Thank you for standing by, welcome to the Woolworths Group F23 Q3 Sales Announcement. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the Star key followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Brad Banducci, Managing Director and CEO of Woolworths Group. Please go ahead. Good morning, everyone. Before we start the call today, I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and I'd like to pay my respects to elders, past, present, and emerging. Thank you for joining us for Woolworths Group's Q3 sales results for the F23 financial year. Joining me this morning are Stephen Harrison, our Chief Financial Officer, Amanda Bardwell, Managing Director of WooliesX, Natalie Davis, Managing Director of Woolworths Supermarkets, Guy Brent, Managing Director of The Woolworths Food Company. From New Zealand, Spencer Sonn, Managing Director of Woolworths New Zealand, and Dan Hake, Managing Director of BIG W. Turning to our Q3 sales performance. We had solid sales across the group in Q3 with two thematics playing out: the trend back to pre-COVID customer shopping behaviors, the... Also the impact or the increasing impact of inflation on our customers' shopping baskets. Group sales increased by 8% to AUD 16.3 billion for the quarter, with overall customer spending remaining resilient. However, we are seeing our more value-conscious customers becoming more thoughtful about their discretionary spend, trading into more affordable options, including our own brands, and engaging more with our digital rewards and e-commerce platforms to unlock more ways to save. Our customer scores for Q3 were mixed. The ongoing inflation environment is impacting customer value perceptions, and despite a gradual improvement in our supply chain, availability remains below pre-COVID levels. Our teams also continued to adapt to the return to pre-COVID shopping behaviors, including more customer shopping on weekends and in the evening. However, there are many bright spots in terms of customer performance, including the continued strength in BIG W and a material improvement in e-commerce compared to the prior year as our team worked hard to meet the ever-increasing customer demand for convenience. Group e-commerce sales for Q3 increased 5.1% to AUD 1.5 billion, driven by a return to growth of 8% in Australian food, with digital traffic remaining strong with over 23 million average weekly visits in Q3, which is an increase of 27.6% compared to the same period last year. In Australian food, total sales for the quarter increased 7.6% to AUD 12.3 billion, driven by Australian food retail growth of 7.4%. Australian food retail items returned to growth from mid-January as the business cycled the impacts of COVID, as well as supply challenges early in the quarter in the prior year. Trade also benefited from the successful Woolies Bricks Farm collectible program launched during the quarter, as well as a strong customer's response to our various value campaigns. Metro food stores had a very strong quarter, with originated sales up 27.9%, reflecting new store growth as well as the recovery in our on-the-go stores as customer mobility has returned. Woolworths Food Company's own and exclusive brand sales grew 9.1% in Q3, with strong growth in pantry and chilled dairy both growing over 20% as customers traded into affordable own-brand alternatives. At the other end of the spectrum, Macro Whole Foods Company grew at over 30% in value-added fresh. Q3 inflation of 5.8% moderated compared to Q2, but remained elevated in the quarter due to industry-wide cost pressure. Improved fruits and vegetable growing conditions, lower livestock prices, and the cycling of inflation in the prior year all contributed to the moderation. WooliesX B2C e-commerce increased 8% to AUD 1.2 billion as the business cycled COVID impacts in the prior year. Customer demand for continuance for convenience continues to increase, with same-day delivery and ourselves reaching record levels in the quarter. Rewards members increased by 200,000 on Q2, and weekly active users on our apps continued to grow materially as more members responded to personalized value. Cartology also had a strong quarter growing by 39% as it cycled the COVID-related impact on the business in the prior year and supported by the Bricks Farm collectible program in the period. Australian B2B total sales for the quarter increased 16.4% to AUD 1.2 billion, with B2B food and B2B supply chain both growing strongly compared to the prior year. PFD sales increased 28%, driven by continued recovery in trading of PFD's customers, new customer acquisition, and inflation with growth across all major customer segments. New Zealand food total sales increased by 8.5% as sales momentum continued to improve over the quarter. However, item growth was impacted by ongoing supply chain challenges and cost of living pressures. Operating conditions in the country remain challenging, but have stabilized following the material weather-related disruption earlier in the quarter, including Cyclone Gabrielle. Turning to Big W. Total sales increased 5.7% with every day in home and leisure and toys performing strongly, assisted by trading gain into Easter. This was offset by lower growth in apparel, primarily driven by slower start to seasonal winter sales. Turning to our outlook. In Q4 to date, sales trends have been in line with Q3, with solid sales growth in our food businesses and growth moderating in Big W. Looking ahead, we've seen overall inflation in food starts moderate, particularly in vegetables and beef livestock prices in Australia. Inflation remains frustratingly elevated in other parts of our customers' baskets, and we need to continue to work hard to provide our customers with great value every time they shop. Our current focus is on continuing to improve our customer experience, especially value for money and product availability. We remain cautiously optimistic that Woolworths Group is well-placed to navigate and respond to the current trading challenges successfully for all of our key stakeholders, our customers, our team, our suppliers, our community partners, and of course, our shareholders. In closing, I would like to thank our customers for continuing to choose us and our team for their amazing efforts. I will now turn the call over to the operator for questions. To give everyone a chance, can I please ask that you limit it to one question per person and then rejoin the queue with any follow-up questions. Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from David Errington with Bank of America. Please go ahead. Morning, Brad. Brad, it's a pretty broadish type of question, but it's on how you, how the market and/or whatever perceives value perception, or what the perceptions are towards value. Your sales are very strong, you know, beating expectations quite nicely. Clearly the customer is seeing your value perception very highly. I'm interested with your exclusive own brands and the strategy there. Coles gives the impression that they are the leader in their exclusive own brands, and I think they call out that their sales are 33% of their total sales are exclusive own brands. Last number I thought you gave was around 10% of your sales. Can you give us a bit of an update with regards to, on a like-for-like basis, what your exclusive own brands are as a% of your sales? What you're focused on in the next, you know, 12 months as the customers become even more value perceptive or more value-driven, what you're doing in your stores that will protect you, retain share for the value-conscious customer, please? I know that's a polluted question. Hopefully, you know where I'm going with that. There's just the competitors giving the perception that they're gonna be better placed to attract and keep the value customer. Can you give a bit of an overview as to what your strategies will be to make sure that you don't lose share in that area? Thanks, David. Well done for asking somewhere between five and 10 questions. I'll give it my best shot. Look, every customer cares about getting value. We are working hard to make sure that we deliver value for each of our customer segments. We break them into five key segments. Those break into sub-segments. The segment most under pressure right now for us, David, are our saver families. I'll come back to those. They really are families that sort of live, you know, in the suburban catchment that are under more pressure than they have historically been, primarily actually due to either their mortgage or rent. It all manifests back into food shopping and what they do. We need to provide value for every customer, but every customer's version of value is slightly different. About on aggregate, a third of value for our customers is made up of price. The other two-thirds of value is made up by a whole range of combinations of health, convenience, range and so on. There are many aspects to value, a third of which is price. Now, for those saver families, that portion is continuing to grow. We're trying to do the right thing for each segment, and we therefore have been very thoughtful on how we arrange our individual stores' core value and how we think about our CJ segmentation by Everyday Rewards. We continue to work both of those mechanics, and included in that are our own brands. I think it's great for us and our competitors to all be working hard and leveraging our own brands to deliver great value for our customers. I think that's just the right thing that we should all be doing. There is, as always, though, the fog of these things, David, who's got the biggest series of own brands. If I ask Guy Brent, I think he would say we do. I think it's actually immaterial. What I really think we should be judged on is the quality of our own brands and what they do for our customers. I'm particularly focused, or we're particularly focused on our own brand NPS, and I can tell you that for the last year, it has grown by every month. We are seeing our customers recognize that when they shop our own brands, they get great value. In some cases, that is priced via our Essentials range. You know, whether it's the line that I got most excited about because it's our material was our 1 kilo rice. Under the Essentials brand at AUD 1.40 against the market leader at AUD 2.40, growing at 50% in volume. That's one version of it. On the other end, we called out in the results, what was interesting to me, our brand that grew the strongest in the last couple of months was Macro, the Macro Wholefoods brand. In fresh shortcuts, we saw fresh value added, we saw huge value. It's not whether you got the biggest, or not, it's that the brands resonate, and they do what we need them to do. That is certainly what we are seeing, and saw in this quarter. The longitudinal trend is, I think even more positive. On the go forward itself then, David, you know, we are very conscious, and we've called it out in this results announcement that we need to continue to work hard for all of these customer segments, and we need to move in line with them and their expectations. If I go back to these saver families, our traditional budget family knows how to save. These are a group of people who are under pressure they hadn't been before. We need to lean in and go on the journey with them. The characteristics of what they're starting to do, they are becoming more functional in how they shop, which is why our entry-level own brands are working for them. What, you know, say Essentials is a beautiful example of that because it says what it is. It's a basic essential that you put in the pantry, flour, rice, sugar, and so on. They're becoming more functional. Interestingly, they are, of course, having more meal occasions at home. You should separate out the size of eat in out of home from occasions. Occasions are moving back in the home, even if the size of the out of home segment is still strong. When they shop at home, though, in those occasions, they are also going back to traditional family recipes and scratch cooking, so they're going a bit safer. The classic things they're starting to do, of course, actually what's interesting, the number one product they're buying is a roast, providing to their families are roast chicken and vegetables. So they've got to get great vegetable prices, which I know Natalie and the team in supermarkets are working very hard on. We need to continue to make sure we've got a great range of affordable protein, generally by going into chicken versus beef. Interestingly as well, the second most had dinner recipe right now in Australia is the old spag bol. We all know it, except the non people are starting to substitute it because of the price of mince into a more value version of that spaghetti alternative. We need to be very focused on going with our customers, meeting their needs in these segments, and invariably, we are. That's a very long answer to a very important question. Value's key. It is the number one focus in our business. We are where we need to be right now, but that doesn't mean we don't need to continue to work hard as customers change and expectations change on the going forward. Our own brands have a great role to play, but so do all our other price mechanics, whether it's our in-store price mechanics or the One3 Everyday Rewards. Excellent. Thank you, Brad. Thank you. Your next question comes from Michael Simotas with Jefferies. Please go ahead. Good morning, everyone. I'm just hoping to understand the relationship in your business at the moment between comp items, average sales and comp sales and average prices. Your comp items declined 0.3, your average prices grew 5.8, your comp sales grew 6.6. If I do the maths on that, it looks like your average price per item grew 6.9% versus inflation, which is 5.8. That kind of implies that the consumer's trading up in aggregate, not notwithstanding the commentary that we've heard around some segments trading down. Can you just talk to that dynamic a little bit and whether you are seeing that in some parts of the business? Yeah, Michael, this in fact, in many ways is a follow on from David's call. There is inflation, which we measure on a, you know, basket and normalized running basis. You are now talking to the average sales price of an item inside a Woolworths store, right? I think, you know, that's the difference. The ASP is a bit higher. The ASP is driven by a whole range of things. It's driven by the category mix in the business, which is a very important part of this, I should add, as well as then what our customers are buying in the context of that. There's a whole lot going on. The answer varies by the type of store, the customer segment we're talking to, in truth, Michael. There are many examples in our hub stores where you're seeing customers trading into great value, elevated ASP prices. In our store, we've talked about Emco before, there'll be many examples of that that you'll see where we're actually getting them to trading into our business, and you're seeing the benefits, you know, there. In our value stores, actually, you will see something quite different happening. There actually what's interesting is, again, even if I go to vegetables, bulk packs start becoming a really important way of driving value, whether it's the great value we deliver through, our 1 kilo or 2 kilo potatoes or onions or whatever the case may be. You're seeing a whole range of moving parts, take place there. It would be fair to say, we are getting as many customers trading into Woolworths as we're seeing customers trading across into value aspects of the business. That's manifest somewhat in that ASP. There are a lot of moving pieces right now, right? As people change the way that they shop given inflation. Yep. That makes perfect sense. Thank you. Thank you. Your next question comes from Peter Marks with Barrenjoey. Please go ahead. Morning, Brad. Just on promotions and what you're seeing there, in terms of, like, the level of sales you're doing on promotion now. I think you made some changes to your promotional program in the first half. Maybe if you could just talk us through the key changes there and what you're seeing in terms of promotions. Yeah. Peter, I mean, promotion's kind of an important part of delivering value for our customers. That's true across our business, including in our value stores, where promotions give customers the ability to actually access an affordable luxury at some times for them or to manage their pantry. There's actually not much to report on this front. We've got a very full program. It continues to be finessed and fine-tuned and be more targeted, but the same size, basic, the size of the discount has gone up by, I think, maybe less than 200 basis points, but relatively steady and Natalie sitting next to me. There's not much to report. It really is a very full, robust program. It's broadly in line with the penetration, slightly up in terms of the depth of penetration, but not much. Yeah. I think it's broadly stable in terms of customers buying into promotions. We're doing a lot of work around our front ends just to make sure that the customers come into our stores. First of all, we're curating what's on those ends, depending on whether you're in a value store or an up store. The products are very compelling, and really trying to make sure that we're putting our most compelling specials on those front ends. I think the other interesting innovation is the work we're doing with rewards actually around in-store activation of boosting offers, which have had a great response from our customers. We did it for back to school, and we're just in another promotion at the moment. We're using some of our front ends to really remind our customers that they should scan their Rewards card and that we do offer a lot of personalized boosting offers, which are also great value for our customers. Again, a lot of our saver families in particular gravitate towards those Rewards offers and yellow specials and our red program in fact. Thanks, Peter. If you, I know many of the analysts on this call do, tracking price indices between us and our competitors, and we read them all with a great interest and actually insight, we always appreciate them. We are very sensitive to price establishment rules, you'll see us being very cautious. You need to look at things over three to six months on a rolling basis to see the programs. We've just got to be very careful that the price that we're promoting off has been established in the market, in a sensible manner. Price establishment is a big and important area for us to keep focus on as we drive price trust. You just need to roll up your numbers over time frames to actually see the right trend lines in a comparative sense. Thanks. Thank you. Your next question comes from Lisa Deng with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Hi, Brad. Just a question on the mix of core value and up stores for the quarter, and if you can also give us a flavor of how they're individually trading with the three categories. Thanks. Lisa, yeah, that's a very detailed question. You know, we can... I'll turn to Nate to talk to it at a high level. Essentially, you know, they're all trading with slightly different demographics, as I've said to you. You know, you're getting more trading into the up stores and more trading into value in value stores. The theory of what we're trying to do with core value and up look is working. We're trying to be relevant to each customer community, and that, you know, is clearly working. What's interesting to us then within that is actually, some stores will be changing the nature of what they are as these saver families in some of the segments that we traditionally would have said are core, they're starting to become more value-like in their characteristics. We need to continue to update our definitions and use them. It will never become a reporting segment. Well, never say never, but it is not a reporting segment because of our need to continue to adjust and dynamically think about what stores fit where within that segmentation. Yeah, if I can add some color around, some of the trends we're seeing in our value stores and our up stores. Brad talked about, you know, all customers are seeking value. We're definitely seeing, a need for affordable protein, and that's coming through with trading into poultry, also trading into our crumbed range. You know, Australians love chicken schnitzel, chicken kyiv. That range is growing at 10%. Mince and sausages, certainly, that trading into value is stronger in our value stores. We're also seeing a stronger trend towards our own brand, products, that Brad has talked to. Rice, pantry in particular, oil and also, in the dairy cabinet. That's definitely coming through, strongly in our value stores. In our up stores, we're seeing, you know, the dinner occasion continue to grow and people trading in from out of home into in-home entertaining and in-home meals. The dinner occasion is up. Products like microwavable rice growing strongly in our up stores. Another example is our coffee beans, so a kilogram pack of coffee beans, which has really picked up in growth in Q3 as many customers switch from, you know, buying coffee out of home to actually making coffee in the home. We're seeing a lot of growth in those affordable indulgences or little luxuries, and particularly coming through in our up stores. David, for you, we have over 40% volume, penetration of own brands in value stores. In the long life category. You'll see the flex in the system. Affordable luxuries, by the way, are working across the group. You'll see that working, whether it's core value or not. All of our customers do need an affordable luxury, and it's really important to them. The trends to premiumizing pizza, and so on are really important. In fact, I should say that our saver families, one of their favorite meals are the premium pizzas. You're seeing premiumization as families start eating more in the home. Got it. Thank you. Thank you. Your next question comes from Adrian Lemme with Citi. Please go ahead. Good morning, Brad and the team. Just following on with this topic of value perception. We're seeing numerous social media and news articles, and I'm sure you've seen these, where people walk into a supermarket and spend AUD 50 and get, you know, only a handful of items. Seems like these are mostly branded products, which is probably not all that fair on the retailer, that it's impacting your customer satisfaction scores. Just wondering how you're working with suppliers to bring the inflation rates down. You know, are you, for example, scrutinizing these price requests a little harder now or taking other measures to soften the blow on your customers, please? Thanks. Yeah, look, our average sales price is about AUD 4.50, you can get great value out of AUD 50. Shop Woolworths, I would say, because you're clearly going into the wrong stores right now. We look forward to having you in our stores. You know, that's basically the average amount spent in one of our stores, and it's about, you know, 10-11 items is what the average customer buys on a shopping experience. We try and make sure that we're competitive at every price point. you know, whether it's trading in from specialty into Woolies, as Matthew was talking about, or thinking about that context in a value store and what's the alternative out the front of the store, in particular in the local fruit and veg shop. We just gotta continue to work hard on that. We engage, as you might imagine, with our suppliers, and we, you know, we certainly have very good conversations around price increases from them to us 'cause we're cognizant of what the impact is on our customer, and we are the agents of our customers. Those are pretty robust conversations. We do have to be, and we are very sensitive about being compliant with the Grocery Code in terms of how long that period goes for and what happens. I think out of 100 cents in the dollar that we're asked for, eventually we agree to about 70 cents in the dollar right now. It's about in that order of magnitude, but each one is looked at in its merits. And in many cases, the truth is our suppliers do have material cost increases. If you look at some of the challenges, certainly we're gonna see freight rates coming down. A lot of that's more out of Asia than Europe right now. But there has been that issue. There are the elevated commodity prices, grains, oils, and so on, and those are legitimate, so we do need to take those into account. There's no simple, easy answer. To your point, the only price that we can actually be confident on is our own brand pricing, so we do need to continue to use that as an important way to make sure the customer always has that choice at shelf. Thanks, Brad. Thank you. Your next question comes from Shaun Cousins with UBS. Please go ahead. Good morning, Brad. Just a question around Australian Food and online. Online grew at 8% and your stores were up 7.4%. It's pleasing, I guess, that Click and Collect still increasing, so there's less of a margin headwind. How much of this faster growth in online was due to some of the startup delivery businesses sort of failing? How much was due maybe the extent that consumers are still willing to pay a premium for convenience? Then maybe just how does this growth in online line up with what Steve Donohue at Endeavour said this morning, which is where their retail sales are down as the consumer's willing to get in the car and drive to the store? I'm just curious around what's driving the strength of your online business, please. Yeah. I'll answer the high level, and I'll turn over to Amanda Bardwell, Shaun. You do need to shop our Direct to Boot service, Shaun, 'cause it's no longer Click and Collect, it's Direct to Boot. In fact, while our Direct to Boot grew very well, 710 stores or somewhere thereabout, Shaun, I'm sure we can find one on one of your various routes. Actually, what's interesting is the pickup from our counter, from our counters was deeply negative. It was all of our pickup growth, which offset the negative growth at picking up at a service desk was in Direct to Boot. I think the reason I mention that is, and it's continuing to hold, Direct to Boot is a very important part of our business, is the convenience that the customer's looking for, whether I'm picking up at a store or I'm getting it delivered to me, it is all about taking friction out and convenience out. The trend line is if you just normalize for COVID, we're back to what we had seen pre-COVID in terms of the way customers wanna shop and what they're looking to shop in. I'll turn over to Amanda to give some more color to our business. I would just add that the impact, and we're very sorry to have seen what happened with Mulgrave, but that was post the end of the quarter. We're not benefiting from the competitor in that sense. It is more what the customer is looking for. Over to you, Amanda. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Brad and Shaun. Look, I think when you're looking at the online result, important, as Brad's called out, just to reflect on what was happening last year with Omicron, that really had an impact on our ability to serve customers in online. We really considered very carefully what services were available in January, and through that quarter three period. Online was also deeply impacted by availability in WA and then the floods in Queensland. We have got that sort of cycling impact. You know, as Brad's called out, what we really saw is customers starting the beginning of this calendar year and going all the way back to the way they previously thought about shopping, which is convenience becomes really important also for saver customers that Brad's been talking about. There's a big portion of our saver family who really benefit from shopping online. It gives them a sense of control. Direct to boot is a great way for them to be able to have that great sense of control, a great experience, also to be able to manage their budgets. On the convenience spectrum, same-day and delivery now, that's growing very rapidly for us. The three key drivers are Direct to boot and same day, along with that sort of two-hour service. All of that really started, quite honestly, at the beginning of this calendar year. Coming back to school, we had a great start, it's just continued on. I mean, the heart of online for us is it's one of the channels that our customers shop. You know, they will full shop our stores and online. We look at the size of the active online customer database, and that number, and we talked about it last quarter, has been continuing to grow. It was the infrequent shopper who, you know, changed, and that trend has just continued, I think, Amanda, to accelerate through to this quarter. Fantastic. Thanks, Brad. We look forward to the Direct to boot at Balmain sometime soon. Oh, well, yeah. This century. Sorry. Low blow. No, no. I think it's fair to say. Thank you. Your next question comes from Bryan Raymond with JPMorgan. Please go ahead. Thanks, thanks for taking the question. Just interested in the recent. If there's been any change in recent months, your competitor recently called out that in recent months they've seen some of this value shopping behavior increase meaningfully for them? Premium range is underperforming. You've talked to macro and some of those trends already, so take your point around those. Just interested in if there's been a more recent shift from, say, the February result to now around customer behavior, that's part of what we're talking about today. It seems like more of a focus on value and offering that value into shoppers. Just keen to get a bit of color around the recency of some of these trends. Thanks. Brian, I mean, we're four weeks into the next quarter, and we're all looking at these numbers last night and looking at the trend lines. You always get so nervous the day before a sales announcement. They have been a bit, you know, each period is unique, but this has been quite particularly different. It's been a late Easter with school holidays backing into an Anzac Day. It's been quite an interestingly complex period to look at. In truth, as I say, we see the trend line continuing. You know, people are looking for value. They're slowly changing what value means to them. You do see some of those trends continuing, but it's. I wouldn't like to overplay it. It's been relatively stable and consistent in the context of what you can look at over a pretty unusual period, if you wanna look for like for like months. Great. All right. Thanks. Thank you. Your next question comes from Craig Woolford with MST Marquee. Please go ahead. Morning, Brad. I just wanted to explore the issue of food inflation, mainly around packaged groceries. There's some of your commentary would suggest that it's easing off, but it seems like more a message around the baseline effect. Over recent results, you've talked to the magnitude of the price rise request. Back in August, you said it was 5x the usual level. In February, it hadn't really dropped off much because there was a Christmas lull, but back in place in February. What are you seeing now, and what's your outlook for packaged grocery inflation? Yeah. Thanks, Craig. look, the number of requests has did reduce materially in April. You know, that's the big one. We do have that in effect change freeze, which is very hard earlier in the year. It does, did come back and does have come off and has come off subsequently quite materially. Hopefully that is a positive aspect. As I say, there are still many, you know, relatively meaningful requests coming through, you know, often on the back of understandable commodity price pressure. You know, it's why we've had this caveat. We do see it moderating, but each product, each category will have a relatively different story. That is the major difference between last year where everything was going up. That's not true, but, you know, you see very understandable pressure in, you know, in dairies we've talked about or, you know, bread. Just look at bread in the last couple of weeks, some material movements in the price of bread on the back of pressure through grain. Yeah, it is lower, but, you know, we'll wait and see and continue to work through it. Thanks, Brad. Thank you. Your next question comes from Ben Gilbert with Jarden. Please go ahead. Morning, Brad and team. Just interested in, Brad, or Natalie, what you're seeing around loyalty. It looks like you've grown your share through the quarter and maybe even the share gains accelerated towards the end of the quarter based on comments at the start. Do you think that the investment you guys have put into supply chain, the rewards, the extra is starting to actually drive some sort of tangible advantage that's seeing your loyalty share of main shops, et cetera, rise? It seems like you had a pretty good end to the period from a share perspective. Yeah, look, I mean, Ben, I think that's a great question. What I would tell you is, the hallmark of the last quarter for us was stability in terms of the way customers felt about Woolworths, not the way they felt about every shopping experience, which was, we talked about was all, you know, jumping up and down. If you look at brand loyalty or three-way brand shopping preference, we've been incredibly stable. We had stability, and we had stability across the board with each segment. Our focus on trying to do the right thing in every store or via rewards for the segments at this stage appears to be, working to our benefit. Ours was a story of stability. All the relative movements were really to do more with changes you saw in the competitive environment than inside Woolworths. Very stable. How you attribute that to the individual element is a very tricky thing to do, to be honest, Ben, and it's hard to do in any short-term timeframe. It would be fair to say our rewards program has continued to grow. You saw the numbers there. We're over the 14 million mark. We're slowly getting more people scanning their cards, which is great. We're getting more people Boosted as Natalie talked about, which is great. We've seen them boost above the line promotions in stores, which is even better. We've seen Everyday Extra, which is a relatively small program for us, get great resonance from those people who are using it. That gives us confidence that we can thoughtfully and carefully scale it. Availability scores have come back for us, but they're still low compared to any number. We're still sort of sitting on a VOC in availability of about 71. You know, we, you know, it's great that it's no longer in the 6s, but, boy, a long way to go. Our outbound service level's running about 96, or store service level, I should say, when we'd like to be at 98.5. Outbound service level is low 80s, when we'd like it to be in the 90s. Yeah, everything. We are improving. We're improving every day, every week, every month. Our customers are giving the credit for us. Still lots of ways we can improve, but yeah, it's hard to attribute it. I know that sounds like a bit of a wishy answer, but so far so good. We are very focused then within our business on, share of wallet for each customer segment. We're tracking that, and we appear at the stage to broadly be holding our share of wallet by customer segment. Do you subscribe to the view, Brad, that the online shoppers are more value-conscious? In theory, your online position should help you drive more because they've got visibility on the basket. Look, well, I mean, as I say, our store shopper is the online shopper. They shop across both channels. It is interesting to us that our penetration in e-commerce by those traditional and saver family is high. Value or saver families do use a lot of online. By the way, when you've got young kids, as you know, online is an important way of actually providing convenience and value because you can shop the specials if you like, you can shop to a budget if you like, you can provide a lot more discipline into what you do. You see that in the constancy of the size of the basket. It is an important part of the repertoire for savers. One trend I would call out, even our conscious and gourmet customers have started to use a lot more Everyday Rewards, which is great. We've always been over-penetrated into the saver segment, but even those more affluent customer segments are starting to lean in. Hopefully that will start to help us there as well. Saver families are the number one users of e-commerce. The number two are actually, funny enough, our gourmet customers. It's kind of an interesting, you know, all varies, and they use it for different reasons in different ways, I should add. Our saver families will use Direct to boot as Amanda's pointed out, whereas our gourmet customers will do home deliveries. Thank you. Your next question comes from Richard Barwick with CLSA. Please go ahead. Good morning, Brad. I wanted to ask about BIG W just for something different. You talk about sales having moderated through the quarter and some further moderation so far in the fourth quarter. It would seem that your seasonal or your winter categories have started off a bit softer. Also wanted to get a sense of this more general moderation in BIG W. How much of that is just the cycling through from the COVID impacts, and how much do you see it as a more general slowdown in discretionary spending? I'll provide a high level answer, and then I'll ask Dan to dive into a bit of the detail. The first point, in line with Ben's previous point, is actually our customer scores for BIG W have been incredibly strong. In fact, our brand NPS has grown month on month for the last, I think eight months. You know, the resonance of customers with BIG W is extremely strong. Then you need to look within that at what the customers are doing when they shop our stores, which is where the action is right now. It's with that important piece of context I'll throw over to Dan to give some color on what is a relatively dynamic situation. It's actually a very chilly winter's morning or autumn morning in Sydney right now, and I'm loving it. So it's changing as we go, but over to you, Dan. Thanks, Brad. I think, just building on the comments on brand scores, actually some of the sub-scores within that, actually for value, for money, our customers are rating us very highly and we're sitting at long time, long term highs there. A bit of context into clothing. Clothing really was a story of a late start to winter, so the winter jacket, the kids' fleeces, the winter pajamas, have all gotten off to a slower start to winter. There's also some positives in the category. Basics and intimates, the socks, the briefs have gone very well. Footwear, interestingly has. Performance had a good run as well. It's just we're seeing the mix of categories shift there. Then maybe value consciousness and the way it's playing out in some of the other categories. You know, in toys, we're seeing actually very good unit performance on those AUD 5, AUD 10, AUD 15 affordable gifting price points, but moving out somewhat of the big play sets and the bulky toys. Then maybe if we go to home and household essentials, we've seen categories like, you know, small appliances, kitchen appliances, where that a bit more discretionary and deferrable. We see those come off slightly. Customers buying into the home essentials, actually a bulk, a good deal on a bulk laundry detergent, personal care, pet have all been doing pretty well. It's really. I think we do have the parts of the range that perform really well in the current environment, and we just need to double down on those and be there for customers and meet them where they're at. Thanks, Richard. I mean, it is, it's probably the business that's adjusting, having to adjust most to this move. Mm. As people prioritize between discretionary and non-discretionary spending. You know, we feel confident in terms of where the brand is positioned. We just need to therefore continue to work on range adjustments, which we are with. Yeah. Thank you. That's some helpful context. Thank you. Your next question comes from Phillip Kimber with E&P Capital. Please go ahead. Good day. Just a question on New Zealand. If I look at, obviously been a volatile business, but, you know, when you look at it on a pre-COVID base, it's actually been pretty stable, growing at about 4.5%. Could you maybe talk a bit, you know, how you're seeing that business tracking? Because I know you had, you know, we had a bit of a step down in profit, but it looks like that business is starting to pick up momentum again. If you could just chat through that'd be great. Thanks. Thanks. Well, let me make some high-level comments, and if Spencer's on the line, I'll pass to him. Look, you know, there's been a lot of volatility there, you know, with the supply chain disruption. It's a business more leveraged to, you know, indent as we call it, or imported products. There's a lot of volatility in COVID with supply chain disruption. Then we've had the volatility now with the weather and the floods, which feel like a distant memory, but aren't really with material impact and Cyclone Gabrielle and so on. There's been a whole lot of disruption, caused us a lot of issues in terms of how we operate our business. You see that actually practically manifested online in particular, because ability to do online with all these disruptions is incredibly hard. You saw a step back in terms of growth and penetration in online, but also, you know, material availability challenges. The business is clearly getting better in terms of the way we operate in the business, Phil, and you see that come through in the improving customer scores and so on. The real challenge we now need to lean into in New Zealand is value in the context of New Zealand, in particular in the upper North Island, in particular in the broader Auckland environment, where we have got a very good position, but there's a lot of pressure there just given what's happening in the housing market there with the rise in interest rates and mortgages, as well as the rental pressure. There's a lot of It's probably one of the more value for money centric parts of our business, but in particular Auckland as a city is particularly value centric right now. Certainly not declaring any success. We need to continue to improve the underlying momentum which we have on just getting the experience right. We need to lean in and continue to drive our value for money narrative and strategy in Auckland in particular. Spencer, I can't see you. I hope you're there. Yeah. I am, Brad. Phil, thanks for the question. I think, Brad, you've hit the main points. Phil, it certainly was nice to exit after, as you referenced, a plethora of disruption to exit the second quarter with some momentum. As Brad mentioned, just as we turned to face into the flooding at the start of February and then the cyclones at the end. Pretty much most of Feb was marred by weather events, which unfortunately take a lot of time to recover from. We did see, I'd say a fairly decent recovery from that, and we saw that through our customer scores. We saw that through the performance into March and the way that we exited the quarter. I think we're feeling cautiously optimistic about the momentum in the business. The point on value is just I would just underscore tremendously. That's really our focus on the go forward. It might be very well known to all of you, but just the gross disposable income for New Zealand towards housing is at 26% versus Australia at 19%. Kiwis here are very predisposed to shopping on promotion. In fact, in 2014, I think 60% of grocery items were sold on promotion. We're now down to 33%. Value for money is a significant issue across the world. It's a significant issue for us in our Australian businesses. It's a massively significant business or issue for us in New Zealand. That's a key focus for us. I think we've got momentum within the things that we can control. The outlook for the balance of the quarter, hopefully sees us maintain that momentum, bar any further disruption. I think we know very clearly what our, what our focus needs to be, to ensure we, we retain trust with the Kiwi customers. Thanks for the question, Paul. Thank you. Thank you. Your next question comes from Michael Simotas with Jefferies. Please go ahead. Thanks for taking another one. Just a couple of housekeeping type questions. The first one, you've called out an Easter benefit in BIG W. Your quarter ended a week before Easter. Did you get a small Easter benefit in Food markets as well? I'll turn over to Stephen Harrison to. He's sitting here very relaxed, so I'll let him answer this one. No. We look at it in each of the businesses, Michael. The only impact was really in BIG W, just the timing of sort of some of the sell-in for Easter. No impact in our food businesses across either Australia or New Zealand that's worth calling out. Yep. Okay, great. Just the second one. It looks like tobacco sales decline has moderated for you, to be fair, it was a similar dynamic with Coles, as well. Can you just sort of talk to what you're seeing in that trend, please? It didn't actually, Michael. It was down 16%. Actually, Coles actually held share, grew a little bit of share. We continued our trendline downs based on our data. No, to the contrary, continues to decline in a very consistent fashion. Like I said, this was 1% more than we had experienced in the previous quarter. You know, no, it is obviously, you know, just need to reference it does impact the ASP, which I should have made the point earlier, just given you've got a $38 average item that's declining, it does change ASPs and how you think about them and a whole range of other metrics inside the business, including GP%. No, the trendline continues to be extremely material. Even more so, I would say just in New Zealand, by the way, so, both places. Thank you. Your next question comes from Lisa Deng with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Hi. Thank you for taking the follow-up. Just a question on the ACCC price establishment, sort of work we're doing. Last time we spoke, I think we were still trying to work with them on more clarity around, like, how long, what categories. Where are we with that, if you can maybe give us an update? For those categories where we are very, you know, we're very strict in following those rules, have we seen a pull away in terms of the price index versus our key competitors? Thanks. Lisa, there's not a lot I can add. For those of you not aware, is there a need to interpret price establishment in the context of the industry, as we said, you've got to make your own interpretations. For reasons that I think you would all accept, we take a very prudent approach to those interpretations. We're asking for a little bit more clarity or guidance, which would be helpful instead of having to make our own decisions in this context. I wouldn't want to over call it, Lisa. It's just part of doing business, and it's kind of an unusual issue that none of us have dealt with in recent times, including the ACCC, so we're all engaging pretty constructively. Thank you. Your next question comes from Craig Woolford with MST Marquee. Please go ahead. Hi, Brad. Yeah, just to follow up, you give us lots of information these days, which allows us to ask lots of questions. Just with regards to the digital growth, you have a figure that shows the amount of growth in digital traffic, which I think was up about 27%. Your online sales are up 8% in food and I think 5% across the group, which actually suggests a drop in conversion, but I'm sure that's not the case. Can you just explain what might be driving traffic growth to be much stronger than sales growth for e-com? Yeah. Thank you, Craig. Yeah, we can fix the first problem with the amount of information we give. No, don't do that. Well, all jokes aside, look, I mean, our customers start shopping us digitally, whether they finish the transaction in e-commerce or in a store, so it should trend ahead of e-commerce at all points in time. It's the way that customers are increasingly managing their overall relationship with us. You know, that's the difference. Digital is that thing, e-commerce is a thing, and so you need to really back your way out there. All I can tell you about digital, the digital engagement is improving. It's gotten more app-based, which is understandable given we're essentially are app store personal shopper. Nat and Tim working real hard to make sure that people use the app as well in the store and how they shop, and they can do running totals and they can find products, so it's as valuable in the store as it is in online. A huge investment, as you will see in the commentary there, into the various tools to help customers better manage the way they shop with us and also their budget. The ability to have a shopping list to see the price and cost of your shopping list, to be able to reorder from it, is really important. It creates a lot of value for our customers as well as for ourselves. The ability to use recipes, to use... As people go back to cooking at home and scratch cooking and meal shortcuts is a huge growth area. Our recipe engagement started to go up and ability to use that again to balance budgets, I think is becoming very valuable. You know, there's a lot of great engagement going on there, great tools that we invest in materially to help our customers manage their relationship with us. Numbers are in line with what we would like. We would expect and hope that we get more customer digital traffic than physical traffic, and that is happening. It's just not happening consistently right now. In some months we see that, and that's what we would expect to see. The biggest opportunity for us actually is in digital for BIG W. How we really continue to grow the digital traffic. It's meaningful, but we know we've got a long way to go. That's where we're trying to use things like MyDeal or Marketplace more broadly to give long tail engagement and the traffic benefit that we can get to the group. Right. Thanks, Brad. Thank you. Your next question comes from Bryan Raymond with JPMorgan. Please go ahead. Thanks for taking the follow-up. Just again, on the New Zealand and BIG W sort of guidance essentially that you provided at the H1, just wanted to check if they're both intact in terms of 2H 2023, if it's New Zealand above both H1 2023 and H2 2022, and then also, BIG W sort of full-year EBIT, you know, a 75%-80% H1 split of full-year EBIT. Is there any change to that given seems like it's been pretty eventful in both businesses over the past few months. No, thank you for taking our sales outlook and turn it into guidance Bryan. No, look. You know, if we had a material issue, we'd be called into that. You can see our trend lines. You know, we're working towards those. no change to those numbers? Yeah. We, we're not, you know, we're not getting into guidance on the call as you said. We, we're comfortable with where we sit right now and, you know, we'll continue to work hard. We've still got a, you know, we've still got a few weeks left and we've got two months left in the, in the quarter and the, and the financial year. We're not uncomfortable sitting right now. Great. Thanks. Thank you. Your next question comes from Ben Gilbert with Jarden. Please go ahead. Hi. Just one more from me and appreciate it's a sales call, but I'm trying to ask this anyway. Is everything seems super positive that you're saying around nix with respect to margin with own brand, weaker tobacco, operating leverage through the P&L. Has there been a lot of discussion around shrink or theft in the market, Brad, and some pretty big numbers being thrown around? I'm just wondering if I'm not looking for guidance or anything, but anything just we need to think about on the other side, particularly around that theft piece that could be a drag on margin? Yeah. Look, we're always cautiously optimistic but very nervous. This is a very challenging time. It's different to what we had through COVID, but value for money means we are continuing to have to be very focused on doing the right thing for our, for our customers. This is not an earnings call to your point. You know, we are very focused on working hard on the issue around stock loss. It has been elevated as we called out at the half, and we're continuing to work to make sure that we bring it down to where we need it to be in the long term. There is work to be done there. We're working on it. Even if I did have the nu... I do have the number, but I won't even if I share that, I'd be nervous to share it right now because coming out of Easter and then Anzac Day, you have a lot of times you close the store, so you end up with kind of weird numbers. But you know, it is an area of focus for us, as you might imagine. Great. Thank you. Thank you. That's all the time we have for our question and answer session. I'll now hand back to Mr. Banducci for closing remarks. Thank you everyone. I made a terrible faux pas in the media call 'cause I said happy Mother's Day for Sunday. Everyone pointed out it's Sunday in a week, in two weeks time. I'm obviously very organized for my mother. As always, thank you for shopping our business. The truth is in our stores. Sure we can open you to the, we'll invite you to the opening of the new Balmain store. We'll make sure that happens and help you shop it as well. The truth is in the stores, and look forward to speaking to you all soon. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.