Auto Trader Group H2 2026 Earnings Report

Auto Trader Group EPS Results

• Actual EPS: GBX 34.17
• Consensus EPS: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• One Year Ago EPS: N/A

Auto Trader Group Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: $624.30 million
• Expected Revenue: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• YoY Revenue Growth: N/A

Auto Trader Group Announcement Details

• Quarter: H2 2026
• Date: 5/21/2026
• Time: Before Market Opens
• Conference Call Date: Thursday, May 21, 2026
• Conference Call Time: 4:30AM ET

Autotrader Group plc is the UK’s largest automotive marketplace and a leading digital platform for the automotive industry. Listed on the London Stock Exchange since March 2015, the company is a member of the FTSE 100 Index. Autotrader’s purpose is Driving Change Together. Responsibly. The company uses advanced data science, artificial intelligence and scalable technology to improve how vehicles are bought and sold, while building stronger partnerships with its customers and the wider automotive ecosystem. Autotrader’s platform leverages significant amounts of proprietary data and machine learning models to power pricing, demand forecasting and personalised consumer experiences. These capabilities enable retailers and manufacturers to make better decisions, improve performance and respond to real-time market dynamics. Autotrader is increasingly digitising the car buying journey, from search and discovery through to financing and purchase, enabling more of the buying journey to take place online. Alongside this, it is using its data and influence to support the transition to electric vehicles. This is all underpinned by a values-led culture that empowers its people to develop and perform, enabling continuous innovation across its platform and products. The company also publishes a monthly used car Retail Price Index, based on the analysis of approximately 800,000 vehicles each day from across the automotive retail market. This dataset provides one of the most comprehensive views of the UK automotive market and is used by organisations including the Bank of England and the Office for National Statistics to inform economic indicators and government policy. For more information, please visit https://plc.autotrader.co.uk/

Auto Trader Group H2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Positive Sentiment: Auto Trader said it grew full-year revenue, operating profit, and EPS despite a tougher trading backdrop, with group revenue up 4% to GBP 585.3 million and operating profit up 4% to GBP 408 million.
• Negative Sentiment: The company acknowledged a weaker second half, driven by pressure on retailer profitability, faster stock-turn, and feedback around the accelerated rollout of Deal Builder, which contributed to higher cancellations and a lower FY 2027 starting run rate.
• Positive Sentiment: Management said retailer numbers, stock, and upsells have been improving since year-end and that the business has “passed the low point,” with April and May trends showing recovery in forecourts and paid stock.
• Positive Sentiment: The board announced a more aggressive capital return policy, expecting to return over GBP 1 billion to shareholders across FY 2026 and FY 2027 combined, while also planning about GBP 500 million of buybacks in FY 2027.
• Neutral Sentiment: FY 2027 guidance calls for group operating profit of GBP 395 million to GBP 415 million, with margins at least maintained and high single-digit EPS growth supported by buybacks, while Autorama is expected to move to a small profit and be reported as part of one operating segment.

Presentation

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Auto Trader Group for the full year ending the 31st of March 2026. Today, you have myself and Jamie Warner here for the presentation and Q&A with analysts in the room. We anticipated trading this year to be tougher as a result of profitability challenges for retailers, a shortage of stock in some age cohorts, and fast speed of sale. Retailer profitability was more challenging than we expected due to a combination of new car profitability, in part due to the ZEV mandate and cost increases following the government budget last year. This led to intense scrutiny on every cost in their business, with many stories of profit declines, redundancies, and store portfolio restructures. The pressure on retailer profitability is most acute in November and December, which combined with feedback on our accelerated rollout of Deal Builder.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

This was amplified across social media, including some factual inaccuracies which we have since clarified for customers. Following this period, we have seen higher cancellation levels than in previous years, which has impacted both FY 2026 and the run rate into FY 2027. Despite these challenges, we have continued to grow revenue, profit and earnings per share. Perhaps more importantly, retailer numbers, stock, and upsells have all been growing since the end of the financial year. We are past the low point. The core metrics underpinning Auto Trader are in a strong place. Supply shortages will subside. Speed of sale has been stable all year. Retailers are returning. Now years into Agentic AI, we're confident that the core of what we do will remain relevant for the future. It's a confidence that is growing as we continue to build, scale, and monetize products incorporating AI.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

In previous technology transitions, including the internet, mobile, native apps, hyperscalers, big data, and AI, we have backed the technology and emerged the other side better for car buyers, for retailers, for our people, and shareholders too. Now we'll turn to the core foundations of Auto Trader, which as I mentioned, are in very good health. The most important foundation of any marketplace is its buyers. From an already very high base, our share of time spent versus competitors has increased again. There are 11x more time spent on Auto Trader compared to our nearest competitor, which is actually four brands added together. We're 6x greater than all our main competitors combined and have seen little change to how buyers use Auto Trader.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

Unique visitors have been stable at over 9 million a month, and 80% of them come direct to Auto Trader, 13% through organic search, and 4% through paid web traffic. AI chatbots represent less than 1%, which isn't changing significantly despite monthly LLM users reaching almost 4 billion globally. Generative chat interfaces and agents are already being used to research goods and services. How people use them depends very much on the category. Vehicle transactions are unique because they are pre-owned, complex, high value, with a lot of relevant choice for any one buyer, and a process that takes around three months straddling both on and offline processes.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

Our experience has shown that car buying and selling is improved meaningfully only when the technology is combined with a deep, specialized car buying experience, a massive range of real-time vehicles, and tools that utilize data, integrations, and over 50 AI models that only we have and have developed. This is true for car buyers and also for retailers who have an even higher need for trust, performance, and accuracy. This is all underpinned by a sustained investment in our public cloud delivery data and AI technology platforms with our 400-person strong product and technology team. Now to Deal Builder. I want to start by saying this remains a big long-term focus for us because we believe it is one of the single most impactful and difficult to replicate experiences we can deliver for car buyers and retailers.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

This is indicated by positive feedback over the three years that it's been live. Car buyers like being able to go deeper into the transaction when and where it suits them. They don't want to wait for return phone calls or dealership opening hours. For retailers, they can sell out of hours and get car buyers that are at least twice as likely to convert to sale. Furthermore, over time, there will be the opportunity to get more car buyers part exchanging and using finance, which are good options for car buyers and important for retailer profitability. While we have had to make some product adjustments and taken more time onboarding some cohorts of retailers, penetration has continued to grow throughout the year. We're also updating our capital allocation policy.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

We've accelerated our buybacks throughout the second half of the year and intend to continue this into the new financial year. We believe this is a rare opportunity to allocate capital effectively at a price that we don't believe reflects the fundamentals of our business. Over FY 2026 and FY 2027 combined, we expect to return over GBP 1 billion to shareholders. As I said earlier, we've continued to grow revenue and earnings. Average retailers for the year declined 0.5% to 13,942. We ended the year with 460 less paying retailers than where we exited the first half. Although, as I mentioned earlier, retailer numbers have been growing since the end of the financial year, which we are very focused on continuing.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

Average revenue per retailer or ARPA was GBP 2,995 per month, which was up 5% on the previous year. Group revenue and operating profit were up 4% year-on-year, and operating profit margins were stable. Averages can be deceiving, so it is worth flagging the group revenue growth was 3% in the second half and lower in the final quarter, which has impacted our run rate into financial year 2027. Cash generated from operations was up 5% and earnings per share up 8% higher than operating profit due to our continued share buybacks, which as I mentioned, we accelerated in the second half of the year. We have reviewed and changed our capital allocation policy, as I mentioned, reflecting our confidence in the business. This year we're also declaring a final dividend of GBP 0.078 a share, which makes dividends for the full year up 9% year-on-year.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

For our cultural KPIs, which are a subset of measures we use to track progress on a number of cultural and organizational priorities. This year, our metrics around the representation on our board, leadership, and organization are relatively stable and generally at good levels. Following Catherine's departure, our board is now 50/50 men and women, we're continuing to work to improve ethnicity in leadership. It will take time for the work that we've done in early careers to make its way through to leadership positions within the business. We aim to have net zero carbon emissions across our value chain by 2040 and halve those emissions by 2030. This year, carbon emissions across Scope 1, 2, and 3 increased 55% to 144.1 thousand tonnes, largely as a result of capital expenditure on our new office and vehicles taken on balance sheet through Autorama.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

Both of these are Scope 3 or supply chain related. Engagement has fallen from 91% last year to 72% this year. It was literally only a year ago when most cultural measures were at all-time highs. As you have heard, this year has been particularly challenging and has impacted our people. Tougher trading, tighter cost control, reorganizing some areas of the business, retailer feedback, and a tighter approach to working in the office. However, all other internal measures, such as recruitment and retention, remain largely unchanged. It's fair to say the team have performed exceptionally well in tough conditions, and I feel privileged to work with such a talented and committed group of people. I'll now hand over to Jamie to talk us through the financials in more detail.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

Thanks, Nathan, good morning, everyone. I'll start by focusing on the core Auto Trader financials. Starting with revenue. Total Auto Trader revenue increased 4% to GBP 585.3 million. Trade revenue also increased by 4%, with the largest component of this being retailer revenue, which also grew by 4%. Within trade revenue, we've seen an increase in home trader pay-as-you-go listings and growth in other trade revenue. Consumer services revenue decreased by 8%. Within this, private revenue generated from individual sellers decreased by 11% due to a lower volume of listings. Motoring services decreased by 4% due to lower revenue from our insurance product. Revenue from manufacturing agency customers increased 14% year-on-year. Much of this increase was due to manufacturers supporting their franchise network with both new and used car advertising. As mentioned, retailer revenue grew 4% year-on-year.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

The average number of retailer forecourts on our platform decreased by 71 to 13,942, which was half a percent year-on-year decrease. Average revenue per retailer increased by 5% toGBP 2,995 per month, with more detail given on the following slide. The chart on the left shows the components that contribute to the movement in ARPA compared to the prior year. As you can see, ARPA growth was driven by the price and product levers with a negative contribution from stock. We delivered our annual pricing event for all customers on the 1st of April 2025, which included additional products and a like-for-like price increase, which contributed GBP 117 to ARPA growth. Products contributed GBP 72. Most of this growth was from our Co-Driver product, which is included in retailer advertising packages in April 2025.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

Prominence, which is largely the movement up and down our package staircase, was not a contributor to the product lever in the year. We continue to review our packages with changes expected in H1, with the aim of returning Prominence to long-term growth. The remaining product lever growth was driven by new car, where we increased the number of paying customers over the period. Turning now to stock. You'll see on the right-hand side of the chart that the number of live cars advertised on Auto Trader was broadly flat year-on-year. Although there was some positive impact from a stock offer that we ran at the start of the financial year, which did not impact revenue.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

From November 2025, prompted by the rollout of Deal Builder and reflecting more difficult cost-related trading conditions. A number of retailers reduced the number of vehicles advertised on the platform, contributing to lower paid stock volumes. Total costs, Auto Trader costs increased 4% to GBP 181.4 million. People costs increased by 1% to GBP 93.6 million. There was an increase in underlying salary costs, while the average number of employees remained broadly flat and share-based payments reduced. Marketing spend decreased 11% to GBP 21.9 million, while other costs, which include data services, property-related costs and other overheads, increased by 13%. This year-on-year uplift was mainly driven by higher cloud infrastructure expenditure and increased property costs related to our new head office. Depreciation and amortization increased by 49% to GBP 9.4 million, also due to our new office lease that commenced in July 2025.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

As a reminder, we fully expense our research and development costs, hence our low levels of CapEx and depreciation. In addition to our investment in cloud-based services, we have 400 people in product technology who are continuously improving our platforms and developing new products for consumers and retailers. Operating profit increased by 4% to GBP 408 million, and operating profit margins remained at 70%. Our share of profit generated by Dealer Auction, the group's joint venture, increased 14% to GBP 4.1 million. Having covered Auto Trader, the main part of the group, we will briefly cover Autorama results. As a reminder, the Autorama acquisition was and remains part of our strategy to bring attractive new car offers to car buyers on Auto Trader, and to make new cars a more important part of our proposition.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

Autorama revenue was GBP 39 million, with vehicle and accessory sales contributing GBP 29.6 million and commission and ancillary revenue of GBP 9.4 million. Vehicle and accessory sales relates to vehicles that flow through the balance sheet, which is not our primary focus. Total deliveries amounted to 8,056 units, around two-thirds of these being cars, and within this, deliveries from Auto Trader increased over three times. Average commission and ancillary revenue per unit delivered is GBP 1,167. The Autorama segment made an operating loss of GBP 2 million. This is a significant reduction on last year through the accelerated integration into the main Auto Trader business and platform.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

From financial year 2027, Autorama will operate and be reported as a single operating segment with the rest of the Auto Trader group. This is due to more than half of all leasing transactions being delivered through the Auto Trader platform in the second half of financial year 2026.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

In the appendix, you'll find a breakdown of financial year 2025 and 2026 in this new format, which will be how we report our FY 2027 half-year results in November. Total group operating profit increased 4% to GBP 392.7 million, and group operating profit margins remained at 63%. As we grow, the strong cash generation of our business leaves us well-placed to return surplus cash to shareholders. Cash generated from operations was up 5% to GBP 418 million. Now to briefly review net bank debt and uses of cash in financial year 2026. During the period, the group drew down GBP 165 million of its revolving credit facility and held cash and cash equivalents of GBP 18.2 million. In the year, prompted by the low share price, we accelerated the number of shares we acquired.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

To put this into context, we acquired three and a half times more shares in H2 than we did in H1, and in aggregate acquired 58.5 million shares, 6.6% of issued share capital, for a consideration of GBP 369.1 million. A further GBP 94.1 million was paid in dividends. The board believes the prevailing share price does not reflect the company's fundamentals or long-term prospects. We are therefore updating our capital allocation policy. We will continue to focus on investment in the business supporting growth while continuing to return approximately one-third of net income to shareholders through dividends.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

We expect to continue the recent acceleration of share buybacks, purchasing around GBP 500 million of shares in the year, and we will be requesting authority to acquire up to 15% of issued share capital at our AGM in July. Based on current assumptions, we expect this to increase our debt levels towards one turn of EBITDA.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

I'll now move on to talk through some of the market dynamics. Moving on to slide 15 and looking at both new car registrations and used car transactions. From a new car perspective, suppliers continued to improve following the impact of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, with five consecutive years of growth. Although the market still remains slightly below the level seen pre-pandemic and significantly lower than the highs of 2017. The retail market or new cars sold directly to consumers continue to remain at lower levels by historic standards. Over the past 12 months, we've seen manufacturers attempt to stimulate private demand with increasing levels of discounts and finance offers, which has had some positive impact, with private retail sales growing for the first time in four years.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

As seen in the chart on the right, used car transactions have continued their steady recovery, growing at 1% over the last year. Over the past 20 years, the size of the U.K. car park has grown steadily by just over 300,000 cars per year, reaching 37 million vehicles. We expect this growth to continue over the long term, driven by GDP growth, population growth and stable car ownership trends. We also expect the value of both new and used cars to rise over time. In 2011, the average price of a used car advertised on Auto Trader was GBP 9,000, which has almost doubled since then, reflecting average growth of over 4% a year. This increase is driven by inflation, improved product functionality, and the shift towards more expensive electric vehicles.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

Over the past decade, gross margin percentages have remained relatively consistent, which means that higher vehicle prices typically lead to higher absolute gross profits for retailers. This trend, combined with the growth in transaction volumes, has resulted in an increased gross profit pool over time. Over the past 12 months, our audience position has remained strong. The number of cross-platform visits continued at record levels at 81.7 million per month. Engagement, which we measure as cross-platform minutes, decreased slightly to 548.3 million on average per month. The chart on the right-hand side shows the total minutes spent across an expanded set of competitors. On average, over the year, Comscore estimated that consumers spent 11 times more minutes on Auto Trader than our nearest marketplace competitor. The combination of Gumtree, Motors, eBay, and Cazoo, which is an increase versus the prior year.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

We were 22 times larger than the nearest single brand and 6x larger than all of these competitors combined. 67% of our audience was unique to us, never visiting these other sites. I'll now hand you back to Nathan to talk through our latest product updates and the outlook.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

Thank you, Jamie. We wanted to start by providing a timeline, including a sample of how our technology has developed over the past decade. There's this sustained investment in the way we deliver software that enables us to deliver at high velocity with stability, to adapt and to scale new technologies quickly and cost-effectively without big bang replatforms, which are prone to time and cost overruns. Rather than go through every item on the timeline, there are a few I wanted to point out. Just over 10 years ago, we began building our data science team and supporting technologies. 2017, we started to migrate to the public cloud by re-architecting and standardizing every application, so it didn't just work in a cloud environment but was optimized for it. We completed this without pausing development around six years later.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

Just after 2018, we acquired key resources so we could build our own proprietary vehicle taxonomy for every vehicle on U.K. roads. Something that is even more relevant in a world of AI and requires a team of technologists and people to constantly update and cleanse the data, as well as build integrations with manufacturer production systems and other data providers. Our taxonomy underpins pretty much every aspect of Auto Trader. Following the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, we employed a full-time postdoc from Manchester Metropolitan University to work on the LLMs. This capability is now productionized across our data science and engineering team and is made accessible to all our product and technology teams through an AI platform integrated with most foundation models, including hosting, scaling, monitoring, and security essentially available to them off the shelf.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

AI will increasingly surface in our consumer experience, sometimes very obviously and sometimes in the background. We believe the technology is transformative, but not if it is just bolted on the side of existing functionality and tools. As we've built, scaled, and monetized AI, we've seen that to be effective in car buying or retailing, the technology needs to be combined with a deep user experience, highly curated real-time vehicle listings, proprietary data, specialized models, and distribution to a highly fragmented customer base of car buyers, agents, and retailers. We've now built and deployed an MCP server, which enables agents to efficiently interact with Auto Trader. Our initial implementation of this is with a ChatGPT app, which you can see in the middle of the slide.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

We've architected it in such a way that it can be used to interact with other agents that arrive either today or in the future. Another example is our new search categories, available under a filter called I'm looking for on the left-hand side of the screen. On Auto Trader, car buyers had to choose 1 make or model when searching for vehicles. These filters, powered by a specialized AI model, enable people to search across makes and models defined by categories in their language, such as big boots, all-rounders, cheap insurance, cheap to run, first cars, luxury cars, and even an oh my God category. These filters are currently being applied by over 100,000 people every day and will become more and more important given the explosion of new brands selling vehicles in the U.K. It's also a very good example of what's required to ensure high-quality responses.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

We could have used a simple LLM to do this task, which would have been less accurate and expensive. We deemed machine learning to be much more effective for the task with negligible incremental cost. On the right-hand side, you can see our current pilot using chat-based search, which is integrated with filters. This provides a different entry point to search with even more flexibility than categories. We've experimented with these interfaces using different technologies before and uptake was limited. If LLMs become a way in which people want to search for vehicles, then the best such experience for cars will be on Auto Trader. This is because of the specialized models I spoke about earlier that use proprietary consumer and retailer data and an onward experience to navigate enormous choice along with market-leading tools to ensure car buyers get the very best results for all their car-buying questions.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

Our Co-Driver suite of products will be known to most analysts and investors. For those who are unfamiliar with Co-Driver, it is the umbrella brand for a suite of AI products that save retailers time, improve quality, and therefore their sales process. The first two products already available optimize the order of a retailer's images and highlight any that are missing using computer vision. The second, which is covered on this slide, writes a description for each unique vehicle. Which sounds simple enough, but is the perfect example of what it takes to get good results from this technology. If you use the foundational model alone, as is shown at the top of the slide, there will be errors and many of the features of the vehicle will not be known.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

Furthermore, there will be no data-based understanding of which of those features are the key points of differentiation and of most value to car buyers. At the bottom of the slide, you can see how we go around this by utilizing both our models, the foundation models, and proprietary data and technology. We've found that every implementation of LLMs to make car buying or selling better has required us to do some version of this. This year, we also launched Buying Signals, which is again powered by AI models. It's been added now to 800,000 inquiries since it's been launched. Buying Signals utilizes the model to predict the likelihood of someone buying a car based on signals collected throughout their journey on Auto Trader. If retailers need to prioritize their activity, this gives them the perfect method to do so quickly.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

It also benefits the ready-to-go car buyer who can be quickly identified, contacted, and followed up. Buying Signals also flag whether that buyer is local and their preferences in case the exact vehicle is no longer available. It offers a similar efficiency to Deal Builder with inquiries marked as high intent, typically converting twice as well as an average Auto Trader inquiry. With over almost 15 million inquiries sent every year to retailers, many of which go unreturned, the benefit to them is reasonably obvious. The new buying journey on Auto Trader, known as Deal Builder, remains a key focus of ours. It delivers a more empowered buying experience whenever people want, and inquiries to retailers that convert at least twice as well.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

For a retailer, that's half the work, and with almost 50% of deals happening outside of business hours, their stores are essentially now open 24/7 without the staff cost that would normally come with it. We always build products iteratively and with customers, which we have been doing for three years now with Deal Builder. However, as we accelerated the rollout to new cohorts of customers, some were not clear on what we were offering or why. We listened to this, slowed down, and made changes to the product, including the ability to choose either full reservations or the ability to request a reservation. The changes were well-received, and we've continued to roll out the product, retaining the goal of achieving 100% penetration during the course of FY 2027.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

You can see from the charts on the slide that penetration has continued to increase throughout the year with more than triple the customer numbers now on Deal Builder and almost triple the number of deals as newer customers tend to be smaller. For the outlook for FY 2027. We remain comfortable with our current levels of investment. We expect group operating profit margins, excluding vehicle and accessory sales, to be at least maintained. In the financial year 2027, we expect group operating profit to be between GBP 395 million and GBP 415 million, which, with the continued acceleration in buybacks, will result in at least high single-digit EPS growth. Auto Trader revenue was flat year-on-year in April 2026 due to a lower run rate and package increase.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

Retailer forecourts, volume of paid stock, and package penetration are now improving, and we expect that to flow through to growth in the second half. The contributors to this will be our packaging event, which will grow the price lever within ARPA by GBP 85-GBP 95. Product growth is expected to contribute GBP 65-GBP 75. Stock will recover, resulting in improvement from current levels to -30% to -40% for the full year. While average retailer forecourts are now growing, we expect the average for the year, due to the entry run rate, to be down 1%-2%. Other revenue will be broadly flat in aggregate, with a decline in consumer services offset by growth in manufacturer and agency. Our focus in Autorama is on volume growth.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

However, we do expect to make a small profit for the year, with commission and ancillary revenue growing 8%-12% and vehicle and accessory sales of around GBP 40 million. As Jamie mentioned, as the majority of leasing transactions now originate on Auto Trader, and due to the extensive integration we've already undertaken, we will move to one reported operating segment in 2027. That's all for the presentation. We'll now take questions from analysts in the room.

[Analyst at Barclays]

Thanks. It's Andrew from Barclays. Two from me, please. First one is on the stock and the guidance you've given to the year, and just trying to kind of unpick what you're seeing in terms of stock in the fiscal year to date on an underlying basis, because it's quite hard to observe that on your site. There's quite a lot of noise with special offers and that type of thing. Then what's kind of baked in in terms of underlying improvement to get to your guidance and if you can kind of unpick that between what's fast stock turn in the market and what is dealers choosing to put their stock on Auto Trader, that would be helpful.

[Analyst at Barclays]

Second question, I appreciate the FY 2028 pricing event is still 7 months from now to communicate it to dealers, is there anything you can give us in terms of how you're thinking about it and what product or what type of products you're going to push to the dealer base next year and how you kind of think about the value of it? I guess big picture, in the last couple of years, the headline increase to dealers has been 8%. This year it was 5.5%. What kind of gives us confidence in the value of the products that you have that 5.5% isn't the new normal and it can get better? Thanks.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

I'll take the first.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

You take that one.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

I'll take the first one. I think there's a bit of a theme. You obviously asked around the stock guidance, but I think it could equally be applied to the retailer guidance and maybe to a slightly lesser extent to product and particularly Prominence. I think if you strip the FY 2026 numbers into first half, second half, you can pretty quickly see that second half, particularly retailers, the stock lever are more negative than they were in the first half. If you think about the nature of where that sort of softening happened was very much fourth quarter weighted. We talked a fair bit in the presentation around the sort of cost-related pressure that customers felt and the catalyst being the sort of Deal Builder rollout. That was sort of November. You feel a lot of that impact in the fourth quarter.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

Nathan talked about retailers exiting 460 lower than where we ended the first half. Stock, if that's a -85 in the second half, you can assume that it's lower than that where we're sort of entering. To get to -30 to -40 needs that sort of steady improvement continuing that we've seen at the beginning of this financial year. I think we're pretty pleased with those signs, particularly retailers and stock that we've seen this year. Obviously, there's offers that we've run alongside the price increase, which has maybe created a little bit of a catalyst, particularly for the stock and Prominence. I think there's also people that cover us will know that we had a stock boost that ran last year that converted at the beginning of June. There is a tougher comp in the first half when we lap that.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

Again, and it gets then easier in the second half. I think to hit that guidance, particularly on stock, bearing in mind where we're coming in, does need that sort of continued improvement. Pleasingly, we are seeing some of that at this particular point in time. I think as regards to kind of trading, where it was certainly felt tougher for customers in November and December, I think generally the sentiment feels as though it was a better January to March certainly, which is also helpful from the stock keeping perspective.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

On the pricing event for next year, I mean, we haven't made a firm decision. I think you know that both the products and the actual size of the event is something that we do. The product we tend to choose quite a bit earlier, but the actual size of the event we take into account things that are going on at the time. On the question of how do we feel about our product roadmap and things that could be included in that event or indeed standalone, I think the answer is that we feel good. Whether that's the advertising products, Jamie spoke about packages.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

They've actually been the piece that has been missing over the last few years. That's been driven by very fast stock turn that's actually not only been fast but been accelerating at the same time, as well as dealers having pretty acute pressures on their own profitability. Those products still do what they've always done. You get more, you pay more. We know how to do those. We've been doing those for literally decades. We do think we are actually looking at those products relaunching or recalibrating those products at the moment. I think as Jamie said, we think they should be contributing to growth, kind of a core part of the business model, and goes along with the packaging event. As for the packaging event, I think there's probably three areas that we think about where there's plenty to go up.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

One is insight data pricing, inventory management. That is something that any retailer that you speak to will probably talk as much around that when it comes to Auto Trader as they would talk about the advertising. Normally, actually, we talk to them more about that than we do the advertising itself. That feels like a rich seam of product development. You've got the Co-Driver suite of products, think of that more generally as things that we can do to help them be more productive and have an easier life. There's digital retailing. The first two, insight and productivity, it's very clear that AI extends the runway on that. It allows us to do things that we just weren't able to do before, we're already showing that, sorting out images, writing descriptions for them.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

There's a lot further we can go helping them have conversations, helping them qualify leads. We're sending 15 million their way. That's a lot of human work to be done as an example. It feels like there's plenty for us to go at. In digital retailing, we're really only at the very early stages of that, rolling it out and getting into the customer base. There's a lot more potentially for us to do around finance, part exchange. Now, don't ask me next year, why haven't you done all those things? That's kind of 10 years of work, but there is plenty for us to go at. That feels good and feels like product ought to be able to support package events and also standalone products in the future.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

One thing that we did see through some of the feedback we had subsequent to November, where we've engaged pretty constructively with retailers, is some of them like that thing, they don't need this thing. Actually thinking about how we might provide a bit more choice will probably be something that we do moving forward. I would say for next year, we've got quite a few opportunities. A lot of the talk is around Deal Builder and how they weren't really happy with Deal Builder. If you look at the feedback from the customer advisory groups, which I go to, I host, actually, it was about localized pricing metrics. It was less friction in portals, that they wanted to stand out and be more individualized, better reporting around leads, and us to communicate a bit more effectively through channels that they use.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

Those don't sound like the most sophisticated products, but they really matter actually to our customer base. Doing some of that stuff is just built into our plan for the whole year. We did 5.5% this year. It's been 8.5% in years before. I think the reality is this year, we're sensible people. There is feedback. It's not the year to be tin ear to those sorts of things. Also retailers are under acute profitability pressures. If asked if retailers are under acute profitability pressures at some time in the future, will you take that into account? The answer is unequivocally yes, we will. We think that's the right thing to do.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

That does swing both ways because the 8.5% that you spoke about over the past few years post-COVID were partly due to the fact that the products were good, but profitability was also very good at the time as well. I think rewinding back into ancient history to the IPO, we talked about events being pricing product combined should be between 5%-7%. I feel comfortable that's still true, and I think we've got some interesting product opportunities that might be able to be a bit more standalone.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

Will?

[Will Packer, Analyst at BNP Paribas]

Hi, it's Will Packer from BNP Paribas. A couple from me. Firstly, the forecourt metric is something the market is very focused on. It's encouraging to hear that there's been some improvement in April and May. The numbers you communicate are averages of averages. Can sometimes be quite difficult for us to distinguish what's really going on. Can you tell us what the trough number of forecourts was at the bottom, which I assume was February or March, and how many you've gained in April, maybe March, April, and May to help us understand the cadence there? Secondly, a common question I get from investors is, can you explain where those who've churned off Auto Trader are getting their digital marketing needs served? I'm sure you've been in dialogue with some of your customers or former customers. Is it CarGurus and Motors? Is it Google? Is it ChatGPT?

[Will Packer, Analyst at BNP Paribas]

Just some color there would help us understand, as I suppose your guidance implies that some of those partners will stay off the platform for as long as 12+ months. Then lastly, alongside Deal Builder AI disruption risk has been a key focus. Could you talk through how LLM originated traffic has developed on your platform? I suppose what we're hearing from most of your peers is pretty limited in terms of its volume and scale. Is that the same for you? How do you think about that? Thank you.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

Do you want to take the other two?

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

Yeah. I totally take the focus on the forecourt number. If you take that, appreciating the averages and the exits. If you take that for the first half, just over 14,000. Nathan's talked about the 460. That's from the end of the first half to the end of September to the end of March. That's how many net have come off. Some of that they'll have the kind of seasonal churn, but also clearly some reaction. You're coming down there to 13.5, just a bit over 13,500. We have improved through April and May.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

The reason why I'm not going to put a number in terms of how much is we always run new business offers, and we have had a new business offer running from probably the middle back end of February into March, and that's driving some of the uptick. What we don't know yet is how that offer converts. I would say I'm very encouraged with how it's gone, and as much as it's winning back customers, we actually seem to be acquiring new customers. Some of it out of our Auto Trader line. Auto Trader's, the guide is to be relatively flat, so it doesn't feel like that's impacting the revenue. Obviously we're only seven weeks into the financial year, so we don't want to get ahead of ourselves. Yeah, overall, I think we're encouraged at the trend.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

On where have the dealers gone? I think we kind of said this in the presentation, but it shouldn't be missed. The challenge to some retailers' profitability is pretty acute. Some of those retailers just don't exist anymore. They've come out of business, sorry, altogether. If they own their property, maybe residential property development seems to be a common one for many retailers. Maybe sold out and been absorbed into other businesses as well or combined. There's a chunk that have done that. There's a chunk that have come back. Where they went is kind of a bit less of a concern because they're kind of flowing back to Auto Trader.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

I think there's also a chunk that are just using a whole combination of competitors. I wouldn't say that we really, honestly, I think we hear a lot less about some. I probably wouldn't be right to comment on individual competitors. More about some others. It is literally a whole mix. You hear. You can see this in the social channels yourself. They're trying to cobble together a whole bunch of the others, put them together to try and make up that response. Our 11x, which is independent data from Comscore, would suggest that you could probably add it all up and get some leads. Whether you get all is yet to be seen. A prominent trade journalist did this experiment, had cars on Auto Trader, had cars on other platforms. You'll tend to get bleed across.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

If you advertise on Auto Trader, you pick up leads on other platforms and found that in terms of cost-effectiveness, Auto Trader was the most. That doesn't mean the others just don't work at all. They tend to be technically expensive, which is why we've always had more retailers than others. I think I'd echo, given that we spend a lot of time with our peers, we're all seeing pretty much the same thing. It's a line that kind of goes like that, not like that. At the moment, it's kind of somewhere between half a percent and 1%. Yeah, it doesn't look like it's really increasing. That doesn't actually. Pardon me. I don't think that's going to change massively because we've got an app embedded into ChatGPT. For us, it was more about building the agentic infrastructure than it was trying to increase that traffic share.

[Will Packer, Analyst at BNP Paribas]

Just as a quick follow-up. It seems the next focus seems to be agentic and how classifieds kind of interact with the future of agentic search. I mean, there's lots of uncertainty as we don't quite know how it will look. We've heard quite divergent things from classifieds. Some front-footed, the future is agentic, others a bit more skeptical. Any kind of quick comments on your initial perspectives on that?

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

I'll try and give you a third view. My view is we don't mind. Whether a person comes to us directly or whether they send their agent, we're going to make sure that both of those people, when considering where they go or agent, sorry, so not both people. Whether it's the person, whether it's the agent, that they choose Auto Trader. We have confidence that that will be the case because they'll end up making that decision based on the same parameters. Is it quick? Is it efficient? Does it provide me the most choice? If I'm an agent, will this thing give me the chance to answer the question as well as I possibly can for the user, which is the way any agent's going to be measured and how they optimize their platforms?

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

We think the answer today is yes, without doing anything other than building an MCP server that they can use. We'll go even further to make sure that is easier and easier. If the alternative for the agent is to try and scan 14,000 of our retailer websites, very few of who will have an MCP protocol. You're relying on scraping and unstructured data. We don't charge for our service, we think it'll be okay and it'll be some mix of the two. Our CTO being particularly open to working with machines as opposed to human beings would say that he'd probably be quite happy if it was more agents. I suspect we'll still have lots of people coming to Auto Trader and then interacting with the agents in lots of different ways.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

To the extent that they're doing things like within chat interfaces, I suspect Auto Trader will appear in a similar kind of philosophical way as we do in Google today. At some point we'll appear, we'll help. They'll come off to Auto Trader to come and do the real detailed stuff because the interface doesn't work for that.

[Will Packer, Analyst at BNP Paribas]

Thanks.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

Sorry, just to clarify and answer just on the LLM traffic. I think it is actually a little bit less than half a percent.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

Oh, okay.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

Rather than saying half and one, was he talking about less than one, but it's actually less than half. Just to clarify.

[Lara Simpson, Analyst at J.P. Morgan]

Morning, it's Lara Simpson from J.P. Morgan. I just wanted to come back to the guidance on Autorama, which feels quite bullish. Just trying to understand what's driving those two line items. Obviously, on the commission revenue, you're talking what, 8%-12%? It was still down at least mid-single digit in H2. What's underpinning that inflection? Is it pricing or volume? Similarly on the vehicle line, I think your guidance talk what underpins probably double-digit increase in vehicles, what's driving the confidence in the output there, and are you taking more stock on balance sheet as a result of it? I suppose the last question on Autorama is, are we seeing any change in strategy there on the long-term view? Because I thought longer-term you'd be running down that vehicle line. Just trying to understand the moving parts.

[Lara Simpson, Analyst at J.P. Morgan]

Just one question on the private revenue line. I know getting smaller, but it obviously remains in decline. Can you just talk about what's driving that pressure from a private individual side? Is it competition? Is it just slower stock turn? Maybe just a bit of color on the competitive dynamics and where that traffic is going.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

Yeah, I can take them both. The Autorama, as part of the commission and ancillary revenue, what's held it back this year is the decline in vans. Cars has actually grown pretty strongly. Volumes on Auto Trader have grown relatively strongly. I think that's down to, it very much is focused on the Auto Trader platform, the car journey, and there is naturally less focus on vanarama.com and the volumes that are getting driven through that channel. I think we're of the belief that van volume is likely to stabilize, and so that's not going to be a headwind and we're going to continue to drive more car growth. That's the driver behind the 8%-12% revenue growth from a commission and ancillary revenue perspective.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

The vehicle and accessory sales is really just growing in line with the volume of units that we think we're going to do. I think it's more that the share of vehicles that wash through the balance sheet is more likely to be consistent in this year. I think it is still a longer term goal that we're not reliant on that volume, but ultimately we're still sub 10,000 deliveries in the year, and getting access to that inventory is still an important part of the volume. It's still longer term. It's something that we want to and believe that we will move away from. It's just not at this particular juncture. I wouldn't read too much into, obviously, if it's going up or down. It's obviously just washing through and doesn't have a real impact on profitability.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

From a private revenue perspective, look, I think we have seen over the last probably two years, it's been quite a competitive environment. It used to just be car buying service. We Buy Any Car is obviously the biggest who we were competing with in that space. Then you've had in this intervening two year window, Motorway have clearly grown their volumes. Carwow have created a similar proposition to Motorway. That's given people more options between the proposition of selling privately, where generally we'll say it takes longer, but you'll get the best value for your vehicle versus a car buying service where it's very quick and efficient, but you're probably getting a lower price. This is something in the middle. I think it's something that we've had to navigate our way through competing with.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

We do now have a proposition that's live where we're leveraging this Dealer Auction joint venture to do a similar car buying service, similar to what Motorway and Carwow do. It's small volumes, but is growing. Obviously implied in the guidance is the decline is going to be less in FY 2027, and a bit like probably how it feels all of the guidance where we're entering is probably a bit weaker. The implied exit position for the year is certainly closer to flat, if not positive. That will be a combination. We think there's a real power in putting to the seller that choice of what you might get for the vehicle over time and hours and effort, and then people making the decision all in one place on one platform.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

I think we're a little bit more optimistic that we're getting to grips with a competitive challenge. Clearly, we're very fortunate to have the brand, the audience. Most people looking for their next car have a car to dispose of. We also want to make sure we're supporting retailer part exchange because that's a big part of their profit pool, but we can offer the kind of holistic options to a seller, and I think we're just starting to get some traction in terms of that proposition versus maybe where we were 12 months ago.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

The only thing I would add to that, agreeing with everything that Jamie said, I would not put down the decline this year to competitive pressures. I think we have got We Buy Any Car, Motorway, Carwow have been out there for years and years and years. The thing I would flag is that we do see private revenue move around. It was only two years ago where it hit the highest levels that it's ever hit, there was still the same competitive environment. There is a bit of an element that it seems to move around with macros. We've not really been able to work out what that correlates with, whether it's interest costs and people getting out of finance deals and feeling that they should get the extra GBP 600 out of the car.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

That's the only thing I would add to what Jamie said there.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

Let's work our way across. I get it.

[Will Allen, Analyst at Bloomberg]

Thanks. Will Allen from Bloomberg. Firstly, just in terms of new capital allocation policy, in terms of the leverage now going to be at 1x by year end, how should we think about that? Is that the new normal, new level? Also talk about evolving the package staircase in H1. Just wondering if you could share more detail about that and particularly relation to Prominence as well.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

Yeah. I'll take the first, you take the second. Yeah. We've taken a view on the new capital allocation policy. I would think I would expect at 1 turn, based on current assumptions, I don't think we feel as though that is over the top. It is insane by some company measures. You're not where we've been historically, but that's still at the prudent end. Very comfortable with the turn of leverage.

[Will Allen, Analyst at Bloomberg]

Would you go higher?

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

It's not out of the question. Yeah, we're certainly comfortable at a turn based on current assumptions.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

The package staircase change. On the surface, the packages are still named the same and still essentially include the same functional benefits, with most of those being in the base package, and the only difference between the packages above that is how much response you get. The way we deliver that now is heavily driven by the relevance of the vehicle, which, without saying the two letters too many times, is a model that sits behind that predicts the likelihood of someone to want to interact with that car. That's the most purest level that we do that. We overlay that with a boost. Within a set of relevant results, you can appear higher or lower depending on what package level you have. There's a relationship between that, which is algorithmically driven, and the price that we charge for that.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

We're looking both at the levels of step up between the staircase without going into too much details. There was one package in particular that wasn't quite a big enough step up for you to be able to unequivocally see it as a retailer when you came on. It's part of the gig of running marketplaces at a retailer. I spent more, but I didn't sell many more cars. You don't want that. You want it to be a bit clearer than that for packages. Some of the other packages work really well, they tended to jump right over the top of all of them. Evening up the staircase, the height of the stairs is part of it, and then tweaking the price that you pay for the uplift in the response.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

That's kind of the thing that we've been feeding in over time to make sure that people are getting good value wherever you are on the staircase.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

Joe?

[Joe Beaulac, Analyst at UBS]

Hi, it's Joe Beaulac from UBS. Two questions left with me, please. 1st one is actually to follow up on Andrew's original 1st question relating to understanding the factors that are impacting stock. Clearly one of the major driving forces on your stock lever is the supply and demand dynamics at play in the market. I'm wondering to what degree other dynamics impacted stock as well. For example, the churn in forecourt flowing through to stock, which is something we haven't really seen before. Also secondarily, are you seeing retailers listing a lower proportion of their cars on Auto Trader than we've seen before? That's question one, just understanding what's impacting stock. 2nd 1, probably for you, Nathan, you spoke a fair bit about AI product innovation, but less about how you're using it internally.

[Joe Beaulac, Analyst at UBS]

Scout24 last week showcased at their CMD that they're already implementing using it quite significantly and seeing headcount reductions as a result. Interested if you see other opportunities, how you expect headcount to move over the next 12 to 24 months, but also perhaps a comment on gross versus net headcount movements. If you're seeing an evolution of your workforce in light of AI, the styles of people that you're employing.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

Yeah. I'll take the first one. Yeah, sorry, I wasn't being deliberately evasive on Andrew's question.

[Joe Beaulac, Analyst at UBS]

We'll get you, Jamie.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

I know. I think it's fair to say the market dynamics are like speed of sale. That was more of a headwind in FY 2025. It's been pretty flat in FY 2026. It is running at historically fast levels, but when you think about the kind of year-on-year impact, like the slot utilization is more consistent over those two financial years. It's certainly not a headwind. People wouldn't go so positively to say we're starting to see it slow down and there's a buildup of inventory. Supply, I'd say is probably getting marginally better. If you look at the kind of transaction volumes, used car transactions are about 1% better. The number of unique cars we've seen on site is around 1%, maybe marginally lower. The amount of live cars advertised on site, appreciating there were offers involved, is up about 1%.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

A little bit of better supply. You get this funny dynamic though, where the kind of supply tightness that existed in the sort of three to five-year-old category is now just sitting in a slightly older age cohort. It sort of works its way through the profile of customers. I would like to say that I would feel like there should be some very slight underlying positive dynamic towards stock getting better. The reverse of that is the negative stock lever, the worst run rate is down to the fact that, as you say, we've lost some customers who are clearly listing cars, but then there's also some moderation, and I think we said it in the presentation. There were some customers that obviously opted to leave in November and December.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

There were some that opted to moderate the volume of vehicles, and some opted to moderate package. That's ultimately the driver to the entry rate into the year where the second-half stock lever was, and then, like I say, improving from this point. That's sort of where we've entered and the reasons why.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

Yeah. On AI internally, it was definitely not being evasive. I mean, we've got a couple of board members in the room, and this is something that we spoke about at a board meeting two days ago. Yes, we are using it internally. I'll start with that. I'll come on to the headcount question. We're focusing initially, partly it's just the way that we work on engineering side of things. We take the general view in life is that if you build really good technology, the benefits of that will then flow through to the rest of the organization, as opposed to having a free-for-all, go and adopt an AI tool and knock yourself out, please make yourself more efficient.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

I think there is a point in that, and this is no comment on Scout24's business at all, it's very much for us, but people do forget that AI is not free. I mean, the latest model that's just come out from one of the big providers is now 3x more expensive, I think, than the previous model. There are productivity gains, but there are also AI costs that I think are not always being factored in. It actually reminds me of the pitch around moving to the cloud, which I think is a brilliant thing to do, by the way. The pitch was always move to the cloud, you'll save money, get rid of those old data centers.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

We're spending exactly the same money that we were spending when we were in those old data centers, but we can do a lot more, and we do it with better quality. I suspect I wouldn't be surprised if from an enterprise perspective, that's how this plays out. I think there is clearly big productivity gains, and you can choose to take those either as headcount reduction or greater execution around product innovation. My preference and my belief is that we should be able to do the latter, but you've got to prove that over time. You'd lose the opportunity to say, okay, well, actually, let's just take a bit of a balance of both those things, do more stuff, but also become more efficient over time. We're furthest ahead on engineering. We have an agent development team that you can ask to do jobs.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

Those jobs are checked off by an engineer first because not every problem should be solved by an LLM, not least because token's very expensive. We've always been cost conscious. Once the engineer says, yes, go, then the agent will go off, build, it'll do the pull, it'll get signed off, and then an engineer will just check in before they send it live. The agents are doing jobs as we speak. It's very scalable, can utilize multiple models. It understands because we did the cloud work, I talked about standardizing our applications. We're able to very easily tell the agents or make sure the agents have the right guardrails and understanding of our estate, so they can solve. Very rarely can you solve a bug or a problem in one application.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

You tend to need to straddle multiple applications, and that's where these things can stumble. That's some of the hard work that we've done that's really good, and we're very proud of it. We're a bit behind in some of the other areas of the organization because we're doing the engineering first, but we're starting to see product managers be able to post jobs, release code, make simple changes that used to never generally get done, actually. The small product requests normally get put on the backlog, and no one ever gets around to them. We're using it in marketing, both the performance marketing. We've used it a bit for creative development as well, but fair to say our people weren't overly supportive of the AI-executed creative, but we'll continue to experiment with that.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

We basically try out thousands of creatives when it comes to performance marketing. We're able to very quickly work out which ones are working, which ones aren't, and hone those further. The other areas where we're focusing is operations and partnerships, which are probably the equivalent size of product and technology, so around 400 people. The jobs that they're doing, the systems are not as good as the systems that our engineers use. We're cleaning up the data models underneath. We're putting in a new CRM system, which will then enable us to put artificial intelligence on top of that to make their jobs way more efficient, whether that's diagnosing a customer's problems, whether that's answering the really easy queries like check my invoice.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

I think there is quite a bit of opportunity, but there's a bit more work for us to get to before we can really make that matter. Yeah, from a headcount perspective to be really explicit, I think at the moment, we're very comfortable with the margin profile. There might be some reinvestment of that productivity over time. You might see it change, but we wouldn't want to make a call on that yet. Measuring engineering productivity is a controversial topic, I think.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

Thank you very much. A final question from Sean.

[Sean Kealy, Analyst at Panmure Gordon]

Thank you. Sean Kealy from Panmure Gordon. Just a couple to finish off. I think what you've tried to do with Deal Builder over the last couple of years is get a bit more into the transaction, maybe start to monetize that a bit more directly. Given the backlash, is that still something you want to do longer term? Maybe start to think about adding financing and other bits into that journey, especially given I think you took a few parts out when you put it into the packages. Linked to that, how do you think about the trade-off for remaining a lead volume platform versus pushing into lead quality more deeply going forward?

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

Do you want me to take those?

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

Yeah.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

Good final questions. On the first one, we needed to listen to dealers. Don't let me say anything other than that. The Deal Builder feedback was actually relatively small part of that. It was pretty challenged profitability. You can go onto our own website, type in Auto Trader customer advisory groups. You can see what they actually raised, and I did check it this morning. We didn't even have Deal Builder down as one of the points, and that was something that was curated by the group themselves. I think we needed to change some things. We needed to ease up on the implementation of it because all of us humans, we're all right to impose change on others, but none of us really like change ourselves, and we experienced that in a big way.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

I don't think our fundamental views of anything relating to Deal Builder have changed as a result of what happened on November. Our implementation of it just needed to be different to what it was. In terms of monetization, finance, I think generally we've put it in the packages because we see that it is much better for consumers. They really like it, and retailers, once they're on it, they really like it too. That feels like it makes the moat, the business that is Auto Trader, so much stronger, and that's worth more of our investment than trying to monetize a standalone revenue line, which was a decision that we took last year. I think there are still opportunities within the bucket of digital retailing. Finance, as you've called out, as being the obvious one. Potential different executions of Part Exchange also being another one.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

Two of the most profitable elements of a transaction for any retailer. The truth is, back to the answer on private, where most of the volume that Carwow and Motorway, most of the volume they're getting has been from part exchanges from retailers. The average rate's probably gone from 45%-50% down towards 35%-30%, so they could really use help there. Are any of those things at the top of our list at the moment? No, not just at the minute. We're focused on getting Deal Builder embedded, getting those reservations and deals up and running. At the moment, it's about 10% of their sales. We want to get that up and up and up once we've got it available across everywhere. That's really our focus for now.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

We've got plenty of other stuff to do around the Co-Driver products, the advertising products. We've kind of prioritized that stuff and focused more on rollout. Your second question is actually a really, really good one, and it is a debate that we have both internally and with customers as well. It is clear that it would be better. We sell probably 4.5 million trade vehicles a year, or go through the platform and we influence the sale. That number's not too important. We send 15 million inquiries, and we send a lot of walk-ins in as well. There is clearly an inefficiency there.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

Anyone with a mathematical or economic-minded, as all of you are, would say, "Well, hang on, if I can not get four things, I can get one, and I get the same number of sales," and that feels like a really good place to be. Getting our retailers into that place. Some retailers are definitely there, but getting the broad base of retailers into that place is a journey that we have to take them on sequentially. Some will say, "Well, it's only me, and I've only got five cars, and I only get 20 leads, and I can make 20 phone calls a week. I'd rather have a go at all of them than I would you just send me the five that buy a car." It's just working through that over time.

[Nathan Coe, CEO at Auto Trader Group]

I think our approach to Deal Builder is really helpful like that because they start with getting maybe 1 in 10 sales coming through Deal Builder. They start to think, "Oh, I like that. I'm going to pay more attention to these." They get to 2 out of 10, or 20% of their deals are coming through, and they tend to find their way to that conclusion themselves. That's basically the way that we're rolling out Deal Builder. That's a long one.

[Jamie Warner, CFO at Auto Trader Group]

Great. I think that's all the questions that we have from the floor. Thank you very much for joining us.

Participants

Executives

• Jamie Warner, CFO
• Nathan Coe, CEO

Analysts

• Joe Beaulac, Analyst at UBS
• Lara Simpson, Analyst at J.P. Morgan
• Sean Kealy, Analyst at Panmure Gordon
• Will Allen, Analyst at Bloomberg
• Will Packer, Analyst at BNP Paribas
• Analyst at Barclays