Peter Pritchard
Management
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the call. I hope you're keeping safe and well. I am Peter Pritchard, the Group CEO; and with me today is Mike Iddon, our Group CFO. We're pleased to share with you our interim results for our financial year 2022. The strong performance across our veterinary and retail operations during the last year have accelerated throughout the past 6 months. And today, our business has never been stronger. This is reflected in the results we are reporting today, and I'm pleased to say that our performance continues to be strong across the group, demonstrating the ongoing success of our pet care strategy. There are 4 key messages to take away from today. The first and most importantly, we now see a pathway to GBP 2.3 billion of customer revenues over the medium term, a substantial increase versus our previous assessment. Sustained and continued growth in the impact over the past 18 months beyond our previous expectations is increasing the size of our addressable market and has led to a material step-up in the growth opportunity ahead. We believe that we are not yet past peak pet. This has reflected the elevated levels of customer registrations across our loyalty clubs, subscriptions and new client registrations in our vet practices. The sign-ups to our bespoke Puppy and Kitten Club have more than doubled year-on-year. These customers are incredibly valuable to us. Not only do they spend more with us, they also stay with us for longer. We continue to register nearly 10,000 new clients across our vet practices every week, supported by our in-store referrals and our puppy and kitten program. And the number of subscription plans across the group has grown 45% year-on-year to over 1.4 million clients. company generated GBP 110 million in annualized recurring revenue, now representing 9% of total group revenue. Second, we are continuing to see strong growth across all key categories and channels. Our like-for-like group revenue increased by 22.2% year-on-year and 28.6% on a 2-year basis. All parts of the group are growing. In retail, our like-for-like grew by 21.9% year-on-year or 28.9% on a 2-year basis. And in our vet group, the like-for-like group on 26.2% year-on-year, that's a GBP 0.238 increase on a 2-year basis. In retail, our sales growth is broad-based with omnichannel revenue growth of 21.5% and like-for-like growth across stores of 21.1%. Strong sales growth translated into strong profit growth with profit before tax growing by over 77% to GBP 70.2 million. And today, we're also announcing a 72% increase in our interim dividend to 4.3p. Third, we are demonstrating the advantages of being a full-service omnichannel pet care business. And through these broad offerings of pet products and services across all our channels, Pets at Home is well placed to capitalize on full growth potential of the market. We're leveraging our growth in an in-house data capability, integrating analytics into our extensive pet data set to driving parallel insights that are increasing our share of wallet. This is now supporting our day-to-day decision-making because we're using intelligent data to support our decision-making across our longer-term strategic investments, which will drive sustainable, high-quality growth across our business. By combining the best of our unique pet care centers, supported by a best-in-class digital platform, we're giving customers a market-leading pet care proposition. We aim to have convenience of competitors, building on a base of 1-Hour Click and Collect, and contactless delivery -- I'm sorry, Contactless Collection and home delivery services, which are all performing well, we're now using our pet care centers as mini distribution hubs, improving capacity and reducing costs. Now the proximity of these centers to the vast majority of the pet and the population has enabled us to pilot the same-day delivery service, including the 2-hour home delivery service with plans to run nationwide in the second half of the financial year. We're driving practice maturity in our unique veterinary model, where strong sales growth has underpinned a significant uplift in profitability and cash flow. Best operating models across the industry haven't evolved for decades. And we've always been a disruptive player within this industry. We recently launched our new operating model, Pathfinder ] into 2 new pet care centers. Pathfinder ] is designed to optimize clinical resource and improve client engagement and practice economics. Early results are very positive. We're now fine-tuning and we plan to roll out at full pace. Fourth, we continue to execute on our strategic investments build on capacity and capability across all pet care platforms. We now at the build mode, the Polestar, our GBP 20 million investment, which is digitizing the pet care experience, making it even easier for our customers. The initial phases will land in early 2022. We'll continue to roll out our next generation of pet care centers through our store transformation project, with 5 new centers launched so far this year, including one in Balham ] as we continue to build our presence within the Greater London. Last week, we opened a brand-new pet care center in Brighton, which includes a significant number of environmental initiatives, which we plan to incorporate into our pet care centers as part of our pets, people and planet initiatives. And we continue with the development of our planned new storage and distribution facility in Stafford, which we broke around on early this year, and it remains on target to go live in 2023. So in conclusion, our performance of the first half further demonstrates the strength of our unique pet care strategy and the robustness of the U.K. pet care market. We start here today a far stronger pet care business, and we look to the future with a well-invested plan with and confidence. We focused on running a successful business, but we also focused on running a good business, too. We continue to do the right thing by all our stakeholders as we progress our journey to become the best pet care business in the world. And finally, I'd like to express my sincere thanks to all our colleague and partners across the group, their times, work and dedication. The last 6 months have been challenging as the country emerges from lockdown, and the strong results we're reporting today would not be possible wherever. So I'll stop there. I'm sure there's going to be plenty of questions and Mike and I are here to answer them. So I'll now hand back to our call operator, Tracy.