Gear4music (Holdings) (LSE:G4M) — Final Results

0:01 Good morning, and welcome to the GEAR4MUSIC Holdings PLC Final Results Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and they can be submitted at any time using the Q and A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press send. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. I would now like to hand you over to Executive Chair, Andrew Woz. Good morning. Hello. I'm Andrew, founder and executive chair of GEAR4MUSIC. Before Chris and I take you through our f y twenty six results, I thought it'd be helpful to start with a brief overview of what GEAR4MUSIC does and why we believe we have a compelling investment case. As a business, we're strong advocates of using AI to achieve efficiencies wherever appropriate.

0:49 So rather than me delivering this introduction, I thought I'd hand over to my digital AI twin. I'll see you again in a few minutes. At its core, GEAR4MUSIC is an online retailer focused on making music equipment more accessible. We offer a broad range of products from guitars, drums, and keyboards to studio, DJ, live sound, and home audio equipment, serving everyone from first time beginners to professional musicians. What sets us apart is our combination of product choice, value, specialist expertise, and a customer experience built around how people buy musical equipment today. Alongside leading third party brands, we continue to grow our portfolio of higher margin own brand products, broadening our appeal across customer segments and price points.

1:34 While many traditional retailers remain store led, GEAR4MUSIC has modernized musical instrument retail through technology, operational efficiency, and scale. At the heart of this is our proprietary ecommerce platform built specifically for the complexities of the musical instrument market. These capabilities enable differentiated services, including the efficient trade in and resale of secondhand equipment at scale, while supporting increasingly sophisticated pricing, inventory management, fulfillment and customer experience. Across Europe, we have localized our websites and customer experience while leveraging a scalable logistics network. This allows us to deliver high levels of convenience, product availability, and service consistency across multiple territories.

2:19 The combination of proprietary technology, specialist expertise, product breadth and scalable infrastructure has created a differentiated market position that is difficult to replicate. It has established GEAR4MUSIC as a trusted destination for musicians at every stage of their journey and positions the business well for continued long term market share growth. Thank you for listening. I'll hand you back to the real Andrew. Hello again. I hope you enjoyed watching that as much as I enjoyed creating it. So before we get into the detail of the results, I'd just like to briefly highlight this slide, which reinforces the points just made my by made by my digital twin, and importantly, what sets GEAR4MUSIC apart from other retailers in our market. The key takeaway is that we fundamentally modernized how musical instruments and equipment are sold in what was a traditional, highly fragmented, specialist retail sector.

3:12 By developing our own proprietary technology platform and creating our own exclusive product ranges, we've built a scalable business model that has enabled us to grow significantly faster than other retailers in our sector over the last twenty years in what is a £5,000,000,000 market. These capabilities give us greater control of the customer experience. They support operational efficiency and provide a strong foundation for continued profitable growth. So turning to our f y twenty six results. In summary, we've had a fantastic year. We returned to strong revenue growth of 30%. Margins improved across the business, delivering significant gross profit growth. And whilst maintaining good cost control resulted in an 84% increase in EBITDA, a profit before tax of just over £10,000,000, an 8,700,000 improvement compared with the previous year.

4:03 That's meant fulfilling a record number of orders over 1,200,000, which has meant we've reached maximum capacity in our UK warehouse. But as we'll discuss in a few minutes, we have a clear plan to address this, providing significant additional capacity and operational efficiencies to support future profitable growth. We recognize investors will want to know how we intend to build in such a strong year. The summary answer is that most of the growth focused system upgrades we've been investing in over the last few years were only deployed during the fourth quarter of f y twenty six. So combined with additional warehouse capacity we have coming online ahead of this year's peak trading period, we expect to see good results from these new developments during the current financial year, and we'll cover these in more detail shortly. Before that, just looking to a few key financial trends.

4:52 On this slide, you can clearly see the progress we're making with revenue growth and continued EBITDA improvement and net debt coming down for the fourth consecutive year. Average order value up by 7%, reflecting the growing contribution from higher value products and customers. We'll talk more about that shortly. And it's great to see European growth bounce back strongly, growing faster than The UK market. I think this is particularly noteworthy given that we saw the greatest level of competitive consolidation in The UK market. For me, this underlines a really important point. Whilst market conditions have undoubtedly helped create opportunities, the growth we've delivered is equally a result of the strategic investments we've made and implemented across the business. In other words, we're not simply benefiting from changes in the market. We're executing against a clear strategy that's driving our market share gains.

5:41 We thought it'd be useful to share a broader range of KPIs in this next slide to illustrate where the growth and progress have come from. And the answer is, it's been pretty much everywhere. Our growth is being driven by multiple initiatives rather than any single factor. Education sales performed particularly well during the year, benefiting from both reduced competition and additional government funding for schools, which happily has been extended again into this year. Showroom sales are worth calling out. All four of our showroom locations, York, Bakeup, Sweden, and Germany, delivered strong growth with York performing especially well. We don't have plans to expand our physical store estate, but there is an opportunity to grow showroom sales within the existing locations. Even the lower growth metrics demonstrate solid, positive progress, secondhand, for example. Sales grew slower than last year because it's been less of a focus with all the other opportunities that we've had, And it does take more physical space to handle and store secondhand products. So given the capacity constraints we've had, it's just been a low priority, but we still very much believe it has a strong future.

6:44 Otherwise, it's good to see both marketing and labor costs grow at a slower rate in revenues, which, of course, helps the bottom line. Earlier, I mentioned we've recently launched several important projects and developments, and slide six provides an overview of these. Two of the most significant are commercial growth projects that support both sides of our business, buying and selling. On the buying side, after three years of in house development, in March, we launched our new AI powered forecasting and purchasing platform. This will help us identify missed sales opportunities, improve stock efficiency and availability, and make our purchasing processes more efficient. On the sales side, we've completely redesigned our CRM and promotion systems. It's a major upgrade that allows us to build and layer promotions in a more sophisticated way. For example, we can now combine offers such as trading your old products and then receive a discount on any gift music guitar.

7:40 The system can also generate far more personalized and relevant automated communications with our customers. We're also highlighting this slide a new largely automated UK distribution center that I mentioned earlier and G4M Courier, which is our in house white glove delivery service just launched last week. We do have dedicated slides for both of these, so I'll move straight on to G4M Courier. We want to make the most of the growth we've seen in higher value transactions whilst also addressing a limitation that's prevented us from selling certain products in the past. For some premium products, manufacturers expect a level of delivery setup and customer service that third party carriers aren't designed to provide. Yamaha is a good example of a brand that have certain premium products that require higher touch service than we've been able to deliver before.

8:30 So we've launched our own white glove delivery service, initially just covering UK and allowing us to sell those products that we've not been able to sell before, potentially generating additional 3 to 4,000,000 of revenue during the next year. And the good news is that the costs are comparable to our existing third party couriers, and in some cases, actually cheaper. Whilst this is a relatively small purchase in the scale of things, it serves as a good example of our approach to innovation, identifying practical opportunities will not grow and better serve our customers. Okay. To slide eight, UK logistics transformation. During the last year, it became clear that if we wanted to continue growing The UK, we had to address capacity constraints within our existing facilities. At the same time, we want to improve efficiency and create a platform that supports long term profitable growth.

9:21 So we're undertaking a transformation program that will take us from a largely manual warehouse operation to a highly automated one, enabling future scaling whilst keeping our underlying operating costs stable. The new warehouse is located less than thirty minutes drive from our existing York headquarters and warehouse. The plan is all UK distribution of new products will move to new facility. This will allow us to close our smaller bake up operation that's focused on AV products and repurpose capacity for the things that require a skilled workforce, including returns processing, expanding our very successful showroom, and unlocking secondhand sales growth. We estimated a phase one investment of just over 10,000,000, which we're on track with. To be completed at peak head of peak this year, it will support more than 60% of UK order volumes as we move into next year.

10:11 Phase two installation will likely begin later this year to be completed ahead of peak 2027. The new facility will be capable of handing handling more than two and a half times our current throughput for broadly the same labor cost we have now. When fully operational, around two thirds of our UK shipments will be highly automated with an 85% reduction in labor required for those shipments, while also delivering a more consistent packaging standard. It's worth noting there will be some duplicated costs as we cross over into the new facility, which the analysts have previously noted, and will potentially result in a slightly lower profits for the current financial year, but it's well worth the small short term p and l downside to unlock future growth. We expect the investment will pay back in just three to five years.

10:56 With that, I'll hand over to Chris, who'll take you through the FY '26 numbers in more detail. Thanks, Andrew, and and welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us. It's great to be able to report that all the strategic, commercial, and operational progress that Andrew has detailed has come through into the financial results for the year. The figures themselves are largely preannounced, albeit slightly higher, and I'll draw up the main point and hopefully add some useful color. The main takeaways from slide 10 are growth, margin progression, and operational leverage. Gross margin is covered in the coming slides and reflects a lot of hard work by our buying teams and improved market conditions. In the year, we had a one off upside on the sale of some deal stock that we acquired out of the insolvencies of two competitors.

11:44 We made sales of 3,600,000 at a 54% gross margin. Although how much of this is incremental is difficult to say as we already stock the majority of the products and make over 50% margin on our own brand products anyway. Just to illustrate the maximum potential impact, if you stripped out all of these sales in full, we'd still have grown at 28 percent and be reporting a 27.9% gross margin, which as you can see in the chart on the bottom left, would still be a very good result. Marketing efficiency has been transformed as we brought pay per click operations and management back in house and as the market improved. Labor costs increased but well below top line growth, which contributed meaningfully to the EBITDA margin improvement.

12:32 Slide 11 breaks down gross margin into its component parts, and we're reporting an improvement in product margin reflecting a continued disciplined approach to buying and pricing and improved market conditions. It also includes a decrease in net carriage costs, which is a reversal of last year's increase and reflects a 7% higher average order value and carrier deals partially passed on to our consumers and partially banked. Own brand improvements reflect the culmination of a lot of hard work to refresh and broaden the range at attractive price points underpinned with a favorable margin structure. Branded margins continue to be stable, reflecting our pricing discipline. Slide 12 draws out the key trading themes, and you can see very strong revenue growth spread across brands and geographies.

13:25 We're especially pleased to see bounce back growth in Europe, reflecting a normalized level of marketing and good stock breadth and depth across DCs, particularly an own brand. The UK continues to do very well for us, reflecting an improved market where our brand is most established and where we launch our growth initiatives first. Own brand is a really important part of our business in terms of margin enhancement and point of differentiation, and it really does punch above its weight with 23% of revenue coming from just 9% of our SKUs. Marketing and labor are the main component parts of our cost base, accounting for 77% of overheads and 65% of admin expenses. Marketing continues to be highly focused on pay per click, although we have reduced the spend allocation from 88% last year down to 84% as we diversify and increase investment in other areas.

14:22 Labor costs are up on last year, reflecting a 9% increase in average headcount and a 7% increase in average pay. Slide 13 pulls together the trading themes in a p and l format. You can see the amplifying effect of very strong top line growth, a strong gross margin, and operational leverage as we report EBITDA of 18,400,000, which is our second highest figure ever and by some way, second only to the COVID year. Touching briefly on a couple of the other lines, other income of 1,000,000 includes 500,000 of property rents, of which 200,000 was a short term sublet in Spain that won't repeat in f y twenty seven as we've downsized.

15:10 And net finance expenses are 500,000 lower than last year, reflecting a 300,000 net improvement in FX and a 100,000 lower bank interest. Moving on to the balance sheet. Net debt of 5,000,000 equates to just 0.3 times EBITDA and is 1,400,000 lower than last year, notwithstanding an 8,000,000 increase in inventory and 3,100,000 of prepayments in relation to our new DC. Reported stock of 43,000,000 was 25% higher than last year, reflecting investment and breadth across our DCs and are continuing to take advantage of opportunities as and when they arise. Stock term has been fairly consistent over the years, reflecting how we run the business and turned 3.7 times in the year compared to 3.6 times last year.

16:05 It's worth calling out we continue to have an unleveraged working capital cycle with 43,000,000 of stock at the year end relative to just 13,000,000 of total trade payables. We have freeholds of 6,700,000 and capitalized 3,400,000 of software development costs, including 600,000 of outsourced costs that have since been reduced. The cash flow waterfall shows our core business generates a really good level of cash. We've invested in working capital, and this can be reversed as we proved in f y twenty four and in a big way in f y twenty three. We invest and we'll continue to invest in our ecommerce platform. And as we grow, the relative size of this investment decreases.

16:52 And as a percentage of sales, this has come down from a high of 3.5% in f y twenty three down to 1.8% this year. These figures are slightly distorted by our prepaying 3,100,000 in relation to our new DC. This is an early payment of part of the 10,200,000 estimated CapEx and reverses in f y twenty seven. Moving on to some website metrics, I should start by calling out that we've moved from user based to session based reporting as this gives a more reliable measure of website activity given the effects of cookie consent and guest checkout. The trends are the same either way, but these figures are more consistent with our other data, and we will be consistently reporting on this basis going forwards.

17:43 We've also moved to a new third party CRM system that should provide better consumer insights each year going forwards. The main points from the slide are a significant increase in traffic to our sites in line with revenue growth and a small decrease in reported conversion, reflecting increases in cross domain journeys and in automated traffic sessions with zero conversion. Slide 80 updates on some customer metrics, and the key point remains that we're profitable from the first transaction with a £45 gross profit and a £14 acquisition cost. Having said that, over 200,000 customers did come back to us in the year, and the chart on the right clearly shows customer retention is improving.

18:31 And this should continue to get better at things like remarketing. Average order value is up 7%, reflecting a higher proportion of bigger ticket sales and lower pricing competition on certain SKUs at certain times. Email subscriber database increased again and by 200,000 to 2,200,000. These are people who have actively signed up and are receiving our emails. And I'll now hand back to Andrew. Great. Thanks, Chris. One objective of our refreshed growth strategy from last year was to diversify our marketing channels and grow more organic sources of demand. An area where we've made really good progress is influencer marketing. Over the last two years, we've invested in a dedicated influencer team to build and develop partnerships across our key markets, and we're now really starting to see the benefits.

19:22 During f y twenty six, our influencer network generated, on average, a 125 pieces of content a month. Over the next twelve months, we're targeting closer to 200 pieces a month with a particular focus on expanding our European presence. While a significant proportion of European customers consume English language content, we want to increase engagement by using more local languages, partnering with a broader network of regional influences. This will help us continue building brand awareness, deepen customer engagement, and further diversifying our marketing mix. As you can see from this slide, we delivered growth across all major product categories during the year. Particularly impressive are our core guitar and drum categories, which benefited from the growth in high value product sales we mentioned earlier.

20:10 During this year, for example, we sold several guitars online priced at more than £15,000, and silver drum kits over £5,000 are becoming increasingly common. Sales of products above £2,500 increased by 55% during the year, well ahead of our overall revenue growth, demonstrating our success in premium categories. Growth in home audio visual was more modest, reflecting our decision to exit the TV market. The low margin nature of TV sales meant it just wasn't attractive for us to keep investing in it, so we decided to focus on high margin product categories instead. So that's about it from us. Just to summarize, FY '26 has been a year of really strong execution and significant progress for GEAR4MUSIC. We've continued to grow market share across both UK and Europe, delivering growth in revenue, margins, profit, reducing net debt for a fourth consecutive year, and further strengthening our balance sheet.

21:05 Alongside this fantastic performance, we've continued to invest in the future of the business. During the year, we launched a number of strategic initiatives across technology, logistics, and customer experience, which expect to support both growth and operational efficiencies during the current financial year and beyond. Our UK warehouse transformation bridge remains on track and on budget, and once operational, we'll provide substantial increase in capacity whilst improving efficiency and supporting long term profitable growth. We secured a 45,000,000 revolving credit facility to support future opportunities, and we continue to diversify both our sales channels and customer verticals. And finally, trading in the current financial year has started well. Despite increasingly challenging comparatives, year to date performance is in line with board's expectations with double digit revenue growth.

21:54 Thanks for listening. I'll be happy to answer any questions you have now. That's great, Andrew, Chris. Thank you very much indeed for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions using the q and a tab situated on the top right corner of your screen. While the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I would like to remind you that recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q and A can be accessed via our investor dashboard. Andrew, Chris, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. And I wanted to start off the q and a session with the first one here, which reads as follows. Why does GEAR4MUSIC's valuation differ from other listed ecommerce businesses? And what gives you the confidence in continued momentum through FY twenty seven and beyond?

22:41 Great. Thanks for the question. Very good question. Not sure we can, comment directly on this one, but I think it's fair to say it's not escaped our our attention. I think we've done everything that we've needed to do. Yeah. We've brought net debt down. We've delivered growth. We built the infrastructure that we need to grow. So it it's hard to answer that question directly, really, but maybe people are worried about consumer spending, which could be a thing, but I can see why that might, affect retailers in certain sectors. But I think today's results for us really clearly demonstrate actually that demand is strong. And and if you get the setup right, you can still do very well. So I honestly don't know what's causing that situation if people feel that's correct.

23:32 Hopefully, that answers the question. Thank you, Andrew. And the next one here is, to what extent is f y twenty six performance down to market consolidation? Yeah. Great question. I think it's one of those things that's yeah. Clearly, it's helped us, but it hasn't been the key driver of what we've done during the last year. I think that's really clearly demonstrated actually between our UK and European growth. We did very well in The UK, and it's UK where most of the consolidations happened with GAG PMC both going out of business. In Europe, sure, there was a situation with one competitor, but they resurrected themselves and apparently are back to doing pretty well again. But actually through a year, you know, we grew faster in Europe where there was a lot less consolidation going on. I think that really demonstrates the point clearly that it hasn't just all been about consolidation of market. It's been about what we've been doing.

24:30 I think European markets, it's really interesting that it's probably still a bit behind The UK market in terms of that transition to one line. I think therein creates a really big opportunity for us. There's still a long way to go with that transition. The market's still changing in that way, but there's a big opportunity for us. We've been able to adapt where other people haven't. So, yeah, I think I'm very confident we can keep growing and show it it helps us a bit during last year, but it it wasn't the key driver of it. Thank you, Andrew. Moving on to the next one is why is the new warehouse such an important strategic milestone for GEAR4MUSIC? Yes. It's a it's a huge step forward for us, not just, in terms of capacity, but just in how we operate as well. This new facility has got a very high degree of automation, which is which is quite new for us.

25:24 We've run on a relatively manual setups in in all of our DCs. They've been quite low CapEx to install. They've been very effective and obviously built a good amount of scale in the business, but we want to move forward from that. We want to be as efficient as we possibly can as we scale and grow the business. And this automated setup is going to allow us to do that. It's it's quite good timing really because even if we tried to do this seven or eight years ago, it it wouldn't have been possible to the same extent that it is now in the the cost of being able to automate has come down quite a lot. It's obviously still requires investment. We're putting CapEx into it, but it is gonna be a total game changer in in terms of efficiency. You know, being about 85% more effective, in terms of labor cost for for picking and packing our orders. So I really can't wait to get this, up and running.

26:19 It's also gonna allow us to focus on where we need skilled people within the business. You know, there's always very much gonna be a place for that. It'd be very difficult to automate secondhand, for example, showrooms, returns, all need skilled people. So it will allow us to also focus on that, and it's gonna create much needed space and capacity in your facility to to expand those areas of the business as well. So I think it's a win in every direction, and I think it's gonna be a bit of a game changer for us. Thank you very much, Andrew. Next one here on AI. In 2024 and 2025, you outlined an AI first growth strategy. What measurable progress have you made against that strategy, and how are you addressing the governance, security, and quality risks that have constrained AI adoption at other organizations?

27:09 Yeah. Great question, actually. We're using AI in so many different places. And certainly, some areas, it's it's pretty straightforward to to measure how effective it is. For example, earlier this year, we launched a AI website chat, which is a great tool, and it's really helping answer actual product questions as well as sort of the customer service kind of stuff. And we can measure pretty clearly the impacts of this kind of thing that's got on call volumes, for example, into our call centers. And it's lowering inbound call volumes relative to how our revenues in our top line are growing. So a really useful tool such as that. And we're using our in some of these places, like in our accounts function, for example, with speeding up repetitive tasks.

27:54 So it's quite easy to to measure that against how we're working before forecasting and purchasing, the big new platform we've just launched. It's gonna take a bit more time for that to bed in, but I think, again, it'd be quite easy to measure that in terms of our growth and our efficiency. We're clearly up against quite big like for likes this year. As mentioned this update, we've signed the year really well, And and it's systems like the AI focusing person that really helping to support that kind of growth. So I think that'll be quite directly measurable as well. Another one I can think of, quite easy to measure AI translation. It's simply reducing reducing our cost of translation, allowing us to do the same things, but better at larger scale, more effectively, and at lower cost.

28:40 So, yeah, lots of different ways we can we can measure the improvement and health that AIR is giving us. In terms of the governance and security side of things, we have a rolling program of internal training. We lean on internal and external experts in the sort of defining implementation rollout of the programs. We perform risk assessments on all the projects that we're doing as we as we work through them, keep those up to date, do all that in conjunction with our data protection officer. So we have a number of of safeguards in place to make sure that we are doing the right things in the right way. Thank you very much. And switching to a question on profit before tax margins. You achieved PBT margins of 5.5% in FY twenty six.

29:26 What are you what are you expecting PBT margins to be once the new facility is established? So, yeah, as you rightly point out, PBT margin hit 55.5% in the year. There'll be a short term transition as we effectively manage duplicated costs. So I point to analysts and what they're saying for the next, couple of years, but so PBT margin around the 3% level. But then, yeah, after that, when you lean on capital and you start to get the efficiency through, all subject to the top line and what level of growth you can push through there. But the idea is you drive efficiency and the PBT margin can be improved above those sorts of levels. So I would like to think in the medium and longer term that we're able to get that, make some improvement on that figure. Notwithstanding it is a very good number in its own right.

30:12 Thank you, Chris. Next one here is how active are you in supplying instruments in bulk to schools and other educational institutions? Yeah. We've actually done really well on this this subject this year. Education sales being one of our fastest growing areas of the of the business. We've got a good education team. We've got a pretty slick online system for schools now. The new delivery service, courier service, we've just announced is really gonna help us with this actually, particularly when you got a large sort of book educational orders. We're now going to have a much better, slicker delivery service into schools. And I think I mentioned maybe earlier on that there's been some extra government funding around, which we're really pleased.

30:57 It's actually been extended into this next year as well. So the schools that do have access to more funding, and it's yeah. It's been an area of our business has been growing quickly. We're very keen to respond to building out our education team, and hopefully, we can continue to grow that. Thank you, Andrew. A question here asks, what level of revenue can the new warehouse support compared with new current capacity? Yeah. So we're building it in the end for about two and a half times the volumes that we currently have. Bear in mind, this is UK. We do ship into Europe a little bit from it, but it's a larger UK based warehouse. So that's an estimate at the minute. The nice thing about it in a way is that we can we can expand the capacity and throughput of this operation by putting in new robots quite easily actually.

31:49 We can increase the throughput. And at the minute, we're only running on a single shift as well, so we could read the dual shifts, which is what happens to in York at the minute, support and capacity. So there is a really good level of headroom. And the the nice thing about it is that as you grow the throughput, it doesn't necessarily cost you really a lot much more in labor as well, which is kind of the big challenge we've got now. Recruiting for our peak seasonal trading period Christmas is is challenging. I think it's fair to say getting enough people to come in at work at that time of year. But with with a new setup, it's it really helps alleviate a lot of those kinds of challenges. So, yeah, a very good amount of additional skilled pass we've got there. Thank you very much, Andrew. Another investor asks, what do you see as the biggest growth drivers in the next twelve to twenty four months?

32:41 I guess, decreeing back to that AI point slightly, how quickly can we adapt and use AI to our our best advantage. For us, it's often about and always been about investing into our platform. We've got this proprietary bespoke platform, and the more we're able to invest into that, the more it's been able to support our growth. It's always been a really key driver of what we do alongside the products, of course, own brand, really important for us. I think we're growing our own brand team faster than most other parts of the business actually. We're now at the point where we're really investing into product development, designing our own products. And the more we can do this, the more successful we are in selling those products, obviously, at high margins as well. So it's another area that we're keen is a is a real driver of not just revenues, but also the profitability of the business as well.

33:38 Great. Thank you. One on competition. With several competitors having exited the market, do you expect new entrants to emerge or existing players to become more aggressive? Yeah. The barriers to entry are quite high, I'd suggest now, that a lot of the, bigger brands are wanting to deal with less people, not more people. And to build a platform of the kind of scale we've got now would be, I'd suggest, very challenging indeed to be able to achieve that even if you invest a lot of money into it. It takes a very long time to establish the relationships that you need, understanding a way to get the products from, how you build those products. So I I think extremely difficult, and I haven't we haven't really seen much sign of competitors or new entrants into the market for really quite a long time now. It has been the other way around is people being exiting the market.

34:35 So I I don't see much of that happening. K. Thank you. And the next one here is on the warehouse once again. Once the investment in upgrading the warehouse is complete, are there any other large CapEx projects on the horizon, I. Within the next five years? In the presentation, that you can download, there is a slide in here about capacities that we have within the business. So right now, we're especially when we put this new UK facility in place, we're fine, but we are a growing business ultimately. And as as a business grows and scales, you have to react to that, and you have to put in the correct infrastructure to ensure that you can keep growing. That's exactly what I've done in The UK. And as and when it becomes necessary, we'll we'll make those similar decisions in different parts. Our UK facility is by far the largest, so there's certainly nothing of that scale that we would need to do in the very near future.

35:34 But, yeah, we'll invest into our infrastructure so it could become more efficient and scale the business a lot more. We're very ambitious. We want to keep growing. So with technology as well, we'll keep investing into technology, but we always have them. So that's that's nothing new. So I don't know any new huge surprises, but we we have to respond to the growth opportunity, and we we need the scale to the the capacity to grow. I'd echo all of that. We are very much focused on software development and what improvements it can bring to our business. So if the question is hinting at is that spend and investment going to drop off once that project is has has been delivered? The answer is no. We're not short of ideas. There's lots of really good things that we do. We can make incremental improvements with our business, which in retail is what it's all about. So we do invest in software development. We always have, and I think we always will.

36:25 Yeah. I think if you wanted to run it just purely for a one off PDL, you can absolutely do that, but we've always been about medium, long term growth and that's what we'll keep doing. It's worth noting actually, and I think I referenced it in the deck that thinking of it as a percentage of sales, it has really started to come down relative to the size of the business, the size of the top line. So when it was probably three, three and a half percent of sales going back a few years, it's now down below 2%. And as the top line grows, the top line showed we outstrip the investment that we're putting into platforms that should become a smaller figure as it were from a cash and a cash flow point of view. Thank you both for that. And the next one here is, should we view the increase in year end inventory as a signal of growth aspiration for the year ahead, or will there be a lot of stock duplication in 2026 during the DC transition?

37:20 No. It won't lead to any, requirements for stock duplication. We do need to run both facilities for a period of time to make sure that we can continue offering a seamless delivery service. And rather than just trying to move a huge amount of inventory over a couple of weeks, it it's just more efficient and cheaper to to allow that to more naturally sell out in one location and stock in the next location. It allows us to scale the new facility step by step, make sure there aren't any or any issues, make sure it's smooth and everything works over time rather than suddenly throwing huge amounts of volume at it overnight, which could be lead to issues. So we're doing it in a more transitioned, smoother kind of way.

38:08 But no, that doesn't mean we have to cheapenk stock. It is a good point. We know we do recognize investment in inventory as a as a lever for growth. We do invest as when opportunities arise. I think it'll be really interesting to see what the new purchasing platform does, how it sort of affects the business. I think in the short term, it might actually increase the natural level of stock in the business that identifies opportunities for us to invest as it were. And then I think in the more medium and longer term when it resets and normalizes replenishment levels, then we could see a lowering across certain parts of certain departments, certain brands, etcetera. I think that'd be quite interesting to see how it plays through and helps us.

38:54 We certainly have the financial ability to invest into stock. It is the right thing to do now. Are you all alerted having renewed our facilities? Yeah. I think I think we do. And I think the point that, we need to probably communicate a little bit better is just how unleveraged, if that's the word, deleveraged our working capital cycle is. So if you look at this period end, we've got £42,000,000 worth of stock and 13,000,000 of total trade creditors. We really have got and we always have maintained a good level of headroom, which is why we take the comfort that we can run the business as we do and make those tactical investments when we can because we can just unwind it. If you look back at FY twenty four, working capital was a net inflow. In FY twenty three, was about a big net inflow into the business with very little effort on our part.

39:42 That's great. Thank you both. And another question here is, to what extent do you rent your products, for instance, to schools and other instrument students? So is that renting was the question? Sorry. That's correct. Yeah. Rent. Yeah. Great question. And the answer is we don't do renting at the minute. I think it maybe in the future, it'd be a a great opportunity. But at the minute, it's not a facility they actually have. We do consumer finance, of course. We do accounts for education, but rental is currently an untapped opportunity for us. Well, look, Andrew, Chris, that concludes the q and a as you have addressed all the questions from investors today. So thank you very much indeed. But Andrew, before I redirect investors to provide you with their feedback, which one is particularly important to yourself and the company, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments? Thank you.

40:36 Yes. Thanks very much everyone for listening. I hope that was useful, and we look forward to doing this again in in the future. Yeah. Thanks for your time. Fantastic. Andrew, Chris, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback, which will help the company better understand your views and expectations. On behalf of the management team, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you all.