And we'll publish those responses where it is appropriate to do so. And before we begin, as usual, we would just like to submit the following poll, and if you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. I would now like to hand you over to the executive management team from Topps Tiles PLC, Rob. Good morning, sir.
Good morning, and good morning, everyone. Very warm welcome to the full 2024 full-year results. I'm Rob Parker, Chief Executive of the group, and with me today is Stephen Hopson, who is our CFO. So we will dive straight in, and I'm going to kick off with a summary of the business and what's been happening across the year. And I'll hand it on to Stephen, who's going to go through some financial highlights, and then I will really take you back through strategy and operational highlights as well. So as we announced at the interim results, we have launched an exciting and ambitious new goal for the business, which is called Mission 365. That's about delivering GBP 365 million worth of sales across the group, up from about GBP 250 broadly today.
We have also refreshed our strategy in order to help us deliver that goal with a specific focus on five key areas of growth across the business. Those five, in turn, as detailed on the slide here, are trade, which is a real area of strength for the business, and it has actually been performing very well. So we're very encouraged by the performance of trade, and we recognize there's a lot more opportunity to engage trade, particularly digitally. And we started that journey already over the second half of our year with some really strong performance coming through over the final quarter. We've significantly expanded our addressable market by expanding our category focus as a business. So a number of hard-surface product categories are either in trial across the group or are being rolled out, but we're already selling online.
B2B, business-to-business growth, we've identified as a real opportunity as well, and we believe that we can build on existing growth across the existing strength across the business, and in the second half, we completed the acquisition of some of the assets of CTD Tiles. We think that's a really strong fit for our strategy and will play an important part in our business moving forward. That business is subject to, or that acquisition is subject to a Competition and Markets Authority, which remains ongoing, and we're assisting the CMA with that investigation. Pro Tiler, which is a business we acquired a couple of years ago now, continues to perform very, very well indeed. So much so, in fact, that we've actually signed up to a new distribution centre in the second half of the year. We'll actually come on to that a little bit later.
That will be operational by January 2025. And then Tile Warehouse, which is the newest part of our group, and we started that just over two years ago. That also continues to make good progress, and sales have actually increased about threefold from where we were a year ago. So turning to our financial results for the year, as investors in the market are already very much aware, 2024 has been a tough year, been a tough year for performance across the entire sector. Our group sales have declined by around 5% across the year. We are very confident that that is a significant outperformance of the market. We believe the market has declined across the year by somewhere between 10% and 15%.
Actually, we now believe the market for the U.K. is around 20% below the level it was in 2019, and our sales over an equivalent period of time have actually grown 15% as a group. Profit for the year was at £6 million. Adjusted pre-tax profit for the year was at £6.3 million. That really reflects the operational gearing in the business. Stephen will cover it in more detail, but actually our margin and our costs are either broadly flat or actually slightly down in terms of costs for the year. So the decrease in performance, in profitable performance, is really all about the decline in sales. And we've continued to deploy our strategy. We've actually completed two acquisitions in the year, so the remaining element, Pro Tiler, the tools we've acquired, and then the CTD Tiles acquisition, as I've mentioned.
We had the balance sheet to do this, and we've been saying for some time we have a strong balance sheet and a robust balance sheet. We've taken those opportunities as they occurred to deploy that capacity that we have, and we believe over time they'll prove to be very good additions to the business. Current trading then for the first eight weeks of the year, so from the start of October to the end of November, we are pleased to be able to report we've returned to growth. It is very modest. We're very conscious of that. It's just over 1% growth, but it is a positive number. That is a significant improvement on some of the results we saw during the course of 2024. Trade within that, I've already mentioned, trade is performing very well indeed.
We've seen strong growth in trade year on year, but that in itself does also underline how weak consumer, and particularly consumer RMI, continues to be across the U.K., and we will continue to deploy our strategy. We remain really well positioned for the medium term, so that's some of the highlights of the presentation. I'll hand you over to Stephen to go through some of the financials.
Thank you very much, Rob. Good morning, everyone. I'm Stephen Hopson. I'm the CFO of Topps Tiles. Thanks for joining us today. Just to frame the results before I get into the numbers, Rob's already mentioned that in the year the group completed two acquisitions, and that was, as was said, it's the remaining 40% of shares that we didn't previously own in a business called Pro Tiler Tools, we bought 60% in 2022 and then 40% in the second half of this year, and then also the CTD Tiles acquisition. In terms of financial reporting and the impact on financial reporting, the Pro Tiler business was already fully consolidated into group numbers from 2022 because the group held a control of the stakes. There isn't any change in that regard.
Then CTD has been consolidated into group numbers since the date of acquisition, which is about six weeks before the end of the year. We have taken the CTD trade performance out of our adjusted financial measures, which I'll explain as we go through the slides. The reason for that is that CTD was acquired out of administration. So in those remaining six weeks, it was sort of the trading wasn't really representative of where the business, I think we'll get to, it needed quite a lot of support and attention in the first few weeks to get it sort of back up and running. We've taken that out for the six weeks. I'll explain the impact of CTD on the numbers as we go through the slides in the forthcoming section. That's the sort of context of it.
So if we start by looking at revenue, or the P&L, and starting with revenue, total group sales for the year on a statutory basis were down 4.1% to GBP 252 million. And that follows three consecutive record years of revenue for the group during 2021 to 2023. As I just mentioned, we have excluded CTD from our adjusted measures. So the sort of the blue bar, two-thirds away across the page, refers to our adjusted sales in the year, which were GBP 248.5 million, which was down 5.4% year on year. Within that, the group has a number of businesses now, the main one being the Topps Tiles brand, which is the largest part of the business at GBP 210 million of sales. Like-for-like sales in Topps Tiles were down 9.1% year on year, with Q4 being slightly better than the previous couple of quarters, with like-for-likes of minus 8.2.
And then from the start of the new financial year, as Rob just mentioned, like-for-like sales in Topps Tiles were actually only very marginally down, which is pleasing results. As we said, trade customers were much stronger than homeowner customers over the last year, which has really supported the group's like-for-like sales. And as a result of that, our trade mix, so the proportion of sales in Topps Tiles that were made to trade customers rather than homeowners, moved forward quite materially from 59.6% of sales within Topps Tiles to 62.8% of sales in the year. And we do think that the group's focus on trade is a real key strength in terms of supporting the top line. It does have an impact in terms of gross margins, which I'll come on to on the next slide.
Parkside, our sort of architecture and design-focused business, saw sales decline GBP 1.8 million to GBP 7.6 million in the year in what was a very tough market. Online Pure Play, the yellow bar in the middle of the slide, consists of two different businesses. Pro Tiler Tools, which I've mentioned, which we completed the acquisition of in the year, and then a smaller business called Tile Warehouse. This part of the group continues to perform really, really strongly. Sales in this part of the group were up 36% year on year, which follows growth of 50% in the previous financial year. Now that part of the business is over GBP 30 million of sales and is a material part of the group. CTD sales in those first six weeks of ownership were GBP 3.3 million, which takes the total revenue, as you can see on the slide, to GBP 252 million.
Moving on to talk about gross margins, secondly, we saw positive growth actually in our gross margins this year. On an adjusted basis, so again, excluding CTD, gross margins were up 30 basis points from 53.0% to 53.3%. And within this, talking you through the component parts, the Topps Tiles brand saw positive gains from price, costs, and volume mix. And what I'm getting at there specifically is reduced cost of sales because in the previous years, people will remember we saw extremely high shipping costs. And also, we've talked to you in the past about the prices of tiles being quite heavily affected by very high gas prices in previous years. Those factors have now primarily normalized, and so therefore we saw a year-on-year benefit on that within FY24. I mentioned on the previous slide that the group's sales to trade customers were particularly strong in FY24.
Trade customers benefit from lower pricing than homeowner customers because they shop with us a lot and they spend lots of money with us, and so they have a sort of benefits associated with that, which is common in this sector. So the increased mix of sales to trade customers had a negative impact on our gross margin percentage by about half a point. And then there was also a further reduction in gross margin due to the high growth in the online Pure Play business. And these businesses, particularly Pro Tiler Tools, which, as I've said, have been growing very, very fast, operate at lower gross margins than the group as a whole. But actually, on a net margin, so a profit before tax margin basis, they operate within actually the target range for the group, the sort of 8%-10% PBT range.
So as the sales in that part of the business grow, it reduces our gross margin, which is the minus 1.2% you can see on the chart, but actually it's positive at a net margin basis. And then the other bar primarily represents operational gains, in particular lower stock losses year on year, which is obviously a pleasing thing. So adjusted gross margins were 53.3%. The impact of CTD on gross margins, which, as I mentioned, is excluded from adjusted margins, but on a total basis, the impact from CTD was slightly accretive, so 0.1% accretive. And that was largely due to some one-off gains as we started to sell through stock that was acquired under the Retention of Title claims, and that took the reported gross margin to 54.4% in the year. If I move on now to our cost base and starting with operating expenses and other income.
On an adjusted basis, I'll come on to the statutory basis in a second, but on an adjusted basis, the cost base was actually lower year on year by 1.1 million pounds at £121.5 million. And that was despite almost £5 million of inflationary costs this year. Inflationary costs were largely in people costs, reflecting the impact of National Living Wage increases primarily from April 2024 flowing into the P&L. And so that was an increasing cost. The other increasing cost was an increase in the online Pure Play part of the business. As I mentioned, sales were up over 30%, and we invested another 1.2p million in that part of the business to drive that strong sales growth. Parkside's costs were actually lower by 1.2p million year on year, and that was largely due to the reduction in the cost base of Parkside that we did in FY23.
So this is the annualisation of that cost reduction. And therefore, if you add up the cost reduction over the two-year period in FY2023 and 2024, total costs in the Parkside business are down over £2 million, which actually represents about 40% of that business's cost base. As a result of that, and despite the sales decline in Parkside that I spoke to two slides ago, Parkside actually moved into a modest level of profit for the first time this year despite the sales decline. The next big bar in terms of cost reduction is tiles profit share.
Now, everyone in Topps Group has an element of variable pay in their jobs, and that is no matter whether you're a service specialist working in one of our Topps Tiles stores, where you will earn commission on the sales that you make, or whether you work in our warehouse and distribution centers, or whether you're a colleague in our support office. And given the year-on-year financial performance of the group, which Rob's already mentioned, was down about 50%, the profit share clearly also dropped substantially as well year on year. The other savings bar on the right-hand side of the page includes some savings in supply chain and in store costs based on those lower volumes. That is a relatively modest saving, and it's true to say that the business's cost base is relatively fixed overall.
So as sales drop, our cost base don't particularly drop as fast as the sales. That's also true the other way around. As costs rise, our sales rise, our costs don't rise as much as well. We describe that as high operational gearing, which is inherent in the group. So therefore, in summary, adjusted costs were down to GBP 121.5 million despite the GBP 5 million or so inflationary costs in business. Now, the difference between adjusted operating costs and statutory operating costs this year is very large, which I've presented on the table on the right-hand side. So adjusted costs are GBP 121.5 million. But if you just look at the front page of the P&L, you'll see that our statutory operating costs and other income were GBP 145.7 million.
And the most significant item, as you can see on that table by some stretch, is called store impairments and lease gains and losses, which was a cost of £18.8 million on an aggregate basis. That includes a large impairment on right-of-use assets and fixtures and fittings, which is a non-cash item, and I'll come back to explain that shortly. The other material item on the right-hand side of the page is the Pro Tiler share purchase expense, £3.2 million. And we've discussed that in previous results presentations. It relates to building up provision essentially to buy out the remaining shares in Pro Tiler, which we did in May 2024. That's now complete as the transaction has been done in 2024. And then the CTD costs of £1.9 million. I've already said a couple of times that we've adjusted out all of CTD.
The net impact of CTD on the business's profit was £0.2 million. This £1.9 million obviously just represents the costs associated with CTD, but as I've explained, we also backed up the gross margin as well, so that explains the statutory profit movement, statutory cost movement in the year, so combining everything now to look at our P&L account on an adjusted basis, I have explained a fair chunk of this already, so I can sort of go through it relatively quickly. Sales are down 4%. Gross margins were up slightly, 30 basis points, as I've mentioned, and OPEX was down by £1.1 million. Interest was up £0.6 million, reflecting higher IFRS 16 interest charges. I should make clear to investors that that interest charge does relate to IFRS 16 interest costs on leases.
That isn't to do with bank interest payments, which basically meant zero over the course of the year, and all of that led to profit before tax reducing from £12.5 million to £6.3 million a year, and it hopefully is fairly clear looking at the P&L that all of that profit movement therefore is down to the sales decline, given that gross margins were up and operating costs were down. The tax rate for the business was slightly lower than the U.K. headline rate of corporation tax, and therefore, earnings per share were down 47%, which is a slightly lower rate than the profit before tax movement of 50% down, and then that led to 2.4p of earnings per share, and we have proposed a full year dividend of 2.4p per share, which is therefore 100% of EPS, down from 3.6p last year.
And again, I'll come back to dividends shortly. So if we turn to the budget and the cash flow statement then, so net cash over the course of the year reduced by GBP 14.7 million from GBP 23.4 million at the start of the year to GBP 8.7 million at the end of the year. And that includes, as Rob mentioned in his opening remarks, GBP 19 million of cash relating to the two acquisitions completed on the period, which are the two bars on the right-hand side of the chart. So excluding those two acquisitions, our net cash actually increased slightly over the course of the year. So if I walk through the slide, operational cash flows before leases, and that excludes CTD, were GBP 34.9 million, which is GBP 6.2 million lower than last year's equivalent number, which therefore follows exactly the year-on-year movement in adjusted profit that I've spoken about already.
We saw a working capital inflow, again excluding CTD, of GBP 6.4 million in the year. But that did include a GBP 9 million timing benefit, which was simply because our year-end this year in the end of September moved to the 28th of September, which fell just before the September payroll VAT and supplier payments, which all went out on Monday, the 30th of September, so the first day of sort of the new financial year. So that gave us a benefit of GBP 9 million from timing. We will retain that working capital timing benefit until we have a 53-week year, which will be in a few years' time. So it'll remain in the numbers until it reverses out and we have a 53-week year. Lease payments were GBP 21.8 million, which are GBP 1.2 million lower than last year.
Again, some cash payments moved just into the start of 2025, which explains that difference. CapEx continues to be relatively low, at £4.5 million in the year. And then there was a dividend to shareholders in Topps Tiles PLC of £7.1 million on a cash basis. And that consists of the final dividend from last year and then the interim dividend of 1.2p that we paid after through this year. So before acquisitions, but including those dividend payments, net cash grew from £23.4 million to £27.6 million. And then I think, as we've explained already, we bought CTD for £9 million and the final 40% of shares in Pro Tiler, and the two of those in total aggregated to about £19 million leaving the group at the end of the year with £8.7 million of net cash. The group has a committed banking facility, which is committed to October 2027.
That banking facility is the value of £30 million. And so if you add the 30 to the £8.7 million of cash that we had, that gives you headroom to the banking facilities of £38.7 million at the end of the year. Looking at the balance sheet, capital allocation and dividends then on this slide, I wanted to come back to this specifically. And on the left-hand side is a reminder of the group's capital allocation policy, which we sort of launched in May 2022. It's not changed from there. I just thought it would be useful to show a recap to investors on the left-hand side of the elements of our capital allocation policy. And then on the, I suppose, the context for the launch of that capital allocation policy was the improving strength of the group's balance sheet.
And on the right-hand side of the chart, you can see the year-end net debt or net cash position of the group over the last, well, 13, 14 years or so. And I should be clear that that excludes lease liabilities. So that is sort of bank debts or cash sitting in our bank. And you can see that the context there is that over a decade, the group swung from a position of having £51 million of net debt in FY11, at the end of FY11, to £28 million of net cash in 2021, excluding leases. This year, that cash balance has reduced to £9 million. As I explained, that includes the two acquisitions that we've made. So we've finished the year at £9 million. If you want to include leases, we have £86 million of lease liabilities sitting on the company's balance sheet.
And therefore, our net debt to EBITDA post leases year-end is 2.3 times. And if you combine that with our GBP 30 million banking facility, I would still describe it as a very robust balance sheet despite the year-on-year decline in cash. So when it comes to dividends, our policy was also described as part of that dividend and capital allocation policy in 2022. Our core policy on dividends is to pay out two-thirds of our adjusted earnings per share as a dividend. But the policy very clearly gives us some flexibility around that. We don't have to adhere to that slavishly. In particular, it gives us some flexibility to pay out up to 100% of our adjusted earnings per share in a year, particularly if we feel there's a sort of relatively short-term period of weaker trading.
And so this year, we have taken advantage of the flexibility that that policy gives us. And we've decided to pay out the maximum that the policy allows us to, which is to pay out 100% of our earnings. And therefore, we are proposing a full year dividend of 2.4p, which consists of the interim of 1.2p0 we've already paid, plus another proposed final dividend of 1.2p0, which will obviously be subject to shareholder approval at the AGM in January next year. I mentioned earlier on that within our cost base, our statutory cost base, there was a large non-cash impairment of store assets. So I thought it might be helpful to show investors a little bit more detail on that, which I've done in this slide. You can read for yourselves on the right-hand side some of the processes that the company goes through.
And then on the left-hand side, there's two snips of some of the notes to the accounts. So the lease note, which explains our right-of-use assets, and then a snip from the property, plant, and equipment, so the fixed asset note as well. And I've highlighted with the box around it the impairment, which you can see exactly in the back of the accounts: the two things that I'm talking about here. There's a process that companies have to go through under an accounting standard called IAS 36, where we're required to look at assets on the company balance sheet and see if there's any, what they call, trigger for impairment across the business, which I think the poor state of the market and the decline in the company's profit year-on-year was, in our view, a trigger to do a full impairment review, which we completed.
In particular, we look at the largest asset on the company's balance sheet, which are these right-of-use assets, which started the year at GBP 81 million. Those assets represent the company's right-of-use leased assets. So almost all our stores are held on leases. But under the accounting standards, those are viewed as assets because we have the right to use those. They have a value associated with them normally on the balance sheet. These are the assets that we're talking about. The way you do it is you look at the future cash flows generated by stores on a sort of fully absorption costing basis. Then where the future cash flows can't support the assets on a store-by-store basis, we're required to impair it.
The outcome was that we posted a non-cash impairment of GBP 17.1 million against the right-of-use assets and GBP 2.3 million against the fixtures and fittings within those assets. The F&F process follows exactly the same process as the right-of-use assets. That impairment gets posted against our statutory profits this year. As I mentioned, it's a non-cash accounting item. We removed it from our adjusted profits. In future years, it will also have no impact on our adjusted profits moving forward, which hopefully makes year-on-year comparisons of profit much more easy to understand for investors as we move forward. The adjusted profit won't change as a result of this. Then my final slide before I hand back to Rob, just looking forward slightly. Again, there's a fair bit on this slide. I'll pick out just a few points for the presentation.
Looking at macroeconomic indicators, I think we'd characterize them as being mixed at the moment. There are some positives, so in particular, things like mortgage approvals are up quite substantially year-on-year, which is a good sign. That hasn't yet led to increased levels of housing transactions. I mean, logic says it should, but there's a lag factor until that happens, so that hasn't happened yet, and then we would hope that after housing transactions start to pick up, then maybe people will start to spend a bit more on their homes again, but that has yet to come through yet. Consumer confidence is something we look at quite a lot. It was on a positive trend, but then it took a bit of a hit in recent months in sort of September and October. We did note that consumer confidence improved slightly last week, but it is still relatively low.
Inflation is trending down, but I think it's fair to say there are upward pressures on inflation as well, which we think may come through in future months. So a mixed set of macroeconomic indicators, I think. Although our own trading is back into slight growth in the first eight weeks of the year, which we are pleased with, I think we've been very clear not to call that a recovery in the market. We don't think that there's been a recovery in consumer spending yet, which I think Rob will touch on in his presentation shortly. We as a business also face our own set of inflationary challenges.
In total, we're guiding investors to think about £5 million of inflationary costs hitting the business in FY25, which includes the impact from national living wage increases in April and also the changes that the Chancellor announced to National Insurance, both the rate of National Insurance, but also importantly, the threshold at which that insurance payment kicks in. So it's been reduced from £9,100 to £5,000, which will impact the business for sure. So in total, we think we have about £5 million of inflationary costs coming into FY24. There's a few other slides where a few other points which you won't necessarily pick out on the slides. Just two more quick ones. H1 to H2 phasing, you should continue to expect H1 to be impacted by holiday pay accruals, which reverse out in the second half.
And obviously, we have high heating costs in the first half as well. And then also one final thing, we've mentioned already the fact that we've acquired a new distribution center or signed a lease from a new distribution center to support Pro Tiler. We will be paying the CapEx cost to fit that out. And so we're guiding CapEx to step up next year to GBP 8-9 million, including the cost of fitting that. So overall, the environment does remain quite tough. The good news is that we do have a large list of self-help measures that we're in the process of implementing, which we think will really drive the business forward, which is what I will hand back to Rob to talk to you about now.
Thanks, Stephen. Very good. Thank you. So yeah, great. Thank you. Moving on to strategy then and operational run-through.
The goal and the addressable market. So it's already covered. And as we announced at the interim, our new exciting goal we think is all about Mission 365. It's about getting the business to £365 million of annualized sales. And that's also combined with a really clear target for profitability. So we believe every part of our business, every operational element can generate at least 8% net margins. Pro Tiler, the business, is already generating that level of profitability today. And historically, prior to the pandemic period and various points of disruption, the Topps Tiles business consistently achieved that level of profitability. Operational gearing will be key, as Stephen's highlighted, to get Topps Tiles back there. But we believe every part of the business can generate at least 8% net margins.
The addressable market for the business has been really materially expanded as well from about GBP 1.2 billion previously, which was just focused on tiles and closely associated products, to GBP 2.1 billion now. We've achieved that by broadening our reach into more of the hard floor and wall surface covering sector and related products. While tiles remain our core, and it's really important to the name of our business, it's what we do. We've also started to extend our reach in recent years, actually, into adjacent categories. We feel there's much more we can achieve in that space. Things like wood, laminate shower panels, XXL tiles, the sort of super large tiles that are now coming out of factories, and also splashbacks. I'll talk to some of those in terms as we go through the next few slides.
So the strategy for the business has therefore been enhanced and refreshed to reflect that increased scope for our ambition and also the fact that we want to ensure we really are market leaders, or as we've called it here, first for in each of our chosen areas of focus. The only exception to that, actually, is hard surfaces where we recognize that we need to build and grow. Our immediate focus is ensuring the customers know that we actually sell all those other categories. Hence, we're going to be famous for hard surfaces, but first for everything else. So the way this schematic works is the four boxes across the top are all about our focus on growing sales. Really, really important point. The first two, therefore, are very much about our customer offer and our product and are therefore product-focused.
And then our consumer and trade are the customers that we serve on the right-hand side. So noting, actually, that trade is also a very, very broad definition. I'll talk to that a little bit in a couple of slides' time. And those four boxes focused on growing sales are then underpinned by three, what we call supporting pillars. So those three are environmental leadership. We want to make sure we really are leading our market in terms of environmental credentials, which is an increasingly important area for our customers. Our people focus to generally is all about top people, top service. And that applies to all areas of our operations. And then operational excellence actually reflects some of the investments that we want to make, which will be proven to be key enablers of strategy over time.
The other thing I would say on this slide then is we've got the five trading brands across the bottom of the page. Investors may or may not be familiar with these to varying extents. But very quickly, Topps Tiles is, I think, will be familiar to most certainly U.K.-based investors. That remains the bulk of our sales. Something like 85% of our sales go through Topps Tiles. That's very much our consumer-focused and trade, but our sort of store-based omnichannel retail business. Parkside is in our business that focuses on the architect and design community. It's very much about direct selling into larger commercial-type projects, corporate clients, those kind of areas, very much B2B. The Pro Tiler business is an online-only essentials business. So they sell everything you need to do a tiling job with the exception of the tiles themselves.
Very much focused at a professional installer, covering both a wide range of customers and applications. Tile Warehouse is the newest part of the business, which we started a couple of years ago. It's very much home-owner-focused and designed to cater for a slightly more value-oriented customer, online-only. And then CTD Tiles is the newest part of the group that we acquired, as we mentioned earlier, back in August. And we'll talk to that a little bit more this week as we go through the slides. In terms of those sources of incremental growth, I talked about, touched on these at the start, and we covered them at the interim presentation. There are five key areas of growth that we've highlighted where we think we can really see meaningful change and meaningful as we work towards our delivery of Mission 365.
We haven't changed any of these at all since the update we gave to investors six months ago. But I thought it was quite helpful just to reorientate investors around how these fit into that refresh strategy I shared on the previous slide. So category expansion, I think, is really clearly all about hard surfaces, or as we're starting to call it internally, more of the house. Tile Warehouse is then part of our first-floor consumer focus along with Topps Tiles, obviously. And then the other areas of focus are actually all about trade in different forms. So we've been really, really clear we want to be first for trade in all of our markets across the U.K. And each of those things, Pro Tiler, the trade and digital experience, and B2B growth, we think will be really key areas of focus to help get us there.
So on this slide then, we talk about the road to 365. Again, this is almost the same chart that we shared with investors at the half year. And of those five key areas of growth, we've tried to lay out as best we can, with a range against each of the numbers, what we think that journey to Mission 365 will look like. I suppose a couple of points to underpin here. One is we've included a block of growth for the market. Our assumptions around market growth are very modest. So this is not a market recovery goal. This is a self-help goal, as Stephen mentioned earlier. Any growth we assume the market will probably grow on a normalized basis, somewhere in the region of 2% per year. If there's any acceleration of that, that will be helpful in getting us to our goal faster.
The addition of CTD then, which we've added into the left-hand side here, which, again, are the things we covered earlier, we believe is a GBP 30-40 million sales opportunity. The way we're seeing that currently is that should be a significant accelerator of our journey to Mission 365. I do think that will have some interrelationship into our B2B area of focus. A lot of CTD business is around B2B, and that's an area we need to consider more fully. At the moment, our focus on CTD is supporting, as I said, the CMA, the Competition and Markets Authority, with their review, and in the meantime, we'll continue with our focus in terms of strategic areas of growth, so in terms of the blocks on the page, just sort of quickly to give people a bit more orientation.
Topps Tiles, therefore, will be a major part of us delivering our goal of Mission 365. This actually remains one of the areas the business is most excited about, despite our existing scale in this space. And I think trade and digital experience and growth through new categories almost all the way will come through the Topps Tiles business. It's very important to us. We've got really strong ambitions, as I mentioned, in the commercial trade space, so B2B. That will be across Topps Tiles, Parkside, and Pro Tiler, and now also CTD as we move forward. And then the Pro Tiler business, we've already touched on at the start. We are very confident that it can be at least a uncertain turnover business. We've already grown very, very rapidly. We bought the business two and a half years ago. It was doing about GBP 12 million sales at the time.
It's now annualizing very close to £30 million. We're really confident that's a £50 million business, and that will give us another, therefore, at least £20 million of growth from where we are, and then the Tile Warehouse business. Again, we're relatively small, but probably now doing something in the region of £2.5 million a year run rate. We think that's a £10 to £15 million opportunity from where we are today as well, so I'll turn then first to the tiles and what that really means and where we focus on here, so tiles, of course, are our heartland. It's really important to the group. A lot of that doesn't change. It absolutely is our key area of strength and competitive advantage. We are the leading specialists. We source from all over the world.
The vast majority of what we sell is either exclusive or own brand, exclusive in some way or own brand to the group. We work very hard to ensure that we continue to have the best, the newest, and the most innovative tile offer in the market. Much of our focus here in our Pro Tiler is about actually ensuring that we continue to strengthen that competitive advantage in all of our markets because that does support the majority of our sales today. We're focusing harder on, in the year ahead, we're focusing harder on range hierarchy and particularly in making it easier for both customers and colleagues actually to navigate the range. We often find we have a number of products that might look quite similar, but actually they're a bit different price points.
We don't necessarily feel we always do a good enough job explaining our range to our customers. So I think reality is sort of a simple kind of Good, Better, Best hierarchy. That already exists in the business. But actually making much more, giving much more focus to sort of features and benefits, particularly in how we explain those to customers, we think it'd be a really good step on for the business. And we also know that essential brands can be really important, including our own brands, particularly more for our trade customer base. And as a group, actually, we're in the best position we've been in for a long, long time. And we'll continue to focus really to develop really clear range hierarchies in our essential range of products as well. So then our next two being famous for hard surfaces.
So as I mentioned, we introduced a greater focus on hard surfaces at the interims. It's an important step for the group. It allows us to materially expand our retail market, as I've explained. But ultimately, it's about us getting a greater share of hard surface coverings across the home. We've made really good progress over the second half of the year. We feel. I'll actually cover that on the next slide. We've updated a lot of our website content already. We have a number of changes planned to improve the user experience. They're all coming in 2025 for people that are shopping with us digitally. We plan to market the website much harder as well. We have particularly allocated specific spend to some of these new areas of products, these new categories.
And we'll invest somewhere in the region of an additional uncertain on digital category expansion marketing for the year ahead. So obviously, the expanded addressable market, and you can see here illustrated, large areas of the home now are increasingly utilizing hard surface coverings. We see that as a really key opportunity for the business. So progress we've made. Outdoor and LVT luxury vinyl tile has actually been in the business for a little while now. They now represent somewhere in the region of GBP 10 million of sales already to date, on a round basis, obviously. So XXL, the sort of super large tiles, these are tiles that can be 1.2 meters square, 2.4 meters long in some cases. And shower panels, they're actually already in stores. They are being rolled out as we talk.
Wood and laminate, we now have an offer which has been trialed in 42 stores across the U.K. and subject to performance. We plan to roll the laminate offer out in 2025 as well, and we're doing more in terms of the online part of our offer as well. It's a really effective low-risk way for us to launch new categories. Things like acoustic panels, which are a new trend in the market, and splashbacks are now available online. We plan to bring displays and ranges of those into stores as we get through the course of the year as well. First, the consumer, well, consumer, I've mentioned, is really all about Tile Warehouse. Of course, Topps Tiles Tile Warehouse, still quite new to us, have seen good progress. I touched on it on the first slide. Sales have roughly trebled here.
Run rates have roughly trebled. We've been seeing regularly about GBP 50,000 a week of sales go through Tile Warehouse. We remain really confident that can be a scale part of our operation over time. Our ambition of GBP 12-GBP 15 million with sales is part of our Mission 365 goal. Topps Tiles remains the leading specialist brand in the U.K. Market research very much supports that. Unprompted awareness for Topps Tiles, if you ask the typical person on the street, where might you think about going to buy your tiles? Topps Tiles actually achieves 33% of unprompted awareness as a place to go to buy tile. The only other business that customers will prompt more than that is actually B&Q themselves. B&Q, obviously, the market leader for all things DIY and home improvement in the U.K.
So we think that's a very, very credible score for the Topps Tiles business. We actually represent around 25% of all tile-related search traffic online. And pretty amazingly, I think the words Topps Tiles are actually more searched for than customers than the word Tiles itself, the word tile itself. So yeah, very strong brand under Topps Tiles. And we want to make sure we continue to nurture and grow that brand. So we see lots of exciting opportunities here. We want to make sure we continue to ensure we have world-class levels of customer service. We achieved 92% overall satisfaction in the year just gone. That's brilliant. We want to make sure we keep delivering for our customers.
We've launched a new service brochure actually in stores, which provides a template really for customers and colleagues both to enjoy sort of really high-quality engagement when the customer is in the store, and it crucially gives them something to take with them as well. We talk about the kind of project they're involved in, the tiles they've looked at in store, the colleague that helped them on the day, and it gives them an opportunity to follow up with lots of clear detail. We're also working on bringing technology into the sale. We plan to start bringing tablets into stores, which will allow colleagues to do more, particularly things like features and benefits I mentioned earlier. It will make that process much simpler for colleagues as well and provide customers with a richer experience, and then range hierarchy I touched on earlier.
Again, features and benefits of products when they're selling is an important part of where we focus moving forward, and we also plan to invest further in digital marketing in the year ahead. We still think it's an opportunity to market the business harder, particularly for customers doing initial periods of research online, which is inevitably where most of our customers start their journey, so in terms of RMI trade, trade for us initially splits down into two areas. We can talk about domestic trade and then commercial trade. Domestic trade is really about jobs going on in people's homes, as they tend to be smaller, maybe a little bit less complex. Commercial trade can be more complex projects. They tend to be larger. They may involve contractors.
They may also be linked to the A&D architect and design sector or customers such as national house builders, those kind of areas. Topps Tiles as a brand is mainly more focused on domestic trade. We do have some crossover into commercial as well. Particularly smaller localized commercial projects will often end up in a local Topps Tiles store. I'll cover that on the next slide, but we've seen some really strong results coming through the Topps Tiles trade channel this year. Pro Tiler, as I said, a couple of slides ago, very much trade focused. They will cover domestic and commercial sectors in Pro Tiler very regularly, and the business has delivered the exceptional growth as we've gone through. I'll touch on the new warehouse in a couple of slides time, and then commercial trade, we see absolutely remains as a key opportunity.
Parkside is now a profitable part of our operation. We restructured our business in 2023 so that business is now running at a small, but importantly, a positive contribution to the group and the acquisition of CTD Tiles may well change our approach, but as I've said, that remains subject to us supporting the CMA with their inquiries so in terms of the Topps Tiles trade and digital experience, trade's been a really key area of growth for the business, particularly in Topps Tiles, and we've indicated there was more to do in the digital space, and pleased to say we've made some really good progress, particularly over the last final quarter of the year. We've actually relaunched the trade website, and at the half year of the interim, as we've talked about, there were sort of various points of friction in the journey for the trade customer.
We thought we could do a better job of them. And pleased to say we really have stepped up here. So things like trade pricing are now available instantly. You come onto the trade website. You don't need to be registered as you did before. To be able to see those prices. And you, as a trader, you can now register and set up an account online in a matter of minutes. Previously, you had to start your registration online and come into store to sort of be validated by the local teams. You can now do all of that in a sort of self-serve fashion online. And we've seen some really, really impressive results coming through, actually. Some from quite a low base, but registrations online are running at double what they were. That's really encouraging. Traffic is actually up about fourfold online.
Trade spend is up about 60% now from a low base, as we said. The group, the Topps Tiles business as a whole, trade sales are up quite significantly in the current trading period, which is very encouraging. In 2025, in the year ahead, we plan to launch our new customer engagement platform, a modern-day version of a direct marketing system. That will really take us forward and really enhance our direct marketing capabilities and allow us to really engage with those, particularly the trade customers who are obviously repeat purchasing from us all the time. We plan to relaunch our trade loyalty scheme as well. We will increase our marketing spend. Historically, trade marketing has been very, very modest. That will be a mix of things.
It will be more digital spend, but it'll also be more traditional mechanics such as radio campaigns, these kind of things. And we plan to launch an app which will actually bring the whole of our trade offer together. That will be later on in 2025. But that's the point where effectively we hope to put Topps Tiles on every trader's mobile device, which will give us opportunities to engage with them wherever and whenever we need to do so. Updates on loyalty points, latest promotional offers, those sorts of things provide a real sort of immediate voice for customers. CTD Tiles we've already touched on a couple of times. So I think probably just useful for investors to understand what we've acquired and why. So CTD Tiles was acquired back in August 2024. We bought the business out of the administration. In essence, we've acquired three things here, actually.
We see them as fairly distinct, really. There were around 30 stores. CTD Tiles was 86 stores in total. A number of stores went to a couple of other players in the market. Some stores remained closed, but we took the 30 best stores, 30 best performing stores that we considered we had the best chance of making some profit from. They accounted for, in the year to June 2024, about GBP 20 million worth of sales. We also then acquired the CTD Architectural Tiles, which is an A&D architect and designer-focused operation, quite similar to Parkside in its nature, actually. We should think of it in those terms, and then CTD Housebuilders, which at the time accounted for about GBP 16 million in sales, actually is serving national housebuilders, and that's a part of the market that Topps Group weren't involved in at all.
That's all new to us. Quite an exciting opportunity for the business. We do see the brand positioning as complementary to our other operations. CTD is slightly more trade-focused than Topps. And in particular, those commercial elements, both A&D and housebuilder, we are on a very small lot on many of those markets at all. That is genuinely incremental growth for us. We do see this as a GBP 30-GBP 40 million opportunity. Nothing has changed our minds on that so far. But as I mentioned a couple of times, our immediate focus is on supporting the CMA. And then we will start to focus on how we build that business back and make sure we get that business back into profitability.
So, moving next on to now, I've talked about, once we go past the sort of four areas of the strategy, which are really all about growing growth, we've then got three supporting pillars. The first of those three supporting pillars then is operational excellence. Two key areas we're really focusing on and keen to update investors on today. So we have now, or we've now signed the lease and are currently fitting out a new distribution center in Northampton, 140,000 sq ft. That will be our single biggest facility we have across the group, which is very exciting. Currently, about half that space will be allocated to the Pro Tiler business, who have literally outgrown their existing facilities in Northampton. So that's a really exciting step on Pro Tiler. The Pro Tiler section, that will be operational by January 2025. So we're currently fitting out.
We've gone pretty busy down there in Northampton. That will be online by the start of the new calendar year. That will also be a key enabler of the next stage of both Pro Tiler's growth and also the growth of the group, because it gives us some additional capacity. We're very focused on our systems as well, our internal systems. We indicated that the half year that we were planning for an investment in a systems upgrade, that's now been approved. We're starting that work very, very soon. Business will migrate to, it's currently on a Microsoft Dynamics platform. It will migrate to, in essence, the newest version of that, which is now called Business Central 365. Project, as I said, will start in January. We expect to complete this project somewhere around quarter three FY26.
So these are big things to do, take a chunk of time, and that will cost us, we estimate, somewhere in the region of GBP 1.2 million, and then our people focus obviously remains absolutely key to the business. I've already talked about world-class levels of customer service. We absolutely have to have great people. We have to have the best people in the market to deliver our customers that world-class service, and we're very focused on this and have been for a long period of time. I'm delighted to say, again, we achieved that in 2024. We have overall satisfaction ratings of 92% for our customers, and we're also getting much more focus on Google reviews as well, so I'm really pleased to say we've now achieved 30,000 five-star Google reviews during the course of 2024.
That will be a big area of focus for us as we go into 2025. It's absolutely key for customers that they can get that reassurance. Most people will go to Google now for initial search and recommendation. That provides a really useful confidence build to customers. They know they'll get a great experience when they come to us. Colleague turnover has fallen again. I'm really pleased to say, down to 26.3% in the year. Particularly, manager turnover is significantly lower than that as well. That's also a really key area of focus for us. We have small teams in stores. The manager provides a key sort of pivotal role in terms of onboarding, recruiting, onboarding, training new starters, so we need managers to be very stable. We'll achieve that this year. We've launched our diversity, equity, and inclusion program this year, called OneTopps.
We're starting, as most people, I think, have done, most employers with listening groups. We're really trying to work and listen very carefully to what colleagues want to tell us about the business and how we make Topps an even greater player, an even greater place to work, and a very inclusive employer as well. Charity is a really important part of what we do. Colleagues and customers both love our charity campaigns. We're currently partnering with the Alzheimer's Society, great charity, really good cause. We have a target to raise GBP 1 million for Alzheimer's across five years. I'm really pleased to say we've reached our halfway marker this year. So we're absolutely on track for GBP 1 million. GBP 500,000 already delivered. Environmental leadership is really focused on two things. It's focused on carbon reductions, and it's focused on circularity.
So in terms of carbon reduction, we've had a pretty clear goal here for a couple of years now, actually, which is across Scope 1 and Scope 2, we want to be carbon neutral by 2030. That is earlier than most other companies have committed to. We've got really clear targets. We've got really clear programs in place. Our focus, we know we're the 5,000. So we currently emit about 5,000 tons of carbon as a business. We know what that's as a result of. And it's pretty evenly split between two things. So it's fuel for our commercial delivery vehicles, our lorries. And then it's also energy used to heat our stores. But everything else is really very, very small in the two big areas of focus. And we're well on our way to achieving that by 2030. Scope 3, we've actually measured. So hopefully, viewers will understand.
Scope 3 is, in essence, everything that happens sort of upstream and downstream of our supply chain. So things we're not directly accountable for. But we do need to be very, very mindful of these and focused on them. So Scope 3 we've measured for the first time. We expected it to be significantly higher than Scope 1 and 2, our own sort of direct emissions. It's actually in the region of 177,000 tons, about 35 times. So we're starting to focus on how we reduce those over time and working with our partners, manufacturers, etc., on what that would look like. And circularity is a big part of our agenda as well. So we've had a couple of areas of focus this year. We've been reducing waste, both across pallets and tiles. Made really good progress there. And we've also had some really good innovation initiatives as well.
So tiles with high levels of recycled content and some of our adhesive product, where we've taken sand out and replaced it with alternative sand equivalents, which are environmentally sustainable. And then Mission 365, the attractive financial outcomes. We had this slide in the half year presentation. We thought it was useful to have back in for investors just to remind ourselves what Mission 365 can look like. So GBP 365 million in sales. Obviously, we believe we can generate sustainable gross margins of 51%-52% across the business. And we are very confident we can deliver at least 8% net margins in, as I said, every part of our business. That will take us to GBP 13 million of adjusted pre-tax profit. And we also expect that will fall through to substantial improvements in working capital over time. And then the final slide, just to summarize, bring it all together.
So, Mission 365, we think it's a really exciting new goal for the business. We've got really clear ambitions about how we want to get there. We've laid out that journey for investors as best we can. We have significantly expanded our addressable market to allow us to do that. And we see the business now being very much focused on hard wall and floor surface coverings. So we've refreshed our strategy to help us achieve that as well as we've got on this page. And we've got five really specific areas of focus where we're confident we can deliver meaningful progress to help us achieve that goal. So that concludes the formal part of the presentation. Thank you. I'll hand back to Jake for a second.
Perfect. Rob, Stephen, if I may just jump back in there. And thank you very much indeed for your presentation this morning.
Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab that's situated on the right-hand corner of your screen, but just while the team take a few moments to review those questions that were submitted already, I'd just like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can all be accessed via your investor dashboard. Rob, Stephen, as you can see there, we have received a number of questions throughout your presentation this morning, and thank you to all of those on the call for taking the time to submit their questions, but guys, at this point, if I may just hand back to you just to read out those questions and give your responses where it's appropriate to do so.
If I pick up from you at the end, that would be great. Thank you.
Yeah, thank you very much, Jake. That's great. And thanks for the questions from our viewers. One of those, I'll read them out now. But I think in most cases, they're probably focused on Rob's answers as well. I'll ask him to pick them up in response. So Rob, the first question is from Alan. So thank you, Alan, for the question. And Alan's question is that he understands that we have around about 22% of the tile market in the U.K. So that's sort of our market share. And Alan wonders who are the other main players in that space.
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, thanks, Alan. Good question. So the market for competition in the U.K. is pretty wide and diverse.
So if we think about the sort of domestic market firstly, all of the sort of DIY sheds , the usual runners and riders , B&Q, Wickes, etc., we have a good range of products for customers and all the accessory products as well. Merchants, people like Selco, will do a good job of selling tiles. You know, have a good range of tiles as well. Then you've got, I guess, the specialist chains after that. So a number of still specialist chains across the U.K. People like Al-Murad, people like Tile Giant, and some regional players in there. You've got online-only specialists as well. So a number of people now got sort of decent-sized businesses, actually. People like Walls and Floors, people like Tile Mountain, people like Porcelain Superstore. You've got some other higher-end chains.
People like Mandarin Stone, a number of centres around the U.K. and a sort of strong web presence. You mentioned the bathroom retailers as well. Most bathroom retailers will also sell a range of tiles. Easy Bathrooms is now a sort of big player in the U.K., over 130 stores. I think Victorian Plumbing, online-only, is also now getting into the tile market. Yeah, there's a really healthy market for tile competition. That's the sort of domestic market. In the commercial market, that tends to be competing on a national basis. There's a lot of direct selling teams in and out of architects and designers and sort of contractors' offices. There are a few sort of larger-scale players in that market as well. People like Domus, people like Solus Ceramics, etc. Yeah, lots of competition across the U.K.
Thank you, Rob.
Next question is about CTD, and it says that a large number of CTD stores have closed, those which you didn't take on. Have we seen any evidence of us picking up sales in the markets where we traded against CTD previously, but they're now closed?
Yeah, yeah. Okay, thank you. So yes, there's some evidence of that. But I guess I'd also refer back to our previous question, which is lots of competition across the UK. I mean, firstly, just to recap, there were 86 CTD tile stores trading. We took 30. We took the 30 that had the best chance of profitability and therefore the 30 that likely to have been the highest turnover stores. Other competitors have taken somewhere, I think 23 were taken by other players. So that sort of gets shot to about 53, something like that.
Leaves in the end, therefore, about 30 probably that are genuinely closed. Yeah, we will have seen some benefit, as others will have done in each of those localities as well.
Thank you. Next one is about trade and digital [uncertain] , which, of course, we covered on that slide of the presentation. But you referenced the relaunch of the trade website and enhancement to the digital experience as key growth drivers. What measurable impact have those initiatives had so far? And then what additional features are planned to further enhance customer engagement? Which I know you covered a bit on that specific slide on trade at Europe.
Yeah, I think we probably have covered quite a lot of that. I mean, ultimately, trade remains an omnichannel part of the offer as well as what I would say. So having more traders come online is great.
Ultimately, we see a lot of those people coming to stores as well. It's very difficult to say exactly how much has been delivered in any part of the business because it's an omnichannel model. In terms of other things we're focused on, I'd refer you back to slide 24 in the presentation, I think, where we sort of went through the areas of focus.
Thank you, Rob. I think the next one is for me. This is from someone called Rob. Thanks for the question. The question is, despite weaker trading, the dividend policy remains intact. Can you clarify the rationale for maintaining dividends at this level given the cash outflow and investment requirements?
A few things within that statement and question to unpack. First of all, clearly, the dividend did actually drop.
We paid 3.6p in FY24 and reduced it to 2.4p. I suppose, how do we think about that? First of all, in the cash flow slide, I was quite keen to point out that the cash generation business does actually remain strong. Actually, we grew our net cash over the course of the year, apart from the fact we did these two acquisitions. The business remains very cash generative. I think it's a real strength of the group, actually. I think from our perspective, we regard 2024 as a very tough year where profits have come down a lot. We are very confident about the future ability of the business to grow both profits and cash, actually, which is hence the whole sort of focus of the Mission 365 goals.
So we were keen to signal to investors our confidence by pushing our dividends to the top of the policy. We think it's affordable. We think the company's balance sheet can sustain it. And as a reminder, we do still have cash on the balance sheet. A lot of companies have debt. We have cash on the balance sheet of about GBP 9.4, GBP 9 million at the end of the year. So that was the sort of rationale, a really clear signal of the business confidence, but also recognition that trading has been a bit weaker, which is why the absolute value came down this year. So I think that answers your question, Rob. And that actually is it for questions at the moment. So Jake, I'll hand back to you for a second.
Absolutely, Rob, Stephen, that's great.
And thank you very much indeed for addressing all of those questions that came in from investors this morning. And of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended, just for you to review, to then add any additional responses, of course, where it's appropriate to do so. But Rob, perhaps before really just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company, if I could please just ask you for a few closing comments to wrap up with, that would be great.
Yeah, great. Yeah, thanks, Jake. And thank you to Stephen for supporting the presentation today. Thank you for joining us. Thank you to all of our viewers and hopefully investors. I hope you found the update useful.
And I hope investors are excited about Mission 365 as well. Thank you.
Perfect, Rob. That's great. And thank you once again for updating investors this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order the management team can really better understand your views and expectations? This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team with Topps Tiles PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session.