XXL ASA

OSE:XXL

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q3

[Tolle Groterud, executive]

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the third quarter results presentation. My name is Tolle Groterud, and I have the pleasure of guiding you through today's presentation. Our CEO, Freddy Sobin, and our CFO, Stein Eriksen, will take you through the results and then 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 over to you, Freddy.

[Freddy Sobin, executive]

Thank you, Tolle. Good morning, everyone. My name is Freddy Sobin. I'm the -- well, semi-new CEO at least for the company. I started 1st of May. It's been a hectic first two quarters. This is my second quarter presenting. And unfortunately, just like the headline says, we are neither proud nor satisfied with the third quarter results. Today, we'll walk you through them and give you some more details. What I would like to focus on today in my CEO presentation is, number one, the reset, rethink plan and how our short-term [ musters ] as well are progressing. And I'm actually glad to say they are progressing well. We are seeing material results. We are seeing change and really gaining momentum in that journey. Number two, however, we are acting in a difficult market right now. It has not been an easy one in this third quarter, and we'll give you some more guidance through that. Hence, the results and the sales are on an unsatisfactory level in Q3, and we will present countermeasures and actions what we are doing to counteract that. One of these are actually that we have now increased our cost [ out ] ambitions moving ahead.But let's start at reset, rethink. This is the long-term plan that we actually launched this summer. So when we presented the second quarter results, we also presented our new plan moving forward. So short term, we have our 5 must-win battles, which will then guide us through the turnaround of the company. But more long term, the plan is to reset, rethink. Reset is all about finding the historic key success factors of the company, finding our way back to what made XXL a fantastic company, an unrivalled success in the Nordics, really taking that back to heart. But we think it's also acknowledging that 2023 does not look like the last 20 years looked like. So, we also need to really embrace the future. We need to evolve, we need to look forward. So reset, rethink and finding the right balance is all what the new plan is about. Reset is our five must-win battles. These five must-win battles is what we've set out to deliver a clear EBITDA uplift in the coming 24 months. These five are the category reset, its availability, the strengthening of that. It's store operations, it's pricing as well as e-commerce profitability. We went through them quite thoroughly this summer in the second quarter presentation, so we won't be as detail today. Also, since before, we've had three key initiatives, which we've been focusing on. They have been to launch what we call XXL Rewards 2.0, our customer club, as well as strengthening CRM. They have been to exit Austria, the only market that we are active in outside of the Nordics as well as working very diligently with cash and liquidity. On that list, we've now added a fourth item, which is a clear cost out focus. We launched this already this summer, but we now increased our cost-out ambitions due to the results in the third quarter. Just to give you a flavor of what we're actually doing, what we are delivering within the must-win battles. These are a few of the highlights that has been delivered throughout the quarter. With regards to category reset, we have initiated a very successful partnership together with [ Stormberg ]. That was done in the second quarter. We are seeing material results both in sales through and in margin. We're also seeing great buying orders coming in for 2024. We are very convinced that this will help XXL moving forward. This will also strengthen XXL in the entry price point position, which we currently are a bit maybe weaker than we would like to be in. Another part of the category reset is also relaunching one of our own in-house brands, McKenzie, which is for mainly hunting, but also partly outdoor. This will come in 2024, and it's also actually done in cooperation with Stormberg. So the Stormberg partnership is really one that we're very happy with and that we are seeing great results from already. We have also initiated what we call the XXL shop deals in the third quarter, and you'll see more of them in the fourth quarter. Here, it's all about the products that are maybe more capital intensive and that we see have more higher stock days that we are now activating in the market to get them out from the warehouse. We talked about this in the second quarter as well, and we've now activated that. But it's not all about bad things in the inventory, if you look down to your left, actually, inventory levels are something that we're actually proud of. We have been working very hard with inventory for the last few quarters, and we are glad to say that they are on normalized levels. So we are actually in control of our inventory levels, and I think that is crucial in the current market. Because we know that the entire value chain is just full of products right now. So here, we are now in a position to work even more closely with our suppliers to maybe help them out as well and to find a win-win position in the market. That is category reset, some of the highlights from the quarter that we've been through. If we move on to e-comm profitability, we have now been able to actually expose products online, which are only available in stores. This has not been the case since before. These are products which are only available in one or more stores, but not on the central warehouse. These are now exposed online and available for click-and-collect purchase. On the day that we actually launched this, we increased online visibility of products with more than 15,000 products. So of course, also something very positive for our customers and hopefully also for top line moving forward. On the rethink agenda, you can see something also happening. So the picture down to your right, is actually fully AI generated. So we are moving into generative AI, and this will help us to work a lot more with imagery that is both inspiring to show our products in the proper environment, doing this in an extremely cost-efficient and fast manner. This is kind of a game changer for us, I would say, communication-wise, and we have gone live with this in the third quarter. So it's not only about reset, it's also rethink and moving into the future. Continuing on further highlights throughout the quarter and the must-win battles. E-comm profitability, we have also launched a new product listing page as well as a new product detail page online. Both of these are thoroughly benchmarked with best practice on a global scale. We hope to be seeing both higher conversion rate and higher average order values coming through over time as the customer now gets acquainted with the new customer journey online. Also, on the E-comm profitability side, we have been focusing a lot on customer returns. We see that especially in apparel and shoes, returns are maybe a bit higher than we would like. It's not a specific problem for us. I would say it's an E-comm general problem for the industry, but we are now attacking returns also from a sustainability perspective to try to get them down. Moving on to pricing. We have now launched for the first time in the company's history, product life cycle management. This is maybe a bit more data-driven and techy. However, we are very certain that this will help us to professionalize our ways of working and to be even better in category management. Moving over to store operations. We have had for some time now, what we call the full potential product for our workshops. We are very glad to report that from Q1 to Q3 this year, we are now very rapidly approaching profitability for our workshops. And to remind you, we have one fantastic workshop in every store throughout the Nordics. So we now have 86 workshops, and we are now very much approaching profitability on these. That will enable the strategic pillar that we have to scale our services to be even faster because once profitable, we can now scale services to customers in a better way. Store operations, moving into that as well, even more thorough. We are looking into what we call the floor plan, space plan in stores. So we're now doing a full test of a new floor plan to help guide customers and inspire customers in an even better way and their journey throughout our stores. We have big stores. We need to do the best of them. This is one way that we are very confident will help both customers and sales. And lastly, store operations. We have also launched a digital tool that will help us even more quickly, agile and frequently follow up on store operations, whether it be campaign execution, et cetera. So all in all, these are just a few of the highlights in a very high paced quarter where we're really gaining change momentum for every week, and we see that coming into the fourth quarter as well. However, it's not only about the must win battles, the reset and the rethink. It's also our key initiatives, and I'm very happy to report also here, we're seeing great progress. So with regards to Rewards 2.0, our customer club, where we have slightly over 3.5 million members, these members can now, for the first time, actually earn points on all purchases. And those points can then be translated into bonus checks when you reach certain levels. Before the customer club wasn't maybe as strong or as modern as it should be. We've now launched this early October, and we're seeing great results already. So, we'll be very exciting to go in now into peak season and to see what the new customer club can do for us. But this is a long-term project, a long-term initiative where we really want to utilize this for personalization to increase relevance towards customers and to ultimately increase loyalty over time. Moving over to cash and liquidity. As you know, it's been a hot topic in the company. It's been a high focus for us. We launched the rights issue this summer, and we're very glad to report that by the 11th of September, we closed that rights issue very successfully as it was actually oversubscribed with 40%. That has helped our liquidity, something we'll come back to shortly. The third key initiative was to exit Austria. While it's never fun to leave a country, I'm actually glad to say that we have executed that plan, and we actually are doing it as we've promised. Before year-end, we will have left Austria altogether. We have now signed the last three exit agreements for the last three stores. that we had. So after 2023, we will have no more operations and no contractual obligations remaining in Austria. So moving into January 2024, we will once again be a Nordic-focused company. This is our core region. This is our home base. This is where we want to succeed.To fully deliver on the reset, rethink plan, we have also strengthened management. As presented this summer, Emelie Friis has now joined us in mid-August as responsible for brand and marketing. [ Siemen ] [indiscernible] from Helly Hansen will join us next week, 1st of November. He will be heading up both category, buying and supply. Very glad to welcome Siemen as well. And to replace Espen Terland, our CIO of 15 years, we went out to the market, both looking at external candidates but actually chose an internal candidate, and we're very happy to inform you that [ Pieter Johnsen ] has accepted to take on the role as Head of IT and development, also taking on that decision from 1st of November. So we are efficiently strengthening our senior management team to fully deliver on the plan. And I think all of them really bring with them great experience, great competence, and we are definitely professionalizing the company. We are on that journey, and it begins here. However, even though we're very proud of the plans that are progressing well and what we are delivering in terms of change and improvements, we are acting in a very tough market and a challenging market. Short term, we see that for the last 12 months, all three core geographic markets are reducing. They are kind of constructing, if you will, in size. So consumer sentiment is down, spending is down. We see that especially for capital-intensive products. And just to remind you, unfortunately, XXL, unlike many of our competitors are maybe overexposed and have an extra high share of capital-intensive products and hardware products, while we are seeing that it's a bit more difficult to navigate in the current market. Even though that's the short-term perspective, we are still very much convinced of the long-term resilience and strength of the sports and outdoor market. Because for the last more than 20 years, and this is the Norwegian numbers, but the Swedish and finish numbers look very much similar. For the last more than 20 years, the market has been growing with the exception for 4 years, and this might be then the fifth exception. But the historic CAGR has been plus 5%, and we are very much certain that we will bounce back to that quite soon again. Number three, we're also very convinced that the market is driven by a few mega trends with health and wellness being the key ones. So underlying, we feel that the position that we are in, the market that we are in is the right one. We just now need to navigate the short-term challenges. And looking into some of those short-term challenges, just to give you some more flavor, we are seeing that high price point products and capital-intensive products right now, have severely higher amount of stock days, meaning they have a lower stock turnover and the sales through rate is just lower than what we've seen before. So as an example, when we compare higher price point products with lower price point products, we see that the stock days is actually 3x higher. And here, you have some few select categories from hardware, where you see the amount of stock days. So some categories right now, to be very honest with you, are pretty much just on the total standstill. And of course, this is challenging for us. But these are the kind of categories and products that we are now activating more and more. But as part of the reset, we've taken an initiative to now review the entire inventory and categories. So we are resetting and rebalancing our inventory composition also with regards to price points, also with regards to capital-intensive products. In the short term, we believe that this is also a part of the category reset, the must win battle. And this is just to also give you a flavour of the market throughout the third quarter, we met a very capital or campaign-intensive markets in all 3 geographic core markets that we're active in. And we are not expecting this to disappear in the fourth quarter either. So we are expecting this to continue, unfortunately. However, that being said, to meet this in an even better way, we are now rethinking our tactical campaign toolbox, because we see that the current campaign toolbox that we have is not agile enough and it's not modernized enough to fully meet competition. So we are now taking action on that as well, to really be on our toes and strengthen commercially. So what does that mean financially? Well, unfortunately, we did lose 10% of sales in the third quarter. Not something that we are satisfied nor proud with. Margins being down with 1.5 percentage points. OpEx, on the other hand, while it's up in relation to sales, which are then down in absolute numbers, we actually see that we are able to quite keep on par with last year on a quite good level. So the already implemented cost-out actions are actually giving effect, but we are now increasing them moving forward because we need to keep costs down. Of course, that means that EBITDA is down in the quarter, and this is something we need to turn around quickly. But on the positive side, once again, inventory levels are normalized and in control and liquidity due to the rights issue is now restored and we are back to almost NOK 800 million in liquidity at the end of the quarter. But that being said, we are not satisfied. And in the second quarter, I stood here and presented a cost-out plan with the ambitions to take out costs with NOK 100 million to NOK 200 million. We've now increased that to NOK 200 million to NOK 300 million, and we're rather aiming for the higher part of that interval than the lower. So cost out is now also very much a part of our key initiatives and the must-win plans moving forward. And with that, I leave over to our CFO, Stein.

[Stein Eriksen, executive]

Thank you, Freddy. Yes, hello, and good morning, everyone. So I'll go through the financial results for the third quarter. And let's just start, Freddy mentioned liquidity. And I just want to assure you that we continue to work very closely on liquidity also going forward despite how we did a successful rights issue in September. So it's around 3 axes. As I said, we secured SEK 500 million in liquidity in the third quarter. Also, we was granted a 12-month extension of a repayment of Swedish tax and this of SEK 345 million, and this will be now due on 12th of September 2024, provided that an extended 36-month payment plan is not accepted by the Swedish tax authorities. I also wanted to state that regarding the previously announced ongoing tax case with Norwegian tax authorities, XXL paid in October, that was in October, NOK 90 million. And this case is not settled and XXL has applied for a so-called mop-up a negotiation. When it comes to the balance sheet, the group continues to have very strict capital and liquidity control. And so far, this year, we have reduced purchased goods with NOK 800 million versus last year, which again, is the main contributor then to the inventory reduction of NOK 850 million. Also, we ended up very low CapEx levels, lowest CapEx levels in the last 10 years. And I also noticed that the supplier or the accounts payable is down with NOK 400 million versus last year. Fred already mentioned it, but XXL then signed the exit agreements for the three remaining stores. So of course, this will help both liquidity or the liquidity situation going forward. And as stated, we have finalized the minority investment in Stormberg. But we still need close monitoring of liquidity and continuous working on working capital and very strict capital discipline also going forward. I will come a little bit back to that. Let's continue on to the P&L. XXL posted an EBITDA of NOK 35 million, a disappointing quarter, where the main drivers for the EBITDA decline then was mainly related to lower revenues and decreased gross margins. Revenue was down, like Feddy said, with 10%, and we had a negative like-for-like growth of 12.8% in all markets posted decline versus last year. And gross margins then ending at 33.4%, down from 34.9% last year. And as previous quarters, we continue to see high inventory levels in the value chain and aggressive prices all over the Nordics. EBITDA, as I said, ended at NOK 35 million and net income at minus NOK 140 million in the quarter. So moving over to the gross margins. We have said this several times now, but excessive campaign activities all over the Nordics. That also includes XXL. As in previous quarters, the challenging market situation has slowed down the sales of capital goods. And we see that the stock rotation of higher price points is decreasing, while at the same time, the stock turnover on cheaper price points is almost at historic high levels. So this means that we need to allocate more capital towards these categories and products, and this will be highly prioritized going forward. Just also want to inform you, we have done no changes stood up to lead provisions in the third quarter. Group OpEx percent in Q3 increased by 1.6%. That's up with 5.2% versus [ Q2 ], mainly then impacted by the negative like-for-like growth hampering scale in operations. In Kroners, we had an increase of NOK 20 million, were then explained by negative currency translation effects. And the remaining increase is then related to new store openings and especially increased marketing spend. We continue to see a reduction in personnel costs. EBITDA, as I said, ended at NOK 35 million, all segments posting a negative development. And as I said, mainly related then to lower revenue and gross margins. Yes, as they did during the last quarters, we have worked hard to reduce the inventory. And as I said, in the second half of 2022, we reduced inventory with NOK 0.5 billion. We continue to reduce it with another NOK 800 million so far this year. And as you can see, this has clearly then positive effects on the inventory. And we have, of course, then also reduced the volume commitments going forward, both in the fourth quarter, but then also in Q1. Moving over to net debt development from 1.1% in Q4, 2022 to NOK 862 million in Q3. The main drivers were the negative EBITDA contracted by a positive thing in working capital. And as I said, CapEx at record low levels, while the capital increase, of course, in Q1 and Q3 contributed positively with NOK 966 million. And then we had payments recognized lease contracts with NOK 503 million negative and interest payments of NOK 103 million. Yes, so then liquidity reserves ended at NOK 782 million and net interest-bearing debt at NOK 862 million versus the NOK 983 million last year. And as I stated in the beginning, as I state at the end, we continue then with strict liquidity and capital allocation going forward. So Freddy, leaving the floor over to you for some final remarks.

[Freddy Sobin, executive]

So in summary and final remarks, we are on both short-term and long-term journey to reset the company to rethink the company. And as we've already stated, we are seeing good progress. We are seeing an increased change momentum. We are seeing material change happening out there. As we stated when we launched the plan, the actual financial effect will come a bit later, as always, but we are positive as we are seeing that we are actually delivering on the plan. We are doing what we said that we should do. That goes both for the must-win battles as well as our key initiatives. But on the more positive notes, yesterday, Thursday, we launched our 86th store in the Nordics. We launched in Lillehammer, a location that we have been wanting to open in for quite some time. At 7:00 in the morning, although being dark and quite rainy, there were more than 1,000 customers waiting in line, to go into our latest XXL store that we now welcome to the XXL family. This was the most successful opening during the last five years for XXL. This points to the XXL concept being still very much relevant in the market. It shows our strength of the concept. So in XXL, we are extremely proud and happy of being now also present in Lillehammer, an important market for us. We welcome the Lillehammer store to the XXL family, once again, 86th store in the Nordics and once again just proves the strength of our concept. That strength is something that we are now also looking forward to bringing into the most important part of the year, the peak season. We are looking forward to both Black Friday to Christmas and to during peak season, welcome more customers than ever before to the XXL concept. We believe that we are a winning concept, and we will show that during the fourth quarter. And with that, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your time.

[Tolle Groterud, executive]

Thank you, Freddy. So then we open up for questions. First, from the audience present here at Alnabru. So please go ahead. All right, so there are no questions from Alnabru. So then we open up for questions from the digital conference. So I then call upon the conference host for further introductions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions]. There are no questions in this call. So I'll hand it straight back to the speakers for any closing remarks.

[Tolle Groterud, executive]

Okay. Crystal clear then. So that's the end of our session. So thank you all for coming, and enjoy your weekend.