ProCook Group H2 2026 Earnings Report

ProCook Group EPS Results

• Actual EPS: GBX 1.45
• Consensus EPS: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• One Year Ago EPS: N/A

ProCook Group Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: $85.49 million
• Expected Revenue: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• YoY Revenue Growth: N/A

ProCook Group Announcement Details

• Quarter: H2 2026
• Date: 6/25/2026
• Time: Before Market Opens
• Conference Call Date: Wednesday, June 24, 2026
• Conference Call Time: 7:00AM ET

ProCook is the UK's leading direct-to-consumer specialist kitchenware brand. ProCook designs, develops, and retails a high-quality range of direct-sourced and own-brand kitchenware which provides customers with significant value for money. The brand sells directly through its website, www.procook.co.uk, and through an expanding network of over 60 own-brand retail stores, located across the UK. Founded over 25 years ago as a family business, selling cookware sets by direct mail in the UK, ProCook has grown into a market leading, multi-channel specialist kitchenware company, employing over 600 colleagues, and operating from its Store Support Centre in Gloucester. As a B Corp, a Real Living Wage employer and a certified Great Place to Work, ProCook is committed to being a socially responsible and environmentally conscious business for the benefit of all stakeholders. ProCook has been listed on the London Stock Exchange since November 2021 (PROC.L). Further information about the ProCook Group (LON:PROC) can be found at www.procookgroup.co.uk.

ProCook Group H2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Positive Sentiment: Record FY 2026 results showed revenue of GBP 85.5 million, up 23% year on year and 11.8% like-for-like, with the company saying it outperformed the U.K. kitchenware market by 20%.
• Positive Sentiment: The business made clear progress on profitability, with gross margin up 170 bps, operating margin rising from 4.6% to 5.7%, and underlying PBT increasing 64.5%. Free cash flow more than doubled to GBP 3.5 million.
• Positive Sentiment: Store expansion remained a major growth driver: ProCook opened 13 new stores in FY 2026 and plans 5 to 8 net new stores in FY 2027, while the new store format is already outperforming its business case.
• Positive Sentiment: Management said its product refresh and seasonal ranges are resonating strongly, especially in tableware, baking, storage, and giftable seasonal products. The company also highlighted improved store service metrics, stronger e-commerce conversion, and paid social marketing efficiency.
• Neutral Sentiment: The company reiterated its medium-term goals of 100 U.K. stores, GBP 100 million revenue, and 10% operating margin, saying it remains on track and may be able to accelerate beyond those targets. It also outlined major investments in ERP, Shopify Plus, POS systems, and a DHL warehouse transition.

Presentation

[Moderator]

For this recorded meeting, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions can be submitted any time by the Q&A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Just type in your question and press send. Company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Lee Tappenden, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

Thank you, Paul. Welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining us. I'm joined here by Dan Walden, our CFO. We're going to walk through a presentation, about 30 minutes and aim to leave 15 minutes at the end for questions. We're going to cover five key areas today. I'll talk through our highlights of our FY 2026 performance, give an update on some of the strategic areas we've been working on over the last year. Dan will give a deep dive on our financial performance and also provide an outlook of the most recent Q1, which ended just this last Sunday. In terms of our highlights for FY 2026, really pleased to share our numbers with you. We had a record year of sales at GBP 85.5 million. That was up 23% on last year and importantly up 11.8% like for like.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

That like for like performance has continued to build up on last year, a two year stack of like for like of 17.3%. On the back of those sales, we've outperformed the kitchenware market in the U.K. by 20%, very pleasing results. We've continued on our journey of opening new stores, and I'll talk about that in more detail later on. We've opened 13 new stores last year. We're making good inroads in terms of operating profit improvements, and Dan will talk in more detail around both our gross margin and our delivery of profit. All of this performance was in support of our medium term strategy we set out in June 2024, which is to get to 100 U.K. stores, GBP 100 million revenue and 10% operating profit margin. We'll talk to how we would have made good progress against those three throughout the deck.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

Just as a refresh for those of you familiar with ProCook or an introduction, ProCook has quite a unique business model. Our model is such that we sell only our own 100% own brand ProCook products. We source it directly from factories, enabling us to control both the value and the quality. Now, ProCook operates in a very fragmented market. The market, kitchenware market in the U.K. is around GBP 5 billion. It's very fragmented, as I say, but stable. Within that market, we only actually operate at about a 2% market share. It gives you some idea of the size of the market and where we play as a kitchenware specialist. Recent product endorsements around our quality are very encouraging.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

We are getting more endorsements from companies such as Which?, Ideal Home, and Good Housekeeping that really give us those quality credentials of our products across all of our ranges. As a business, we are extremely passionate about listening to our customer feedback and very proud to share that we have maintained a 4.8 score on Trustpilot with over 150,000 5 star reviews. In terms of being a responsible retailer, I will talk again later, but we managed to be recertified as a B Corp organization. Now just a quick look at the strategy. We set this out a couple of years ago. Go to the next slide, Dan. Thank you. Four key pillars to our strategy. One, to accelerate our profitable sales growth. As you saw from the headlines earlier, we had a very good year in driving sales.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

In doing so, we want to make sure we drive efficiency in our business, and we have made good inroads in driving improvements to our EBITDA over this period. Although we have sought to drive a much more performance culture in the business, we still have very high engagement across all teams in ProCook. Finally, as I said, operating as a force for good, doing this always in the right way, that being reinforced by our B Corp certification I mentioned. The first pillar I am going to talk about is expanding our store estate. It is a journey we have been on now for a couple of years. Last year, we opened 13 new stores on the back of 12 the previous year. With a handful of closures over that period, it means we have opened net 21 new stores over the last two years.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

The new stores alone last year give us, on a mature basis, sales expectation of around GBP 10 million. You can see there with over 200 million visitors to the centers we have opened in, a huge opportunity to get the ProCook brand in front of far more customers. Given our investment model, we are still targeting a payback of around two years. We are currently working on the FY 2027 new store pipeline, and we are working on, at this moment in time, net around five to eight new stores. Next, let us talk about the new store format. Within that 13 stores last year, eight of them were within this new store format. The images go some way to telling the story, but in person, it is actually more impressive.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

Our objectives on designing the new look and feel for the store were to, A. make it more contemporary, much more warmer, much more warm lighting in the store. We have reduced the height of our fixtures to improve all of the sight lines and improve the category visibility. Ultimately, we want it to be a store where customers would feel happy and want to spend more dwell time. In the eight stores we have opened last year, all stores are ahead of our business case economics, so we are very encouraged by the initial results. Today, this Q1, we have opened two more stores with exactly the same package in Brighton and Maidstone. Next, let us turn our sights to product. We are primarily a product business, and this is an area where probably the most significant improvement has been made over the last 18 months.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

The commercial team have done an amazing job of looking at our products and reinventing some core ranges, but also introducing a lot of seasonality. I'll talk a lot more about that on the next slide. The team have delivered a major refresh to core product ranges in tableware, kitchen utensils, and range extensions in a couple of categories where we typically have not been strong, such as baking and storage. If I cast my mind back to 2024 Christmas, it was our first opportunity to actually trade in seasonal products. We built on that last year with a much more enhanced 2025 Black Friday and Christmas offer with great success. I'm pleased to say that we've actually built upon that for this upcoming year. The Christmas buys and Black Friday buys are complete, and there's even more expanded ranges coming for this Christmas.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

The success of seasonal products is very important to our business. Spring summer ranges at the moment are proving a great hit with our customers. Launching earlier in the spring than normal, around late March, and driving the business into the early summer period. The final point to cover here is the commercial discipline that the team have been doing and driving in these product range extensions and changes. Working very clearly on a much more progressive commercial trade plan, looking at intake and freight management and pricing promotions, they've managed to drive significant improvements to gross margin that's been enhanced by some FX gains that Dan will talk about. Looking at the next slide, some details of products that have come into our business.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

As I say, tableware has been a major core range refresh. It's just a lot of color in our business now that we didn't have a year ago. Tableware, for example, in that market share I talked about, tableware is one of the biggest categories in kitchenware in the U.K. It's about 40% of kitchenware, and it's a business actually with less than a 1% share. We have a 0.9% market share in tableware, so it's a massive opportunity. Tableware incorporates sort of glassware, tabletop cutlery, linen, textiles. The team have made a huge step forward in improving our offer. Just as an example there on the top right, the green lovely product there is our Porto range that's been developed and manufactured in Portugal. Moving now to our stores. We have a very clear objective to differentiate ourselves from large box retail.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

We want our customers to be able to go into our stores and engage with our colleagues and spend time talking about product with knowledge. We've reinvested in a whole new service and selling model that was retrained across all of the regions of the country with our two field-based regional trainers. We've driven some significant improvements in like-to-like ATV, up nearly 2%, and like-to-like conversion up 1.5%. At the same time, at the start of last year, we introduced a new incentive program for store managers and all other colleagues. All of our colleagues in stores are entitled to receive a bonus on a quarterly basis now. We've simplified the metrics within the business. Every store is very laser focused on five top KPIs, driving sales, ATV, conversion, email capture, and payroll management.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

A real focus on driving consistency across all of our stores in terms of customer service. Moving now to e-commerce and our customer service team. Made a lot of improvements around e-commerce in 12 months. I'll call out just a couple here today. We've launched personalized product recommendations at the point of checkout, which we did not have a year ago. We've launched AI facial recognition for age-based verification on knife purchases online, making the customer experience much more seamless. We've also introduced parent and child configuration online to improve the shopping experience. In terms of our customer service team, this is the team here on the right getting recognized at a national retail event as a customer service team of the year.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

They've made incredible improvements in reducing the customer service wait time. We're now in the midst of launching a new technology system in our customer service team to give them much better visibility of the customer end to end, whether they've shopped online, in our stores. It's really going to simplify both their workload but also enable them to help our customers in a much more seamless way. A couple of years ago, we talked about one of our opportunities and challenges at the same time, which is our unprompted brand awareness still is very low at around 9% or 10%. We've seen significant increases in both new customers acquired and active customers over the last year.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

This is a five-year timeline, but you can see the hockey stick effect over the last year with both customers acquired and active customers up by around 24% year-on-year. How have we done that? Three key levers to pull. One, first and foremost, is the opening of so many stores over the last 12-24 months. In the last 12 months, around just over 200,000 new customers have been introduced to ProCook through the new store openings. We've also spent quite a bit of time, we talked about this last year at the results, around increasing our reach through social media and through social channels. In the last 12 months, we've introduced close to 60 new customers to ProCook.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

Through our email campaigns and our email capture and our whole paid media efforts, we've now increased our contactable email database by over 20% on last year. Social media remains a real focus for us. I believe we are very early days into a very compelling story around the benefits here. Our investments in paid social marketing delivered really good results last year, with attributed revenue up over 90%, 93% year-on-year. At the same time, we've done that with a real eye on cost of marketing efficiency with our customer acquisition coming down by 7.4%. Organic social continues to drive engagement. Our new internal content creation team is creating far more content that's actually going to be seen very clearly on Meta. We're getting great engagement combined with and complemented by us using user-generated content from influencers.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

As I mentioned earlier, our efforts both in stores and online and across the whole business, we were driving a more performance culture. That said, we've managed to maintain really high engagement in the business of 77%, which we're super proud of, and that enabled us to get ranked 70th in the U.K. Best Places to Work in the large business category. Finally, I would call out our B Corp recertification that I mentioned earlier. It's a huge amount of work to achieve B Corp certification, but we get recertified, and we achieved a 16% increase with a score of 93%, something we're extremely proud of across all of ProCook. Five key initiatives that were launched in the latter half of last year, and that will see us accelerate the business into the future.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

In terms of content creation, we have our own internal team, I talked about, but also we acquired last year a content library of around 9,000 digital assets of recipes and how to guides, which are going to be a massive asset for us going forward in how we talk to customers. We're going to continue to reinvest in customer acquisition as we did last year. There's three I want to call out here, which we talk about in more detail involved, which is a technology change program, a warehouse operation transition, finally, a store refit trial. Firstly, the technology roadmap. We spent a long time considering what we need to do for the future of the business and to build a technology platform and foundation that's solid for the long term.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

We're embarking on a three-year journey. Dan will talk a bit more about the numbers on this later on. This involves us going to a Microsoft-based ERP system, as well as leveraging all of Microsoft's systems around our reporting. Coupled to that, we are looking to introduce new POS systems across all of our stores over this summer period. Our current retail POS systems are close to 20 years old. The reinvention of this through very standard off-the-shelf solutions will enable us to get much more flexibility, improve the customer interaction, and enable us to have mobile POS in our stores at peak trading periods. Very importantly, we're looking to go on a journey to introduce Shopify Plus as our new re-platform for our e-commerce business.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

This will give us a lot of benefits in terms of SEO, Shop Pay in terms of the general population of the U.K. usage today, and potential opportunities around marketplace integrations. Finally, this full end-to-end tech reinvention over this period of time will enable us to unlock the opportunity with click and collect in our stores. Secondly, our supply chain transformation and our next phase of how we actually make sure we can grow and maximize the real capacity and scalability for the future. After a long process, we've decided to partner with DHL. In this transition, DHL will operate out of our single warehouse facility today in Gloucester, where we will remain, and our existing colleagues will transition to DHL to keep that continuity.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

The next two to three months will see that transition complete ahead of peak, but we will defer the warehouse management system transition until February, March of next year to ensure that we have seamless trading period through peak. This transition and this partnership will allow us to fuel further growth beyond the next one to two years. I'll talk about the refit trials. As I said, we're very pleased with the new format. The initial results are encouraging and ahead of our business case, as I said earlier. We have a lot of our stores in older generation look and feel, some very significantly old and tired, which we want to address.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

In that process, as an example, we're currently relocating two of our stores as we speak in Lewes and Harrogate to better town locations with the new format, and they're both opening respectively on July 3rd and July 10th. It'll be a great indication for us for how that will perform. We have some lower volume stores where we can't justify the full capital expenditure of a full refit. Some stores will justify a full refit, others will go for a hybrid lower cost approach.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

This gives us the benefit of the look and feel I've talked about and also the benefit of getting our brand consistency across all our stores over a period of some time after we reevaluate and evaluate the results of this refit trial in FY 2027. With that, I'll pause and I'll hand over to Dan to give you a deep dive on the financials.

[Dan Walden, CFO at ProCook Group]

Thanks, Lee. As Lee said, we're very pleased with our performance again this year, another year of excellent progress, driving improved financial performance and a stronger balance sheet. Our results demonstrate the significant momentum and the substantial step change that we have delivered as a result of the initiatives that we've pursued. Revenue is up 23%, gross profit's up 26%, supported by improved margins. EBITDA, operating profit and PBT are all up year-on-year, demonstrating the early impacts of the strategy that we set out in June 2024. Net cash increased to GBP 4.4 million, reflecting a free cash flow of GBP 3.5 million after GBP 5.1 million of capital investment. The momentum in our sales performance is strong, and it's supported by a growth in our customer base, which increased by 25%.

[Dan Walden, CFO at ProCook Group]

We've delivered 10 consecutive quarters of revenue growth, and with two record years achieved back to back, we've reached GBP 85.5 million, and importantly, 11.8% LFL. From a channel perspective, the performance is equally encouraging in both retail and e-commerce, both up 23%, and therefore retaining our e-commerce mix of sales of 37%, despite the significant growth in our retail estate. In our retail stores, our focus on service excellence, availability, and improvements to our product offer resulted in a 5.7% LFL growth. After investing in new stores both last year and this year, we added another GBP 8 million of revenue to our retail channel year-on-year.

[Dan Walden, CFO at ProCook Group]

In e-commerce, LFL growth was 21.2%, driven by customer experience improvements, AOV growth, the halo effect of new stores, which typically runs at 6%-7%, and digital marketing initiatives, including our drive to scale paid social revenue. Our relaunch on Amazon UK continues to support revenue growth in e-commerce. As we anticipated, gross margin has improved year-on-year, and with the increase at 170 basis points, this was a little higher than the 50-100 basis points we originally cautiously projected for FY 2026. The key drivers were selected price improvements, as well as landed cost reductions. Factory gate cost pressures were offset by foreign exchange and freight benefits.

[Dan Walden, CFO at ProCook Group]

The cost of distribution to retail stores increased a little, driven by volume, labor and fuel costs, as well as a conscious decision to increase delivery frequency to support improved product availability for customers to shop. Our operating profit margins have begun stepping up, and for the second year in a row, we've increased the margins from 4.6%-5.7%. In the year, of course, we had an additional slug of cost relating to our new stores. We increased our eCom volumes significantly, however, partly mitigated that effect by improving digital marketing activity becoming more efficient. In terms of investment, we consciously chose to spend an additional GBP 1 million on initiatives which would support future growth beyond our current medium-term plans. These include content creation, technology change, and customer acquisition, as Lee's already explained.

[Dan Walden, CFO at ProCook Group]

Just want to take a moment to touch on the impact of the new store impact on our P&L. Our current new stores mean that we achieve maturity within about three years. In year one, revenue represents about 80% of third year mature sales, and in year two, that increases to 90%. From an operating profit perspective, the growth is slower, but actually climbs more quickly in years two and three. In year one, we make around about 5% operating margin in the first full year of trading, increasing to 15% and then 20% in the third year. That holds relatively steady until year six. Assuming that we do not break the lease at that point, the store fixtures, as a result of our prudent depreciation policy, would be fully depreciated, and therefore we'll see a step-up in operating profit margins from year six onwards.

[Dan Walden, CFO at ProCook Group]

The EBITDA margin, which I'll just touch on also, steps up more quickly than operating profit margin. It's a better indicator of the future productivity of our retail stores, and you can see that our EBITDA margin increased, or EBITDA increased from GBP 8.9 million-GBP 12.5 million this year. 25% is the norm that we see in year one, increasing to 35% in year three.

[Dan Walden, CFO at ProCook Group]

The result of this is that we see significant dilution in our operating profit as a result of these new store openings. You can see that the retail channel operating profit margin on the right-hand side drops from 20% last year to 17.3% this year as a result of that dilution, whilst our retail like-for-like stores increases from 22.9% to 23.6%, circled there in red, giving us confidence that our underlying core estate is performing well and that we will see continued benefits from maturity of the new stores. On the left-hand side, you can see the full P&L, the key point to call out there is that PBT on an underlying basis increased by 64.5% year-over-year, and that was after a GBP 0.8 million foreign exchange impact, which is an additional GBP 500,000 of impact year-on-year.

[Dan Walden, CFO at ProCook Group]

As I mentioned earlier, free cash flow improved, more than doubling year-on-year from GBP 1.7 million-GBP 3.5 million. Working capital actually was a net cash inflow for the second year in a row, despite increased inventory investment to support a larger business. Net capital expenditure also increased year-on-year to GBP 5.1 million, meaning that we are fully funding our investment for growth, both in new stores and in operating expenses. Just shortly after the year, we concluded an amend and extend agreement to our committed revolving credit facility. We increased it to GBP 15 million from GBP 10 million, and we extended it to April 2029 with two one-year extension options available to us.

[Dan Walden, CFO at ProCook Group]

Looking at the current trading, Q1 just finished on Sunday. We're pleased to report that our momentum in Q1 continues in line with the performance across the last year as a whole, despite what has been a soft market backdrop, particularly during the period of significant macroeconomic uncertainty earlier on in the quarter. Revenue was up 21.5%, like-for-like revenue was up 11.5%. Retail like-for-like is positive, new stores adding to the revenue channel growth. We've opened two new stores during the quarter, and we've closed one. We've opened one new refit trial store, and we've got one more under fit-out currently, opening in the next couple of weeks. We've got two relocation stores that are now in fit-out, which will benefit from the new format, as Lee said. Our e-commerce like-for-like accelerated again to 27.9% year-on-year, driven by growth in traffic and AOV improvements.

[Dan Walden, CFO at ProCook Group]

Importantly, the market was softer, as I say, but our performance held strong, and we outperformed the market by an even greater 31 percentage points during the first quarter of this financial year. Looking ahead to the full FY 2027 financial year, we expect to make continued strong progress towards our medium-term ambition and set the foundations for the period beyond that. We anticipate opening five to eight net new stores, plus receiving the benefit of annualization and the maturity of the new stores that we opened in the last couple of years. We anticipate like-for-like revenue growth will be mid single digit and weighted towards e-commerce. We anticipate gross margin will remain broadly flat year-over-year. With regards to the tech program that we launched last year, we spent GBP 0.2 million last year, FY 2026, absorbed in our numbers.

[Dan Walden, CFO at ProCook Group]

GBP 0.6 million will be in FY 2027, which again is absorbed in the existing consensus and OpEx guidance, then a remaining GBP 0.2 million in FY 2028, taking the total to a GBP 1 million investment there. As a recap, H1 is typically around 40% of our full year sales, and it is loss-making still, albeit over time we anticipate that the seasonality improvements that we're driving will support improved profitability. We're not there yet. In the 53rd week, which we have every few years and arises in FY 2027, we will have one extra week's revenue in our full year numbers, but there will be an immaterial profit impact from that extra week. We will set up 52-week comparatives for ease of understanding. Finally, touching on cash flow. Our working capital we do anticipate will increase by GBP 1 million as a result of investment in inventory.

[Dan Walden, CFO at ProCook Group]

The last couple of years, our investment in inventory has been offset by favorable improvements in the trade payables position, resulting in net capital inflows. This year, we expect it actually to be an outflow. From a CapEx perspective, we forecast to continue to spend around GBP 300,000 per new store, and we're planning to extend our distribution center racking to provide more capacity for product as we grow in the year ahead. Finally, deferred tax, as it says on the page, we do not anticipate any cash tax payments in this financial year. I'll hand back to Lee. Oh, I'll do one more. As you can see from this slide, we've just shown the step change already delivered in our revenue against our target to achieve GBP 100 million. We've gone from GBP 63 million-GBP 86 million.

[Dan Walden, CFO at ProCook Group]

We really see the balance of that remaining GBP 14 million to come from new store performance, both new stores that we opened and annualization of new stores from the last year. Plus then some like-for-like growth driven by product, service, brand, and availability improvements. From an operating margin perspective, we've stepped up already from 3.4%-5.7%. We always projected that the growth would come through in the latter part of the plan in terms of operating profitability, particularly as a result of the effect of the maturity of those new stores that I just went through earlier, and the resulting impact of our leverage of our fixed costs to our central overheads. That's the journey that we're on, and we're making very good progress.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

Okay, thank you, Dan. Just to quickly summarize, as Dan mentioned, we set this out in 2024. We're on track to deliver that medium term ambition and actually, we believe there's an opportunity to accelerate beyond that point in the coming years. In summary, we're really confident in our customer proposition. It's resonating extremely well. We have excellent trading momentum at the moment at the top line, and we deliver significant improvement to our financial performance on the bottom line as well. We see profitable growth acceleration beyond our current plans.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

Finally, the point I would mention is that through the initiatives I talked about earlier, which would be the technology investment, the supply chain work around the warehouse transition to DHL, and the opportunity with both new stores and the refit program, which we're testing going into this year, we are aiming to prime the business for future growth beyond this point. With that on pause, we have a few questions that have come in already. First question we have from Gary. This was early on, Gary, so maybe we covered this in the presentation. How has the customer acquisition costs and repeat purchase behavior evolved in the last couple of years? I would say on the costs of acquisition, as I think I said on my slide there, it's down 7.4% year-on-year. We've been very mindful around the marketing efficiency of customer acquisition.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

I believe there's more opportunity to go there. Then in terms of repeat rate, I think basically our repeat purchase behavior is flatlined around 20%. It dipped two years ago. We've managed to get it back to about 20.5%, so it's stabilized. I think it is a definite opportunity for us to leverage going forward, and that's part of the work that we'll be focused on through our paid media investment. Second question after this. What metrics do you focus on a weekly basis? With the technology program and store expansion, how do you see balance between online and stores in terms of sales? As you can imagine, on a weekly basis, we look at a huge amount of data in our business, both in our store metrics, as I talked about, and online.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

We have really diligent focus around our cost base on a weekly basis as well. There's a huge amount of trade data that goes into every Monday discussion. Even to your second point and second question there, even with the expansion of new stores, we are seeing online sales still stay at around 36%, 37% of our sales. Actually, we see that maintaining over the next year for sure, and potentially beyond that right time horizon as well. We expect e-commerce to continue to accelerate and have the growth it's had over previous years of 9%-37% sales participation. What else do we have from Paul here? Do you want to take this one, some of it, Dan?

[Dan Walden, CFO at ProCook Group]

The question from Paul, thank you, Paul. There's a few questions there. I'll cover them in turn. Why don't you start paying a dividend? I'll cover that first. First up this year, the board hasn't recommended a dividend as we continue to invest significant CapEx into growth, as we've just discussed. That's for this last financial year. We haven't yet commented on future years, that's one for future discussion. With a cash position that we have at year end strengthening, what we need to do, that's good news, but we need to make sure that we have adequate funding and resources and headroom available to support our business, hence the decision this year end. When do you think you'll achieve your 100, 110 target?

[Dan Walden, CFO at ProCook Group]

Hopefully, we have covered that off in terms of the progress made, and I hope that we've covered off the question around the extraordinary, the increase in profit margins up to 10%. I hope we've given you some confidence in our response there. Actually, that's a very similar question next from Ashton. Thank you again for your question. Is the target still achievable, as in 10% operating profit margin? We're absolutely working towards that target, and beyond, as we've said a few times. That was a medium-term target. What we are absolutely committed to do is strengthening this business, both in terms of performance, profitability, balance sheet, to create a strong, sustainable business that is cash generative, for the benefit of all stakeholders. That's what we're working towards, and we're very confident that that is the direction of travel.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

Okay. We don't appear to have any more questions. If there's a last question, we have literally two or three more minutes before we wrap up. Any other questions?

[Moderator]

We'll just give that a couple of seconds, guys, as they come through. Just while we do that, I'd like just to remind all the attendees that a copy of the presentation, along with a recording of the slides, will be available on the Investor Meet Company platform. If we don't have any further questions coming through, Lee, perhaps if I could just ask you for a few closing comments, if I may.

[Lee Tappenden, CEO at ProCook Group]

Yeah. Thank you, Paul. First of all, thank you to everybody for attending. Closing few words. We are very pleased with last year building on a solid previous year, so a two-year stack now of strong financial performance. We feel very confident in the momentum of the business. We believe the strategic focus is correct, and the additional three elements I talked about at the end there around technology, supply chain transformation, and the store refits, we believe are going to even add further to the fuel to drive the business. We are confident in the year ahead and the trajectory we are on. Thank you very much for all of your interest. Thank you.

[Moderator]

Thank you both for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close this session? You should be automatically redirected to provide your feedback, in order the team can better understand your views and expectations. It only takes a few moments to complete and is greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of ProCook Group PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That concludes today's session. Good afternoon to you all.

Participants

Executives

• Dan Walden, CFO
• Lee Tappenden, CEO

Analysts

• Moderator