Angling Direct (LSE:ANG) — Half year results for the six months ended 31 July 2026

0:00 Good morning. Welcome to the ANGLING DIRECT PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and could be submitted at any time just by using the q and a sub situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Please just be typing your questions and press send. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll, and then I'll hand you over to the management team. Steve, good morning.

0:21 Good morning, everyone. Thanks for making the time this morning to go through the half year results for ANGLING DIRECT PLC. We'll take you through the presentation that's up on the website and then we'll leave some good amount of time at the end. First, we've some pre submitted questions and happy to sort of take any other questions as we go through the presentation. I'll just skip on to Slide three, the highlights, sort of to open the batting. I think overall, a very positive set of results set against a pretty choppy and tricky backdrop. The year started when we were talking to shareholders and potential investors back in May where we'd had a very challenging Q1, the backdrop of the Iran conflict really coming through and consumers normalizing to that. And then post that situation, sort of a very dry summer, much of The UK in drought conditions, which obviously impacts sort of angling conditions, particularly water levels and oxygen in the water.

1:22 So against those much publicized headwinds, we've been retaining and growing our customer numbers and we think the sort of the strength of the sales and the strength of our earnings is testament to the resilience of the business that we've built over the last few years and has really given us a platform to sort of increase the scale of growth and the scale of ambition, particularly in The UK for the business. We look there on tiles. One of the things we think is most impressive is the scaling of the earnings, over indexing our sales growth 10% EBITDA growth against a backdrop of a tougher sales environment. How have we done that? We've been very disciplined in terms of making sure we leverage those scale investments we made in previous years. In particular, we spent over GBP 2,000,000 on digital shelf edge labeling across all of our physical store estate and invested in our fulfillment facility in The UK in terms of an automated packing capability.

2:23 Both of those really helped us get into sort of driving operational gearing and getting those savings to drop through to our EBITDA performance. Set that against in terms of where we go in the strength of the balance sheet, the cash you'll see on the left hand side remains in a very strong position. It is our cash peak point, the half year. The working capital cycle means at the end of the year is when we're most capital hungry and we have our lowest cash point. But notwithstanding that, we've built the cash position further while still at the same time driving accelerated returns to shareholders through our buyback program, which I'll talk a little bit more about later. On this slide, we've set out where we are against our medium term objectives, which we published our upgraded medium term objectives back in May.

3:20 It's worth reminding everyone that our previous set of medium term objectives, we substantially delivered those within two years, giving us the opportunity to reframe the ambition for the business. I'm not going to go through and read everyone out, but I think the important reference points on there is The UK business on 125,000,000 ambition. We are scaling those like for like customers in The UK, 2.9% growth at the lower end of the corridor, but particularly set against those difficult conditions, we show that we think that shows that we are delivering on consolidating this sort of category and market within The UK. And indeed, we're pacing around a four year CAGR to deliver those medium term objectives.

4:08 And as we gather momentum as we go through the year, there's potential to exceed that. On the earnings side, again, I've talked about over indexing that EBITDA earnings growth relative to the sales, leveraging those investments we've made to drive that return in. And at the same time, with the CAGR on our earnings is pacing around four years to deliver that scale ambition of £8,000,000 MyAD, our loyalty program, continues to scale its numbers. We're nearly 700,000 at the half year. We've passed that number as we've gone through the last couple of months post the period end. We think that's a particularly impressive stat in terms of the sort of the customer envelope we've now got that we can talk to digitally and physically.

4:56 And our most valuable customers, our omni channel customers, we continue to grow those. They grew 8.3% in the half and omni channel customers worth well over £500 a year and we continue to focus our sort of our data and our learnings into how we talk to and sort of extract more value from that customer base. Europe, you know, we're doing what we said we're going to do on Europe. You know, we think the European market will turn. We're retaining that optionality whilst reducing the drag on the earnings and the return on capital. The loss is reduced to around 7.5% of The UK EBITDA and the ROCE reduction in terms of that drag has gone back to two seventy basis points and we're making further progress on that as we travel towards the full year.

5:45 Again, our focus in terms of cash deployment and how we balance that European optionality is very much focused on what our free cash flow yield can look like and our medium term return on capital ambition of over 15%. Interestingly, our share buyback component of how we're thinking about driving that medium term return on capital, we've now deployed over $4,000,000 of cash and we've acquired around 12% of the company at a price of 44 p, which we think represents very good value for the shareholder base. And finally, you know, ANGLING's largest responsible employer for the first time, we are community fund that was part of our competition website.

6:30 We've returned over £20,000 back to good causes within the sort of ANGLING community. We've had those voted on by our customers and we're in the process of disseminating that cash to those various winners that we held across the four regions in The UK.

6:49 In terms of some sort of standouts, in terms of the business review, we've sort of we've given some more fulsome detail on the next couple of slides. I'll just pick out a few of the highlights as we go through. You know, on the left hand side, The UK customer, I talked about the omnichannel customer and its importance and its value. I think, you know, on a glass sort of half empty, still over 40% of our store only customers visit us once a year. On the glass, you know, half full, that is a real opportunity for this business. You know, the data and the understanding we're getting of our customers is increasing. We've seen over 14% of failure of independent tackle stores over the last eighteen months, and we're increasingly seeing those customers coming to us.

7:35 In terms of our store footprint in the middle there, we've done three stores so far in the half. One of those is an acquisition. They're all delivering in line with this with the business case we set ourselves. As a reminder, we are very disciplined in terms of the return on capital. We look from those sites as a sort of simplistic rule of thumb, a four year payback is what we target. We've done more work in terms of refining our data catchment model, our secret KFC recipe as I refer to it. And actually, we're increasingly confident with the level of failure and our understanding of average customer spend, drive time and postcode, we can access increasingly more catchments within The UK.

8:23 On The UK digital front, again, we continue to acquire customers. We've done a really solid job in terms of delivering increased customer numbers using our digital marketing effectively and targeting those customers where we're making a positive contribution to the overall business and at the same time, leveraging the investments we put in place, in particular, that for the first bullet point in the right hand stack there where fulfillment ratios have improved over 60 basis points year on year. With a page, Europe, as I said, it's very much doing what we said we'd do, keep the option open. It's a scale market. It's over twice the size of The UK, The Netherlands and Germany put together, ensure that we reduce the drag of the losses, ensure we reduce the cash drag on the business, look at the efficiency of the capital we're deploying and very much reduce the drag on the free cash flow yield and the return on capital.

9:24 We still think from a medium term, it remains an attractive option, and therefore, we'll continue to deploy the strategy of lowest cost to retain highest optionality. On the commercial front, our own brand story has been sort of a key component of what we've been building in this business in the last few years. That continues to go from strength to strength. It's over 15% of our gross profit penetration now and the earnings from that brand grew over 20% in the half. We continue to refine our approach to our own brands and we see there being more sort of further growth from an existing brand or a complementary brand as we move the business further forward. The bottom point in that stack, one thing that we've really benefited from this year is when we've put digital price edge labeling into the stores, That's enabled us to be more choiceful about when we change prices, who we match prices on and how quickly we can deploy those into our physical store estate and then back onto our website.

10:29 Historically, we'd have only changed prices twice a week. We're able to do that seven times a week or beyond once a day if we wish and that's really helped us focus in on that contribution aspect of driving incremental customer growth, particularly into our digital offer. The right hand side, communities and sustainability, you know, as I mentioned, the AD community fund, that's something that we're most proud of. You know, we continue to scale that ADWIN competition website, that's got the potential to go over 800,000 this year, meaning we'll donate over 40,000 to good causes within the angling community, and that's going to play a sort of a core strand as we move forward in terms of how we're engaging and building the wider angling market.

11:15 Now that I'll hand over to Sam on the financials. Good morning, everybody. So starting with just a few of the key financial headlines on the slide there in front of you, and we'll get into a bit more detail on the next couple of slides. But hopefully, this just gives you a snapshot to show that we're continuing to make progress in the delivery of those upgraded medium term objectives. And just to fill out a couple of the other headlines on there, if we start in The UK, you know, that, as Steve's touched on, that's been delivered in h one in The UK despite what's been a pretty challenging backdrop for us. But you can see that we continue to grow sales, drive that critical over index and adjusted EBITDA growth, which has been challenging, particularly sort of as we move through the half and we saw a bit more sort of gross margin pricing pressures, which we'll come on to in a bit more detail.

12:03 But then that's been more than offset by, as Steve's touched on, the investment in the digital shelf edge labeling and the automated packing technology alongside then our sort of continued robust cost base management, and that's really enabled that sort of over indexing. You see that European sales have gone backwards year on year. That is actually ahead of our internal plans, though, as we continue to focus on the value accretive sales. And as a result, the the European losses have improved by 20% to minus 200,000, and that is now represents just 7.5% of The UK earnings on on a trailing twelve month basis. And then from a cash perspective, you can see there, we're continuing to invest the cash to to sort of underpin the delivery of those medium term objectives.

12:54 H one's focused on new space. Again, we'll come back to that. And you can see there as well, we've also then returned excess liquidity through the buybacks with 400,000 deployed in h one and then a further 3,100,000 delivered post period end. So moving on to The UK in a bit more detail. So you can see there UK like for like sales up 2.9% with store like for likes, and here we mean the the stores excluding the f y twenty six and f y twenty seven stores and and the closures. So the stores were broadly flat year on year minus 0.2%, and online was up seven and a half percent.

13:38 Whilst both channels, h one was shaped against that challenging backdrop, q one trading impacted by the consumer reaction to the consequences of the Iran conflict, which sort of was the immediacy of higher fuel prices was the standout there. And then in q two, we went into that period of record levels of low rainfall that saw drought conditions declared across many parts of The UK, and that really impacted their handling conditions. Moving across to store closures. So we ceased trading in Beckels in late f y twenty six and then Cheltenham in the... In q two this year. And we closed both of those stores because they couldn't deliver the right unit economics for the stores against our rocky ambitions. So it's better for us to take that stockpile and reinvest it in the business to drive an incrementally accretive return against that ambition.

14:30 And then finally there, just the big green bar, the 2.3, that's the new space. So that's the six new stores we did last year and the three we've done so far this year. And they continue to scale as an overall group in line with the business cases and each store sort of individually within its own business case planning corridor. So overall, can see there revenue up. UK, 6.9% or 3,500,000 to 54,600,000. Moving to adjusted EBITDA in that bottom bridge then starting with the gross margin, you can see that we've got a 40 basis points decline year on year. So if you look at the bridge of that and start with the the positive bridging components, we've got a 40 basis point improvement overall because of our own brand progression, you know, continues to go well. Gross profit growth year on year of... Not just over 22% and now just just shy of 16% of our UK total gross profit, and that's up 200 basis points year on year at the half.

15:29 Then we also have a 10 basis points improvement in the margin through new revenue streams. So these are things like our in store services where we do real servicing and real spooling, our commercial marketing income, and our new competition website, ADWIN, as we continue to leverage that cost base as well as our my AD customer scale and reach. And moving to the negative bridging components in there, we've got a 60 basis point reduction in the margin reflecting the high levels of price discounting in the market, particularly over the second quarter. And we've we've got increasing amounts of data and insight on who is setting the pricing in the market around which SKUs in particular are being being discounted, and that's enabling us to be increasingly choiceful in terms of where we focus our efforts and our resources from both the competitor and supplier perspective in that area.

16:24 And then finally, the 30 basis points of high shrink year on year. Now the primary driver of this is warranty claims on third party products where we've both got a higher amount of claims year on year and a higher level of unresolved supply warranty claims. So we are seeing higher levels of warranty claim, but the key driver in here is the rollout of new third party warranty claim technology we we sort of deployed in the first half. That is initially slowing down the resolution time frames,

16:55 but we think that with the more robust comprehensive information that is is used within that within that technology that suppliers... Alongside then the suppliers engaging DIRECT will see a much better resolution rate. So we've seen a bit of an initial slowdown, but we ultimately expect that resolution rates come back and also actually provide us with better data and insight in terms of how we can, you know, have less warranty claims coming in and also how we can in... Increase the claim resolution velocity with suppliers.

17:28 And moving to the right hand side dashed blue box on there in terms of the cost base. So we continue to keep a gripe... A tight grip on costs and also more... Even more imperative in a period where we've got some more gross margin pressures. But because of the significant work we've done in this area over the past few years to offset some pretty significant cost headwinds, it's obviously an increasing challenge to find more and more options in terms of that cost optimization. But, you know, we we... You know, all of our efforts still sort of stay focused on this to make sure that we're we're squeezing every pound of value we can out the cost base. So starting in that direct cost ratio, and this is the fulfillment cost in stores and online as a ratio of sales. So think store and warehouse colleague, payroll, paid advertising ratio, etcetera.

18:20 So the ratio here increased by 1.4% year on year and a half, which under indexes versus the inflationary cross pressures we're seeing. So think 4.1% national living wage increase and payrolls probably over half of this cost in in terms of direct costs. So with this is weird where we're seeing the benefit of that digital shelf edge labeling and the auto pack returns paying through for us sort of offsetting some of that headline inflation in in the direct costs. The channel cost ratio, so here, this is the the the overheads directly attribute... Attributable to the online store businesses. So for example, the store premises, this ratio is actually flat on a year on year basis. And, actually, if you take out the new space, our spend is broadly flat on a pound note basis as well, sort of reflecting our, you know, focus on really leveraging that cost base.

19:15 On a similar note with the group overheads there, so that's where the sort of central overheads, so sort of think our head office functional teams, if you like, as a percentage of sales. You can see there that's actually improved by 90 basis points year on year. And on a last twelve month basis, we're now down at 6.3% of UK sales. And so that's well within our sort of 7% appetite in terms of what we what we need to deliver at to hit those medium term objectives. Overall, that reflects then UK adjusted EBIT growth of 10% off to 4,500,000 and that EBITDA margin growth of 30 basis points to 8.3%. Moving to Europe, set... As I said before, the the sales are down a touch being headed internal plans and that is also delivered at a contribution ratio. And by that, what I mean is the adjusted EBITDA prior to the overheads as a percentage of sales.

20:11 That's actually improved by a 100 basis points year on year, so really supporting that overall loss reduction plan and alongside what is already a bare bones overhead structure in Europe is really what's allowed us to sort of get that... Get those losses down further by the 20%. And as I said before, we're we're down at seven and a half percent of UK adjusted EBITDA down from 12.5 last year and 22.4 the year before. I won't dwell on this side for too long. I'll let you have a look afterwards, but hopefully, it just provides a bit of context for sort of understanding where that first half performance fits in and where we've come from over quite a short short period of time. And then finally, just moving to cash flow and return on capital.

20:58 So you can see the cash bridge at the top of the page there just to pull out a few highlights. So you can see there we've got a working capital inflow of naught £700,000 in the half. So, theoretically, in a steady state business where, you know, we weren't deploying any additional... Any of the working capital flexibility we've got in the capital allocation policy for example, you expect about 3,000,000 inflow at this point because it's our working capital low point for the year. So that 2,300,000 variance against that 3,000,000 theoretical sort of reference point does reflect the flexibility, the capital allocation policy, both in terms of that new space where we've deployed about £500,000 into those three new sites we've done in h one alongside some acceleration in the stock intake where we went deeper on our... Some of the top thousand SKUs. And just as a reminder, that top thousand covers about 55% of our revenue, and we did that sort of earlier in the season at the outset of the Iran war just to underpin the peak trading period given we, you know, we didn't know where we were going to get to at that point in time in terms of, you know, how much flux that would cause us. And some of that still sat then on our balance sheet at the end of July as we headed into sort of the August, September trading period.

22:16 On interest, if we park to one side the IFRS 16 interest element, the underlying interest income remains sort of similar to last year, about naught 200,000. And then finally, on CapEx, in the half, it's 1,300,000. As you can see, 0.6 is roughly relate... Relates to the three new stores with the rest of them reflecting maintenance CapEx, and then you can see there on the buybacks, which we've already touched on. We've also given the adjusted free cash flow in that box on the right hand side there where we then strip out the investments in the CapEx and working capital for new space and then other investment CapEx, which there isn't any other in in in half one this year and the buyback cash flow. So then sort of understand what that underlying cash flow generation looks like, and you can see there that continues to strengthen with a 5,000,000 inflow, 1,400,000 higher than last year.

23:12 And then finally, moving to group adjusted ROCE, continue to make progress here, 130 basis points up year on year on a trailing 12 basis to 10.3. And we can... You know, that this is our focus here in terms of delivering on both sides of the equation. So you can... And and the... Really, the cocktail here is trading twelve month EBIT growing at 25%, but the adjusted net assets only going forward by 0.3%, so really delivering earnings growth of a broadly flat balance sheet ex cash. And with that, I'll hand back to Steve. Thank you, Sam. So back in May, as I said, we upgraded our medium term objectives. We just set out in the presentation a reminder of how we chose to sort of move those objectives forward from the previous set that we'd put out in the market.

24:09 Worth noting sort of the level of ambition that we've put in there, particularly around the earnings piece, scaling those earnings by a further 33% over the medium term, worth just referring back to we delivered substantially delivered the previous set of objectives within a twenty four month period and we're on a CAGR right now of around four years based on the May announcement date that we put out there. We've nuanced some of those around particularly around Europe, where very much are determined and committed as a management team in terms of leveraging the balance sheet, where we to expand into Europe. We have got a very robust cash position and our capital allocation policy considers what level of cash we need to retain to open up that European optionality should it manifest itself.

25:00 Over the page, what we've done is one of the some of the questions we often get you know, what are the key drivers that sit beneath those levels of ambition? So we've just set out on the page there some of the fundamentals that underpin each of those aspects in terms of those new broad and medium term objectives. In particular, the return on capital point is the one that I'm sort of most passionate about that free cash flow yield and that return on capital does require us to sort of continue to strengthen The UK business, be very disciplined about how we think about the European optionality, look at what is an optimum cash holding level that we need to hold for the business, challenge ourselves around that and at the same time return capital to shareholders where it's compelling to do so. We're particularly we think buying 12% of the company for 44 P represents fantastic value for the shareholder base and we've still maintained a very, very strong liquidity position. And we continue to generate cash as Sam just signposted with that $5,000,000 inflow number at the half.

26:11 Over the page, current trading and outlook, you know, everyone will have seen that the weather was a bit more helpful over sort of September, which sort of gave us gave us a bit of a shot in the arm in terms of there was some pent up demand there, a little bit more fishing activity, you know, a really strong performance in August and September. And underneath that 10.7, there is some very solid like for like figures, particularly in The UK stores as we saw our customer base increasingly come back to us after being unable to sort of participate in the past time over the summer with the very low levels of water and associated oxygen. We think that demonstrates the resilience in terms of our customer base and the strength of the sort of the customer moat that we're building for The UK business.

26:59 Again, post the period end, I've talked about the buyback. We did deploy more cash as folks would have seen to the date of the RNS that we put out last Tuesday and subsequently post the RNS last Tuesday, we've done some more buyback of what we think is a compelling price relative to where we believe the sort of the short and medium term value for this stock should be.

27:23 The Board confirms that it's still trading in line with full year market expectations. We are gaining customers. There is some discounting in the market, as Sam signposted. We do see the competitors making what we consider to be irrational decisions in some aspects of their trading. We'll continue to respond to that in a choiceful fashion, which we think builds long term sort of sustainability for our business. But we're very much still trading in line with those expectations that we've set out to the market, which is a UK business delivering over 6,000,000 of EBITDA and a European business losing more than £400,000

28:04 With that, that takes us to the end of the presentation. Thanks very much for listening. That takes us on to the questions. Perfect. Thank you, Steve and Sam, for updating investors today. Could you please remind investors to submit your questions just by using the Q and A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen and for your reference recording of today's presentation, it will be available in the Investor Me Company platform shortly after the meeting has ended. Guys, as you can see, we have received a number of questions during today's presentation. So Steve, if I could just hand back to you at this point to read out the questions and give responses where appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end. Thank you. I'll let the first one's about free cash flow, so I'll let my CFO handle that. So the first question is you've provided an indication of expectations for EBITDA and revenue this year. Please, can you provide an indication for free cash flow performance?

28:53 So if we look at what our two covering analysts have in their notes, obviously, that's the source of the EBITDA and revenue guidance. If we if we park to one side the buybacks and just look at the underlying free cash flow, this obviously includes investment CapEx and and working capital as well. They've got us in that 2.6 to 2.8 range, so that's probably a good corridor to think about. Thanks, Sam. Next question. Please can you discuss how the dry conditions in The UK impacted your business this summer? The way we look at it is we, you know, we... About 80% of our customers now, it is transacted through MyAD, so our customer loyalty program.

29:38 Think, you know, QR code on your phone, you can swipe at the till, so we can actually see who it is and how they're behaving. And so what what we saw particularly in q two is in our... Is our store only customers, I. E. Those who are coming in, who are buying a greater proportion of bait and consumables, I. The things that you need to buy to go fishing. We saw a reduction in frequency across sort of all of our cohorts, you know, our one time customer, our two to three times customers, you know, four to five, six to nine and our 10 pluses. So we saw we saw people engaging in the activity less frequently as those dry conditions prevailed. What we were able to do in response to that, given, you know, that we we've got, you know, a substantial amount of data now around customer preferences, behavior, frequency of purchase, rate of sale, we were able to really lean into our sort of customer database and talk to our most committed customers in an increasingly sophisticated way, whereby our omnichannel customers, the one who shops with us physically and digitally, we were able to, in nearly all of the frequency cohorts that I just talked about, drive greater frequency and that was how we were able to underpin our like for like sales that we sort of sampled up on the screen, the 2.9 and again, you know, in a more sort of a benign weather environment,

31:09 we think that's why we've got the confidence in those medium term objectives to see those UK like for like scale even further, where we haven't got the headwinds of that sort of dry weather in The UK.

31:23 Next one, your prepared remarks were cautious on the health of The UK customer. Please can you help us understand the volumes versus price dynamics within your like for like growth? I think as I said earlier, our overall customer footprint in like for like sort of business right across The UK was mildly accretive. What we did see was discounting in the market more laterally in Q2 and therefore, we saw average spend levels across each of the frequencies reduce and that's both in our store only customers, in our web customers and in our omnichannel customers. So we were really able to lean into a sort of stable and modestly growing customer base, but at the same time pressure on average transaction value from those reducing prices in the market.

32:16 Next one. With your own brand gross profit up 22, what scale remains to grow your own brand sales and margins without compromising customer choice or quality? Yeah. Great question. You know, I am an angler. I'd I'd... You know, I do recognize the value of of the branded offer. I'm very I'm very conscious of we do not want to be an own brand store. The way I'm thinking about the Advanta brand is can we be more choiceful about the categories we lean into and how we're clearer the role Advanta plays within each category strategy. We're increasingly challenging our buying economics by those choices we can make relative to the specification of the product. One of the things that does come through is we offer very high quality gear at a very affordable price And are there choices we can make around that to drive the economics harder in the categories we wish to play?

33:16 Obviously, Advanta is going to have a ceiling. It's not quite there yet, but in twenty four months' time, one could argue we're getting towards the scale of the ambition for that brand. We'd love to sort of run a second brand that sort of sat above Advanta. We keep scanning the market for sort of inorganic opportunities and we'll continue to do that and we'll be disciplined on the price we'll pay for that relative to the size of the price.

33:48 Next one, wondering what ideas you have for giving kids the skill set to become anglers, e g going into schools teaching mental health or teaming up. You know, on that, we very much see the AD community fund playing a role in that. You know, we we we raised 20,000 this year. That will double to 40,000 next year. We've given that we were giving that to four regional winners. We were fortunate enough in the regional winners didn't command all of the cash that was in the pot, so we've actually ended up disseminating it to nine different winners. As that scales, very much a lot of that is around participation, around sort of giving skills folks the skills and the confidence to go out and fish. Another angle to that is in our web page, in our customer service team, we have got someone dedicated to enabling folks to use the telephone to call up and talk about how they, you know, where the how to guides, how do access the kit, where do they go.

34:49 What we're not going to do is run scale organized activities ourselves. We've done that historically or the business did it historically about three, four years ago and that was completely uneconomic in terms of sort of gaining new customer footfall and growing the market. Next one, how do economics of the Dutch store compare to The UK average store?

35:13 The challenge on the Dutch store is the margins in Europe remain very challenging, particularly in the sort of capital item space. And when I define capital items, mean something over sort of €30 price point. You know, the volume of the capital items you need to push through the store environment to sort of recover those economics against what a standard UK model would look like is disproportionate. The consumables in The UK store model is around 40p in the pound. In the Dutch store, we see them in excess of that because of the pricing digitally where folks are much more aggressive digitally. We're clear on what our loss threshold in your...

36:00 Our tolerance is, and and we're within that sort of loss envelope as as we're trading that store today. Next one. Can you say more about from whom you bought all of these shares? You know, all all of the tier ones that we have done are are sort of up on up on the website. You know, there there... There's been a mixture of of of sellers for for various different reasons. I'm not gonna go into each individual seller and their reasons for doing that.

36:30 We've taken some from institutions, some from the retail market. We're relatively agnostic on who the sellers are. We're more focused in on what is that sort of that price point that we think is real value for the rest of the shareholder register. And we think at the current price, the stock's trading that, that still represents a very deep discount to what fair value is. So we put in our RNS, we're going to go and seek to increase our buyback permissions again to sort of give us optionality over continuing to return capital to shareholders through that mechanism, whilst we think the pricing remains at a level that the Board is comfortable with. Perfect. That's great, guys. Thank you for updating investors today. Before we ask investors to share their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company, Steve, could I please just ask you for some closing comments?

37:25 Yeah, look, thanks for making the time this morning. You know, we're pretty proud of what we've done in very difficult market right now with the consumer backdrop. We think sort of the hard work from the last three years from all of the team has proven itself out. The UK is a much more resilient business, has got the sort of the scope to scale quite quickly now, take Europe out of the eye line, we think the sort of the time is now. We're confident in those medium term objectives and we're sort of looking forward to talking to you again in May with hopefully some more, you know, some positive further positive momentum against those. That's great. Can I please ask investors not to close this session as you now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback? On behalf of the management team of ANGLING DIRECT PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you all.