XXL ASA

OSE:XXL

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q3

[Tolle O. R. Groterud]

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the presentation of the third quarter results. My name is Tolle Grøterud, and I have the pleasure of guiding you through today's presentation. And with me is the CEO, Pal Wibe; and the CFO, Stein Eriksen, and they 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 requests to our press contact. So without further introductions, I'll leave the floor to you, Pal.

[Pal Wibe, Group Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you, Tolle. And I'd thought I'll start with a little bit of marketing. Of course, XXL is all sports united, and we have a diverse set of sports. So I thought I will bring with you today a little bit of the highlights in the assortment this quarter and going forward. You see some football shoes here. That's actually one of the top models we just got into the assortment, and it's actually kangaroo skins. And for an old veteran player like me, this kind of boot would have been much better if I had access to those previously. And football is one of those categories that we're doing a lot of different good things on the category development. Next year, we will, before the season, we will launch an enhanced football section in more than 20 stores and will also improve the assortment in all stores in football. So a lot of great news in the football section, but also very good sales development. In Q3, we had more than 20% growth in football. Another highlight, especially for our Swedish and Finnish colleagues, is hockey. This kind of hockey skirt, even at home, would have been fantastic to have. On the expensive side, but for the enthusiast, this is also important. And for the first time, we can actually also now have an assortment that is matching the specialist in Sweden and in Finland. And I was traveling to Finland myself last week and could see that we had a fantastic hockey section within the bigger stores. And then, of course, the world's fastest-growing sport, Padel. Tried it myself. It's a fun sport. And this is from Bubble Up, carbon and glass fiber. Fantastic product. We have a full assortment. And this is one of those sports that is really booming, not just in Norway. It started in Sweden, coming to Norway and now growing all over the world. So just some highlights from the -- from our category offering and development. To the third quarter results. As we said this morning, it was sort of overall not satisfied with the development. Incoming delivery of bikes was one of the main factors also in this quarter, explaining 70% of the deviation to last year. But even if you take that into consideration, we think that we're not satisfied with the top line and market share development. We see that the migration to online is continuing at a fast pace. We had 18% growth on e-com this quarter, and that is actually on top of record-breaking figures last year. So we have -- just yesterday, we got the Board's approval to invest even more into our e-com offering. We think we can do a lot better even if we had good sales in this quarter. We think that there was an increase in campaign activities, as we talked about last quarter, in this quarter, and that impacted the gross margin. But long term, we believe that the long-term guiding of 39% is still sort of valid. We are in a strong financial position, as Stein will come back to. We have given out the NOK 250 million in extraordinary dividend in September, and we'll do another round in December, returning to the dividend policy. If you look at the quarter, as I said, this was against a tough quarter last year and with the bike influencing around NOK 100 million in lost sales compared to last year. So it's still a huge influence this year. The good thing is, of course, that now we have almost 100,000 bikes ready for the season start next year. But at least we are a little bit more stable situation when we start the season in FY '22. E-commerce growing 18%. On the market share, these are 12-month rolling figure. So this is like -- this is including in the comparable figures, you have the [indiscernible], the clearance sales last year. We have the closed stores this year and the bike. So this is -- it shows that we have had a drop in market shares over the last sort of 12 months compared to the 12 months before. That is not satisfactory. XXL is all about taking market share and top line growth. That being said, if you look at the month-by-month figures, so if you look at the August and then this morning, we got September figures from SSB, you can see that the market share has been stabilized in Norway and Finland, and we are taking market share in August in Sweden. So at least it looks like it's leveled off. It's too early to conclude that this is the priority #1 with us now to take market share again. And here, you can see the figures, the like-for-like growth and the EBITDA growth per segment. And as I said, Mike is explaining a lot, especially outside of Norway, in Sweden and in Finland in particular, as you can see. The sort of growth ex bikes is more positive in Finland and in Sweden, both Stein will come back to. Yes. We talked about bikes, so we're getting a little bit tired of talking about bikes. Hopefully, next year, we can talk about the bikes we have and the bikes we're going to sell. And been a lot of delays and cancellations in the entire market that it's been really long. And the last bikes we actually got or getting these weeks. As I said, it's been a year that has been unprecedented. But the good thing is that we will have a lot of bikes for the start of next season. We are also -- a lot of people are wondering about -- what about the FY. Everything else on bikes. You have all read about the delivery situation, the container situation. I would say that it's by far not as dramatic as the bike situation has been this year. Overall, we think that Christmas products are here, and we are sort of ready for Christmas. But of course, there is a lot of uncertainty in general in the market, but by far not as dramatic as we have seen in bikes this year. So we are pretty much on top of that. But it can change, of course, because it is a lot of uncertainty in the market. What we're doing is, of course, then to monitor this weekly with our category team and looking at exercising options, front-loading volumes and doing all kinds of things. So as I said, I feel pretty confident about the Christmas trend. But of course, long term, this is going to be something to watch for also throughout 2022. With that, I think I'll give the word to Stein, who will take us through the figures, and I'll come back to you.

[Stein Alexander Eriksen, Group Chief Financial Officer]

Thank you, Pal. Good morning, everyone. Yes, let's take a deep dive into the main financial items for Q3. If we start with our P&L and the key elements in the quarter. Pal has already touched upon some of them. But revenues ending at NOK 2.7 billion, a reduction of NOK 137 million versus last year, where around NOK 100 million of the decline is related to the late delivery of bicycle. Gross margin ended at 38.9% versus or down from 40.8% last year, while OpEx ended -- OpEx percent, sorry, ended above last year, while OpEx in kroners ended below. EBITDA was NOK 336 million, down from a strong last year of NOK 420 million. Moving over to the gross margin. We did say in the Q2 reporting that going forward, we aim to sharpen campaign activities in order to regain market shares. And in Q3, we did what we said, and this hampered gross margin with about 1.5 percentage points. And that, together with higher freight costs of around 0.8 percentage points, were the main explanations for the decrease in margins. Sharper campaign activities were especially the case in Sweden, Finland and Austria. As Pal mentioned and as stated in previous quarters, XXL targets to stabilize the gross margin above 39%. Moving over to OpEx. OpEx percentage increased to 26.4% in Q3 this year, impacted by the negative like-for-like growth hampering scale in operations. In kroners, we had a decrease of NOK 23 million, mainly explained by reduced consultancy costs of NOK 10 million and lower bonus growth of another NOK 10 million. EBITDA. The group EBITDA in the quarter was NOK 336 million, as I said, with the main decline versus last year was mainly explained by negative revenue growth, as well as the lower gross margin. The EBITDA margin ended at 12.5% versus last year's level of 14.9%. All segments posting negative or a decline in EBITDA versus last year. Of course, moving over to my favorite slides, and that's the financial situation of the company. If you look at the development in net debt from NOK 71 million in net debt by the end of Q4 2020 to NOK 393 million in net debt by the end of Q3. So you see that the positive EBITDA is the main driver, somewhat counteracted by higher working capital, especially the inventory that has increased with almost NOK 300 million in the quarter and also some CapEx of NOK 184 million. And as you know, we have paid out dividend of NOK 244 million together with share or purchase of our own shares. That makes us end at NOK 393 million. But still very happy with the financial situation of the company. We have strong liquidity reserves of NOK 1.4 billion and net interest-bearing debt of NOK 400 million, as I said. So to sum it up. EBITDA, as I said, ending at NOK 336 million versus last year, NOK 420 million. Our inventory continues to be at healthy levels and healthy composition also in H. So very happy to see that both the levels and the H is developing in the right direction. And as I said, we have a strong financial position. And this -- I'm sorry, in the second front of the extraordinary dividend of NOK 250 million will be paid out then in December 2021. So Pal, handing the floor over to you.

[Pal Wibe, Group Chief Executive Officer]

Okay. Yes. So to talk a little bit about the outlook going forward. We have previously talked about the main sort of strategic areas that we work on. That continues. But we are also short term sort of focusing on some of these elements more than others. There are 4 areas that I would like to highlight that we are putting extra focus on at the moment in the entire organization. One area is the category strategies, the category plan and the category execution. It is like this sport units, the hockey assortment, the Padel, the kind of category and concept development that we do. That is one of the main long-term improvement levers. And as I said before, I can say that if you look at from a quarter-to-quarter, you will not see huge changes because there are long lead times in this industry, but we can see that there's a positive momentum. We are now one of the top partners of one of the big brands in football, and we are getting better and better access quarter by quarter, season by season. So that's a positive thing even though the long-term, you will see most of the effect of it long term and the new assortment is coming on in the stores and online. So that's one big area, a very important area in all retail concept. Then we have replenishment, an end-to-end improvement, which is basically handling that supply chain, optimizing inventory in the stores. We have had a period with too little. We are now getting closer to normalized levels. We have a little bit too much of summer products, but that is okay to have for next season start because of the uncertainty in the market. But we always -- we are trying to balance that in that area. And we still think that we can do better in terms of optimizing replenishment and inventory levels. You see, that's one of the drivers that hurts our sales in some categories. We are doing a lot of work on the campaign and seeing the results of the campaign, not just the campaign, but also the process, and that is not good enough. And we are putting a lot of resources into optimizing that. And then as I said, e-com is one of those areas that has been growing most during the pandemic. Very pleasing to see that it's also growing out of the pandemic. These things that we can do even more. And this is one of those areas that we're going to have to up the game and actually invest even though we sort of with a fantastic result, we still need to continue to invest and improve. So we just got the okay to continue that journey online. So that's the 4 areas that we internally focus most at the moment. And then in all these kind of change processes, it takes time to see the full result of it, but this is also what makes it fun in retail, that you work on a lot of these different things and then eventually, you see the results of it. Now it's more hard work. And in Q3, you didn't see all of it. If you look at the long-term targets that we have communicated to the market, the 3 things. One is that we want to long term take market share, and there being no doubt about that. As I said, we have been in a period where we lost, 4, 5, 6 months, we have lost market share. And we think that period seems to be leveling out from the latest market share data. Too early to conclude, but that is priority #1 with us. Second is to improve gross margin from historic levels and keep it above 39%. And then to work on those operational efficiency initiatives that we talked about before, RFID, ESL, how we organize the stores in order to sort of decrease the cost ratio and improve efficiency. So with that, just to close off, Q3 severely hampered by a delay of the incoming goods, but we are not satisfied even if you take that into consideration. Strong financial position, as Stein mentioned. The focus areas we talked about, 4 or 5 focus areas. And if you look at the outlook, we think we are going to get back to gaining market share in all markets over time. Seems to be leveling off, but that's not good enough. We have 2 new stores signed for this year. One has already opened in September in Austria. I was there a couple of weeks ago, great store in Klagenfurt, and then we have one more store at Sickla opening on the 17th of November. And in 2023, we have one new store in Norway in Oslo, and then 2 in Sweden. And of course, as always, we are optimizing the store portfolio. And one of the stores that we are closing is Töcksfors, which is an outlet store. Obviously, been extraordinary affected by the COVID. But even if you see beyond COVID, we see that the sales in Töcksfors is not going to be up to the level it needs to be to have a full XXL concept. So that's why we're closing down Töcksfors in March, April next year. And that is -- and we cannot get the kind of the sale or the conditions that we require, we do every now and then close them for good. But as I said, net-net, we are still opening a few selective stores. So with that, I think we'll open up for questions.

[Tolle O. R. Groterud]

So thank you, Pal. Then we open up for questions. And then first from the audience present at Alnabru. So please wait for a microphone, and we kindly ask you to introduce yourself and ask one question at a time. So please go ahead. All right. I have already received some questions, so let's start with them. The first one is, how has the sales development been in October?

[Pal Wibe, Group Chief Executive Officer]

I think that we see the same kind of trends that we saw in Q3 in October. It is a little bit difficult to say because in Norway, we have a fantastic campaign the last weekend, reward days. First time we did it. But that is a change from a campaign we had in November last year. So it's sort of not really comparable figures. I believe it's better than last year, but you have to see November and October together. I would say it's kind of a similar trend as we saw in Q3.

[Tolle O. R. Groterud]

The second one, how should we think about the gross margin going into Black Week and the Christmas season? And how is the competitive environment?

[Pal Wibe, Group Chief Executive Officer]

So gross margin during Black Week is, of course, always under pressure. But then, as you all know, December is normally a very good month when it comes to margins. So yes.

[Stein Alexander Eriksen, Group Chief Financial Officer]

I think we have done a great job in planning for Black Week. It's one of those -- Black Week is not being drawn out. So it's not just a Black weekend, it's a longer period. And we disable the kind of formal level getting to work. And yes, we think that is sort of stable.

[Tolle O. R. Groterud]

And the last one for you, Stein. Are you happy about the quality and the quantity of your current inventory?

[Stein Alexander Eriksen, Group Chief Financial Officer]

Good question. I would like the inventory maybe to be a little bit higher, maybe NOK 100 million, NOK 200 million higher. And -- but the health of the inventory, I'm very happy about. It's continuously improving. So that's -- yes.

[Tolle O. R. Groterud]

All right. So then let's open up for questions for those of you listening in on the phone. So I then call upon the conference host for further introductions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from the line of Carl Fredrik Waage from Arctic Securities. As there is no answer, we go to the next question. And the next question comes from the line of Markus Heiberg from Kepler Cheuvreux.

[Markus Borge Heiberg, Equity Research Analyst]

So I have 2 questions. The first question is on your campaign level and the increased campaign activity and how you have sort of measured that. And can you give us any data points on how the campaign level has impacted traffic to store? And are there any indications that, say, the lower gross margin that you have has actually had a positive impact on traffic? That's my first question. And the second question is on Austria and how we should look at the like-for-like numbers and how you expect that to progress because we're coming over the next 12 months, we will have very, very low base levels, if you look at like-for-like and how you expect that to develop?

[Pal Wibe, Group Chief Executive Officer]

As you say in the report, we think we have sort of normalized and sort of sharpened and normalized, the campaign activity from last year was at the low side. We still think that traffic levels figures are not satisfactory. So that's one of those things that is not satisfactory even despite the increased campaign levels. So I think we are balancing the campaign levels quite sort of consciously looking at the products and the margins and the gap to competitors. So it's sort of we think we're getting close to an optimal mix, but we can always do better in terms of the execution of the campaign more than the campaign rebate level. So that was on the campaigns. On Austria, obviously, this year has been, if you look at the 2020 figures and we compare to 2021, together with bikes, this is those 2 things that has been like a horrible year for Austria in many multiple closures and a really, really severe COVID situations. We expect for ourselves and the markets that we are going to significantly improve the results next year. That's the plan. So we have to improve a lot from this level. And then 2021 was a very, very special year in Austria.

[Operator]

The next question comes from the line of Carl Fredrik Waage from Arctic Securities.

[Carl Fredrik Waage]

Good morning, guys. Can you hear me?

[Operator]

Yes, we can hear you. Please go ahead. As there is no answer, there are currently no further questions in the queue on the phone line. [Operator Instructions] There are no further questions on the phone lines, so I hand back over to your host.

[Tolle O. R. Groterud]

Thank you. So Carl Fredrik, just call me, and I will answer the questions afterwards. So thank you all for coming, and have a good day.

[Pal Wibe, Group Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you.