Marks and Spencer Group PLC

LSE:MKS

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q2

[Archie Norman, executive]

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Marks & Spencer interim results for 2022. I'm wearing my Jaeger zip neck top today because, of course, we've turned the temperature down in the building a bit. So it's a bit chilly, sign of the times. Anyway, it's a tougher world out there. I don't think there's any -- ever been a time in my career where the macro factors have been more formative on how the business is performing and it's what we're all talking about. But we can only do what we can do. And I hope you'll get the impression today that we're really driving this business irrespective of all the noise in the outside world. Look, here's my view on it. I think we are now in the consumer crunch period. I think we can already see that. I think it's been very well socialized. And actually, one thing people underestimated, customers have been hearing about this, they've seen it on their television screens for months now, what is less well ingested is the cost of doing business crunch. So right across retail, manufacturing, distribution, we're seeing rising cost of operating. It's not just wages, it's the energy cost, it's the transport cost, it's the packaging costs and so on. And some of that is still to come through. And so that means that all of us have got to run faster up the down escalator. Look, I think we know that winter is coming. The customer knows that, and we've already seen a few falling leagues. So we are seeing people change. But our trading in the first half has been relatively strong. We've seen good growth, partly growth in market share. And even though, in food, you can see signs where volumes across the industry going negative, you see signs of trading down for discounters, our own remarkable range has been -- well, have been -- had difficulty keeping up with the volume of demand.

The Marks & Spencer customer isn't just any customer. I mean it's partly the brand strength, but also most of our customers probably either in employment. On average, they're -- most of them have slightly above average earnings. The majority of our customers, not all, are not that exposed to high levels of mortgage, partly because of a significant portion of retired and tend to be a slightly older demographic. So we do think that whilst we're not insulated, we've got some protection in that regard.

The second point to make is that our cost of doing business has been too high. But yes, we're making a lot of changes. And there's a lot of stuff that's happening. And I hope you'll see this in the presentation, which should allow us to reduce our cost faster than some of our perhaps more well-oiled competitors. So just 2 or 3 examples of that. I am very excited about what we're doing now with store rotation I know it sounds the old fashioned, the idea of opening great new stores and closing old ones, but for Marks & Spencer this is really powerful. Secondly, online, so moving volume into online. On average and depending how you account for it, and it's not an exact science, our online business is roughly as profitable for the store business. You could say it's more profitable. As we move more volume in it, it becomes more profitable.

And the third thing to say is that we've invested a lot of money into omnichannel data and digital data engine. We'll translate that investment into driving sales. And actually, we do believe that we could end up in a market-leading position, [ also we're ] positioned well ahead of many of our competitors in that respect and we're beginning to get there. So those are really exciting things.

And I don't want us to get too consumed with what's happening in the macro environment because our job is to change M&S for the future. That's what the team are doing. The scope for improvement here is tremendous. We've got a new leadership team which is very dynamic, very fast-paced. We've got a lot of good things happening, and that's why we're looking forward to the year ahead, and we believe we're going to come out of it stronger than ever.

[Stuart Machin, executive]

Thank you, Archie. Well, good morning, everyone. Welcome to the M&S half year results presentation. If you're watching this on November 9, there is a conference call for analysts and investors at 9:45 a.m.

There are 4 parts to today's presentation. Firstly, I will share an overview of today's results, then Eoin will walk you through the financial detail. Katie and I will then talk to you about the commercial plans driving our performance in the period, and importantly, how we're building resilience to the downturn as we reshape M&S for growth. I will then come back to talk to you about our guidance for the balance of the year and what we are doing to accelerate change and build further resilience to the macro headwinds ahead. So now to the results. Trading in the first half has been robust. Sales have grown ahead of the market in both Food and Clothing & Home, with profit before tax and adjusted items of GBP 205 million. We generated very strong sales growth and market share gains in Clothing & Home and, importantly, maintained our full price mix from last year, which helped to deliver a margin of just under 10%.

In Food, sales were strong and volume outperformed the market as we kept our shape. But profit was down as we invested in trusted value, reflecting the market-wide inflationary headwinds, and we also absorbed higher costs in a number of areas partly due to timing.

International delivered a bounce back in sales and a recovery in profit despite continuing to absorb Brexit-related costs and the exit from several markets. And as already reported, the Ocado Retail result reflected normalizing customer trends, increased costs from new capacity as well as inflationary headwinds.

We exited the period with a strong balance sheet and cash position and access to liquidity, having completed the important strategic acquisition of our food logistics provider, Gist. This gives us control of our supply chain and one of our biggest cost levers for the first time.

Over now to Eoin, who will walk you through the detail of these financial results.

[Eoin Tonge, executive]

So the group headlines for the half. Group revenue was up 9%, and the group delivered an adjusted profit before tax of GBP 205.5 million, which demonstrates a robust performance. It's worth noting that last year's profit figure included GBP 47.5 million of U.K. business rates relief. Net debt, whilst down year-on-year, has increased since year-end. This was driven by a free cash outflow given our acquisition of Gist and the expected movement in working capital.

I'll start with our Food business. Firstly, as I said before, M&S Food reported sales do not include our direct online grocery business interest, with these sales reported through Ocado Retail instead. Total Food sales were up 5.6%, with like-for-like sales contributing 3% of this growth, and new space and new business, including our partnership with Costa Coffee delivering the remainder.

Sales were driven by increasing price inflation and mix through the period. Although volumes continue to outperform the market, they were down in core baskets due to the market reversion post-pandemic. They are still strongly ahead of pre-COVID levels. The continuing recovery of our franchise and hospitality businesses provided a tailwind in the half as expected. These parts of our business attract smaller baskets. So our overall average basket size is down compared to last year.

Operating profit decreased compared to last year, but it is important to understand the detail. Firstly, given the highly inflationary environment, like most of the market, we have seen a decrease in gross margin. Although we had the improving margin mix from our recovery in hospitality business, this was, therefore, more than offset by cost inflation and our decision to invest in trusted value for customers. In store staffing, ongoing efficiencies enabled by technology improvements in store more than offset pay inflation. Within other store costs, last year, the food business received GBP 19.7 million of business rates relief, which was not repeated this year. This contributed 60 of the 70 basis points impact you can see here. In addition, we have seen inflation in our energy and other store running costs.

And then our supply chain costs, in the first half, we saw the annualization of the increase in labor costs, which started to build as a result of labor shortages in the market last autumn. And we also felt the impact of higher fuel costs. These impacts were partly offset by productivity efficiencies. Central Food costs reflect our investments in technology, data and digital initiatives, which are weighted towards H1 this year as well as market spend.

Overall, stripping out the impact of business rates relief from the comparative, operating margin in the half reflects our decision to protect customers, investing in trusted value and not passing through the full effect of inflation in cost of goods. Also, increased supply chain costs from H2 last year, which we are acting at pace to address starting with the acquisition of Gist. And finally, the first half weighted nature of investments.

Turning now to the contribution from Ocado Retail. The revenue performance has already been reported in some detail as part of Ocado Retail's quarterly trading updates. But as a recap, revenue declined over this period as the increase in active customers and order numbers was offset by the decrease in average basket size to pre-pandemic levels. The M&S brand remains consistently over 25% of Ocado sales and a growing share. We've moved into growth over the period as we annualized against the temporary closure of our Erith CFC after a fire last July, which gave a softer comparative.

EBITDA reflects this reversion to more normal shopping habits amongst customers, but it also reflects the lower operational leverage of new CFCs, which are currently underutilized, and of course, industry-wide pressures within fulfillment and delivery costs. These impacts were partially offset by lower administration costs, reflecting the release of management's long-term incentive provisions given current trading. We had a number of exceptional items in the period, mostly relating to insurance income for our Andover and Erith CFCs. Overall, M&S group share of Ocado Retail loss after tax was GBP 0.7 million in the period. Moving on to Clothing & Home. Overall, sales were up around 14% on both a total and like-for-like basis. This was driven by volume growth, price inflation and product mix. Store sales continue to recover back towards pre-pandemic levels, Alongside this, the online business had a robust performance.

Going into a bit more detail, online performance was driven by higher traffic and average order value due largely to product mix, which helped offset a slight reduction in conversion. Returns rates were higher year-on-year as expected, driven by the increasing penetration of third-party brands as well as product mix and customer behavior. Encouragingly, when compared to '19/'20 levels of returns, the main driver of the increase is brands.

Our stores showed a strong continuing recovery as footfall, transactions and basket size were all up year-on-year, and we saw positive performance across all store formats. In total, Clothing & Home generated an operating profit almost 10% higher than last year or over 30% when excluding rates relief from last year's figure.

Looking at the detail, gross profit was down, driven by headwinds in raw materials and the unhedged portion of currency, partially offset by sourcing improvements. Full price performance for the business continues to be strong. However, it's worth noting that as we grow our third-party brands business, which is mostly online, it has a dilutive effect on gross margin.

Across all cost lines, the impact of inflation and our investments was offset to some extent or another, by increased leverage from higher sales, in-store staffing and other store costs. It's the same story as our Food business. Naturally, the cost pressures in other store costs from not having rates relief this year and energy inflation more heavily impacted our stores business compared to online. Within distribution and warehousing, better fixed cost leverage, along with a favorable delivery mix, offset inflation and the additional cost of servicing third-party brands.

And finally, within central costs, again, fixed cost leverage and lower depreciation offset a number of additional costs. This included investments in technology, data and digital initiatives, additional cost to support third-party brands and higher marketing activity. These investments are all heavily weighted towards our online business. Overall, a very strong performance, with a decrease in gross margin offset through better fixed cost leverage with online operating margin impacted more by the growth of third-party brands and our growth investment decisions.

And finally, to International. In Clothing & Home, a strong performance was driven by post-COVID recovery in India and Ireland as well as shipments to our Middle East franchise business, offset by the decline from our Russian exit. Food sales declined due to the exits of part of our French franchise business and the chilled business in the Czech Republic, and the continuing challenge of EU border-related issues on the Republic of Ireland. Excluding France, however, Food sales were level on the year.

Overall, operating profit was up. Gross profit increased. The recovery in Clothing & Home store sales in India and Ireland post-COVID has driven an improved margin mix. Store staffing improved as a percent of sales, driven by greater fixed cost leverage due to the sales recovery. For similar reasons to the U.K., other store costs have increased. Last year, we received COVID-related government relief in the owned markets and rent concessions in India, which did not repeat this year. And we have also seen the headwinds from increasing energy costs.

Distribution costs increased due to inflation as well as higher operational and administrative costs. And in central costs, whilst these increased, the growth was in line with sales.

So bringing that all together for the group, excluding the impact of U.K. business rates relief and the change in Ocado profit, the core M&S business generated a modest improvement in profit. As discussed, a reduction in profit in Food was partly offset by the improved profit delivery from our Clothing & Home and International businesses.

M&S Bank contribution was broadly flat as an increase in the bad debt provision due to economic conditions was mostly offset by the increase in demand for travel money and increased credit card sales. Net finance costs were down for 2 main reasons. Firstly, due to a higher pension credit, reflecting the higher pension surplus at the start of the year; and secondly, as a result of the partial buyback of our 2023 and 2025 bond maturities in May. Overall, the group delivered a GBP 205.5 million adjusted profit before tax. I will cover off adjusting item charges in the period next. After accounting for these, we get to our statutory profit before tax.

Within adjusting items, the store estate charges reflect the latest view of the store rotation program timings, ex routes and assumptions. Within our organizational change, a noncash charge has been recognized for updated assumptions relating to the sublet of previously closed offices. We've recognized the credit within adjusting items, reflecting the latest fair value assessment of the contingent consideration remaining for Ocado Retail.

And as a result of the economic environment, like many of our peers, we have recognized additional store impairments due to a change in discount rates. The acquisition of Gist has resulted in an adjusting items charge, around GBP 6 million of this relating to transaction costs. And details on the rest of our adjusting items can be found within our press release. As we turn to look at cash flow, let's take a moment first on CapEx. CapEx levels stepped up as we increased our investment to drive business performance. You can see the property made up over half to spend, essential maintenance and asset replacement spend continued, as did our investment in new store formats or renewals and the store rotation program.

Supply chain investment in the period includes investments in our Food and Clothing & Home infrastructure, including vehicle upgrades. IT and M&S.com spend includes costs relating to technology replacement and upgrades in stores, website development and technology solutions for our supply chain infrastructure, as well as investments in digital capabilities across the group.

Looking at the full cash flow now. Overall, we had a cash outflow in the half driving an increase in net debt compared to year-end. This was, of course, driven by our acquisition of Gist and an expected working capital outflow. But I will step you through the detail now.

Firstly, EBITDA was down, which I've already discussed. As I flagged in May, we saw a partial unwind of the working capital benefits we've seen over the past 2 years. This was a little higher at the half due to phasing. A detailed breakdown of the levers is given in the financial review. CapEx I've already spoken through. As expected, cash tax stepped up as we restarted corporation tax payments after utilizing brought forward losses last year.

Investments and acquisitions largely related to the acquisition of Gist, offset by the cash acquired upon purchase. The adjusting items, cash outflows include costs relating to the exit of our Russian franchise business, the U.K. store estate program, Gist acquisition transaction fees and M&S Bank insurance mis-selling provisions. There are, of course, other ups and downs, but despite the cash outflow, we maintain a strong cash position.

Which leads me on to the balance sheet. In the year, as part of our focus on liability management, we bought back GBP 150 million of bonds due for maturity in 2023 and 2025, reducing our near-term liquidity draws. We finished this period with GBP 2.9 billion of net debt, with around GBP 600 million of financial debt within that. We have GBP 770 million of cash on our balance sheet and an GBP 850 million revolving credit facility. This, along with some uncommitted facilities, gives us access to over GBP 1.6 billion of liquidity.

The future is, of course, uncertain. So we thankfully enter it with a robust balance sheet and a more disciplined approach to capital allocation.

[Stuart Machin, executive]

Thank you, Eoin. Well, Katie and I have been out in stores, so we can walk you through the commercial and strategic highlights in the period. Starting first with Clothing & Home, we had a standout half year with sales up 14%, style perception continues to improve and we lead the market on value perception. This reflects the changes we have made to our product, our improved shape of buy, buying fewer options in greater depth and investing behind growth categories such as Kidswear and our third-party brands.

Alongside this, we generated growth of over 50% in sales of dresses and men's formal wear, reflecting improved availability and improved product offer and focusing on key events. This has not been at the expense of casual wear, where we are strong, and we've continued to grow our sales. As we move into autumn, growth is now shifting to thermal to knitwear and nightwear, where we have big category positions.

With improved results, we are well positioned to invest in the customer experience and opened our first full line renewal store here at Stevenage. This store totally reimagines the Clothing & Home experience across the store, including new fitting rooms, lighting, navigation and a more flexible approach to how we display our merchandise.

But it's not just about the look of the store, the store is built in a more efficient way with improved technology throughout. From comprehensive use of RFID to self-service checkouts in clothing. Not only as the store here in Stevenage performed really well, but is attracting a younger and very different shopper base. We're overindexed here on Children's Wear and Kidswear. We're overindexed on home and beauty, as customers are inspired to shop across the whole store.

Alongside this, we're also starting to unlock the substantial opportunity for improved efficiency across the clothing and home supply chain. This will be achieved through optimizing the flow of stock from source to shelf, and back through our returns process.

Moving on to Food. In Food, it was a very good half regarding our sales performance. We delivered a strong trading performance with volumes ahead of the market, with like-for-likes up 3%, particularly strong growth in our [ heartlands ] of Food on the Move and hospitality. Importantly, our focus on building a bigger, better, fresher food business is paying off as categories critical to drive in a larger basket remains substantially larger than pre-COVID levels. More of our customers are buying a wider range than ever before. However, as you've already heard from Eoin, margin was down as has been the case across the Food market. This reflected our decision to hold our price position and protect customers by not passing on the full effect of the inflation in cost of goods. As previously highlighted, we also incurred increased costs. However, as you know, with the acquisition of Gist now completed, one of the first decisions I made as Chief Executive, were now acting with pace to reduce this cost pressure.

Overall, in the first half, cost annualization and investment were significant pressures on cost growth, and we don't expect these to reoccur to the same extent in the second half. The strategy for M&S Food has always been to provide great quality food at great prices every day. We started the year by refocusing and investing in remarksable value everyday lines of M&S quality, but with prices competitive with mainstream supermarkets.

And this month, we have priced-locked 100 family favorites until 2023 and have 40 extra lines offering bigger packs, better value. Our iconic Dine-In program has also been relaunched. This offers great quality, great value and is a fantastic alternative for families to eating out.

But our focus on trusted value is not at the expense of quality or innovation, where we continue to lead the market using our good, better and best category tiering. Over 900 new lines in this half year have been introduced. We have also continued to drive our food renewal program, 7 more stores landed in this half including 5 in a lower-cost, capital-efficient format. These renewal stores that opened last year are performing really well, with sales on average up 18%.

Most importantly, we completed the acquisition of Gist, our food logistics provider, which gives us control of the end-to-end food supply chain for the first time, immediately removing around GBP 25 million of management fees, but also enabling us to drive productivity improvements and to invest in a fit-for-purpose supply chain network to support the future growth of our Food business. Just to remind you, taking all of this together, with the actions to reduce waste and stock loss and mitigate cost inflation, we expect a much improved margin trend in the second half.

Let's talk about Ocado Retail. As Eoin has outlined Ocado Retail revenue and contribution was down in the period. While we generated strong growth in active customers and orders, basket size reduced. The combination of increased fixed costs due to additional CFC capacity and higher short-term fulfillment costs, the drivers of which are market-wide, as well as marketing costs are impacting short-term margins. As you know, during the pandemic, trading conditions translated into a very strong profit performance.

In this period, Ocado Retail's proposition of market-leading quality, service and choice underpinned by M&S Food became diluted. Under a new leadership team led by Hannah Gibson, we're focused on restoring the core proposition. That starts with a new front-end website later this year and an improved collaboration with M&S Food for much improved combined offer for our customers. When we announced the joint venture, we said we were bringing the best together and we're going to do just that. We see substantial growth and scope to the medium to longer term as we reset the customer proposition for Ocado Retail.

Moving next to our store rotation program. Our objective is to create a more focused group of high productivity full-line stores, fit for the omnichannel retail future, like the store Stevenage, which I'm in today. But also growing a pipeline of bigger, better, fresher food stores, with high-quality click-and-collect services, particularly for Clothing & Home.

As I outlined at the Investor Day, store rotation improves productivity as it reduces the tail of stores with low contribution margins and allows us to recapture sales online. We are making good progress towards our targets and opened 2 full-line stores in the first half and opened 3 new food stores.

What's great about this program is we're able to make the most of today's market conditions, securing great space on strong terms with shorter leases. We're generating higher sales in these new stores, using technology to lower the cost of operations and quick paybacks on the capital we invest. For example, the 2 stores we opened last year in the half at Paisley and Sears Solihull will pay back the capital invested in just over 2 years.

As you know, I set out an ambition at the Investor Day to accelerate our 5-year program into 3. Our aim is to reduce the number of full line stores to 180 and open 100 new bigger, better, fresher food stores. There are 3 main levers to accelerate this plan. Firstly, the pipeline of new stores. We're making good progress on this with 10 new full-line stores and 27 new food stores. Secondly, we've begun a program of driving increased recapture through the use of customer data and targeted marketing. And finally, the development team is working to reduce exit costs from our legacy sites.

So good progress, but an ambition to go further and, of course, faster.

[Katie Bickerstaffe, executive]

I'm here at our White City store to talk to you about the progress we've made in omnichannel development and our strategy to leverage data better to connect customers to M&S. Over the past 3 years, we've made substantial investments in developing our ability to interact seamlessly with customers online and in-store, and enabling them to shop with us and have products delivered or returned when and where they like.

We've created a single view of the customer through our customer data engine, containing a substantial volume of data and attributes relating to our customer base. We've quadrupled the number of active app users to over 4 million. We've relaunched and grown our Sparks loyalty program to 16 million members, and invested in creating world-class data science capabilities across Marks & Spencer.

This has required substantial foundational investment of more than GBP 200 million, which has largely been expensed through our P&L. But it's starting to deliver sales traction through increased personalization and a better online and in-store experience, and has helped drive dot-com to over 30% of Clothing & Home sales. The objective of our digital development is to encourage customers to use more of our sales channels and services as customers with multiple digital relationships spend substantially more.

Our ongoing development program in omnichannel retailing includes scaling the use of the M&S app, investing in an improved click and collect and returns experience, and increasing access to relevant third-party brands. So starting with the app. The app already enables friction-free shopping on M&S.com, allows customers to spend and load best Sparks offers, provide Scan & Shop in M&S Food stores, and gives customers up-to-date recipe checks.

Our objective is to double M&S app usage with a long-term goal of 10 million users. As a result of our growth, the app now accounts for around 1/3 of our Clothing & Home online sales. And while still small, Scan & Shop enables its use in store and food.

To drive further growth, we're working towards launching a single digital identity across all Marks & Spencer's related touch points from M&S.com to Sparks, to the bank, and eventually to include Ocado Retail. The goal is to make the M&S app a super app that is indispensable to customers, whether they are shopping, browsing, buying and accessing our services, which means we can communicate personally to all our customers on a regular basis.

The app also helps us to deliver digital click-and-collect experiences, which means customers can now collect from store in less than 1 minute. And by leveraging the store estate, we've tested same-day click and collect within the hour. This capability provides additional capacity at peak times and will ease pressure on our future distribution requirements.

During the half, we also rolled out key move and return processes to all stores, enabling the movement of stock between stores rather than lengthy and costly returns processes. While the M&S own label will always be our #1 priority, the combination of 30 million Marks & Spencer's customers, market-leading customer data and engagement, alongside omnichannel purchase and returns, is making us increasingly attractive to third-party brands. We have over 50 partners from Seasalt to Nobody's Child, to Clinique and Dune.

Last month, we talked about our ambition to build a GBP 400 million business, and sales at the first half have more than doubled to GBP 71 million. Our approach is based on thoughtful curation rather than a wide range of duplication, which makes us much easier to shop. It's driving new customers, frequency and spend, whilst ensuring that almost all orders also contain a Marks & Spencer's product.

We are building on the substantial growth we've seen with the launch of broader sports clothing and footwear offers in half 2. And we will also introduce drop-ship capability, enabling us to remove the costly manual processing of brands through the Marks & Spencer's network, driving faster growth and improving customer service.

While our customer data platform enables us to leverage data to create an omnichannel experience, it's also critical to personalizing our marketing to deliver increased frequency and spend. This will help us bridge the gap in our profitability to our key competitors. We're starting to generate substantial value from the customer data engine through personalizing offers and product recommendations, repeat purchase recommendations and using personalized language.

For example, frequently brought together recommendations, which show products most typically bought alongside the product you've just added, have been worth an incremental GBP 20 million of revenue to date. It's anticipated 20% to 25% of all of our digital interactions will be personalized this year, and personalization will generate more than GBP 100 million of incremental revenue for our business.

Sparks, our digital loyalty program, is an increasingly important part of this, which is the vehicle for delivering the very best of M&S to our customers, whether that's personalized promotions and offers, family days out or access to delivery, including through our recently launched Sparks Pass. During the first half, we launched Sparks Pay within the M&S app, creating a digital credit account for our Sparks members, giving them more ways to pay and even more reasons to keep returning to Marks & Spencer. As you can see, our investments in omnichannel, digital development and personalization are starting to drive substantial revenue growth, and this is evident in all of the results we have reported today. Last month, I spoke about our ambition to grow global partnership sales by GBP 500 million in the medium term. Like in the U.K., customers are responding to better product, with strong demand for Clothing & Home from our key franchise partners and a doubling of sales in India as it recovered from last year's COVID lockdown. In October, we launched Sparks globally in 26 markets and already, we've grown this to 3.9 million members. Order books remain robust as we've invested in trusted value. Alongside partner demand, we're putting in place the foundations for profitable trading with European platforms, commencing consignment trading and developing plans for EU fulfillment from our new logistics center in Croatia, which will increase speed to market and reduce costs.

Our business in the Republic of Ireland has continued to generate a strong sales performance in Clothing & Home, but Food remains disruptive with costly EU border processes. We've begun the process of investing to mitigate some of these costs with automation and substitution with local products. We also signed an agreement for a 5-store trial with the roadside retailer Applegreen, reflecting our continued commitment to the Irish market and a belief that, in time, we have an opportunity for substantial growth there.

I hope this gives you a flavor of the actions underway to drive growth through a better connected omnichannel experience in our stores, leveraging customer data to personalize and deliver improved frequency, spend and margins and the growth we're delivering from capital-light partnerships as we reshape M&S.

I'm now going to hand you back to Stuart, who will talk about the outlook for the remainder of this year.

[Stuart Machin, executive]

So as you will have read this morning, we have entered our peak quarter with the business continuing to trade well, with sales growth in line with our forecast. We are well set up for Christmas with improved ranges, a fantastic pipeline of new product and strong value across both of our businesses. We expect quarter 3 to provide a lot of opportunity without the benefit of the unusually timed World Cup.

Costs will continue to rise, although we expect some to annualize. All material operating cost increases for the remainder of the year are largely known. Overall, we now expect to deliver an adjusted profit before tax in line with the expectations set out at our full year results. As you will remember, from this, we excluded business rates relief and the exit from Russia, as well as a Ocado Retail.

As we look forward to FY '24, we expect market conditions to become more challenging, putting pressure on margins in the sector, but also creating more opportunities for M&S. We believe our position in the market and accelerated change underway provide greater resilience. We're also confident the business will emerge with a strengthened market position and prospects for growth.

Our Clothing & Home and Food product offer has much improved. Clothing has market share positions of over 15% in many of its categories, which are less acutely exposed to discretionary spend. M&S Food has a differentiated position in the market, with strength in convenience and dining at home. And we are price competitive on the back of our investment in trusted value. Our entry price remarksable range was lower price than many of the supermarkets last month. In Clothing & Home, we lead the market on value perception. Our customer base affords us many opportunities for growth, with slightly higher incomes and age demographics and some savings cushion. We head into tougher times with a stronger customer proposition, and we're acting now to face into the headwinds, accelerating removal of unproductive costs.

Already at least GBP 150 million of cost savings have been identified and targeted in FY '24 from efficiency of the supply chain, retail operations, optimization of technology and digital spend and simplification of the whole organization.

And of course, the group's balance sheet enters this period of uncertainty in an improved position after several years of reducing debt. We have strong cash and access to liquidity and limited unsecured refinancing required in the coming years. So to close, overall, it's been a good first half. We are well set up for what we think is going to be a strong trading performance over Christmas. And we're now turning our minds to setting M&S up for success in more challenging times ahead. Looking beyond the current stormy weather, much is in our control, and our mandate is clear: To step up the pace, accelerate change and invest in growth opportunities to build a reshaped M&S.

Thank you.