A fundamentally strong business
By focusing on what we do best, we are well positioned to deliver long-term, sustainable growth and attractive long-term returns for shareholders.
Our three strategy pillars
B&M's earnings model draws on over four decades of experience in UK value retail and an agile, disruptive approach to discount merchandising. This has enabled us to scale to close to 1,300 stores across 3 fascias in two countries, which in the UK alone serve more than 5 million customers each week.
Our strategy combines the strength of our brand with B&M's unique value proposition, which offers amazing value across targeted ranges of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) alongside a rapidly changing, seasonally-inspired General Merchandise range that delights our customers.
We scale this formula through a large, expanding store estate in both the UK and France, both of which possess considerable headroom for future growth.
Our strategy spans three pillars of opportunity. Our immediate priority is to restore growth to our UK business (phase 1) through a comprehensive execution-based plan we call Back to B&M Basics. Beyond this, we see medium-term opportunities to deepen our growth foundations (phase 2) before accelerating growth through strategic opportunities to develop our core offer and explore growth options for B&M France (phase 3).
Underpinning this expansion is a financially disciplined approach to space growth that demands positive contribution margins from a low-cost store model with fast payback times.
Direct sourcing and low operational overheads help us to deliver superior industry margins and strong cash returns for shareholders.
None of this is possible without the skills and expertise of our people, who over the past four decades have scaled B&M from a disruptive challenger brand to the UK's largest variety discount retailer.
Building on our strong foundations
B&M's original value proposition remains strong. Yet in the recent past, our execution has drifted in our B&M UK business. We see immediate opportunities to tackle this by implementing solutions that we are confident can restore B&M UK to sustainable like-for-like1 (LFL) growth.
These solutions were brought together in an action plan named Back to B&M Basics. Introduced in October 2025, its goal is to realign the business with the principles that made B&M so successful – and its number one priority is to return B&M UK to sustainable LFL growth.
Back to B&M Basics is already having an impact in how we price, promote, range and ensure availability in the key brands and products people love. For more details on our goals and ambitions here, see pages 10-11.
And seizing longer-term growth opportunities
Back to B&M Basics is part of a multi-phase approach to first restore and then accelerate growth across our business. The full impact of these actions will take time, but we are confident they will restore B&M's original customer proposition and support a return to sustainable LFL sales growth for B&M UK.
But that's not the limit of our ambition. Beyond B&M Basics, we have valuable opportunities to deepen B&M's foundations to support future growth.
This is Phase 2 and includes smarter use of data and customer insights, where we under-index, and simplifying many of our in-store processes, some of which are overly complex and, in many instances,
paper-based. It will also see us flex the format of our stores to best suit their location, especially town centre sites where the customer shop can vary, and ensure our in-store experience for customers is one that reinforces B&M as a destination store.
With these foundations in place, we also see a third phase of opportunity to accelerate growth by investing in the success of B&M France and properly investigating longer-term opportunities in private label, ecommerce and loyalty. These are not decisions for today: for now, fixing the basics is our sole focus. But as European value retail evolves, we will continue to reinforce B&M's customer offer to maximise growth where opportunities present themselves.
Where we're going
While securing attractive returns as we grow
We see opportunity for sustainable, profitable growth in the B&M store estate, both in the UK and France.
Our UK target remains around 1,200 B&M UK stores, compared with 799 today. Our UK store estate is in strong financial health, with over 99% of stores making positive margin contribution in FY26.
With 150 stores as of June 2026, our profitable France estate enjoys considerable long-term expansion potential given the earlier stage of the B&M brand rollout there.
We are improving the analytical tools we use to select new whitespace opportunities. Our new store openings are based on a data-driven process to identify financially and operationally attractive locations.
We remain disciplined in approving new sites to ensure we allocate our capital in the most efficient manner.
This results in a pace of new openings of around 25-35 stores each year in the UK on an organic basis. We have increased this by another 10-15 stores annually when distressed market opportunities have arisen for us.
These opportunities made a contribution to new store growth this year, during which we opened 41 gross new stores in B&M UK, and 22 on a net basis.
B&M continues to grow organically in France, with 12 new stores added in FY26 and a long growth runway ahead of it.
