Robert Forrester
Management
Good morning, and welcome to the presentation of our latest preliminary results for the year ended February 2026. My name is Robert Forrester, Chief Executive. I'm joined by Karen Anderson, our long-standing Chief Financial Officer. So the group, I think, has proven during the year that it can focus on controlling the controllable elements of the business despite significant external challenges. And the aim is obviously to deliver long-term returns to shareholders. This is the 20th year we've been in business. We've got 5% of the U.K. car and van market, and the company has never lost money in a financial year. We have an excellent resilient aftersales business, which continues to show growth. Management have been proactive in managing the business. Our strong ethos of risk management is clearly seen in the presence of the extended insurance cover, which largely protected the business from the third-party cyber outage that we incurred with Jaguar Land Rover in the period. Our use of technology to drive productivity and very, very good customer journeys comes through. That's also aided GBP 10 million of cost savings, which we've actioned in recent months to aid FY '27 profits. We have a big focus on returns for shareholders. And to date, we have in the form of dividends and buybacks, returned GBP 112 million in cash, reflecting the strong underlying cash flows of the group. We announced recently another GBP 12 million buyback program. We will make the right decisions for the long term, be it in pruning of operations that deliver poor returns, so recycling capital in growing the Chinese brand presence to secure market share and future cash flows and to continue to invest in leadership training and future management. We've rolled out a very successful degree apprenticeship program to strengthen our talent pipeline for the long run. And in January, we promoted 2 new Managing Directors, and we're already feeling the benefits of that move. We have the financial and operational capacity to grow when we've got visibility on returns and when we will grow the scale of the group when the time is right. In terms of the performance, you can see here in headlines that we've got increased revenues, but profits were back. The zero-emission vehicle mandate that the government has put in to target battery electric vehicles in the U.K. is weighing heavily across the U.K. automotive sector, including on ourselves. Overall profit pools in the U.K. automotive sector are reduced in the new car channel. Many auto retailers are now losing money. We remain profitable. We remain cash generative and in control of our costs. Our strong balance sheet reflects in the GBP 61 million of net debt against a very strong asset base, and that's before the receipt of GBP 3.4 million of insurance payouts on the JLR cyberattack, which we've included in FY '26 profits. Our tangible net assets per share is up again 75.9p, and we continue to sell surplus property at above net book value, showing that our property book values are indeed conservative. There are other key themes present. The growing strength of Chinese brands in the new car market is clearly important for the long run, and it's a key issue for management to address, making choices as to which partners to partner with and the speed of growth. The FCA stance on motor finance claims rumbles on. We've had a redress scheme announced, and we've now had a redress scheme postponed, clearly aimed at lenders rather than the credit brokers such as us. Overall, we're in control of the business. We're controlling the controllables and looking to seize opportunities. If we turn to current trading in the months of March and April, we're delighted to show that we've had a strong start to the financial year with growing profitability above last year levels. There's a number of reasons for this. We've had the positive impact of last year's closures of underperforming dealerships. Our start-up and acquisitions are starting to mature and the cost savings that have been delivered are clearly helping. The profit bridge here shows 2 very interesting trends. The first is the growth in the new retail and motability market, which has been in decline for much of the past 2 or 3 years. The reason for that growth is that the manufacturers are actually starting there to push the retail channel to overcome their increased reliance on low-margin fleet. The Chinese are coming into the market with a cost advantage, and that is driving growth. And we're of the view actually that the growth in the new car market is partly and debatable how much, but it's certainly there that the Chinese are switching used car customers with 2- or 3-year-old cars into relatively affordable PCPs on new cars. And we think that explains a lot of the growth. The market is also seeing increased levels of preregistration activity in new cars, which flatters the SMMT registration statistics. But it's good to see growth, particularly as well the return to growth in the motability market, which was down heavily last year. That's generated more gross profit. We have seen what we think is startling growth again in our aftersales business with GBP 2.9 million more gross profit in the core business in the 2 months. Record labor sales were achieved in the month of March. We are seeing a benefit in terms of efficiency in our service departments because a lot of the portfolio now does not open for service on a Saturday, and that is increasing the efficiency and profitability of our service departments. If we turn to fleet and commercial new vehicle sales, this actually showed a modest decline in gross profit, which is unusual. Last year, in March, we saw significant deliveries of high-margin pickup sales in the commercial vehicle arena ahead of tax changes, which clearly we didn't get this year. We are seeing major growth in volumes. And if you see in the fleet car area, we were up 32% in the 2 months. However, we are seeing a knock on margins due to channel mix. Vans historically have a higher margin than cars, and we are entering into car markets with slightly reduced margins. So we think we'll benefit in the full year from growth. The van market itself remains subdued, but we're delighted that we grew by 8.5% like-for-like taking good share. It is a major focus of ourselves to grow our fleet and van volumes this year. The used channel is very steady. We sense that certainly premium used car demand is being impacted by the growth of new cars in the Chinese, but we do expect growth in the year in the used car channel. If we turn to outlook, what of the outlook? Well, we can all name significant headwinds and imagine all kinds of problems ahead of us from impact of oil supply to growing inflation due to the Middle East war and lack of economic growth in the United Kingdom. If we take the oil issue, I think the biggest concern around the Middle Eastern war, apart from the wider impact on the economy is actually oil supply itself. We cannot service petrol and diesel cars without motor oil. That's a pretty fruitless task. However, we have stockpiled supplies of motor oil to mitigate supply disruption. So we think that will stand us in good stead if the dislocation continues. We remain very focused on costs and cost control with -- and have got a number of initiatives to grow sales and profits going forward, including a new initiative in the used car arena, which I'll talk about more in due course. The Z mandate is not going away. In fact, the targets for cars and vans are the major drag on activity in the whole automotive sector and indeed profits. They remain -- in fact, they ratchet up -- this is the highest level of state intervention since the 1970s when the government actually owns the car plants, and it is set to get worse. We expect the government to act in relation to wholesale feedback from the whole automotive chain from part suppliers through to manufacturers, through to retailers, and there will have to be some change to that policy going forward. If we look at our strategy, this slide has remained consistent and is likely to do so. We are committed to growing the scale of the group. However, in the past 12 months and actually in the near term, the economic uncertainty and the impact of the Z mandate has reduced visibility of returns, and we have concluded that it wasn't the right time and isn't the right time for expansion unless there are strategic opportunities of very, very much the right value. This may happen in terms of the distress in the sector, but we will clearly look at opportunities and assess them. However, we have been allocating capital to buybacks and portfolio reconfiguring rather than acquisitions, and that is likely to remain the case. However, as things change, we will clearly look at opportunities. We've got the management, the systems, a strong core business, the financial firepower to attack when we consider it right to do so, and we feel we are well positioned to do so. So what's the external environment? And I think one word that most people would use is volatile. There are 4 key elements of change, which has affected the financial year and some of them going forward. The first is obviously the ZEV mandate. I've talked a lot about this over the last 2, 3 years. The targets set by the government for battery electric vehicle mix will not be hit in cars or in vans. In fact, the SMMT have recently reduced the percentage of battery electric vehicles they expect in 2026 in the car side. We are not going to achieve the ratcheted up targets to 80% BEV mix by 2030. In fact, the policy defies basic economics. It forces manufacturers to heavily discount and retailers to discount to hit targets, reducing cash flow for further reinvestment. There will be, in all likelihood, a change in the policy because of the immense pressure that is being put on the government from the impact of this policy. It's likely that the battery electric vehicle mixes will be reduced out to 2035 or even 2040 with more alignment with the European Union. The second area is the well-documented rise of Chinese brands, which you can see with your own eyes on Britain's Roads. Chinese-owned manufacturing brands had a 14% share of the U.K. market year-to-date. And indeed, Chery's Jaecoo 7 was the best-selling car in March. We will and are expanding with the Chinese, but it is nuanced. Not all of the entrants into the United Kingdom will be successful. Traditional players in our portfolio make good profits around very strong after sales from years and years of selling cars. The Chinese have no aft sales when they enter the U.K. We therefore apply our consistent investment models to seek to maximize returns and profits over a 3-year time frame. We may indeed go slower than others, but we are ultimately seen as a desirable partner for new entrants and we'll gain share over time in a deliberate manner and where we could accelerate that through acquisition or indeed brands changing their representation plans over time. So we are not concerned about the speed with which we are taking on Chinese brands. The third area is the FCA Motor Commission review. The redress scheme was announced. It's now been announced it will be postponed, and that's because it's being challenged as well documented in the press. The redress is aimed primarily at lenders, and therefore, we have been consistent in not making provisions in this area, and that remains the case today. We will, however, be working with lenders on providing data so they can deal with claims as and when they arise. The regulatory uncertainty and the retrospective changes to the profitability of the lenders could indeed have a damaging impact going forward on the financial sector. If people aren't clear that the rules might not change in the future and lose confidence, then motor financing could be difficult with tighter supply. We're not seeing any changes in current supply, but it is worth noting that 2 of the major providers of used car finance have reduced their exposure to the U.K. or announced their intention to do so and an independent player according to press speculation, looks like it will go into administration. So the regulatory machinations of recent years could very well have an impact on future supply. We've clearly also got the Jaguar Land Rover cyberattack, which clearly is now finished and complete. We were very pleased with how Jaguar Land Rover reacted to the outages that they saw in September. They got production back up quicker and is now back to normality. We originally in October set out, we thought the impact could be up to GBP 5.5 million. At the end, it was GBP 3.9 million, but the insurance policy that we had has now paid out GBP 3.4 million. And hopefully, that issue is now behind us. So we've had to work nimbly and intentionally to manage the business through a period of some turbulence, which indeed continues. We have not been distracted by major acquisitions. And actually, I think that has helped because we haven't been in integration mode. We've been focusing on what we can control. And here are the areas that I think are worthy of discussion. In terms of digitalization, the business has always been very tech focused, and our systems are generally seen as sector leading. We have 60 in-house developers, and this area is undergoing absolutely major change in recent months almost with the impact of AI coding, which leads to much faster development and our team are busy being retrained and we're taking on AI specialists. We've seen great use of AI deployed in our contact center environment and also in the sales environment, where we built our own large language model looking at 30,000 inbound sales phone calls where we can now see a projected conversion for each call, but it also prompts our teams on what the next steps are in the sales process, what are the hot buttons, what should you not say? It also helps our regulatory risk. So there's some great work being done here and there's more to come. The finance efficiency project, which we've talked about and has been led by Karen has delivered real savings in removing manual processing. There is more to come, but we're delighted with progress there. The investment in the data warehouse and customer data platform in recent years is now being extended in terms of the number of use cases. That is helping efficiency and indeed aiding our conversion in marketing by having more targeted personalized marketing. In terms of the web, I think we highlighted to shareholders about 18 months ago that we thought we were off the pace with regards to the search engine optimization and the way our website drove and held search engine optimization. I'm pleased to report that the modular changes made to our website are now fairly well complete. It is now designed to drive SEO performance and our SEO performance is now much better with a leading visibility score in the sector. That's allowed us to rebalance our pay-per-click spend, which I think we're over-indexed in. We're now investing in YouTube as a channel with car reviews that helps SEO, especially in an age of increasing AI search and rich content. And we're increasing the number of the online car reviews, and that's driving more engagement. I'll now pass to Karen to discuss the cost reductions.