XXL ASA

OSE:XXL

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q2

[Tolle Groterud, executive]

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the second quarter and the first half year results presentation. My name is Tolle Groterud, and I have the pleasure of guiding you through today's presentation. And our CEO, Pal Wibe; and our CFO, Stein Eriksen, will take you through the results and the key drivers followed by a Q&A session. And for media, there will be an opportunity to perform separate interviews after the presentation. So please direct your request to our press contact.

So without further introductions, I turn the floor to you, Pal.

[Pål Wibe, executive]

Thank you, Tolle. And yes, welcome to the quarter 2 presentation. And obviously, it's been a challenging quarter, as you have -- we have previously announced, with a very sharp deceleration of the demand in the market that has obviously created a situation with too many products in the market, pressure on prices, increased campaign activity at least short term. But I think that at the same time, I would like to commend the team and Stein and the team that has been really working proactively on addressing some of the key challenges that we have faced in especially on the cost base, where we are working on adapting cost levels to the changed market and sales outlook. That -- Stein will come back to that later. So a tough quarter but also a quarter where we were taking the necessary actions long term for XXL to prosper.

Before we go to the quarterly results, I thought I would just -- a few sort of points on the highlights on the development side because it's important even in quarters like this. This is a picture from our pilot at Alna where we are piloting sales of used products where we repair and resell products. And of course, it's a small business today, but we think it can be a very exciting and big business in the future. And the first initial feedback from the customers and the market is very, very positive. So this is something we will do more of in the future together with great partners like [ Bergans ]. Also on the development side, in a concept like, XXL and then retail concept, you always have to develop the categories and the concept. In this quarter and season, we are focused on what we call the mountain sport initiatives. Together with great partners like Mammoth, Salewa and others. We have done a pilot in selective stores, and then the feedback is, again, very, very positive. We will do more of that and expand the initiative in the future because we think that we can take a bigger share of the market in everything you need in order to be enjoying the mountains.

So it's an area that is important for XXL in the future. And this is just one example of category and partner development initiatives we do in order to further improve the concept. But to jump to the -- to hard facts in the quarter, I think that in Q2, we saw, as I said, especially from mid-May, a very sharp deceleration of demand in the market, not just for XXL, but the entire sport and outdoor market and also some other segments in the retail sector, especially on the higher price points.

And of course, at XXL, most of the products we sell is at higher price points. So -- so that has been sort of a tough sort of market headwind. Sales ended at NOK 2.2 billion, gross margin going down from a combination of this price levels in the market being reduced but also the campaign activity in the market increasing and customers choosing more campaign products and less of the ordinary sort of products, resulting in a sharp reduction in the EBITDA in this quarter isolated. Historically, if you look through the kind of this quarter and the special circumstances in this quarter, the Nordic sport retail market has been growing around 4% yearly, if we take a very long picture on it. So the long-term outlook is not necessarily bad, but in this quarter, it has been a very tough challenge. We have expected a strong sort of -- after 2 strong years and normalization, but of course, the extent of it and the sharp drop that happened in the middle of the quarter, well, has been surprising many.

Our target that Stein will come back to later is to work towards what we call a long-term 40-30-10, which is a target of 40% on gross margin, 30% on cost levels, resulting in an EBITDA of 10% in a normalized market over a longer period of time. Of course, we will, at any point in time, have to protect our market share if we are challenged on price. But we think that this is realistic, and we will come back to how that can be achieved. The key change of focus here is that we need to adapt our cost base to sales. And this is a work that we have started and that will be ongoing in the second half of 2022, and Stein will come back to it.

Yes. Q2, as I said, tough quarter, keep in mind that last year, we had store closures in Norway and Austria. So initially, we had quite an okay sales, but then it dropped in the second part of the quarter. E-commerce was obviously somewhat artificially boosted last year because of the closures and other activities. This year is more normalized but still at quite high level. And if you compare it to 2019, the e-commerce sales at XXL is far, far above 2019 level. So it's still -- there's a huge change taking place. But if you look in isolation versus 2021, it looks negative.

As we talked about, gross margin, 37.6%, that is negatively impacted by clearance activities in the market as well as increased freight costs. That will be the case as well as the surplus volumes in the market. But obviously, everyone is doing like what we are doing now and adjusting their purchasing volumes. So at some point, that situation will normalize when people have adjusted their purchasing levels. And we can then see a normalization of gross margin.

Yes, you have read the paper, so we don't need to tell you all about this. And it's not just the sports sector that faces a challenging market situation. I think everyone who sells a product, especially a higher price -- at higher price levels, see that the consumers are getting a little bit more wary of doing investments in capital goods. So that's something we see in many sectors.

We talked about last year about bikes. And initially, we saw that last year, we didn't have any bikes. This year, we have more than enough bikes. We saw initially in the important March, April month that we had a really, really good development in sales of bikes, but then suddenly, in May, it really, really dropped compared to last year. So initially, we benefited from having availability of bikes. But then in the second part of the Q2, we saw a very negative development also in bikes, not -- even if bikes relative to other sectors has been doing okay.

Market share in -- starting at the bottom with Finland, since Finland has been a market where we have lost market share for some time, it's very pleasing to see that in 2022, we have gained market share in every month, in Finland. So big credit to Pasi and the team in Finland that has really been working hard together with our category and marketing department to revive the trend in Finland.

In Sweden, we are stabilizing market shares. But keep in mind that in 2021, we gained quite significant market shares in Sweden. So it's compared to a very good 2021. In Norway, we have lost some market share in the first half part of -- so far in 2022. But if you look at the figures more closely, it is mainly in April. And again, in April was the month that we last year had closed stores. And this year, we are comparing ourselves to a month where we don't have close stores. So in April, we lost market share. in the automotive, it was a little bit more mixed. But overall, we lost market share in Norway in the year-to-date and not satisfied with that. As we said before, the long-term gain is to take market share in all markets longer term. Now we're doing it in 2 out of 3 markets. We need to do it in 3 out of 3.

Yes. Gross margin, we talked about being tough also with the freight cost that is increasing and that also puts a burden on the margin by approximately 1 percentage point. Yes. So we talked about that already. Of course, all this leads to a negative development in almost all sectors except Austria. So it is a tough quarter. And in Austria, we had a negative EBITDA of minus NOK 3 million, which is less than we have had in any sort of quarter year-to-date so far, but it is also just a half a year. We have done some actions in Austria in order to reduce the cost. We have been conducting the first part of the strategic review. We have decided to close 1 store and not being able to agree with the landlord about the conditions. We are also announcing the intention to move out of the central warehouse facility outside of Vienna during 2023, and we will come back to that.

And also here, Magnus and the team in Austria is doing a fantastic job in significantly reducing the cost and inventory levels in order to minimize the losses. And as we have said before, we are committed to significantly improving the profitability in Austria in 2022. And the strategic review will continue where we are looking at all options. So we are not finished with the strategic review. We're just -- this is just the first phase.

With that, I think I will hand over to Stein, who will take us through the financial review and the first part of the outlook. Stein?

[Stein Eriksen, executive]

Yes. Thank you, Pal. Yes. Good morning, everyone. Let's then take a deep dive into the main financial items for Q2. Pal has, of course, already touched upon some of it, but I will try to repeat some of it. Yes, we are disappointed with Q2 results definitely driven by the weakening consumer sentiment and reduced demand for sporting goods. And as you can see, this heavily impacted the revenue that was down with 9%. Both stores and e-com had declined. And the latter, the e-com part, down with 27% then partly explained by the store closures last year. Pal has already mentioned it, but we experienced decelerating sales during the quarter and especially then from week 20 until end of June.

Gross margin was down with 4.2 percentage points, mainly explained by higher campaign activities in the market, and OpEx percent was up with 3.2% mainly then related to the weaker top line. EBITDA ending at NOK 191 million in the quarter, down from NOK 392 million last year.

Moving over to the development in gross margins that in the quarter was down from a record high 48.1% last year to 37.6% in Q2 2022. Both the market and XXL had more clearance activities this year, driven by poor market conditions impacting the gross margin negatively. During the quarter, XXL has seen a transition to more sales on lower price points as well as a higher share of sales on campaign products, impacting the gross margin negatively. In addition, we had increased freight costs, hampering the gross margin with around 1 percentage point. The current demand -- the current market demand strict focus on inventory levels and liquidity control, which will lead to fluctuations in the gross margin between quarters and season. That being said, however, XXL targets a long-term sustainable gross margin of around 40% for the group, and I will come back to that later in the presentation.

OpEx as a percentage of sales, like I said, increased to 28.9% in the first quarter this year versus 25.7% last year. Impacted then by the negative like-for-like growth, hampering scale in operations. OpEx in kroners increased to NOK 635 million versus NOK 621 million last year related to new store openings, closed stores last year as well as higher HQ costs, but it was partly counteracted by lower bonus accruals of around NOK 20 million.

XXL target OpEx percentage ex IFRS 16 of on and around 30% on a NOK 10 billion revenue base, and I will come back to this as well. So then EBITDA, like I said, ending at NOK 191 million with all segments then except Austria posting negative EBITDA development in the quarter and mainly explained by the reduced revenues and the lower gross margin.

Looking or moving over to the net debt development from NOK 707 million last year or by the end of 2021 to NOK 1.1 billion at the end of Q2 '22. As you can see, a positive EBITDA contribution of NOK 267 million contracted then by the increased working capital, which is mainly related to the continued buildup of inventory.

Although the inventory is still healthy with very low levels of old stock, for example, the stock about 18 months is on record low levels. The level of inventory is too high, and we need to work actively to adjust it downwards.

CapEx in the quarter was NOK 92 million, where a bigger part of it was linked to implementation on the ongoing strategic project as well as one store opening in Sweden and some maintenance investments. Payments recognized lease contracts of NOK 303 million and net interest-bearing payments of NOK 60 million, then leading to a net debt ending, as I said, at NOK 1.1 billion, so then liquidity reserves ending up at NOK 700 million and net debt at NOK 1.1 billion, leverage ratio ending at 2.8.

As stated, we are clearly not happy neither with the results nor the buildup of the inventory. We have, of course, been in dialogue with the bank consortium. I had constructive dialogue with them. However, firstly, we need to take internal actions, both in order to increase operational efficiency as well as adjusting our purchasing volumes. As Pal mentioned, the XXL organization has done so far a strong effort in both areas, but we need to accelerate and enhance the efforts even more in the second half of 2022, where focus will be on cost reductions as well as strengthening our balance sheet through both reduction in purchases as well looking at strength in campaigns and sales execution.

So then moving over to the outlook section. Pal touched upon it, but as earlier communicated, XXL is in the face of implementing several strategic initiatives and projects to improve in profitability and operational efficiency going forward. The aspiration for a well-run XXL concept is an EBITDA margin of at least 10%. And to reach this, we have set up longer-term targets of what we call 40-30-10 on gross margin, OpEx and EBITDA, respectively, and then excluding the IFRS 16 effects.

Right now, given the current market conditions, a 40% gross margin in the near future will be challenging to reach. However, we do aim for 40%. And one of the most important actions to reach this is to increase private label share from today's 10%, up towards 30%. On OpEx, a 30% OpEx base on a NOK 10 billion turnover is something XXL needs to aim for. As a big-box concept and as the Nordic sports retailer with the lowest prices, we need to have the most efficient operations. And this means in all parts of the value chain: in-store, a slim HQ organization, improved marketing efficiency. Also, we need to look at structural measures like downsizing of stores, exit unprofitable stores as well as continuing the strategic review in Austria.

XXL will sharpen the efforts around these 6 main priorities in the upcoming phase. Costs already stated, adapting costs to sales will be extremely important going forward, 30% OpEx on the NOK 10 billion turnover. Category strategies, we need to continue the good work on category to improve brand allocation, and we can already now see strength in assortment from several strong brands like adidas, Mammoth, Norrøna, Nike, Saucony, Salewa, just to mention a few. Full fletch omnichannel player, we have started the journey. The most important actions going forward is to significantly improve the customer journey online, to strengthen the Click & Collect services, to improve our last-mile distribution and introduce endless aisle.

Private label, I touched upon it. But as I said, we have around 10% owned labels today, but a significant part of XXL portfolio is from so-called C or non-brands. And by substituting these brands, we should be able to reach an ambition towards 30% share, which will also strengthen our competitiveness as well as margins.

Austria, as Pal already stated, continuing the strategic review and finding a good solution for both the stores and our employees. And then lastly, improve our campaign and marketing, both the planning process the look and feel of our marketing as well as the effectiveness of our campaigns. So Pal handing over to you on final remarks?

[Pål Wibe, executive]

Yes, and then we'll have a Q&A. Yes. So we closed a very challenging quarter. As Stein said, we are not satisfied obviously with the development. But -- we also believe that we have taken the necessary actions to start adapting the cost base to sales. And we expect, as Stein said, long term, the market to normalize and then players have adjusted their volumes, so that gross margin target of 40% is achievable long term. This is my last day at XXL, but I will hand over the rein to Stein in what I would call smooth transition. We have been working very closely together for a long time. The reason why it happens today and not in August is very practical reasons. So it's nothing special. But we thought at the end of the quarter is a natural point to do it, and the process of handing over has been smooth. So that's why we're doing it today. So nothing dramatic there. And the process of finding my successor is ongoing and it is led by the Board, and they will, of course, announce it as soon as suitable candidate has been found.

So with that, I think we will open up for questions, Tolle.

[Tolle Groterud, executive]

So thank you, Pal and Stein. Then we open up for questions. And I call upon the conference host for further introductions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] We currently have no questions in the queue so it is a last reminder. [Operator Instructions] We have no questions coming through. So I'll hand the call back to your host.

[Tolle Groterud, executive]

Okay. Thank you so much. So that ends our session now. So thank you all and enjoy your summer holidays.