freighting products all over the world by fulfilling some orders locally. So that's why when we look back over the last couple of years, we've filled all of our new distribution centers to be able to properly serve customers. Then, as those warehouses settle and they operate to a normal level, what happens is, all of that stock then runs down to a normal level, but you end up building your stock up hugely, invest in that capital, and then that stock comes back, turns back into cash for you as, as that, as, as that comes back in. And that's what you're seeing.
You'll see stock reductions all over the group, that you've seen year-on-year, probably about GBP 100 million on last year. The finance guys can always correct me, on separate analyst for you there, but constantly improving, and we've still got stock that will be coming out of that. The EBITDA progression in the business just continues, right? So the, and the EBITDA is cash. So yes, you've got growth in EBITDA, you've got, you've then got your interest that you pay off at your rents. But, but, you know, that's why we had GBP 50 million of free cash flow last year, -70 in the first half, because it's seasonal outflow.
You'll have a positive free cash flow again, and hence, that's why you're broadly free cash flow now, and you will be, if not positive next year as well included. So obviously, we'd be expecting EBITDA growth to come back quite considerably next year as well, which I think is in consensus. So that's why there's nobody in this room here would correlate to that, nor would any of the other guys.
Yeah. Matt, can I just add? It's Damian Sanders, and in terms of, you know, the annualizing of the EBITDA points, clearly, we've already talked this morning about the impact of beauty manufacturing, and that will significantly come back. So it's not just a case of, you know, extrapolating. And the point about Christmas, clearly, peak is our big seasonal impact for us. And, you know, as Matt has said, we always have a cash inflow in the second half because of working capital. Because we've done the investment in the infrastructure in the warehouse, we actually, we've been able to, as Matt said, now reduce the stock levels. We can reduce it further, but the important point that I would make is that availability will not be negatively impacted.
In fact, because of the efficiencies that we have, in many respects, availability is better. So we can actually, we do have levers where we can further reduce working capital. We know that EBITDA is coming back, and therefore, we are very confident about the neutral free cash flow for this year, and then positive beyond.
Okay, that's helpful. Thank you. Appreciate the color.
Thank you. We're moving on to Paul Rossington from HSBC. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Can you hear me?
Yeah, we got you loud and clear.
Thank you. Just, a couple of, quick ones, actually. Just in terms of competition, on the beauty side, has the Sephora launch in the U.K., kind of, meant for a more meaningfully competitive environment in this particular market? I don't know if that's been a factor or not, if you could comment.
Look, there's plenty of competition across beauty all over the world. I don't think it'd be fair for me to say that Sephora has had an impact on our business as of yet. Our UK performance is super strong within beauty. The actual beauty numbers, that if you did the territory breakdown, the only reason there's a drag on the UK is because the beauty manufacturing site that delivers for a lot of brands manufactures and developed products. Actually, the core beauty performance of Lookfantastic, of Cult Beauty is really strong across the UK. So it wouldn't be fair for me to say that, but obviously, Sephora is a high quality player across the world.
You know, it's also, I think if you looked at the competitor landscape, it's quite interesting to see, you know, if you were to look two years ago, or three years ago, everybody, every man and his dog was getting into beauty because they thought it was gonna be, you know, an easy win for them. And it, you know, based on, you know, recent announcements, you'll see a lot of people have pulled out of beauty as they've tried to do it. And so you look at, you know, I think Farfetch were the most recent to pull out of it themselves, you know, the biggest luxury platform online, and they pulled away from it.
So actually, I do, I do think a lot of the investment has really put us on a strong, competitive footing because beauty is a relatively low AOV category at sort of like 45 GBP per order, let's say. Can be 50, depending on the time of the year. But, but, so as a result, automation is key, and we're fully automated. You look at the U.K. with the robots, you look at the U.S., the cost that we have to serve, that's a really, really strong competitive advantage that we have just in the operating nature of the business.
And, and so many people that have tried to enter this have come in and, and, and those operating costs mean it can't be a profitable category for them because, you know, it's, it's, it, it takes some investment to get there. So actually, I think competitive landscape has moved in our favor.
Brilliant, thanks for the color. Just on, on Ingenuity as well, clearly, this, there's another quite large, established online grocer in the market that's talking about expanding into non-food fulfillment contracts as well. Are you bumping heads with, with Ocado at all in that regard? I don't know if you're able to comment, or, or are they, are they in the same kind of tenders that you're looking at, or is it, is that an area of competitive threat?
I think I can be honest and say we've never once come up against Ocado. But again, you know, the tech space has got plenty of players in there, right? So, you know, the key people we would come up against week after week would be Salesforce, I'd say, and to a lesser degree, depending on the scale, you might have Shopify Plus that are in there at the moment. But, you know, as a U.K. tech champion, I'd be, you know, I wish Ocado all the best, and, you know, it'd be great to see them, you know, break through as well between as we- maybe we can have a global impact, but we haven't come up against them yet.
Brilliant. Thank you. My last one is just, I think you talked about, you mentioned, feels like a while ago now, balance sheet, strategic flexibility or optionality. Does that are we to take it that you are kind of still in the market to acquire complementary or, strategic assets? Or, is it the case that perhaps post a period of quite significant M&A since IPO, that kind of you're kind of pausing for the time being? I'm just just wondering where your view is on that right now, and under what circumstances would you start to acquire other assets or not?
Look, we're obviously always mindful of opportunities in the marketplace. You'll have seen we did the City AM thing, which was tiny, right? But we're always in the market, understanding, et cetera. It depends on your... But what you wouldn't do is deploy capital from your own business to buy an asset as a higher multiple, realistically, unless there were some incredible synergies in doing so. So, we're always mindful of that. In terms of balance sheet optionality, look, we have super strong balance sheet optionality. As I touched on earlier, you know, we just Myprotein alone, you know, we get bids that are at multiples of our market cap, you know, in times gone by, just for that brand, but we're just not interested, right?
We don't in that regard. That said, you know, if we could find something that came along at the right kind of valuation, of course, we would look at it. We'd look to, you know, to do a deal or a transaction if it was there. We've got the flexibility to do so. We've got the balance sheet strength to do so, if we so chose to do. But given where your own personal market cap is, doesn't make a lot of sense for me personally at the moment to be doing too much in that space.
You know, given the last 12, 18 months of inflation, the challenges that are out in the wider world, et cetera, there's been a real focus on, you know, sorting your own business to the very best of its ability and making sure it's in super good shape so that when the market does right itself out there, then we're first out of the traps and in pole position if we do want to do some strategic stuff. So that's been our focus for now.
Excellent. Thank you very much for the call.
Thanks, Paul.
Thank you. Our final question for today comes from Andrew Wade of Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Hi there, just a couple from me. Almost everything has been asked already. So, just on the beauty side, first of all, the return to growth in August, obviously pretty encouraging. Could you talk through what's changed there to drive that? Because you don't annualize the sort of step back in marketing until Q4. That'd be my first. And then the second one, on the Myprotein rebrand, going back, you noted encouraging early results from the rebrand. Any more color you can give us on that?
Sure. I mean, look, the key thing is, actually, we started to focus on more profitable orders, you know, probably from last Easter, really.
Yeah.
But we really started to drive it, drive it harder and harder as we went through 2022. So what that meant was we were looking at making sure that orders were profitable on first order, and that would directly link to where products were being distributed from. So if you were to look at places like Europe and Asia, which typically you have to travel further from... Even though we've got a huge facility in Poland, you know, for Europe, the further away you are, the more, the more expensive it is to serve different territories. So what we've done is just make sure profitability is on a first-time basis, rather than looking at a, you know, a second order, third order kind of principle.
There's an element of that does annualize, but then at the same time, there's also an element of where you, as a result of doing that, you fight harder in those territories where you are you have got a competitive advantage, and they are more profitable. So we have been doing that, and we are taking share. We know that for a fact in all those kind of areas that we just talked about. Someone asked about the UK market a little moment ago as well. So I think we're just taking market share. Those territories, you know, like the UK and other places we, we're doing particularly well, where we're serving closer to our distribution facilities, and that's driving us back into growth.
The final one is obviously the manufacturing business at the same time. You know, that's now back in growth, which has been a bit of a drag as well, 'cause it is a sizable manufacturing business dealing across the beauty industry. Second question was on Myprotein, encouraging results on the rebrand. Look, I mean, the encouraging results are born out of how trade is every single day, right? And, and the profitability, the margins, and the rest of it, that's how we see it. Obviously, there's been good customer feedback. We feel very good about it. It's been on the way for 18 months. These things don't just come about. Lots of, you know, customer testing and the likes.
So we just feel very good about it, and it's translating quite well into product and design, and all of those things. So far, so good. But it is really early, right, in terms of that, but we certainly wouldn't expect it to be a negative.
Great stuff. Very helpful. Thank you.
Thanks, Andrew.
Thank you, and that concludes today's Q&A session, so I'd like to hand the call back over to you for any additional or closing remarks.
Okay. Well, thanks again, everybody, for taking the time to listen to us, and hopefully next time, in a few weeks' time, we'll have some other good updates for you and just continue cracking on. Thank you.