DFS Furniture plc (DFS) Q2 2024 Earnings Call

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Replay transcript excerpt

WEBVTT 00:00:00.031 -- 00:00:04.876 Hello everyone and welcome to our financial year 24 interim results presentation. 00:00:04.876 -- 00:00:09.942 I'm Tim Stacey, the Group CEO and I'm here with John Fallon, our CFO. 00:00:09.942 -- 00:00:14.326 Today I'll provide a brief overview of our performance and current market conditions 00:00:14.326 -- 00:00:19.452 before John runs through the financials. I'll then provide a strategic update 00:00:19.452 -- 00:00:23.997 and run through our profit expectations for the full year before John and I take questions 00:00:23.997 -- 00:00:28.743 from analysts. By way of introduction, there are three key messages that John and I will 00:00:28.743 -- 00:00:32.228 build on throughout the presentation as follows. 00:00:32.228 -- 00:00:37.254 First, and this is a continuation of the trend we saw in financial year 23, we 00:00:37.254 -- 00:00:41.520 continue to win, but in a very challenging upholstery market. 00:00:41.520 -- 00:00:45.785 The market has been weaker than we had based our full year guidance on, but we've continued 00:00:45.785 -- 00:00:52.692 to grow our market share up approximately 0.5 percentage points to a record high of 38.5%. 00:00:53.120 -- 00:00:58.189 Second, we're delivering on our cost programme announced in September last year. 00:00:58.189 -- 00:01:03.599 Gross operating costs have reduced by £22 million year on year, which more than offset 00:01:03.599 -- 00:01:08.308 £11 million worth of inflation and interest rate headwinds. 00:01:08.308 -- 00:01:14.018 Gross margins also continue to increase, up 220 basis points year on year, 00:01:14.018 -- 00:01:18.297 and overall our operations are in great shape. 00:01:18.297 -- 00:01:22.204 The operational performance has helped mitigate both the relatively weak market...