Well, good morning, everyone. Thank Thank you for joining us for the Motorpoint Group Plc half year results for 2023, our financial year to 31st of March and our strategy update. This morning we're going to be looking at our half one results, which I'll take you through. Our CFO, Chris Morgan, also joins me. We'll be taking us through our financial results and ESG update, then he'll come back to me for a strategy update and outlook, then we'll take any questions. So just to clarify a little bit for those who don't know who we are, this is a beautiful photo of our new Coventry branch. Motorpoint is the U.K.'s leading omnichannel used car retailer. We only sell used cars. We only sell up to four years old and 30,000 mi. Currently, we're investing for significant and profitable long-term growth. Many areas of investment and our key targets are to grow our market share through building our brand and rolling out our footprint across the rest of the United Kingdom. Again, just a reminder who we are. We have two distinct channels. We have the retail half of our business, which is Motorpoint branded locations and also motorpoint.co.uk. Through that we sell the vehicles to the criteria mentioned earlier into consumers and also like commercial vehicles or vans, as we would call them. We have two businesses. The second part is Auction4Cars.com, which is a trade-only website. These are the vehicles that are above our criteria of four years old or 30,000 mi. We sell those into the wholesale market through an entirely online process. Our operating model is the Motorpoint virtuous circle. It's very important to us. This model has been with us since I joined the business and our three key stakeholders of employees, customers, and shareholders and how they interact. The way we explain this to all of our team, like many of the new starters in the business, is that our employees are most important to that stakeholder because if we get that bit right, the rest of it flows very well. Engaged employees, we've always been a best company to work for in The Sunday Times list. Engaged employees, I believe, provide dramatically better customer service. Those customers get great service and recommend and repeat purchase from us, which obviously pleases our shareholders. We create our share growth, that shareholder community then allows us to continue expanding the business across the rest of the U.K., creating promotion opportunities for our employees. In terms of some of the KPIs, we have had record turnover in the, in the period and further strong market share gains. As I said at the start, growing our market share is very important to us. Market is, has become smaller, due to various different factors, mainly around supply. It's important for us that we continue to grow our market share. In 0-4 market in Q3, our share rose to 3.7% from 2.9% in the same period last year, against 3.1% in all of FY 2022. We're obviously pleased with that. For those markets that are 30-minutes drive from a Motorpoint branch, you can see our share increase a lot, to 9.5% from 7.3% in the same period. That's mainly because we've got more market areas. We've got 19 now. We've opened five in the last year. That's part of our strategy to make sure that we are nearer to our customers. Typically, when we open in a market, or we put a branch in a market, it dramatically increases our brand awareness and our market share dramatically increases also. It's a very well-trodden path for us to open a branch, take market share and be successful. In terms of revenues, you can see they increased to GBP 786 million (Pound Sterling) from GBP 605 million (Pound Sterling) in the previous year. Pleasingly for us, our e-commerce revenue continued to grow up to GBP 350 million (Pound Sterling) and 1/2. As a unit, probably the part which we don't like is that despite a dramatically smaller market, we have also become slightly smaller. Our units have fallen to 49,000 from 53,000. Since the half year, the market's remained challenging. We expect that this will pick up at some point. Typically, in the used car market, you get a period of decline or a period of acceleration, and then it does tend to stabilize. I think we're probably seeing that, the beginnings of that now, and also the beginnings of the return of new car supply, which is encouraging for us. In terms of units sourced from consumers, the supply has been challenging, as everyone in the industry knows. We've continued to grow the amount of units we source from our consumers, now up to over 22% versus 15% in the previous period. Excuse me. In terms of our momentum continues, we, as we've said previously, we will continue to invest strategically. We will remain profitable, but we will continue to invest strategically. In a more challenging environment, we're aware that people would sometimes retreat from a strategy, but we do not intend to do that at the moment. We can see that it's working, the numbers back it up, that growing our footprint, growing our brand awareness leads to a big growth in market share, and that's the path that we are, we are following at the moment. As you can see, that does have an impact on profit. So much lower profits compared to the previous year. I would remind you the previous year was probably the most stellar trading conditions I've ever seen in the industry in 20 years, with values of cars, going up every single month. That GBP 3 million (Pound Sterling) would compare to probably a normal period in the past of maybe GBP 6 million (Pound Sterling)-GBP 7 million (Pound Sterling). We are investing a lot, but it is within a controlled environment, and it is within a variable environment that we can dial up or dial down as we see fit. Our customer acquisition costs have come down a little bit, so some of that marketing spend has started to work and making sure that we're being very efficient with our marketing spend is probably the more important thing to say. That has come down slightly, as has our days in stock at 50. Still too high for my liking, but we're working very hard on that to get that even lower. Chris will talk about cash shortly, but obviously we're pleased that we're in a cash positive position, which is very important in economic times as we're in now. Our facility of GBP 195 million (Pound Sterling) remains very substantial with a lot of headroom for us. Continue to be pleased with our customer NPS at 84%. I think anything over 80% is something we're happy with. They're Best Companies to Work For, I mentioned earlier, but that's the eighth year in a row that we've been in the top 100 which we're delighted with. As we did the investment, does increase our market share. We continue to grow the market share gains that we've had in the past. We continue to open in new markets. As I mentioned, five since the previous time we spoke in October 2021. We have 19 now, two of them opened in this half. They were in Coventry and Edinburgh. As I mentioned, we've got no structural debt with substantial headroom in our facilities. We have maintained our price leadership. That is a key aspect of our proposition is to be the price leader. That does obviously impact margin at times, but we think it's better to maintain price leadership. We are very confident that when someone does buy from us, from a Motorpoint store or Motorpoint online, they will not go anywhere else, and the vast majority of our customers do stay with us post their purchase. In terms of the investment, the key areas are the infrastructure, so the branch rollout, the technology, a dramatically bigger team and in the brand, and also the digital marketing capability within the business as well, which we'll talk about shortly. I think this is a slide that we put in 'cause I think this is really compelling. You know, for us to grow our market share in every single market, in the period, in both periods that we're looking at here is really encouraging for us. I think, you know, you can only control what's within your control. We cannot control the macro environment. We cannot control the affordability challenges that some of our customers will have with the cost of living crisis. What we can control is make sure we are the cheapest and that we take share in an environment. Motorpoint has always done very well. In situations like this, we tend to take share, we tend to hold on to that share when the market recovers. This is very much a play around investing now. As the market recovers, we will maintain and continue to grow that share and become a much, much bigger business in the future. In terms of the investments that we'll be making, our digital team is probably the biggest in-investment that we've made. Dramatic increase in the skill sets that we've had previously. And to be open, you know, we thought we were pretty digital in the past. I can assure you that we weren't, now that we are. That we really understand what this now means in terms of digital marketing. Bringing in-house those functionalities will lead to dramatic improvement in the long term, and also really has an impact on operating costs compared to using outside agencies. I think we will always seek to internalize core parts of the business, and we would not outsource that. That's really encouraging that we've now got a very strong team in that area, which we'll talk about later. In terms of product, we've now got a product-led approach to our engineering that is leading to dramatically faster capability in terms of changing the website or changing something else within the engineering community. That connectivity that we have between the product owners and the engineers working in partnership and really focusing on what is the stuff that we need to get done that makes the biggest difference to Motorpoint. We'll come to that shortly as well. In terms of the opportunities to increase sales through the product, that's what the team are focused on by improving the customer experience. Give some examples of that shortly. Also generating business efficiency, so things like self-serve a customer, making sure that that is very easy to use and then driving customers to use that, which reduces the requirement for us to have people waiting for customers to come in because most of the work's being done by the customer when they arrive to collect their vehicle. As I mentioned, the reduction in development times due to that partnering with the engineering teams, and also the development of new site features and functionality. Now looking to really make that seamless journey between a customer being online and offline. Almost all of our customers, no matter which way they buy, do visit our website for one reason or another, and it's very, very important for us that that feels very seamless to the customer, rather than two separate businesses. In terms of content and design, we have also recruited a content team, and that they will be making videos and putting lots of written content on. That obviously drives our search engine optimization. In terms of UI and UX, we've recruited those teams internally as well to test and enhance the customer experience. All of these teams sit under our new Chief Digital Officer, Andrew Thomson, who is making great progress with us and making us sound like we know what we're talking about on some of those things. In terms of digital marketing, key activities we've done so far, the paid marketing platform, so Google, et cetera, with linking that with the business MI. Looking at smarter targeting, reducing wastage. You can blow an absolute fortune on Google Pay, as I'm sure you're aware, and it's important for us that that is an efficient spend and a controlled spend. The SEO strategy that we have in place with the new SEO team and the content will drive significant long-term organic search growth. The team are providing brand awareness support, as an example, with our new marketing campaign that launches on Christmas Day. The team are obviously supporting that as well through our digital capability. We've also continued to improve our CRM to make sure that we can personalize as much as we can, and we've increased the amount of contacts we make with customers which have been very good in terms of the success that we've had with creating demand and creating inquiries from customers. Going forward, we need to continue working hard in this area, reducing the reliance on the paid media and replacing with organic traffic is important. We always rather it be organic rather than paid, and increasing our content and production quality. I think that is a good opportunity for us to build real trust with customers. Of course, we will target our spend on the relevant keywords and search terms to make sure that we get the right results for those. Just some screen grabs of our website. You can see that we've replaced our new header and footer. Really has a premium look now, much dramatically improved performance as well, which is where the vast majority of our traffic is. We've also replaced our homepage, so much more look into a lifestyle approach to inspire customers to see what the vehicles can do in terms of their lifestyle. We believe that's an important thing for customers. We've also improved the navigation, and we've enhanced the content as well. In terms of the information we have available, we now provide EV data, which is still something that people don't really think about. You do not need to show miles per gallon with an electric vehicle. We show MOT histories and the number of keys that we have for that vehicle. Giving as much information as we can to customers, being as transparent as we can for customers, reduces the inbound inquiries from customers about a vehicle because we provided all of the information to the customer. That helps the efficiency of the transaction from a customer perspective. Also a better visibility on the website now of our proposition. To test drive, to reserve a vehicle, we offer nationwide transfers of vehicles, and we also offer home delivery. Making sure that they are all very visible as a, as a conversion point on the, on the website has been important. As I mentioned earlier, some improved sort and filter options to make sure customers can get to the product they're looking for more quickly. You can see the product delivery continues here with a new screen. You can see the introduction on the left of a, of a money-off proposition. Obviously we do reduce the price of cars over time if they, if they haven't sold. We've never really told customers that that car is now a thousand times cheaper than it was, and that is something that we've now introduced. That's been a pretty recent development. It also include in things like wish list and vehicle comparison tools. As you can see on the right, an improved image gallery, which really helps the customer in terms of the desirability of the product. There's more to come on that in the next couple of months also. In terms of the availability of vehicles, we will be now far more open with customers as to when is that vehicle actually available rather than in the past, customers have bought the vehicle and then found out when they could buy it, so collect it, sorry, they could collect the vehicle. Again, upfront, giving the customer as much information as possible. We've also improved the checkout journey. It's very different now if you're buying or reserving, so to again, give customers more clarity. We've also upgraded our finance banner, which is shown at the bottom to make sure the customer is petitioned in the full details of the vehicle if you were to take our finance. As I mentioned on the slide earlier, we have achieved market share growth in every market. You can see the five locations we've opened recently in the top left, and we will be targeting a national share within 30 minutes of 10% at maturity. All of those branches can get that in our opinion. We have lots of market areas identified. Whether we believe they're all economical or not is another matter as we come closer to the turning point. We certainly will have more than 19 locations across the U.K. As I said earlier, our market share growth, when we put a footprint into a market, is very proven. We've done it 19 x now. We've never not taken share when we've opened a branch. Therefore, you know, we can be convinced that when we go into market, we win. That's very important for us in terms of making the investment decisions as valid as possible going forward. It's very important that we get that experience of opening branches and taking share into the investment community. As you can see, our investment in brand drives market share gains. This is a summary slide from previous, but this also shows the linkage between our the higher the brand awareness, typically, the higher the market share in that market as well. That's just by a cohort of openings. As you can see, the strong correlation between markets, brand awareness and market share. A few customer comments for you to read there. I think the key thing on this slide is that Autotrader, obviously the leading used car platform in the country, in terms of being the most cars on there, they do grade a vehicle based on the price, whether it's low, great, good or not good, which, I forget the name that they use, but it's basically a higher price than you'd expect to pay. 99.9% of our stock is in one of those sort of best-in-class categories for pricing. Something we are passionate about, and it just validates our proposition on price leadership. Just a few examples for you. I know everybody likes to see these slides. You can compare various different competitors there. We have Arnold Clark, a traditional main dealer, which is Hartwell Group, as well in the middle, and Cazoo online only. As you can see, we are always cheaper. We've got a very strong proposition. Our APR is 9.9%. At the moment, some lots of dealers have gone to 10.9%, 11.9%, 12.9%, and even more in the independent sector. We are still holding at 9.9%. For now, having increased it recently from 8.9%. Good savings there on customers for relatively similar cars. Our NPS growth is something in terms of our proposition, you know, continues to grow and make sure that we get to a good position on that. I think 84% is probably as high as we would want to see it, frankly. I think you can buy your way towards 100% if you want to. You know, we need to make sure that we're not giving too much value to customers in terms of a if there's a slight issue with the car or something the customer's not happy about, you know, we want to get genuine feedback rather than get a higher and higher and higher NPS score. We want to know exactly what our customers think. I think as long as it stays around 80%, I'm happy. I hand you over to Chris now for our financial highlights and ESG update. Thanks, Mark. Yep. Good morning, everybody. Hopefully you can hear me. In case if you, I mean, the headline now and Mark has waited back on you know, really pleasing return to cash surplus in the half, when we talked about market positions and investments. If you just go onto the next slide, please. Again, picked up on some of these, you know, strong growth in the revenue, you know, what is particularly pleasing is the market share up to 3.7% from 2.9%. The gross profit as climb we'll come back to the P&L in a second to look through that and obviously the PBT. ROCE has dropped from 51 to slightly over 40, which is still relatively high. You know, clearly that's been impacted by the profitability of the business. If we just quickly look at the operating results. You know, as Mark mentioned, and we all know, you know, the business is really split into two. You've got retail, which is sold via branches, call center or our digital channels online. You've got the wholesale platform, which is Auction4Cars.com, which go direct to dealerships. If we take retail first, you can see record revenues. Revenue from retail customers is up by 28%, and selling 32,000 vehicles. Roughly about 34% of those were sold online. Interestingly, what we are seeing is that we're not seeing an increase really in customers sort of moving from the branch to the online experience ultimately in terms of how they buy a car. I think, you know, that sort of reinforces the omnichannel model is the right way to go and to make sure that all the touch points with the customer, whether it be through the website or the branch experience or somewhere in between, make sure that we've got the best possible experience for customers. We'll continue to work through that. Margins, retail margins did drop. You know, as Mark mentioned before, they were stellar performance last year in the first half. They dropped to 6.6%. You know, it's again, price leadership is absolutely key for us. You know, we're very keen that we offer the best value to customers, whether it be in prices of vehicles or indeed finance. Off the back of that, you know, we held our APR rates in the second half of the quarter to make sure we're giving best value to customers, but that did impact profitability. We believe was the right thing to do. Finance per vehicle sold improved significantly. That was partly because of the increased prices for customers on cars because of the inflation. Importantly, penetration continues to increase. Penetration in September was around about 57%. Quite a few percentage points from what we're seeing historically. As Mark mentioned, again, you know, our APR rates are competitive and will continue to be so. Descending through to wholesale. This is Auction4Cars.com. This is either cars that we purchased directly from consumers through the Sell Your Car channel, or indeed part exchange customers. Around about 17,500 vehicles were sold by this purely online platform. Gross margins did weaken somewhat to 4%. However, it was built pretty much again with the two halves in the first half of the year, where we saw that the margins did strengthen in the second half as we went through August, September, to roughly sort of around about GBP 200 (Pound Sterling) a car, which is more normal going forward. Seeing that sort of come through. That's good performance there. Looking at operating expenses, you can see the operating expenses grew roughly about 6%. Within that, there's a lot obviously going on. There's firstly, it's about GBP 3.5 million (Pound Sterling) of incremental investment costs. That's in relation to the new branches, but also the digital and technology offering again, which Mark mentioned. Despite new branches and growth of the digital marketing team, the an overall headcount did actually reduce around about 8%. Again, you know, we've got a strong focus in terms of efficiency, whether it be in branch preparation or indeed the head office. Energy costs, obviously, that's a sort of a headline for a number of businesses currently. So energy costs, we actually fixed the prices for the current portfolio just over a year ago, which is clearly the right thing to do as it turned out. You know, the really good news is that from a like-for-like energy usage perspective, so if we look at the same branches to what we had a year ago, then actually usage is down 12.5%. The water, just quickly on interest, you can see that interest has jumped quite strongly from GBP 1.6 million (Pound Sterling) to GBP 2.9 million (Pound Sterling). We're no surprise, but clearly we expect that, you know, that growth to continue in the second half in relation to the interest costs. That can be expected. That's what ultimately overall we saw the PBT down to GBP 3 million (Pound Sterling). Okay, Mark, if you jump over to the balance sheet. From a balance sheet perspective, yeah, very pleased from a cash perspective in terms of how the cash improved from a debt position at year-end through to a positive. That's really around about the working capital control, not least around the inventories. You can see the inventories have fallen from year-end from GBP 228 million (Pound Sterling) to GBP 286 million (Pound Sterling). Again, you know, that does reflect sort of tight control and, you know, we feel as particularly as we now move into the busy Christmas, post-Christmas trading period, that we've got the right levels of inventories for the business. You can see the cash there was at GBP 4.5 (Pound Sterling). I'll come on to the, in terms of the cash, in a second. We spent about GBP 5.5 million (Pound Sterling) on CapEx, and that was primarily with the new branches, Edinburgh, Coventry. We did a significant refit at Newport, which looks great by the way. Also a million, GBP 1.4 million (Pound Sterling) on intangible costs, really around website and software development, which links in with the digital investments that we talked about earlier. Stock days, around about 50. As Mark said before, we wanna get that into somewhere in the 40s. That continues to be a focus. Then lease liabilities increased, but that obviously reflects the additional leases. Just finally on that, you can see the right of, within the right of use assets and the assets held for sale. At year-end we had GBP 9.2 million (Pound Sterling), and that related to the Stockton-on-Tees branch and the Peterborough prep center, which were earmarked for sale and lease back, and those successfully went through, realizing about GBP 9.7 million (Pound Sterling) of cash proceeds in the first half. They were sold and moved on at pretty much no gain, no loss. Mark, if we move on to the cash movement. You can see we exited year-end at GBP 21.2 million (Pound Sterling) of debt. That's the opening cash and RCF number on the far left. That primarily included the RCF, which is fully drawn down at GBP 29 million (Pound Sterling). As we mentioned at year-end, that was really around the timing of the availability of the stocking finance facilities, and then using that to fund the stock. We were able to use the stocking facility in the first quarter, and you can see the GBP 20.4 (Pound Sterling), the stock net financing facilities. That reflects the fact that we're able to convert the RCF into the financing, the stock financing facility, which is what it's there for. The other big move is the GBP 9.7 (Pound Sterling). That was the sale and lease back transactions that I mentioned before. Yeah. Much happier from a cash perspective and a real focus both in terms of working capital and stock management. Okay, next slide please. Just moving on to ESG. I mean, I think it's, you know, with, you know, the challenges that we have in the industry and some of the macro headwinds that, you know, we've spoken about, you know, it's quite easy to overlook some of these factors. You know, this is really, really important for us as a business, not just now, but going forward. We wanna be viewed as the most environmentally friendly used car retailer. As we mentioned at year-end, we've got a ESG Board Committee set up, those have now been meeting and operating very successfully. We purchased carbon credits to offset the first year of customer driving emissions. From an EV perspective, we've already sold as many EVs in the first half of this year as we did in the whole of FY 2022. Obviously to be expected, it's really important that we can make sure we get the communication clear to customers. Mark showed one of the screen grabs earlier about performance of EVs, we've worked hard on that. We're pleased with the EV performance. Mentioned energy usage down 12.5% on a like-to-like basis, even despite the new branches, down overall. We're carbon neutral, Scope 1 and 2 emissions, we're working hard on Scope 3 emissions. We'll be announcing more developments on that when we do our year end. Zero waste to landfill. Again, successful. On the right-hand side, more areas about the governance. Talk about onboarding, talking about cyber attack resilience rolled out, we've got stronger defense measures in those areas. Improved business continuity plans, you know, real living wage employer. Again, we're looking at employees in that bracket going forward to how we can best support them in difficult times. Okay. I think that's my slides. I think I'll hand you back to Mark. Thanks, Chris. We'll just go back to our strategic update. Really happy with the progress that we've made on our strategic targets. As I said at the start, you know, we are continuing to invest despite the current macro headwinds, mainly because we can see that it's working and therefore we intend to continue. In terms of particular progress, we have grown our market share, which we've mentioned several times already. We've opened five branches. We have a customer acquisition channel called Sell Your Car. We continue to invest in that digital capability, and our efficiency activity is improving our KPIs. That's another part of the benefit of technology investment, is that we're becoming a leaner business going forward. Despite the challenging headwinds, we have, you know, lots of things that are making life a bit more difficult. New car registrations remain very subdued. That obviously impacts new vehicle supply, so that we have remaining shortages right now. We are expecting 2023 to be a much, much better year in terms of supply for new vehicles. Clearly, we need to manage carefully the impact that has on our, on the value of our used vehicles. We will be the first beneficiaries in the used car space of those new supply channels becoming more open, as the supply eases. There is a reduction in the market size, which we talked about, which is causing us to have to work much harder to grow our share. We've seen obviously unprecedented vehicle inflation in the period, cars sitting still 40%-45% more expensive than they were pre-pandemic, on average. That cost inflation is something we're grappling with like every other business. Customer affordability challenges continue to be an issue as well going forward. We've got to be very careful with how we price our vehicles. That price leadership should allow us to be relatively insulated from that. Obviously, we've got a much more diverse competitor set with the huge investment from the online players in the market. Despite all of that, I think the important thing is for us that we continue to roll out new branches and continue to take market share, which, I think we'd all agree is a good result given those macro headwinds. In terms of our e-commerce capability, something we talk a lot about, I mentioned our Chief Digital Officer earlier. We've also appointed a Technology Advisor to the Board, and we expect our new CTO to join in early 2023. That's taken a long time. But we know who we want, and we're waiting patiently, and we think we've got that person now, so they should be joining in early 2023. In terms of the capability, in technology, that continues to build. As I mentioned, the focus on product and engineering working together is really important, and we continue to build our data science capability, and that is increasingly driving business decisions with some oversight from humans. We think that that's the balance that we've seen. We've tried data science alone, and we've tried human alone. We think the best answer is to merge the two. In terms of generic paid search bids, that is something that you can automate, that is informed by a lead score based on success of previous campaigns and what volumes they lead to. Obviously, we are continuing to increase our email communications with the digital activity. Customers are getting more personalized, more frequent email communications, which is leading to an increase in sales through that channel, which we're delighted with. Another thing, we have a store in Manchester, and we've actually converted part of that store to be a Technology Hub. There's a lot of talent in Manchester in the digital space. I think that's important recognition from us that if we want the best talent, we need to be in the best market. We've created a Technology Hub within our Manchester branch, and that team, because a lot of people are based around there, they can go in and collaborate in that space, and that will help to attract the best talent in the country. Continuing our investment into that technology, data, e-commerce capability will accelerate the future growth. I think we've not seen much benefit of this yet in terms of what it will bring in the long term, but we continue to build that capability and that will be very, very powerful for us going forward. In terms of our customer acquisition and retention, we have five new markets as we talked about. We do have more opportunities in the pipeline. Nothing concrete yet, but some coming. We know that new branches accelerate the market share and that price leadership combined with that delivers significant market outperformance, which is why we continue to grow our market share. We do continue to also allow our customers as much range and as much choice as possible from our products. Our unique mix is over 80%, which means 80% of our product is individually make, model, color. Our EVs, as Chris mentioned, continue to grow. As that supply comes into the used car space, again, we will see it first because we are the key operator in the zero to four, we get the new technologies first. We've also introduced as well as an ESG board, a customer board. Something I felt that we needed to do was to really focus in a dedicated session on customer experience and KPIs, and that's now up and running, and we'll focus on driving those improvements. We also have a product underway with our entire company on how Motorpoint will operate in the future. It's the Motorpoint of the future project. It involves everybody across the business with all of the ideas that they may have. The goals are for us to give the best service to our customers, to have a seamless website and branch experience, making sure that our people are rewarded to drive market share growth, and in essence, how can we be the best at what we do in every single aspect. In addition, just finally, we have a new brand advertising campaign launching on Christmas Day. Again, that's another step up for us working with a new partner in that area and something we're very excited about. Maybe you can tune in on Christmas Day to watch it. Just to summarize on that, we are creating a truly omnichannel experience for our customers, and that seamless is the word that we really tend to use a lot internally, but we don't want customers to feel the difference when they are online than when they come into store. We want to connect those journeys as far as possible. In terms of Auction4Cars.com, so in terms of wholesale, Sell Your Car obviously creates supply for Motorpoint, but also for Auction4Cars.com. That's a part of the business where there's no admin fees or payment fees. We do stand on our bid. The payment's made whilst the customer's in the store, and it lands in their bank account, which always customers seem to be very impressed with. We continue to source more in the half than we did in the entire last financial year, vehicles sourced from customers, and you can see some of the stats there. Where the customer car is over our criteria, then we sell that vehicle through Auction4Cars.com. We've also continued to expand our home delivery and collection fleet. We have our own trucks now and our own drivers, making sure that we can be as agile as possible in terms of doing those things. I mentioned operational efficiency, technology and innovation. There's a few points on this slide to just show that that technology investment is not all about having a better website. We have seen dramatic improvements in efficiency across our branch preparation and back office functions so that the system's been upgraded, the system's been automated, and that has supported some headcount reduction. Despite the increases in the digital capability, we do have less people. An ongoing review of what is left as processes that can be automated is continuing. As an example, we have upgraded our quality control app, which has taken the time to prepare a car down 11%. In terms of the technology and innovation, this is around customer self-serve. You know, what information do we need? How quickly can we do it? Some of the processes were probably quite clunky, which we probably didn't realize until we get technologists involved. That has allowed us to improve and automate quite a few of our processes. Like I said, there's more to go, that has reduced our branch like for like headcount down by 16% following our automation and customer self-serve, so something we're very pleased about. We have a company-wide procurement review launch, so I think it's a drains up period when the macroeconomic times are tougher than we would all like. It is an important function to go through and make sure that everything that we're spending is justified, valid and is great value for the business coming forward. Excuse me. As well as those website enhancements I've talked about, our other projects around this include, and technology include the Salesforce and CRM being increased in capability. We've refreshed all of our IT hardware across the business. We've upgraded all our networks, so we're faster and slicker as a business, and we've also launched a new collaboration platform, which is basically new telephony system, which has a lot of capability going forward in terms of things like chat and AI capability as well. That will all lead to enhanced customer experience. Just in terms of outlook, I think we've said this so many times in the past, it is important. Price leadership, we believe is absolutely vital, especially in times like we're approaching and in right now. We continue to offer the best value for our customers. We believe value wins in the long term, but value should win even quicker in a environment where customer affordability is challenged. We obviously have the macro challenges of inflation, rising interest rates and consumer uncertainty, as well as vehicle supply challenges which are unique to our sector. All of these have obviously contributed to impacted and impacting used car demand. In terms of macro factors, we see that those will continue well into next year. Like I said earlier, that it does tend to stabilize. We, we're not really seeing it stabilize right now, but used cars normally do suffer less in a downturn than new cars. It'll be very interesting to see what the size of the new car market will be going forward, particularly our zero to four, which we believe will be just around 2 million units a year when the market recovers. We do have a strong track record of demonstrating that resilience. We've never lost money. We've always made a profit. As we've said previously, we are continuing to invest. Our only goal is to remain profitable. In the long term, we think that that will lead to dramatically higher long-term profits than we would have otherwise achieved if we'd not embarked on this strategic journey. We do see profits being lower in the short term compared to the previous long-term averages as we continue to execute on these investments. In the future, the business will be a leaner business. Technology will create that efficiency, and our lower non-strategic costs will give us a very lean operator model that will lead to substantially increased profits as we move forward. That's all from me. I think now we'll hand you over to Alex, and then we'll take questions. Many thanks, gentlemen. Those in the audience, if you could please raise your virtual hand, so I can then take you off mute to ask your question. Your first question today comes from Sanjay Vidyarthi at Liberum. Sanjay, if you'd take yourself off mute, please go ahead. Morning, Mark. Hope you're doing okay. Morning, Chris. This is a slightly convoluted question, but I was interested in your comment about NPS scores and not wanting to take them too far above or, you know, keep them around 80% rather than going too far above that. I can see the kind of from a perspective of investing in price, there's probably a very clear correlation between how much you invest in price and how much market share you can take. If we follow that through with investment in digital and omnichannel, do you look at it as an absolute vision of excellence that you want to achieve? Again, there's an element of relativity in that you don't wanna go too far with it. Because the competition is actually lagging quite a long way behind you, and therefore, the incremental market share benefit isn't necessarily that much. How do you think about it? Is there an absolute vision? Do you look at someone in the U.S. or, you know, how do you think about the pace at which you need to stay ahead on digital? I think it comes down to making sure the NPS comment is, I think if I said to my team right now, "I want NPS to be 95%," you know, one of the ways you can get there is by giving customers more in terms of the sort of if there's a slight issue with the vehicle or there's something, you know, you give the customer GBP 500 (Pound Sterling) compensation or something like that to make sure the customer remains happy. It is not what we want to do. You know, we wanna make sure that we get the customer experience to be genuinely that good, rather than, you know, it's 95% because we bought our way to 95%. In addition, you can incentivize teams too much to go for that score. You know, then you probably get employees asking for scores, which is not what we want either. I've seen that in the past in the industry, not with us, but I have seen it in the past on certain, you know, manufacturer scores and things where the only thing that the employee cares about is to get a score rather than giving a great experience. That's what the comment is based on. In terms of the digital capability, it's all about being absolutely the best in class. It is about making sure that our investment is yielding those results. Market share, we want it to be as high as it possibly can be. I think that the price leadership and the technology integration and the market share growth are very interlinked and making sure that we continue to run as fast as we can. If we're ahead, we wanna pull away. If we're not ahead, we wanna catch people up. I think that we're certainly not the best in class across all parts of our business. Others do things, whether it's in the U.S. or the U.K., that we admire. You know, we're very open-minded on what other people do and how they do it, and why do we not do it that way, or why are they better than us in that area. Yeah, we will continue to invest in that journey. Not sure whether that answers your question, Sanjay. No, I think it does. There is still, you know, in terms of being best in class and benchmarking yourself against others, there's areas where, there's scope from improvement, hence it's still worth making the investment. Well- Even though there's probably a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of, you know, a lot of independents, a lot of car supermarkets that are probably not doing very well at the moment and haven't got the capability to invest in technology at all. No, I agree. I think, yeah, there's definitely share dramatically being lost by some somewhere. Because, you know, if you take Cazoo, Cinch, and us all growing our share dramatically, then someone is hurting somewhere, and it's very hard always to work out who that is or where that is. Yeah, we think there's tons of stuff where we continue to, y ou know, we've got it on the roadmap, we've got it on various things to make sure we do execute. Over the next couple of years, as we continue to build that capability, you know, an awful lot of what we've talked about in terms of people and capability being internalized on this presentation, they've barely got their feet under the table. You know, we've not really yielded any significant results from most of those teams yet because they've just joined in the past sort of six to 12 months. As we go forward now, I think there's a huge amount that we'll continue to achieve. If you were to come into our head office, you know, historically, we would have been a business that looked and felt very much like a car dealer. We probably look more like a technology company now with the people that we've recruited and where they've been recruited from. There's still a, an old-fashioned car dealer at the heart of us, believe me. You know, it's important that we've got those modern technology people into the business to help us to be a winner in that. I think the capability we're building is super exciting. You know, we've pretty much transformed the business from where we were two or three years ago, to be honest. Understood. Thank you very much. Just one follow-up, if I can. In terms of supply side of things, I know obviously you're going direct to consumer, but are there any other new areas that you've been exploring? Well, not really. The supply is always where's the car. The car's either with a manufacturer, a finance company, an auction house, or the customer. You know, there's not really many other challenge avenues you can go down. We're always looking to source vehicles wherever they are. I think sometimes it's about how economically can you source them rather than whether you can source them or not. We definitely have seen some lift in new car supply. I think new car demand has come off in the same way that you're seeing in terms of the used car market shrinking. That new car demand coming off is an interesting thing because, you know, as supply eases and new car demand isn't quite there, excuse me, then, some of those new cars will probably find their way into the secondary market, which would be us. We are, you know, excited about 2023 and what that could bring in terms of finally starting to see some fleet product come through or some nearly new, genuinely nearly new. You know, sort of six months and under vehicles come onto the market, and that'd be a great thing for us, I think. Okay. Understood. Thanks very much. Thanks. Thanks, Sanjay. Our next question comes from George Pilakoutas at Numis. George, if you take yourself off mute, please go ahead. Thanks, morning team. First one, kind of another fairly high-level one. We've kind of seen the Carvanas and the Cazoos, and market kind of seems to be taking a view that things got slightly overengineered perhaps in some areas and in elements of the proposition having to be taken out. I guess just interested how that is changing your approach to investment into that proposition. As you're trying to scale further investment, particularly in some of those digital areas, just how you're able to keep tabs on continuing to generate the healthy returns that you have done so far. Maybe that was the first one, and then I do have a few others. Yeah, I think so in terms of capability, probably a year ago, I may have said that we need 50 or 100 home delivery trucks, by this time this year. That actually has really unwound in terms of what customers' behaviors have changed. If they've actually changed very rapidly in the last six months to home delivery not being anywhere near as important, as it seemed to be post coming out of COVID. Capability wise, you know, there are investment areas where you thought you would be spending a lot more, that now looks like maybe you don't need to spend that. We're quite fortunate that we haven't dramatically scaled in any area where now the behaviors look like they're changing. I think there is no doubt that customers will want that omnichannel experience. You know, the key thing that's been static throughout this period is there are some customers who are willing to do more of the journey online than others. Most customers do want to come to the store to collect the vehicle. As I said, you know, we offer free home delivery to customers, but that has declined as a percentage of sales over the past six months as I think, I don't know this for definite, but it feels to me like customers are far more cautious, and they don't want a home delivery vehicle if they're not sure about it. We're seeing customers, you know, being only really committing to vehicles that they're very confident about. Maybe some of those passive customers who are not really that sure as to whether they want the vehicle or not, they're now coming into store rather than buying online and having home delivery. I think there's an element of cautiousness around customer. I think all the other things, you know, in terms of technology, if it isn't driving sales or it isn't driving efficiency and productivity to make us leaner, we won't be doing it. That's really interesting. Thanks for that. Maybe a shorter one is just kind of managing that growth versus profitability and how you think about what is kind of a minimum level of return that you want to be achieving. What are some of the levers that you can pull to ensure that, let's say we're in the environment to worsen? I think, you know, we want to remain profitable. But what we don't want to do is to get to a period and decide that we can't do this or we can't do that because we've committed to a profit number, so we don't comment on profitability. I think it's important for us that we have that freedom to invest if we think it's the right thing to do rather than to not invest in order to hit a profit number. We've said we will remain profitable in the period. We still believe that's the case. Clearly, quarter one next year, calendar quarter one is our final quarter, which is always a very important trading quarter for us in terms of how the profits are generated in the business. Excuse me. That's the sort of minimum level of return for us is to be profitable. However, we want to make sure that the business is continuing to invest wisely. We have not committed to significant fixed cost basis. You know, we can vary the cost base down. We're not into long-term marketing contracts or other. Clearly, the biggest fixed cost we've got is people and property. You know, clearly both of those are more fixed than whether you put an ad out or not. We are trying to make sure that we're being very careful around the cost that we incur is how do we get out of it if it's something that we that we may need to get out of. We're trying to make sure that things are as variable as possible going forward. On the kind of site cohort charts, I mean, I guess really encouraging to see market share growing for some of the larger, more mature sites. To kind of really my questions are more on some of those more immature sites or some of the newer sites even opened subsequently and just how they're trending. Are they delivering the returns that you thought they would? Are they having a similar maturity curve to historic sites? Anything interesting that you've seen there, and does it change your ambition going forward for new sites? Yes. I think we opened a couple of sites which were much smaller footprint, particularly the ones in the Southeast. They, you know, they are gonna take a lot longer, I think, to get, you know, with a 50-car display compared to a 250-car display, you are gonna take longer to build the market share to a point where we're happy. Sometimes some of those stores may relocate to a bigger store once we've got an established base in that market, and we've got the demand for more. I think the only surprising thing for us is that some of the new stores are more online than in branch than our existing stores. When we open in a new market, the customer base tends to be about 50/50 online versus in store. That does tell us how many cars we need on display or how we need to staff it. You know, those new stores are dramatically smaller in headcount than the other ones because more of the content is online. They are also, of course, handover points and home delivery bases. Making sure that we get those stores up and running is important. The two latest ones in Coventry and Edinburgh, they are more like an older Motorpoint store in that they've got 200-ish cars on display, and they are trending much better than something like Portsmouth, which, you know, is a 50-car display. We'd be very happy with the Coventry and Edinburgh openings. The ones in the Southeast are obviously a bit harder to judge because they are smaller footprint. Therefore, you know, they're not gonna go and get the market share that a big store like a Burnley or an Newport would have. Great. Last one for me is just on competition and I guess you're continuing to invest. I'm guessing most others aren't. Are you able to start seeing differences? Other people, like you kind of touched on APR is going pretty high in some areas. Is there any other kind of anecdotal evidence of peers struggling? Well, I think, you know, I'm not as annoyed now when I've got the TV or the radio on because lots of other people are no longer on TV and radio every three seconds. I think there's definitely an easing up of the sort of onslaught that was out there this time last year. That is encouraging for us. That it doesn't really matter which those are, whether it's a retailer or a vehicle acquisition service. You know, that cannot be a bad thing for us that others are not out there and we are out there. It probably levels the playing field a bit more than it would've done in the past, where it was very skewed to those startups in particular that had lots of cash. Super. Thanks very much. Thanks, George. Thanks, George. Our next question comes from Mike Allen from Zeus. Mike, if you take yourself off mute, please go ahead. Morning, guys. A quick one for me just on ESG, if you wouldn't mind. I guess you said that you've done Scope 1 and 2, which is great. Just assuming that's done via carbon credits, what you'd expect, you know, the% of EV cars being sold, what you know, what that is this year and what you'd expect that to grow to. A follow-up on that is just kind of timing on Scope 3. Assume it will take a lot longer, but is that an objective for next year, or would it take a bit longer than that? Yeah. Do you want me to pick this up, Chris? Yeah. Hi, Mike. Just picking up on those points. Scope 1 and 2 emissions, you're right. They are purchased carbon credits, and that it's not, it's not a huge cost. The much bigger cost for us is around the carbon credits for the first year of customer emissions. That is quite a chunky outlay. We're looking at that. Now, clearly, over time, that will reduce because of the EV element. We'd expect that to come down over time. But at the moment, it is a fairly big outlay, which we'll continue with. Just going back to the second point, going forward and Scope 3. We're working really hard looking at that. I think there's 15 things. We're just working out which ones are relevant for most part. There's about eight of those sort of key objectives. Clearly it's just, you know, in terms of the supply chain, the transportation, all that side of things, it's fairly big numbers in there. We're looking through on those. We will be giving an update in our annual report and accounts on those Scope 3, but we are taking those seriously as well. Okay. Thank you. Thanks, Mike. Our next question comes from Clive Black at Shore Capital. Clive, if you take yourself off mute, please go ahead. Yeah. Good morning, guys. Thanks for the presentation and, sorry to hear you're not so well, Mark. Two questions. Firstly, could you just say where you think Auctions4Cars is in your strategic progress? It was an important part of, you know, the overall activity level in the market and how you feel about that in the next year or so. Secondly, you know, this is a presentation where technology is being used as a word like never before, showing the development of the business. What do you see the main outputs from that hub in Manchester being for Motorpoint? Thank you. Hi, Clive. In terms of Auction4Cars.com, I think that's one of the areas where we talked earlier about, you know, do you keep investing in certain things when you think there's other things that could be better done? In terms of Auction4Cars.com becoming a wholesale platform, we've paused that as a project in terms of the investment required to get that to a point. What we're focused on more now is to increase the customer base of Auction4Cars.com by ensuring that we can grow the amount of people buying the cars there. We felt that if we did introduce other vendors' stock onto there at the moment, then it would probably be damaging for us as a business, given the level of customer base we've got. We've switched that strategy to grow the customer base first and then leverage the capability that we've built. It's not fully complete, but it is there. It'll be on a sort of a smaller scale than we maybe would have anticipated in the past. It's still an important part of the business. You know, it's the vehicles that we buy through Sell Your Car in particular provides a good output channel for those, and we see that as being a very good part for us. We will continue to generate more stock for that part of the business and to sell it. Probably the new vendor, or adding other vendors to sell their cars in there is not as much of a priority at the moment. In terms of technology, I think the key outputs, as I said, you know, the mantra that we've used very, very much at the moment, if it doesn't sell us more cars or it doesn't make us more efficient, why are we doing it? That's something that technology applies to as well in terms of, you know, if it's not increasing the customer experience, if it's not giving us faster, more efficient tools, or it's not leveraging data and data science capabilities in the business to make better decisions, then they are the three key areas that we do it. If it's not doing that, then we shouldn't be doing it. In terms of clear outputs from Manchester, you know, given you've got that new investment and a new subculture there, are there one or two things you're saying if you're talking back to us in three years' time, this was the output of that? Yeah. Sorry I didn't answer that bit. The key thing is recruitment, in that, you know, when you say you're based in Derby and people think they have to trek to Derby from Manchester, you know, three days a week or four days a week to collaborate with their team, then that's more of a challenge. Therefore, we thought that we can put quite a lot of the people that we've already recruited, are living in the Manchester area. Then these guys, we don't really need them all to drive to Derby in order to be able to collaborate. We've created that space. We think it'll be good for the existing team that we have recruited, all of whom have pretty much joined in the last 12 months. Also it'll be good for new recruits as well, to see that they've got a base nearby. I think what's happening now is the work from home concept is fine for some people. We've got quite a few people who say, "Well, I want to be able to come in regularly to collaborate rather than just, you know, once every once in a month. Yeah. Okay. Thank you very much, guys. Keep well. Thanks. Thanks, Clive. Our next question comes from Darren Shirley, also at Shore. Darren, if you can take yourself off mute, please go ahead. Yeah. Morning, morning, gents. Just to house Clive's comment on the better, Mark. With the site maybe being a bit more important than you would anticipate maybe 12-18 months ago, you commentary around being particularly pleased with the performance of the larger sites you've opened recently, does that change your thinking in terms of the rest of the pipeline to get to that 24? Are you maybe looking for something a bit more different than you were when you first started the strategy? Just to follow up on that, I mean, how are you seeing in terms of site availability as other people struggle, and what are the implications of that in terms of costs, et cetera? Please. Yes. I think in terms of sites, you know, I was really pleased with, as I said earlier, with Edinburgh and Coventry because it felt like they'd launched like our historic business had launched in terms of volumes that were starting to go through them. Whereas, you know, a Portsmouth or Maidstone, which, you know, we're not really known in those markets, and they will take longer to be established. They are different to Edinburgh and Coventry, where we should be known in those markets 'cause we've got adjacent towns and cities where we do have a branch. That was the reassuring part for me, and probably more so than the footprint, to be honest. I think the footprint helps by having more cars on the ground in those markets does definitely help create more demand than having less cars on the ground. I think what it says is that we wouldn't want to put maybe a 50-car display in a big city outside of the Southeast. You know, that's the thing that it probably says to us, that if we're gonna be opening in some of the other areas, we want a minimum of a 100-car display in some of these towns and cities. Making sure that we don't go into collection only sort of centers. Right now, at some point in the past, we thought maybe we just need collection centers. I don't think we do at the moment. I think we do need, still need, big displays on those branches 'cause it helps to establish the branch faster because you've got more product available, which therefore gets more eyes on it, and then that creates the demand that customers can come in and then purchase the vehicle. What was the second part? Sorry, Darren. It was just about, site availability. Oh, yeah. Cost implications and stuff like that as times get tougher. Yeah. There's actually a lot of availability at the moment, and there's a lot of main dealers either shrinking or merging dealerships. I know we've spoken about this in the past, you know, that's definitely happening. Feels like there's a manufacturer regularly, you know, saying that they're terminating everybody or reorganizing their network, and there's always a bit of fallout from those things. I think when that happens, we are one of the first people that you'd call if you're looking for somebody who will pick up a larger ex-OEM dealer site. Motorpoint will be one of the best future occupants of that branch when the manufacturer pulls out. In terms of, are you seeing any easing of cost or any change in sort of- Yeah. You pretty much, you're not able to name your price, but you're certainly able to reduce the rent from what it would've been in the past. I think that's the key thing. You know, they're more economical for us, at lower yields, of course, than they are for others. You know, I think that the rents that you probably thought you would have paid to secure a location that, in that area are not where you are. We are always looking to generate that new branch with a much lower rent than was previously paid by the previous incumbent. Just one more. I mean, in terms of what you've seen over the last sort of 12-18 months, does that lead you to think that maybe 24 sites could be increased in the future? I know it's still early days, but. Yeah. No, I think, you know, we've got at least five, you know, I think there was a number in there, about 20-ish, future locations. As I said, whether we do all 20 of them, there's definitely scope for a lot more. I think we've just gotta make sure that we go for the bigger ones first. It is supply-led, of course. You know, there's plenty of gaps on our footprint where we don't have a location anywhere near that market. Think of the Southeast of England, Southwest of England, the North of Scotland. You know, we've gotta try and get representation there. One of the things, Darren, is if we don't have a location, it's an absolute nightmare to get that car up to the customer. You know, you're talking about a day round trip to deliver a car into Inverness or something from our Glasgow branch. You know, it is important for us to go to where the customers are buying from, as well as having extra footprint in the U.K., because when we're in those markets, we do take share. Okay. I'll leave it alone now. You still look far better than I see, Mark, even though you're ill. Cheers. Mm-hmm. What a lovely closing comment. Mark, I'm pleased to say there are no more questions from the floor, so over to you for any closing comments. Thanks, Alex. Right. Okay. Thanks, everybody for listening. Anything you have, if you've got any other questions, then you can always come through to Chris or myself. I'll just leave you with the point that, you know, the strategy, in our opinion, is working very well. You know, one of the things that when you go into these things is to, is that going to work? How will it play out? I'm personally delighted with how it's working in terms of us taking market share. We want to grow our volume, of course we do. That's obviously very, very difficult in an environment where the market is shrinking. The market won't shrink forever. It will stabilize, and it will grow from there. As the market grows, Motorpoint's share will continue growing. As I said earlier, we will be a dramatically bigger and more profitable business in the future, and that's what this investment is about. Less focus on short-term profitability, much more focused on the future of Motorpoint and what it can become and how big and how profitable it can become, which is what excites us. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll speak to you again soon. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thanks all.