Dominos Pizza Poland is listed on the Aim market of the London Stock Exchange and has a market capitalisation of £66m. The company owns the Dominos master franchise for Poland and Croatia. There are currently 113 Dominos stores in Poland and 3 Dominos stores in Croatia. There is a very clear strategy to improve store profitability and then grow store numbers which, over time, could be a multiple of the existing footprint. Key to this is consistently delivering great value, great taste and great customer service which will drive all important volume and profitability.
I spent a day in Warsaw last week with Nils Gornall, the CEO of Dominos Pizza Poland and Edward Kacyrz the CFO. Nils joining about 12 months ago but has worked in, managed and owned some of the most profitable Dominos stores in Australia over the past 20 years. Edward joined at the end of 2022 and as well as being a chartered accountant has a wealth of experience in the retail space and digital transformation. We spent some time in the head office, visited a number of Dominos stores in Warsaw as well as the commissary in Lodz.
Whilst here in the UK we have suffered from inflation running above 10%, in Poland, inflation touched 18% earlier in the year before beginning to fall back down and this has been challenging for the company to manage. The approach has been to ensure the company is running as efficiently as possible to mitigate some of these cost pressures, which in a number of areas have seen double digit cost increases.
Looking at the property portfolio all stores were rebranded to the Dominos brand in 2022 but a number remained with the old Dominium internal layout. We visited stores both pre and post upgrade and improvements made to the layout improved the flow of pizzas through the kitchen and overall capacity within the stores. There were also staffing benefits from the new store layouts and a new labour scheduling system is currently being implemented which will provide further staffing benefits.
Another impressive factor about all the stores visited was the cleanliness and tidiness of all locations, both behind the scenes and the customer facing areas. I was particularly impressed with the cold rooms and stock cupboards where everything was meticulously labelled in the right place. This attention to detail seemed…
