Headlam Group H2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
March 11, 2025

There are 4 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good morning. Welcome to Headland's twenty twenty four Full Year Results Presentation. I'm Chris Payne, the group's Chief Executive, and I'm joined by Adam Phillips, the group's CFO. So without further ado, just turning to the agenda. We're going to cover just a handful of things today.

Operator

I'm going to hand over to Adam to talk about the current trading performance, and I'm going to spend a little bit of time giving an update on the strategic initiatives the group's been following for a little while, and an update on the transformation plan that we announced last year, and to give an update on how it's performing and how we see that working through the next couple of years. So if I hand over to Adam to focus on the 2024 financial performance to start with.

Speaker 1

Thanks, Grace. I've got a handful of slides on the financial results. I'll start with a brief market update on the flooring market and how that performed in 2024. And on this slide, we've got a few of the indicators that we've shown before. These are quite helpful indicators for what's going on in the flooring market, top left consumer confidence.

Speaker 1

And you can see that's been edging upwards over the last eighteen months, but has remained negative and fragile. And in particular, you can see the big step down in the autumn last year around the time of the budget announcement. And what this has meant is that whilst disposable income has been rising and inflation and interest rates have been coming down, there hasn't been an uplift in consumer spending. So that middle chart on that slide there, that's the consumer spend data on home improvements. It's been one of the worst performing retail categories over the last couple of years.

Speaker 1

On the right hand side, on a bit more of a positive note, housing transactions, which is a good lead indicator for the flooring market, those have now been in growth for almost a year, which indicates there should be some good building demand as and when confidence can be unlocked. So how has that impacted on the flooring market in 2024? Well, we've seen now three consecutive years of decline in volumes in the flooring market and a 9% decline in revenue and volume in 2024 in both the market and in Headland. So Headland maintained market share during the year. And Chris will talk a bit more about outlook for the market and for Headland a bit later on.

Speaker 1

So just turning to revenue then and Headland's revenue. So regional distribution first, This is the part of our business that has been most heavily impacted by the market conditions, particularly with the residential market performing weaker than the commercial market. We did, however, continue to grow revenue in the strategic initiatives of larger customers and trade counters. And in the larger customers channel, there's been quite significant change this in the last twelve months. We've seen three retailers drop out of the market.

Speaker 1

So CarpetRight and Homebase entered administration and then SCS made a strategic decision to exit the flooring category. Carpyright was only a tiny customer of ours, but Homebase, we did generate $7,000,000 of revenue with during 2024. But despite these headwinds, we grew revenue 4% through larger customers in 2024, and this principally reflected growth with TAPI, who picked up a large proportion of the carpi rye business as well as a couple of new customer wins in the year. In Trade Counters, we grew revenue by 7.4% and the investments we've been making there have performed in line with the business case despite the market headwinds. And we ended the year with 76 sites and we expect to finish the investment phase of the Tradecounter business this summer with around 83 sites.

Speaker 1

So overall, U. K. Revenue declined 8.9% in line with the market for 2024. Moving to the bottom of the slide, Continental Europe. And the market there has been even weaker than in The UK and revenue declined 14.9%.

Speaker 1

So taking a look at the income statement, I've covered revenue on the previous slide. Gross margin of 29.9% was 180 basis points lower than the previous year, and this is due to four factors. Firstly, stock clearance. We undertook significantly heightened stock clearance activity during the year linked to the transformation plan to simplify the network and ranges. Secondly, rebates.

Speaker 1

So the combination of the volume decline in the market combined with our drive to improve stock turn reduced purchases from suppliers in 2024, which impacted our rebates, rebate tiers and thresholds, etcetera. Thirdly, mix and the revenue from larger customers, whilst contributing positively at operating margin, is at a lower gross margin than revenue from regional distribution, for example. And then fourthly and finally, price and promotional activity. And in response to market activity on price, the group responded with some price and promotional activity to remain competitive, albeit this was overall a relatively modest driver of the overall movement in gross margin. Moving on to operating costs.

Speaker 1

These increased by 6.9% mainly due to cost inflation, which added about 7,500,000 of additional costs in the year. This is lower than the £10,000,000 of cost inflation we had in 2023, but it's still elevated compared to the long term average cost inflation impact that the group would typically see. And that reflected elevated pay inflation across both The UK and Continental Europe with pay inflation in The UK averaging about 6%, driven particularly by the 10% increase in the national minimum wage at the start of the year. Sticking with operating costs, we also invested in new trade camps sites, and these added about $5,500,000 of operating cost to the business in the year. Mitigating actions offset some of that, and these included the benefit of the introduction of dynamic route planning on our transport network in the second half of twenty twenty three.

Speaker 1

And the transformation plan, which we'll talk about Chris will talk about a bit later, that had no impact on 2024 operating costs. We're starting to see the impact of that in 2025. Moving down the P and L, interest costs were higher year on year reflecting the average borrowings. That was prior to the property disposals at the end of the year. And all of this resulted in an underlying loss before tax of £34,300,000 and that was before non underlying items of GBP 7,200,000.0, which I'll cover now.

Speaker 1

So these were a net P and L expense of GBP 7,200,000.0, but actually a net cash inflow of GBP 48,500,000.0 due to the property sale proceeds. I'll focus on the middle of sort of middle section, the middle rows here. If you look at business restructuring and change related costs of £19,700,000 about half of that was a cash cost. So the cash element of $10,200,000 comprised severance costs and the cost of relocating and dual running associated with the transfer from Ipswitch to Raili. And there's an adviser fees in there as well.

Speaker 1

The next row down, profit on sale of property, I'll cover that in a bit more detail on a separate slide, but $21,000,000 of profit, $61,000,000 of cash generated. And then ERP system development, 2,600,000 of cash spend in the year, broadly in line with our guidance at the start of the year of around $3,000,000 Turning to cash flow then. Good operating cash generation, so $27,600,000 of underlying operating cash flow in the year. Now this does include $11,000,000 of VAT that we collected on the property disposals in December and then paid over to HMRC in January, but nonetheless, a good positive underlying operating cash flow even after adjusting for that. And this reflects working capital movements.

Speaker 1

Stock levels were reduced in the year. And if you exclude the movements on provisions, the cash benefit of this stock reduction was $17,600,000 as set out in the table here on this slide. Receivables was an inflow reflecting the movement in revenue and payables was an inflow of $10,700,000 but as I've mentioned, this includes $10,800,000 of VAT collected on the property disposals in December that we paid over in January. So if you normalize that out, payables were pretty flat year on year. And there were no significant changes in suppliers or terms of supply such as payment terms during the year.

Speaker 1

CapEx was $10,600,000 in the year and that compares to $18,000,000 in 2023 and GBP 14 million dollars in 2022. And we expect that CapEx number to drop further as the trade counter investment phase comes to an end and the replenishment requirements on existing equipment are much reduced following a big year of replenishment and refurbishment in 2023. Just the final few rows on the cash flow then here. So lease payments were £12,900,000 cash outflow in the year and there was a £4,800,000 cash outflow for dividends in June, which reflected the final dividend payment in respect of 2023. Property disposals, $61,000,000 cash flow, more on those in a minute.

Speaker 1

And then the other non underlying netted to a cash outflow of $12,800,000 as set out on the previous slide. So all of this resulted in a net cash position at the end of the year of $10,900,000 compared to net debt of $29,600,000 at the start of the year. And on this next slide here, we just set that out in a bridge, the movement from last year's the previous year's net debt position of about $30,000,000 to the $11,000,000 of net cash. And you can see the inflows from working capital and property disposals there offset by lease payments, CapEx, dividends, etcetera. Property disposals, so just a little bit more detail on those.

Speaker 1

So we sold five properties in the year as set out in this table. Three of those were vacant sales, and these properties became surplus to requirements as a result of the network optimization initiatives in the transformation plan. Two of the properties, Guildersham and Leeds, were lease sale and leasebacks and the implied yield on those leasebacks is broadly equivalent to the group's cost of borrowing. In total then, the total proceeds were million and all of the properties were sold for a significant premium to book value, averaging 68%. And at the end of the year, the group continued to own property with a book value of £67,000,000 and a market valuation as of January '23 of £94,000,000 Final slide for me then.

Speaker 1

So one of the characteristics of Hedland that we've talked about before is the strong balance sheet. And I've set out the balance sheet on the left and then just a few of the highlights on the right hand side of this slide here. Firstly, good liquidity headroom, so $10,900,000 of net cash at the end of the year and £72,000,000 of borrowing facilities. And the progress we made in the year on the cash upside from the transformation plan has enabled us to reduce the size of the facilities from £100,000,000 to £72,000,000 which reduces the fees we pay on unutilized facilities. The majority of the GBP72 million comprises a GBP61 million revolving credit facility with three lenders, and we have a revised covenant package in place whilst we implement the transformation plan.

Speaker 1

Secondly, the Orangebox strong asset backing and that includes GBP 94,000,000 of property assets and over GBP 200,000,000 of stock and receivables that aren't leveraged in any way. And then thirdly, bottom right, during the year we also further strengthened the balance sheet by completing a pension buy in, and this significantly derisks the group's exposure to movement in pension assumptions and removes future contributions into the scheme. So I'll now hand you back to Chris.

Operator

Thanks, Adam. So I'm going to cover just an update on what we've been doing on the strategic initiatives that the group outlined a little while ago and also an update on the transformation plan and the key components of that. So just before I get into the detail on the transformation plan, just the first slide is a reminder really about the marketplace. So what is it that we're doing and why are we trying to access the sort of strategic initiatives firstly? So this slide just outlines the shape and scale of The U.

Operator

K. Market, and we estimate that's worth between billion and billion a year of flooring spend at distributor prices. And I've covered this slide many times before, but it's key to the way in which we've articulated our strategy. So on this slide, you can see Headlum's sort of relative share and relative weighting of how we face into the different customer types. So we have identified seven customer types on this slide.

Operator

And Headlum's traditional strength has been in the left hand side of this page, which is around the independent retailers and the small fitters that populate The UK marketplace. And then further towards the right, these are categories of customers that Headland traditionally has had a lower exposure or a lower share with accordingly. So Headland's weighting has moved from heavy and deeper concentration of customers on the left to a lighter share on the right. Nonetheless, for us to offer service to the whole marketplace, I felt it was important. And the groups are following a strategy of this broadening the base of the business so that we offer great service to the independent retail market, but we can also offer service to other parts of the customer base in The UK market.

Operator

And we've seen evidence of that successfully over the last few years, and that's important to seeing headlands return to growth. Regardless of the market conditions, we should still be able to see us growing our market share in those other customer types. So just talking about the how our strategy aligns against that. So on the next slide, partly a reminder and partly an update slide, this one. So on the left hand side of this slide, you can see our existing strategy, and that's the five pillars to our strategy.

Operator

The first one on the left is around how we offer service. So this is being greater offering next day service typically to our independent retailers and our small fitter customers. So this is just doing what we do and doing it well, being the best in the marketplace at offering service to our customers and retaining that position in the market. The second pillar of our strategy was around growth and actually in particular offering growth to these new customer types that we've been targeting. And that's really the story behind the numbers that Adam referred to earlier around we're seeing just over 7% growth in trade counters and single digit growth in our larger customers.

Operator

And that's because we're offering service to new customer types, and we've developed our service proposition to access these types of customers. And that's contained within the second pillar of our strategy. The third pillar is around operational efficiency, and that's around being efficient and cost effective at how we offer service to our customers. And in the past, we've offered changes to the way that we've offered our transport network, for example. Adam mentioned earlier around dynamic route planning has enabled us to take cost out of our service network, and that's an example of an efficient part of our strategy.

Operator

And really, this is where we see some of the transformation plan also taking effect this year in the next couple of years and delivering efficiency further. The fourth and fifth pillars of our strategy are really around how we do business and our ESG credentials and how we wish Headland to be a great place to work. Now we're not really focusing on those fourth and fifth pillars of our strategy in these slides. There's sort of more information on what we've been doing in those areas in the RNS and trading update in the detail. But in the slides, we'll be focusing more on the first, second and third pillars.

Operator

So if I just focus on the right hand side of this slide now, the transformation plan, we've talked about this at the half year, and we're going to provide a little bit more detail and a roll forward on what we've been doing in the last few months. And there are three main components to that, so three components. The first one is more of a sort of front office, if you like. The second one around simplifying the network is sort of middle office. And then simplifying how we operate is more of a back office point.

Operator

So it's a sort of front, middle and back office feel to the transformation plan. And we very much started on the front office. So if we just sort of turn the page and we can see on the next slide, and the bars in blue on the left hand side are the update that we provided just after the half year. And then the orange ones are really the focus as we see going forward. So this is where we consolidated our 32 wholesale businesses, if you like, that we're offering services to our regional independent retailers.

Operator

We've consolidated those 32 businesses into a single trading entity called Picado. And by doing so, we've been able to effectively offer just one face to the customer. So 17,000 customers have been contacted, and we completed the migration of those customers into this single business in January. So we commenced it in the fourth quarter and completed that activity in January. So wholesale changed to the way that we focus on customers.

Operator

And I'm pleased to say that customers responded really positively to that. Some of the comments were, I can't believe it's taking you so long to do this, real kind of common sense feel for why we may be looking to make that change. And I think here, this is around it's given us an opportunity to really clarify customer engagement, add depth of ranges for customers. So instead of customers needing to have multiple accounts with Headland to get the best out of us, they can just have one and they get access to our whole product portfolio. It's meant that we could restructure our sales teams to have more of a focus on our sales teams that were knowledge about residential product and other teams that could focus on commercial product.

Operator

And adding that layer of trust and knowledge has meant that we've been able to face into our customers in a more meaningful way. So some really good steps forward. And I think one of the other features is around this clarity around some of the digital assets. So I think digital investment and how we go to market with our digital assets is going to be important now and in the future. And of course, when you've got, in this case, 32 businesses, each with their own website, it makes it very difficult to invest effectively in modernizing those websites, adding clarity to customers to see what products they have access to.

Operator

And by consolidating this, we now have one platform. We've replatformed that website onto a single business. And it means we can now invest in that and progress the digital assets much more meaningfully. So what are we doing for this year? Now we've consolidated onto a single business.

Operator

As I said, I think we've now got the opportunity to invest in that single portal. Customers can now get access to all of our products online. And we can now invest in making that a much more user friendly experience. In the past, I've used an example of kind of giving our customers an Amazon feel. So as consumers, we know we're very used to logging on to a website, picking our product, being served up complementary products or customers who have ordered this have also ordered that or we might be out of that product, but it's very similar to a replacement product.

Operator

So I like our customers to have the same customer experience as that, so that when they log on to our portals, they can see products they've ordered before, they can see complementary products, and substitution of products. So I think that experience for customers more and more BT customers are demanding that and that gives us the ability to invest in something like that. The other key feature here is this is all aimed at investing our expertise in developing the independent retail channel. And as Adam described, this is an area that's come under quite a significant pressure in the marketplace, and we've seen revenue move backwards. So this gives us an opportunity to reinvest in this category.

Operator

It's the most important category for the group. It's where we have our higher share of our revenue. So being able to now go as one, talk as one in the marketplace and refresh our point of sale, which we're planning to do in Q2 and Q3 this year, means we can talk to customers, give them access to new ranges of products and refresh the POS that we put into the market. Our sales teams are now consolidated. They don't have to compete with any other Headland businesses in their territory.

Operator

They can be the Headland representative for our community, for our postcode and get to know their customers and talk with confidence about what's coming downstream from Headland's product launches. So exciting developments this year, and this is a key area for us to continue our investment in. So the second part of our transformation plan, this is the sort of middle office, if you like, the sort of network and operations part of our business. And actually, this is one that started a little while ago. So although it wasn't part of our transformation plan, part of our strategy, as I said earlier, was about being efficient and effective in our operational offer to customers.

Operator

A little while ago, we put in some of these building blocks, the foundations for this transformation plan by moving to more of a national network. So rather than this sort of fragmented regional distribution center network that Headland had in the past as a result of its acquisition strategy, we've been trying to move more to a national offer. And that national offer can now underpin this sort of move to Mercado as our single trading entity. So we started this a little while ago. And so this is more of an update really on what we've been doing.

Operator

And as Adam mentioned earlier, some of the property disposals that we've been able to deliver this year have come off the back of this transformation. So the investment in a single transport network, investment in some of the technology, which enables us to switch delivery routes seamlessly from one site to another has meant that we've been able to squeeze our network down. It's meant that we've been able to focus on fewer sites and offer broader service from fewer locations, freeing up sites, therefore, for a disposal process. So that's something that we've been doing successfully now for a little while. And as Adam outlined, the number of sites have become surplus to requirements during 2024.

Operator

This is something that we're going to continue to look at as we go into 2025. And the next phase really straddles into the sort of back office side of things where having stock in the right location to service local customers, not just customers that have ordered from that particular distribution center, but customers who have ordered from anywhere in the country and they can get service locally. It's important that we have the right stock holding to service those customers. So the next slide is just a little mini kind of case study or a little bit of insight as to the Southeast. So a couple of questions I had from shareholders a few months ago was Ipswich was a relatively new site.

Operator

So it seems strange that you're perhaps consolidating that and moving to a different location. So I thought it'd be useful just to illustrate some of the benefits of these changes in the network by just focusing on that Southeast area. So the previous map showed quite a lot of red dots, which is the sort of inherited distribution centers, and they were based around the regional structure of the business. But as you might imagine, as you move to a UK wide distribution network, you need those distribution centers to be more central and to be better located to service your customers. So this slide here talks to a new site that we've opened in Raleigh and Essex much closer to the London conurbation and to service our customers in the Southeast.

Operator

So as a result of moving to a new site and closing our facility that was in Ipswich, it's meant that we've been able to move our stock and our service close to customers, which gives them a better service. It's given us a more efficient footprint, so we're able to offer service to customers from a smaller location, which has meant that we've got slightly lower operating costs, but also it meant that we're able to free up that capital from the site in Ipswich and return those funds to the business. So all in all, better service, lower cost to serve and freed up capital. And that in a nutshell is the insight that we've been able to give for this one change as we move across the network looking at other opportunities. The third element of the transformation plan is this sort of back office piece.

Operator

And although that may now sound the most exciting part of the change, I think one of the areas that I wanted to just dwell on is around this sort of centralized approach to product list and ranging. So now we can act as a single voice. Headlum can offer a single version of its product ranges. We can remove the duplication that came from having multiple businesses effectively offering the same products there. And it means that we can act as one, act as one business offering products, but also importantly acting as one business working with our suppliers to select those products, go deeper in ranging and ordering from suppliers.

Operator

It means suppliers can offer big production runs. They have certainty over Hedlund's ordering approach, and we can define the amount of stock we hold in certain locations. So it really does give us that kind of scale benefit from acting as a much larger business as we select the ranges we wish to offer. So good progress in the year. But I think the main focus for 2025 is getting control over this sort of acting as a single business and working with our suppliers to make sure we've got the right stock in-depth across the country.

Operator

So that's the sort of summary of what we've been doing around the transformation plan that overlays with the strategic initiatives that we'd already started. So just to give you a sort of sense of the scale and the timing of when these benefits might land, I'll just hand back to Adam who can talk you through the benefits page.

Speaker 1

Yes. Thanks, Chris. So in September, we set out the targets for annual profit improvement and the cash impact of the transformation plan. We've now upgraded those. So in the middle of this slide here, you can see our latest targets.

Speaker 1

So taking the annual profit improvement first of all, GBP 25,000,000 we're targeting from this once the transformation planning is fully complete. That's up from GBP 15,000,000 in September. And this is net of reinvestments. This £25,000,000 is net of any reinvestments we're making. So for example, we've invested in market leading remuneration packages for our sales teams.

Speaker 1

And this £25,000,000 principally comprises overhead and interest cost savings, but also there is some margin benefit in there from centralized buying and ranging. Moving on to cash. So we're targeting at least GBP 90,000,000 of one off cash benefit. That's up from GBP 70,000,000 in the guidance in September. That's a combination of disposal of property and then also working capital optimization.

Speaker 1

And then finally, the cash costs, the costs of executing and implementing this transformation plan, we expect to be around $30,000,000 and that is slightly higher than we guided in September and that reflects the additional projects that we've identified to find additional savings and cash benefits. And those one off cash costs, they include things like restructuring, relocation costs, fit out of new sites, advisory costs as well as a significant investment in point of sale materials, which Chris mentioned. So just to give you a bit of an indication on how that how those benefits phase in over the next few years. And on this slide, we just set that out through from 2024 to 2027. Profit benefit of $25,000,000 as I mentioned $25,000,000 as I mentioned earlier, none of that in 2024.

Speaker 1

We're starting to see that realized in 2025, and we're targeting $10,000,000 in the current year and getting to a run rate of CHF 25,000,000 in about two years' time, so in 2027 have the full CHF 25,000,000 annual profit benefit. Cash, we generated CHF 57,000,000 of this in 2024. I've taken this from halfway through 2024, which is when we launched the transformation plan. So from that point onwards, $57,000,000 of cash benefit in the second half of last year. We're targeting to get to cumulatively at least $80,000,000 by the end of this year and then GBP 90,000,000 plus by the end of next year.

Speaker 1

And then the cumulative one off cash costs GBP 30,000,000 in total, GBP 9,000,000 spent in the second half of last year, another GBP 10,000,000 or so this year and then the rest spread over the next couple of years. I'll hand you back to Chris for outlook and summary.

Operator

Thanks, Adam. So just a couple of slides sort of closing out the presentation really. So if I just turn to the first one, which is sort of short term outlook. Look, we're not going to get a helping hand, it seems, at the moment from a market recovery. And when you look at the macro factors that Adam outlined at the start of the presentation, it would suggest that we're going to see and the expectation in the market is that there will be a modest recovery at some point in 2025.

Operator

But it does feel like we've been saying that for some time. The certainly, the housing transactions, which is probably the key piece of data, has flipped to positive movement in the second half of last year. As I said, that just needs a little bit of consumer confidence behind it, which will trigger that kind of growth piece. So we're expecting the market to return to growth at some point this year, but the timing of that remains uncertain. So it is important that we now start to see the benefits of the transformation plan and strategic initiatives that we've outlined previously starting to deliver.

Operator

And I think it's important that we can see that return to profitability and that recovery in the business regardless of that sort of scale of the market recovery. And I think that's a key part to the transformation plan that we've outlined is just focusing on those health help measures, doing the things that we know we can control, and the market will at some point undoubtedly recover. So if we just look at this sort of longer term outlook, as I said, it's important that we keep going with those strategic initiatives. It's showing some growth. So Trade Counters, as Adam mentioned earlier, we will have completed the investment phase of the Trade Counter rollout program this year.

Operator

That means we'll start to then see an improvement in the drop through profitability of the revenue that comes from the maturity of those types of initiatives. The transformation plan, which is now gathering pace, and we'll start to see that million in year benefit to profitability this year rising to million over the next couple of years. And at some point, market recovery. Now as I said, we're not necessarily baking in or expecting a large element of market recovery, but we should see that return to some sort of modest growth this year and perhaps a little bit more beyond that. So that's how we see the outlook.

Operator

And it's important that we get a business that's in a more efficient, cost effective shape that can drive the business back to profitability. And then when market recovery does happen, we can see that driving the business on. So last slide for me then before we move to questions. It's

Speaker 1

just

Operator

a summary, and we shared this at the start. I think it's great to see the transformation plan landing, going well and given us the confidence to increase the guidance around the benefit in terms of P and L and cash that that will bring us. We have seen growth coming through from the initiatives, the strategic initiatives we started a little while ago, and we need that to continue as we get to maturity points on the strategy. And we stay in control of the things we can control. Now we can't control the market, but what we can do is invest in the areas of the business that we know is going to give us the opportunity to take market share, to make our business more cost effective, more efficient, and then take advantage of the market when it does come back.

Operator

So yes, the market has weighed heavily on our performance in the short term, but we do expect that to turn around in the medium term. So thanks for listening into our presentation this morning, and we can now move to some questions.

Speaker 2

Charles Hall from Peel Hunt. Huge amount of change in that transformation plan, which is ongoing. Chris, could you just give us a feel for the impact of that transformation plan as you go through it in terms of the impact on your employees, what the customers are seeing, so customer service and customer satisfaction?

Operator

Yes.

Speaker 2

And also have you seen any disruption from it either in your like for like sales numbers or the short term disruption on profits?

Operator

Yes. Yes. I think one of the things we guarded against, I guess, when we went into the transformation plan, certainly on this front office part that I described, when we're trying to transform a business that's been this way for twenty, twenty five years, sort of breaking something and putting it back together in a way that hadn't been done before. I was concerned how customers would react. And the reality is they've been very supportive, very understanding of the change.

Operator

But of course, they still want service to continue. They still expect us to offer the great service we have. So I think what's landed well, customers and our sales teams have understood it. I think it was helpful to us that we were able to preserve customers' terms through that, give them reassurance that they were accessing the same level of credit that they had before, the same great prices and the same access to effectively a broader range of products they had before. So they were sort of reassured.

Operator

Our sales teams were we did have some cost reductions as a result, but the sales teams that we've got with us, we're able to invest in better packages. So they've had more confidence, they're better paid, no one encroaching on their territory from Hedland, which perhaps was a feature of the past. So I think that's gone pretty well. On the service side, we do get blips when you close a big site and you open a new site. There is a period of transition.

Operator

And I think, as you might imagine, certainly in January, I think there was a feature of closing an Ipswich site, opening a Railey site. And that took us a few weeks to get up to speed. I wrote to customers to say to them, we're going through this process. We moved our service model to forty eight hours instead of twenty four hours just to accommodate that. Customers understood that.

Operator

And at the February, we've moved back to a twenty four hour service. So I think you do get little ripples of impact on customer service. And And it's important that we communicate that when it happens. And then we got to scull it back to that great service again. So since then, we've seen in March a return to our sort of normal service model, which has gone well.

Operator

So that's good to see. And I think it's just a feature of as and when we make changes to the network, I think we just got to recognize that there is an impact when we do these things. But this is all for the future good, and our customers understand that. And we just have to be honest and open about the changes we're going through.

Speaker 2

And secondly, on market share, I think overall you say you're pretty flat in market share, but you're gaining share in larger customers and have lost a bit of share in the regional distribution side. Do you want to just comment on market share, Jeremy, and how you

Operator

see Yes. We spend a bit of time trying to understand the market, and I put that slide up at the start around the size of the opportunity in the marketplace. So it's important that we can track the performance that we have as a business in the whole market, but also in the segments that we operate. And as you rightly say, we've as we've been focusing on growth in certain areas, we've been transforming the way that we go to service our traditional customers, if you like. And that's the area that we've lost a little bit of share, I think.

Operator

Now our overall position, as you rightly say, is maintained. But why is it we're losing share in that sort of part of the marketplace? There's a number of factors. We've it's a very competitive part of the marketplace. And particularly where demand is scarce, there is a bit of a pressure point for customers trying to get the best deal and saving pennies here and there.

Operator

And there's a bit of price pressure in that part of the marketplace. We've got a couple of competitors who have been targeting that as their only real customer segment to go after. And as I said, it's important, therefore, that we reinvest in that segment. That is the biggest part of our business, and we offer the best service. We survey our customers' views on service and price and various other attributes in the market, and we're consistently seen as the best service provider.

Operator

So we need to harness that, invest in it, and that's part of the reason why we're putting out a new POS refresh and launching new products this year. It was difficult to do it in the last year or so because of the changes we're going through. It would have been a bit strange for us to have launched a lot of new POS and a lot of new products just at the point that we consolidate all those brands away. So we sort of had a bit of a pause on that, but now we're acting as a single business. It means that we can actually invest in that POS in a much more meaningful way to have a better impact on the market.

Operator

So I think for us, '25 is around just stabilizing and perhaps recovering some of the market share in that part that we've suffered from a little bit in the last year or so.

Speaker 2

Got it. And lastly, Adam, gross margin down 180 basis points last year. How much of that was one off in terms of things like stock write downs? And how much do you expect the gross margin to improve in 2025 going on?

Speaker 1

Yes. So the biggest single factor was the accelerated heightened level of stock clearance we did in the year. And that, I would expect to be that as a one off in 2024. So we push through quite a lot in readiness for site closures like Ipswich and then one of the sites in Scotland. So I don't expect to repeat to that.

Speaker 1

Some of it mix, etcetera, is kind of semi permanent. The rebates bit as volumes recover, I would expect that bit will unwind, but not in the year. It will probably take a few years. It will be in line with market recovery kind of thing. So to answer your question, I would expect some recovery in gross margin this year, not all of the 180 basis points, some movement back towards where we were in previous years.

Speaker 2

Perfect. Thanks very much.

Speaker 3

We have a written question from Mark Fertiades from Canaccord. You ended the year with 76 trade counters. Are all of these now invested in the latest format? Can you remind us of the expected profit contribution on a mature site based on the £2,000,000 expected revenue per site?

Operator

Yes. I don't mind answering that one. So the vast majority, we've only got a handful of those 76 that remain to be invested in. And as I said earlier, we expect the investment phase and the rollout of those sites to be completed around the middle of this year. So maybe around July, maybe slightly later, we expect us to have completed that initial phase.

Operator

We'll probably end up with about 83 sites at that point. We anticipate on average, they'll be generating around £2,000,000 a year, and we expect that that sort of level there around about a 10% operating margin. So there will be a margin enhancing part of the business once they reach maturity. But as I described previously, once you open a site, a new site, you open with zero sales, but you've got the costs. And therefore, you do have this period of drag while you open a new number of sites that drags the performance of the business down.

Operator

And in some cases, you get the revenue coming through, but of course, the revenue is not yet up to a point where we can contribute to profitability. So the investment phase will end, which means that drag will start to be reduced, and then we'll start to see the contribution coming through from trade counters as they reach maturity. Maturity point on trade counters can be anywhere from two to five years depending on how quickly it can move through the revenue cycle. Some of our trade counters do actually do much more like 4,000,000 a year, so they're much larger. But as we discussed previously, some of the trade counters were down at around GBP 1,000,000 a year.

Operator

So what he has been pleasing to see is the sites we've invested in have outperformed the ones that are uninvested. And as those have nearly dried up now, we're starting to see these the higher levels of revenue growth come through. And in fact, last month was the highest trade counter revenue we've seen ever. So they're starting to generate that kind of pull through we expected. Any other questions?

Operator

It doesn't look like we've got any more questions.

Speaker 2

No?

Operator

Okay. Well, that brings us to the end of the presentation. Thank you for listening in and contributing to questions as well.

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Earnings Conference Call
Headlam Group H2 2024
00:00 / 00:00