Hello, and welcome to the Flight Centre Travel Group Full Year Result Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]
I will now turn the conference over to Mr. Haydn Long, Media & Investor Relations Manager. Please go ahead. Haydn?
Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us for our full year result presentation. We'll just run through the presentation now.
I'll hand over to the first speaker, Adam. Hang on one sec, we just seem to be having a problem with the line.
[Operator Instructions] My apologies, ladies and gentlemen. I will now turn the call -- we thank you for your patience. I will now turn the conference over to Haydn Long. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for Flight Centre's full year results presentation. Today, I'm joined by Adam Campbell, our Chief Financial Officer; Chris Galanty, our Corporate CEO; James Kavanagh, our Leisure CEO; Skroo Turner, our CEO; and [ Tuff Doug ] and also Greg Parker, the CEO of our Supply Division.
Chris will obviously speak about his business, the corporate business. JK about the Leisure business. Skroo will talk about outlook and what he sees for the future. But Adam will kick things off with the highlights and the numbers. Adam?
Thank you, Haydo, and welcome to everyone who's made the time to jump on the call in what's been a busy week. As highlighted in our preliminary results update last month, we've seen a strong profit turnaround during FY '23, and in particular, in the second half. This turnaround has been driven at the top line with our annual sales of $22 billion being around 115% increase on last year, and the second highest sales recorded by the group.
That sales included record TTV levels in corporate, 24% above the previous record sales in FY '19 as well as the $10 billion contribution in Leisure division sales. That included significant growth in TTV from our shop network as well as record contributions from our online independent and luxury businesses.
Our continued cost discipline has meant that just under 40% of incremental revenue was converted to EBITDA during the year, resulting in underlying EBITDA of $302 million a nearly $500 million year-on-year profit turnaround, which is a result that we can all be very, very proud of.
Cash and investments have also continued to grow to $1.4 billion by year-end, driven by $250 million operating cash flows in the second half alone. The solid financial results, the strength of our balance sheet and the improving industry dynamics that Skroo will talk to further shortly, mean that we're comfortable to announce the implementation of a new capital management policy for FY '24 and beyond, as well as a relatively small, but important final dividend for FY '23 of $0.18 per share.
Chris and JK will talk to their respective divisions shortly, but first I'll just highlight a few key takeaways from the full year results overall. Our underlying cost margin of 9.6% is at an historical low and compares to 13.6% last year, and 11% back in 2019. This reflects the structurally lower cost base in place, with operating costs sitting at just 75% of pre-COVID levels.
Importantly, we've been able to reduce our cost margin while still investing in future growth drivers, such as our people, networks, products and technology, which Chris and JK will expand upon.
Productivity has also remained high, with 61% of the FY '19 workforce delivering 92% of relative TTV. Overall revenue margin has trended up, with our 10.4% margin being 70 basis points above the prior year comparatives. And this will continue to improve as specific leisure and corporate initiatives are embedded, and as competition and normal market dynamics re-emerge.
Importantly, our total available supplier margin in land, tour and cruise sectors are now generally in line with pre-COVID levels. As you're all aware, our total available margins have been impacted by front-end commission primarily in the ANZ segment, and the lack of competition and capacity globally.
We're now starting to see volume-based air incentives increasing as traditional back-end contract structures are reintroduced. And we think we've got some good opportunity for further increases from strategic NDC deals and content with airlines, the use of net fares and global airline partnerships.
And as Haydo mentioned, our CEO of Supply, Greg Parker, is with us, and he is going to be more than happy to discuss the machinations of our total available margin opportunities in more detail.
Underlying PBT for the year was $106 million at a PBT margin of 0.5%, with that margin progressively improving over the course of the second half. Half to PBT margin for the Leisure division was at 1.7%, and for the Corporate division, 1.5%. There's still a long way to go towards our 2% PBT target for FY '25, and we will never sacrifice sustainable long-term profit growth to achieve a short-term target. But it is pleasing to see the path towards the Leisure and Corporate brands contributions to that target becoming increasingly clearer for everyone.
Before handing over to our divisional CEOs, I'll just finish on capital management. The final fully-franked dividend of $0.18 per share, along with the establishment of a new capital allocation framework from FY '24, should be seen as a reflection of the confidence that we have in our balance sheet, our ongoing top-line growth prospects, and our ability to continue to convert that top-line growth to profit.
At the core of our framework is ensuring an appropriate balance between maximizing shareholder returns and long-term growth with a conservative capital structure. We'll always look to reinvest back into our business first to ensure ongoing growth and sustainable profitability, and this can take the form of organic portfolio growth, investing in transformation and optimization, and also using our balance sheet for appropriately-sized M&A opportunities.
I do also note that, we've got $800 million in convertible bonds on our balance sheet, which, although a relatively cheap source of debt, could lead to future dilution for our shareholders. As a result, and to strike a balance between EPS growth and dividend yield, from FY '24, we will look to return between 50% and 60% of our operating profit after tax to our shareholders via a combination of dividends and the buyback of either convertible bonds or issued capital.
As our balance sheet continues to strengthen, and should we have surplus cash flows, for example, as we utilize the $1.2 billion of gross tax losses, we may look to accelerate the reduction of our convertible notes and or issued capital.
I'll now hand over to Chris to provide more of an update on our corporate brands.
Thanks, Adam. Good morning, everyone. I'm going to give a brief update on our very pleasing corporate performance in 2023, the year where we firmly established Flight Centre as the fourth largest TMC in the world.
I'll start with the corporate business overview, a story really about strong organic growth. I'm really pleased to say that we've grown market share through both high customer retention rates and a very large and successful implementation of new account wins.
We've returned to beyond pre-COVID levels well ahead of the market. And I'm pleased to say again, by the end of the financial year in June, both Corporate Traveller and FCM brands were trading comfortably above their pre-COVID levels, delivering a record TTV of $11 billion for the year.
Geographical diversity remains strong with roughly 30% of our turnover coming from Australia, New Zealand, EMEA and the Americas and just over 10% coming from Asia. In all 4 regions, we have strong management teams who are very focused on delivering to both global and regional local customers.
So how have we achieved this growth? Well, uniquely, we address the market with 2 brands, Corporate Traveller focusing on the SME segment and FCM focusing on the large market to enterprise segments. This enables us to be more customer centric to our competitors, because we believe that SME and large market customers have fundamentally different needs from their travel programs. So both brands have dedicated management teams, dedicated brands, customer acquisition and retention models, dedicated proprietary technology, which enables them to deliver exactly what customers need in the 2 different segments. And that enables both brands to win simultaneously without neglecting any customers at all.
So a quick '23 update. Well, as I said, we continue to outpace industry recovery with all 4 regions comfortably surpassing their previous TTV records in 2019 and very strong new wins yet again this year. We signed roughly $2.6 billion of annual spend from new customers and our Grow To Win strategy, I should call out has delivered $4 billion of our $11 billion of TTV this year. That means of the $11 billion this year, over $4 billion came from new customers signed since 2020.
Our Grow To Win strategy is now evolving, really focusing on productivity gains as well as welcoming new customers on board. This means that we're launching a productive operations strategy really to deliver better customer consistency, better productivity, more automation, digitization and better returns to profitability.
We've on-boarded more than a thousand people this year who've been recruited and trained by our fantastic people in recruitment training. It's a big task they've accomplished very well. We're now fully right-sized with full staffing across the business globally. And I'm pleased to say, there are already some positive early trends with the fourth quarter this year, delivering much stronger profit margin. And this run rate, we see continuing to the new financial year.
So I'll give you a quick update of our scorecard, some KPIs that sit behind our TTV and revenue and profit numbers. We saw transaction volume grow by 72% versus 2022 with income per transaction. So the amount of revenue we deliver per transaction up 10% and cost per transaction down 10%. And we see many, much further opportunities in that cost per transaction reduction with our productive operations strategy. Customer retention sat very high again, over 96%. And as I've already said, we signed $2.6 billion of new business during the year.
So some of the trends we're seeing across the business, well, firstly, customer activity has recovered well, and we see it to continue to recover. And talking to our customers, not only do they see their travel spend continuing into 2024, many see it increasing. And many of you will have seen the GBTA forecast of full market recovery for business travel and actually it becoming a growth sector again, moving forward.
We've also seen a trend where the smaller SME customers who previously would have self-served, gone on to supply websites and book their own travel, seeing the benefits of a managed travel program. And it's really benefits corporate traveler. In fact, over 50% of Corporate Traveller new account wins this year were previously unmanaged.
There have been some changes in the workforce and more working from home. And we're seeing particularly amongst our larger customers, them investing in bringing staff together in various Meetings & Events. And that's leading us to spend and invest more in our Meetings & Events capabilities. We can deliver that to our customers globally.
And finally, a trend that's becoming very noticeable is the suppliers distributing content via various different means, meaning that content is becoming more fragmented, more difficult for customers to find. And we see this as a real opportunity for TMC such as ourselves, who have invested heavily in both air and land content aggregation.
So the key drivers moving forward for us remain firstly, continued organic sales growth, investing in customer retention, but also investing heavily in our sales and marketing machine to make sure we can keep delivering new volume into our business. And I'm very pleased to say, we have a very strong pipeline of potential customers right now.
Great, that leads to greater efficiency in economies of scale. But further than that, we want to invest heavily, as I said, in our productive operations to make sure that we're investing more in streamlining and standardizing systems and making sure we introduce even more automation into our business. And all of that leads to increased margin improvement, both from a cost and income side. And also we're investing in new services that we can generate new revenue from by solving more customer problems.
So I'll finish by looking at the 2 brands individually. Firstly, Corporate Traveller has recovered very strongly. It has a strong footprint in 6 countries around the world, and it has a very large and growing customer base. Corporate Traveller is a true SME business where the average spend is around $250,000. It has over 16,000 active clients around the world. And as I've said, over 50% of the new accounts were previously unmanaged.
CT wins by having a highly personalized offering, blending dedicated people, fantastic people with leading proprietary technology. Now many of our competitors in this area are good at the people's side or good at the technology side. We believe we win by being good at both.
CT has come back very highly productive, and part of that is our investment in our proprietary platform, Melon, our digital booking and management platform, which is going from strength to strength with very high NPS scores from customers. Over 90% of new customers in USA now go straight on to Melon, and the platform is being launched and doing well in Canada and now in the U.K.
We're really focusing on growth, particularly in the USA, which remains our biggest opportunity for growth. We've just opened a new hub in Manhattan in New York, and we really see New York as a big opportunity as is all of the U.S. for growth for Corporate Traveller. And we continue, the management team in CT continue to look at solving new customer problems, and that will lead to us being able to generate new revenue streams.
Moving on to FCM, FCM is now firmly established as the alternative to the traditional TMCs. It's been a huge story of growth for FCM over the last 3 years, and that carried on into this year, where they signed $1.6 billion of new accounts during the year, typically signing them on a 3 to 5-year contract. And that means that more revenue and TTV will be flowing into the business in this new financial year.
Excellent customer retention rates, again, of over 96%. And we continue to invest in FCM in the areas that our customers value, particularly technology. The FCM platform all of this year has been available in our 100 markets that FCM operates, and all of our new customers have been going straight onto the FCM platform. Many existing customers have been migrated, and all will be migrated onto our new technology this year.
We're making strategic investment in Meetings & Events, as I said earlier, to make sure that we can really globalize our offering and capitalize on the strong demand for high-margin Meetings & Events from our existing customers. And we're focusing on revenue diversification as well, making sure that we're generating revenue from new services, such as consulting, which is high-margin and in high demand from customers, and software development. FCM's fully staffed, so all the focus now is on productivity gains.
And moving forward to the future, we really look at driving content capability, making sure that both NDC and the airspace and also land is available to our customers through whichever channel they choose to book. We're running out our new operating system across the board, and our productive operations strategy is really there to generate better revenue and better economies of scale.
So overall for Corporate, it's been a year of growth, it's been a year of innovation, and above all, it's been a year where our people have worked really hard to deliver a great experience to our customers.
And on that note, I'll hand over to JK to give you all an update on our Leisure business.
Thank you, Chris, and Hi, everybody. I'm delighted to update on the performance of our leisure business with a focus on business strategy, trading results, and some key trends. Firstly, taking a look at our leisure business today, we operate a diverse portfolio of leisure travel brands, as we believe this offers our customers the widest range of products, services, and value in travel, from budget-focused customers through to luxury customers who are taking multi-generational holidays and anywhere in between. This strategy also provides our supply chain with access to the most valuable and diverse range of customers through a single travel group.
Starting with our B2C travel brands, Flight Centre, our flagship mass market leisure brand, is really a modern retailer that makes it easy for customers to book through our well-located retail stores that are now boosted by enhanced online and app capability, offering great deals on flights and holidays located in 5 global markets.
Our luxury travel collection added Scott Dunn, and the luxury tour operator, this February, and Luxperience, who will host the first event in November this year to connect providers of luxury travel with high-end sellers of experiential travel. Both complement travel associates to provide one-of-a-kind experiences to discerning and high-net worth customers.
Looking at our portfolio specialist complementary brands, these really focus on target product categories, such as cruise and touring, student travel, and foreign exchange, and now are forecast to contribute 20% of our leisure portfolio. The cruise segment has recovered faster than international air travelers, with passenger numbers in '23 expected to be back at 2019 levels and expected to grow from 31.5 million passengers to 39.5 million by 2027.
With Australia being the fourth largest source market globally, last week we announced plans to launch a dedicated cruise brand later this year, Cruiseabout, to capitalize on this growth.
In the B2B category, who are independent agents that partner with the Flight Centre Travel Group to access our products, technology, and expertise, this segment now makes up 15% of our leisure TTV.
On the next slide, you'll see that our strategy is working by diversifying our business segment, with sales from lower cost, highly scalable models now on track to deliver 1/3 of our TTV in 2024.
Fast-growing models of online and independent agents complement our wholly-owned employee models, and these lower our operating cost margins, such as property, payroll, et cetera, while maintaining TTV volumes.
On the next slide, you'll see our drivers for growth, which are focused on expanding our core offering, investing in our customers, and leveraging our assets. All of these result in scalable, profitable growth.
Looking at expanding our core offering, we believe that our network is now appropriately sized, and future store growth is moderately planned, mostly with travel money and Cruiseabout.
While Flight Centre and Travel Associates are now in normal network planning mode, our main focus is on growing staff numbers and teams over physical locations. We're now receiving over 6,500 job applications in a month, and hiring will actually be to stay ahead of demand, capacity, and backfill replacements of our salespeople. We'll continue to invest in our customers through digital experiences, relevant product ranges, and loyalty solutions to deliver high NPS.
Looking at the digital front, our Flight Centre website is now the largest shop front, with customer sessions across all channels of 62% year-on-year. We now have the ability to actually sell package holidays across all channels, and the Flight Centre app is the highest converting digital channel now rating 4.5 on the App Store.
Looking at product design, our specialist teams have been busy curating extensive new product ranges, which are performing strongly, such as the Travel Associate Signature range in Japan. Our Flight Centre holidays domestically are also performing very strong.
When we look at leveraging our assets, we'll continue to focus on sustaining productivity, which is attributed to intuitive systems and more efficient workflows. We will retire some more legacy platforms to make sure that we can sustain productive operations.
So moving on to the next slide and looking at our trading update and performance scorecard. The next couple of slides really highlight that we finished the year strong with TTV of $10 billion, which is up 162%. These results included record performance in our luxury category, independents and online models, which doubled, complementing the very strong performance of the Flight Centre brand who makes up over half our results.
Profit for the year was $101 million, which is a great turnaround of $343 million. And this is attributed to a revenue margin increase of 90 basis points in the second half of the year versus the first. And also, our cost margin decreased below 10% in the second half, which improves the bottom line, resulting through benefits of scale.
Taking a look at our performance scorecard on the next slide, you'll see that all KPIs are growing positively and productively across our 4 pillars, from our model shift to our productive network, the execution of our omni-channel strategy, to improve customer metrics, which all results in great top and bottom line results.
Productivity levels have been sustained as we added 700 more selling staff and opened more stores. 38 stores opened in Flight Centre, most of which were actually hibernated stores, and we opened 42 stores in Travel Money. It's great to see now that average basket sizes are growing due to increased international sales. And actually, we've seen a good increase in the number of components per booking, which has increased from 2.1 in June 2022, through to 2.6 in June 2023 in our Flight Centre stores.
We continue to focus on driving ancillary revenue as a key initiative. And recently, we announced an upgraded version of our Captain's Pack, which is relaunched to provide additional value to our customers. The Captain's Pack is now attaching at 75% of bookings, and we're seeing good growth in service fees, which is all contributing meaningfully to our revenue growth.
Moving on now to an update on Scott Dunn on the next slide. We're really delighted with the integration so far of Scott Dunn. Trading is in line with expectations. And this month, we opened a New York office, leveraging off the FCTG infrastructure.
We're working on some initiatives around cross-brand synergies and we're testing sales of the Scott Dunn Explorers Club product to Flight Centre as well as testing a range of Scott Dunn product to the rest of the group. I'm delighted to say that the management team are signed up to the Flight Centre Travel Group long-term retention plan and all is going well on that front, too.
Finally, taking a look at the last 2 slides around customer trends. The key message here really is that the economic challenges are not evenly felt. The Commonwealth Bank recently reported on home loan balances, deposit balances, change in savings and spending, and all of these align well with Flight Centre customer demographics.
You'll see in the slide here that 60% of Flight Centre's customers are actually over 50, who were typically less affected by the current economic challenges, and will continue to prioritize holidays in their spending. It's important to note that the under 40 segment is still growing and we believe we've got a great value product offering in the Flight Centre brand and services segment too.
Our recent customer research indicated that travel is still top of mind, and 88% of Aussies intend to travel internationally in the next 12 months. We also note that 72% of survey travelers intend to take one or more domestic trips in the same period.
From a destination perspective, London is still a standout, although, we are seeing growth in destinations like Japan, Bali and Thailand, which are all trending positively once more. So while we're optimistic about the future of growth in Flight Centre Travel Group leisure, as the travel industry capacity returns to normal, we're also conscious of the current economic landscape, but we believe that our portfolio of brands and unique proposition best positions our Group to serve all budgets and travel experiences.
I will now hand over to Skroo to continue on with the update.
Thank you, JK. Just from a trading update point of view, we -- currently, we're performing in line with expectations in July and August. Strong TTV and profit growth to-date, but obviously as compared to a weak period last year. We're going to provide more guidance at the AGM in November.
The current expectations for 2024 are further improvements in industry dynamics. For example, we certainly will expect significant capacity increases. With record TTV flowing from a geographical diverse brand stable in a market that's gradually recovering. Also, as you heard from Adam, we've got profit margin improvement, driven by gradual revenue margin recovery and ongoing cost margin discipline.
In our Leisure business, it's already tracking out on near pre-pandemic TTV levels in our key southern hemisphere markets, which is Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. And we're targeting improved profitability from the smaller TTV base in Northern Hemisphere, where we had a much more severe cut down of our business during COVID.
In Corporate, the outlook, as you heard from Chris, our corporate productivity and efficiency uplift expected in a rapidly growing global businesses with a strong TTV pipeline. And just in the second half, new accounts implemented during the second half of financial year '23 was about $750 million, and that they are now trading. July '23 TTV was up more than 20% on pre-COVID levels.
In the Travel Services business, we've had modest profit growth expected from touring, hotel management, destination management business during the year 2024 financial year. And you'll see those results are included in the other segment.
Travel's traditionally being a highly resilient sector and is typical a priority spend area. This is evidenced by long and consistent growth trajectory globally. There's only been a handful of year-on-year declines even pre-COVID. And this is illustrating that chart there.
There are also some macroeconomic challenges currently and over the last year, but also some significant offsetting factors, including very lower unemployment globally. And this is a key driver of leisure travel demand.
Also, we're successfully navigating tight labor markets during our post-lockdown rebuilding phase. And as you heard from JK and Chris, we've added about 2,500 FTEs to our workforce during last financial year.
As JK said, a healthy percentage of our leisure customer base is not leveraged to mortgage stress, and increased interest rates are also contributing to a material uplift in interest earnings on our cash flow.
Our Corporate business is winning new accounts, as you heard from Chris, and that will drive TTV growth while clients are typically spending less compared to pre-COVID. And on another positive note, industry dynamics are gradually improving, capacity and competition increasing and prices stabilizing, although there's further room for improvement, and we think we'll see this over the next 6 months.
There are also some potential benefits from the growing returning of the Chinese traveler and increases in the Chinese carriers' capacity. And you see in the chart on the left, the Chinese carriers' gradually rebuilding international capacity. And remember it's only about 7 months since they reopened.
The chart on the right shows Australia look set to be a major beneficiary of this Chinese tourism. Australia is a bucket list destination for Chinese travelers, Chinese capacity in Australia is currently tracking at less than 70% of August 2019 levels. Also, Australia was re-included as you would in China's approved group travel destinations on August 10.
Further Chinese capacity has increased to likely that positive impact on overall international pricing as that competitiveness cuts in. We believe this pent-up demand is still out there. Demand is rebounded solidly, of course, since border restrictions were lifted, but international travel still lags, historical highs and the domestic recovery.
For example, Australia during 2019 short-term resident departures effectively equated to 45% of the country's population. This fell rapidly in 2020 and 2021, but it's recovered to 23.6% of the total population during 2022. And of course, this represented good year-on-year growth, but it means there's a little more than half that 2019 outbound traffic in 2022. So there's almost certainly significant pent-up demand and this is illustrated in that graph.
The strong and consistent growth in near and short-term resident departures pre-COVID, also underlines travel's resilience during that Golden Age of Travel characterized by higher affordable fares, more direct services and better in-flight experiences. There are currently some positive developments with airfare pricing ahead of capacity returns. Prices are now starting to stabilize -- and there are some good sale fares starting to reappear, for example, Sydney, London, you can get early next year to about $1,600 Air Canada to Los Angeles and New York, is $1,066 and $1,630 early next year as well. And Rome is about $1,550 in February next year. So there's some good fares around, although, we are looking for to capacity growth, which will bring all the airfares back in the line, not much more expensive, we believe, than the 2019 levels.
So Haydn, can I hand back to you.
Thanks, Skroo. I think we're ready for Q&A now.
Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Ben Gilbert with Jarden.
I hope all is well. Just the first one for me. Just maybe, Adam, just the cash conversion. How are you guys thinking about cash conversion moving forward? Presumably, you'd be expecting that to improve as you see again to a more normal rhythm on earnings from here on in?
Yes, we are expecting that. At the moment, there's a bit of a -- bit of noise in there, obviously, particularly in the corporate space. We've got a debtor book that's growing there. But as we get a more normalized situation, the conversion will start to improve. The benefit for us -- the other benefit as well that I think is worth highlighting there is obviously our tax losses, which will -- at a total cash level would help us to improve the cash available for us going forward. But, yes, certainly, we'd expect that conversion to improve over the next sort of 12 to 18 months.
So, has there been a structural shift in terms of, as you continue to build corporate, you're obviously winning a lot more global, bigger accounts that you're going to have bigger debtor books. Does that mean that we should be thinking cash conversion shouldn't be around 100% if you continue to grow corporate now? It should be -- I don't know, pick a number in the 80s or 90s?
Look, it's interesting. If you look at pre-COVID, I think from memory, our TTV was roughly 2/3s leisure, 1/3 corporate. Now, we're a situation for the full year, we've just gone through where Corporates about 55% -- or sorry, about 50%, leisure's about 45%, there's about a 5% of other stuff in there.
So, leisure is returning and returning reasonably quickly. So, it will depend a little bit on the relative growth that we see between the Leisure and the Corporate businesses over the next 12 to 18 months. But certainly, I would expect that there will be a bit of a shift in terms of -- I don't think that Leisure, for example, will be that 60% to 65% of total TTV going forward. I think Corporate will be proportionately higher amount.
I think, and just take one from me, and this is for Adam, but just on overrides, I know we ask this a lot and you said it's changed a lot since pre-COVID. But I'm just looking at how those results this week, and their override accruals doubled from last year to this year and particularly could post to pretty strong June.
How are you seeing the discussions from broadly run overrides now? Are you expecting those to ramp quite materially into fiscal '24, just going to the fact that you're obviously seeing some decent growth coming through, you're probably getting more visibility and more comfort around the negotiations?
Yes, I'll now get Skroo to answer that first and then Greg Parker, the new CEO of Supplies here, he's probably got a good view or 2 on that as well. But Skroo, you want to start with that?
Yes. Look, it's obviously a bit of a mixed bag. But generally, I think and Greg can be more specific, but generally, we can see overrides coming back pretty well in most parts of the world. So, we're reasonably confident.
Obviously, we want to produce the volume and that too. So, it is a 2-way thing to get back to hopefully significantly above where we were as a percentage terms pre-COVID. Greg, do you want to add to that?
Yes, Skroo. Just in terms of you break it down in the category, overrides and probably total contract margins in the cruise and touring space, also leisure, hotel, and car, corporate hotel and car, also small group and adventure and insurance and GDS, is by and large the same as what it was pre-COVID. So, they've all restored and stabilized.
If anything, they're probably marginally above where they were. From an air perspective, when you look at super-override, which is a component of the total available margin, we're actually seeing that come back to pre-COVID levels as well from a super override perspective.
There's obviously a mixed bag, as Skroo said, between carriers that are actually still working on sort of transitionary deals that we're doing during COVID, but also ones now that are looking for different ways to remunerate. So, we're definitely seeing overrides improving and stabilizing in the air space.
Great. Just a final one from me. Just the 2% PBT margin for 2025, you obviously talked about it consistently now, it feels like should we be taking this as a guidance or an aspiration number still now? And just in terms of how you get there, is this just pretty much based on the assumption you can retain it, continue to get that sort of circa 40% incremental EBITDA margin on revenue and that's how you're thinking about it or are you assuming any big shifts in mix over that period?
Yes. Look, it's certainly a target internally that we're driving towards. There's no doubt there's a lot to do to get there. So I think you see that in what most of the analysts that are still pegging us down a bit versus that when you get to '25, which is fair enough when you look at where we're traveling at the moment.
But certainly, my view is that it's, like all of our targets, certainly aspirational, but I think we see a clear path of how we can get to that 2%. And that will be a combination of revenue margin continuing to improve, but also holding to that efficiency and cost discipline that we've seen really, really strongly over the last few years.
So I think it's certainly not something that's in the bag for us. And you've known us long enough to know that Skroo is not one to throw out an easy target. So, there's a bit of work to get there, but we do see that path of how we achieve it.
Your next question comes from the line of John O'Shea, Minnett -- with Ord Minnett.
Can you hear me okay?
Yes. All good John.
Yes. I've got a name change now. I like the new name better. Thanks very much to the operator. Just a question from me perhaps about maybe a bit more color around the outlook you're seeing, Skroo, in terms of the early part of the year and your sort of general views around the leisure customer and how you see that kind of playing out, particularly compared to the way the leisure customers performed historically pre-COVID compared to post-COVID. Are you seeing any change there, or do you think you're dealing with the same beast if you like? Or can you give some sort of comments around the observations of your team as to how the customers are thinking about leisure travel over the next couple of years? Do you know what I'm asking?
Yes, John, look it is early days yet really although it's been -- we've been in the recovery mode now for a couple of years, I guess, and we've still got a couple of years to go. But from what we're seeing, I'll get JK to elaborate, but generally our customer, our leisure customer, and obviously, it varies in the different countries and different brands. But generally, they're middle -- mid to higher income people generally, particularly the ones that we do reasonably well out of and particularly international travel.
Ant it's probably fairly similar to travelers pre-COVID. It's just that as airfares are now significantly more expensive pre-COVID, interest rates are higher, that these are the customers we are certainly expecting to continue to travel and we haven't seen any indications. It's not happening at the moment. But the next year, we will obviously be -- it'll be interesting to see where it all ends. So what's your view, JK?
Some of the trends that we're seeing is that certainly, initially there was the category of travel that was probably the slowest return was the family category. But then the opposite of that shows that -- and there's a slide in the pack that shows a mix of customers, where we saw a lot of solos and couples traveling. And they certainly have a lot more disposable income.
What we've noticed in terms of buying trends is that basket sizes are starting to increase more, where more product is being added to the trips, whereas initially air travel was consuming the largest part of the budget. And now we're noticing that we're actually attaching more non-air sales.
In terms of mix of products, we haven't seen -- they're certainly not buying down a lot more into economy class. We're actually seeing the same purchase behavior between economy and business. But we are actually starting to see destination mix even shift to more seasonal type booking patterns. So you can imagine the U.K., the U.S. that really started quite strongly.
But now we're seeing a lot more interest in Japan, Indonesia is really popular, and Thailand is popular again as well. So, we're shifting back to sort of repeat behaviors. Our focus though is making sure that we've got the right product and value range to actually some to different budgets.
Sure. And just one more for me before I go, perhaps a question for Chris around the corporate space. Obviously, we've seen a challenge in terms of getting volumes back in some of the key markets around the world. That's certainly not new news. Have you seen that reflected in terms of the intensity of the competition for some of the business? And is that having any impact on the margin at all? Or are you -- what are the customers making their decisions on primarily, I guess, 2 parts of that question, I suppose.
Well, look, it's always -- as you know, it's always been a very competitive segment, business travel, that's not changed over the years. I think customers really make the decisions on a couple of things. One is service. And as you know, we were very quick to upstart this year. We brought back 1,000 people. One of the reasons we've won a lot of business is the referrals from existing customers about our service levels.
Now it has been challenging because we've had to train up a lot of new people this year, but I'm pleased to say that process is now fully complete. Also technology, technology is very important, and that's why we've invested so heavily in both the FCM platform and Melon, to give customers excellent technology experiences, both travelers bookers and managers.
And also third thing, I'd say, increasingly is access for content as well, making sure that customers can get the full range of content, both on air and land. And again, that's why we invested in that. So yes, price is important, of course, it is. We do with procurement, particularly in a large part of the market. But I don't think that's the primary reason for the buying decision. That's certainly not what the customers tell us.
Your next question comes from the line of Michael Simotas of Jefferies.
First one for me on revenue margins. You've given some good color on what you're seeing and what you're sort of expecting. So you've said you expect revenue margins to be lower, largely as a result of business mix. Does that mean that you're effectively expecting to be able to get your total available margin on air back to something similar to what it was before COVID?
Michael, it's Adam. I'll start with that and then I might get JK and Chris just to jump in on their respective businesses and the revenue margin that flows into those.
But certainly, we believe that business mix is going to have a big impact on those margins. And the different channels that we've got will operate at both the lower revenue margin and lower cost margin. We are starting to see that come through.
Although, I will actually say some of the businesses that we thought would be lower revenue margin like our Travel Money business is actually operating still at a low revenue margin, but a much more efficient business. So our PBT margin on that is probably doing better than we expected.
In terms of total available margin, I think we've been pretty consistent saying that, with the air side of things, some of those commission drops will be able to be offset in other areas, but we're not expecting the full amount to be completely offset.
So from an air perspective, we're not expecting to get fully back to where we were pre-COVID. There are, however, other areas in both corporate and leisure where we're looking at improving our revenue margins outside of that. And I might just hand over to JK first and then Chris, just if you guys can just talk through those specific initiatives in your businesses. JK.
Yes. From a leisure perspective, you can see in the slide that shows the different mix of booking channels that we operate in between employee-based models, online models and independent models.
And certainly, the revenue margin within those is quite different. And even if you look at our store model, our revenue margin at a store level, compared to some of the specialist teams that we have at nearly a 3% variance.
So I think the focus from leisure perspective is really making sure that we're driving margin growth across the different segments. But the mix is going to have an impact on that more broadly speaking, because, if you look at, say, Luxury Travel for us, we'd expect the revenue margin to be significantly more in that space, whereas the move to online is going to see significantly less. So it all kind of depends on the actual growth rate of the different lines that we focus on.
But what we are seeing on a year-on-year basis, when you look individually at the brands, we've actually, in leisure had a 90 basis point uplift between the first half and the second half. And when you break it down on a brand-by-brand basis, each of them are actually growing quite positively.
So some of the stuff that's in there is a focus on ancillary margins that we're using to drive growth. And that's actually common across all of the brands to actually try and lift revenue margin. It is working. We're pretty happy about it on a year-on-year basis. And even a half-on-half basis, we're seeing pretty positive trends.
And Michael, from a corporate perspective, you're correct that the trend is lower revenue margin, lower gross margins. There's a couple of things driving the lower revenue margin. The first thing, is the great share of FCM, which operates at a lower revenue margin in Corporate Travellers both by brands have grown, but FCM's have grown faster.
The second thing is yield increase. So airfares, particularly also hotel rooms have been higher this last year or so. And that results us having a lower revenue margin because of that fee. However, the good news is that revenue margin in the later part last year was improving and cost margin was falling, which is really what we want to see.
And it's similar to leisure, we have several initiatives around fee increases, new fees, new problems that we're solving for customers around payments, around software development, various things and consulting that we have in place to generate new revenue. So we're acting the trends going the right way on both revenue and cost. And we see that continuing.
Okay. Great. And second question for me is on staffing. Can you give us an indication of how many FTE you expect to add to the business in FY '24? And are we likely to see more employee retention costs below the line in '24? And just interested in any comments on how you expect staff remuneration to play out as your staff roll off some of those retention payments?
Michael, I might take the second bit first, and then once again I'll get Chris and JK to talk about their staffing levels. But from a staff retention cost perspective, as you noted, we have $30 million taking them below the line. That was specifically for the Global Retention Rights program that we put in place with all of our people globally in particular.
That finishes so those rights are best in February. So in the FY '24 year, there will be $14 million residual cost that flows through, and that will be taken below the line as well and then those costs disappear. So they are only one-off costs, they're not going to suddenly appear in our employee cost base going forward.
At this point, we don't have any intent to add additional costs such as that, that would be required to be taken for those lines. So this year, there will be about $14 million, as I say, that goes below the line to finish those off. Chris, do you want to go first on FTEs?
Sure. So corporate is fully staffed. So we're not -- despite have the -- we will obviously see growth in transaction numbers in the current financial year that we're in. We're not expecting any increase in staff numbers at all. And that's partly through better automation, but it's also partly throughout people's ability to deal with more volume, because so many were new over the last year, certainly in some markets, some of us are actually new to the whole travel industry, let alone to FCM or corporate travelers. So we've really had to train them as complete novices, which is very unusual in corporate, but we've been through that process. So we're not expecting any starting at all.
And from a leisure perspective, Michael, we'll be staffing to stay ahead of demand, and we will be actually adding more staff numbers in the coming year. It won't be as many as what we added last year. We had a target to get to in terms of upstaffing. Our recruitment team did a phenomenal job. There was a lot of questions about could we achieve it, but at the core capability of ours, the focus will be primarily on consulting, selling staff, and also maintaining the productivity levels that we're at right now, which we've actually seen has been effective in the year that's just gone.
Your next question comes from the line of Lisa Deng with Goldman Sachs.
A couple of questions for me. Just the first one, a bit more on the incremental revenue fall-through. I was doing some back-of-envelope maths. And if I'm basing it off, say, 25 consensus revenues and then doing that 47% fall through for corporate -- sorry, leisure and then 40% fall through for corporate. We kind of don't get to that 2% PBT margin. So I'm supposing that it needs to be more.
And maybe if you can just illustrate to us what we can expect to see higher fall-through assuming you've already talked through the corporate not adding headcount?
Yes. That's a good question, Lisa. I think there's a couple of things to talk to there. Certainly, as I look ahead, I would most certainly, if I think about corporate first, the focus that Chris and his team has now is on productive operations, and that is taking all of the work that they've done over the last few years in terms of retaining their customer base and adding to their customer base, which has been very, very successful getting ahead of those customers coming on board to make sure that we're able to service them appropriately straight away.
That now turns into how do we turn that to more of a productive business going forward. And what that means is, I would certainly expect that the corporate flow-through of revenue to EBITDA will improve from where it currently sits, we should see that certainly in the next 12 months improving from where it currently sits at the moment.
Leisure, Leisure probably won't improve as much. As JK said, there's been a real uplift there. It's really about now in his business, a bit of the mix that flows through, which will lead some of that efficiency coming through.
But again, if you look at where we're tracking in leisure towards the latter part of the year, we were not far off of 2% PBT margin in a couple of those months. That will continue to get full year momentum through it. And so on a total level, you'll see the returns coming through there as well.
The other point I will point out is we have our other segment and that's one that has probably been a little bit worse than we expected in the current financial year. And so there's been more of a drag on that total the total conversion coming through as well.
I'll just address that now. I'm sure someone will have a question on, so I've talked to that now, which is effectively, if you look at our roll forward from last year to this year, in the other segment, there's been 3 major contributors to that loss increasing, one being our investment in TP Connects, which is investment, we took control of a bit over 12 months ago, and is a strategic play for us in addressing distribution, particularly through NDC. That we've spoken to will lose around $9 million a year for the next couple of years. And this year was the first year that we saw that flow through.
We'll probably had a similar result in FY '24, but then we should start to see that loss start to reduce as we not just get better benefits from it internally, but we also look at increasing our external revenues coming from that business as well.
Our GOGO business, which is our wholesaling business over in the Americas had a loss of about $7 million worse than last year. And that's really a business we're having a really close look at, at the moment as to how that should operate going forward and those losses really are volume based at the moment. And we've got a bit of work to be done there. But again, we should see those starting to reduce going forward.
And the last one is we have a contribution from the Pedal Group, which last year was a contribution of $12 million profit, and this year, it was a $4 million loss contributed, and that's largely to do as that industry that like industry starts to come out of COVID was a really powerful few years. There are some stock issues and oversupply issues throughout the industry. And we -- and our Pedal Group there has not been unaffected by that, which means that we've taken some fairly conservative provisioning across that in the current year.
The other point I'll make that feed into your 2% question, there Lisa, it sits around capital management. We currently have debt of $350 million facility bank debt and $800 million of convertible notes. As we look to more proactively manage those levels, we may well be able to see some benefit flow through that interest line as well. There's a few things that are play there that sort of give us, as I said earlier in the call, a good path through the 2%.
Got it. And then the follow-up is actually on interest, sorry, not interest income tax. So we talked about a $1.2 billion income tax benefit that we can utilize. How do we think about the net sort of income tax payments in the cash flow that we should be sort of thinking about?
And then on that, we made the comment about something about the $1.2 billion, we could potentially accelerate the buybacks. Can you may be further explain that?
Yes, sure. First of all, $1.2 billion is the gross tax losses that we hold. We would expect -- and that converts to about $350 million deferred tax asset that we've got on the balance sheet there. And about 2/3s of that roughly, relates to the Australian business, meaning that as we're generating profits within Australia over the next few years, our tax expense will be offset against those carryforward losses rather than being paid in cash through the ATO. And that's the same in overseas jurisdictions.
The difference, there are some jurisdictions such as the U.K., where you can only offset half of your profit in any given year using carryforward tax launches. So there will be some payments that come out. But certainly, historically, most people would have looked at our projected profit, taking a projected effective tax rate and said that cash is going to come out in some way or another, we would not be looking at that going forward.
And so the other comment that I made there, Lisa, was because we are not utilizing cash to pay those tax expense, we will have excess cash compared to pre-COVID that we're building, and we may be able to look to use that to accelerate some of the either share buybacks or convertible note buybacks.
Your next question comes from the line of Wei-Weng Chen with RBC Capital Markets.
Just a couple of questions from me. So clearly, Flight Centre are beneficiaries of competition in the travel sector, but I guess more recently, there have been some decisions that have been taken by the federal government, which may lower competition. Not looking necessarily to comment on that decision, but I'm more keen on knowing what you think that means for Flight Centre, does it impact the return of overrides in the local market, or is a single carrier immaterial? And then maybe is the decision from your perspective on deal? Or is there scope for sort of backtracking?
Skroo's come running over to answer that one. I think Greg Parker will probably also have a little bit to say on it, but Skroo first.
Yes, no, good question. Look, we think this is a fairly -- we certainly didn't agree with the decision, and I think the government is going to regret this. But by the same token, I'm not sure that Qatar will reverse the decision soon on something like Qatar. But I think it probably holds well for any other carriers coming into Australia.
And I think and Greg can follow-up on this. But generally, this market has been one of the tougher ones for air margin in terms of the last 4 or 5 years compared to most of our overseas areas. And I don't think this is going to change for the worse.
Hopefully, we'll get slightly better outcomes over the next year or 2. What's your view on this Greg?
Yes. Global capacity has gone up 14% in the last 12 months. So it's sitting in now at 99% of sort of 2019 levels. But Australia has been one of the slowest regions to actually recover. And internationally, we're sitting at about 88%. So, obviously, the more competition that comes into market, the more freedom traffic that comes in, the better it is in terms of airfare pricing, which then puts you in a different scenario in terms of how you can negotiate air margin and sort of bespoke content as well.
So we definitely, as Skroo mentioned, welcome additional capacity to come back into the market. The Chinese carriers alone at the moment flying back in are about 70% of what they were pre-COVID. And that's going to accelerate again over the next 12 months. But yes, that's how we're sort of seeing capacity play out in terms of deals and things like that.
Okay. Cool. And I guess the next question for me is just on corporate. So pre-COVID, you guys did 3% margins in corporate. I'd appreciate corporate is made up of a few different businesses. But is your expectation that as we sort of approach FY '25 that corporate should be back at 3%. And then how should we think about FY '24, will the recovery, sorry, be broadly linear?
So if you look at the pre-COVID margin, what -- there's a couple of things have changed. I think I mentioned at least one of them earlier. One of the things is the mix between FCM and CT. CT does have a lower net margin than -- sorry, CT has the higher net margin than FCM, but FCM has come back as a larger business. But also the yield increases, which have been very high at the moment, depress the margin.
Now, so the question really is with yield increases, what will happen between now and 2025. And I think there's a reasonable expectation they certainly won't increase from where they are now, particularly airfares, and they may come down in line with extra capacity coming to the market. So I think all things being equal, if FCM and CT were exactly the same size, I think we'd be very confident about 3%. But the yields do skew it and I think that will change.
So I think we're -- my way of viewing this is that both brands were targeted to get back to their pre-COVID margin levels, but the split between the 2 may well be different in 2025.
Your next question comes from the line of Tim Plumbe with UBS.
Great. I will just ask 2 questions and get back into the queue. Thinking about those productivity trends on the Flight Centre Leisure consultant around double pre-COVID levels in FY '23, operating environment now is a little bit different to what it was in the first quarter of '23. So how are you thinking about that productivity per -- productivity per consultant in FY '24 versus pre-COVID levels as you take on more heads?
I'll answer that one. We are definitely focused on sustaining productivity and largely, because we've changed the operating model. So the systems that we're investing in are completely different than a few years ago. So for us, it's about maintaining efficiency, taking out non-value-adding activities out of the stores to make sure that they're either automated or offshore in some case to actually make sure that we can sustain those productivity levels.
From an in-store perspective, there's definitely been a shift from huge pent-up demand, so now our consultants are in a good space to be able to service customers well. And we believe that the systems that we've put in makes new consultants joining our business far more productive. So, you can see straightaway consult in joining for another start-up within a number of months, they're actually twice as productive as what they were before.
Got you. And the second question is just around the store network. I think you guys said 37 hibernated sites reopened. How do we think about incremental stores being put back into the portfolio in Leisure over '24, '25, are we rightsized now?
Yes. Certainly, within the Flight Centre brand and Travel Associates brand, we are, and it will be normal network planning as to population growth opportunities of new suburbs, et cetera, our shopping centers and that's just normal network planning.
But where we will see some growth will be with Travel Money and also with the Cruiseabout business that we've just announced last week that we expect to see some store growth in that space. But it will certainly not be going back to what it was, it will be moderate growth in the year ahead.
Your next question comes from the line of Mark Wade with CLSA.
We've heard about this renaissance of the travel agent as a concept, and even from you guys in the past, do you still concur with that view? And how much further has it yet to play out? And when might we see it really start to impact your market share?
JK?
So, we love that term, the renaissance of the travel agent. But typically, it actually happens after every crisis that affects the industry. There's a resurgence in interest within the travel agent. What we've noticed is actually a lot of newer, younger customers coming in to our business, both in-store and online. And I think certainly most of the travelling community really wants to have an expert by their side.
I think there's certainly not any challenges in terms of the pricing that's been applied, or even charging some services in some of our brands. You can see that, the customers are actually willing to pay for the service now in terms of some of the brands. So, Travel Associates, as an example, provides a concierge fee, and customers really see the value now. So, we see it's going to last for some time. We can't see it going away. And we're prepared for future crises where the renaissance of the travel agent continues.
Very good. And as a follow-up there, I mean, any particular plans on how to really get that next generation of consumers through the door, over and above what you're doing now?
Oh, sorry. What was that? Next generation ofâ¦
Yes, just how to attract the younger customers, JK. Obviously, it's great at the moment to have a 55-year-old customer who's cashed up and probably feeling good about themselves. But in time, I suppose, we'll look to how do you get the next lot through to replace as the customers go out the other side.
Yes. No, that's -- it's a really good point. But if you look at the slide, you'll also see that, there is a good spread of younger customers as well. And particularly, we've invested a lot in our digital solutions in recent years. And 40% of our customers who actually book with Flight Center are under the age of 30 through our online channels. For us, it's about making sure that we have the right product that actually speaks to that segment. And that's just really within the Flight Center brand. But if you look even with Scott Dunn, the business that joined us in February of this year, their average customer age is actually 45. So you can see that our value proposition is speaking to a younger, more affluent customer.
So really, it's about product and value proposition. And we're quite -- our thinking and strategy is very much about making sure that we have the right product to meet the right customer across the variety of brands that we operate.
Okay. Very good. And last 1, maybe for Adam, just on the capital review, what were the various options you contemplated in coming up with today's decision on the dividend, which I think is probably a good one, but just curious on what else was on the cards.
In terms of the short term, the dividend itself or the capital management plan going forward?
Yes, just more longer term. You're ruminating on this capital review for some time. I'm just trying to get a handle on what was being considered at the board level.
Yes, look, it's interesting. I think, to be honest, Mark, I think at the heart of what we're talking about was we want to have a basis that we want to have a fairly conservative approach to it. And we also want to make sure that we're able to reinvest back into the business as a #1 priority. Those are the 2 things we started with when we were talking about it at a leadership group with the board. There's a range of things we could have looked at in terms of, we had our previous policy, which is effectively just positive each year.
But then when we look at the capital we've got on the balance sheet, we think about some of the dilution that's gone through for some of our shareholders, all of our shareholders over the last few years. We need to really think about what the best return overall is. And I think where we landed was this mixture of, certainly you look at our shareholdings and a dividend is important to a lot of our shareholders. But we can't turn our back on the fact that we have diluted our shareholders, particularly some of our larger shareholder and more loyal shareholder over the last few years.
For all the right reasons and we had to do it, but it is a factor. So I'm very keen to ensure that our balance sheet is strong. The convertibles we have in place, we see as a relatively cheap source of debt, but they will lead to dilution down the track. We want to either reduce the impact of -- we want to reduce the impact of that either by reducing those notes, or if it's commercially and economically more sound, having them convert in due course, but buying back other share capitals.
So there's a few things like that, that we're bouncing around. And I think where we got to was a pretty good balance between that view of EPS growth overall, dividend yield, whilst maintaining an ability for the likes of Greg and JK and Chris to continue to reinvest back in their business and really target, not just the 2% PBT margin, but ensure that over the next 3, 5, 10 years, they're building sustainable businesses that are going to set us up and our shareholders up over that time.
Your next question comes from the line of Sam Seow with Citi.
Maybe just 1 for Greg. On the total available margin, we've seen a lot of negative structural plus channel changes. And on the flip side, maybe the booking fee and NDC shifts now. Do you have an explicit percentage or number that you're targeting? And would it be fair to say, I guess, non-front-end commissions were comfortably over 100 basis points, PBT margin pre-pandemic?
Yes, good question, Sam. Just thinking through how NDC is sort of playing out, this is probably the major topic in place with all our air partners at the moment about how they're looking at content freedom and who they want to give access to content to and who they don't want. This validates, obviously, our TP Connects air content freedom strategy that we've got in place that Adam touched on before.
But out of the top 17 carriers, 15 of those were actively involved in distribution deals about how do we get access to exclusive content and how do we actually put it in market with some good commerciality that sits behind it. So very topical, but that will sort of start playing out in terms of back-end super override over the course of the next couple of years as airlines get more mature in that space.
Just Adam mentioned too, from a total available margin perspective, yes, there's been a shift in Australia and New Zealand in air in terms of the base commission reductions. But we've got a lot of experience globally on this. Australia and New Zealand were really the last 2 countries to sort of follow and we have the ability and experience in other markets to evolve the model so that we can adapt to those changes as well. So that will flow through into AUNZ over the course of the next couple of years at the same time.
Okay. And maybe 1 to Adam. I just want to clarify the 2% PBT margin that includes other. And I guess what would other look like in that 2% number? I guess there's been a fair few moving parts in and out of that segment over the last couple of years. So yes, what the comparable life for like PBT margin other looks like in the 2%?
Yes, we certainly haven't given explicit guidance on the breakdown of the 2%, but we have said that, the leisure and corporate divisions will need to be tracking much higher than the 2% to be offset by other. If you look at the other segment though, Sam, the prime things we've got in there is there's about $40 million at EBITDA level. There's about $40 million which is costs that don't get distributed out to businesses. They're sort of global head office costs that we don't feel appropriate to push out.
Outside of that is travel services, operating businesses, like our touring businesses, our hotels, Discover, which is our in-destination business. They're all pretty much break even for the full year just completed. We'd expect them to start to generate profitability over the next, certainly, it'll be a small profit for those in FY '24 and should continue to improve profitability through '25.
We have TP Connects, which I spoke to earlier, which is a $9 million loss or investment, depending how you look at it, in '23. It'll be similar in '24, should start to reduce from that a little bit from '25. So you're just getting some benefit through there. Then our other businesses that sit in there is our wholesale business in the U.S., which is a $7 million loss for us. That should certainly be at least back to a break even by '25 and shouldn't be a drag on that result.
And the Pedal Group, which is a small loss this year, which again by '25, we'd like to see back in profitability and giving us a share of profitability. So all-in-all, the $60 million loss we see this year, I would like to think is coming back closer to at least a $40 to $50 million loss by the time we get to '25.
Got it. So broadly, other than global head office, in FY '25, you expect all the other businesses to be breakeven at least?
I would, yes. I think TP Connect is the 1 that might take a little bit longer, but again, we should be able to start certainly reducing the drag from that and that'll be at least offset by the other businesses. So yes.
Your next question comes from the line of Annie Zhu with Barrenjoey.
My first question was for Chris. So following-up from an earlier question, I understand that FCM is currently 60% in terms of TTV of corporate. Any idea of how that might trend going forward?
Sorry, could you repeat? I didn't quite hear that question.
FCM weighting, how would it trend going forward?
Yes, we think that for the next couple of years, we think the weighting versus corporate savings will remain pretty consistent. They're both growing now. FCM recovered faster, so it won a lot of new business, very large accounts much faster. But CT's back to really good levels of growth and has been for most of the last 6 or 9 months. So the current weighting we think will carry on.
Great. And a question for James, also a follow-up from an earlier question. So regarding the return to travel agents, can you sort of say that reflected in your performance for storefronts versus OTAs, or what do you think in each of those?
Well, we see that we're maintaining market share in the core markets that we operate in. There's certainly a mix of the stores are performing very strong, and they're actually twice as productive as what they were before. So even though we've got a smaller network, the volume of business that's actually going through those store networks is actually incredibly productive at the moment.
In terms of competing against OTAs, I think you'll find there's a bit of a shift between supplier direct moving more to the agency community and some of the data that we looked at from credit card spending certainly shows that the agency community is actually performing quite strongly. So I can't comment on the overall mix and shift between OTAs and that, but there's certainly been some swing back to the agency community.
And regarding the Scott Dunn contribution, I'm just wondering how that compared versus your original expectation, I think it was $6 million to $8 million of earnings. Was that in line?
Yes, that was in line with that. At the upper end of it, in fact, they performed well last year. So we're at the upper end and slightly above, but toward that sort of $8 million -- $8 million or $9 million mark of their operating result coming through was a good result for us. And JK, that started pretty well in this year as well.
Yes, they're pretty much performing to expectations. We're very happy with how things are going there.
Your next question comes from the line of Belinda Moore with Morgans.
Chris, maybe if I could start with you, please. Just to give us a bit of comfort on the scaling of this corporate margin. You said in the fourth quarter it really increased. Can you give us some flavor of what that fourth quarter margin was, please?
We're not breaking down the quarterly margins today, but what I will say is we really improved the profit margin by both revenue margin increasing in that last quarter, and that was down to various things, fee increases, new fees going in, but also the cost margin coming down. And that was, again, down to 2 things. One is economies of scale, so natural reduction in margins, more volume goes in, but also the initial productivity gains we're already seeing. And to reiterate what I said earlier, the main focus going into next year is really working on those productivity improvements to improve that cost margin even further.
Okay. And you can't share what sort of net profit for tax margin we should see in '25? I mean, '24, sorry, '24?
No, we'll give guidance to the AGM, Belinda, and we'll give a bit of color around that then.
Okay.
Yes, Belinda, we have also said in the -- I think Chris said at the half year he thinks that that margin will pick up this year as it gets closer to '25 and goes again next year.
Okay. Great. Then just a couple of financial questions for you, please, Adam. How should we think about the group CapEx spend in '24? And just how you're thinking about your P&L tax rate going forward, please?
So CapEx this year was a bit under $100 million. It won't be too far off though. I'd say if you're thinking about it, say $110 would probably be about the right number at this point in time. It picked up in the second half as our confidence and the results started to come through. We picked up that investment a little bit more across both divisions, but I'd say somewhere around that $110 is where we're thinking at this point for '24. And the ETR for '23 was about 32%. I think it'll be roughly around 30% to 32% is where we're thinking at this point it should land for FY '24.
Okay. And just going forward, expecting to return to more sort of normal seasonality, or how are you thinking about your sort of seasonality split between the halves in '24?
Yes, it's interesting. My gut feel is that the split in '24 will probably be fairly similar to last year in '23, where we had about 1/3 of the result in the first half and then 2/3s in the second. So at the moment, I think it'll probably sit around there. Historically, it's moved around a bit, but it's been anywhere between sort of that 30% and 40% in the first half waiting. So I would expect at this point that we'll see continued momentum as we go through the year, as some of these initiatives and strategies start to play out and the benefits that we've seen over the last 12 months start to really play out on an ongoing basis. So that'd be my gut at this point in time, Belinda.
Your next question comes from the line of Brian Han with Morningstar.
Chris, in the corporate business, I see you guys are winning a lot of new businesses and so is Corporate Traveller and so is Amex. I'm just wondering, where is most of that new money coming from? Is it mostly from smaller players or is it mostly from that unmanaged space?
I think that is an excellent question. I ask myself that question all the time. All I can say is, I won't comment on our competitors, but what I will say is when we talk about the business we're winning, you can see in the growth of our volumes. So our talk about winning customers is linked to our recovery way ahead of market. So, but I won't comment on our competitors and what they're winning. I'll leave that to them.
Brian, just following up on Chris. So with SME, a lot of that you win from unmanaged, but in the FCM space, you tend to win it from competitors. It might be one of the big global competitors, depending on what sort of business it is. If it's an enterprise-level account, you can really only win it from 3 other people. If it's a big multinational, you will win it from a competitor. It might be a local competitor or it might be one of the global players.
Okay. Guys, I like the term renaissance too, but you don't see the risk of the pendulum swinging back to in-housing now that COVID is over and technology continues to improve to facilitate in-housing?
For corporate business?
For all, especially leisure, sorry.
Leisure. JK?
I'm not sure I understand the question around in-housing. Is that DIY doing it themselves?
Yes, yes.
Well, look, I think consumers always want choice. And at the moment, even when fares and that are quite expensive, they're going to look to an expert that can actually provide choice that's not through a single travel provider going direct. We've got a great value proposition that's not just focused on a single product. There's a lot of components to our service proposition, and that's why customers come and speak to an expert. They do a lot of research themselves, but they certainly come to us for some of the deals that we have, the bonus value that we include in our product lines, but also the confidence of knowing that they have somebody by their side.
So there's more to a proposition of a travel agent than simply just a pass-through a product. And we see that's why we've got a significant and quite a high repeat customer base. In fact, our repeat customer base seems to be growing month-on-month as we're seeing more customers return to us. So we're reasonably confident, but also cautious to know that I think some of the headwinds that will be coming with not necessarily a shift back to a supplier direct strategy, but more so what's happening with some of the cost of travel. And that's where people want to actually come and make sure that they're getting good reasonable advice with appropriate choice and options.
Understood, James. James, how many retail shops do you guys have now in Australia? And in terms of geography, is your ANZ business still by far the region with the most percentage of its TTV coming from leisure?
Yes, the majority of leisure, about 3 quarters of it is really coming out of the Australian New Zealand region. Australian New Zealand and South Africa are the regions that are quite strong for us. We made a choice in the Northern Hemisphere really to focus on profitable growth, and we cut back deeper there over the last couple of years. And then the reinvestment is to make sure that we come out strong, particularly focused on the luxury segment, as well as the independent agent channel, but also making sure that we have a healthy Flight Centre brand in those markets. From a retail geographical perspective, Australia certainly has the largest number of stores, and we've got about 436 stores in the Australian marketplace.
Your next question is a follow-up from Lisa Deng of Goldman Sachs.
Just a follow-up on corporate. Last year, we talked about the $2.6 billion new customer wins. This year, we talked about the transacted as of '23 at $7.50. How should we then think about the full year sort of new win pipeline or possibility relative to that $2.6, please?
Yes, so I'll let Chris take that one up in a sec, Lisa. The $7.50 is stuff that's included in that $2.6. This is stuff that was implemented during the second half. So that's part of that $2.6. But in terms of future wins, I'll let Chris take that one up.
Yes, it really depends. Yes, it's a good question. It really depends on the customer. So when we win a very large enterprise customer, which we really didn't win any this year, so we didn't go for any very large enterprise customer wins this year, this financial year, it can take longer to implement. They often have quite a long lead time to design their program. When it's something like an SME customer, which has been a larger share of our wins this year, particularly in the Corporate Traveller space, but also in some markets and FCM, customers can start trading within weeks in many cases. So what we're seeing this year, what we expect to see this year versus some other years is a quicker speed to market in terms of wins to trading transactions.
So, are we talking the $2.6 included a higher proportion of SME wins?
Yes, SME and smaller large market. So not just SME, but also smaller large market. So we didn't have any very large, huge enterprise customers in there this year.
Okay. So the FCM rebound faster than CT is actually coming from existing customer rebound, and the $2.6 relates more to theâ¦
No, it's customers we've, the FCM growth is really coming from customers who we've won since 2020. So since the COVID period. Now, bearing in mind that international travels only, I mean, we forget this, but it's only really been open just over a year. So the volume we're seeing in this year is really coming from a lot of those customers that were on borders during COVID, but in many cases, we didn't travel very much. So it's partly existing customers, a lot of it, though, is customers won since COVID, and some of it is customers won this year already implemented.
Guys, I think we've run out of time. If anyone else has any more questions, just follow-up with us during the day, and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks very much for your time. Thanks for joining us.
Thanks, everyone.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.
