Halfords Group plc (HLFDF) Q2 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning everyone and welcome to the Halfords Group interim results for the 26 weeks ending the 29th of September 2023. I'm Graham Stapleton and joining me today is Jo Hartley, our CFO. In terms of the agenda for this morning, Jo will begin today's presentation by taking you through our financial performance. I'll then provide you with an update on the progress against our strategy and this year's plan before moving on to the outlook for the remainder of the financial year. You'll then have the opportunity to ask questions at the end. Before I hand you over to Joe, I thought it would be useful to start with a quick overview of the first half of the year. We've made a very strong start to the year with outstanding sales and profit growth. That's despite some poor summer weather and the fact that two of our core markets, cycling and tyres, have underperformed. In a year of continued macroeconomic headwinds and significant inflation, negatively impacting gross margin, we have maintained our focus on what we can control and here we have made good progress. Firstly, we've grown share across all four categories and exceeded our own market share targets in three of them. Secondly, we've delivered over 16 million of cost and efficiency savings in the first half. That's more than half of our targeted savings for the year. And Joe will come back to talk about that in a detail in a few minutes. And thirdly, I'm really delighted to say that the strategic investments we've made across motoring services have delivered a significant uplift in both revenue and profit in our auto centres business. These results are clear evidence that the strategic shift we've made into the more needs-based categories of services and B2B over the last few years is creating a resilient performance...