Greetings. Welcome to the Cazoo Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the call, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to hand the call over to Anna Gavrilova, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining today's call to discuss our results for the third quarter of 2023. You will be able to find today's press release on our investor relations website at investors.cazoo.co.uk. We appreciate everyone joining us today. With me on the call are Alex Chesterman, Founder and Executive Chairman, Paul Whitehead, Chief Executive Officer, and Paul Woolf, Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, I would like to remind you of the company's safe harbor language, which I'm sure you're all familiar with.
Management may make forward-looking statements, including guidance and underlying assumptions. Forward-looking statements are based on expectations that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For a further discussion of risks related to our business, please see the filings of Cazoo Group Limited with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Today's call will not be recorded and will not be available for replay. We kindly ask you not to record it and not to transcribe it. I will now hand the call over to Paul Whitehead.
Thanks, Anna. Good morning, everyone, and thanks a lot for joining us today. I'm very pleased with the results we are reporting today, and that we have delivered another quarter of meaningful improvement in our profitability. We have achieved a lot over the first nine months of this year. We restructured our operational footprint and headcounts to better match the scale of our business. At the same time, we've consistently been driving improvements in our unit economics quarter-over-quarter against the backdrop of a deteriorating economic environment.
Interest rates are much higher than a year ago, and inflation is persisting far above the 2% target set by the Bank of England. High cost of living and cost of credit are causing volatility in demand for used cars. At the same time, the supply of new cars has been rising towards levels seen before the COVID pandemic. This has had the effect of aggravating the misalignment of supply and demand in the used car market, and daily depreciation for our stock selection has been higher than normal market conditions.
Despite all of this, we've continued to focus on unit economics, and we managed to maintain quarter-on-quarter improvement in retail GPU, reaching a new Cazoo record of GBP 1,470 per unit. The improvement was achieved across several areas. We took a number of steps which helped to partially mitigate the impact of higher interest rates on customer demand. Most significantly, we focused our web platform optimization efforts on enhancing customers' digital finance journey with our finance-first approach.
Despite these improvements, our finance attachment rate declined to 49.8% from our record performance of 53.2% in the previous quarter. A nd we are implementing a range of actions to target areas such as pre-eligibility and pre-approval, with the goal of enhancing our future performance in this area. We also initiated a program to enable our delivery specialists and our Cazoo Customer Centers to sell ancillary products offline when we hand over the purchased car to the customer.
This has proved to be a growing source of ancillary revenue for us, helping to increase attachment rates for the products we offer. We've made further progress in reducing our reconditioning costs as we focus on the efficiency of our operations. We continue to work on optimizing our car acquisition pricing by combining our own proprietary data with third-party sources. There is still further scope to sustain and grow our retail GPU by targeting opportunities across all these areas, with particular focus on faster stock turn, as well as further efficiencies in our operations through digitization.
In the third quarter, we sold 9,525 retail cars, as our fully online proposition continues to resonate with customers, and we generated revenues of GBP 173 million. These results were in line with our focus on unit economics. Retail GPU of GBP 1,470 increased by 14% quarter-on-quarter and by 201% year-on-year. Average retail GPU for the first nine months of 2023 was GBP 1,215. Gross profit of GBP 11 million increased by GBP 1 million year-on-year, driven primarily by higher retail GPU to lower volume of units.
Gross margin improved by 350 basis points to 6.5%. Ancillary revenue per retail unit sold at GBP 735, increased by 29% year-on-year, and the finance attachment rate of 49.8% represented a 6.7 percentage points improvement year-on-year. Both metrics, however, declined quarter-on-quarter due to factors related to higher interest rates. We continued to reduce fixed and variable costs in line with expectations to extend our cash runway. Our cash position remains strong, with GBP 151 million of cash and cash equivalents, plus approximately GBP 35 million of self-financed inventory as of September 30, 2023.
We announced in September that we had entered into a Transaction Support Agreement with certain noteholders and shareholders in connection with the contemplated transaction. We are updating our cash balance guidance for 2023 year-end, to take into account such transaction-related costs, which were incurred in the third quarter and will be incurred in the fourth quarter. We now expect to finish the year with between GBP 100 million and GBP 115 million of cash and cash equivalents, and between GBP 20 million and GBP 30 million of self-financed inventory.
Higher interest rates, high used car prices, rising insurance premiums, and the recent spikes in fuel prices, driven by geopolitical conflicts, means higher cost of car ownership for customers. Demand for used cars will remain volatile, and against this backdrop, our priority is to continue to deliver better unit, better economics per unit sold. We expect retail unit sales in Q4 2023 to be around 8,500, and the full year retail sales to be between 40,000 and 42,000 units. Total unit sales, including both retail and wholesale, are expected to be between 50,000 and 52,000 units. Given that we have averaged GBP 1,215 retail GPU for the first nine months of this year, we expect the average retail GPU for the full year to be higher than previous guidance.
We now expect to end the year with average retail GPU approaching GBP 1,250, and the exit rate is expected to be around GBP 1,400, which reflects normal market seasonality and a challenging economic environment. We are maintaining our Adjusted EBITDA forecast at between -GBP 100 million and -GBP 120 million. Our top priorities remain to further improve unit economics, reduce our fixed cost base, and extend our cash runway, as we work towards our goal of reaching profitability. Thank you very much, and we'll now take any questions you might have.
Thank you. We will now be conducting the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for your questions. Our first questions come from the line of Rajat Gupta with JP Morgan. Please proceed with your questions.
Great. Thanks for taking the question. I had a first question just on, you know, the profitability cadence, going forward. I'm curious to know if, if there are more cost savings or, on the SG&A side or, or more GPU opportunity, at the current level of units, that you can capture before the company can decide to return to growth again? And, and when can we expect the business to return to growth or target return to growth, in order to start scaling the fixed cost eventually? And then relatedly, you know, what kind of macro or company specific factors we should be watching, to determine that timing? Thanks. I have a quick follow-up.
So I would say- Paul Woolf here . Thanks so much for the question. So there's a fair bit more to do, as we said and referred to in the announcement on GPU. And I think our- y ou know, there are a number of levers across multiple areas. The two that are sort of forefront of our mind, one is to reduce the days to sale in the business. And obviously, the faster we turn over vehicles, not particularly on the website, but that is the taking on refurbishment, getting onto our site, and then eventually the fulfillment. The faster we do that, you know, the less the vehicles depreciate during our ownership. So that still remains a significant lever for us.
Finance and ancillaries has been, you know, it's been a success story all the way through. Paul just described how it has taken a step back at an attachment rate level, finance attachment that is in Q3. But mind you, that's been largely offset in terms of overall finance income or ancillary income by the other products. So we continue to evaluate new products, and we continue to drive attachment through opening up new channels to drive attachment and improving our digital journey, which is, again, we referred to in the commentary just then, really where, you know, a lot of our technical team are spending their time at the moment, and we describe it as finance first.
And then there was a question also, so GPU, yes, we would expect that to continue to go up, albeit we've, I think, we've called out in the announcement that Q4 will take a small step back from the Q3 number due to the market and seasonality. You know, we expect it to take a small step back from the Q3 number due to the market and seasonality. So those two things are against us in Q4, but Q1, we'd expect to be sort of back on the growth track again. And then in terms of fixed costs. There is more to come out. I think the main numbers are out now, so it's smaller slices, but we continue to reduce fixed costs really every quarter. We're not shouting about it because the numbers are relatively smaller.
But, you know, the big chunks are done, but there are several—certainly, the numbers aren't going to go up in terms of fixed costs. We expect them to continue to gently go down, you know, notwithstanding inflation and everything else. And there's a question—and the final question was around, which is the great question around growth. What we've consistently said is once we establish the, you know, the right foundations for unit economics, we would wish to push the growth button again, but when we do that, we're not gonna be—we wouldn't expect to be growing at the sort of 50s or 100%, you know, as we were prior to 2023.
We're in the process of putting together our plans for next year, and we'll be talking about that in due course. But we're certainly at the levels of profitability now per unit, which, as you rightly point out, means that we, you know, by doing more units, we will be, you know, better off absorbing the fixed costs better.
Got it. Got it. That, that's really helpful color, and thanks for all the detail. Just, just one follow-up, just on that. Could you, could you help give us an update, as it stands today on what the, the fixed versus variable mix is within, within, within your SG&A? That'll be all from my end.
Yeah, sure. So, the fixed versus variable mix, I mean, it hasn't really changed. It is sort of 50%-60% fixed within SG&A.
Understood. Got it. That's helpful. Thanks a lot.
Thank you. We have reached the end of our question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the floor back over to Anna Gavrilova for closing comments.
Thank you very much, everyone, for joining us today. We'll speak to you next time. Thank you.
Thank you. This does conclude today's teleconference. We appreciate your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Enjoy the rest of your day.