WH Smith PLC (SMWH) Q2 2022 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, everyone. I'm Kyle Cowling, Group CEO, and I'm here with Robert Moorhead, our Group CFO and COO. Thank you for joining us this morning. It's great to see those of you who are here in person and welcome to everyone who's dialed in. As usual, we'll give you an update on our performance for the six months ending the 28th of February 2022. And we'll also run through the highlights and important strategic tenders we've won in travel, both in the UK and overseas. So in a moment, I'll hand over to Robert who will take you through the numbers, including a brief update on current trading. And I will then take you through the operational performance of the business and we'll end with your questions. Before handing over to Robert, then a quick overview from me and turning to slide three. Over the past two years, the clear focus of the management team has been to ensure that we successfully navigated the pandemic. and today's set of results demonstrates what we've achieved. This is thanks to the focus and efforts of the team, which I'm sincerely grateful for. At the same time, we've taken advantage of many opportunities which will underpin the growth path of the next few years, and I'll go into the detail of this throughout the presentation. During the half, we've seen a strong rebound in profitability, and we're on track to deliver meaningful profit for the full year. This has been supported by good recovery across all our travel markets, growth in passenger numbers and a strong performance over Easter. We have a very focused plan across the group around increasing conversion and driving average transaction value. This continues to deliver double digit increases in average transaction values versus pre-pandemic across our markets. Importantly, this is holding firm...