Wickes Group plc (WIX) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, and thank you for taking the time to join us today. And I'd also like to welcome everyone who is watching via the webcast. I'm here with our CFO, Mark George, and we're delighted to share with you our first-half results for 2025. We'll spend the next 20 minutes or so taking you through the performance of the business, broader market trends, and highlighting the great progress we are making on executing our strategic plans. I'm pleased to report that both our retail and our design installation business has had a strong first half. Our retail business has continued its volume-led sales recovery trajectory, resulting in record market share. And the self-help actions we took last year and earlier this year to transform our design and installation business are resulting increased project volumes, a return to like-for-like sales growth and driving market outperformance. This sales growth plus our productivity plans are driving operational leverage. A 5.6% increase in group revenue combined with our productivity savings, which has helped to offset inflation, has resulted in a 17% increase in adjusted profit before tax of £27.3 million. We continue to pursue growth through targeted investment. When it comes to our store estate, in the first half, we opened one of the five to seven new stores planned for the year and refitted a further four stores with more refits to come in the second half. And this year, we have stepped up our investment in tech to underpin and advance our growth and productivity plans. And Mark and I will share more on this later. And of course, we continue to invest in product innovation with new ranges in retail and some great stylish kitchen and bathroom ranges that are proving very popular with customers. We are delivering attractive retu...