Headlam Group H2 2024 Earnings Report

Headlam Group EPS Results

• Actual EPS: -GBX 35
• Consensus EPS: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• One Year Ago EPS: N/A

Headlam Group Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: N/A
• Expected Revenue: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• YoY Revenue Growth: N/A

Headlam Group Announcement Details

• Quarter: H2 2024
• Date: 3/11/2025
• Time: Before Market Opens
• Conference Call Date: Tuesday, March 11, 2025
• Conference Call Time: 1:00AM ET

Headlam is the UK’s leading floorcovering distributor. Operating for over 30 years, the Company has expanded to a network of c. 2,030 people, 17 distribution branches, and 76 trade counters. The Company works with suppliers across the globe manufacturing the broadest range of products, and gives them a highly effective route to market, selling their products to the large and diverse trade customer base. The Company has an extensive customer base spanning independent and multiple retailers, small and large contractors, and house builders. It provides its customers with a market-leading service through the largest product range, in-depth knowledge, ecommerce and marketing support, and nationwide next-day delivery service.

Headlam Group H2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• 9% decline in revenue and volume: The flooring market experienced its third consecutive year of contraction in 2024, as fragile consumer confidence weighed on home improvement spending despite rising housing transactions.
• 4% and 7.4% growth in key segments: Headland grew revenue with larger customers by 4% and trade counters by 7.4%, expanding to 76 sites and planning to reach 83 locations by summer 2025.
• £25m annual profit improvement: The transformation plan now targets a net profit uplift of £25m (up from £15m) and at least £90m one-off cash benefits, against £30m in implementation costs, delivering £10m of gains in 2025 and full run-rate by 2027.
• £61m property disposal proceeds bolstered cash: Sales of five surplus sites generated £61m, turning net debt of £29.6m into £10.9m net cash, cutting facilities to £72m and finalizing a pension scheme buy-in.
• Modest recovery in 2025 but timing uncertain: Headland will focus on completing trade counter investments, implementing transformation efficiencies, and leveraging its service strengths to capture market share regardless of near-term market swings.

Presentation

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

Good morning. Welcome to Headlam's 2024 full-year results presentation. I'm Chris Payne, the Group's Chief Executive, and I'm joined by Adam Phillips, the Group's CFO. Without further ado, just turning to the agenda. We're going to cover just a handful of things today. I'm going to hand over to Adam to talk about the current trading performance, and I'm going to spend a little bit of time giving an update on the strategic initiatives the Group's been following for a little while, and an update on the transformation plan that we announced last year, and to give an update on how it's performing and how we see that working through the next couple of years. If I hand over to Adam to focus on the 2024 financial performance to start with.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

Thanks, Chris. I've just got a handful of slides on the financial results. I'll start with a brief market update on the flooring market and how that performed in 2024. On this slide, we've got a few of the indicators that we've shown before. These are quite helpful indicators for what's going on in the flooring market. Top left: consumer confidence. You can see that's been edging upwards over the last 18 months, but has remained negative and fragile. In particular, you can see the big step down in the autumn last year around the time of the budget announcement. What this has meant is that whilst disposable income has been rising and inflation and interest rates have been coming down, there hasn't been an uplift in consumer spending. That middle chart on that slide there, that's the consumer spend data on home improvements.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

It's been one of the worst-performing retail categories over the last couple of years. On the right-hand side, on a bit more of a positive note, housing transactions, which is a good lead indicator for the flooring market, those have now been in growth for almost a year, which indicates there should be some good building demand as and when confidence can be unlocked. How has that impacted on the flooring market in 2024? We've seen now 3 consecutive years of decline in volumes in the flooring market and a 9% decline in revenue and volume in 2024 in both the market and in Headlam. Headlam maintained market share during the year. Chris will talk a bit more about outlook for the market and for Headlam a bit later on. Just turning to revenue then and Headlam's revenue. Regional distribution first.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

This is the part of our business that has been most heavily impacted by the market conditions, particularly with the residential market performing weaker than the commercial market. We did, however, continue to grow revenue in the strategic initiatives of larger customers and trade counters. In the larger customers channel, there's been quite significant change in the last 12 months. We've seen 3 retailers drop out of the market. Carpetright and Homebase entered administration, and ScS made a strategic decision to exit the flooring category. Carpetright was only a tiny customer of ours, but with Homebase, we did generate GBP 7 million of revenue during 2024. Despite these headwinds, we grew revenue 4% through larger customers in 2024. This principally reflected growth with Tapi, who picked up a large proportion of the Carpetright business, as well as a couple of new customer wins in the year.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

In trade counters, we grew revenue by 7.4%, and the investments we have been making there have performed in line with the business case despite the market headwinds. We ended the year with 76 sites, and we expect to finish the investment phase of the trade counter business this summer with around 83 sites. Overall, U.K. revenue declined 8.9% in line with the market for 2024. Moving to the bottom of the slide, continental Europe, the market there has been even weaker than in the U.K., and revenue declined 14.9%. Taking a look at the income statement, I have covered revenue on the previous slide. Gross margin of 29.9% was 180 basis points lower than the previous year, and this was due to four factors. Firstly, stock clearance.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

We undertook significantly heightened stock clearance activity during the year linked to the transformation plan to simplify the network and ranges. Secondly, rebates. The combination of the volume decline in the market combined with our drive to improve stock turn reduced purchases from suppliers in 2024, which impacted on rebates, rebate tiers, and thresholds, etc. Thirdly, mix and the revenue from larger customers, whilst contributing positively at operating margin, is at a lower gross margin than revenue from regional distribution, for example. Fourthly and finally, price and promotional activity. In response to market activity on price, the Group responded with some price and promotional activity to remain competitive, albeit this was overall a relatively modest driver of the overall movement in gross margin.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

Moving on to operating costs, these increased by 6.9%, mainly due to cost inflation, which added about GBP 7.5 million of additional cost in the year. This is lower than the GBP 10 million of cost inflation we had in 2023, but it's still elevated compared to the long-term average cost inflation impact that the Group would typically see. That reflected elevated pay inflation across both the U.K. and Continental Europe, with pay inflation in the U.K. averaging about 6%, driven particularly by the 10% increase in the national minimum wage at the start of the year. Sticking with operating costs, we also invested in new trade counter sites, and these added about GBP 5.5 million of operating cost to the business in the year.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

Mitigating actions offset some of that, and these included the benefit of the introduction of dynamic route planning on our transport network in the second half of 2023. The transformation plan, which we'll talk about, Chris will talk about a bit later, that had no impact on 2024 operating costs. We're starting to see the impact of that in 2025. Moving down the panel, interest costs were higher year-on-year, reflecting the average borrowings. That was prior to the property disposals at the end of the year. All of this resulted in an underlying loss before tax of GBP 34.3 million, and that was before non-underlying items of GBP 7.2 million, which I'll cover now. These were a net P&L expense of GBP 7.2 million, but actually a net cash inflow of GBP 48.5 million due to the property sale proceeds.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

I'll focus on the middle, sort of middle section, the middle rows here. If you look at business restructuring and change-related costs of GBP 19.7 million, about half of that was a cash cost. The cash element of GBP 10.2 million comprised severance costs and the cost of relocating and dual running associated with the transfer from Ipswich to Rayleigh. There are advisor fees in there as well. Next row down, profit on sale of property. I'll cover that in a bit more detail on a separate slide, but GBP 21 million of profit, GBP 61 million of cash generated. ERP system development, GBP 2.6 million of cash spend in the year, broadly in line with our guidance at the start of the year of around GBP 3 million. Turning to cash flow, good operating cash generation. GBP 27.6 million of underlying operating cash flow in the year.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

Now, this does include GBP 11 million of VAT that we collected on the property disposals in December and then paid over to HMRC in January, but nonetheless a good positive underlying operating cash flow even after adjusting for that. This reflects working capital movements. Stock levels were reduced in the year, and if you exclude the movements on provisions, the cash benefit of this stock reduction was GBP 17.6 million as set out in the table here on this slide. Receivables was an inflow reflecting the movement in revenue, and payables was an inflow of GBP 10.7 million, but as I have mentioned, this includes GBP 10.8 million of VAT collected on the property disposals in December that we paid over in January. If you normalize that out, payables were pretty flat year on year.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

There were no significant changes in suppliers or terms of supply, such as payment terms during the year. CapEx was GBP 10.6 million in the year, and that compares to GBP 18 million in 2023 and GBP 14 million in 2022. We expect that CapEx number to drop further as the trade counter investment phase comes to an end and the replenishment requirements on existing equipment are much reduced, following a big year of replenishment and refurbishment in 2023. Just the final few rows on the cash flow here. Lease payments were GBP 12.9 million cash outflow in the year, and there was a GBP 4.8 million cash outflow for dividends in June last year, which reflected the final dividend payment in respect of 2023. Property disposals, GBP 61 million cash flow, more on those in a minute.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

The other non-underlyings netted to a cash outflow of GBP 12.8 million as set out on the previous slide. All of this resulted in a net cash position at the end of the year of GBP 10.9 million compared to net debt of GBP 29.6 million at the start of the year. On this next slide here, we just set that out in a bridge, the movement from last year's, the previous year's net debt position of about GBP 30 million to the GBP 11 million of net cash. You can see the inflows from working capital and property disposals there offset by lease payments, CapEx, dividends, etc. Property disposals, just a little bit more detail on those. We sold five properties in the year as set out in this table.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

Three of those were vacant sales, and these properties became surplus to requirements as a result of the network optimization initiatives in the transformation plan. Two of the properties, Gildersome and Leeds, were sale and leasebacks, and the implied yield on those lease backs is broadly equivalent to the Group's cost of borrowing. In total then, the total proceeds were GBP 61 million, and all of the properties were sold for a significant premium to book value, averaging 68%. At the end of the year, the Group continued to own property with a book value of GBP 67 million and a market valuation as of January 2023 of GBP 94 million. Final slide for me then. One of the characteristics of Headlam that we've talked about before is the strong balance sheet.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

I've set out the balance sheet on the left and then just a few of the highlights on the right-hand side of this slide here. Firstly, good liquidity headroom. GBP 10.9 million of net cash at the end of the year and GBP 72 million of borrowing facilities. The progress we made in the year on the cash upside from the transformation plan has enabled us to reduce the size of the facilities from GBP 100 to 72 million, which reduces the fees we pay on unutilized facilities.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

The majority of the GBP 72 million comprises a GBP 61 million revolving credit facility with three lenders, and we have a revised covenant package in place whilst we implement the transformation plan. Secondly, the orange box, strong asset backing, and that includes GBP 94 million of property assets and over GBP 200 million of stock and receivables that aren't leveraged in any way.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

Thirdly, bottom right, during the year, we also further strengthened the balance sheet by completing a pension buy-in. This significantly de-risks the Group's exposure to movement in pension assumptions and removes future contributions into the scheme. I'll now hand you back to Chris.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

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

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

This slide just outlines the shape and scale of the U.K. market, and we estimate that's worth between GBP 2.5 and 3 billion a year of flooring spend at distributor prices. I've covered this slide many times before, but it's key to the way in which we've articulated our strategy. On this slide, you can see Headlam's sort of relative share and relative weighting of how we face into the different customer types. We have identified seven customer types on this slide. Headlam's traditional strength has been in the left-hand side of this page, which is around the independent retailers and the small fitters that populate the U.K. marketplace. Further towards the right, these are categories of customers that Headlam traditionally has had a lower exposure and a lower share with accordingly.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

Headlam's weighting has moved from heavy and deeper concentration of customers on the left to a lighter share on the right. Nonetheless, for us to offer service to the whole marketplace, I felt it was important, and the Group's following a strategy of this broadening the base of the business so that we offer great service to the independent retail market, but we can also offer service to other parts of the customer base in the U.K. market. We've seen evidence of that successfully over the last few years, and that's important to seeing Headlam's return to growth regardless of the market conditions. We should still be able to see us growing our market share in those other customer types. Just talking about how our strategy aligns against that. On the next slide, partly a reminder and partly an update slide this one.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

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

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

That is because we are offering service to new customer types, and we have developed our service proposition to access these types of customers, and that is contained within the second pillar of our strategy. The third pillar is around operational efficiency, and that is about being efficient and cost-effective at how we offer service to our customers. In the past, we have offered changes to the way that we have offered our transport network, for example. Adam mentioned earlier that dynamic route planning has enabled us to take cost out of our service network, and that is an example of an efficient part of our strategy. Really, this is where we see some of the transformation plan also taking effect this year and the next couple of years and delivering efficiency further.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

The fourth and fifth pillars of our strategy are really around how we do business and our ESG credentials and how we wish Headlam to be a great place to work. Now, we're not really focusing on those fourth and fifth pillars of our strategy in these slides. There is more information on what we've been doing in those areas in the RNS and trading update in the detail, but in the slides, we'll be focusing more on the first, second, and third pillars. If I just focus on the right-hand side of this slide now, the transformation plan, we've talked about this at the half year, and we're going to provide a little bit more detail and a roll forward on what we've been doing in the last few months. There are 3 main components to that. Three components.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

The first one is more of a sort of front office, if you like. The second one around simplifying the network is a sort of middle office, and then simplifying how we operate is more of a back office point. It is a sort of front, middle, and back office feel to the transformation plan. We very much started on the front office. If we just sort of turn the page, we can see on the next slide, the bars in blue on the left-hand side are the update that we provided just after the half year. The orange ones are really the focuses we see going forward. This is where we consolidated our 32 wholesale businesses, if you like, that were offering services to our regional independent retailers. We have consolidated those 32 businesses into a single trading entity called Mercado.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

By doing so, we've been able to effectively offer just one face to the customer. Seventeen thousand customers have been contacted, and we completed the migration of those customers into this single business in January this year. We commenced it in the fourth quarter and completed that activity in January. A wholesale change to the way that we focus on customers. I'm pleased to say the customers responded really positively to that. Some of the comments were, "Can't believe it's taken you so long to do this." Real kind of common sense feel for why we may be looking to make that change. I think here, this is around, it's given us an opportunity to really clarify customer engagement, add depth of ranges for customers.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

Instead of customers needing to have multiple accounts with Headlam to get the best out of us, they can just have one, and they get access to our whole product portfolio. It has meant that we could restructure our sales teams to have more of a focus on our sales teams that were knowledgeable about residential product and other teams that could focus on commercial product. Adding that layer of trust and knowledge has meant that we have been able to face into our customers in a more meaningful way. Some really good steps forward. I think one of the other features is around this clarity around some of the digital assets. I think digital investment and how we go to market with our digital assets is going to be important now and in the future.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

Of course, when you've got, in this case, 32 businesses each with their own website, it makes it very difficult to invest effectively in modernizing those websites, adding clarity to customers to see what products they have access to. By consolidating this, we now have one platform. We've re-platformed that website onto a single business, and it means we can now invest in that and progress the digital assets much more meaningfully. What are we doing for this year now we've consolidated onto a single business? As I said, I think we've now got the opportunity to invest in that single portal. Customers can now get access to all of our products online, and we can now invest in making that a much more user-friendly experience. In the past, I've used an example of kind of giving our customers an Amazon feel.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

As consumers, we know we're very used to logging onto a website, picking our product, being served up complimentary products, or customers have ordered this, have also ordered that, or we might be out of that product, but it's very similar to a replacement product. I'd like our customers to have the same customer experience as that so that when they log onto our portals, they can see products they've ordered before, they can see complimentary products and substitutional products. I think that experience for customers, more and more B2B customers are demanding that, and that gives us the ability to invest in something like that. The other key feature here is this is all aimed at investing our expertise in developing the independent retail channel.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

As Adam described, this is an area that has come under quite a significant pressure in the marketplace, and we have seen revenue move backwards. This gives us an opportunity to reinvest in this category. It is the most important category for the Group. It is where we have our highest share of our revenue. Being able to now go as one, talk as one in the marketplace and refresh our point of sale, which we are planning to do in Q2 and Q3 this year, means we can talk to customers, give them access to new ranges of products, and refresh the POS that we put into the market. Our sales teams are now consolidated. They do not have to compete with any other Headlam businesses in their territory.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

They can be the Headlam representative for our community, for our postcode, and get to know their customers and talk with confidence about what's coming downstream from Headlam's product launches. Exciting developments this year, and this is a key area for us to continue our investment in. The second part of our transformation plan, this is the sort of middle office, if you like, the sort of network and operations part of our business. Actually, this is one that started a little while ago. Although it was not part of our transformation plan, part of our strategy, as I said earlier, was about being efficient and effective in our operational offer to customers. A little while ago, we put in some of these building blocks, the foundations for this transformation plan, by moving to more of a national network.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

Rather than this sort of fragmented regional distribution center network that Headlam had in the past as a result of its acquisition strategy, we've been trying to move more to a national offer. That national offer can now underpin this sort of move to Mercado as our single trading entity. We started this a little while ago, and this is more of an update really on what we've been doing. As Adam mentioned earlier, some of the property disposals that we've been able to deliver this year have come off the back of this transformation. The investment in a single transport network, investment in some of the technology which enables us to switch delivery routes seamlessly from one site to another, has meant that we've been able to squeeze our network down.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

has meant that we've been able to focus on fewer sites and offer broader service from fewer locations, freeing up sites, therefore, for a disposal process. That is something that we've been doing successfully now for a little while. As Adam outlined, the number of sites have become surplus to requirements during 2024. This is something that we're going to continue to look at as we go into 2025. The next phase really straddles into the sort of back office side of things, where having stock in the right location to service local customers, not just customers that have ordered from that particular distribution center, but customers who have ordered from anywhere in the country and they can get service locally, it's important that we have the right stock holding to service those customers.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

The next slide is just a little mini kind of case study or a little bit of an insight as to the Southeast. A couple of questions I had from shareholders a few months ago was, which was a relatively new site. It seems strange that you're perhaps consolidating that and moving to a different location. I thought it'd be useful just to illustrate some of the benefits of these changes in the network by just focusing on that Southeast area. The previous map showed quite a lot of red dots, which is the sort of inherited distribution centers, and they were based around the regional structure of the business. As you might imagine, as you move to a U.K.-wide distribution network, you need those distribution centers to be more central and to be better located to service your customers.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

This slide here talks to a new site that we've opened in Raleigh in Essex, much closer to the London Conurbation and to service our customers in the Southeast. As a result of moving to a new site and closing our facility that was in Ipswich, it's meant that we've been able to move our stock and our service closer to customers, which gives them a better service. It's given us a more efficient footprint, so we're able to offer service to customers from a smaller location, which has meant that we've got slightly lower operating costs, but also it meant that we're able to free up that capital from the site in Ipswich and return those funds to the business. All in all, better service, lower cost to serve, and freed up capital.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

That, in a nutshell, is the insight that we've been able to give for this one change as we move across the network, looking at other opportunities. The third element of the transformation plan is this sort of back office piece. Although that may now sound the most exciting part of the change, I think one of the areas that I wanted to just dwell on is around this sort of centralized approach to product list and ranging. Now we can act as a single voice. Headlam can offer a single version of its product ranges. We can remove the duplication that came from having multiple businesses effectively offering the same products there.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

It means that we can act as one, act as one business offering products, but also, importantly, acting as one business, working with our suppliers to select those products, go deeper in ranging and ordering from suppliers. It means suppliers can offer big production runs. They have certainty over Headlam's ordering approach, and we can define the amount of stock we hold in certain locations. It really does give us that kind of scale benefit from acting as a much larger business as we select the ranges we wish to offer. Good progress in the year, but I think the main focus for 2025 is getting control over this sort of acting as a single business and working with our suppliers to make sure we've got the right stock in depth across the country.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

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

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

Yeah, thanks, Chris. In September, we set out the targets for annual profit improvement and the cash impact of the transformation plan. We've now upgraded those. In the middle of this slide here, you can see our latest targets. Taking the annual profit improvement, first of all, GBP 25 million we're targeting from this once the transformation plan is fully complete. That's up from GBP 15 million in September. This is net of reinvestments. This GBP 25 million is net of any reinvestments we're making.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

For example, we've invested in market-leading remuneration packages for our sales teams. This GBP 25 million principally comprises overhead and interest cost savings, but also there is some margin benefit in there from centralised buying and ranging. Moving on to cash. We're targeting at least GBP 90 million of one-off cash benefit. That's up from GBP 70 million in the guidance in September. That's a combination of disposal of property and then also working capital optimization. Finally, the cash costs, the costs of executing and implementing this transformation plan, we expect to be around GBP 30 million. That is slightly higher than we guided in September, and that reflects the additional projects that we've identified to find additional savings and cash benefits.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

Those one-off cash costs include things like restructuring relocation costs, fit-out of new sites, advisory costs, as well as a significant investment in point-of-sale materials, which Chris mentioned. Just to give you a bit of an indication on how those benefits phase in over the next few years. On this slide, we have just set that out through from 2024 to 2027. Profit benefit of GBP 25 million, as I mentioned earlier, none of that in 2024. We are starting to see that realized in 2025, and we are targeting GBP 10 million in the current year and getting to a run rate of GBP 25 million in about 2 years' time. In 2027, we have the full GBP 25 million annual profit benefit. Cash, we generated GBP 57 million of this in 2024. I have taken this from halfway through 2024, which is when we launched the transformation plan.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

From that point onwards, GBP 57 million of cash benefit in the second half of last year. We're targeting to get to cumulatively at least GBP 80 million by the end of this year and then GBP 90 million plus by the end of next year. The cumulative one-off cash costs, GBP 30 million in total, GBP 9 million spent in the second half of last year, another GBP 10 million or so this year, and then the rest spread over the next couple of years. You're back to Chris for outlook and summary.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

Thanks, Adam. Just a couple of slides sort of closing out the presentation, really. If I just turn to the first one, which is the sort of short-term outlook, look, we're not going to get a helping hand, it seems, at the moment from a market recovery.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

When you look at the macro factors that Adam outlined at the start of the presentation, it would suggest that we're going to see, and the expectation in the market is that there will be a modest recovery at some point in 2025. It does feel like we've been saying that for some time. Certainly, the housing transactions, which is probably the key piece of data, has flipped to positive movement in the second half of last year. As I said, that just needs a little bit of consumer confidence behind it, which will trigger that kind of growth piece. We're expecting the market to return to growth at some point this year, but the timing of that remains uncertain. It is important that we now start to see the benefits of the transformation plan and strategic initiatives that we've outlined previously starting to deliver.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

I think it's important that we can see that return to profitability and that recovery in the business, regardless of that sort of scale of the market recovery. I think that's a key part to the transformation plan that we've outlined, just focusing on those self-help measures, doing the things that we know we can control, and the market will, at some point, undoubtedly recover. If we just look at the sort of longer-term outlook, as I said, it's important that we keep going with those strategic initiatives. It's showing some growth. Trade counters, Adam mentioned earlier, we will have completed the investment phase of the trade counter rollout programme this year. That means we'll start to then see an improvement in the drop-through profitability of the revenue that comes from the maturity of those types of initiatives.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

The transformation plan, which is now gathering pace, and we'll start to see that GBP 10 million in year benefit to profitability this year rising to GBP 25 million over the next couple of years. At some point, market recovery. Now, as I said, we're not necessarily baking in or expecting a large element of market recovery, but we should see that return to some sort of modest growth this year and perhaps a little bit more beyond that. That is how we see the outlook. It is important that we get a business that's in a more efficient, cost-effective shape that can drive the business back to profitability. When the market recovery does happen, we can see that driving the business on. Last slide for me then before we move to questions. It is just a summary. We shared this at the start.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

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

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

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

[Charles Hall, Head of Research at Peel Hunt]

Thanks. Charles Hall from Peel Hunt. Huge amount of change in that transformation plan, which is ongoing. Chris, could you just give us a feel for the impact of that transformation plan as you go through it in terms of the impact on your employees, what the customers are seeing, so customer service and customer satisfaction? Also, have you seen any disruption from it, either in your like-for-like sales numbers or the short-term disruption on profits?

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

I think one of the things we guarded against, I guess, when we went into the transformation plan, certainly on this front office part that I described, when we're trying to transform a business that's been this way for 20, 25 years, sort of breaking something and putting it back together in a way that hadn't been done before, I was concerned how customers would react. The reality is they've been very supportive, very understanding of the change. Of course, they still want service to continue. They still expect us to offer the great service we have. I think what's landed well, customers and our sales teams have understood it.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

I think it was helpful to us that we were able to preserve customers' terms through that, give them reassurance that they were accessing the same level of credit that they had before, the same great prices and the same access to, effectively, a broader range of products they had before. They were sort of reassured. Our sales teams were that we did have some cost reductions as a result, but the sales teams that we got with us, we were able to invest in better packages. They have had more confidence. They are better paid. No one encroaching on their territory from Headlam, which perhaps was a feature of the past. I think that has gone pretty well. On the service side, we do get blips when you close a big site and you open a new site. There is a period of transition.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

I think, as you might imagine, certainly in January, there was a feature of closing an Ipswich site, opening a Raleigh site. That took us a few weeks to get up to speed. I wrote to customers to say to them, "We're going through this process. We moved our service model to 48 hours instead of 24 hours just to accommodate that." Customers understood that. At the end of February, we've moved back to a 24-hour service. I think you do get the little ripples of impact on customer service. It's important that we communicate that when it happens. We've just got to get back to that great service again. Since then, we've seen in March a return to our sort of normal service model, which has gone well. That's good to see.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

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

[Charles Hall, Head of Research at Peel Hunt]

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

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

Yeah, we spend a bit of time trying to understand the market, and I put that slide up at the start around the size of the opportunity in the marketplace.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

It is important that we can track the performance that we have as a business in the whole market, but also in the segments that we operate. As you rightly say, as we've been focusing on growth in certain areas, we've been transforming the way that we go to service our traditional customers, if you like. That is the area that we've lost a little bit of share, I think. Our overall position, as you rightly say, is maintained. Why is it we're losing share in that sort of part of the marketplace? There are a number of factors. It is a very competitive part of the marketplace. Particularly where demand is scarce, there is a bit of a pressure point for customers trying to get the best deal and saving pennies here and there. There is a bit of price pressure in that part of the marketplace.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

We've got a couple of competitors who have been targeting that as their only real customer segment to go after. As I said, it's important, therefore, that we reinvest in that segment. That is the biggest part of our business. We offer the best service. We survey our customers' views on service and price and various other attributes of the market. We're consistently seen as the best service provider. We need to harness that, invest in it. That's part of the reason why we're putting out a new POS refresh and launching new products this year. It was difficult to do it in the last year or so because of the changes we're going through.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

It would have been a bit strange for us to have launched a lot of new POS and a lot of new products just at the point that we consolidate all those brands away. We have sort of had a bit of a pause on that. Now we are acting as a single business. It means that we can actually invest in that POS in a much more meaningful way to have a better impact on the market. I think for us, 2025 is around just stabilizing and perhaps recovering some of the market share in that part that we have suffered from a little bit in the last year or so.

[Charles Hall, Head of Research at Peel Hunt]

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

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

Yeah, the biggest single factor was the accelerated heightened level of stock clearance we did in the year. I would expect that to be a one-off in 2024. We pushed through quite a lot in readiness for site closures like Ipswich and then one of the sites in Scotland. I do not expect to repeat that. Some of it, mix, etc., is kind of semi-permanent. The rebates bit, as volumes recover, I would expect that bit will unwind, but not in year. That will probably take a few years. It will be in line with market recovery kind of thing.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

To answer your question, I would expect some recovery in gross margin this year, not all of the 180 basis points, some movement back towards where we were in previous years.

[Charles Hall, Head of Research at Peel Hunt]

Perfect. Thanks very much.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

Thank you.

[Adam Phillips, CFO at Headlam Group]

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

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

Yeah, I do not mind answering that one. The vast majority, we have only got a handful of those 76 that remain to be invested in. As I said earlier, we expect the investment phase and the rollout of those sites to be completed around the middle of this year.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

Maybe around July, maybe slightly later, we expect us to have completed that initial phase. We'll probably end up with about 83 sites at that point. We anticipate, on average, they'll be generating around GBP 2 million a year. We expect at that sort of level, they're around about a 10% operating margin. There will be a margin-enhancing part of the business once they reach maturity. As I described previously, once you open a site, a new site, you open with zero sales, but you've got the costs. Therefore, you do have this period of drag while you open a new number of sites that drags the performance of the business down. In some cases, you get the revenue coming through, but of course, the revenue is not yet up to a point where we can contribute to profitability.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

The investment phase will end, which means that drag will start to be reduced, and then we'll start to see the contribution coming through from trade counters as they reach maturity. Maturity point on a trade counter can be anywhere from two to five years, depending on how quickly it can move through the revenue cycle. Some of our trade counters do actually do much more like GBP 4 million a year, so they're much larger. As we discussed previously, some of the trade counters were down at around GBP 1 million a year. What has been pleasing to see is the sites we've invested in have outperformed the ones that are uninvested. As those have nearly dried up now, we're starting to see the higher levels of revenue growth come through. In fact, last month was the highest trade counter revenue we've seen ever.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

They're starting to generate that kind of pull-through we expected. Any other questions?

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

Thanks, Charles. I'm going to ask a question.

[Chris Payne, CEO at Headlam Group]

It doesn't look like we've got any more questions. Nope. Okay. That brings us to the end of the presentation. Thank you for listening in and contributing to questions as well.

Participants

Executives

• Chris Payne, CEO
• Adam Phillips, CFO

Analysts

• Analyst
• Charles Hall, Head of Research at Peel Hunt