Pets at Home strong growth

The start of their new financial year coincided almost exactly with the implementation of lockdown across the UK. The table below, showing customer behaviour both before and during full and partial lockdown, as well as the impact of phased re-instatement of services and permitted procedures across our Retail and Veterinary operations, most of which was completed in June, clearly illustrates that Retail LFL sales growth for the 20-week period commencing 28 February 2020 is ahead of the 48-week period last year, prior to the impact of the pandemic. For illustrative purposes, Vet Group Sales LFL in the table below includes the gross customer sales made by Joint Venture vet practices, company managed vet practices and Specialist Referral centres only (and not the Joint Venture fee income derived by Pets at Home from those customer sales made by Joint Venture vet practices).

To attract and retain new customers to our products and services:

• The number of active VIP members  grew 20.3% in the quarter, YoY to 5.7m,with the number of VIPs who purchase both products and a service growing 8.5% for the quarter, YoY
• The number of Puppy and Kitten Club members grew 12.0% in the quarter, YoY underpinning a steady increase in new client registrations across our First Opinion practices, further improving their economics and mitigating any requirement for the Group to extend additional short-term financial support relating to COVID.
• Subscription customers5 across the Group grew to over 906,000, up 18.1% for the quarter, YoY

Omnichannel revenues grew 71.0%, with previous investment in capacity supporting record order volumes and a step change in participation of Retail revenue from 9.8% in the prior year to 16.6% in Q1 FY21