THG: The Platform Story Is Gone, the Protein Is Real
THG: The Platform Story Is Gone, the Protein Is Real
Something structural shifted inside THG's story this half, and it shows up most clearly in what the company stopped talking about. The vocabulary that dominated earlier quarters — tech spend, Ingenuity clients, distribution-centre buildouts, exceptional costs, divisional reorganisation — has all but vanished from the recent transcript. In its place: two branded consumer businesses, a commodity cycle turning, and a bet on how AI changes shopping. Chief executive Matthew Moulding framed the demerger as the hinge: it “transformed THG from a CapEx heavy cash-consumptive operating model into a capital-light group focused on 2 market-leading global businesses” — Matthew J. Moulding, Chief Executive Officer · 2026-09-10 — THG Beauty and THG Nutrition.
The numbers back the pivot. Group revenue rose 7.2% to £829m, adjusted EBITDA more than doubled to £42.8m, and last-twelve-month EBITDA stood at £95.4m. Management guided to £25m–£35m of positive free cash flow for the full year and to roughly 1x leverage by 2027. For a name that spent years being defined by cash burn, that is the real headline.
Myprotein: scale plus a commodity turn
The sharpest company-unique signal is the claim around Myprotein. THG says it sold approximately 58.5 million branded units in H1, up from 37.2 million a year earlier, and expects about 130 million for the full year.
That is a scale claim the broader market cannot corroborate, but it is the engine of the narrative — unit volume growth paired with brand reach.We believe this makes Myprotein the world's number 1 sports brand by unit volume and by some distance, selling at least 2x the number of products of our nearest global competitor.
Underpinning it is a commodity turn investors have waited on. Whey protein costs have risen roughly five-fold since 2021, compressing the whole category. Management now says, “we are finally seeing evidence of stabilization together with indications of forthcoming price reductions” — Matthew J. Moulding, Chief Executive Officer · 2026-09-10 — a potential tailwind into 2027 and the path back to the targeted 12% Nutrition EBITDA margin. Contrast that with a year ago, when Moulding described pricing as “stuck where it has really at these kind of record levels” — Matthew Moulding · 2025-09-11. The direction of travel has genuinely changed.
Demand is also being pulled by a broader health wave: GLP 1 drug use is now THG's top-ranked keyword, and it is clearly a market-wide theme rather than a THG idiosyncrasy — obesity and weight-health keywords pepper other reporters and the global tape. THG's angle is less about launching GLP-1-specific products and more about mainstream protein education, plus a widening set of licensing deals (Five Guys shakes, confectionery, convenience) that stretch the brand across new channels.
Agentic commerce: riding a wave, not paddling alone
The second live theme is how AI reshapes discovery in beauty. THG confirmed new Google pilot programmes and disclosed early numbers on its in-house beauty adviser: “we are seeing over 1% of customers engaging with that right now, and the customers who do engage with that are 7x more likely to go on and purchase” — Matthew J. Moulding, Chief Executive Officer · 2026-09-10. More striking is the traffic shift: “Up to half of customers now do a lot of their research via LLMs ahead of coming to the website. We are seeing a 4x uplift in traffic to the site that is coming referred by LLMs” — Matthew J. Moulding, Chief Executive Officer · 2026-09-10.
This is where THG is riding a genuine market wave rather than setting one. Agentic Commerce now appears across the global keyword set — from Oracle's Agentic Studio to smaller software names touting agentic capabilities. THG's digital heritage gives it a plausible seat at the table, but the thematic is crowded; the differentiation will be execution, not vocabulary.
What's still unresolved — and an instructive contrast
Two overhangs remain stubbornly outside management's control. The HMRC VAT claim has slipped again, with HMRC needing until end-October 2026 to assess an industry-wide claim — delaying a contingent asset that a year ago Moulding sized at “GBP 30 million contingent asset for us there. If that was to come to pass, that's actually looking more like GBP 45 million” — Matthew Moulding · 2025-09-11. And on disposals of non-core assets, the answer is still no: THG has declined all offers so far, though a meaningful sale would push the group net cash positive by 2027.
There is also a telling contrast with the rest of retail. The global tape is thick with Tariff Refund beneficiaries — AEO, Macy's, JILL, DBI and others all booking recoveries. THG is on the wrong side of that ledger for now, citing the introduction of EU duties it is "in the process of mitigating." Where peers are getting one-off cash back, THG is absorbing a fresh headwind.
The takeaway: THG has swapped a complicated platform-and-logistics story for a simpler branded-consumer one, and the fresh evidence — Myprotein scale, a whey cycle nearing a turn, agentic-commerce optionality — is more legible than anything the company has offered in years. It is still a small-cap turnaround dependent on commodity luck and a tax claim landing, but the storyline has finally stopped leaking cash and started compounding it.