Motorpoint Group H2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
June 10, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Motorpoint reported a record retail volume of just under 65,000 units and continued strong trading into the new year, with sales up 15% in the first two months.
  • Positive Sentiment: Gross margin and profitability improved, with metal margin up 8% to £1,075, EBITDA up 15%, and profit before tax rising 83% to £7.5 million.
  • Positive Sentiment: The company highlighted major data and AI-driven efficiency gains across pricing, stock allocation, and customer engagement, including the AI assistant “Lily,” which contributed about 900 incremental car sales last year.
  • Positive Sentiment: Motorpoint sees a large runway for growth, saying it still has only a small share of a highly fragmented market and plans to expand its footprint, including a new Leeds store and additional secured sites funded by a further £10 million RCF.
  • Neutral Sentiment: Management flagged some pressure from higher finance costs and APRs, though it said supply remains strong, consumer demand has held up, and record Sell Your Car volumes are helping support margins.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Motorpoint Group H2 2026
00:00 / 00:00

There are 6 speakers on the call.

Speaker 1

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Motorpoint's full-year results 2026. I'm joined today by Chris Morgan, our CFO. I'm Mark Carpenter, I'm the CEO at Motorpoint. We'll take you through our operational highlights. I'll hand over to Chris to do the financial highlights, and back to me to give you a bit of an update on our strategic progress and our outlook. One of the things we'll talk a lot about today is the use of data, and obviously the benefits we can embrace from AI as well. It's genuinely changed a lot of the ways we work in Motorpoint, and super exciting times for us going forward, how we embrace that going forward. Just a few highlights before we go into that, to remind people why Motorpoint is such an excellent investment proposition. We are in a very big market. It's hugely fragmented.

Speaker 1

You'll see the market share stats later. We still have a very small share of a very big addressable market. A very big opportunity for us to continue growing. We're very efficient. We are one of the most efficient operators in the industry. We're very focused on cost and continuing to be as efficient as possible to drive that bottom line. We have built up over many years, an integrated infrastructure, which is a very difficult thing to do over time, to have the stores, the logistics, the preparation capability, as well as the ability to store, display, and sell vehicles nationwide. Our customer experience continues to be very strong, so we have an NPS of 84. That's been built up over many years. Again, a very difficult thing to get right, but it's ingrained in the business to be customer first proposition.

Speaker 1

Our financial models obviously continues to be robust. We have always been a very cash generative business, and that's asset light business model, and we have no structural debt. Our technology, the use of it specifically, is continuing to grow our competitive moat and our improvements that we're using in purchasing, pricing, and also productivity, continue to deepen that moat. I'm pretty convinced that that is going to continue in the years to come. Obviously, one thing to say about our team, we couldn't do anything without our team. We have a very strong culture and a highly engaged team, which is a huge part of why Motorpoint is such a different proposition for people looking to change their car. Continued strategic progress continues to demonstrate the strength and the flexibility of our business model. Just into a few highlights.

Speaker 1

The volume that we achieved last year, just under 65,000 units in terms of retail, was a record year. It's taken us a long time with some market disruptions to return to our peak volumes, and it's only just to finally get past that barrier post-COVID. Now we see that the volumes can continue to grow from here. We are dependent on supply, of course. If the car hasn't been made, we can't sell the used car. That record volume continues to grow into this year as well, that we're currently in. Most importantly, to see the volume grow and the margin grow at the same time really gives us a strong sense of the ability to continue to grow profitably into the future.

Speaker 1

I think that volume and margin stability, more importantly, is a testament to our use of technology and the decisions that we now make using the data rather than a manual decision. The automation of that continues to drive that stability. In terms of market share, we are predominantly under six years old. About 90% of our sales are under that. As you can see, even within that sector, and that is talking several million vehicles in that market. We still only have a 2.5% share. It's still a relatively small market share. Huge room to grow. In the 0 to 10, that's obviously even smaller. A bigger addressable market and still under 2% in that. There's 98 cars for every two that we sell that we still do not sell, that we can look to take that share.

Speaker 1

Our target is to be around 10% in the markets that we're in. We're only in 21 markets. We open in Leeds next month, which will be our 22nd market. As you know, we have very strong market shares where we have a physical location. It still is important to have physical representation in those markets, and that 10% gives you an idea of the total performance capability. We've continued that performance into the current year. The market share, we believe, will have grown. We don't get the data yet on the market size. With our sales being up 15% in the first two months, then it's very doubtful that the market is up 15%, so we believe we've continued to take share. Just touched on this. This is important, that within a 30-minute drive time, that our share is very strong in those markets.

Speaker 1

As you can see, it continues to grow over time. If you consider that our mature stores, mature would mean that maybe they're not growing that much or they only grow with market. We continue to take share in those markets, which is very important. Our proposition when we open in a market, we know that we absolutely take out the competition. We get to 5% very quickly in terms of market share within the first year, and we then will be growing that share from there. Depending on the size of the market, of course, we will be taking share in Leeds within a month. We'll be up to a good share of that market very quickly. As you can see on the next slide, the market share opportunities. Despite these gains, you can see the sort of circles.

Speaker 1

The orange segment in circle is our share, and the white remainder is the market opportunity. Within each of these markets, you can see if you look to the holy land of South Wales, where I'm from, the market share is quite strong in those two markets as an example. We still have share to go, and we are still growing in those markets that we've been in for many years now. The Swansea share as an example is almost the same now as the Newport share, even though Swansea's only been open six years. In certain markets we can grow very quickly, particularly if we have brand recognition. We believe that will be the case in Leeds because we're in and around Leeds and in other markets. Despite these market gains, we still have a small share of these markets and there's considerable opportunity.

Speaker 1

As you can see on the map, there's a lot of areas where we do not have a store at this moment. We have secured more markets to enter in the coming years. They will be rolled out and we'll announce those as we get planning permission and consent and things like that. In order to continue that, we have secured a further GBP 10 million RCF facility to help fund those property expansions. At some point, those will be depleted, and then we are likely to sell and lease those back, to put the money back in the till. Touched on this earlier in terms of customer satisfaction. It is so important for us to make sure that customers, when we deal with them, they are going to recommend us.

Speaker 1

We do spend money on marketing, but the most effective form of marketing for us is repeat and recommend from our existing customers. Obviously the NPS question very much asks around are you going to recommend us? For that to see on a range of minus 100 to positive 100, for us to be all the way up at 84 is something we believe is very strong. We are selling refurbished product. It's not a brand-new car that we're selling. It has been used. It will have some marks of ownership on it. For us to be able to get to that level of such a high level of customer service, I think is testament to having such an engaged team who believe passionately in giving customers a great level of service. A little bit of feedback.

Speaker 1

Our employee of the month for 12 months in a row is Lily, who's our attentive AI chief. Lily is very patient with customers. If you consider what Lily does, she picks up the leads from customers that our sales team have decided the customer has completed the interaction and has decided not to purchase from us. These are closed leads. In the last year, Lily picked up those leads and sold around 900 cars through that tool. Those are genuinely incremental sales. We have given up on that customer as a salesperson, and Lily has picked that up and has continued very patiently to answer all the questions on the vehicle, has reintroduced the customer. Even things when you look at the interactions and you read, we obviously get the transcripts.

Speaker 1

When you read the transcripts of interactions with Lily, it is actually outstanding what that tool can do. We are delighted with it. We will be now getting Lily some brothers and sisters, to pick up other journeys with customers, and continue to try to get the customer to be as researched as possible. When they then finally are ready to buy, we do still manually pick that up with a salesperson to make sure that we get absolutely everything right and the customer's spoken to a person before they place the order and we take the order. Really exciting times. The ability of that tool, to basically progress customers through what can sometimes be a very prolonged journey in terms of what car do I need, what color, what price, how does the finance work, what's the PCP?

Speaker 1

Lily answers all of those questions and puts the customer in a very well-researched position before they then speak to the salesperson who basically then puts the ball in the back of the net and moves on. Really exciting times for us in that. You can see there some great feedback for our human employees as well as Lily. Lily's great. There's no national insurance on Lily. We have a super engaged team, so delighted that we were in The Sunday Times being recognized in their list for 2026. This is based on employee surveys, of course, and do you like working where you're working? It's great for us to be on that list. I think it does. We've put a huge amount of effort into listening to our team with surveys and individual sessions.

Speaker 1

I do every welcome day for new starters, and we also go out to the stores and do honest hours where we listen to the team and explain what's going on in the business, as well as things like town hall meetings. They genuinely then feel that they are engaged, they are listened to, they are informed of what's going on in the business. We even explain things like profitability is really good. If we can grow our profitability, we can grow cash. If we have cash, we can expand, we can create opportunities for you. That's how we explain it. We do talk about how important profitability is and profitability growth. As you can see, a lot of promotions in the business through the year as we continue to grow.

Speaker 1

As an example, in Leeds, we've just promoted a sales manager to be the new general sales manager in Leeds. That's another example of being internally promoted. 88% of our managers have been promoted from within. I don't think many companies can say that 9 out of 10 people who are in a management position started as a team member and have been developed and grown and trained to be a manager. That gives us a real strong sense of culture throughout. Just into financial performance for a few highlights, before we hand over to Chris. The metal margin is really important, the difference between what we pay for the car and what we sell it for. That's up 8% to GBP 1,075. We are in record margin levels at the moment.

Speaker 1

That is in no way to be underestimated because that is very much driven by the use of data and how we've now generated using tools to give us much more thorough analysis of margin, much more thorough analysis of what we stock and how many of what we stock, where to place the vehicle, is all driven now by margin. Sorry, by tools. It is not done by human beings, and that is very important, and that has driven a very high metal margin. As I said at the start, really embracing that throughout the business. That's driven an EBITDA increase of 15% and obviously the profit before tax from a low level last year up 83% to GBP 7.5 million.

Speaker 1

Return on Capital Employed, something we don't talk too much about, but it's very important that the business is very asset light and to generate a 67% Return on Capital Employed that will continue to grow is a very strong performance. Just to recap on what have we done with that profit, I think we've made GBP 13 million PBT in the last few years, and of that, GBP 12 million has been distributed to shareholders. That's always the case for what we do. Ultimately, the money will come back into shareholders. We will flow that strong working capital cycle, cash generation turns into dividends and share buybacks as appropriate. Hand over to Chris.

Operator

Thank you, Mark. Morning, everybody. Moving on to the finances. I think Mark sort of touched on the headlines. We can see the profit and loss. To stay record 271,600 and hopefully continuing to grow. Just a point on turnover per unit, a drop in the second half. Those of you who've seen the half year result, sort of closer to the full year, will see that it did come off from that. Partly because of an affordable mix, but also the cars that we acquired from customers. We acquired 46,000 cars through either Part Ex or Sell Your Car. A significant growth, particularly in Sell Your Car. Some of those cars were good quality, so we retailed them, obviously drove better margins of over GBP 1,000. That was a really good thing to do from a profitability perspective.

Operator

Talked about data already, Mark's mentioned it. Intelligent data-led pricing. It's dynamic, it's daily. It's very different to where we were two or three years ago. Overall retail gross profit per unit, which is the key measure for us, was about GBP 13.70 per unit. About GBP 13.30 a year ago. Within that metal margin grew extras, which are things like warranty products in particular, but also paint protection, alloys, that sort of thing as well grew. Probably what is the one sort of small cloud on the horizon really is finance and APRs, it's the cost of money. That has put pressure on that finance commission number. That's still over time, hopefully, as markets settle, interest rates come down, then there's still lots of room for improvement there as well. Generally overall, some big growth.

Operator

This is a really important stat, I think we'll focus more on this as we go forward. Gross profit, you can see, grew 9%, and our OpEx cost base grew 4%. Because we're a very leveraged business, then if we can grow that gross profit significantly more than OpEx, then it drives through to your operating profit and PBT as well as earnings per share. 122% from 116% last year, which is basically the ratio of profit over the cost. We'll focus in on that. I'm really pleased about OpEx. Yeah, we've had wage inflation, NI increases, all the horror stories out there in the news. It's been tough. We've managed, it's a variable cost, and we managed it really close. Things like heat and light have come down. We did a big change to open banking this previous year.

Operator

We were spending over GBP 1 million on store card charges. Last week we were at 97% open banking, effectively no cost at all. Things like that really affect the bottom line. I'm really pleased. Customer acquisition cost, you can see, has fallen. We spent about GBP 10.5 million on marketing costs year-on-year, both years. The actual acquisition cost for the units have increased. The acquisition cost per unit has dropped to GBP 160. That's just because we just get better. We've got a really good marketing digital team. If you go back a few years, it was very much we just throw a load of money on TV, throw a load of money on Auto Trader or whatever. Whereas now we can see the returns from each channel and we're focusing on those. We're very nimble in terms of where we spend our money.

Operator

Much more efficient and AI as well, as Mark has already mentioned. It's relatively cheap. Actually, it's a really good sort of revenue driver also. Finance costs I mentioned. Interest, that's one small cloud on the horizon really, but you can see the finance expense has increased. That's been driven by the inventory levels. Inventory was up to GBP 190 million year-end, about GBP 150 million a year ago, that's why it increased. Fixed assets, already mentioned. We've got Leeds, but we've also secured a couple of really good sites. We would look to sale and lease back those at the appropriate time. Just on that point, we did sale and lease back for about GBP 5 million. Derby store that was substantially refitted a year or so ago. We got the GBP 5 million came through on that. Mark's already mentioned supply.

Operator

It's really sort of back to normal levels where we need it. I think the last few years, we've always moaned a bit about, "Well, if we can't get the cars, we can't sell them." Whereas things are different now. We've certainly got supply. If something else goes wrong, then apart from that. We're also really increasing demand bought direct from consumers. That's really important because we don't pay a further margin. We don't pay the middle person. That car was bought straight from the consumer. As I mentioned before, Sell Your Car is a really important enabler in terms of that supply. Payables increase just move the stock. Stock facilities, we've got great finance partners, both in the stocking finance facility. As you can see, it increased from GBP 165 million a year or so ago to GBP 210 million now.

Operator

We've certainly got the cash behind this and working capital support to buy the stock we need, which is fantastic. Similarly with our banking provider, great news, we've secured another GBP 10 million, which we're calling a property RCF. The holding company facility to fund our new growth expansion. Again, really supportive. That's really helpful. Net asset movement, you can see it's slightly dropped, primarily because of the share buyback. We also got some shares millions over the current employee benefit trust, and the dividends as well. That's offset by the profit increase. As we know, we need to go across asset number for that. The cash flow, probably touch on a few areas of this. You can see the CapEx on there was heavy last year.

Operator

We expect it to be GBP 15 million going forward, but it was because we bought a couple of expensive pre-owned sites, which looks into bank. You can see the interest paid and the lease payments on there. The development sites, the GBP 5.1, we return to shareholders because the EBT buying of the roughly GBP 8 million a year. Support on borrowings from the bank, GBP 14 million, then working capital outflow. That's really around having enough stock. As we know, we went into Easter, coming out of our year-end, as Mark already mentioned, systems set up. We've got stock to satisfy customers. It's really important that we really stocked up in that final quarter, which was successful. Return on Capital Employed.

Operator

Somebody asked me, "Well, why do I put FY 2020 on here?" But I think it just shows that we can get back to these really historic numbers, these are real. We're 47 last year, 67, and we're certainly on the right road to getting that back. Back to the allocation policy. Three priorities. I mean, the first one, which we've been talking about, organic growth, and I think we've made some really good progress on that. New sites acquired. Those three things are real important drivers for us, and it's been very successful. We return cash to shareholders, if we can do both, that's great. As Mark said, we returned GBP 7 million, and we reduced the cost of the share dividend by GBP 0.073.

Operator

Priority three, if there's still cash and there's an attractive opportunity out there, potentially we'd look at it if it was EPS accretive. But there's been no progress in that area during the year. This is my favorite picture. The prize is for guessing where that is, it's a natural history museum. Conference there a couple of weeks ago. That is the globe with the Motorpoint logo on. Caring for our planet, ESG, it's still very important. Again, we'll put bonus on it as well, just to give the focus it deserves. Targeted efficiency improvements. You can see energy performance and certificates on a web update in a number of stores, which is great. 1% waste built to landfill. We reduced scope one and two in business travel emissions by 5.5%.

Operator

Again, the focus that we've had at store level in prep, as well as the office, drove some of that increase. A rapidly expanding electric vehicle offering. Last year we did about 6.6% of our sales were EVs. The previous year, they were 2.8%. We're probably running about 10% now in the first couple of months of FY 2027. That's definitely fantastic. With that, I'll hand it back to Mark.

Speaker 1

Thanks, Chris. We'll go now into the bit more of the strategic progressions that we've made and a little bit of outlook as well. This slide, the market share growth which results from the strategic event investment is a slide that we try and use to emphasize the ability of our profit to continue growing going forward. We know that there's some, if you call them strategic blocks, that as we execute and over time we return to the market where we've seen the pre-COVID, we had a lot of disruption in supply post that as we well documented. We are now back to a level, I believe, of pre-COVID supply. There are lots of cars in the market, as that expands, then those supply pressures ease. We've talked about metal margin, that's the first point.

Speaker 1

Getting a more stable metal margin, not seeing margin coming down and having volatility in the margin based on the seasonality that's in the market. We have pretty much eradicated that from the business now that there is a very stable margin performance. I believe that that is capable of growing over time as well. We will have that embedded into the business now, and that will lead to better margin over time. We talked about supply, the new cars, the Chinese cars coming into the country at about 15% market share. They are broadly incremental, that is leading to a very healthy supply dynamic for us. I would say we're probably at peak supply points at the moment where there's plenty of cars around, that is absolutely fantastic for us as well. In terms of the market, that is continuing to grow.

Speaker 1

As I said, as the new car growth that is coming through right now, that will lead to a growth in the used cars available to us. That will continue to benefit us as the market grows, we will grow. Obviously, we're in a position where we are taking share as well. The only cloud, which Chris touched on, is the cost of money post the Iran conflict has gone up. That has led to an increase in the APR that we charge our customers, we pass that cost on. That may dampen a little bit the demand that we see in 7 to 30 days. We're only a week or so into that slightly higher rate. This slide basically intended to show you that, how does Motorpoint get back to GBP 20 million in profit? It is very doable.

Speaker 1

We know the way to get that journey formed, as we're seeing already, even in the first two months of this year, we keep making leaps forward in terms of profitability, not small incremental steps. That will continue for the foreseeable future. We talked a lot about supply. On the next slide, the supply chain channels. Phil mentioned the new cars coming into the U.K., they are broadly coming in through bulk and fleet purchases. We call them bulk because we tend to do deals in hundreds, not in single units. That will help us in terms of our preparation efficiency, a lower cost to prepare those cars. Sometimes they just need a wash and put them on the pitch. They are waiting for our team as well to light touch vehicles straight from the pitch and get them sold.

Speaker 1

That is really good for us. Also then in terms of how we buy cars. We are much more likely now to be bidding on vehicles that we know we want, that we know we can sell, we know where to put the vehicle. In essence, we would look across multiple different ways of the stock mix as to have we got the right mix of cars. Frankly, historically, we would have looked and thought, we need 6,000 cars. 6,000 what, is what we ask ourselves now. How can we continue to match the demand with the supply and make sure then that we've put them in the right location. All of that, as I've mentioned a few times, is very much data led. It's not opinion led. That is a big difference in the industry as well for us.

Speaker 1

We talk about Sell Your Car. I think the important thing here is that is customers who have decided to sell us. There is a lot of crossover with part exchanges here. We do talk about them together because sometimes we maybe acquire a customer because they're looking to dispose of their vehicle. Equally, as you'd expect from a car dealer, when they are doing that, we're saying, "What are you doing about your next car? Because we could help you with that as well." There is a lot of crossover, but it is great to see that we are now a lot on those purchases. 10% of our cars come from customers where we purchase the car, and as Chris said, that's a very much more efficient transaction for us. We're not transporting that vehicle. The customer brings it to us.

Speaker 1

There's no buying fees, which we would incur if we go to an auction to buy that vehicle. The run rate's now about 12,000 per annum in that segment. Equally, what we are seeing is that those customers, some people who have started out the journey to Sell Your Car, they turn into a part exchange because we end up selling them a car. A journey that started as a transaction to sell us a car from a consumer turns into a sale and a purchase for us, which is great. You'd expect a slide on efficiency and data and AI, based on how much we talk about it is genuinely transforming the business, and that's so exciting, as I mentioned already. In terms of some examples of this. In the past, if we bought 20 cars, what would we do?

Speaker 1

We've got 20 locations, let's send one everywhere. That is no longer the way that we do it. We use the algorithm to tell us where do you think these cars should go. It obviously has a predetermined set of rules in there to make sure we don't put everything in one store or we try and get some sort of mix. The demand indicators we see on the website, in which markets, how fast are those products selling, is very much now how we would allocate that vehicle. It may not feel right to us to send 10 of the same thing to one store, but if that's what it tells us to do, that's what we do. That is proving to be very successful in terms of driving sales in those markets. Also then flows through into our pricing strategy.

Speaker 1

The decisions are very much formulaic. They are not emotion driven or opinion related. Those decisions are priced, and the great thing with that is having a strategy is you can just tweak it slightly if it's not quite giving you what you think you need. We're always starting from a position of knowledge and being informed by the data rather than making a decision based on an emotion or on opinion. The digital discovery assistants. This is Lily's sister. Her name's Ava. She's on our website. You can go onto our website, and you will be serviced by Ava, which stands for Automated Vehicle Assistant. Ava will help you answer all your questions about the vehicles you're looking for, whether you want finance, what else can you help me with? I would challenge all of you to go on there and ask her.

Speaker 1

Try and break it for us if you can, because we've not managed to break it yet. I'm sure somebody will. We talked earlier about Lily, which is the attentive AI chief, so that's well documented. One thing we haven't talked about, which is an efficiency measure, again, in terms of how do we use our team. We want them selling as much of their possible time we want them selling. One of the sort of more tedious tasks that we always call out tedious tasks in the business that we want to get rid of tedious tasks and automate or stop that activity, which is basically one of those was changing price boards in cars. Most dealers around the country, as you know, you'll have a price on the vehicle.

Speaker 1

If you change the price, which we obviously now do far more often because of the dynamic pricing, they may even change every day. We would be out to that car every day to change that price board. Go and get the keys, open the car, change the price board, print it off, go back, off the car, put the keys back to the door. That takes forever if you're a salesperson, and we use the sales team to do that. We no longer do that. We have one price board. It has a unique QR code in the vehicle. It gives us huge insight into what customers are doing. You'll see some customers who go around who will scan 80 cars. You see some customers who will come on, and they scan one car and go straight to the showroom and buy the car.

Speaker 1

We get to see consumer behavior. We get to see how many people are on store. We get to see when people are on the store. As an example, on a Saturday, we have great sales days on Saturday in stores. Busy day for us. We've realized since then that we need more staff because we are missing people. If all of the desks are full, you can't go and speak to the people on the pitch. Now we know that there are still people out there when we're all sat at the desk. We need more staff to help do that. That helps us with our staffing and obviously the insight and productivity gains we've achieved through that are very well. We continue to invest in the digital experience. This is hugely important to us, as you'd expect.

Speaker 1

Over 90% of our customers have been on the website. Even if they walk into the store and they say, "I'm just browsing," they have been on the website. We can link those customers back to their journey. We know what they've been doing, especially if they then click on the QR code, we can see that that's the car they were looking at on the website. They've now come into store. They've said they're just looking, but they've not stated so far that they're looking on the website, and we can match back to see exactly what they were doing and see that, yes, that is the customer who was looking on that website. Obviously we can then attribute the channel for marketing efficiency and those sorts of things. Lots of things to get from that.

Speaker 1

Other things that we've done, we've redone our PLC website, which gives us a bit of an SEO boost. We've got the QR code, which I said about that gives us a lot of insight, takes the customer straight to the product landing page on the website. We've introduced new vehicle comparison functionality. Customers do like to compare still, whether it's the key features or the price or whatever, and customers do get all of that as well. Then the AI chatbot, that's Ava, which we talked about, which I'd encourage you to have a look at. One of our other consistent themes is to broaden our brand reach. Obviously, we want as many people to buy their next car from Motorpoint, lots of things have been done around that. We have a YouTube channel where we put our car reviews on there.

Speaker 1

We have a team who look after that. They do videos, and they have guest presenters. They've got 4.5 million views this year, they've got 55,000 subscribers, which was about 3,000 a year ago. The views is the important thing on here, and they do some fun stuff on there in terms of probably doing donuts in fields and things like that. I'm not sure quite what they do, but they do some great work in there reviewing the products themselves. The next point is really important because we for many years have been trying to become the most prominent positioned car retailer on Google. We have now reached that position, and we measure a range of about 450 keywords in used car searches. Whether it's a make and a model or SUV or whatever, and we are in the top three positions now.

Speaker 1

We have the most prominent positions in Google. Obviously being top three is where we want to be. Chris mentioned a little bit of this in terms of aggregator diversification. We are obviously on aggregators, but it is starkly marked how some aggregators are much more efficient for us than others, and that has led to more leads coming through from those channels as well. We've upgraded the Sell Your Car journey. Again, looking at what customers are actually doing on the Sell Your Car and then pulling apart into the steps. That's helped us grow the Sell Your Car journey. As an example, little things like removing the need to give us an address when the customer buys from the car. That's been a lot simpler for customers. In terms of technology, next page, we continue to invest heavily in the technology.

Speaker 1

I think the important thing here is that we are very careful what we invest in technology. We're always quite happy to mimic and copy, use third-party systems and customize, and to make sure that we get the best bang for our buck. In terms of what we're up to at the moment, we are currently replacing our stock and customer systems. Those are quite big projects for us. We're also implementing a new workshop management system, which will give us a lot more efficiency in our workshops. We'll have a lot more understanding around the sales part of the business. We have tons and tons of data. We really, really understand how productive we are. In our workshops, we are not as understanding of that data.

Speaker 1

The new tool we're providing will give us much more efficiency and reporting on our workshops and the teams in the workshop, and also we require that to start doing warranty work, which we are doing, launching from the start of next month. We put a new finance system in place, which has been very successful. We've just completed the audit, obviously, and that was an excellent clean bill of health for us with the new system that's gone in during that period. That's a real success for us. We've developed a new in-house imagery app. One of the things that we get frustrated by is having to use third-party tools to do imaging. We've built our own car imaging app.

Speaker 1

Our team can basically grab an iPhone, go on the app, and then it'll tell you where to position the car, where to position the camera, and take the photo. That photo then gets ripped out of that image and placed into what looks like a showroom condition into the website. That's all in-house built and developed. The last point is just about cybersecurity. We do continue to invest. We are very conscious of the impact that can have. We spend a lot on that as well to make sure we have got very good defenses. I mentioned a little bit about workshops. In terms of preparation, this has been an area we are investing at the moment. We've invested quite heavily in this recently in terms of the teams that we're bringing in.

Speaker 1

We're upskilling a lot of our workshops to make sure we can do more of the more heavy lifting in-house. Historically, we were not MOT testing stations. We used to send all of those cars out to MOT test centers. We now internalize that. I think 90% of our MOTs are now done internally. We bring in warranty work in-house. Again, if a car's on a Motorpoint Warranty. If something goes wrong with a car, the customer then goes to a third party to get the car fixed. We've now internalized that work. Historically, we wouldn't have had the skill set in-house, we've upskilled our workshops, and we will now do that work in-house. That should have a marginal improvement for us as well. We've upgraded our workshops.

Speaker 1

We clearly are going to need more tooling to be able to do some of these more detailed works, whether it's a new engine or a new gearbox. That work will now be done internally. We've invested in the equipment to do that. We've also now, as we've continued to grow, we have two preparation-only facilities. They obviously supply some of our retail-only stores where there's no preparation on-site. Some of those retail-only stores now have grown to an extent where we are now reinstalling preparation facilities back in those facilities to give us a bit more efficiency around logistics and making sure that the car goes to one location, get mopped, then gets handed over there. In terms of our current trading and outlook, there obviously is the Middle East conflict, which keeps ebbing and flowing.

Speaker 1

I have to say, we have not really seen any impact on consumer so far. B, if anything, we've seen stronger demand, as you can see the levels in April and May. We were a point on weaker comparatives that we were lower stocked last year, so we are higher stocked this year and therefore we have a stronger growth rate. The profitability has been excellent in those two months as well, and that continues to flow into June. We are very optimistic for this year. The momentum around sales is probably, potentially leading to a growth in our sales by customers maybe switching into more efficient models such as EV, as I mentioned earlier, and maybe just a more efficient vehicle because GBP 150 on diesel at the petrol pump hurts everybody.

Speaker 1

We're definitely seeing that, and that may be actually creating growth in the market. It certainly feels like that way to us. As we've mentioned, metal margin. We have a really good level of supply and our metal margins are stable, we are optimistic that is something that is now embedded in the business. As we mentioned as well, Sell Your Car. Over 200 a week since the year end. We're having record weeks on Sell Your Car, and that will continue, and we're anticipating over 12,000 purchases from consumers this year. If you think that if those cars were not purchased from that channel, those cars would've been purchased from an auction at an average fee of about GBP 500 per car. It's a huge saving for us, and that obviously helps drive the margin.

Speaker 1

I think just to continue the theme, we are very confident. The opportunities are there. The market is enormous, and we are quite small still in terms of our market share. The ability that we have in the business is well documented, but also now using technology, data, the AI, gives us real optimism for continuing to grow that profitability into very strong levels in the future. We'll take any questions.

Speaker 3

I'll go first. Excuse me. Sorry. Well, I have to say, my family bought three cars from you this year.

Speaker 1

Yes.

Speaker 3

Well done. I have to say that empirically it was off the clock in terms of how easy it was and how good it was. Well done. I've got three questions, but I'll just ask one now and then let other people ask. You talked about quite a few themes there, but I just wondered, life post Cazoo. You went through an awful lot of upheaval in the last decade.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 3

A lot of capital went into challenging you, and you've come through exceptionally strongly. Just one question to start with. Life post Cazoo, how is that for you in terms of how you're taking your business forward in a competitive environment?

Speaker 1

I think the environment is so hugely fragmented that the one particular player hasn't really been able to make the inroads that you've said. I think it is a business that it requires a lot of patience, and I think you've got to do things slowly and steadily. I think that's, from our perspective, when we had those challenges, it felt like it wasn't possible what they were saying was possible, and I think it proved to be the case. I think the rapid expansion is more difficult, and it is about putting footprint down. We are a very strong brand recognition, but the biggest brand recognition we have is having the store in the market. I think customers, when they are buying a used car, things can happen to the car. There can be complications or the car might have an issue develop.

Speaker 1

I think people want to know where they can take that car. I think the footprint is a hugely important part of it, and the business model has proved hugely resilient. I think from my perspective, I've been here 15 years this month. Can you believe it? I've seen an awful lot of stuff in that time, and I think the way that we build the business patiently, we open in markets, we grow our team, we spend a huge amount of time on customer. We spend a huge amount of time getting the product right and looking at the market. They are things that are deeply embedded in the business, and I would say it's not very easy to get to where we are today. It takes a long time to get there, and I think that's our defensive moat.

Speaker 1

That it is difficult to get to this sort of scale and have the opportunity that we have now, which is to continue growing. one more store used to be a huge thing. one more store isn't a huge thing for us now, and it's a lot easier for us to do, and I think you'll see an acceleration in that opening program into new markets, which can really drive our growth going forward. We are very excited and very optimistic about what we can achieve in the coming years.

Speaker 3

That online-offline balance, you think you've got that right now?

Speaker 1

Yeah, because online used to be about 33% of what we sold, and it's actually about 25 now. There's definitely been a return in customers wanting to interact in person, which is ironic when we talk about the AI part. As I said, the research journey customers tend to do on their own, and the AI tools are helping them do those research journeys. You're not going to walk into a store clueless as to, "I have no idea what I want." You are walking into the store thinking, "I'm pretty well researched now.

Speaker 1

My interaction with you as a person should be a lot quicker." The way we look at that is that if it's a one-hour interaction at the desk normally to buy a car, when you turn up and you say, "I want to buy a car, but I don't know what I want," that would maybe take an hour for a salesperson to get you through a process and really fine-tune what you want, so we make sure that we get the right car for you. That interaction potentially can now be 20 minutes.

Speaker 3

My son bought a car in 20 minutes.

Speaker 1

Yeah. You can buy a car at most 20 minutes, within 15 minutes, walk out and drive the car away. That's something that we are proud of and that obviously helps our team to be able to sell more.

Speaker 4

Can I just ask then, I'll jump in on sort of data. You talk about the use of data. How much of that data is proprietary to you? How much of that is scraping prices and stuff from an Auto Trader and all that?

Speaker 1

Yes, we use several tools to get the market look. What is in the market? What's the market price? What's the market supply? That is scraped, but I would say the vast majority of the data we have is about our own data, our own performance, and it's supplemented with external data. I would say it's probably 90% proprietary internal and 10% embedded, sort of give us a market overview.

Speaker 3

You mentioned China, and Chinese cars. Is it JAC who's the number one car in-

Speaker 1

JAC S7, yeah.

Speaker 3

From a supply perspective, how meaningful is that to you? I guess, is there a worry in your mind that the European market could be knackered from a supply perspective in JAC?

Speaker 1

Well, I'm not that bothered where the car is made.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 1

I just want to sell it when it comes into the market. I think the Europeans have a real challenge. The Chinese are miles ahead-

Speaker 3

Yeah

Speaker 1

in my opinion, on the product, the technologies. I don't think anybody would say within 12 months of launch, a Chinese car would be the best-selling car in the U.K. That's been afforded god knows how long. I think certain manufacturers in Europe really have a challenge on their hands because the product is excellent.

Speaker 1

They've got 15% shares straight away pretty much. We've sold MGs for a long time. Customers love those cars. We get a lot of those cars. They're probably the ones that are more mature in their fleet offering. We do see more of that product in the secondhand market. The others are quite new in terms of their entry, and therefore some of their fleet offerings are very mature at the moment. They will come, and they will maybe take even more share going forward as they grow their fleet position.

Speaker 1

It's a great product.

Speaker 3

You don't worry about eventually China will lead to a change in supply if Europe has to be shut?

Speaker 1

I don't think it matters. Maybe some European manufacturers will scale down or will disappear. I think that's just market forces. Doesn't particularly concern us.

Speaker 3

I was quite interested by what you said, consumer confidence is in the U.K. is on its arse. Historically, what's the correlation between consumer confidence and Motorpoint's demand?

Speaker 1

I think the used car market is always resilient. I think the one thing when it wasn't resilient is when there wasn't enough used cars. The market hadn't produced the vehicles, therefore can't escape that then because the market by definition is smaller as there's less product around. Historically, if you look back 20, 30 years, the used car market is very resilient, much less affected by consumer confidence. I think the oil price increase is probably stimulating some demand. We certainly are seeing that. We're not seeing any downturn. Each week we'd be thinking that maybe this is the week we're going to see a bit of a drop-off because the news flow is terrible and consumer confidence is low, and as you can see, we've been performing super strongly. At the moment, we're not seeing anything.

Speaker 4

Can I ask about sites? I've been past the Leeds site. I've seen a lot of It's a big site. It's more like a traditional Motorpoint than what maybe you've opened post-COVID.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 4

In terms of this pipeline that you're building now, I'm not looking for where they are exactly, but what sort of scale are they going to be? Are we now back to traditional old school Motorpoint, big sites?

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 4

Sort of those smaller sites and

Speaker 1

Old school with a K, yeah?

Speaker 4

Yeah.

Speaker 1

We are old school, yeah, we are. Yeah. We will not be opening any of the smaller format locations. We will be looking to relocate some of those smaller formats. Clearly that takes time to find the right land in the right place or the link. Everything that we've acquired or are close to acquiring is of a scale similar or bigger than Leeds.

Speaker 5

Just on site availability.

Speaker 5

How those dynamics have changed. Where these new sites are coming from, I guess.

Speaker 1

Yeah, there's a mix. We bought land to develop, which obviously we've got to go through the wonderful process of planning.

Speaker 1

with U.K. local authorities, which takes forever. We've got somewhere we've bought a building, like Leeds, where we can refurbish and get going within 6 months. We like those as well. It's a lot cheaper to get a building and repurpose it than to build from scratch, partly because of the planning process. We've even got somewhere we're in advanced negotiations to take a pre-lease agreement where a developer will build the property for us, and we release it when the money's complete. Three different channels really, and I think that is what's opening up our ability to have more stores going forward. I think, hopefully in a few months we'll be able to say a bit more about this, but we're pretty confident we'll have a very strong runway of new store openings to come, which will be really exciting.

Speaker 3

In terms of those new stores, how much is data driving your decision-making around?

Speaker 1

Yeah, we know our market share in every single postcode. We have sold a car into every single postcode in the U.K., which is a great stat. We know that our market share, as an example, in certain markets is under 1%. We know that if we open, that will immediately, almost instantly, go to 5%, and over time it can go up as high as 20%. We've got real insight into where those markets that we're not servicing are, and therefore where we should be. Data, we wouldn't do it without looking at that. We wouldn't think, "Ooh, let's open one there." It would be driven by the data.

Speaker 3

It's by age as well, we can put a really new car to a 10-year-old car or whatever. That's important.

Speaker 1

Very good. One of the interesting things actually is because of our proposition. Let's say when we go into a market, maybe we expect to get 5% share. What tends to happen is because we end up putting a lot of product on the ground, we actually grow that part of the market by pushing more product into that. People who are buying a six-year-old car for GBP 10,000, they come into Motorpoint. Now I can buy a four-year-old car for GBP 10,000, and we tend to push out those competitors quite quickly. Which is where we take the share from.

Speaker 4

Excuse my ignorance on this, have you ever done a freehold store before? Is this sort of a new strategy for you guys?

Speaker 1

No, we used to buy and build.

Speaker 1

Yeah. Not for a long time. I think Castleford was the last one, which probably was 12 years ago maybe. One of the reasons I mentioned the planning is because we went through the meeting to talk about going into planning permission, and I couldn't believe how much more complicated it was since we did the last one, which is only 10, 12 years ago. The amount of boxes you now have to tick, and the costs. You need a consultant for this, a consultant for this, a consultant for this. I think we had three consultants on Castleford. I think we need about 12 on these new ones. It adds a lot of cost, and you're still building a building, but there are just so many more boxes to tick. We do have the expertise. We've got-

Speaker 4

It does signal a sort of step change in confidence, if you're willing to-

Speaker 1

Yeah

Speaker 4

commit to freeholds.

Speaker 1

We need cash as well. We've got cash.

Speaker 4

You've always had cash.

Speaker 1

Well, yeah, maybe not enough that we can invest in property. We do now have that. You're right, you're not going to be buying land when you think that we were losing money a couple of years ago, then it was a very small profit, and now we can see that right, the cash is coming through the profits there, through the markets there. I think the other point around what else does data and some of these other tools that we've got give you? It gives you the confidence that we can go and supply these kinds of stores in these markets with the product. Supply was always a bit of a concern.

Speaker 1

When you look at Sell Your Car, we can ramp that up to 20,000, 30,000, 50,000 units, with the right marketing, with the right ability to receive the vehicles. That gives us a lot more confidence that we can get the supply and grow significantly.

Speaker 5

Can I just touch on marketing and maybe ask about those kind of channel shifts that you touched on in a bit more detail, where you're seeing the highest returns?

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 5

How are you thinking about maybe how marketing might change going forward?

Speaker 1

Yeah. The team are very focused on attribution, obviously, but also on the efficiency of the channel. We've got a very rare thing in a marketing team that actually try and work out if it's working or not, which is great to have. That channel efficiency is super important to them. Clearly we have aggregators. Some are more efficient than others in terms of the acquisition cost of the customer. We therefore put more money into the cheaper channels that are producing more. We then compare the aggregators versus something like Google. We then look at social. To be honest with you, I think part of the efficiency is there's less brand, there's more performance marketing. That's a big part of it. I think we'd probably continue in that realm as well. I think we've just got to be careful.

Speaker 1

You do need to do some brand to make sure that you can continue to resonate. A huge part of the business historically was always about the repeats, referred. A lot of what we sell is to people who have either heard of us or driven past or bought before. That's clearly the best form of marketing.

Speaker 3

The operational leverage in this business is phenomenal.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 3

It's actually quite lovely to hear your.

Speaker 1

Yeah, it's not so much fun going the other way.

Speaker 3

I get that.

Speaker 1

You can see how it expands. I draw the graph that manages the business I talk about, that if you can grow your gross profit by 10% and your OpEx by five, you'll quadruple profits.

Speaker 3

I guess the question then is from a capital allocation, you talked about capital allocation in your pack. From a capital allocation perspective, where do you see the balance between organic development and return of cash to shareholders?

Speaker 1

I think-

Speaker 3

Where's the emphasis?

Speaker 1

You have to look at it over a sort of a multi-year period, because as an example now, we're quite heavy on land and we're going to be building a few things, so we'll be potentially heavy. They will be completed, then we'll sell them, lease them back, have that money back in the tin. We would always rather not buy and build, frankly, because it takes longer, it's more cash intensive, but we do then get the money back in the tin. As long as we've got enough money to get that, and we're sort of at a point now we may even be at sort of CapEx maybe through this, where you think, "Well, it's not going to go higher than that because they're going to roll off." Even if something rolls on, it just replaces what's rolled off.

Speaker 1

I think in terms of capital allocation from that perspective, we're probably quite close to maximum of what we believe we're going to need. To your point, the rest of the cash you generate, what are you going to do with that? We don't envisage ramping up the dividend dramatically, other than in line with earnings. The last point obviously is to then do share buybacks. The share price is like a lot of small cap-

Speaker 3

Yeah

Speaker 1

U.K. is very challenging, illiquid, we will buy them back. It isn't that illiquid that we can't buy them.

Speaker 3

Where would you be, therefore, in terms of buyback versus special dividend? Do you have a formula? For the buyback where it's optimal, or do you say actually-

Speaker 1

We do the analysis on the efficiency and the return on the buyback, that is always the one that wins. I think buybacks are-

Speaker 3

For now, buyback

Speaker 1

For now, buybacks. I think, yeah.

Speaker 3

Sorry, just in terms of your estate, where would you see now, because it is a different Motorpoint, the optimal estate in the U.K.?

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 3

How many sites is that?

Speaker 1

We used to say 30.

Speaker 3

Okay.

Speaker 1

We used to say 20 a long time ago.

Speaker 3

Yeah, you did.

Speaker 1

I think I'm still not sure we've answered that question because to the question earlier, where we can see, we've got no market share in this town or city.

Speaker 3

We've still got 1%.

Speaker 1

Yes, when we think we can get to 10, and you think the last 4,000 units we're in. As you know, 10% of the market is an enormous growth from where we are today in terms of volume. Therefore, we'll keep going and while we see those opportunities. We used to say 20, we're now saying 30. I'm not sure 30 is going to be enough. We're definitely not going to get to 10% market share with 30, for sure. Maybe they're slightly different formats. Yes, I don't think there's a limit at the moment.

Speaker 3

Okay. Great. Matt, back to you, if that's all right.

Speaker 2

Yes, thank you very much. We have had a few questions online, but they have all been covered off by questions in the room. At this point, I'd like to pass back to Mark for any closing remarks.

Speaker 1

Thank you. Thank you for listening, everybody. We've had a great year last year. We've started even stronger in this year. Just to re-emphasize what a great investment proposition Motorpoint is. We'll be growing our profitability going forward. We've got exciting times, and whether it's the use of technology or rolling out our footprint across the U.K. and taking market share. Thank you for listening. Have a good day, everybody.

Speaker 2

Thank you very much. That brings the webinar to an end. Thank you very much for joining this morning.

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