Channels — Reach and Scale

Our market leading positions across multiple product categories such as Sat Nav, Audio and DAB radio roll-out (where we hold No. 1 sales positions) provide us with an opportunity to continue to consolidate a largely fragmented market.

Our operations provide access to unrivalled economies of scale, achieved through our extensive national coverage. Our coverage is supported by a number of elements including our distribution centres, store footprint, store and multi-channel experience.

Distribution Centres

Having reconfigured our distribution network in 2010 to include a state-of-the-art central distribution centre in Coventry, we are well placed to meet the needs of our extensive store footprint.

Store Footprint

Halfords maintains an extensive network of great-looking stores, providing a strong and resilient presence on both the high street and at prime locations within retail parks with high footfall. "Rightsizing" of our store portfolio will ensure that our store presence is an enabler of growth.

Our store network has a national footprint, driving Group revenues. It also enables us to differentiate our multi-channel offering as the network provides additional availability, accessibility and service — configured to meet the local demographic needs of our national customer base.

We combine our strong retail heritage with technological developments, offering a strong retail footprint both offline and online, providing our customers with an increasingly tailored customer service.

Store and Multi-channel Experience

Our stores are well run and provide dynamic, optimum space for delivering our customer proposition. To provide a great offer we are making our stores more family friendly, listing more relevant ranges and providing a differentiated service designed to make our customers feel more engaged. Our added expertise and service are difficult for competing online players and supermarkets to compete against.

Stores act as a consolidation point, drawing in web customers with the "Reserve & Collect" and "Order & Collect" online propositions as well as facilitating our retail service offering of checking, building and fitting products.

Further, our online offering allows us to target categories that customers are happy to transact with online. As a result, some of our online ranges are 600% bigger than our in-store ranges — attracting those customers who are savvy online shoppers.