Deep-Dive · Company Intelligence
Record revenues, a surging balance sheet — but profit has quietly peaked and cash is nearly gone.
Origin
NEXT PLC is classified under SIC 70100 — activities of head offices, and was incorporated in England & Wales in 2002.
At a glance
Timeline
Big year-on-year change
Net assets surged 67% — from £1.64bn to £2.74bn.
Big year-on-year change
Net assets grew 41% — from £1.17bn to £1.64bn.
Where our data starts
Earliest analysed accounts: FY2023. 21 years of earlier trading history are not in scope — this report pulls the most recent filed accounts from Companies House.
Name changed
Previously incorporated as Next Group PLC.
Name changed
Previously incorporated as Bronzejasper Public Limited Company.
Company founded
Next PLC was registered at Companies House on 2002-04-09.
02 · Financials
Scene 01 · Revenue
From £5.03bn in FY2023 to £6.12bn in FY2025 — a 22% increase.
FY2023 – FY2025 · Companies House
Scene 02 · Metrics
Financial health
Computed from · cash · net assets · current ratio · debt to equity · total liabilities
Scene 03 · Trends
Eight years of revenue, profit and operating performance side-by-side. Hover any dot for the full year cross-section.
Revenue, profitability and operating growth over time
Scene 05 · Full detail
All metrics across FY2023–FY2025, now fully contextualised by the story above.
| Metric | FY2023 | FY2024 | FY2025 | Δ YoY |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Turnover | £5.03bn | £5.49bn | £6.12bn | ▲ 11% |
| Cost of sales | -£2.83bn | -£3.03bn | -£3.46bn | ▼ 14% |
| Gross profit | £2.18bn | £2.42bn | £2.64bn | ▲ 9% |
| Other operating income | -£16.3m | £12.3m | £850.0m | ▲ 6811% |
| Administrative expenses | -£481.8m | -£657.7m | -£670.6m | ▼ 2% |
| Other operating costs derived | -£735.7m | -£787.2m | -£1.75bn | — |
| Operating profit | £941.5m | £987.9m | £1.08bn | ▲ 9% |
| Finance income | £5.7m | £6.8m | £8.2m | ▲ 21% |
| Finance costs | -£77.9m | -£87.5m | -£96.6m | ▼ 10% |
| Profit before tax | £869.3m | £1.02bn | £850.0m | ▼ 16% |
| Tax | -£158.6m | -£215.3m | £0 | ▲ 100% |
| Profit after tax | £710.7m | £800.5m | £850.0m | ▲ 6% |
| EBITDA (memo) | £1.15bn | £1.23bn | £1.39bn | ▲ 13% |
| Metric | FY2023 | FY2024 | FY2025 | Δ YoY |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intangible assets | £137.1m | £757.2m | £735.4m | ▼ 3% |
| Tangible assets | £644.8m | £687.5m | £686.4m | — 0% |
| Investments | £114.6m | £38.0m | £2.48bn | ▲ 6415% |
| Total fixed assets | £1.75bn | £2.28bn | £2.48bn | ▲ 9% |
| Stocks | — | — | — | — |
| Debtors | £32.7m | £1.45bn | £261.6m | ▼ 82% |
| Cash at bank | £105.0m | £188.3m | £700k | ▼ 100% |
| Total current assets | £2.23bn | £2.45bn | £262.3m | ▼ 89% |
| Trade creditors | -£791.1m | -£991.8m | -£1.08bn | ▼ 9% |
| Bank loans (current) | -£102.3m | -£58.7m | -£60.6m | ▼ 3% |
| Total current liabilities | £1.09bn | £1.25bn | £1.57bn | ▲ 26% |
| Net current assets | £1.14bn | £1.20bn | £262.3m | ▼ 78% |
| Total assets less current liabilities | £2.89bn | £3.48bn | £2.74bn | ▼ 21% |
| Bank loans (non-current) | — | -£29.5m | £0 | ▲ 100% |
| Long-term liabilities | £1.73bn | £1.84bn | £1.55bn | ▼ 16% |
| Provisions | £33.8m | £52.4m | £55.7m | ▲ 6% |
| Net assets | £1.17bn | £1.64bn | £2.74bn | ▲ 67% |
| Total equity | £1.17bn | £1.64bn | £2.74bn | ▲ 67% |
| Metric | FY2023 | FY2024 | FY2025 | Δ YoY |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Net cash from operating activities | £798.8m | £1.12bn | £1.13bn | ▲ 1% |
| Net cash used in investing activities | -£271.4m | -£334.4m | -£181.2m | ▲ 46% |
| Net cash used in financing activities | -£727.1m | -£663.3m | -£939.6m | ▼ 42% |
| Net increase / (decrease) in cash | -£199.7m | £122.6m | £13.1m | ▼ 89% |
| Cash at end of year | £2.7m | £124.3m | £171.3m | ▲ 38% |
Scene 04 · Waterfall
How each cost layer eats into the top-line on the way down to profit after tax. Cascade chart coming in the next release — for now the table below shows the same flow.
FY2025 accounts · cascade view
03 · Risk
Working capital + cash
Four numbers that tell you how stretched the balance sheet is today. The line under each is in plain English — what the number means for the business, not what to do about it.
Screening status
Compliance signals
Five directors held positions for under 12 months, which may indicate nominee arrangements or governance instability and warrants further review.
Severity · medium
One outstanding charge is on record, typical of companies utilising secured lending facilities and unlikely to represent a material risk.
Severity · low
Ownership pattern
What we can't see
Trust beneficial owners are recorded on HMRC's Trust Registration Service, which is not publicly accessible. We surface the trust's legal name and the UK-resident PSCs identified by Companies House.
04 · Market
Industry classification
Professional, scientific & technical
Companies House records the SIC2007 classification for this entity under 1 code: 70100.
Sector context · thin
This filing doesn't carry segment reporting, concentration analysis, or a stated-priorities block — typical for small / micro-entity filings where the disclosure threshold is lower. The SIC classification above is the load-bearing market signal.
05 · People
Officers on file
Historical board
Every officer who has left the company, newest-resignation first. Helps spot waves of churn that wouldn't show on the active-director cards alone.
06 · AI Investigation
AI forensic pass across 100 Companies House filings. 0 page-cited signals from three specialist agents, 0 cross-signal correlations, and 0 verification questions for management — every claim traces back to a filing reference.
AI Analyst commentary
Narrator-written context blocks — what an analyst would read in 90 seconds and walk away with the picture.
Next's balance sheet has transformed over three years. Fixed assets — the long-term physical and lease infrastructure of the business — grew from £1.75bn to £2.48bn, reflecting sustained investment. Net assets more than doubled from £1.17bn to £2.74bn, driven by retained profits and balance sheet reorganisation. The most dramatic movement is in debtors, which surged to £1.45bn in FY2024 (likely reflecting Next's consumer credit book) before collapsing to £262m in FY2025 — a shift of over £1.19bn that needs explanation, possibly a reclassification or sale of receivables. Cash, meanwhile, has effectively evaporated from £105m in FY2023 to just £700k in FY2025, leaving the company almost entirely dependent on ongoing trading cash flows to meet day-to-day obligations.
Next PLC has a notably large and diverse board, with 15 current directors listed — including Lord Wolfson of Aspley Guise (Simon Adam Wolfson), who has been Next's CEO for over two decades and is one of the most recognisable figures in UK retail. The board includes a mix of executive and non-executive directors such as Amy Stirling (CFO), Soumen Das, and several independent non-executives including Annette Court, Michael Roney, and Tristia Harrison, suggesting strong governance depth. Unfortunately, specific appointment dates were not available in the filing data, so it's not possible to identify recent changes, but the size and composition of the board reflects the governance expectations of a FTSE 100-listed company.
Narrator output not present
This report doesn't have v2-narrator chapters or hidden gems — typical for small / micro-entity filings where the source data is too thin for chapter-level synthesis. The Verdict tab still surfaces the load-bearing headline finding.
07 · Documents
Filing pattern + upcoming windows
Due at Companies House by 2026-07-31 for the period ending 2026-01-31.
Annual confirmation due by 2026-06-22 (made up to 2026-06-08).
Final chapter — The verdict
Strong filing
Here's the most surprising thing in this data: Next's pre-tax profit in FY2025 is actually identical to its post-tax profit — both are reported as £850m. Normally, a company pays corporation tax (typically around 25% in the UK), so these two numbers should differ by hundreds of millions. This likely reflects a deferred tax credit or a one-off tax adjustment, but it's an unusual figure that any sharp observer would want to understand. It means the FY2025 profit figures may not be directly comparable to prior years without knowing what's behind that tax line.
FY2025 accounts
Decisive findings
£1.33 of cash for every £1 of reported profit. Earnings are not an accounting story.
Pre-tax profit -16.3% YoY — worth understanding the cause.
09 · Verification
What we read
Screening status
Steps we ran
Limits and caveats
No sector-cohort comparison was generated for this filing — the benchmarking pipeline either skipped this SIC code or this report predates that block.
The v2 narrator did not produce story chapters for this report. AI Insights still surfaces hidden gems from the v1 narrator.
No PSCs are recorded against this entity — typical for listed PLCs (widely held by institutional investors) and for dormant / micro-entity filings.
The filed accounts did not surface a structured principal-risks register, or one was not extracted by the parser. Small / micro-entity filings are not required to disclose this.
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