Domino's Pizza Group H1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
August 5, 2025

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: In H1 Domino’s delivered record market share gains (up 560 bps) and improved average delivery times, underscoring strong operational resilience despite a tough market.
  • Negative Sentiment: Underlying EBITDA fell 7.4%, EPS dropped 14.3%, like-for-like sales were down 0.1%, and management reduced full-year guidance to £130 m–£140 m.
  • Positive Sentiment: The group generated £25.7 m free cash flow, lifted its interim dividend by 2.9% and signalled plans to resume share buybacks by year-end, reflecting confidence in its cash-generative model.
  • Neutral Sentiment: CapEx remains focused on supply chain automation (new robotics in Warrington and Avonmouth), alongside the rollout of a loyalty programme (c. 10% transaction incrementality) and a cautious new-store pipeline.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Domino's Pizza Group H1 2025
00:00 / 00:00

There are 5 speakers on the call.

Speaker 3

Good morning, everybody. I'm Andrew Rennie, CEO of Domino's Pizza Group. I've got Edward Jamieson here with me, and Will McLaren, our CFO and Head of IR. Thank you for joining us for our half-year results here for 2025. We appreciate everyone's time. With that, we'll get started. Let's go. First page, Will. I'm going to give an overview, just a brief overview of the half. Pass on to Edward to give you a bit more detail on the financial bits and pieces. I'll dive into the strategy and where we're at. Then we'll open for Q&A, if that's okay. Thanks very much, Will. Look, I think the most important thing is that everyone's seen the numbers. It's a tough environment, right? We're not going to sugarcoat it. It's tough out there.

Speaker 3

In this tough environment, we're so happy to be part of this brand that's been around for 40 years. It's so resilient. The numbers we continue to punch out, the cash flow, we're getting stronger. The stronger are getting stronger. It's all about our market share gains. I've never seen a 560 basis point market share gain in my 30 years' history. It's very rare. We are taking serious gains. Our delivery times continue to get better, which is always a risk in times when costs are forced upon you, that franchisees might pull back on investing into customer service. That hasn't happened. In fact, our franchisees have doubled down and made sure that our customers are getting better value than ever, which is represented by our service and our delivery times and our quality of our products. I'm so proud of those numbers. Really proud of our automation team.

Speaker 3

Pete and our team are delivering the robotics that we've talked about for some time now. They're actually in play and almost completed in our first two commissaries, and they're going to deliver us more efficiencies rolling into 2026. This environment's impacting us, yes. Impacting our franchise partners, yes, and impacting our customers. I think the uncertainty, particularly that's been messaged around the autumn statement, has sort of put people back on their heels a little bit since April. We had a terrific first four months, where the momentum was building. We're feeling quite positive. The last couple of months have really sort of gone backwards. We think a lot of it's to do with the costs that have been imposed with national insurance, et cetera, but also this uncertainty of what's coming before us. People are quite anxious about that, not only our franchisees, but also our customers.

Speaker 3

We're not anticipating any improvements just because of this uncertainty. People are just waiting to see at this stage. That's why we've been quite prudent with our numbers. We continue to assess our earnings, but we're still very positive about things like our second brand. However, we have flagged, to be fair to shareholders, because of the cash flow nature of our business, that we are prepared to start buybacks again, which we'll look at at the end of this year. Yet we haven't got hold of that second brand by that stage. Does that mean we're moving away from that strategy? No. It just means that the cash flow build-up by then will allow us with the things that we're looking at. We have the balance sheet to do that. Debt is still a very healthy position. Financing is in a very healthy position.

Speaker 3

We don't need to raise equity, which we've talked about before. There's no dilution. We have confidence in our long-term strategy. It hasn't changed. Our ambition of 2,000 stores is still there. We're going to open a few less stores this year, but when you actually model that out, it's an extra two to four stores a year sort of thing. We're not too concerned about that. The confidence we want to illustrate, that we have confidence in where we're going, is that we've lifted our dividend again. We have complete confidence where we're going. In tough times, the tough get on with business and benefit from that. We're not immune from what's going on, but we certainly are in the best place to take advantage of it. Very proud of that. With that, I'd like to pass over to Edward, our CFO, to give a bit more detail.

Speaker 3

I'll come back later and speak more about the strategy. Thank you.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Andrew. Good morning, everybody. I'm now going to run you through the key takeaways from our half-year 2025 results and update you on our trading outlook and guidance. As we told you this morning, we saw a positive performance across the first four months, but we've been affected by the weaker consumer environment since May. What does that mean for H1? Total orders were flat in H1, at 35.1 million, with like-for-like sales down 0.1%. I'll walk you through the shape of trading this half shortly. Total system sales were up 1.3%, with DPG revenue also up a similar amount. Underlying EBITDA was down 7.4%, with lower volumes in our supply chain a key driver. Higher depreciation and interest costs resulted in the first half of underlying earnings per share down 14.3%.

Speaker 1

We continue to generate good cash flow and, consistent with our progressive dividend policy and confidence in the strength of our model, we've increased the half-year dividend by 2.9%. Let me now go through some of the drivers of these numbers in more detail. Turning to the next slide. Starting on the left-hand side, you can see the system sales grew 1.3%, with growth in both the delivery and the collection channels. Looking at orders, delivery was down 0.6% in the first half, with a first-quarter growth of 1.3%, more than offset by a 2.6% decline in the second quarter. The success of our first-ever dedicated national advertising campaign, highlighting the value in the collection channel, led to growth in the second quarter, and overall collection orders were up 1% in the first half.

Speaker 1

The positive performance that we saw across the first four months of the year did not continue into May and June. That resulted in the Q1 positive like-for-like sales reversing in Q2, which meant that overall, first half like-for-like sales were down 0.1%. I've covered system sales already. I'll now move on to DPG revenue, which was up 1.4%. Firstly, our supply chain revenue was down 3.4%, and this was primarily driven by lower volumes in the supply chain. Whilst total orders were flat in the period, customers were putting fewer items in their basket, and so volumes were lower in the supply chain. The other main driver of our revenue performance was corporate store revenue. This increased 45.8% as a result of a full six months of ownership of ShoreCal compared to less than three months in the prior half year.

Speaker 1

We also benefited from revenue from Victor, our Northern Ireland JV, which we acquired majority control of in March this year. Finally, as a reminder, we sold the London corporate store estate in 2024, so there's no contribution this year. Turning to the flow of our revenue performance to underline EBITDA. Overall, DPG EBITDA was down 7.4% to £63.9 million, primarily driven by lower supply chain EBITDA. As I've outlined, there were lower volumes through the supply chain, which flows through to lower supply chain EBITDA. Net overheads, property, and incentives were up £4.3 million. Around half was driven by one-offs. The remainder was driven by higher employment costs and investment in people, particularly in technology and cyber. Because of the one-offs, we expect a more limited increase in H2. We've been investing substantially in the development of our technology platforms, in particular a new ERP and e-commerce system.

Speaker 1

The ERP system is now complete and has been successfully rolled out across all our supply chain centers. As a result, the technology platform costs fell from £3.5 million in the prior half year to £1.5 million in the first half of this year. Depreciation and amortization was £1.9 million higher than the first half of last year, driven by an increase in our store estate, the new e-commerce platform, and investments in our delivery fleet. Our net finance costs increased £0.6 million, driven by a higher average level of debt. Tax was £1.9 million lower due to a one-off charge in the first half of last year. The resulting impact of these movements was a 14.7% reduction in profit after tax to £33 million. Underlying earnings per share fell slightly less as a result of share buybacks undertaken in the prior year.

Speaker 1

Turning next to free cash flow, a strong feature of our capital-light business, and we remain highly cash generative. We generated £25.7 million free cash flow in the first half of this year, despite lower underlying EBITDA. We had a working capital outflow of £12.1 million in the first half, which was largely a timing issue. The shape of our working capital profile is consistent with prior years, and we expect the first half outflow to largely reverse in the second half of the year. Turning to how we deploy this cash generation and about how we invest, recycle, and return capital. We introduced the capital allocation framework in March 2021, and we use it to make decisions on free cash flow deployment and our approach to leverage. There's no change to our framework, but I've shown it in a more detailed slide.

Speaker 1

Our primary sources of cash are the free cash flow generated by the business, as well as capital recycled, such as the £33 million cash received last year from the sale of our London corporate store estate. We continue to invest in the core business to drive long-term sustainable growth with rigorous internal CapEx hurdles. There's no change to our progressive dividend to shareholders. We also continue to selectively invest in additional accretive growth opportunities, which we can partially fund through recycling capital. Finally, we assess if we have excess capital, considering our investment opportunities and leverage. If we have, we return this to shareholders. Since 2021, we've announced over £500 million of shareholder returns. We've increased dividends again today. We remain committed to returning excess capital in the future. We do all this within our target leverage range of 1.5 to 2.5 times.

Speaker 1

As I outlined earlier, we generated £25.7 million of free cash flow in the year. The first priority was to invest in the core business. To that end, we invested £8.5 million in capital expenditure in the half year, including in supply chain automation and digital investment. We paid dividends of £29.4 million, reflecting our sustainable and progressive dividend policy. We've grown the interim dividend again, reflecting confidence in our long-term opportunity. Applying our disciplined approach to accretive investment and recycling capital, we spent £25.5 million in March, increasing our stake in the Northern Ireland JV Victor from 46% to 70%. The net effect was a £41.1 million increase in net debt to £306.6 million, giving leverage of 2.32 times, within our target range of 1.5 to 2.5 times. We expect net debt to be lower at the year end.

Speaker 1

On this slide, I've outlined the guardrails which the board applies for a second brand, as well as the returns which we use to assess potential opportunities. Many of you will be familiar with the guardrails on the left-hand side, which we first outlined in December 2023. On the right-hand side, I've laid out the returns assessment which the board undertakes. We apply strict internal hurdle rates when we assess any project. Importantly, as Andrew outlined in his initial presentation back in December 2023, there must be EPS secretion from a potential acquisition. We carefully evaluate the risk-adjusted premium relative to our weighted average cost of capital, as well as run calculations as to whether capital would be better deployed in buying back shares. Aligned to the guardrails which we've clearly laid out, there must be clear synergies across our assets, particularly across our national supply chain and procurement capability.

Speaker 1

We'd not issue equity for any of the opportunities under current consideration. While a second brand remains a core part of the strategy, no acquisition is announced by the end of 2025. The Board expects to resume share buybacks. We're now guiding for CapEx to be around £22 million for this year, slightly lower than the around £25 million figure we guided earlier this year. We see opportunities for further automation across our supply chain, and we're accelerating projects across our existing centers to focus on this opportunity. Andrew will go into this in more detail shortly. When we announced the new profitability and growth framework with our franchise partners, we also announced that we plan to open a fifth UK supply chain center in Avonmouth, where we currently operate a cross-stock facility.

Speaker 1

CapEx spend this year on this is expected to be around £6 million on the initial work in Avonmouth. This spend relates to bringing the distribution capability, which is currently outsourced, in-house. We also plan to invest in the continued innovation of our app to drive frequency. Finally, we expect some new store CapEx in ShoreCal in the second half as we unlock the growth opportunity. Moving to outlook and guidance, as I've said, we saw positive performance across the first four months, but we've been affected by the weaker consumer environment since May.

Speaker 1

Although we've seen sales improve somewhat towards the end of July, post the Men's Euros comparative period, we've now seen enough to conclude that the tougher consumer environment means that we should revise our range to £130 million to £140 million, despite our increased market share and operational progress so far this year, which Andrew will cover in his presentation. Thank you, and let me now pass you back to Andrew.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Edward. OK, into the strategy. If we look at the numbers, it's pretty clear that the market's in a tough place, right? There's no new news there. Everything's down. UK takeaway market's down. The pizza market's down. We're up in both categories. In a tougher market, the stronger getting stronger, there's no doubt about it. We are taking market share. I think it's evidence of, A, how strong this brand is, and B, how strong our value proposition is. Consumers, through third-party research, continue to tell us that we're the best value they've seen since 2022. I do believe that's after a couple of hard years of hard work of just continually being consistent with service and the product and the value that we offer. Extremely proud of all the work that, A, the franchisees, the 40,000 team members we have, our head office team.

Speaker 3

We can't shy away from that. Whilst the market we can't control, the macro, what we can control is what we do. What we're doing is we're winning in this tough market. Very proud of that. As Edward said, it's an incredible business that's given back over half a billion pounds in four years to shareholders. That's quite impressive, right? I'd like to think that we're going to do the same looking forward because we've set up a strong base. Next. This speaks to why we're up so much. We're over 1,000 stores bigger than our nearest competitor now. Not only in store count, it's significantly more when you take it into sales as well. There's been some media, I think, out today about one of our competitors closing more stores. It's tough out there, right?

Speaker 3

If you don't have a strong brand that has strong marketing capabilities and has strong operators, you're faltering, all right? That's what's happening at the moment. We continue to open stores, albeit a little bit slower. If you put it in context relativity, it's dramatically more than those obviously closing stores. A big delta there. Moving forward. This is our unique and scalable platform. It's sort of the flywheel. I wanted to remind a few people, particularly those who might be sort of quite new to the brand. We have got an incredible supply chain, all right? The efficiency that we're bringing to it now through automation, it's going to make us even more efficient. The distribution we have across all of UK and Ireland, and soon to be more with Avonmouth.

Speaker 3

The buying power that we have, right, which is, you know, obviously, we bring all these benefits to another brand in the future. The large customer base we're in, over one in two households is ordering from Domino's every year. The data we have on those customers and knowledge we have of the consumer is quite impressive. We have an incredibly rich data and insights. The digital and technology, there's been a lot of investment put into that in the last sort of three years or so. As Edward said, the ERP now is fully done. The IT system is done. All that investment is now starting to come to fruition. A lot of people were concerned that one of those things might have blown up. A lot of 70% of those things falter. Ours didn't. We got it through to the end, which is fantastic.

Speaker 3

Marketing, we had an incredible marketing team, incredible insights team. The work they do, social media, branding, data, it's phenomenal. We are very, very fortunate to have the marketing team that we have. That shines through. In these results, when others are negative double digit, we're basically flat. A lot of managing experience. It makes me feel old, of course. There's 200 years of management experience in QSR here from both UK and also international. You've got a team here that's been through rough times before. I've seen a few recessions in my time in different countries. What we're seeing here is perfectly normal. Finally, our world-class franchisees, the results, the delivery times we're achieving, the Google reviews we're getting, best in class in the world through their hard work. These guys have been around 20, 30 plus years. They've seen it all before as well, right?

Speaker 3

We'll get through tough times like we are now. We'll get to the better times. 40,000 Dominoids who are our employees. They're not contractors. They work for us. They love this brand. They work every day for this brand and for our customers. That's the flywheel of what DPG is all about. Very scalable. Next is we talk about the capital discipline at the heart of what we're doing, right? For those who say, you know, maybe I've been distracted looking for other brands, I think a 560-point market share gain sort of dispels that. Is that how could we be distracted if we're taking such market gains? How could we be doing that if we're achieving best in class and best ever in history delivery times? It's because we have a team who are all focused on these things every single day. Our first focus is the core business.

Speaker 3

The core business, in a tough market, continues to be solid. Grow Ireland. We've invested in Ireland, and as you've seen from the results, we'll talk a little bit later on, we're over-indexing there with growth. We had a record organic store opening there last year, double the highest previously, and we'll continue to grow that market. We see the fact that we're 50% less penetrated there on a per capita basis than the UK, which is one of the reasons why we're there. We believe in it. The brand is very strong there, and we've got a great bunch of franchisees out there as well. Step three is acquire, you know, acquire another brand. We've been talking about it for some time now. We understand that shareholders might be saying this is taking a bit long, and that's because we're being disciplined, right?

Speaker 3

If we don't find the right thing that has the long-term growth, then we get multiples of value upside for shareholders, we won't do it. Therefore, if we haven't achieved what we want by the end of this year, we will start buybacks again, right? That's what we expect to do. Number four, in the future, other brands, other international markets, et cetera, but step by step. The reason is because I spoke about it before, the platform that we have to leverage off is quite impressive. Not many brands have that vertically integrated platform that we have. Next, maximize the value of Domino's UK using the multiple levers. If we look at the growth system order volume, new store openings, and we'll talk a little bit more detail about that soon. Frequency and loyalty, our loyalty program, a million customers an hour on our loyalty program.

Speaker 3

We look like we will roll that out towards the end of next year for the whole business, showing double-digit incrementality there. We think that one of the big advantages is it keeps those customers inside our ecosystem, so it has a real part to play. Our aggregators, our third-party providers, and just to remind everyone, we do all the deliveries ourselves. They bring an order to us, but they're delivered by us. Why is that important? Because that's our superpower. No one else is delivering as fast. People think, so what, 20 minutes faster, is that a big deal? Yes, it is, because the quality of the product is so much higher, which is why people come back to you so often. The consistency of it, and the market research is very clear.

Speaker 3

We would rather have a delivery through you guys than someone else because of the consistency and the quality. That is our superpower. Next, we want to maximize profit, right? We are, even though shareholders today probably aren't happy with what's happening in the context of the environment, I think it could be a hell of a lot worse if you're backing some of our other competitors, is that we are investing in automation. We haven't changed from that. We will get efficiency from that, right? They are real. They'll also give us scale and give us capacity for more growth without having to invest a lot more CapEx. Our procurement, because of the volume, we can procure exceptionally well and ahead of time. The ERP is going to help those things, of course. Last again, franchisee partnerships, you know, we're in this together, right? Their success is our success.

Speaker 3

We have incredible, incredible operators. We can't understate that. We're on the same page. We're working together. They're just as frustrated as us by all the macro things that have been forced upon us. They're resilient, right? They've been around 30 plus years that we're fighting together, and we will win. Next. The loyalty program, as I said before, it's focusing on low, medium, and high-frequency cohorts. We're being very tactical about how we do that. We're seeing sort of a 10% incrementality on that at the moment, which is fantastic. That's without really any marketing behind it. It's a great system so far. We're just ironing the bugs out of it. We're learning lots. The team are doing an incredible job on that.

Speaker 3

We feel very confident that we'll start launching that towards the end of next year because you have to build a whole new system to make this happen. We've got that plugged in now. We feel very confident where that's going. I know that's been talked about for a long time. I don't want to oversell it. I think it's going to play an important part of our growth and our business, particularly keeping people inside of our ecosystem. It's very positive. We get, again, a lot of insights from that as well. Those sort of insights also help us in the main business, not just in the loyalty part of the business. Next slide. This is something that's very interesting because when you have the doubters about how do you get to 2,000 stores, et cetera. We wanted to just pull out a few data points here.

Speaker 3

We've opened a bunch of stores the last couple of years in the smaller towns, so less than 10,000 addresses. Just to remind everyone, our average store count is about 20,000 addresses, 20, 21,000 addresses for the average store. Some have 30, 35, 40. Some have 15, 12,000, and then we've got the small towns, which is below 10,000. We've actually been opening stores in these areas for the last couple of years. As you'll see there, the average sales per address is almost double that of a larger address count, the more average, which is why that gives us confidence to go into these territories. There's over 400 of these territories just in these smaller address counts.

Speaker 3

We've had some stores open recently where they're doing five, six times the national average in sales in some of these smaller towns because they've been wanting Domino's for 30, 40 years, and we finally come to town and service these rural customers. I grew up in a regional small town myself. My first Domino's store was in a regional small town. I know how important we are to the community, not only providing jobs, but providing a service that they haven't had that their cousins in the city have had. It's a very important role that we play. Next. Delivery times I've spoken about already, extremely proud. These are extremely hard to do. You look around the Domino's world, there's no one else delivering it across the sort of size of our business, these sort of numbers. These are accurate because they're all GPS tracked, right?

Speaker 3

They're not numbers that can be fudged. They're real numbers. It's really important to us. We track these literally by the minute because we know that today's bad service is tomorrow's lost customers. Consequently, today's great service is tomorrow's customers as well. It's a lot of work. You've had a lot of skill to do this. That's why our team continues to double down on this and improve it every month and every week. Next. Our innovation team, we've got a fantastic innovation team. We sold out of the cream egg cookies again this year. We launched a hot honey pepperoni, which sold out as well. We had a couple of really exciting things coming down the pipeline I cannot talk about because they are confidential. I don't want our competitors to get a look into those things. I'm extremely positive about those.

Speaker 3

We're doing a test in a couple of months' time. If that goes as I think it will, we'll be really going after that next year. I feel very positive about that. We continue to innovate. Innovation is very important for us. We won't move away from our core. The pepperoni passion is still something that people love. We also have, you know, we're also respectful about providing balanced meals. We have less than 600-calorie pizzas, less than 400-calorie wraps, less than 150 calories, believe it or not, mini pizzas, et cetera. We're always trying to provide a balanced meal for people because we know nutrition is important. We have our own nutritionists on board now as well to help us with those things. At the end of the day, we supply people with their favorite treat. That's really important to us. Next.

Speaker 3

Supply chain, which I've spoken about, Pete and his team do an amazing job, to the sort of 99.96% accuracy and 99.9%, it's the same as our IT system. We are in that last sort of 0.1% sort of accuracy, way above competition and best in class around the world. Our guys are exceptional. Why is that important? Our customers therefore have always got products in stock, et cetera. Our online is always up, et cetera. These things all, they're all 0.1s, but they make a massive difference. The robotics, et cetera, which I think is on the next page, all these things about whether it be transport costs, we're getting more efficiencies through fleet utilization with using GPS tools. The warehousing costs are coming down because we're investing in the robotics. Production costs are coming down. That robot there is called Nessie. It's up in Scotland.

Speaker 3

It's actually operating as we speak now and replaced some of the hours that we had there before. We'll continue to invest in that area for the next couple of years. Next. This one here is an actual photo of Warrington. It's soon to be up and running, bringing 10% labor cost efficiencies and giving us an extra 30% capacity. Therefore, when you do this as a commissary, you don't have to build another commissary in the future because you've created all this capacity inside these current facilities. Great ROIs, three to four years' sort of ROIs on these investments. Very, very good for shareholders' returns. Next. Resilience. I think that's the key word for me, that we've got a franchisee base that have been around 30-odd years, 40 years old, the company this year in the UK, extremely resilient. Profits are down a little bit. We don't like that.

Speaker 3

We're going to fight hard. The franchisees are fighting hard to find more efficiencies and grow more customer counts in this next six months. Who knows? We get a bit of good luck. We get a bit of a tailwind. We get some positive news in the market, which would be fantastic for a change. Who knows? We may snowball into some success. The last quarter is also always a very big month, big quarter rather, for us. A really good last quarter, who knows? Maybe the autumn statement is nowhere near as bad, and maybe it's positive for business. We may get this body of momentum that actually flies us into 2026 with a lot of positive momentum. They're certainly out there fighting hard for that.

Speaker 3

The good thing that I say to people is that the franchisee's profitability was in such a healthy position last year that when you come off a little bit, you're still in a very healthy position. I'd hate to be our competitors, and I've seen some of their numbers, horrific, nothing like these numbers. In fact, we've seen why they're closing stores. Extremely confident. We're working with our franchisee. We're using an AI scheduling tool now that's helping. We're always continually trying to find ideas to work together to find how we can deliver more efficiently, how we can look after our customers. Particularly in these times like this, when you have a big group like this with so much data, so much experience, it plays to our strengths. The strong are certainly getting stronger. Next. Grow Ireland.

Speaker 3

It's only a tiny, tiny place, Ireland, or the island of Ireland, as I like to call it these days. We've got investments now in both the Republic and in Northern Ireland. If you look at that graph on the bottom there, you'll see that there, that's the incremental growth over the market. 5.5% incremental order count growth in those stores that we own there now compared to the rest of the market. We're driving the growth over there. We're controlling that future for ourselves and the brand. Very profitable market. A lot of white space over there. We're doubling down on Ireland. We feel very confident about that. You'll see through our investments going forward that we're going to maximize the investments we already have there, not only in corporate stores, but our supply chain, which we've already invested into.

Speaker 3

We continue to invest in that business, and we see a great part of our growth. I know it's a small part of the overall picture in terms of revenue, if you like, but if you look in terms of profitability, that's going to become quite a significant part of our revenue base. We're quite proud of that. Next. Delivering a sustainable future is very important. Of course, we've got electric trucks in our fleet, with more coming due in 2025. We've got a nutritionist, as I said, because we want a balanced meal for our customers. Quite often, there might be four or five people in a family, and there's somebody that wants to eat a particular way. We want to make sure we cater for everyone in that family. It unlocks the purchase for others as well. The new two-vegetable sides under 200 calories is quite phenomenal, right?

Speaker 3

You can have something from Domino's for under 200 calories. It's very possible. We're always on top of strengthening our modern slavery and risk mitigation and those processes, et cetera. These things are also very important for us because they're the right thing to do, right thing to do for our customers, right thing to do for our team members. Next. If I step back for a second, I'd like to say this: we haven't changed our ambition. Still on the path to doing exactly what I said back when I arrived. Our capital allocation program hasn't changed. We have the same mentality. Yes, it's a point in time at the moment. It's a bit tougher. I'm thankful that we have such a strong business to plough through these tougher times.

Speaker 3

We're not anticipating any change in the environment at the moment, mainly because that autumn statement has got such a cloud over how people are feeling at the moment. We're hoping it's good news, but we can't be sure of that. We're being quite prudent there. We're making sure that whilst it's tough for our customers at the moment, it's tough for our franchisees and ourselves, that we stick together. We keep delivering incredible value to our customers. We keep working on finding efficiencies for ourselves and our franchisees that we'll get through this year in a pretty good place and set ourselves up for a great 2026. Our pipeline for stores in 2026 is also very healthy. I say our long-term ambition has not changed one little bit. With that, I'd like to hand over for Q&A and open up the floor. Yes, the front here.

Speaker 1

Are we doing my thing?

Speaker 3

Yeah, we have. Here we go.

Speaker 1

Thank you so much. Good morning. Ivor Jones from PL Hunter. Can I ask you three things, maybe one at a time?

Speaker 3

Great.

Speaker 1

In terms of return on investment, could you just talk about how the Avonmouth project will pay off for the group? You gave us a bit of detail about Warrington, but if you could talk about the step up from third-party logistics to in-house, I think that'd be really interesting. Thank you.

Speaker 3

Yeah, sure. Thanks for the question, Ivor. Pretty well all of our investments in our supply chain all come in between sort of three and five-year return on investments. The question you have to ask yourself is that that depends on how many stores you open and like-for-like, et cetera, with transaction growth. However, we feel pretty comfortable with that between three and five years. Some are two. Some are slightly higher, more towards five. Typically, that's what they run at.

Speaker 1

What is the payback? Why is it better than what it replaces?

Speaker 3

Simply because we can put more stores down there. From a freight point of view, freight is a very important cost of our system. When you put Avonmouth and we can distribute more from Avonmouth, we don't have to spend as much on freight.

Speaker 1

That's great. Thank you.

Speaker 1

Just a point. In addition to those transferable cost efficiencies that Andrew's talked about, remember what it also does is provide much greater resilience and future capacity. There's a range of benefits. There are financial benefits, but also non-financial benefits.

Speaker 1

Thank you. That's really interesting. I'd like to ask a similar question about what you said about the first national advertising campaign. I have the same sort of question, really. Why was that better than what preceded it? Why was it better than the local campaigns?

Speaker 3

Yeah, just to be clear, it was the first national campaign of a collection offer. Typically, we'd always advertise delivery offers. We went after, particularly when consumers are looking for better value, because collection is better value, much cheaper, because it doesn't involve a cost for delivery drivers, et cetera. We wanted to make sure the customers knew we'd advertise it locally for a long time. We wanted to put it above lines to just remind people that may not have got our local store marketing that we also have this amazing collection offer. That grew collection customers.

Speaker 1

Thank you. The last thing, going into this environment where competitors are suffering and demand's uncertain, could you just talk about your tactics around pricing? It's obviously the trade-off with volume. How are you thinking about trying to drive the second half? What's the priority? Thank you.

Speaker 3

Yeah, so the relativity of price is that our pricing is fairly similar to a lot of the other competitors. The difference that we have in the value proposition is that we can deliver on much better service times, I think a much better quality product, much more consistent. Because the analogy I use with people is that if you paid £10 for a pizza and it took 40 minutes to get there, it was cold, and you versus £11 or £12 for a pizza that was there in 22 minutes and it was hot and it was fresh and tasted better, which one's better value? It's an analogy I use over and over again, but it's very real because where are you more likely to go back to next time when you want that occasion with your family? All right?

Speaker 3

You don't want the cold late pizza no matter what the price is. Now, having said that, our price is pretty well parity. Yes, there's offers from competitors and ourselves from time to time, but we like to be as consistent as possible and not confuse the customer. Consistency is very important in both terms of service and also in terms of pricing. There's no doubt people have had to take price because the costs have been forced upon all of us. It's about the whole package because some others are cutting back on labor, therefore giving worse service. They're making their value proposition in a much worse position than ours. Our franchisees have gone the other way. They're giving better service. In times like this, others are cutting back. We're investing in that service and that value.

Speaker 1

Thank you. Thanks, Ivo.

Speaker 1

Thank you. Kate Cousins from Shore Capital. Two from me, if you don't mind. Firstly, on loyalty. About a third adoption of the loyalty program so far. Is that kind of how we should broadly think about your target going forward in the full rollout, or actually what steps are you taking to be able to achieve higher than that?

Speaker 3

Yeah, thanks, Kate. Great question. I don't know the answer yet because we're still in test phase. It varies by customer. If I think of it this way, if you're a light user, your propensity to take up is probably much lower than a heavy user. However, with a heavy user, you want to be careful that you don't push it too hard either because they're already buying from you a lot anyway. You need to get this nuance between light and medium users correct first before you go too headfirst into heavy users. The more, the merrier. We'd like to get everyone on there. Just remember, too, we haven't pushed it nationally yet. We haven't put it above the line. Typically, when you do that, a bit like collection, you will see a bump up as well.

Speaker 3

We won't do that until we've got it all bedded down, working properly. That might happen in 2027, etc. We might push it a bit above the line. I feel we do a lot of consumer research, what are they thinking of the program, etc., and get feedback so we can adjust it. The feedback's been really good. We're feeling quite positive about it.

Speaker 3

Secondly, just on GLP weight loss drugs, how would you find that's impacting the sector? Is that a concern for you guys going forward?

Speaker 3

Good question. Look, we do a lot of research not only here, but also what's happening in the U.S., et cetera. The thing that we find is that it doesn't feel like it's having an impact on us for a couple of reasons. One is our frequency is so low in context of sort of some of the heavy users. We're only 4.3 times a year. So once a quarter on average, you know, it doesn't tend to, particularly when you put that in the context of 1,000 meals possible in a year, 4.3 is nothing in that context. The other thing is a shared meal. Quite often, if one person of a family is on GLP, you know, there's three or four others who aren't, all right? Being a shared meal is that you don't tend to see the impact.

Speaker 3

If you're more of a singular purchase, you might see it more so, but we're a shared meal. We don't see an impact from that in our business. Based on what I've seen from around the world, it doesn't seem to be affecting anyone else in the pizza industry that I've seen.

Speaker 3

Thank you.

Speaker 3

Good questions. Thank you.

Speaker 1

Thank you.

Speaker 1

Andrew from Domino’s Pizza Group, I have two, if you don't mind. The pizza takeaway market is down 9% compared to the overall market, down 4%. Why do you think that is? I guess it's got to do with the competition exiting the market. Does that give you opportunity to open stores, especially in those areas where they are closing stores? I know that it may be a case of doubling down on stores, but it's definitely those stores may be catering to some consumers that you can cater to now if you open stores there. Secondly, on the incrementality that's coming from the loyalty program, the 10% incrementality versus giving customers a free pizza after five orders, the cost of that. If you balance those two, is it a profitable proposition, or is it more about keeping the customer in the system through the loyalty program?

Speaker 3

Yes, a great question. I'll answer the last one first. The incrementality has to be actually to make it profitable is a lot lower than that. We're already well above the break even for ourselves and franchisees. That was an important part of the program. It had to be profitable for ourselves and franchisees, particularly franchisees. Otherwise, we wouldn't roll it out. We've been very careful to do that in a way that made sure it has incrementality. We're fine with that part at this stage. On your first question, yes, there's a couple of factors. Yes, competitors closing is part of the pizza market being down for sure. Also, there's a slight swing towards, as we saw, collection. When you drive collection, it's a lower ticket. Therefore, it may be the same transaction quantity, but a smaller ticket average because people are looking to save money at the moment.

Speaker 3

I read more in the fact that people are probably a slight switch out from delivery to collection rather than not from pizza per se. Certainly, having competitors close stores doesn't help. Are we picking up the slack? Yes. The one thing about our franchisees, they're classic entrepreneurs. They're competitive. They like to win. They've been doing that for 30-odd years in this market or 40 years this year. They're going out after taking, making sure that they pick up the pizzas and make sure we can service those customers who really want a good pizza delivered or collection. Yes, we are. We are making hay while the sun shines.

Speaker 3

Thank you.

Speaker 3

Thank you, Richard.

Speaker 1

Thanks, Ivor. Just Juba from Deutsche Numis. Just a few questions for me, please. In terms of EBITDA for the franchisees, would you expect it to be sort of flat year on year or back to growth when we get to the second half?

Speaker 3

No, not at this stage, Richard. A couple of reasons. One is they're down 5% at the moment, but we've got to remember that the national insurance, et cetera, only came in in April. OK, so you're not seeing a full six months impact of that. They've got a full six months impact in the second half. Unless we see something dramatically change in the autumn statement, that consumer being sitting back on the heels doesn't help that cause. Now, franchisees are quite entrepreneurial, right? They can go after it, and they can do some tactical things locally. Our competitors closing, there's opportunities there. We're certainly seeing some franchisees are up on last year, all right? They are winning. Being the competitive nature of our franchisees, I'm sure a lot of them are going to fight to the death to get back to where they were last year.

Speaker 3

We're certainly doing what we can to help them get there. That sort of would be our goal. At this stage, it's fairly similar to where we are, that we expect the second half to be just as tough. We'll both be down a bit on last year, unfortunately. If we set ourselves up in a really good position, we've done the right thing by the customers, we can take more advantage of those declines from others into next year.

Speaker 1

The second question is, I know it's still probably quite early days, but do you have any sort of idea what the food basket inflation will be for 2026?

Speaker 3

For 2026, yeah, that is a big ask, particularly with the world moving so much. Look, beef globally is definitely on the up, right? We don't have too much beef on our products, to be fair. Cheese is up at the moment, but we'd like to think that that probably starts to temper towards the back end of 2026. We've factored this into our numbers, by the way. A lot of other things are fairly constant at the moment. I wouldn't say massive inflation. I'd like to think that they balance each other out at this stage. You know, it's a long way away at this stage. I'll have a better idea towards the end of this year, Richard. At the moment, flour is in a good place. There's no reason for panic, that's for sure.

Speaker 1

On the buyback, you say if you haven't done a second brand by that stage, you'll initiate that. Would that also be backed? Would that go straight? Would you look to get net leverage up to sort of 2.5 times pretty much immediately after that, or would you sort of make the buybacks not quite as aggressive as you have done in the past, keeping some sort of wiggle room for acquisitions?

Speaker 3

Yeah, look, I think we'd want to keep our powder dry. I mean, this is a board decision, to be fair. I think we'd always want to keep some wiggle room there for acquisition because we're not walking away from an acquisition strategy. What we're saying is that the cash flow we would have accumulated by then would put us in a position where we feel like we can do both. Our ambition hasn't changed with getting the right brand.

Speaker 3

Just to add to that, remember none of the current opportunities we're evaluating would put us outside our stated leverage range. We've been clear on that, and they'd be financed from more resilient facilities. I just wanted to reiterate that point as well.

Speaker 3

OK, Chiara.

Speaker 3

Hi, Chiara from UBS. On the store count, can you please emphasize on the target of 1,600 stores by 2028? Do you still think that the 2,000-store target by 2033 is still achievable?

Speaker 3

Yeah, it's a good question. We still think that the targets are still achievable in terms of numbers. We want to get through this year first and reevaluate. We'll probably at full year come back and sort of base on how the year unfolds and how the next year looks. The autumn statement plays a lot into this, right? We just don't know what that's going to look like at this stage. It's no doubt in my mind that getting to 1,600 stores and 2,000 stores is very achievable. Will we need to adjust that by a year or so? I don't know the answer yet. I want to wait until we've got some more informed data before we come back to the market on that. No more questions. All right, thanks for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 3

I'd like to think that you walk away from me going that Domino's Pizza Group is still a very solid company, probably best in class. We're certainly benefiting from these tougher times in market share gains. Thank you very much for your time. Talk to you again soon. Bye.

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