DFS FURNITURE PLC (DFS) — Interim results for the 26 week period ended 29 December 2024 (H1 FY25)

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good afternoon, and welcome to the DFS FURNITURE PLC investor presentation. Throughout this quarter presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged, they can be submitted at any time via the Q and A tab situated in the right hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives in the meeting itself. However, the company can review all the questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Tim Stacy, CEO. Good afternoon to you, sir. Good afternoon. Hi. I'm Tim Stacy, group CEO of DFS FURNITURE. I'm here with Marie Wall, our interim CFO. And together, we'll go through a a brief update of our half one performance, an update on our strategy and the outlook for our financial year. Okay. Next slide. So I guess, by way of summary, over the last few years, we've been very focused on building compelling customer propositions across our two retail brands, DFS and Sophology. We've been investing in a lot of new product development, developing a digital first marketing strategy, and training our people to be the best salespeople in the industry. And the combination of all of these efforts has supported our continued growth in market share, and I'm pleased to report that we grew our order intake by 10.1% in the first half of the year. We've also focused on our operational execution and continue to make progress here with our gross margins up 70 basis points year on year and our cost to operate program achieving GBP43 million of annualized savings well on track to meet our £50,000,000 target by the end of financial year 'twenty six. Gro...