Good morning, and welcome to Currys interim results. We're joined today by Currys Group Chief Executive Officer Alex Baldock and Bruce Marsh, Group Chief Financial Officer.

I'd like to hand the call over to Alex. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Good morning, everybody.

A few words from me before I hand over to Bruce to take you through the numbers, then I'll be back with a short update on the strategic progress behind these numbers, but of course the full strategy update will come in January as usual. They're promising numbers, too.

We're pleased with the strong results and a good trajectory. It's healthy growth that we're posting in sales, profit, free cash flow, and shareholder returns, and of course all resting on a net cash balance sheet.

This is driven by strong underlying performance in the UK and Ireland in the face of some quite strong headwinds, and with growing revenue and market share, and growing in the areas we said we'd grow, with good margin and cost discipline, all of that offsetting most, but not all, of some unhelpful government cost headwinds. In the Nordics, meanwhile, we're pleased with the accelerating performance in a rapidly recovering market, showing big jumps in profit and cash flow, and also showing good sales growth with discipline on margin and on costs.

All of this stems from a consistent strategy that's clearly working, as I'll say a bit about later. Now I'll hand over to Bruce.

Thank you, Alex. Good morning, everyone.

Stepping through our first half financials, group performance continues to strengthen, and we've seen growth across the board. Group revenue was £4.2 billion, up 8% year on year, and up 4% on a like-for-like basis.

Our adjusted EBIT stepped forward by 32% to £54 million, giving an adjusted EPS of 1.6p. Our free cash flow at £84 million was up by 68%, meaning that we finished the half with closing net cash of £133 million.

Finally, our shareholder returns in the half were £46 million, which is £16 million of dividend and £30 million of share buyback. Stepping through each market, starting with the UK, UK revenue was strong, plus 6%, driven by our core strategic initiatives, and that resulted in UK like-for-like of plus 4%.

We were pleased to see our recurring services revenues up by 11%, driven by iD Mobile. Our adjusted EBIT in the UK did step back.

It stepped back by £4 million due to the government-imposed inflationary headwinds, but that was offset by volume and cost savings. Our adjusted EBIT margin stepped backwards by 20 basis points to 0.8%.

Operating cash flow was relatively flat at £33 million, and our segmented free cash flow was £53 million, driven by lower cash profits and increase in adjusting items. Looking at the UK EBIT waterfall, as I've said, the UK EBIT margin was down by 20 basis points, with gross margin down by 40 basis points and operating expenses favorable by 20 basis points.

In both buckets, we were negatively impacted by the government's inflationary headwinds, and you'll remember at the year-end we talked about both National Insurance and National Living Wage giving a full-year negative impact of £32 million for this year. Stepping through gross margins, as I've said, backwards by 40 basis points in the UK, all of that decrease is driven by those increase in colleagues' costs across our supply chain and our service operation.

Our actual underlying gross margins in the half were positive. Our operating expense to sales ratio was up by 20 basis points, and we saw colleague cost increases and increase marketing across both iD Mobile and B2B, but these were more than offset by operational leverage and cost savings.

Moving on to the Nordics, we've seen strong performance across the board. From a revenue perspective, we've seen a big increase in sales.

Our reported year on year was 11%, on a currency neutral basis plus 7%, and like the UK, like-for-like was plus 4%. Our recurring services revenue were up by 4% on constant currency basis, and we're really pleased to see that our adjusted EBIT almost doubled to £35 million, driving our EBIT margins up by 90 basis points to 2%.

Higher profit drove increases in operating cash flow to £43 million, and our segmental free cash flow increased by £44 million, and that's despite the fact that we doubled our spend on CapEx. In terms of the EBIT bridge for the Nordics, you can see that the whole of the 90 basis points improvement in EBIT came from operational leverage.

Overall, Nordic gross margins were flat year on year, as we've continued to maintain a profit-focused discipline of not chasing less profitable sales. Operating expense to sales plus 90 basis points as we maintained tight cost control despite increases in volume.

The costs in absolute terms were up just by single digits of millions, but we enjoyed significant operational leverage. Moving on to group free cash flow, we enjoyed improved cash generation driven by increased in profit and working capital inflow.

Operating cash at a group level was £76 million, up £15 million. Capital expenditure increased to £31 million as we've invested in both stores and IT, although we've maintained tight control over spend.

Exceptional items doubled to £20 million, and these relate to restructuring and property costs, all of them are one-off in nature. Cash tax stayed low at £2 million.

Cash interest paid was broadly flat at £7 million. Finally, working capital, working capital was an inflow driven by volume thanks to negative pay days stock and tight control, meaning that overall inflow of £68 million in the half, which gives free cash flow of £84 million.

The strong free cash flow was used for pension payments and shareholder returns. Dividend, the final dividend for last year that was paid in H1 was £16 million.

Purchase of our own shares, of the £50 million that we've announced, we did £30 million of share buyback in the first half. We also purchased our own shares for our employee benefit trust, which was a further £13 million.

From a pension perspective, we made the final payments under the old arrangement before the actuarial review, which was a contribution of £82 million. All of that was paid in the first half, and there will be no further pension payments in the second half.

Overall, it gives a movement in net cash outflow of £51 million and closing net cash at the end of the year, sorry, at the end of the half of £133 million. In terms of our balance sheet, our balance sheet continues to strengthen.

We've now improved by over £900 million over a six-year period, and we have no gearing. We finished the period with net cash of £133 million, and our pension deficit dropped to £16 million.

Our capital allocation priorities remain unchanged. Our first priority is to maintain a prudent balance sheet, and as we've said previously, our year-end net cash will be at least £100 million.

We will then pay required pension contributions, and the contributions for the coming years will be just £13 million. We will then invest to grow profits and cash, and capital expenditure for this year will be around £90 million and looking forward will be less than £100 million.

We will pay and grow ordinary dividends. As we talked in the past, we will have a progressive dividend policy, and today we're declaring a 0.75p interim.

Finally, any surplus cash flow will be available for share buybacks. As I've said, of the £50 million that commenced on the 4th of September, we've completed £30 million in the first half, and we will resume the balance of that after our close period finishes on the 21st of January.

Finally, current year outlook and guidance, we continue to expect our full-year profit and cash flow to grow this year. Trading since the end of the half one period have been consistent with board's expectations.

As usual, we'll provide a full update on peak trading on the 21st of January. We're providing some specific updated guidance: total interest expense will be between £60 and £65 million, capital expenditure will be £90 million compared to the £95 million that we've said previously, and we are guiding to higher exceptional cash outflows that we expect to be around £40 million on a full-year basis compared to the previous guided £30 million.

These relate to a delayed IT project where we've got dual-running costs, and Alex will talk more about that in a moment. In terms of shareholder returns, our total cash dividend payment for this year will be £25 million, which includes the £16 million final payment for FY '25 and the £8 million interim dividend that I've just described.

Finally, the £50 million share buyback program underway, we will complete the balance that is outstanding. I'll now hand back to Alex.

Thanks, Bruce. As usual, more to come in January on the strategy that's behind these results, but for now I'll just say a few things.

This is a clear strategy that we've we've been following consistently for some time that is evidently working. It's a strategy that's based off having colleagues who know what they're doing and want to be working at Currys, who in turn make it easy for customers to shop, and then get more of those customers to stick around as in stickier and more valuable customer relationships, customers for life in our language, which in turn drives higher profits and cash flow.

Starting with the colleagues, I mean we do have more capable and committed colleagues. Our engagement is firmly established in the top 5% of companies worldwide, and we've just become the first UK retailer to break 4.0 in Glassdoor, which is good.

That's translating into a better customer experience, and we're making it easier for customers to shop. In particular, the omnichannel model that customers prefer, that we have and competitors don't, and that we're investing in.

We can talk in Q&A if you like about investments in stores, in better tools and processes, like electronic shelf-edge labels, headsets, sales floor leaders, which all drive lower cost and higher conversion. We are building stickier and more valuable customers, customers for life, particularly through the services and the solutions, which are so valuable to customers and to Currys.

Services like installation, which is up in both the UK and the Nordics; in credit; in iD, our MVNO; and in the Nordics customer club, where customer numbers up 11% to over 10 million members now, who account for more than half of Nordics revenue. All of this is translating into higher profits and cash, as you've heard from Bruce, good margin and cost discipline.

Importantly, we're also now back into growth in areas like kitchens in the Nordics, new categories in the UK, and B2B in both. Let's take a quick closer look at the UK and Ireland.

There is good underlying momentum here, with healthy sales growth of 6% in a market that's been going backwards by 1.2%, which means share gains healthy share gains of 60 basis points, and with margin and cost well controlled. Now, I said we're growing where we said we'd grow, and B2B is a good example of that.

B2B, as the SME market is an adjacent one to our core B2C market, and grows our total accessible market by 60%. It's good that we're growing by 16%, 1-6%, in the first half in B2B, and we're nicely on track to double the size of this business within three years.

New categories, areas where we've historically been underweight, we're paying more attention to now and and so it's gratifying to see that grow by 35% in the first half, in areas like health and beauty, up fully 69% within that. Growth in services and solutions, which are good for sales and margins and recurring revenues, which, by the way, are up 160 basis points now to over 30% of our sales.

Services and solutions like credit, where we've had another strong half, adoption is up to over 23%, up 160 basis points, and this is good. It's good for customers, but it's also good for Currys.

Credit customers spend more, they shop more often, and they're twice the lifetime value. iD Mobile had another good half, subscriber numbers up 21% to 2.4 million.

We'll now handily beat our full-year 2.5 million subscriber target. ID has inspired the launch of our first Nordics MVNO in Finland.

Good momentum. Still, in the interest of balance, not everything's going our way.

We've mostly, but not entirely, been able to offset the government cost headwinds that you heard about from Bruce. We've worked hard to do that, but we haven't entirely offset it.

Equally, we haven't got everything right. Bruce talked about a delayed IT program, which is disappointing.

We've had to pause the completion of the IT cloud migration into the new calendar year. It's a good project, it's well worth doing, migrating on-premises data centers to Microsoft Azure will in time yield a double-digit millions reduced cost total cost to operate, a mature annual cost benefit in the double-digit millions.

It also future proofs the business. We have 90% completed this migration, but it should by now have been 100%.

We've had some teething troubles, and so we chose to pause it in October to protect the peak trading period. It's the right decision, but it does in delaying completion to 2026, it does mean dual-running costs for a time, which will show up in the exceptionals.

One disappointment in a first half of many successes, but we do like to be self-critical, though it's hard to be too critical of our Nordic colleagues with their accelerating performance in a market that's coming back quite rapidly now. Their only blemish is a nudge down in H1 market share, but even with hindsight, we wouldn't do much differently.

We won't chase unprofitable sales, and we won't match some competitors in their aggressive promotions and store openings. We're not solving for market share, but we're solving for sustainable free cash flow, and we're happy with the healthy revenue growth that we've seen, also in the targeted areas.

B2B in the Nordics grew at 12%, it's the number one group-wide growth opportunity, but also kitchens. We have an Epoq kitchens brand in the Nordics, which is growing nicely at 30%.

Good revenue growth, good margin and cost discipline, good cash conversion, which means those profits up by 94% and free cash flow up by 65%. A strong first half with more to come from the Nordics, which is on a good trajectory with accelerating performance.

Still, having said all of that, we do enjoy the benefits of scale, and we we like being more than two and a half times the size of our nearest competitor. We get hard benefits from that, we'll keep a close eye on market share trends, and we expect that to stabilize in the second half.

In summary, not a first half without blemish, opportunities to learn and keep improving, but also plenty more to come, good opportunities for quality growth to keep profit and free cash flow heading in the right direction with good, continued margin and cost discipline, good opportunities to build on the strong momentum we've seen in a successful first half from a strategy that's working, that's allowing better shareholder returns, and that's seeing a business on a good trajectory, one that's on us to keep going, and we can see how. Finally, before I hand over to Q&A, I wasn't going to pass up the advantage of having all these affluent and time-poor consumers on this call, no doubt so busy that minds are now only now turning to to Christmas presents.

Never fear, we've got you with some amazing tech, some astounding deals, and I'd hurry before we come to our senses on some of the pricing. On two examples I'll pick out, happy to take any more on Q&A: the aptly named De'Longhi Magnifica, an excellent bean-to-cup coffee machine, mere £365 with £165 off, pay nothing for 12 months, and get it exclusively at Currys.

While stocks last, I would tuck into the Shark CryoGlow face mask, only £299 £269, I should say. The in case anyone knows someone whose faces have blemishes, lines, wrinkles, tired eyes, well the dual tech LED and cold tech will sort it out, part of an an electrification trend in health and beauty, which is bringing that category increasingly into our wheelhouse, showing 69% growth to show for it.

Shop in store or online at the UK's number one tech retailer this Christmas, a retailer whose performance continues to strengthen. We're pleased with today's promising numbers and trajectory, and we're determined to keep it going.

With that, we'll pass to you for Q&A.

Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to ask an audio question, please press star one on your telephone keypad and just make sure that your line is unmuted to allow your signal to reach our equipment.

That is star one for questions. Our first question this morning will be coming from Monique Pollard of Citi.

Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hi, Monique.

Hi. Hi.

Morning. Thank you for taking my questions.

Also enjoyed the slide with the Christmas products. Maybe I can look into the LED mask.

My first question was just on the UK budget and business rates. I'm just wondering what the net impact of that will be and whether that is actually a small tailwind for the business from April 2026.

The second question I had was on iD Mobile, basically trying to understand a bit more why you're gaining share in a declining market, do you think? Then the final question I had, sort of coming back to the budget, UK and Ireland B2B sales up 16%.

Obviously, you said you want to double that business in three years, you're targeting SME, taking learnings from the Nordics. Just wondered if there was anything either in the macro environment or specifically in the budget that may make that plan of doubling that business in three years more challenging to achieve?

Thank you.

Hi, good morning, Monique. Let me cover the first one for you in terms of the budget.

Obviously, this financial year based on the budget 12 months ago was a very significant impact, with as we've described £32 million of headwinds. The good news is that the headwinds are significantly smaller as we look ahead to next financial year.

Taking each component in turn, first of all in terms of the living wage, it's broadly where we anticipated it would be, very high single-digit millions impact year on year next year. The good news was that the changes that the Chancellor made to rates, both in terms of the plus and minus half a million rateable value, but also the changes to the rating values, meant that we are expecting next year to see a small benefit year on year, let's call it mid-digit single millions.

When you bring those two together, the overall net impact is single-digit mid-millions next year of headwinds. Hope that makes sense.

Let me take the next two questions, Monique on mobile, I mean you rightly point out we've got a growing share growing sales and share in a declining market. I think there's a couple of things behind that.

We've had our historical troubles in this in this category, as anyone who's been following us for long will know. Those are behind us now, and we've got this back into profitable growth.

We've got this we're leaning much better on the Currys machine and the and the scale that we enjoy across electricals as well for for effective cross-marketing. We've got good partnerships with the handset manufacturers to whom we matter a lot more than just in mobile, the likes of Apple and Samsung and Google.

We have much broader partnerships with them, and so we are able to get preferential treatment. We've got a good partnership with the network operators, like Vodafone and Three.

We also have got the power of iD behind our mobile mobile growth, and as this is an MVNO that's growing very nicely for us, 21% growth in subscribers to 2.4 million, and will handily exceed, as I said, our 2.5 million subscriber target for the full year. Here, very simply, we've got very good terms that we've secured for longer thanks to the CMA that allow us to price quite aggressively, but still very profitably, in in this market.

That's that's the principal enabler of of this healthy growth in iD, along alongside customer experience improvements like the app, which has which has got had good take-up. That's that's that's the story in mobile, and an area where we're underweight but catching up fast, and we see further headroom for growth even without any help from the market.

Your last question was on the SMEs. No, we don't see an impact from the from the budget here on our plans.

Clearly a better macro picture would be better that better all round, but our plans are independent of that. That's because this is a market where we're we are significantly lower in our starting market share than in our core B2C market.

If you think about our market share in B2C as 24% and our market in B2B as nearer 4%, you won't you won't be far off. There's a lot more of headroom for for growth, but we've got everything it takes to be successful in this market, with our suppliers, the products, the services, the solutions, the supply chain and service operations, the channels, and the colleagues.

We've built all of this, and and we've got the 16% growth in the first half to show for it. This is an adjacent market where we've got every right to win with much more fragmented competition, and we and we have the and we've got built some momentum here.

There's a lot more to come in in this space irrespective of the policy and the macro environment.

Very clear. Thank you.

Thank you, Monique.

Our next question will be coming from John Stevenson of Peel Hunt. Please go ahead.

Your line is open.

Morning, John. Thanks.

Morning, able. Just two questions from me.

You mentioned in the strategy update, I don't know if you can talk a little bit more about the in-store service and operational improvements, particularly in light of higher staff costs, as it's fearful of a task to take out a store while maintaining and driving service. Then secondly, I don't know if you can comment a little bit on the UK consumer.

Obviously, the market's gone backwards, you're taking share, but any sort of highlights, particularly as we move in towards peak?

Yeah. Let me start with in-store, and you're right to point out that we've had to work very hard to offset some, but not all, of the headwinds we face, and that includes in stores.

The store productivity has been significantly improved through initiatives like electronic shelf-edge labels, headsets, and sales floor leaders. What do I mean?

Electronic shelf-edge labels, rather than the paper ticketing that we used to have, was an innovation we started in the Nordics. It worked very well, we've rolled it out to now all stores in the UK.

That improves the customer experience, it allows for significantly more dynamic pricing, and allows us to make many more price changes much more often than previously, and it of course reduces costs. That's one good example.

Another good example is on the sales floor leaders and the headsets. What this basically means is a customer coming into a Currys store will be greeted more quickly and allocated to the right colleague immediately, reduces wait time, it increases conversion, and ATV because we've got the right colleague with the right customer, and reduces downtime and therefore colleague productivity.

We've worked really hard in the stores to achieve this. It's not just in the stores, though.

Across the supply chain and the service operations, the right first time initiative, for example, making sure that when we turn up to install a washing machine in a customer's home, we do so with the colleagues and the parts so that we can do it there and then without incurring the cost of having to come back a second time, that continues to bear a lot of fruit. We've had to take some tough decisions here at head office.

We've reduced our central overheads by 10% during the course of the year, as well as right across the business going harder on areas such as automation, offshoring, and outsourcing. There's a lot going on, in short, John, on the operational improvement front.

Second, you asked about the UK consumer. It is muted.

The confidence and spending both, and of course we are in the box seat to see that, serving as we do 80% of UK households. What we're seeing is some concerns on employment, but more concern on increasing tax burden from an already high base that's weighing down on real incomes.

The best data on this would be the GfK Consumer Confidence Tracker, as you'll know, and that's at historically low levels and has decreased further. It's decreased from minus 17 in October to minus 19 in November.

Our own market, as you pointed out, the technology market declined by 1.2% in the first half. A muted consumer environment for sure.

I think there's a couple of things to say, though. One, we're planning cautiously.

When Bruce talked about our expected healthy growth in profits and free cash flow this year, we're not assuming any improvement in the consumer outlook, if we're surprised, it'll be on the upside. Second, importantly, we've built a business that's less dependent on the UK consumer.

Over 40% of the group is now in the Nordics. It's going well, and it's an accelerating performance in a rapidly recovering market.

In the UK, areas such as B2B and services and solutions are important in this context, too, because B2B operates on a different cycle from the UK consumer, and of course recurring revenues that come from areas such as our services and solutions, credit, and iD, but necessarily are less susceptible to swings up and down in consumer confidence. When we've set out to grow in areas where we were underweight, areas such as mobile, such as new categories as health and beauty, those we have more headroom to grow again without being dependent on the underlying consumer confidence.

We do believe, and we can see, that we're building a more resilient Currys as well as a more successful one, and the evidence for that we think is in the results: healthy growth in sales, profit, free cash flow, shareholder returns. In the UK, we're growing sales at 6 in a market going backwards at minus 2, and building on four years of profit growth in the UK without any help from policy or from market.

Hope that answers your question, John.

No, that's great. Thanks, Alex.

Thank you very much, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, once again, if you have any questions, please press star one on your telephone keypad.

We'll now go to Richard Chamberlain of RBC. Please go ahead.

Your line is open, sir.

Hi, Richard.

Thanks. Hi, Alex.

Three for me, please, if that's not too greedy. A couple on the Nordics then just to follow up there.

I think you've seen a little bit of share loss, albeit off a high level. I presume that's to the likes of the pure play online retailers.

I wondered if you're seeing overall kind of rational market in terms of competitive behavior and the margin situation there. Then again on the Nordic, what are you seeing in terms of big-ticket sales?

I think you mentioned strong kitchen sales. There's some good innovation coming through in that business.

Wonder what you're seeing there. Then finally, on the stock intake, I think that's higher.

To what extent is that just a sort of comps thing as a result of sort of disruption and so on last year? Are there some timing impacts there that are driving that higher stock intake?

Thank you.

Thanks, Richard. I'll let Bruce take the stock question first, and I'll come back to the Nordics.

Hi, good morning, Richard. There are two factors that are causing stock to be up compared to last year.

The first is the impact of week 53 last year. We had 53 weeks last year, which means this year every week is bumped along, our half year was much further into the peak cycle than it would have been 12 months ago.

That just naturally has increased our stockholding as our stock builds. The second is driven by volume.

Obviously, we're showing healthy growth in both the UK and the Nordic business, and on that basis to maintain availability, we've increased our overall levels of stock. Those with two reasons.

Got it. On the share loss in the Nordics, Richard, you're right to observe we did shave 60 basis points of market share off in the first half.

It was pretty evenly spread between categories. It was particularly concentrated in Finland, but we did see some in other markets as well.

I think the short version is, even with the benefit of hindsight, as you imagine we look at this pretty carefully, we wouldn't do very much differently. We're not going to chase unprofitable sales, but we're not going to price unprofitably on base or promotions.

We're not going to open stores without prospects of paying back. We're solving for sustainable free cash flow here, and as long as we've got healthy growth in sales, profit, and sustainable cash flow, then overall we're reasonably happy.

Now, that said, we like the benefits of scale that we get in this business, and we like being more than two and a half times the size of our nearest Nordics competitor. We get hard benefits, not least with our suppliers from that, we keep a very close eye on this, but I wouldn't say we're happy to shed any market share, but it's not what we're solving for, but in an ideal world we'd have a row of cherries and we'd have that heading in the right direction, too.

Now as it happens, we expect to see a stabilization of Nordics market share in the second half, we'll come back to that a little later in the year. You asked about the competitors.

There is some aggression. I mentioned some aggressive promotions and some store openings, but nothing irrational on the scale that we were seeing a few years ago.

That's the main point to make here. This is a market that's coming back.

It's coming back on the bottom line as well as on the top line, it's part of a big driver of the accelerating performance that we're talking about today in the Nordics, and our confidence in the trajectory and that we will keep going on it. You asked specifically about big-ticket in the Nordics.

We're quite pleased with Epoq, our kitchens business. It's a big kitchens business in the Nordics.

If you're there, you'll see it everywhere. Some really really pleasing growth in kitchens, up 30% in the first half.

I suppose a couple of interesting things about kitchens: firstly, they tend to pull along MDA sales, major domestic appliances like washing machines and fridge freezers and ovens and the like, they're pulled along when you sell a kitchen and vice versa. Second, kitchens is quite a useful lead indicator of consumer confidence, which is rising in the Nordics.

The markets are growing in the Nordics, and when it almost invariably either discretionary or house-move-related kitchens sales are on the increase as healthily as they are, that's usually quite a good lead indicator for the future health of the consumer, one reason for our confidence in continuing the trajectory in the Nordics.

Excellent. Thanks a lot for the color.

Cheers.

Thank you, Richard.

Thank you, sir. Next question will be coming from Nick Barker, calling from BNP Paribas.

Please go ahead.

Morning, Nick.

Good morning, all. Thank you very much for taking my question, and congratulations on the numbers.

I was hoping you could just give me a little bit of color around that looking into the full year. With kind of approximately £10 million beat in the first half and no change to full-year guidance at this stage, that kind of implies flatter H2 profits year on year.

Can you talk me through the puts and takes of this? That's my first question.

Then my second question is about the new MVNO in Finland. It'd be great to hear a bit more about that and the thinking and rationale behind it.

I'll take this second body of a question first, and then hand over to Bruce. It's very simple on the MVNO.

One of the benefits of having a group in a relatively homogenous category like technology is that we can try something in one country and be reasonably confident that if it works in Denmark, it'll work in Ireland. It's proved many times in our business.

MVNO is the latest example of this. We've got a very successful and fast-growing MVNO in the UK.

We're building something that's a valuable asset, by the way, as well as an important and profitable part of the customer experience, up to 2.4 million customers in the UK, and we're keen to try it elsewhere. Finland was the right place to start.

It's a small market, the stakes are lower, it's a good place for trials, and it's probably not the market in the Nordics where we have the strongest relationship with the mobile network operators. For all those reasons, it was a good place to try it.

It's relatively small scale, subscribers are in the tens of thousands at the moment rather than anything bigger than that, but it's got off to a good start, and we'll see where it goes from here.

Good morning, Nick. As you probably expect me to say, we're not sharing any numbers in terms of guidance on a full-year basis right now.

We'll be back on the 21st of January. At that session, we'll cover all of peak trading, and we will guide you both profit and cash for the year.

Bril.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Nick. Ladies and gentlemen, as a final reminder, if you have any questions or follow-up questions, please press star one at this time.

We'll now go to Wayne Brown of Panmure Liberum. Please go ahead, sir.

Hi, Wayne.

Hi, can you hear me?

We can.

Great. My question is the following: Currys has come a long way in the last few years, and it's pretty obvious that there were some clearly things at the top of your agenda that needed sorting out a few years back, and I'm not going to go through the list, the high debt, pensions, etc.

Obviously, the business is now in really good shape, much better shape. If we had to take a step back and think about what's the one or two things that warrants most of your attention currently within the business?

Thanks.

Gosh, that's a big question, Wayne. Thank you for it.

There's a few things. I won't repeat everything you've heard about the much better state that the business is in now, and the strong foundations that we've built, and the good momentum as you know that we're on with.

There's a few things. I think that this is an opportunity-rich environment for us, and one of the things that we're very focused on is making sure that we've got profitable growth in the business now, and we want to keep that going.

I say profitable because it's really important that we maintain our margin and cost discipline, but we've done that. There are some very, very opportunity-rich areas in the business.

B2B is the obvious example. Sorry to belabor the point, but it is really important.

This is our number one growth opportunity in the Nordics and in the UK, grew it by 12% in the Nordics, 16% in the UK, but so much more to go. If we've got 4% market share in an area where we have just as much right to win as we do in the area where we have 24% market share, that gives you a sense of the kind of headroom, long-term headroom, that we're thinking of.

It's not just the fact that we've got everything it takes to be successful ourselves, it's also the case that it's a much less competitive market where the competition is much more fragmented. This is an area of real opportunity for us, which is why we're putting so much emphasis behind it.

That's one area. As it's not the only growth area.

You might say belatedly, but in any case, we are catching up in areas where we've historically allowed ourselves to become underweight, whether it's new categories like gaming or health and beauty or accessories. That's a catch-up game.

Then there's new technology that's emerging, and AI, rather surprised we've got to this stage of the call without it being mentioned, but here it is. AI computing is a trend that's really biting, and we saw that in the 12% growth in AI computing in the first half, and it's an area that we are making our own.

We need to maintain it, we're not getting complacent, but 70% plus market share in AI PCs and being the number one partner for the likes of Microsoft and Google testify to that. Those are all the growth areas that we're focused on.

That's kind of one way to answer your question. The second thing that we're really focused on is building this business out into a true solutions provider.

Much for the buzzword, but what does that actually mean? We don't want to be sitting just between a powerful supplier and an occasionally flighty customer, shifting a box and just selling a product.

Clearly, that's the heart of what we do for customers is to sell products, but it's not the only thing that we want to do. Increasingly, we've been able to help the customer not just periodically with a product sale, but all the time through services and solutions right the way through the life of that product: solutions that allow them to afford the product in the first place, with areas like credit; to get started with it, in installation; to give it longer life through repair; and to get the most out of it through various subscriptions.

That's not just nice for the customer that we're helping them in areas where they need help, it's also very good for us because it's an area of growth, it's high-margin growth, and it's also recurring revenues that now up to 30% of our sales, that are very good for Currys as well as being very good for the customer. Those are two areas I would pick out, Wayne, as we need to keep this profitable growth going, and we believe we can because there's a lot of opportunity there.

We need to continue the march that we're on, again with a lot more headroom to go, on building out the growing, high-margin, recurring-revenue-rich services and solutions that we are uniquely well placed to provide to customers. None of our competitors can do what we can do here, as well as customers value it and are willing to pay for it.

That's very helpful. Thank you, and have a good Christmas.

You too, Wayne.

Thank you for your question, sir. We have another question just came in now.

It's coming from Kate Calvert of Investec. Please go ahead, Kate.

Your line is open.

Hi, Kate. Hello, Kate.

Hello, Kate.

Kate, your line is being unmuted. Sorry, can you hear me?

Sorry about that. Do apologize.

Morning. Just a quick question on future cost-saving opportunities in the UK.

You've obviously talked this morning about investing in the likes of electronic shelf pricing, the use of headsets, etc., and you mentioned that when you finish off this server migration, it will give you some nice sort of cost-saving benefits. Where is next really that you need to go to in terms of continuing to improve the efficiency of the business?

I think you've used the word in your question, Kate, it is all around efficiency. Over the course of the last four or five years, I think most of the heavy lifting that we had in terms of fundamental fixes and maybe taking huge amounts of waste out of our organization have been dealt with.

We're now looking at how do we fine-tune the business and get more effective from process perspective, whether that be within our stores, whether it be on our online business, within our supply chain and service operation, or indeed in our center and our IT costs. A lot of our focus right now is looking at process, looking at end-to-end process, which obviously is a bit of a longer burn, but it's both about refining our cost base, but also refining the way that we work so we can be more effective.

Great. Thanks very much, and happy Christmas, everyone.

Thank you.

Thanks, Kate. Happy Christmas to you.

Thank you very much, ma'am.

As

we have no further questions, Alex, I'd like to turn the call back over to you. Thank you, sir.

Yes, thank you. Thank you very much for your attention this morning.

We are pretty pleased with the trajectory of the business. We're pleased with these strong results.

We're pleased on every level with sales, profit, and free cash flow and shareholder returns all heading in the right direction off a base of engaged colleagues and happy customers. More than that, we can see how to continue doing it.

Some help from the policy and market environment might be nice, but we don't need it. We don't need it to show the healthy growth in profits and free cash flow for this year that we've talked to.

I will leave you not just with a happy Christmas, but with an encouragement to the, as I say, cash-rich and time-poor on this call to get yourself to a Currys store or online immediately to take advantage of some of these absurdly generous deals that we have on offer at the moment, and that will provide fantastic Christmas gifts for your loved ones. Happy Christmas, everyone, and look forward to picking it up with you in the new year.

Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, that will conclude today's conference.

Thanks for your attendance. You may now disconnect.

Have a good day, and goodbye.