Next Group Plc Unsp/Adr (NXGPY) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning to everybody and welcome to the half year results presentation for NEXT. In this brief introduction, I would like to recognize the very good work of our soon to be retired CFO, Amanda James. As I previously mentioned in the March results presentation, she made an outstanding contribution to the group and as expected in the handover to our current CFO, Jonathan Blanchard, she did a great job. Jonathan is now up and running and already making a great contribution to the group. When I reflect back on my seven years at Next, I do remember the early days when our label business and our overseas business was still very, very small. It was growing, but very small. And today you'll see in the presentation by Simon that these two business segments now are quite significant and making a big contribution to the group. And I think one of the real strong points of next management is the fact that they're able to identify winners early on, put capital and management focus behind those winners. And over time, these small little pearls become big contributors. Anyways, that's how it works in most cases. So with no further ado, over to Simon. Thank you, Chairman. Good morning, everybody. Welcome. First of all, group sales were up 8%. Quick spoiler alert for the whole presentation, if you want the sound bite. The beat in the first half was all down to overperformance in the overseas business. The UK business performed pretty much as we expected. Lots of things going on with costs and profits and all the rest of it, but basically that's the the key thing there. And then in terms of the upgrade we've issued today, that is all about the strength of the sales we've had in September. I think what that does is it's not so much that we're looking at those numbers and think, oh, ...