JDSPY - JD Sports Fashion Plc (JDSPY) Q4 2025 Trading Update & FY 2026 Guidance Call (Transcript)

2025-04-09 14:01:06 ET

JD Sports Fashion Plc (JDSPY)

Q4 2025 Trading Update & FY 2026 Guidance Call

April 09, 2025, 09:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Regis Schultz - CEO

Andrew Higginson - Chairman

Dominic Platt - CFO

Michael Armstrong - Global MD

Conference Call Participants

Jonathan Pritchard - Peel Hunt

Ashton Olds - Redburn

Richard Chamberlain - RBC

David Hughes - Shore Capital

Thierry Cota - Bank of America

Alison Lygo - Deutsche Numis

Anne Critchlow - Berenberg

Richard Taylor - Barclays

Nick Barker - BNP Paribas

Presentation

Regis Schultz

Welcome to everyone. Welcome to the one who joined us on the webcast. Welcome to JD Update. Unfortunately or fortunately, as he will explain to you in his video, Andy Higginson, JD Group Chairman, is not with us. But let's share with you his welcome video.

Andrew Higginson

Good afternoon. It's Andy Higginson here. I just want to apologize for not being with you today. The reason I'm not with you is I'm in Vancouver visiting my eldest son, who I've not seen for 18 months and more importantly, meeting my new granddaughter so for the first time. I'm afraid that took precedence on this particular occasion. What I wanted to do is just really as an introduction to the day, give you a little bit of a view from the Chair, a personal view of what's happened in the last 2.5 years and the progress we've made.

There's no question that we failed to manage our [indiscernible] properly. We got our forecasting wrong and that's led to a disappointment, which is you see reflected in the share price. But I think what it does mask is just the underlying strength of this business and the great work that Regis and the team have done, which perhaps doesn't get the attention it deserves.

And we've been here 2.5 years now, I think it is and '22 -- '22, when we joined 2022, it seems like a bit of a distant land in a way. We inherited this incredible platform, this global platform from which to grow and which we're so grateful for in terms of the way we work every day. Having said that, the infrastructure that we inherited, the good and the bad, the infrastructure was very weak and the infrastructure was weak on IT. It was weak in terms of our online offer. It was weak in terms of our distribution infrastructure. And most importantly, particularly in the context of the City, our accounting and finance infrastructure was woefully short of what was needed. We spent two years, 2.5 years fixing a lot of that. It's important to say that we have a strong and stable leadership team. We have grown the business, okay, with the help of new stores and so on. But we've continued to grow the business through a very difficult time trading-wise. We have achieved growth. We've retained strong cash flows and retained a very strong cash position. We funded the two acquisitions in the last year out of our own resources.

And we've rationalized our strategy to a significant extent. We sold off the sprawling fashion business. We bought in minority stakes in MIG and ISRG in Spain. We bought new acquisitions of Courir and Hibbett to come into the business and we are in the process of rationalizing our DC strategy around the world. Most importantly, we now have a clear and obvious platform for growth as we look forward.

Our strategy is very simple in a way. We are selling lots of sports-related gear to customers, primarily through JD, which is our international brand that's present in all the markets. But we have complementary businesses that allow us to sell to a wider group a similar sort of gear, which gives us heft in the marketplace, whether that's with the brands, whether that's with the landlords or whether it's with the distribution companies that send our products out to customers. All of that helps and they're complementary to the JD First strategy.

So where do we go from here? Well, I think looking forward, we're obviously in an uncertain world. It doesn't take me to tell you that the political developments of the last few weeks have been seismic. But we're in great shape. We're a business that generates a lot of cash. We can fund our own expansion. We're able to take a long-term view and invest through difficult times to make sure that we come out of those times in fantastic shape....

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