Bang & Olufsen A/S
CSE:BO
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Bang & Olufsen A/S
Earnings Call Analysis
Summary
Q4-2024
Bang & Olufsen achieved a record high gross margin of 53.3% and the best EBIT margin in 6 years at 2.4%, despite revenue for FY '23/'24 falling short of expectations. Strategic shifts towards luxury, including collaborations with brands like Ferrari, and a focus on high-margin channels contributed significantly. The customer base grew by 19%, and efforts to reduce inventory levels and focus on branded channels have paid off. Revenue for next year is projected to grow between -3% and +3%, with plans to open new stores and invest heavily in marketing and product development.
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Bang & Olufsen's Full Year and Q4 Presentation. Today's call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] Speakers, please begin.
Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining the call. With me today is our CFO, Nikolaj Wendelboe. As you have probably seen, we made two announcements yesterday. Along with our Q4 and full year earnings release, we also shared our plan to accelerate our strategic execution, which includes midterm financial ambitions. Therefore, today's agenda will be a little bit different from our normal earnings calls.
I will start by taking you through our key highlights for the year and give you an update on our strategic execution. I will then turn to the introduction of our midterm ambitions and outlook for '24/'25. Nikolaj will take us through the financials in more detail, and I will conclude the presentation part before we open up for questions.
So if we move to the next slide. Let us begin by looking at our Q4 and full year performance. Overall, we are pleased to see that our continued effort in building a robust financial foundation for the future is paying off. In '24/'25, (sic) [ '23/'24 ] we delivered a record high gross margin of 53.3% and an EBIT margin of 2.4%, which is the best in 6 years. We achieved this despite the fact that our revenue of DKK 2.6 billion was lower than we originally had expected. The margin improvement underlines that we have created a more resilient business which enable us to continue to execute our strategy despite headwinds.
Looking at sell-out numbers, we delivered an increase of 3% year-on-year. The increase was mainly driven by APAC, which came from a low base last year, while we are still seeing challenging markets in some regions. As part of our strategic transition towards luxury, we significantly reduced our presence in selected multi-brand and e-tail stores and shifted our focus more to developing our branded channels. The changes in the distribution and product mix towards high-margin revenue along with the positive effects of our pricing initiatives were crucial to our EBIT and gross margin improvements.
Since we started -- if we move to the next slide, since we started implementing our Luxury, Timeless, Technology strategy in January 2023, we have made good progress with key initiatives, while also improving our company and financial robustness. This year, we extended our partnership with Scuderia Ferrari for another 2 years. We also partnered with Ferrari and brands such as Riva on product collaborations to reinforce our Luxury position. This is a way for us to amplify our own brand and to build brand equity, but it's also a revenue driver.
In June, we announced our latest brand ambassador, Ferrari's Formula One driver, Charles Leclerc. He's one of the most popular sports stars in the world and has a large fan base, and he will help us to increase our awareness globally. Our marketing efforts to attract more customers have been a success. This year, we grew our customer base by 19% and customers who own two or more products grew by 14%. We also made new additions to our portfolio and strengthened the customer experience through our proprietary software platforms and updates to the app. Among others, we introduced BeoLab 8 and Beosound BeoLab.
Both products complement our existing portfolio extremely well, with the latter being our first outdoor proposition, which is of growing interest for our target audiences. We also launched BeoSystem 9000c as part of our recreated classic program, and we presented BeoConnect Core, which enables our customers to connect past, present and future products and turn them into a modern music system.
Being a champion of long-lived products and ensuring that our products can have multiple lives are important differentiators for us. That's also why we are committed to cradle-to-cradle certification of all our products. This is one of the world's most ambitious product circularity standards. And recently, we had BeoSound A5 certified at the bronze level, making it the third product to receive this validation.
Our work to create a Luxury retail experience and optimize our footprint continued. In December, we established a global retail organization to drive that effort and ensure brand consistency and we are seeing a positive impact of that. We have improved and systemized our training and started the rollout of our new store concept.
In '23/'24, we reduced our monobrand network in EMEA region by 18 stores. And as mentioned earlier, we have significantly reduced the number of multi-brand stores and e-tailers to strengthen our luxury position. We will continue to have a presence in multi-brand. However, we want to be more selective about where we are and what product these retailers can carry.
We strengthened our presence in our Win cities this year. We relocated a store in New York. We opened the doors to our brand new flagship store in London. And at the end of this financial year, we opened a new company-owned store in Paris. On top of that, we have started our work to implement our Win City concept in Hong Kong.
So if we move to Slide #6. With our strategy, we are moving towards a differentiated and unparalleled position in the attractive and growing luxury audio market, where we have a huge untapped market potential. You can see that our strategy is working. We have delivered a historically high gross margin and delivered about 50% in the last 5 quarters. This is an outcome of the structural changes we have made in our channel network, the Win City concept, our luxury pricing strategy and the investments in our product portfolio.
We want to build on our momentum a strong foundation. And that is what we have decided to accelerate our strategic execution with investments that can further strengthen our position in the audio luxury market. This will enable us to deliver higher profitability and sustainable growth in the medium and long term.
I will come back to some of the key elements of our strategic acceleration, but first, I'll go through how to finance the investment needed for implementing the plan and to ultimately achieve the midterm targets we announced yesterday.
We plan to carry out a capital increase of up to 20% of the share capital within the first half of '24/'25. This will be done as a directed issue and private placement without preemptive rights for existing shareholders. In order to do so, we need our shareholders' approval for the authorization to increase the share capital by 20% at the Annual General Meeting to be held on August 15. The actual proposal will be included in the announcement to convene the AGM.
We have strong interest from several existing and potential new investors and have a high degree of confidence that we can execute on our midterm plan. We also have the support from our main existing shareholders for our AGM proposal.
Please move to the next slide. I will now go into more detail of our strategic acceleration, which will help to reinforce our luxury positioning and our plan to meet the medium-term financial ambitions in the period.
We want to further enhance brand awareness and brand equity through targeted marketing investments. We have made progress over the past couple of years by building partnerships with luxury brands. This has increased our global visibility and among our key target groups, especially within the high net worth individuals. We improved our e-com experience and systemized our CRM efforts. Collectively, these efforts have enabled us to grow our customer base since the launch of our strategy and increasing the brand awareness is key.
We might have strong brand awareness in Denmark. But globally, we still have work to do to reach our target audiences. Over the 3-year period, we want to improve the brand visibility by, among others, increased advertising, increase the number of local activations, collaborations with brand ambassadors, and influencers relevant to our target groups, and more targeted storytelling that reflects Bang & Olufsen's unique design, sound and craftsmanship and heritage.
Our branded channels are an important part of our growth plans. This is where we can give customers the full Bang & Olufsen experience, and we want to have stores in the right locations, in the right cities around the world where our customers are. We are still lacking being present in cities where our potential customers are. We have seen from our Win City concept and from our key retail partners that when we do it well, we can grow the business significantly.
Therefore, it will be a priority to optimize Bang & Olufsen store network and experience. This includes closing underperforming monobrand stores, relocating and upgrading existing stores and opening new monobrand and company-owned stores in key global cities and regions where we don't have sufficient presence today. We need to be where our customers are. We are fluent design and music lovers of which there are approximately 200 million globally. Take Miami, for example. We don't have a presence today but it's a prime destination for our target audience, and we need to build a stronger footprint there to capture the potential.
We will continue to invest in IP rights and in our timeless product portfolio. The latter will include continuous investments in our two software platforms, which will enable us to strengthen our portfolio of seamlessly connected products and bring innovative new products to the market faster. We will also expand our outdoor and recreate the classics portfolio and invest in our bespoke capabilities. We will continue to leverage our product pricing power to strengthen our luxury position and improve our profitability.
Finally, we will seek to grow license revenue from strategic partnerships by engaging with new partners that reinforce one or more of our luxury timeless technology pillars. Our license business not only generates revenue but is also a significant margin driver, and we see big opportunity to grow this further with this plan.
So if we move to next slide. We believe that by building on the momentum we have and adding the right investments, we will be able to grow and strengthen our position as the world's leading luxury audio brand and realize Bang & Olufsen's growth potential in the midterm. We are aware that there are elements we are not in control of that goes for macroeconomic development and for the uncertainty related to the timing of our retail investments, where it will be essential to get the most optimal locations for company-owned stores as well as finding and onboarding the right partners for new monobrand stores.
We have crafted a thorough plan, which has led us to announce the following midterm financial ambitions. Organic revenue growth of 8% CAGR during the 3-year period covering the financial years '25/'26 to '27/'28 to reach an EBIT margin before special items of 8% in '27/'28, to have free cash flow of DKK 250 million in '27/'28.
We have come a long way, and I'm confident we can achieve this, and I'm very excited about the future of B&O. With this, I will hand it over to Nikolaj.
Thank you, Kristian. Now please move to the next page. Let me start by adding some more details to the midterm ambitions from a CFO perspective. We have defined three key building blocks that will help us accelerate profitable growth, brand awareness and pricing, channel development and growing the product and license business. We want to increase brand awareness and brand equity and strengthen our luxury position. This requires investments in marketing. We will focus marketing spend on these things that work. And then when the timing is right, we will accelerate marketing spend and expect it to be a strong growth contributor.
Increased pricing continues to be an important part of our strategy implementation to reflect the luxury position and will be a key revenue and margin driver. A large part of our investment lies within channel development. We will target CapEx towards opening of new company-owned stores and invest in upgrading our monobrand network and closing underperforming stores. In addition, we will hire staff to support this, which is expected to increase the capacity cost level.
The last of our key building blocks is growing the license business. We will target investments towards software solution that underpins our offering, enable us to delivering a licensed business, which is more than our logo on a third-party product. Products are not outlined as a specific building block on this slide, we will, however, continue to invest in our product portfolio and our software platforms. Continuing to delivering a world-class product portfolio is the foundation for succeeding with all the building blocks. And therefore, investments into our products will also increase as part of the plan.
In total, the initiatives are expected to increase CapEx by 30% to 40% during the period compared to '24/'25, while our capacity costs are expected to increase by DKK 100 million to DKK 200 million per year during the period.
Please go to the next page. I will now take you through the outlook for '24/'25. The outlook for next year is based on the assumption that we are getting the capital increase approved and we can make the required investments to accelerate our strategic execution. Therefore, 2024/'25 will be an investment year for us, and bear in mind, the effects from the value-creating investments come with a delayed effect.
Also, more elements of the midterm plan is now completely within our control timing-wise. As an example, the timing of the opening of new stores will depend on finding the right location and fitting the store. We also expect that capacity cost increase will be front-loaded as we will have to hire the right competences to help us execute on the midterm plan.
In the financial year '24/'25, we expect to increase our capacity cost by around DKK 100 million. In addition, CapEx is expected to be in the range of DKK 250 million to DKK 275 million. For the financial year '24/'25, we are therefore expecting revenue growth in local currencies from minus 3% to plus 3%, and with an EBIT margin before special items of minus 2% to plus 1%, and free cash flow is expected from minus DKK 100 million to 0. We expect our outlook for the year to follow regular seasonality, and I would like to remind everyone that Q1 of last year was better than a normal Q1 due to the price increases we implemented in September last year.
Now please move to the next page. So now we'll take you through the Q4 financials. I'll try to be quick as I guess the main topic today will be our midterm ambitions. So move to Page 12.
So I'll start by going through sell-out for Q4. On group level, our like-for-like sell-out declined by 2% compared to last year. APAC reported sell-out growth driven by improved market demand, while sell-out in EMEA and Americas declined. Last year, we also made some end-of-life deals to reduce inventory levels, and this is also reflected in the numbers. If we exclude these deals, like-for-like sell-out grew compared to last year. Across regions, the Staged category grew by 9%, while Flexible Living and On-the-go declined by 3% and 19%, respectively. This reflects the change in channel mix towards our branded channels as well as the end-of-life deals last year that I just mentioned.
If we look at the regions, like-for-like sell-out in EMEA decreased by 5% year-on-year. The monobrand channel increased slightly, while other channels declined. The stage category grew while Flexible Living and On-the-go declined in EMEA. Sell-out in Americas declined by 7% across the channels, except for our company-owned stores where we delivered double-digit growth. The monobrand channel declined due to poor performance in a single geographical market.
Like-for-like sell-out in APAC increased by 6%, with most channels performing. Sell-out in China grew 4% with positive traction in the monobrand channel, in the Staged and Flexible Living categories. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, all reported double-digit sell-out growth.
Please move to the next page. Reported revenue for the quarter was DKK 655 million. This is an increase of 3% in local currencies as compared to Q4 of last year. Overall, the performance was good and at the higher end relative to the expected. In terms of channels, the development was driven by reported low single-digit growth in branded channels, offset by a decline in the multi-branded channels. Our brand partnering and other activities grew by 24%. This was mainly driven by higher income from the recently launched Cisco 950 earphones. Our license income compared to last year was driven by automotive. As we have previously communicated, our HP agreement is expiring and HP income, therefore, declined as expected.
Please turn to the next page. Looking at the split of product revenue, EMEA and Americas grew revenue, while revenue -- while APAC declined. In EMEA, revenue grew 1% in local currencies to DKK 311 million with enterprise channel performing well. In Americas, revenue increased 12% in local currencies to DKK 78 million. The ramp-up of our collaboration with the Korean luxury automaker, Genesis, helped us to deliver double-digit growth in the enterprise channel.
Revenue in APAC was DKK 163 million, which corresponds to a decrease of 6% in local currencies. Revenue from China decreased by 2% in local currencies. However, monobrand increased year-on-year despite one partner having relatively high inventory levels. Each channel decreased double digits as we continue to limit our presence in this channel as part of the transition towards the desired luxury positioning.
All-in-all, the Staged category increased by 27%, reflecting the change in distribution channels as well as a strong performance from Enterprise. Flexible Living and On-the-go declined 30% and 17%, respectively. Both categories were impacted by end-of-life deals in Q4 last year. The decline in Flexible Living also reflected a strong launch of BeoSound A5 last year.
Please turn to the next page. The gross margin was 54.3%, which was a 2.9 percentage point improvement from last year's Q4 margin of 51.4%. In the first comparable quarter without any impact from extraordinary component and logistic cost in last year's number, the improvement in Q4 was driven by increased margins across regions, price increases and a positive change in product and channel mix. The EBIT margin before special items was 1.8%, equivalent to an EBIT margin of 2.4% for the year. We have generated a positive EBIT margin every quarter throughout the year, and we are pleased to report our highest margin in 6 years.
Please turn to the next page. Looking at Q4, capacity cost increased DKK 54 million, of which DKK 36 million was special items, mainly due to a reorganization. This especially impacted the cost development in distribution and marketing. The higher development cost was driven by higher incurred costs, which was partly offset by a higher capitalization ratio. Costs were mainly for software platform development and product roadmap activities. Administrative costs increased by DKK 10 million year-on-year. The low level last year reflected a no bonuses were paid. In addition, special items drove some of the increase.
Please turn to the next page. Net working capital decreased by DKK 34 million during the quarter to DKK 263 million. We continued our focus on inventory management, and we saw our inventory level continued to decrease, ending the year at DKK 447 million. The decrease in receivables was driven by collection efforts and sales with extended credit remains at a low level.
Please turn to the next page. And finally, the free cash flow for Q4 was positive DKK 43 million. The development since last year was driven by increased cash flow from operating activities. And for the full year, we reported a positive free cash flow of DKK 11 million. CapEx was DKK 48 million for Q4, totaling DKK 280 million for the full year. As I alluded to earlier, we expect the level to increase in the coming years. Capital resources amounted to DKK 344 million at year-end, of which available liquidity was DKK 184 million.
And with that, I would like to hand the word back to Kristian.
Thank you, Nikolaj. Please turn to Page 20. So finally, let me summarize our presentation today. This year, we delivered a record high gross margin and the best EBIT performance in 6 years. We achieved this despite a lower revenue level compared to last year. We have made good progress with the implementation of our Luxury, Timeless, Technology strategy and the results underline that we have built a more robust company and business.
We have had a particular focus on building a stronger retail foundation, luxury pricing, portfolio development and reinforcing our luxury positioning through key partnerships and collaborations most recently with Riva, Ferrari and Charles Leclerc. We want to capture the market opportunity and to build on our momentum, and we have presented a plan for accelerating our strategic execution to help us realize new medium-term growth ambitions. We want to initiate a capital increase to support this, and we will look for a shareholder approval of 20% authorization at our general -- Annual General Meeting in August, where we expect to have the support from our main existing shareholders.
Our investments will be focused on further optimization of our branded channels, targeted marketing initiatives, and continuous development in our product portfolio. We believe that this plan will help us to realize Bang & Olufsen's growth potential and solidify our position as the world's leading luxury audio brand. And I would also here like to take the opportunity to thank our employees, partners, suppliers, brand ambassadors, customers and shareholders for their continued support and trust in B&O.
[Operator Instructions] The first question will be from the line of Poul Jessen from Danske Bank.
I have a few questions. Let's start by the strategy plan and on your Slide #9, where you put in these three drivers to get to the 8% CAGR '25/'26. Can you put a little more flavor on the relative expectations for these -- thinking if you, as in the past or in maybe in the Luxury industry in general will raise prices by, let's say, 3% or 4% per annum, and you leave about 4% growth both to channel and to licensing to more awareness. So how should we think about the relative performance there?
So maybe I'll start and then I'll pass over to Nikolaj. So we know that the strategy that we put in place are working, and we see lot of good signs that it is working in terms of interest in the brand, interest in the products, interest in the classic program, the services and everything we do, and we know we're in a unique position. But we also know that we haven't made people aware of that.
And we know that we have been very prudent in marketing investments for visibility. We have not been present in many of the places where we do meet our target audiences. We have some presence, but we don't have enough presence. So we will put more marketing investment, obviously, for visibility. We will also continue to upgrade our store network, and we know where we have done that and where we demonstrate and show the full B&O experience with all the products and with the brand and with the heritage, again, and where we have really well-trained staff, it delivers results.
So again, to accelerate the rollout of the new store concept, to also be able to cover white spots in distribution where we're not -- and move to better locations where we're not optimally positioned, will help to drive our growth.
And then finally, of course, to continue to invest into product and product experiences and adjacent businesses that will make that better. Those are the three general pillars. And we have modeled this into different plans and different scenarios, and Nikolaj will be able to share more on how that has come to life.
Yes. So I'm not going to give you sort of any sort of specific numbers on the sizes of each of the boxes on the bridge, because it -- there is some uncertainty to timing of retail investments. There's also things that can impact how much price increases what we are going to do. But what I will say is that, we will increase prices, and we will increase prices most likely more than inflation in general in society.
So there is a general margin lift up and growth driver from that. But price increases also goes hand-in-hand with the investments into the brand because the stronger brand that we are building, the more we can also increase prices. So there's a positive sort of effect from those two elements. That's why we actually put them together in this slide, as increasing the brand awareness and pricing as one sort of combined initiative, because the stronger the brand gets, the higher we can set our prices. We're pretty convinced on that perspective.
Then on the channel development, this is where a lot of the investment goes in. This is also where it takes time to build growth, because you need to build a store, and then you need to ramp up the store. So when you build a new store, then the first year, of course, is not fully into operation. And the assumption in the plan is that it will take years for a store to sort of grow to a normalized expected level for a store to be at. So there's some delay in those investments.
And then finally, on the licensing part. Of course, there's a growth in the licensing part on our existing partners, which will -- we expect to see a steady growth from, but bringing in new partners is a little bit binary right. When exactly do you get them on board? And what's the ramp-up plan for them? So that's why it's very hard to sort of give a precise sort of number for how big a part that will be. But when we then combine it all together, we feel that our growth ambition of an 8% CAGR is very, very reasonable to communicate today.
Two follow-up questions. Can you give some insight into how you look at -- when you come up with new stores, how much owned and operated should we expect coming in here? You talked about a large part of the investment is growing. So I assume that you are going to accelerate your views on how many owned stores you want?
Yes. So first of all, I think it's important to say that we will still be a company where the monobrand network is an extremely important part of the business, of growth and of earnings. So when you look at everything we are planning to do in the channel, it's a combination of three things.
So we will open more CoCo stores, especially in the key Win cities. And a rule of thumb is probably that we will double the number of CoCo stores in this midterm plan -- over the plan. So not from day 1, but over the plan, right?
Then we will relocate and also close some of the underperforming monobrand stores, relocate others and really work with our monobrand partners on enhancing performance in the store through retail excellence, with our global retail function, training, et cetera, et cetera, but also, of course, making sure they get into the new store concept.
And then we will also open new monobrand stores with new partners in parts of the world where we don't have sufficient presence today, but where we feel it's better to open the stores with a partner than doing it ourselves. So net-net, when we take into opening stores, closing stores, relocation stores, actually think that at the end of this period, we would actually have totally fewer monobrand stores than today because we will probably close more than we will open up new, but it will be stores in better locations, better performing stores that will drive much higher revenue per store and for B&O as a group.
And when you look at your CapEx guidance, when you -- as I calculate you guide, CapEx beyond '25 or DKK 325 million to close to DKK 400 million per year. And that's an increase from DKK 215 million last year. Is that mainly going into your own stores or I was thinking about how much of that is going into helping your partners?
Yes. So it's -- of course, our own stores sort of drive more CapEx per store than when we're helping our partners for sure, quite a lot more, but we also set aside CapEx to support our partners in what they have to do because there will be a benefit to all of us, because we can do it faster together then. If we also help them with some of their investments, as we've also done to some extent in the past.
But we're also going to invest in our product portfolio. As Kristian said, there's also CapEx investments just intangible that will be a growth in that CapEx. Today, we are -- the main part of our intangible CapEx are already going to the products that will grow to a higher number because we want to improve our portfolio and expand it as well, over time. And then there will be investments going into also improving our e-com, which has been underinvested. And then there's a number of investments, as we talked about in the past, that is more sort of the foundational investments. As we are going to do retail excellence, do more e-com, we also need to tie everything together from an omni-channel perspective. So we are already in motion on changing a lot of our infrastructure and IT system to actually be able to support this plan.
And the last for now, Q1 last year, you gave a deep dive into your market assumptions, you said CAGR of 16% with first years being below and the later years being above. So if we then assume whether it's 18% or something for this strategy plan. Have you changed your market outlook before doing these numbers?
Yes. So since we presented what BCG had found on Luxury growth, which is correct, like you say, 16% back in the day. I think that the Luxury industry as well has suffered some decline, and I don't think that number is 16% anymore. So it's certainly down. But it's still in the double-digit number. And when we look at it, we again see a good opportunity for us and a good potential for us to go and realize that.
The next question will be from the line of Niels Granholm-Leth from Carnegie.
First question would be on your implied gross margin for fiscal '28 given the growth outlook and your expected 8% EBIT margin, and the expected increases to capacity cost, where would you see the gross margin in fiscal '28?
My second question would be about the number of store closures. Would you expect the store closures to be front-end loaded during this strategy period running until 2028? And how many store closures would you expect for this first fiscal year? And then which effect would that have on your revenue for fiscal '25?
Yes. So -- on gross margin first, so I'm not going to give a specific number, but we are expecting sort of our gross margin to increase in the midterm periods from the level that we have today. And of course, price increases is driving that together with channel development.
So more monobrand, more better performing monobrand partners but also more company-owned store revenue and e-com revenue will all as equal increase the gross margin. So there is a, I don't know if I should say significant, that's probably over the years, but there is a solid gross margin improvement built in to the plan. And that's something that we definitely think that we'll be able to deliver on. We're also going to invest in value engineering and being even better and looking at how our cost of goods sold is constructed in this period as well.
On number of store closures, it is not going to be specifically front-end loaded. We have a system in place where we are constantly evaluating all our monobrand partners on specific objective criteria. And every year, we will close the lowest performance ones according to these criteria. This will primarily be what we call Tier 3 and Tier 2 stores that are sort of having a relatively low revenue and are not delivering on the brand and the experience we want to give our customers in the store. We have built in the impact of those closures into our numbers coming into '27/'28. As a percentage of total revenue, the closure impact is minor.
Great. And when it comes to the store acquisitions, you said that you expect to double the number of company-owned stores. You currently own 12 stores. Would you expect those acquisitions to be front-end loaded during this strategy period?
No, that will not be front-end loaded. That will be pretty steady implementation over the period. It takes a lot of work to open a company-owned stores. It takes a lot of work to open any store. And there's a limit to how much we can front-end load that just from an operational perspective. So we expect this to be sort of, yes, a fairly steady development over the period of the plan.
You have 12 focus cities where you expect to implement the Win city strategies. And out of those 12 focus cities, I presume that all of your existing 12 stores are located in -- within those 12 focus cities. How many stores should we expect to be in those 12 focus cities? And would all those stores be company-owned stores by the end of this strategy period?
No. So we will not cover all the 12 cities only with company-owned stores in this strategy period. That will require more stores than what we have in the plan. So we will have some of the cities still being covered by partners as well or maybe a combination of our stores and partner stores could -- is also something that we are looking at. Today, the 12 stores we have today is correct. Most of them are in the 12 cities, but 2 of them are actually not. And they are the ones in Copenhagen, which is not one of the 12 global cities, but of course, it's still an important city for us as this is our home market.
The next question will be a follow-up from the line of Poul.
I have then a question on the license business. HP is going to ramp down over the next, I guess, say 12 months for, when the products are being renewed, a replacement for that one. Is there anything to say on when we should expect that it should pick up? Or if we just should take the license revenues to go steady down during the financial year?
Yes. So let me start. We have certainly not rested on our laurels since we knew that we were going to face HP out, but we cannot announce obviously anything before we have anything done and I cannot give you any guidance on that, but it's a strategic important area for us, and we have had many good conversations with different opportunities and we will announce them in due course.
Okay. And on the capital increase, can you say anything about the potential investors that you're talking to and who has shown this strong interest. Is it venture capital, is it institutional investors, is it active investors, is it industry companies or what kind -- I don't have good names, just what sort of investors are you talking to?
I will not go into detail on that either, but we have strong interest from several existing and from potentially new ones. And -- that's all we will say at this point in time. But it's good that we have interest, and we are confident that we will be able to execute on the midterm plan.
And then on the -- my final question is on the current year guidance, which is 0 plus/minus. As I recall it, you had a headwind last year of 5% from closing of multibrand. Are you expecting any headwind from the multibrand restructuring this year? Or is that actually given your head start to the year? Yes. And then secondly, when you look at the guidance for this year, you said that part of that was because of a postponement of a product into the current year. Shouldn't that give you underlying support for this year? So what's your key assumptions for handling of the rates that you are giving?
Yes. So we have sort of -- largely sort of lowered our presence in especially physical multibrand to a level where we have done the cleanup in last year. So we are pretty certain that we will not see headwinds from that multibrand sector and to the same extent in next year. e-Tail is a little bit different because we still have -- we're still sort of working a lot with e-tailing platforms in China that are struggling.
It has nothing really to do with Bang & Olufsen, but in general, with a huge price sort of pressure on discounting in that channel that we are not part of. So we expect e-tailing to continue to be a difficult channel for us in the coming years, and we're also going to be more focused on what assortment that we are selling in e-Tail, so we have a more clear separation. But in the bigger picture, for this year, of course, we did the main -- we took the main hit, so to speak, on e-Tail and multi-brand last year. Was there another question?
How much of the total revenue -- just follow up. How much of the total revenue is Chinese e-Tail, just to have an indication of how much total revenue at this point?
Chinese eTail is around 5% of total revenue.
Of the group?
That would be my -- on top of my head.
And the postponement of product launch, as it was the reason for lowering the guidance last year then, that you move it into this year? Is it then neutral because it was coming late to last year or how should we look at it?
So I think, how should we look at that? We have -- we are constantly working with developing new products and launching them and with the resources we have, we are developing a number of products every year. Sometimes it goes faster. Sometimes it is slower, depending a little bit on what kind of products that we are launching and how much newness we have from a tech perspective. So I don't see that as a something that is changing our look on sort of the financial performance of the year.
Next question will be a follow-up from the line of Niels.
Just going back to your product introductions for this year, you're saying that you will introduce plus four products. Could you talk about within which product categories is it going to be primarily in Staged, Flex or in the On-the-go category? That's my first question.
Unfortunately not, Niels. Unfortunately not, Niels, we will have to do that when we do that. So -- but we know where we're going to do it.
Okay. Can you just explain a bit more about the economics of your company-owned stores. I mean, we can do the backward calculations in terms of the average revenue that each of the B&O stores are generating, but can you talk about the average revenue that we should build into our forecast models for the stores that you own and operate? And what kind of gross margin that you can extract from those stores?
So I will talk about it, but I will not mention numbers because I don't think I want to give you all our details of the plan. But obviously, a CoCo store -- when we put CoCo stores in, we put them into the 12 cities primarily as we talked about. That's, of course, also with the expectation that these are stores that will have a relatively good performance because they are in a city where you have more of our target audience and more customers. And when we implement the Win City concept, we know that this works and can drive growth. So you would have and higher sort of average revenue in these stores that you would have in other parts of the world where we have -- where we're operating with monobrand partners.
We -- it takes time to ramp up a store, especially if we go in a place that is more white spot, because you need to build up the ecosystem around the store, of course. And we expect actually it takes 3 to 4 years for a CoCo store to be fully sort of operational from a performance perspective. Of course, you get more revenue because you get the retail revenue from it and we get a higher margin. And I think we said that before, so a margin in a company-owned store is around 70% in this point in time. And we, of course, expect that will also be the case going forward and growing from there with price increases, et cetera, et cetera.
And can you talk about how much revenue, retail revenue that your company-owned stores are generating, say, on an index compared to the average of the franchise stores?
Yes. Compared to the average of the franchise stores, they are doing quite a lot better. I think if you take like compared to the top 20 of our franchise stores, our company-owned stores because the locations they are in are typically doing 10%, 15% more. But of course, our monobrand brand partners who are also doing things right are also running a really solid business.
Great. And then finally, just on the strong interest that you're mentioning as to the share issue, should we read it as the share issue is essentially already covered?
So we have, like I said, strong interest, and we expect it with high confidence to be executed, that's all I will say.
The next question will be from the line of Poul.
I have two final questions. One is the CAGR of 8% that you put up. Should we see that as equal over the 3 years? Or will it accelerate over the 3-year period?
So it's a CAGR. So it is not necessarily going to be equal, over the 3 years. And I think especially the timing of the retail investments will really determine whether there will be a higher growth rate towards the end of the period compared to the first part of the period. So that's why it's a CAGR. It's -- not unrealistic to grow 8% every year, but retail investments are important and the timing of those will determine whether it will be skewed a little bit.
And then the final one, that's coming back to the CAGR thing. You say you have very strong interest. And you also say that it will be completed before end of November. But you also have the AGM already in, it should be mid-August, I think, should we expect that if you already have discussions now and you get an acceptance at the AGM, that it could be completed in September? Or is it totally over?
I think we would not be able to specify that at this point in time, but as soon as possible after that.
[Operator Instructions] As no one else has lined up for questions, I will hand it back to the speakers for any closing remarks.
Yes. Thank you, everybody, for joining today. And thank you, Poul and Niels for all your good questions. And if you have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to our IR department. So thank you very much.