Good afternoon and welcome to the Topps Tiles plc half-year results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged, and they can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses when it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll, and I would now like to hand you over to CEO Rob Parker. Good afternoon to you.
Great, thank you. Yeah, I'll try again. Yeah, hello everyone. A really warm welcome to the Topps Group half-year investor presentation. I'm Rob Parker, Chief Executive for the business, and joining me today is Stephen Hopson, our CFO for the business. Thank you very much for joining us. If we turn straight into slide four of the presentation with the half-year summary and highlights from myself. The strategic highlight summary is we've got a really clear strategic goal for the business. We call that Mission 365. That's about generating GBP 365 million worth of sales across a single financial year. We actually established and launched that goal about a year ago now in the business, and that also carries with it a really clear profit underpin of between 8% and 10%.
We believe every part of our trading operations over time can generate at least an 8% net margin. As part of that new goal and refreshed strategy, we've identified five really clear areas of strategic growth opportunity. Every single one of them, we believe we can really meaningfully grow the business over time. I'm pleased to say we have made, we feel, really good progress over the first half of the year with each of those areas, and I'll talk later on in the presentation to some of the detail behind each of those five areas of growth. The CTD business, we acquired that operation last August, so just about nine months ago now. Part of our strategy for growth is all around business-to-business, B2B, and the CTD acquisition was a really key part of that strategy.
The CMA process we've been involved in, well documented in the market, has slowed us down in terms of integrating the business, but we're now largely through that process at this stage, which is good, and we can start to put our plans in place in all but four locations. The CMA did not identify any concerns around competition, and I'll talk to the four locations as we go through by throwing the slide deck. We are a group with operations spanning five different trading brands. All of those have their core focus on the tile market in the U.K. That includes omnichannel operations, digital pure play, and also direct selling operations across the group. Post the CTD acquisition, actually, our group sales are now 75% trade-weighted.
We're really much more of a merchant, and actually, we are a retailer, and each part of the business, I'm pleased to say, is also delivering good growth. The final number actually on this page is group online penetration. Group online sales are actually now 20% of our overall sales mix, and that number's growing as well. About 1% every six months, our group online sales percentage is moving forward. Over on the right-hand side, the financial headlines, Stephen will pick this up in much more detail, but group sales, delighted to say, back in growth over the first half with an improving trend as well. Q2 was a bit stronger than Quarter One, which is great, but overall sales grew across the group by about 4% over the first half of the year. First half profits also slightly improved year on year.
We generated an underlying pre-tax profit of about GBP 3.2 million. That's up about 3% from where it was this time a year ago. The EPS growth, actually stronger still. Stephen can talk to the detail, but it improved because of full ownership of the ProTiler Tools business. Current trading over the first seven weeks of the second half of the year, the last seven weeks, we've just traded stronger again, actually. Nine and a half, 9.5% growth across the group, which is 6.2% on a like-for-like basis in the Topps Tiles part of the business, which obviously remains our biggest single trading operation. We are confident. We're confident in delivering a meaningful increase in profits for the year and see further growth of the business over the second half.
I'll hand you over to Stephen, who's going to go through some of the financial highlights.
Thank you, Rob. I'm sorry to say we're having some slight network issues, so we're just going to go to a sort of audio-only section for the balance of the presentation, but hopefully everyone can hear me perfectly well. Yes, in terms of the financials, the half has seen the group move back into both sales and earnings growth, actually, with a strengthening trend over the period and then into the first weeks of the second half, as Rob just mentioned. Just before we get into the numbers, just to orientate investors, I wanted to note that the practical impact of the CMA process that Rob just described is that the CTD business has remained outside of the control of the group's management, actually, until April.
Although CTD's results are, of course, consolidated into our statutory group numbers, we've treated the whole of the CTD business as an adjusting item in the period end and will continue to do so until the year end. As we go through, I will help to bridge the differences between adjusted and statutory numbers, and also there's an appendix which investors can see, which clearly lays it all out at the end of the presentation. If we start by looking at revenue, total revenue for the group stepped forward by 16.4% from GBP 122.8 million last year to GBP 142.9 million in the first half of FY2025, including a contribution of GBP 15.1 million from CTD, with sales in that business currently therefore running at about GBP 30 million annually.
As I just mentioned, we have excluded CTD from our adjusted measures, so our adjusted sales were GBP 127.8 million, showing good growth year on year of 4.1%. Within that, there was an improving trend and good momentum going into the second half. The timing of the different holiday periods makes the numbers slightly difficult to read by quarter, but our best reading is that our underlying sales growth was 3.3% in the first quarter, 4.4% in the second quarter, and then including a good March. As I will come on to, 9.5% growth excluding CTD in the first seven weeks of the second half. Looking by brand then, starting at the left-hand side of the page, Topps Tiles moved back into growth at the start of the year, and especially for an operationally geared business like Topps, this is obviously very important.
Total sales in Topps Tiles grew by 2.2% with a 3% like-for-like growth and slightly fewer stores trading year on year. A key feature of the first half has been a rapid increase in trade mix within the Topps Tiles brand as a result of the work that we're doing in that space and changes in the market. We are positive about this change because a higher trade mix means we sacrifice some gross margin, but we sacrifice that for repeat custom and higher lifetime value. Looking at the other businesses, Parkside was slightly down in sales but still delivered a small profit in the first half.
Our online pure play business, which includes both ProTiler Tools and Tile Warehouse, was once again very strong, with both of those businesses growing strongly and contributing to a 21.7% increase in sales to GBP 16.8 million in the first half. If I turn now to gross margin on the next slide, this chart follows the same format as my previous presentations, with statutory numbers at either end of the chart, and then in the middle, the dark blue bar represents the half-year 2025 adjusted results. Excluding CTD, adjusted gross margins of 53.4% were 50 basis points lower year on year, which was all related to business mix changes, specifically the continued growth in online pure play. Actually, our adjusted gross margin stepped forward 70 basis points when compared to the second half of fiscal year 2024, which was good to see.
Looking at the Topps Tiles part of the business, which is sort of represented by the area surrounded by the dotted box, gross margin was actually broadly flat to last year, with some gains from price and cost changes, a 90 basis point hit from the higher trade mix that I just talked to, and an 80 basis point benefit year on year from other factors, including lower stock losses and some FX gains year on year, which is based on our forward currency contracts that we have in place. On the online pure play section, which shows a 60 basis point dilution in gross margins, I kind of make this point in every presentation, but it is definitely worth making.
ProTiler structurally makes a much lower gross margin than the rest of the group, and so its continued sales growth dilutes the group gross margin percentage over time, but actually, it makes a higher PBT margin than the group overall. Its growth is actually incremental from a bottom-line perspective, not just in absolute pounds terms, but also in terms of increasing the PBT % margin. That takes you to the adjusted gross margin, and then moving on to CTD and the impact of that on our statutory gross margin. We now understand that the gross margin in H1 in CTD has been poor at just 39% at a total level and actually only 35% after stripping out GBP 0.8 million of one-off gains from selling through stock acquired under retention of title clauses following the acquisition of the business.
That underlying 35% gross margin is only slightly higher than ProTiler's gross margin, which clearly does not have any of the overhead costs of running stores. We need to improve it, and we will act quickly in the next few weeks to resolve that and move the margin up to a more sustainable level. The statutory impact of the CTD business on the group gross margin in the first half was one and a half percentage points dilution, which takes the stat number to 51.9%.
If I now move on to operating expenses and other income, on this slide, I've shown the adjusted numbers on the chart, on the sort of bar chart on the left-hand side of the slide, and then on the right-hand side, I've presented a bridge that takes you between the adjusted number and the statutory operating costs, which again, you'll see on the face of the P&L. The reason for this presentation is there's a bit more going on in the world of costs than just CTD between these two numbers, and I wanted to give investors more clarity around what these are. If I start with adjusted operating costs on the left-hand side, overall, there was a 1.6% or GBP 1 million increase year on year from GBP 61 million last year to GBP 62 million in the first half of this year.
Within that movement, we saw cost inflation of GBP 2 million, which is about 3% of cost inflation, the bulk of which related to wage inflation, and that is both the impact of last year's national living wage increase of 9.8% and also our own wage rises from October 2024 for colleagues, which are not paid the living wage. Clearly, there is more pressure to come on wages for April 2025, which I will come back to in a second. Performance-related pay is an important part of our employer proposition, and this increased GBP 0.6 million in the first half. That largely relates to the Topps Tiles store bonuses and also ProTiler, which is now included in group bonus schemes, which it was not last year. We expect this to continue growing in the second half, assuming our profit momentum continues.
Marketing and systems then refers to active investment in the business that we've made, including increased digital marketing spend and investment in our new digital, in our new marketing platform, together with some initial costs relating to core systems replacement. Finally, as per recent years, we've continued to invest behind both ProTiler Tools and Tile Warehouse in the online pure play part of the group. In particular, there was more investment in digital marketing and payroll costs within ProTiler, and over Christmas, ProTiler moved into their new home in Northampton, which would increase their property costs but greatly expand their potential to grow the business. Largely offsetting these cost increases, we then saw GBP 3 million of cost savings, including some savings in stores, slightly fewer stores year on year, lower provisions, and then some central savings.
On the right-hand side, the statutory cost number is significantly higher at GBP 68.9 million, with the main difference being the inclusion of the ongoing cost base of CTD in the group, as well as one-off items and CMA advisory costs incurred in the first half. If I bring all that together in the overall adjusted P&L on this slide, you can see the overall results of the group in the first half. Sales at a group level on an adjusted basis were up 4.1%, as I've mentioned. Gross margins were down half a point against last year, but as I just said, up against the second half of last year. Costs grew by GBP 1 million, which is at a lower rate than sales or GP, despite the inflation mentioned on the previous slide. Interest costs of GBP 3 million compared to GBP 2.1 million last year.
As is the way now, that interest is a combination of bank interest and also interest relating to leases, so IFRS 16 interest, and the increase in interest costs were a factor of both of those elements. Our cash interest, our cash banking interest was higher as our balances were lower in the first half, and also IFRS 16 charges increased as interest rates rose. Therefore, profit before tax rose slightly from GBP 3.1 million to GBP 3.2 million. The effective tax rate was slightly higher than the headline rate of corporation tax, but even despite this, our earnings per share grew 8.7% to GBP 1.12. The reason the earnings per share grew by more than profit before tax is that last year, ProTiler Tools was only 60% owned in the group, and therefore there was a non-controlling interest in this business, which had the effect of depressing the EPS number.
Now that the group fully owns ProTiler, all profits accrue to the owners of Topps Tiles, which of course drives EPS and is an enabler of future dividends. If I now turn to the group's balance sheet and its cash position on this slide, this shows a bridge of our adjusted cash from the start of the period, so the year end of FY 2024 until the end of the period at our half-year point. Over that period of time, the group's cash balance dropped from net cash at the start of the period of GBP 8.7 million to net debt of GBP 1.2 million at the end of the period. That was largely due to a working capital outflow, as you see on the chart, higher CapEx than usual, and of course, the inclusion of CTD.
I will just pick out a few of the larger bars on the chart. Operational cash generation, which includes leases but excludes CTD, as well as excluding working capital movements, was GBP 4.2 million in the period. That was GBP 1.7 million lower than the same period last year, impacted by non-operational warehouse costs and provision movements. The non-operational warehouse costs refer to the warehouse that I mentioned a minute ago with ProTiler moving into the new warehouse. This is the period of time before ProTiler moved in, but after we signed the lease. Working capital movements were a GBP 4.5 million outflow in the first half, again, excluding CTD, which is shown in a separate bar. The outflow last year was GBP 1.7 million, so this year the outflow was GBP 2.8 million higher.
That was driven by higher debtors, including a larger move into trade credit, which Rob will come back to in a second. Also, lower payables due to lower accruals and some small timing differences year on year relating to the date of a few rent payments, which came just before the half-year this year and were just after the half-year last year. CTD cash flows, including the CMA advisory costs, but excluding CapEx, was a GBP 2.3 million outflow, which included significant increases in stock, trade debtors, and trade creditors as the business has been reestablished since the year end. CapEx in the first half was GBP 4 million, and that included the cost of setting up the new distribution centre for ProTiler Tools and CTD, which actually accounted for GBP 2.5 million of that GBP 4 million.
On dividends, obviously from a cash flow statement, the bar here represents the payment of last year's final dividend, which is made in the first half. If we look forward, as part of these interim results, we have declared a GBP 0.8 interim dividend, and that is in line with our dividend policy, where the interim dividend is set at one-third of the prior year full-year dividend. We paid GBP 2.4 in total last year, which implies that the interim dividend will be GBP 0.8 this time around. We have also stated very clearly on the slides and in our R&S that our expectation for the full year for this year will be to pay a dividend that is at least consistent with last year's level, so at least GBP 2.4 for the full year.
My final slide before moving on to Rob, I'm just going to spend a second or two looking forward and actually just starting with current trading. Rob's mentioned this already, but the momentum that we've seen build over the first half has definitely continued into the start of the second half. In the first seven weeks, which takes us right up to last week, group sales at a total level, but excluding CTD still, were up 9.5%, which is a good step forward compared to the first half rates. That includes all of Easter being in this period this year, which actually would be slightly detrimental to our numbers. Even so, we still deliver 9.5% sales growth.
The acceleration in sales has been pretty much across the board, actually, with Topps Tiles like-for-likes also stepping forward to 6.2% in the last seven weeks and other businesses accelerating too. The next section covers a bit of more technical guidance about some phasing of costs. I suppose one I would pick out is that we do expect gross margins to trend higher again in the second half, which is good. I suppose just some comments to wrap up on the macro. We do see the macro becoming a bit more favorable, actually, and some other people in the wider sector have recently reported better current trading too, which I think bodes well for the market.
For us, I think as well as that, we also start to see the success of some of our own initiatives coming through, and we have a lot further to go on those, which Rob will touch on in a second. As a result of all these things, we do expect to deliver good growth in both sales and profits this year. With that, I will hand back over to Rob.
Thank you very much, Stephen. Yeah, turning to the road to 365 firstly. I said I'd come back to the five key areas of growth. More important than that is this is how our sort of journey to our goal of GBP 365 million of sales we think looks. Firstly, the important thing is, as I said, there are five distinct areas.
The market improvements we think only need to be very, very modest indeed. So, we assumed when we set this maybe 1-2% growth in the market, we're not reliant on a market sort of rebound or recovery or high levels of growth to deliver our goal. A year on from when we started, CTD Tiles is obviously now part of this schematic. We've included that as part of our B2B plans. CTD Tiles actually delivers GBP 30 million of sales from today. So, we do think that will accelerate the delivery of mission 365 and create a really strong growth opportunity in itself from here. But 12 months on from launch, actually, FY 2025, the full year this year, including CTD Tiles, we think the business will now be somewhere between GBP 290-300 million of the sales. That will be a new all-time record of turnover for the group.
Even excluding CTD, we think we'd be broadly in line with the highest ever year we previously achieved, which was FY2023. The five areas I'll come on to cover, but very, very top line on this slide, category expansion is all about selling new adjacent hard wall and floor surface coverings through the Topps Tiles part of the business. The trader digital experience is about making sure we've got better modern digital engagement again for our Topps Tiles traders. B2B is actually about a number of areas of the business, but the CTD acquisition has really sort of dominated that one in the year we've just had, and I think is likely to in the year ahead. ProTiler continues to grow from strength to strength. That's a GBP 50 million target. We're well on our way to that already.
Tile Warehouse, we think, is a GBP 10 million-GBP 15 million opportunity over time, and I'll come on to that on my final slide. If we turn on to the category expansion slide, the key to category expansion really was there are lots of other hard wall and floor surface coverings, some of which we've sold historically, but we weren't selling a year or so ago. Actually, these are quite material parts of the market. By adding these categories into our assortment, it actually extends our addressable market from GBP 1.2 billion to GBP 2.1 billion. It's a very, very material expansion of our market. We've identified this as a GBP 25 million-GBP 30 million opportunity, relatively modest, but we're sort of at the start of our journey. Over time, I'm sure we can see more than that.
Over the first half, we've continued our push into these adjacent categories. We are seeing some really good traction in some areas and encouraging signs in others where we're still a little bit earlier on in our journey. Outdoor tiles, which have actually been in the business for a few years now, is a good example of a major category for us. While the market actually does remain very, very competitive, we are delivering really good incremental sales here. The range has been extended over the first half, and we've also increased the level of marketing support we're investing in this space and seeing some good responses. LVT luxury vinyl tile also continues to perform well, and we've also seen good margin gain.
We're now direct sourcing some of the key selling lines in LVT, and that's actually helping to deliver the results I'll come on to in the final section. We're now delivering broadly comparable margins on LVT to those which we deliver on tiles. Newer to the range and quite recently launched, on the right-hand side of this slide, you can see two images of island boards in stores. They are covering both porcelain splashbacks and acoustic wall panels. Acoustic wall panels, particularly, is quite a new trend or quite a new technology. It's very much on trend at the moment. We now have displays in all stores. We've got good stock availability throughout our chain. With some modest marketing spend, we're actually seeing very encouraging results around some of these new categories, particularly on the acoustics.
Marketing and colleague training also remain key. We are specialists. We've always prided ourselves on that. We can offer really high levels of service and advice, but we want to make sure that we can do that also on these newer categories. We are investing in upskilling colleague knowledge. As I mentioned, investing into digital marketing where it's appropriate to do so. Over the first half, as I said, good progress. Just under GBP 5 million of sales delivered across these categories. That's about 17% growth year on year. Actually, from a gross profit perspective, about 30% growth year on year because of those margin gains we're making, particularly in LVT. Turning next to the trader digital experience. I mean, Topps Tiles trade sales have been a real area of success for the business.
Digital has really played its role there, and we've definitely stepped on in our credentials in the digital space in the last 12 months. A year ago, we would have been talking about, you know, there were a number of areas of sort of friction online. For traders that wanted to use the trade website, you couldn't see pricing until you had a registered trade account, and you couldn't actually register as trade until you came into store to sort of get formally approved. We've removed all of those points of friction now. Trade prices are available as soon as you come onto the website for visibility, and you can now complete your registration as a trade customer of ours through the website alone and then shop online or shop in store, whichever you choose to do.
We've taken our existing sort of trade offer, and we've rebranded that under the sort of umbrella of Trade Club. That happened over the first half. Stephen mentioned it briefly. We also now have a much better credit solution for some of our largest spending traders. The majority of our traders don't need credit, but where they do, and as I say, the largest spenders logically sort of more expect it. It's more of a hygiene factor, and we can now offer a really good in-house service for that. Over the second half of the year, we're a couple of new pieces of technology launching. One, we'll have a whole new website for trade, which will make navigation of our offer online easier to gain. We'll also launch a new customer engagement platform.
We have an existing, what was previously called sort of CRM system, direct marketing campaigns, but that is due to be replaced by a more modern piece of technology, and it will make our communications with our trade, our loyal trade customers much easier again. The opportunity to sort of talk to them very much real-time about latest offers and maybe where they're not buying some of the products that we think are opportunities for us to sell to them. We think that'll be a really good step forward over the second half. As we come into 2026, we will be very focused on launching our trade app. Again, we already have an app for traders in the business. It does not have a huge amount of take-up, and we think could actually do a much better job for us.
We think a whole new piece of technology is the right choice here. That really will become the default platform for our traders. We want them registered to that, you know, logged into the system. That really will allow us to present the entirety of our trade offer to those traders through their mobile phones. We think that's quite exciting. That will include things like click and collect functionality as we get that platform launched in 2026. Financials for trade, very strong. Trade traffic, again, we have seen quite a big step on in trade traffic, admittedly from quite a low base, but trade traffic is actually up about four-fold. Digital trade sales are up about 85%.
That would not necessarily follow the trade traffic numbers because a lot of those traders, whilst they use the website to browse, maybe to set up their trade accounts, they still want to come into stores. The evidence is we are driving quite a lot more of them into stores. Total trade sales for Topps Tiles alone are up 12%, which is obviously, you know, leading the Topps Tiles business, so very much the stronger part of the operation. Actually, the number of active traders is up again around 11% to almost 150,000 active traders. They are trade customers that have shopped with us in the last 12 months. Moving on then to slide 16 and really the start of sort of three slides exploring our trade strategy in a bit more detail.
Within trade, we now operate four distinct brands, each of which have their own purpose. Topps Tiles is very much the market leader in the U.K., but the business does have a more domestic focus. We would talk about, you know, RMI, repair, maintenance, improvement market where Topps Tiles is concerned. Even when a trader is buying the goods and paying for the goods, often a domestic setting is the destination for that product. We operate a truly national chain. We do feel we have very strong digital platforms, some of which I've just been through. Importantly, the customer, the trade customer, often identifies as a general builder and a smaller sort of self-employed tiler. General builders, you know, may only be doing tiling jobs once every few weeks.
Tilers, it's a day job, but it tends to be, you know, more sort of solar style fitters. Again, people doing jobs in domestic homes generally. ProTiler is then a digital pure play business. It sells everything you need to do the job with the exception of the tiles themselves. Tools and consumables, very much to a professional customer base. Again, fitters, but also smaller contractors. ProTiler can actually do a very good job of handling some of the larger bulk in the market. I'll come on to that on the next slide as well. CTD, the newest part of our operations, actually has a very, very strong trade bar. 85% plus of the sales are through trade. It's much more focused on sort of contractors and also the larger national house builders.
Branch operations are key in the CTD world, but also key is their ability to handle bulk. In CTD, we have, you know, racked warehouses, forklift trucks on site, sort of capability to handle bulk, which Topps Tiles stores do not have. We do not tend to have racked warehouses. We will keep some stock, but not huge quantities of sort of trade consumables. Whilst we have electric pallet trucks, we do not have forklift capability in the Topps Tiles estate either. We think that is quite different on that basis. The Parkside business is all about selling directly into the commercial tile market. Ultimately, the contractor is the person that ends up purchasing the tiles, but Parkside is about getting specified for the larger infrastructure type jobs and a really strong B2B operation.
The B2B strategy in itself, as we said a couple of slides ago, represents a GBP 35 million-GBP 40 million opportunity. I actually think that's over the short term when you include CTD. Over the medium term, I think it can be a much larger opportunity. The next slide then, our trade group trade strategy shows how each of those brands really complement each other and allows us to serve the entire U.K. tile market, I think, very effectively. The trade strategy in itself is really based around the customers we serve and the channels we sell through and is about selling, not fulfillment necessarily. Customers range from, as I've mentioned on the previous slide, general builders who actually potentially need quite a lot of technical support and help as well because they're occasional tilers through to large scale contractors and house builders.
In essence, there are three channels that we sell through. Physical channels, i.e., our stores, digital online, and then direct and relationship based. It is worth saying by way of explanation, there are some blocks on this chart which are sort of grayed out with NIAs in them. The reason for that is we either think those sort of intersects between the customer selling channel, the customer and the selling channel are either so unattractive, we just would not go there or actually do not really exist at all. Good examples might be national house builders will not just go to a website and order the tiles they need. They expect to see, you know, curated ranges, presentations, handboards presented to them. You know, there is quite an involved process there, very relationship based as well.
Similarly, an architect won't just walk into a tile shop to source the tiles they need. They want to be working, you know, again, with a very bespoke personalized service, often long periods of time in advance as they specify and design their projects. If we talk to the individual brands then next, Topps Tiles very firmly occupies the bottom left-hand side of the chart, very much in the physical space with trade, lots of general builders, solars, fitters, but increasingly stretching into the digital space as well. As I've already explained, we've been on that journey now for a little while and seen some good traction. ProTiler will continue to be the digital specialist for tools and consumables, and they themselves can actually stretch into larger contract customers as well.
They can actually do a very good job of handling bulk pallet, you know, multiple pallet dispatches out of the warehouse are relatively straightforward for ProTiler, direct to site as the customer requires it. Where customers are more price sensitive, ProTiler can do a very good job in that space for us as well. Within Topps Tiles, there is a small direct selling sort of B2B team as well. They will offer a range of coverings and consumables. They can either be direct to site or collected through stores for convenience. The key to the focus there really is around sort of national facilities management type companies and smaller contractors, smaller contractors as well. CTD on the bottom right-hand side provides the opportunity, as I mentioned on the previous slide, really to serve those larger trade customers.
I think particularly more integration with the commercial and the house builder operations, I think, can be really interesting over time when we think about how we fulfill some of those sales. CTD Tiles is modest in scale today. I'll come on to it on the next slide, but we are really confident it can grow very meaningfully from here. The commercial part of the operation on the top right of the schematic can also be a much larger business. It is now around GBP 18 million worth of sales post the acquisition of CTD Tiles. Very heavily relationship based, but again, the group are able to offer a really wraparound service to some of those customers that I think competitors will find very difficult to match over time.
Access to brands, our group buying power, the service levels we have, and also the convenience of branches where that may be appropriate as part of the fulfillment solution. House builder particularly remains a significant opportunity for the group, I think, and CTD has given us a really good head start in that space. Today, those trade, different trade, different brands and trade operations add up to GBP 220 million worth of sales, which is 75% of the overall group as we stand. On to the following slide dedicated to CTD in itself. I mean, CTD, the first half of the business, the last sort of six, seven months has been very much dominated by the CMA inquiry and the CMA process. Phase one, I'm pleased to say, is now complete. We're not going into phase two of the inquiry.
We've agreed some undertakings in lieu of phase two. We are now back in control of all the operations as of about four weeks ago for CTD, with the exception of four stores, which are part of those undertakings, and we will dispose of those four stores where some competition concerns were identified. That will happen over the second half of the year. The stores are now being run under the ProTiler management team. The stores will remain branded to CTD. I do think that's really important, but the ProTiler team have really strong trade credentials, particularly in essentials and consumable items, and they can give the CTD customer base, I think, really what they need, and they can deliver that at a pace which is important from where we are now. It's also all integrated under a single warehousing operation now.
During the first half of the year, we moved the ProTiler business into a new warehouse, and we've actually now also moved the CTD operation into the same warehouse. All under one roof, which drives further efficiencies. The CTD architectural business has already been integrated into Parkside. We've done that at pace. CTD architecture is, in essence, a small central team and then a small field team. They do very similar work to that which is done in Parkside. That can and has been integrated relatively easily. The CTD house builder team will continue to be run under a separate branding.
The CTD brand will be retained for house builder, and that's now being run by our Head of National House Builder who actually joined the group in January and was previously running the CTD house builder team in its previous ownership structure when it was part of the Sangaban Group. We think that's an important step for the business as well and lots of opportunity to get after in that space. Over the first half of the year, the underlying loss for CTD has been about GBP 1 million. Obviously, we've not been, as Stephen mentioned, we've not been running the operation for the last six or seven months. We are now, but about GBP 1 million of underlying trading losses over the course of the first half.
If you annualize that based on current levels of trading, sort of March, April into May, we estimate that's about a GBP 1.7 million run rate loss. Four weeks into sort of having the keys back and access to all parts of the business, we've already identified about a GBP 1.9 million profit improvement program for CTD Tiles. That is a mixture of improvements in margin, and that in itself is a mixture of sort of reductions in COGS and increases in price. Stephen mentioned the margins. They will have to be moved meaningfully forward from where they are. Also, savings in OpEx, which are largely efficiency driven. That's about further integration into the group. Things like IT systems we were ready to integrate about six months ago, we'll now have that done by the end of July. I think that'll be a really big step on for the business.
Things like logistics integration, we think there's some very good savings to be made there, particularly around things like transport. Those will have been delivered by Q4, and therefore we are confident the business will be back into a profit, modest probably, but a profit generating situation by Q4. As we come into 2026, the focus will all be about growing that business and really getting it back on the front foot, which we think there's lots of opportunities to get after. Longer term, we remain confident in the brand as part of the group. We think it is a good brand. It's got a good place in the U.K. market.
There is an opportunity for a national network providing a more bulk orientated trade offer to a customer base, which is focused very much on larger contractors and house builders, and in itself therefore quite different actually to what the Topps Tiles core brand is all about. If we turn on to the next slide then and ProTiler, I've already mentioned it briefly, but yeah, we have successfully relocated the ProTiler business into a new 140,000 sq ft warehouse over the first half. They actually occupy about half that space, which in itself is probably about three times the amount of cubic capacity they had in their old facility. They really were very much range bound in their old facility, and we needed more operational space. They've now got that.
This warehouse facility is more than sufficient to deliver our goal of GBP 50 million, and we're making really good progress towards that number. The business continues to expand very rapidly. Operational improvements as well. We keep improving the business, or the ProTiler team certainly do. The latest significant improvement, I think, is we now have a 9:00 P.M. cutoff in ProTiler. As a professional trade customer, you can order anything up to 9:00 and still get next day delivery. Most of our competitors in the market, if we're honest, struggle to get sort of past midday really. We think it's a really, really good step on again from the business. We were already at a 6:00 cutoff, we're now at 9:00. Financials are strong. The business is delivering very well. It continues to grow 17.5% over the first half.
Probably within that, numbers have been a bit held back because of the constraints we face in the old warehouse facility, but that business is now regularly delivering three times the level of sales versus when we acquired it three years ago. Profit this year will probably be flat, but that in itself we think is actually quite a good result because we've got all the additional costs of the warehousing space. As we've absorbed that and continue to grow, profit will start to move forward again as we move into the year ahead. Final slide from Tile Warehouse, the newest part of our operations. Again, good progress over the first half. Tile Warehouse, actually we believe, based on traffic, we believe is the fastest growing tile specialist in the U.K. That's traffic data from SimilarWeb, who are a third party reporting agency.
Traffic growth has been good over the first half, 31% growth, but actually probably more important than that is the quality of the traffic that we're getting to the website. We are seeing really good improvements in conversion as well, which is, as I say, probably more important than traffic itself, is the quality of the traffic you get and the subsequent conversion levels. Actually over the first half, sales have more than doubled in Tile Warehouse, which is good. We continue to invest digitally in driving, as I say, both traffic and the right quality of traffic. We are striking, I think, a pretty sensible balance between sales growth, ambition, and trading losses. Doubled sales over the first half, and we've managed to halve the level of trading loss.
There is still a small one, but that is half, and that will continue to improve from here. Our ambitions, part of Mission 365, very much remains GBP 15 million worth of sales over the medium term. The summary slide, excuse me, including the strategy, Mission 365, we think remains a really exciting goal for the business. We have got a really clear ambition and a sort of profit underpin, if you like, of at least 8% net margin in every part of the business. Over time, we believe that will drive a really meaningful shift in our profits. Thank you very much for listening today. I hope you found the presentation helpful.
Fantastic.
We will now move to questions.
Perfect. Rob, Stephen, thank you very much indeed for your presentation.
Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions using the Q&A tab situated on the top right corner of your screen. While the company takes a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I would like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via our invested dashboard. Rob, Stephen, as you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. Stephen, if I may now hand back to you to chair the Q&A, and I'll pick up from you at the end. Thank you.
Yeah, thanks, Alex. That's great. Thank you. Yes, we have had a number of questions. As always, thank you very much to investors for listening to the presentation and also for your engagement with the questions on the page.
Rob, there are a few which probably are going to come your way. The first one that we have from a question is about how many different products we sell. They are wondering whether we sell too many products, sort of how many new products we put out per year and that sort of stuff. Do you have any comments on sort of range, maybe of the different brands? You might be able to contrast the different brands and how they approach that.
Yeah, I think Topps Tiles is obviously the biggest part of the operation. From a tile perspective, I mean, it is about this sort of SKU count and then there are ranges. The range count is probably about 200 ranges of tiles in Topps Tiles. That is between 18, somewhere around 1,800 SKUs, I would say, is a good rule of thumb. The ranges do churn.
They're fairly slow moving, I would say, but we would probably be introducing maybe 25-30 new ranges a year, something like that, two a month. We sort of preview to colleagues through our sort of regular video huddle updates, something of that order of magnitude. We review that, of course, all the time. I think the answer has to be, we think that's about the right size of range. I mean, a business like Tile Warehouse, which is very consumer orientated and more sort of value orientated as well, Tile Warehouse has about a fifth of the size of that range, about sort of 400 SKUs, and therefore probably about 100, you know, between 50 and 100 ranges, something of that order.
When you then think about the consumable side of the market and probably more onto the trade side, they're more into the brands, brands become more important to those customers. The Topps Tiles business, if you take tile adhesive as a good example, we'll sell three or four different branded products of adhesive in store, but the majority of our sales will come through two, really. The other end of the spectrum would be ProTiler as a professional installer. If you go to the ProTiler website, you'll probably have a choice of 12, certainly 10 plus, but 12, maybe 14 different types of tile adhesive. And CTD, actually, as I've sort of indicated, would sit somewhere in between the two. A range of different brands for different parts of the offer and different types of customer. That's kind of how we see the offer today.
That will continue to evolve over time, but yeah, we think that we're in a pretty good place.
Thank you, Rob. And one build from me, actually, just in terms of the way we introduce products, we compare to some other places that maybe I've seen in different industries that I've worked in the past. We have quite good discipline, actually, of when we bring new products in. We're quite good at sort of delisting another product, so we try and maintain the level of products. So, there's always new stuff coming into the shops, but at the same time, you know, we don't have too many products spiraling out of control. So, that's quite good discipline in our MPD process. Okay, the next question is on customers, and I think we've half answered this.
The question is about customer overlap between Topps Tiles, ProTiler Tools, and Tile Warehouse, and is there a risk of cannibalization or is it clearly segmented by customer profile? I suppose, Rob, before I hand over, I'd say that the presentation spent quite a lot of time talking about the customer differentiation from a trade strategy side. You know, we clearly differentiated Topps Tiles, ProTiler Tools, CTD, and then our commercial business. Maybe, Rob, just a small comment on the sort of homeowner side and the different brands in the group on that, maybe picking up where Tile Warehouse sits within the group.
Yeah, I think that's right, Stephen. I think we have covered trade pretty comprehensively. Yeah, so Tile Warehouse was, you know, we started it from scratch.
It was designed to be more of an online sort of price fighter, certainly to target or to cater to more of a value orientated customer, you know, maybe first time buyers or people just on tighter budgets. Also, you know, the kind of customers that might naturally think to go to a DIY shed or Wickes or a B&Q or even some of the other online sort of more value orientated operators. Yeah, our primary goal would be to see a customer go to Topps Tiles, where we can offer them a great range and brilliant levels of advice and all the convenience to the stores. If a customer does not feel that is quite the right offer for them, Tile Warehouse is very deliberately designed to sit slightly below the Topps Tiles offer.
Great, thank you, and thank you for the question.
Okay, the next one moves us on to the market, about the levels of competition in the market and how price sensitive the market is at the moment, Rob. Could you maybe just talk a bit about where competition is at the moment?
Yeah, I think, I mean, I think the market is very active, and I think, you know, having been through the CMA process, you know, we can see there's a very healthy market for tile competition in the U.K. Lots of different operators with all sort of slightly different angles. I mean, I think the instinct to go to here is to split our sort of thought process between homeowners and traders. Traders are very knowledgeable about products and price and exactly what they want, and therefore tend to be really quite price sensitive.
We make sure we have really great value for trade customers, again, access to sort of the brands they wish to buy, really strong pricing, and we do lots of things within that trade club I mentioned actually. Loyalty points, but also bulk deal discounts. If you buy five or more, you get an even better price. I think our value credentials in trade are very strong and have been for some time. To the homeowner, of course, we also offer very good value, but it's a slightly different perspective here. Customers, homeowners in this space, they need lots of sort of support and help. You know, it's often very common that a homeowner might just bring in a page out of a magazine and sort of say, you know, could you sell me something that looks like this?
They're looking for sort of design advice, inspiration, technical support, lots of different things. There are no brands in tiles particularly, so it's about making sure the customer's got the tiles that they really love, can fit with their sort of what they're looking for from a design perspective, and making sure we offer them great value as part of that sale as well. That is not necessarily about just being the cheapest that we can possibly be, because, you know, we offer something quite different to what most of the competitors offer.
Great, thank you, Rob. Yeah, thanks for that question. The next question, I think maybe I will take, it's about operational leverage. It goes, if you get an extra 10 million of sales in the Topps Tiles retail parts, how would this drop down to profit? It's actually a very important point this.
We often describe Topps Tiles or the Topps Group actually as quite an operationally leveraged business, i.e., what that means, just so everyone's clear, is that, you know, relatively small changes in sales can lead to relatively big changes in profit, and that's going sort of both up and down really. The reason for that is that Topps Tiles as a group has relatively high gross margins and then relatively high fixed costs. They do not particularly change that much as sales go up and go down, and therefore the profit drop through can be quite rich. I think to answer your question, in the very immediate term, I mean, you know, the gross margins in the Topps Tiles part of the business are in the sort of high 50%.
You know, if you make literally one pound of extra sales, you obviously therefore make in the high 50% of that as extra gross profit, then there's a bit of employment cost in terms of commission and a bit of supply chain cost. I think if you're talking in the scale of sales increases that you're talking about there, an extra GBP 10 million of sales, you know, that would have slightly wider impacts. I think a good rule of thumb is probably about a 20% drop through to profit. GBP 10 million of extra sales might lead to about GBP 2 million of extra profit. Of course, if you look at our sales, say last year, about GBP 250 million or something, GBP 10 million would be about a 4% increase in sales, and GBP 2 million profit would be about a 25% increase in profit.
You can see how that relatively small change in sales can lead to big changes in profit. That does happen on, you know, on the upside and on the downside. I hope that explains the operational leverage in the group. The next question is about the number of shops that we have. Rob, I'm going to throw it to you in a second, but the question is, have you got too many shops given the trend towards online sales? In five years, what will the optimal number be?
Just before I hand it to Rob, I will observe that we have actually done a fair bit of work on the store estate in recent years, and we have actually reduced the Topps store estate from about, I think it was 372 stores at peak, and that was maybe 2017, and that is down to 298 stores at the half year. It has come down by about 20% already. Rob, do you think, how do you see the store estate moving in future and over the next five years?
Yeah, and just to build on that slightly, Stephen, absolutely right. A lot of those reductions were about sort of going from multiple locations in a town to single location. We identified quite a strong transfer of sales that we knew was therefore sort of profit sales dilutive, but actually profit accretive.
That program, I think, has actually served us very well. I mean, I think it's something we keep under review. I think probably in the year ahead, we should do another piece of analytical work to really understand what is the right size and shape of portfolio. We've been saying for a while now, it's probably broadly 300 is about the right number, but I think we should do a bit more of a ground up exercise on that to satisfy ourselves that it is. What I would say is the vast majority of our customers do use one of our stores as part of their journey at some stage. It's very common. The part of the journey sort of starts online with initial research, you know, where's my nearest store, etc.
But the vast majority, I mean, 90 plus % of our customers will visit a store as part of their journey. They want to see it, they want to touch it, they want to get that advice, you know, design, inspiration, etc. that I mentioned in the previous point. Ultimately, the value of sales we transact online is about 8%. The group as a whole is 20%, but Topps Tiles is about 8%. It is still relatively modest because we are an omnichannel business. Yeah, open to it, keep reviewing the right size and shape of the portfolio, but I would not assume it is obviously one way from here because of sort of growth in online.
Thank you very much. Great, and thanks for the question. Okay, moving on, this is another one for me, I think, which is a question about working capital.
What are the working capital dynamics if we get to GBP 365 million in totality? Obviously, this refers to our sort of achievement of our Mission 365 goal. Topps Group has actually been, historically, one of its strengths, I think, is it is pretty highly cash generative as a business. It does not have huge capital, fixed asset sort of capital requirements, and actually working capital tends to work in our favor as well. Really, in times of good growth, we tend to actually see working capital inflows, and in times of more difficult periods, we tend to see outflows as we sort of unwind all the creditors in the group.
You know, in principle, if we can grow more sales through the business, and you know, if we can therefore, we'll obviously need to buy more stock for that, but if we can turn that stock around quicker than, you know, than our payment terms to those suppliers, then you actually end up with a positive working capital dynamic in the group. You sort of get, you know, extra profit, extra cash from your profits, but also working capital can work in your favor as well. When we were outlining the financial implications of hitting Mission 365, we talked about quite a substantial improvement in our return on capital employed, and partly in my head there was the fact that there was not a great deal of need for additional working capital as we grow the top line.
That is quite a positive aspect, I think, of the group's growth strategy. Thanks for that question. Next one, I do not know, maybe Rob, you might start it and I might come back as well, but the question is about sort of lead indicators really. The question goes, historically, Topps's fortunes have been closely linked to housing transaction volumes. How relevant is this as a lead indicator? Rob, I do not know if you want to start on that?
Yeah, yeah, no, I am happy to. Yeah, I think historically, actually, we have always said housing transactions were sort of a top slice of the business. It is very difficult to know, but historically, we would have said 15-20%, something like that.
Yeah, if house transactions are up, of course, that's useful, more people moving, but the vast majority of our sales are people improving rather than moving, actually. I think therefore, for a while, we've said rather than house transactions, actually, the important thing is that customers are confident in the outlook, confident in their own personal financial outlook. House price, I think on that basis, is probably more useful than house transaction because, with the best will in the world, if the value of the asset is going down, it's quite difficult to expect people to invest money in their homes. If it's going up, it makes people feel much better about that investment. House price, I think, but also consumer confidence is just key. Again, you know, ultimately, it is a discretionary spend. You don't have to spend money on home improvements.
You can delay and defer things. Therefore, I think if you're confident in the outlook for yourself and the value of your property is improving, that's a really good backdrop to the market for us.
Yeah, great. I don't really have anything to add, so thank you, Rob. That's brilliant. I think the last question for now, unless anyone enters something in the next few seconds, is about other covering. I'm guessing this is referring to the category expansion part of our Mission 365 growth. The question is, what is the upside and what market share do we think we can get? You know, in that answer somewhere, maybe pick up some of the peers or the fact that the market's quite fragmented. Rob, I'll hand over to you.
I mean, just to, you know, the headline number is the one that is on the page, the sort of waterfall chart that Rob showed, which is that we think category expansion can be a GBP 25 million-GBP 30 million opportunity. Rob, I do not know if you want to expand any further than what you said in the slide deck.
Yeah, I think we have covered it to a large extent. I mean, when we, so again, it is about, you added about GBP 900 million of addressable market. It is obviously an enormous number. We realize that. And in our own modeling, we were quite conservative. We sort of said the Topps Tiles business, obviously, in the tile market has a very strong market share. In these newer categories, we sort of said, look, what if we could achieve 5%? Even that would add up to GBP 50 million.
To your point, Stephen, we've actually added sort of between GBP 25 million and GBP 30 million. We've really been quite conservative here. The key is it's incremental. It is upside. You know, we've started on that journey. We're at differing levels of advancement, but yeah, it's incremental. It's upside. We're not really needing to take anything. We don't think we're losing any sales from existing assortment either. Some of the tiles will be already double dual displayed in stores. We think there is potential, well, not potential. We think we can deliver these additional categories in stores without really losing from existing displays and therefore losing sales. I suppose the thing that gives us most encouragement is we know customers come in, they ask for these products, actually. I mean, wood flooring is a good example.
If you go back far enough, we used to sell wood flooring. It was quite a meaningful percentage of the overall business. Yeah, customers come in. There does seem to be an expectation that if we sell tile, we will sell, you know, LVT, wood flooring, shower panels, these kind of other products. Not carpet, I think for obvious reasons. Soft flooring, I think, is very different. Yeah, there is definitely an expectation and a willingness from customers to engage in this part of the offer, which I think makes it really exciting. Thanks, Rob. We just had one more coming in, which we do make reference to in the R&S. I will just hand over to you for a comment, which is just looking for an update on the CEO recruitment process.
I'm not sure how much more we can say over what's in the R&S, but Rob, any just want to reiterate what we said? In advance, it's obviously with the board. We are, I think, down to the final sort of handful of candidates. Board are conducting final interviews over the coming weeks. We've put in, we expect to have an announcement over the second half. We make sure we've got plenty of time for an orderly transition. I'm around till the end of the calendar year, so still sort of seven months to go. Yeah, we would hope to have a very orderly transition over the final part of the year. Indeed, as part of our investor roadshow, when we come to December for the full year.
Yeah, brilliant. Thank you, Rob. Thanks once again to everyone for their questions. I'll hand back over to Alex.
Perfect. Thank you very much, Stephen and Rob. Thank you for addressing those questions from investors today. Of course, the company can review your questions submitted today. I will publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. Rob, before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company, could I please ask you for a few closing comments?
I think just thank you to everyone for joining us today and people that will watch this subsequently as well that were not available for the live broadcast. We are really excited about our goal and our strategy to support it, our goal of mission 365. We think we have had a good first year of progress towards that. As I said, you know, it will be a record year of sales between GBP 290 million-GBP 300 million.
I think we're already a good step on that journey, and we're excited about the opportunities ahead of us, and we'll keep pushing on. Thank you.
Fantastic, Rob. Stephen, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the board can better understand your views and expectations? This will only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure it will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Topps Tiles, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.