Wickes Group plc (WIX) Q4 2023 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

everyone and thank you for joining us here today and also for those who are joining by webcast. I'm here with our CFO Mark George and together we would like to take you through the performance of the business for the year ending 30th of December 2023 and to share our outlook for the rest of the year. We will also highlight how our distinctive, balanced business model and continued investment in our proven growth levers is driving market outperformance and presents us with a great opportunity in the UK's large home improvement market. I'm delighted to say we've delivered a robust sales performance with our relentless focus on providing great value and service for customers in what continues to be a challenging market. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all of my 8,000 colleagues for their incredible work in delivering these results. We've delivered some great results across each of our strategic levers with significant growth in our digital TradePro scheme, record customer satisfaction scores, a successful relaunch of our ready-to-fit Wix lifestyle kitchen range with sales up 24%, and good progress on our new store openings and refit programme, more of which I'll share later. Investment in our growth levers combined with disciplined cost management and successful execution of our productivity plans has resulted in us achieving profits ahead of market expectations and continued market share growth. We have a strong cash position at the year end and are maintaining our four-year dividend at 10.9 pence in line with guidance. And during 2023, we completed 10 million of the 25 million share buyback programme. We do expect 2024 to be another challenging year, but confidence in our balanced business model and growth levers makes us comfortable with market consensus f...