DFS Furniture plc (DFS) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

So good morning, everyone, and welcome to the DFS Group 2025 Interims Results Presentation. I'm Tim Stacey, Group CEO, and I'm here with Marie Wall, our Interim CFO, and together we'll update you on our half-won performance. I'll provide a bit of a strategic update and also a future outlook. Marie will come and talk about the financials. So in terms of the introduction, over the last few years, we've been very focused on building compelling customer propositions across our two retail brands, DFS and Sophology, driving significant amounts of new product development, developing a digital-first marketing strategy, and training our people to be the best salespeople in the industry. Now I'll share more detail on these initiatives later, but the combination of our efforts has supported our continued growth in market share, and we're pleased to report today an order intake growth of 10.1% in the first half. We've also focused on our operational execution and continue to make progress here with gross margins up 70 basis points year on year. And our cost to operate program achieving 43 million pounds of annualized savings, well on track to meet our 50 million target by the end of FY26. Obviously growing sales, increasing margins and reducing costs has clearly driven profit growth and profit before tax and brand. And well, it's almost doubled to 17 million pounds despite operating in a market that we believe is slightly subdued down slightly year on year. Our financial position has also strengthened through profit generation and disciplined cash management. We've lowered our absolute debt levels and our leverage has come down from 2.5 times at the previous year end to 1.6 times as we target getting back into our 0.5 to 1 times range. Finally, we may remain increasingly confide...