DFS Furniture plc (DFS) Q4 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

I'm Tim Stacey, Group CEO, and I'm here with John Fallon, our CFO. So today, I'll just take you through a brief introduction. John will go through the financials. I'll come back and give you a bit of an update on strategy and operation where we're at and finish with a bit of an outlook and summary and then take questions from the analysts in the room. So I'd like to start by highlighting three key themes that John and I will expand upon throughout the presentation. Firstly, with regards to the variables that we can control, we've made good progress on our key focus areas. We've got record customer net promoter scores were achieved in a number of areas, and we've maintained a very strong focus on the customer experience. We've consolidated the four percentage point improvement in our market share position since 2020, maintaining a clear market leadership position. And this has been underpinned by continued product innovation and new brand partnerships, such as our exclusive Ted Baker ranges in DFS. We've also seen significant advances in data-driven digital marketing, especially at DFS. Savings delivered from our cost to operate program have been delivered ahead of our initial expectations. Across both cost of goods and operating costs, we've delivered over £27 million of savings that are permanent. Secondly, you know, clearly last year it was very challenging with market volumes now nearly 20% below pre-pandemic levels. Now, we did expect the market demand to decline, but not to the extent that it has. And consequently, our sales and profits unfortunately came below our original expectations for the year. We do, however, expect the market to start to recover in financial life as interest rates and inflation start to come down. But to protect against any unexpected do...