Good morning, everyone, and a warm welcome to those of you here with us today and to those watching online later. Thanks for making the time.

I know many of you will have been on results calls all week, we will aim to make this one worth your time. I'm here with John Roberts, our founder and Chief Exec, and between us, we're going to take you through what it means and where we go from here.

A quick word on structure: I'm going to take you through the financial and operational performance, the numbers and the story behind them. John's then going to pick up strategy, our customers, our markets, and the moats we've been building.

We'll finish, as always, with questions and answers. A year of delivery is the headline, let me take you through it.

FY 2026 was a year of delivery. We did what we said we'd do, and we did it through a tougher cost backdrop than any of us were planning for at the start of the year.

The headlines are: revenue was £1.27 billion, up 11.4%; adjusted profit before tax was £50.5 million, up 16%, at the top end of the £40 to £50 million range we gave you last June; free cash flow was £66.4 million, over 2.5 times last year. We ended the year with over £200 million of available liquidity made up of a cash balance of £81 million and an undrawn RCF of £120 million.

All of this resulted in a net funds position of £16.4 million, having started the year with net debt of £35.9 million. Profit is growing faster than revenue, cash is growing faster than profit, and the balance sheet has never been stronger.

The flywheel that John has talked about previously, and will return to later, is doing what he said it would do. I think it's worth me starting by walking back through the commitments we made last June.

We told you to expect £40 to £50 million of profit before tax, and we've delivered £50.5 million. We told you we'd convert that profit to cash; we have, £66.4 million of free cash flow.

We told you we'd absorb about £8.5 million of group costs from the April changes to National Insurance and the national minimum wage, and we have. We told you we'd fix or close Mobile, and we fixed it; it's now contributing profitably to the group.

We told you Magpie would integrate and turn profitable; it has, 18 months on, it's on an exit run rate of profitability. There were no adjusting items in the year, reported PBT is equal to adjusted PBT at £50.5 million.

Basic earnings per share were 6.36 pence, compared to 1.7 pence reported last year, or 5.7 pence on an adjusted basis. Broadly, we said we wanted to be reassuringly boring, and we have been.

On to the revenue lines. As I've said earlier, group revenue was £1.27 billion, up 11.4%, and that breaks down as follows: B2C retail revenue was £911 million, up 9.5%, and that growth is share-driven.

Our share of the MDA market grew by 6.8% to 17.1% of total market, with share growing faster in SDA and AV categories. About 720,000 new customers chose us in the year, taking our customer base to 13.3 million.

B2B revenue was down 11.9% to £103 million, and that's the annualization of the deliberate exit from the low-margin kitchen furniture work that we started in FY 2025, and that reset is now materially complete. Mobile revenue was down 18.4% to £77 million, which is the output of the pivot to Mobile profitability, and I'll come to that on the next slide.

Re-commerce was £119.5 million and up 180%, which is obviously the effect of the full year of Magpie consolidation versus a part year last time. Third-party logistics grew 9.2% to £33.3 million, where we leverage our existing network.

Recycling grew by 6.8% to £22.7 million, with volumes up, and this was partially offset by lower commodity prices, particularly on steel, as we flagged at H1 and hasn't recovered in H2 as we'd expected. Moving on to gross profit.

We delivered £316.1 million, which was up 14.5%, growing faster than revenue at a 25% margin, and this was up 0.7 percentage points on last year. There are three things to call out as to how we get from FY 2025 to FY 2026: the single biggest contributor was the pivot to profit in Mobile; the second was the full-year inclusion of Magpie at a higher margin mix than the rest of the business; and third was that core retail gross margin was slightly up, which helps offset the lower average selling prices we saw across the year.

This was a combination of market dynamics and us sharing economics in the form of great prices with our member base, and we'd expect to see more of this into the future as we continue with our principle of scaled economies shared. We saw some partial offsets in labor inflation in logistics and the lower commodity prices in recycling that I just mentioned.

On Mobile specifically, and I'll keep this brief because John will cover it later in his section, it's important to know it's now a turnaround story rather than a problem story. Revenue is down by £17 million by design, but the business is now contributing profitably to the group.

At H1, I said margin was lumpy and bumpy; H2 has been materially cleaner. Our focus is now on concluding longer-term agreements with the networks to give us economic certainty into FY 2027 and beyond.

As we look to the future, particularly on Switch24 and the MVNO, Switch24 launched in H2; we had some supply constraints, which affected the period, and we still have work to do to simplify the customer messaging. We have soft-launched our own MVNO, AO Mobile, and look forward to gradually releasing it to more customers, and John will take us through how we see that developing.

On to the cost base: advertising and marketing was £53.5 million, up £9.1 million on the year. About £3.5 million of that is the full-year effect of Magpie; about £1 million of that increase is brand expenditure.

The biggest piece, £8.4 million, is PPC on ao.com, where we leaned harder into direct customer acquisition when the unit economics justified it. This was partially offset by about £4 million of reduction in Mobile, where we pulled back from those unprofitable connections.

Warehousing was £75.1 million, up £13.1 million year on year. £7.3 million of that is Magpie; the rest is volume and labor cost increases.

About 30% of the warehouse cost is infrastructure, about 70% is labor, which is where the government-driven inflation lands the hardest. Other admin costs were £138.2 million, up £12.5 million.

About £11 million of that is the full-year impact of Magpie; the rest is labor inflation, which in total was about £8.5 million of group costs from the April changes to National Insurance and the national minimum wage, as well as continued investment in our ERP program, significantly offset by offshoring and rightsizing. We absorbed that and still delivered at the top end of the range.

On the self-help side, our offshoring program saved about £2 million in the year, which is about £4 million on an annualized basis. That lower in-year figure reflects phasing and the necessary dual running costs whilst we were learning.

We've now got about 150 colleagues based in South Africa, and we expect the majority of our customer engagement operations to be overseas by the end of FY 2027. We've also re-engineered warehouse shift patterns, team structures, and our returns operation, and we'll come on to robotics on the next slide.

I'll repeat something I said at H1 because it's worth repeating: we will never take a cost saving that compromises our service standards. Our Trustpilot rating of 4.9 out of 5 across over a million reviews is not something we would ever trade for short-term margin.

Our operational foundations matter for what comes next, let me give you a bit of operational color because some of this isn't in the headline numbers. Logistics first: we have about 2 million square feet of warehousing for products and about 17 last-mile home delivery depots.

The fleet includes about 800 delivery trucks and a national network of about 260 primary logistics trailers, which enables the miracle of 4.9 out of 5 on a million Trustpilot reviews on a national, next-day, seven-day-a-week delivery operation. We added 160 new delivery vehicles in the year, including 10 electric vans.

We'll replace about 360 more vehicles in FY 2027, and that'll be on hire purchase. The longer-term direction for our trunking fleet is unclear as the economic and operational reliability of new lower-carbon technology develops.

On hedging, for cost certainty into FY 2027, we've got about 80% of our expected fuel usage hedged through to March '27, and substantially all of our electricity for the group fixed through to October '27. On robotics, during the year, we carried out a small-scale exploratory trial, and we will expand this in FY 2027 to include testing in a live operational setting.

John will pick up the broader strategic context on this in his section. On our ERP program, we spent £3.8 million in the year against £2 million in the previous financial year, and we expect that to be nearer £7 million in FY 2027.

The second phase of our program, which is the replacement of our warehouse management system, is expected to complete during FY 2028. We've also replaced our contact center platform, which didn't go as smoothly as we'd hoped, but it is now in, and we look forward to building AI solutions on top of it that will improve customer experience and in time lower costs.

In recycling, we processed 1.6 million major domestic appliances at our Telford facility in the year, up from 1.17 million last year, and that takes us to 10 million products recycled since we opened the facility in 2016. Now, this is the slide I'm most pleased to talk about: free cash flow was £66.4 million, compared to £26.3 million last year; cash flow from operating activities of £95.7 million, up from £58 million.

Now, there's a timing piece to walk through on working capital. Net working capital was £46.8 million, compared to £66.6 million last year, and so that's an improvement of about £20 million.

At H1, I flagged we had about £39 million of timing inflow, which we expected to largely reverse in H2. It has, broadly, and the underlying year-on-year improvement is real, not a timing artifact.

Inventory days came down from 47 to 40. Within that, we deliberately reduced Mobile inventory by about £14 million as part of our pivot, and we increased core retail inventory by about £13 million to support range expansion and availability.

Growth gives us about half of the reduction, with the other half coming from phasing around the stock days calculation in the different business units. Importantly, it's a tighter overall position with the right shape underneath it.

Receivables were up £6.5 million, and we ended the year with cash of £81.3 million. Total available liquidity is of £201 million, and this was supported by our £120 million revolving credit facility, which remains fully undrawn and is in place until October 2028.

As I said at the start, we started the year with net debt of £35.9 million, and we ended it with net funds of £16.4 million, a £52 million swing in a single year on top of the £10 million buyback and the EBT purchase of £4.2 million. CapEx in the year was £6 million against £8.9 million last year, and this was mainly in our recycling facility.

It included the additional purchase of land that we'd previously been leasing. Asset finance lease additions were £22.3 million, and that was principally the vehicle refresh I spoke about.

If you look at our total investment in operational capacity, CapEx plus lease-funded, it's higher than the headline CapEx number suggests. Now, the balance sheet position is what enables the next conversation.

I want to be explicit about how we think about capital allocation because we now have a business that generates real cash, and how we deploy that matters. We have a simple framework with three priorities, in order: first, the balance sheet, we want it to be strong, resilient, and flexible.

We don't manage to a fixed leverage target, and we're comfortable moving between net funds and modest net debt depending on the investment needs and the cycle. What we won't do is trade liquidity for short-term optionality; we want enough headroom to trade confidently through whatever the cycle throws at us.

Second, investment in the business, but only where the returns justify it. Every meaningful project is assessed against our cost of capital with disciplined criteria around payback and strategic fit: logistics, technology, and infrastructure.

On a case-by-case basis, we'll review M&A opportunities where it's consistent with the strategy and enhances our capabilities. If a project doesn't clear the bar, we won't do it.

Then third, returning surplus capital to our shareholders. Where we generate cash above what the balance sheet needs and what the business can sensibly deploy, that capital goes back.

Our preference is share buybacks where they represent an attractive return relative to our cost of capital, and special dividends where appropriate. The aim is to be consistent and flexible, not rigid or formulaic.

We completed our first-ever share buyback in the year, £10 million, which equates to about 10 million shares, and we also funded the EBT with £4.2 million to satisfy share schemes. Reflecting our strong cash generation in FY 2026, and the discipline of the framework I've just described, we have today announced an intention of a further £20 million of returns to shareholders: a special dividend of £10 million and a new £10 million share buyback, both to commence following the circulation of the annual report.

Both are the natural output of the framework. We've got a balance sheet in its strongest ever, an investment program including potential M&A that we're funding comfortably from operating cash, and surplus cash generation returned to shareholders.

Looking forward, the external environment remains uncertain. Geopolitical pressures continue, inflation in input costs and on the consumer haven't gone away, and consequently, consumer confidence is subdued.

Our guidance for FY 2027 is for profit before tax to be in line with current market consensus and with continued progress towards our medium-term 5% PBT margin target. The things that we've got working for us in FY 2027: we expect to continue to gain share in core retail; we'll have a full year of Mobile profitability; a full year of Magpie profitability and more synergies to pursue; and offshore savings annualizing to about £4 million on a run rate basis.

The costs we're absorbing: we've got further inflationary pressure from labor, stepped-up investment in our ERP program, the fleet refresh, and the short-term cost of robotics trials. We're committed to the principle of scaled economies shared, and so on the journey to our 5% PBT target, some of the efficiency gains we deliver will necessarily be shared en route with our customers.

We're expanding our membership promise such that now our members always pay less. John will talk more about this later, but for now, we know the cost will be at least 20 bps of gross margin.

On a combined basis across capital expenditure and asset financing, we expect to invest about £29 million in FY 2027, with £7 million of this being traditional CapEx across recycling and technology, including robotics and infrastructure, and a further £22 million being the refresh of over 360 vehicles in our logistics business, and that'll be done by asset finance. One last point: our effective tax rate for the year was 28.9% against the UK corporation tax rate of 25%, and the gap is driven by the IFRS 2 share-based payment add-back, where we don't get a corresponding corporation tax deduction.

We've assessed our exposure under Pillar Two and don't expect any material impact. Cash tax in FY 2027 will reflect normal UK corporation tax rates.

That's the numerical picture: a year of delivery against tougher conditions than we were planning for; a balance sheet in its strongest position ever; a framework for returning capital that we're now actively using; and an outlook that keeps us on our path to our medium-term margin target. I'll hand over to John now to talk about turning that delivery into something more: the strategy, the customer, the moats, and the runway in front of us.

Thanks.

Thanks, Mark. I think it's fair to say the numbers speak for themselves.

What I'll do now is step back from the numbers and talk about what they actually mean and where we're heading. Because profit doesn't happen by accident.

Revenue growth at this level doesn't happen by accident. A Trustpilot rating of 4.9 out of 5 across 1 million reviews certainly doesn't happen by accident or quickly.

What you've just heard from Mark is the output. I'm going to share with you more of the inputs and the engine that we continue to build.

For the last few years, I've been telling you that our model is working and gaining momentum. Today, I'm going to take you through just how deep the roots of that model now go and why I believe that the best of AO is yet to come.

Our strategy is built on a simple idea: scaled economies shared. We use our structural cost advantages to offer customers better value.

Better value builds loyalty, loyalty builds scale, scale strengthens our cost position, and around it goes. We've talked about this flywheel at the last set of results, and likely I'll continue to talk about it probably for about the next two decades.

Over the last 12 months, our revenue crossed £1.2 billion and profit before tax was over £50 million, and in our main retail business, we grew share. Critically, though, profit grew faster than revenue, and that is the flywheel working.

That is operating leverage, and that is exactly what the model was designed to do. None of this is luck; it is the compounding result of decisions we've been making consistently for years.

Some of those decisions are uncomfortable, some of them are expensive, and most of them took longer than we expected to, but that's how moats get built. The first moat is customer trust.

We now have over 1 million Trustpilot reviews at 4.9 out of 5. That is a world first.

When you think it's in a category where we step over customers' thresholds, we take away their old appliances, we install new ones, often within hours of the washing machine breaking down, that rating really is simply extraordinary. It matters strategically, not just reputationally, because if AI-driven shopping is increasingly informed by trusted signals, and that's certainly what we're seeing, then being Britain's most trusted electrical retailer is a very good place to start that AI revolution.

The second moat is operational excellence. Running a two-man home delivery network servicing every UK postcode seven days a week is genuinely hard.

The graveyard is full of businesses that have tried and failed. We do it at the highest quality standard in the world, and we do it as the lowest cost operator, and we do that while still growing.

That combination of world-class service at lowest cost is not a coincidence; it's a culture. Culture, as we all know, takes years to build, and it is almost impossible to copy.

The third moat is brand relationships. Getting global brands to supply us directly on terms that enable us to compete has taken years, in some cases over a decade.

I certainly know I've invested a lot of my liver in the process. Those relationships are now deep and reciprocal.

Those brands trust us with their premium products because we look after their customers properly and we add value to their brands. In reality, there are only a few retailers in the UK that hold these relationships at scale.

Three years ago, we launched AO membership. I was clear at the time that it wasn't a quick fix; I said it would take time, I said it would be uncertain, and I said it would take patience.

I was right, and I'm very glad that we applied our normal long-term lens. Today, every key membership metric continues to improve.

Members transact more frequently, and they give us a greater share of their electrical spend. They cost less to retain than they did to acquire, and they're increasingly buying across categories, not just major domestic appliances.

That last point is important: when a member buys their washing machine from us, and then their laptop, and then their phone, that is scaled economies shared working exactly as it was designed. We get more of their wallet, they get more of our value, everybody wins.

Membership is not a loyalty scheme that's just been bolted onto a retail business; it's the architecture of what AO is becoming, and I've never been more convinced that we're on the right track. I know you would all love to see all the data under that bonnet, but we continue to believe that the value that we're building is very commercially sensitive.

For now, you will see that and continue to see that in growth, profit, and cash. 18 months ago, we welcomed musicMagpie to the AO family, and we're really pleased with progress.

We've taken a business together with the team there that at a PBT level was losing a run rate of £6 million per year and is now run rate profitable on an annualized basis. That's not because all the systems just plugged in together perfectly on day one—they rarely do—but it was because the cultures fitted.

Culture, as I said earlier, is the really hard bit. One key thing we've been able to do is launch a partnership with Timpson, and that lets customers trade in tech for instant cash at over 1,300 locations across the high street.

That is genuinely new and real convenience that's transformative for Magpie. The bigger opportunity is what the capability we bought unlocks for the broader AO ecosystem.

Trade-in reduces the effective cost of a new purchase. Lower effective cost drives higher conversion.

Higher conversion drives greater frequency, and greater frequency deepens membership value. It's another flywheel within a flywheel, and it really is only just getting started, it is material upside for us for the future for both Magpie and the AO retail business.

Mobile has been a tough chapter for us, and I've been clear about that over the last few years. The postpaid market has contracted, consumer behavior has shifted, and the economics of bundled contracts have been under real pressure.

We faced that reality, though, early. We worked closely with our network partners in O2, Three, and Vodafone to either reshape the category into something that works for everyone or close it in an orderly way.

I'm pleased to tell you that that focus and creativity on all sides has delivered a meaningful improvement, and the Mobile business enters the new financial year now profitable. If that changes, we'll be pragmatic: we'll exit without drama or any material cost.

I think that is AO doing what we do best: seeing things clearly and acting decisively. The more exciting part of the Mobile story is what we're building, not what we fixed.

Switch24 and AO Mobile are big pieces of the strategic jigsaw falling into place. Switch24 is genuinely great value for customers: you pay for the depreciation of the handset and nothing else, and you get a new phone every 24 months.

I am absolutely delighted with the proposition. However, we have to be honest that it hasn't landed quite yet the way that we expected it to.

The reason, when we look back at it, is quite straightforward: customers weren't actively searching for it in Switch24 within the Mobile category, and they're still not. The proposition, though, is compelling once you understand it, but the customer journey at launch was more complex than it needed to be.

We're working hard within the constraints that we have of the FCA regulations to simplify the experience. As Da Vinci said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."

Right now, we're not quite sophisticated enough. At the same time, we underestimated how important the airtime offering would be alongside the handset.

The share of people whose main mobile plan is SIM-only has grown from 35% to 42%. Handset-only sales, meanwhile, even of the latest flagship devices, represent only about 46% of the total of mobile transactions.

Handset-only sales naturally skew towards a very specific customer, which is affluent, early adopters who are already more predisposed to buy outright. That's not mass market, and the handset-only market is to a significant degree stagnant.

These days, people need a genuinely compelling reason to change their phone. Without airtime alongside, Switch24 wasn't giving enough people that reason.

AO Mobile changes that, we think, entirely. When we put the airtime and the handset together, AO Mobile with Switch24, we create the combined value that we'd always intended.

So £29 a month for the latest iPhone 17 with effectively an all-you-can-eat SIM is truly market-leading and compelling. For context in that, the cheapest unlimited SIM on EE, for example, is currently £35 a month, and that doesn't include a phone.

Given that there are three SIMs per UK household, the saving for AO members is huge. They're also then well placed to embrace the latest tech and the AI revolution by having the latest tech in their hands.

With constant media reports about the cost of living, the strait of Hormuz, rising interest rates, and energy costs, with energy costs estimated to rise by about £220 per year, I think this is another brilliant example of AO engineering our scaled economies to share with our members at a time when they need it most. I think it'll make a real difference to people.

I believe the current model of buying the latest technology outright through your mobile phone bill will soon look as outdated today as Blockbuster Video does. We're early, though, and we know that, but I would far rather be early and course-correct on this one than be late and playing catch-up.

A customer who takes Switch24 and joins AO Mobile is, in my view, a member for life. We will give them the lowest price forever on their mobile, and in return, they give us their share of wallet on everything else.

That is the stickiest, most valuable customer relationship that we will have ever built. I'll make you a £1 bet, because you all know how much I like my £1 bets, that when we look back in 5 to 10 years, this will be how people access the latest tech, in exactly the same way that PCP transformed how 80% of people now finance new car purchases.

Now let me turn to the external environment and to what we're doing about it. You all know that we have a government that does not understand or value business, and most disappointingly makes no effort to understand or appreciate the value that great businesses generate.

They're unwilling to tackle any of the difficult decisions of the day, preferring to steer us as a nation into dependence and unaffordable benefits in exchange for voting for that paymaster. The results of this is basically higher costs at every turn for businesses.

National minimum wage and employer National Insurance rises increase costs on businesses, and the recent labor market changes reduce the flexibility that businesses have historically relied upon. We're not immune to that, as pretty much no business is.

Here is what I know: at exactly the moment that costs are rising, the capability of AI, automation, and robotics is accelerating, and the cost of that technology is falling. We're taking a parallel approach: on one track, we're capturing the immediate productivity and efficiency wins that AI can deliver today, as you would expect us to.

We have multiple AI projects impacting the business now in flight, from the simple rollout of Copilot to our knowledge workers to building on the capabilities of the new telephony system that Mark mentioned, and a number of customer-facing innovations that will improve their journey through our website. Over time, there will be clear cost savings by using AI to automate repetitive tasks that don't add value.

Personally, I'm much more excited about how it can revolutionize customer experience and amplify growth opportunities, of which we have many. On the other track, we are reimagining the whole business from first principles with AI at its core.

What does AO look like if we were to build it again from scratch today? That's the question that we're asking ourselves.

I won't pretend to have all the answers yet, because nobody does. The pace of change in AI is such that certainty is the wrong ambition.

We have always been comfortable with saying, "I don't know," while still moving ahead at AO speed. What I can tell you concretely is that our offshoring program in South Africa is delivering.

Around 150 roles have now moved there, and it took time to get it right: to recruit, to train people, and critically, to embed the AO culture. Mark has already made this point, but it bears repeating for absolute clarity: we will never, ever take a cost saving that compromises our service standards.

We're now out of the learning phase and into business as usual, and the cost base is materially lower. The service quality is excellent, and the flexibility we have gained is significant.

Then there's robotics, and I'm really excited about what this can do for our business. In the same way that AI is going through inflection points, cars are probably one of the most advanced of the physical applications of that.

Whilst clearly, as ever in the UK, we'll miss pretty much every opportunity possible to be an early adopter of this stuff, Waymo self-driving cars are now a pretty normal and ubiquitous form of travel in many states across America, driving along roads safely at 50 mph, dealing with dynamic, real-world eventuality, making critical, life-saving decisions in real time on the road without human intervention. In 2022, AI had an event horizon with the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT-3.

In the last few weeks, NVIDIA has launched Cosmos 3, which I believe will be for robotics what ChatGPT-3 did for large language models. When people hear warehouse automation, they often think of something like this.

Yes, that's a phenomenal piece of engineering, but it's not what we're doing. It's not right for our business, our product range, or our model.

What we're doing is something much more like this: this is much more flexible, relatively low-CapEx, software-driven solution that has application across multiple formats and for many of our product types. It's going to be built to work with our operation, not to replace it with something entirely new.

As Mark mentioned earlier, we've been testing this for a while now, and we have seen capability improve and costs reduce. Cosmos 3 should turbocharge both capability up and costs down over the next few years to create ever more scaled economies to share with our customers.

To conclude, last year was genuinely one to be proud of: sales over £1.2 billion, profit over £50 million, market share growing, a balance sheet at its strongest ever, and over a million reviews at 4.9 out of 5. The business is now generating real cash, which gives us optionality to invest, to grow, and to return surplus capital.

Underneath all of this is a flywheel that is working, accelerating, and compounding. We have meaningful moats, a membership model that is coming of age, a re-commerce business that is run rate profitable and full of potential, a Mobile proposition that is finally, genuinely exciting, and an AI strategy that is grounded, moving at pace, and realistic, not hyped.

None of this happened quickly, and none of it happened by accident. Building something that lasts, something that competitors can't easily replicate, takes time, investment, and patience.

I've said that before, and I inevitably will say it again. I have never been more confident that we have the right strategy, and I am deeply grateful, as I always am, to every AOer, every trading partner, every customer, and every one of you for being part of this journey.

Thank you. Before we move to questions, on housekeeping, if you can take the microphone as normal and before asking a question state name and organization so that anyone who's watching online can hear clearly.

Andy, would you like to go first?

Sure.

We always start with

9:15 it was supposed to be, there's 9:45 now. No, no, I'm joking.

I've

got a delivery from AO coming today, actually. It's going to be 15 more minutes, I can start complaining then, or not, hopefully.

A whole bunch of moving parts in the P&L in the year ahead. Not to go over all of the things that you flagged there, but inflation, ERP, trading down, and the non-fixed element of fuel on one side; the offshoring annualization, Mobile profit, Magpie profit on the other side of things.

There's a whole load of moving parts there. It sort of feels like they broadly net off-ish this year, such that the underlying growth that consensus implies is sort of underlying-ish.

Yeah. I guess two questions really coming from that: one, well, you've already confirmed that they sort of broadly net off this year, but then those factors aren't always going to net off, are they?

How do you think about managing profit growth over a year-to-year basis when you're doing £1 billion and whatever of revenue and you're trying to land it within a few million quid? How do you feel about that?

Are we going to have years where it's a bit more volatile, say, in terms of delivery? I guess that's my first question.

Yeah. Look, you're right that broadly all that stuff nets off and that the growth then delivers the underlying profit growth that sort of the market's expecting.

I think there will be things like the investment in our ERP program, and that is a mix of revenue costs and there'll be a little bit of it that's capitalized as well. There will be things that we do over time that means some of our profit number might move a little bit, and we'll happily talk to you about that in advance and try and get you to sort of understand the journey that we're on.

We've set ourselves a medium-term target of 5%. We're going to continue to progress towards that, and as we grow the business, we should get closer and closer to that 5% and then onto our longer-term target that we've set out after that.

The direction of travel will be that way. Some years we'll have some lumps and bumps in it, and we'll try and give you the visibility, but we do expect that growth continues to drive an increase in our profit growth.

Sorry, Andy, I would add to that as well that if you sort of think back to 2022 coming out of COVID and our pivot to profit, what we did then was when we look onto the horizon, it was fix or close anything that isn't making money or generating cash, so that was that program. Then when you look at our strategic house, if you like, and the flywheel, it was bring all the pieces of that jigsaw together.

That's all done. We have no problem areas of the business; we have no turnarounds, we have nothing to fix.

This is now about head down and drive, and we've got loads of, as I said before, flywheels within flywheels, and growth opportunities, and things that we've not done. We've got huge re-commerce opportunities that we've not plugged into ao.com yet.

What will it do? I don't know, because we've not plugged it in yet.

There's loads of initiatives across the business to drive growth, and at the same time, there's loads of initiatives to take cost out. It isn't one big silver bullet; there's loads of contributors that will make that happen.

The biggest thing for me is the strategic jigsaw is in place, and the stickiness of that just keeps driving the flywheel.

Great stuff, thanks. The capital return, £20 million additional, good to see that.

50/50 between special and buyback. Interested as to how you came to that, why you're not doing it all buyback, as an example?

I think there's two things there: is that the different returns appeal to different categories of shareholders, and so we think it is important to address both of those. The other one on why not just all buyback as the default, the reality is that our last £10 million buyback probably took about nine months to deliver.

We wanted to return 20, not 10.

That makes perfect sense, yeah. Fair point, yeah.

Then the last one, sorry, left the most boring one till last, I'm afraid. £22 million on the vehicle refresh in the year ahead, can you just sort of help us how that's going to play through well, we sort of know on the balance sheet, but how it's going to play through balance sheet and P&L?

P&L, there won't be a big impact. It's all replacing existing vehicles, the cost of vehicles has probably gone up slightly, and so the run rate of the cost will go up slightly, but it is nothing that

What about the impact on the interest line?

No. Effectively, they will all be done on asset finance, it doesn't actually go through the CapEx line, but it is on sort of the IFRS 16 piece.

Fine. All right.

Pretty straightforward then. Thanks.

Cheers. John Stevenson from Peel Hunt.

A couple of questions as well, please. Just start on credit-enabled sales.

You've quoted the credit penetration. Can you talk about how that's grown over the last couple of years, what the blocks are, I guess, and to what extent your credit customers are converting into kind of five-star members, because this seems like an obvious kind of conversion place?

Secondly, just picking up on Andy's point on the cash, in my model, you're going to be over £200 million of net cash in a couple of years' time, three years' time. There's potentially a lot more coming out.

Do you see anything from a capital point of view that would stop that happening? It feels like the cash returns are going to become more

I'll take the second question first if you like. No.

I think, in terms of the profile of the cash generation, I don't see anything that sort of makes a big change to that. We've talked about our allocation policy that, we've got make sure the balance sheet's strong, that we will, consider internal investment projects and M&A.

We might do a little bit more of that. In terms of the big macro piece on the fundamental assumption on the cash flows, then no, I think, we probably broadly agree with you, which is why we've sort of set out the allocation framework today.

As far as the AO Finance is concerned, you won't be surprised to know that I'm not going to give you the number of how many of them are members, but, they're some of our best loyal customers, and incredibly cost-effective to market to. We have now over £1 billion of available to spend in their accounts.

It's just very much business as usual; there's no great step change, it is just a progression along the way. Okay.

Last one, just on the automation piece: you're starting testing, you've got, I think, £40 to £50 million of kind of overall sort of warehouse costs. How do you, whether it's just keeping that down as you scale or whichever way you sort of think about it, how quickly do you think you can start to have an impact?

We don't know, but the direction of travel is firmly towards robots moving things around rather than people moving things around. It's just as simple as that.

Costs walk into businesses on legs; those legs are getting more expensive and less flexible. The tech is getting better, and the cost of it's getting cheaper.

We've reached that inflection point. That is firmly the direction of travel.

It wouldn't surprise me in the short term if that's more of a cost, actually, than a saving as we learn how to scale that. It's just uncertain at the minute, but there's nothing massive or material in it; it's much more of a direction of travel.

Caroline just behind you.

Morning. Caroline Gulliver from Equity Development.

I just wanted to pick up on something you just mentioned around your customer data lake, effectively. Now you've got your five-star membership, you're obviously collecting quite a lot of good data, and in particular that cross-purchase from the washing machine to the TV, etc., to the computer and the mobile.

When you look at your marketing, how much personalized marketing are you doing now? At what point in the journeys do they start to buy other categories?

Could you just link that to the fact that you talked about SDA and audiovisual growing faster than MDA, particularly doing well, have you seen a pickup in TVs ahead of the World Cup, that kind of thing? Are there any particular categories you would call out where you feel like you're particularly winning share?

I've just spent an hour doing press calls talking about TVs and the World Cup. Yes, TV sales, you won't be surprised to know, in May because of the World Cup are up, but again it's not big news; I wouldn't want to get distracted on that.

On your question on personalization and the phrase of data lake, a data lake is a phrase that I hear a lot and how AI is going to be able to drive everything that goes with it. If I was to score us out of 10 on how good are we at personalization at the minute, I would score us probably a 2 or a 3 out of 10.

On the one side that's not great; on the other side, that's a ton of opportunity. Yes, we've got the data, and we are getting to the final stages of what has been a very long project to be able to harness all that data.

Frankly, it's an education process. We are very well known for major domestic appliances; we are increasingly known for TVs.

That is just a time and education piece with our members. We in the non-MDA category this is true across all categories, but particularly in non-MDA categories—we massively over-index our share in our member base.

When we look at the multiple category purchases is materially higher in our member base, and it wouldn't surprise you to know that. Overall, it is just firmly direction of travel.

I always say the dirty secret about our businesses that nobody wakes up in the morning thinking the way to buy electricals is a problem. They go from zero on caring about it, when something breaks, suddenly they go instantly to 100.

I don't know what you're having delivered today, Andy, but

Microwave oven.

Not that serious

for Could be pretty serious. Probably is actually, in yours.

If your fridge breaks or if your phone breaks, then you go from 0 to 100 on the care scale really quickly. Then we fix that for you very quickly and brilliantly, and you forget about it very quickly, and you get on with your life.

In a low-frequency category, it takes time to educate people, and we're on that journey, and everything is working, and every metric is getting better. If we went and spent £50 million quid on TV advertising, I'm not sure how much it would certainly be a terrible return on investment, and I'm not sure how much it would accelerate it.

Thank you. Then just one quick question on offshoring.

You mentioned the annualization impact, but just in terms of you've obviously 150 people in South Africa or in Africa. Is there more opportunities to do more of that?

For sure, Mark said that We'll

continue doing it this year, and we are recruiting exclusively in our contact centers in South Africa at the moment, not in the UK.

Cool.

Hi. David Hughes at Shore Capital.

A couple of questions from me, please. Firstly, on the gross margin, obviously that progression was, a big driver of the improved profitability.

Is that mostly coming from better profitability at, Mobile and Magpie, or are you also seeing gross margin improvement in the core business and what's supporting that?

Most of that change is Magpie and Mobile. There is a small improvement in the retail business that's effectively offsetting a slight decrease in average selling prices.

That's broadly the delta, but most of the improvement is Magpie and Mobile.

Then secondly, you called out the million pounds in brand marketing. Are you seeing kind of improved brand awareness, improved kind of brand consideration on the back of that?

If you've got anything you can kind of share in terms of metrics or just at least directionally?

The unprompted brand consideration continues to improve. We're investing in interesting and different things.

For example, we now sponsor over 1,000 grassroots sports teams, and I think we spend about £500, about £0.5 million quid that we spend on that, which is difficult to measure overall, but we believe it plays to our brand. We're the biggest buyer of teddy bears in the country and continue to be, and it continues to resonate.

The only metric that we have for that on brand consideration is that wherever Bear is mentioned in a review, we have 100% 5 out of 5 rating. Other than that, I just think it speaks to the brand.

One of the things I actually love as a metric on it is just quite how many of them are traded on eBay. It's bonkers.

It's probably our drivers selling most of them, but the fact that people are buying them is incredible. We're not looking to just go and do brand spend on traditional TV advertising and those routes.

We'll try and get good bang for our buck, and we're quite willing to be a bit brave and quirky about how we do that, but all the brand metrics continue to improve.

Thank you.

Bruce? ]:

Bruce at [Langton?] .

I'm interested when you get weak consumers or surges of inflation and deflation, the changes within electricals markets are often very subtle in terms of consumers buying to a budget or lowering that budget. On top of that, we've got the presence of cheaper goods from China.

Could you just talk us through how that's affecting the business, if at all, how competition is reacting to protect profits on lower ticket prices, etc.? I'd

say I don't think we've seen anything massive or material on that. When you talk about cheaper Chinese goods, I'm not necessarily sure that actually plays.

If you look at brands like Haier, just had amazing success, and it's in at much more of a premium price point. If you look at Beko and Indesit as brands would be now 40% of laundry share, and, they're not Chinese-made.

If you look at Hisense on TVs, it's a reasonably premium product. We've got a bit of price deflation that is self-inflicted because of the value that we're delivering through the membership program, but other than that, sort of nothing to see here really, I think, would be my unless you've got anything, Mark.

We've probably seen a tiny bit of shift in refrigeration from sort of Korean manufacturers to Chinese manufacturers, and there is a bit of a price point difference there, but I think broadly, as John said, it's that we've seen a small bit of price deflation and it's a combination of a little bit of shift, but nothing significant, and the continued savings we pass on to the member base.

If I think about the point on the competitive landscape, I would expect, we've seen significant cost pressures, and, some of our bigger competitors, and particularly store-based competitors, will have had materially more cost pressures into their business than we've had. Electricals is not high margin.

I think we're probably now the most profitable global electrical retailer at scale, and so there just isn't it's not in there for people to be taking huge chunks out of everything.

Sorry, I've got a reload. Joybuy, how are you seeing them, any view on what they're doing and what they could do?

First one. Then second one, particularly when you were talking, John, you can really get the sense of how important you think membership and the stickiness that PCP and MVNO is going to sort of bring to the business and to the customer base.

How would you be feeling and how would you be looking at revenue growth going forwards if you were sitting here and hadn't started membership three years ago? Would we be looking at a 3% to 5% growth business?

Just interested as to how you think the business would be looking if you hadn't done all that work to and kicked it off three years ago? Those are my two, sorry.

By definition of how committed we are to membership and everything that we're building around it, for me, it's not a three-year journey. The foundations of that journey were sort of set in 2017 when I went and spent all the time with the team at Amazon and the team at Costco, and I sort of think about the business as a venn, the sort of the intersection of Amazon from a sort of Prime, Costco membership model, and Ryanair I always think about as a lowest-cost operator.

Then it's right. If that's the strategy that we set out in '17, '18, there's some big pieces of that jigsaw to put in place.

It's been a long journey and an uncertain journey, and what we're now seeing is we've got real clarity on it and we can see the data. When we launched it, everyone said we were crazy, you must be mad: nobody will pay £39 a year to join an electrical retailer membership scheme in the UK.

That's normally when we know we're on the right track, when people are saying stuff like that. We'd done our homework, it wasn't an accident of how we've been incredibly thoughtful about how we've gone through it.

The problem is the "I don't know" answer doesn't work very well, does it? When people say, "Well, how long will it take you to get the re-commerce engine to be able to do all this?"

"I don't know." We've had years of "I don't know," and we're now coming out of that, and we can see all the data, we can see all the visibility of it, and so we're just delighted that we did it.

Not particularly bothered about pondering what would have happened if we hadn't. I think it makes the business incredibly more resilient, customers more loyal, and, deeper, wider moats.

In terms of Joybuy, well, I think it's a bold strategy to set out to out-Amazon Amazon in the UK, and so, let's applaud them for being bold. I think the UK grocery market would be generally recognized as quite competitive, with, pretty meaningful infrastructures around the key retailers in that space to deliver that.

I think that'll be quite difficult to go and disrupt. I think it's a big ask for Joybuy to go and do it, but, look, they're very committed to it, they're very clear about that.

I bring you back to the graveyard that's full of two-man home delivery businesses: what we do is very, very difficult. We're at by far the most difficult end of what they're trying to do, and that gives us inherent protection.

Clearly we've got a watching brief on what is happening, and what we're hearing is a lot of noise; what we're seeing at the minute is not a lot. There's no way we would be arrogant enough to think that they're not going to grow that into being a serious competitor.

We're not seeing any impact from it at the minute.

Cool. Thanks very much.

Just on chip pricing, just interested to see what you're seeing in terms of incoming inflation, product inflation, and anything it might do in terms of supply?

We are seeing that in categories like gaming particularly, which ironically has been quite helpful in the Magpie business. Across the rest of the piece, nothing that is yet materially affecting stuff, but it is being flagged by brands that it is a possible driver of inflation over the next 12 months.

To what extent, we'll see as we get into it. The I'm pretty relaxed about that in the context of it'll affect us and all our competitors in an equal way.

There's no competitive advantage or threat in that. Normally, in the same way that, if oil goes up and we know we're hedged, but it affects everyone, if there's shipping costs rises, it affects everyone.

On that, would you see trading capability on the ao.com website for gaming this year?

I hope so. It's something that we really want to get in, but from a tech point of view, we've got a whole long list of priorities, and so, we have to stack that up against what capacity we've got.

We can't do everything that we want to do. Fundamentally, getting trade-in and re-commerce onto the .com platform will be a material win for us, we think.

Selling re-commerce product not just on the Magpie website, on the ao.com website as well. There are more complexities than you might think in the background on fulfillment and everything that goes with it.

Thanks very much. It has been a year to be proud of, and as Mark said, the one message that I would like people to take away is that we've done what we said we would do.

Thank you. Thanks, guys.