Boozt AB

STO:BOOZT

Earnings Call Transcript 2018-Q1

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Boozt Q1 2018 Teleconference. Today I'm pleased to present CEO, Hermann Haraldsson and Allan Jensen. [Operator Instructions] Speakers, please begin.

[Hermann Haraldsson, Chief Executive Officer]

Good morning, and welcome to our statement for the Q1 results for Boozt. Let's just dive into the presentation and go to the first slide with the key highlights.In general, the quarter was more or less in line with our expectations. We grew 31% and adjusted EBIT margin of negative 0.7%. In general, we see quite a solid momentum in the business. Our KPIs, such as new customer intake, average order value, true frequency are developing quite well, as well as Booztlet, which has been the star of the season and where we can see that our dedicated efforts are beginning to pay off.Of course, the growth in the quarter also was negatively impacted by the weather. Our trading conditions, in that perspective, was almost a [ boring ] quarter, because spring didn't come until after the quarter ended, and so the growth was a bit negatively impacted by the high share of -- also winter sales and less shares of spring-summer sales. But this was also partly offset by a positive impact from currency. So, all-in-all, it was in line with expectations.Gross margin was 5.3 percentage points down versus last year, and this was as expected, partly due to the fact that we don't have any commission sales from ECCO anymore, partly because we did not have the same amount of campaign stock that we had the previous year. And then finally, a large part of the sales was discounted, also winter stuff -- stock and that was sold at a discount and that meant that we just didn't have enough spring-summer sales yet. This was, however, offset by strong operational leverage. Our operational KPIs have been developing quite strongly during the quarter and so this resulted in an adjusted EBIT margin, more or less on par with last year, which was as expected.As you can imagine that with spring arriving in April, I believe it was 2nd of April, it finally came, we have a positive start and the combined momentum of the business and also with the expected tailwind from currency, we feel quite confident that we can increase our growth outlook for the year to more than 33%.If we turn to the next slide, KPI highlights. We have positive developments in the number of orders, but most importantly, in the average order value. A part of the average order value is of course affected by the currency tailwind. But even without the currency tailwind, we had a good increase in average order value, which is good. So our customers are putting more items and more expensive items in the basket.If we turn to the next slide, into the cohort developments and some of the more interesting stuff, we can see that the number of active customers over the last 12 months has increased by 28%, which is very positive and the average -- the number of orders per active customer has also -- it's gone up. But the most important KPI and the one that we are highlighting in general is the true frequency, which is basically -- which is telling us the people that are buying today, what is the likelihood that they will -- what is the frequency of their purchases over the next 12 months. We've seen that, that has gone up from 5.9 to 7.2 and this is a strong testament that when people try us, both new customers and also old customers, they are increasingly coming back.Turning to the next slide, looking at the customer satisfaction, which is the most important KPIs. We are maintaining our Trustpilot score of 9.2. It went up in the Q4 last year and has stayed there. And most importantly, the NPS score is at a solid 68. This is world-class and this is the best proof to us that our customers are happy and that they are quite likely to come back.Turning to the next slide, I just want to briefly touch upon Booztlet. Even though Booztlet still is quite a small shop, small segment, it's quite promising. We put more emphasis on Booztlet going into this year. Last year, we had so many things on our plate that we did not show it enough attention, but now we do. And what we are offering now is a quality outlet, selling off-price items, old items, typically from Boozt.com, but providing the same level of service as customers can expect to get from Boozt.com. That in regards to customer experience, speed of delivery, et cetera. It's a strong end-of-lifecycle management tool, [ will contribute to ] Boozt.com products, plus we can get access to a lot of new customers. The off-price segment has a great potential and we can use our strong relations with the brands to help them clear some of their old stock. And it complements Boozt.com quite well and we saw growth of 105% in the quarter, so that was quite strong.Turning to the next slide, we look into the beauty. The beauty segment is progressing as expected. No secret that we had hoped that it would grow stronger, but also we learned that we did some mistakes in launching. What's the mistakes we did there? We ignored the haircare category. We will remedy that. So we will launch strongly into haircare in the coming quarter. But we see in general that there are quite positive synergies with the apparel. 70% of the beauty baskets are combined baskets. And we can also see that the customers that buy beauty, they buy more frequently and they also add when they buy apparel into the basket. So it's actually working quite well.So for us, it's a -- the key thing is to increase the awareness, to get the new brands on board and we've signed some very strong concepts like M.A.C., Kiehl's and Urban Decay. We've been waiting for them for quite a while and managed to sign them and will launch them during this quarter. We will launch also haircare as a category and onboard some strong haircare brands. And then finally, we will open up our new flagship store in Copenhagen in mid-June this year. So with the things that are going on, also with the new brands that we are onboarding, we're quite confident that the beauty category will continue to grow and will continue to be a good complement to the rest of the shop.Go to next slide, for the financial update, I will hand over to Allan, our CFO.

[Allan Junge-Jensen]

Thank you, Hermann. And if we turn to the next page, results update. You will see that net revenue for the group is up by a little more than 31% from last year and now we have surpassed SEK 550 million in the first quarter. You can also see that the gross margin is down 5.3 percentage points. Hermann has mentioned it, but it's mainly due to a delay of spring, as well as the fact that we sold fewer campaign goods in this quarter than we did compared to last year. A minor effect is also that this is the last quarter were comparison figures are affected by the ECCO mono-brand store commission sale agreement, which last year generated 100% gross margin. However, despite the gross margin decline, we are actually happy to see that the adjusted EBIT margin is only 0.1 percentage points lower than last year. And this clearly shows that our cost drivers have improved in comparison to last year.If we turn to the next page, net revenue by segments. You will see that the Boozt.com segment grows approximately 33%. You will also see that the strong smaller segment, Booztlet, grows more than 100% and together they approximately grow a little more than 35%. You will also see that the segment Other, which last year included the ECCO mono-brand store, has declined a lot, by 80%. And remember now that now it mainly constitutes, or is constituted by the 2 physical stores in Denmark.If we turn to the next page, adjusted EBIT by segment. We can see that the adjusted EBIT margin has improved on the Boozt.com segment with 0.3 percentage points. So this is a good and more or less as expected. We can also see that the smaller segment Booztlet.com improved the margin by 6 percentage points, better than expected, and also clearly demonstrates the scale benefits that we can receive in this off-price segment. Remember here that Booztlet will benefit in the first quarter and the third quarter from terminated products from Boozt.com. The Other segment declines in the adjusted EBIT -- EBIT and EBIT margins, ECCO was no longer part of this segment and the 2 physical stores did not manage to deliver profit in the first quarter.If we turn to the next page, cost ratio development is sort of already said, but here you can see that the 3 main cost drivers; fulfillment, marketing and admin & other, are all improving considerably from last year. You can see that the depreciation cost ratio is up, in line with expectations, as we now depreciate our AutoStore over 5 years and that affects the depreciation cost ratio. So, all in all, we are actually happy that the adjusted EBIT margin, despite the higher gross margin decline, is only down by 0.1 percentage points.If you move to the next page, key financials. First one, [ demonstrating ] working capital as a percent of last 12 months net revenue, you will see that we have a slight improvement of 1 percentage point. Slowly it is improving in line with our expectations, but we are -- actually, we are glad that it is declining. In the sense that you will see the CapEx, the capital expenditures, you will see that our acquisition of intangible asset has increased. We have previously said that we will -- we expect to hire a lot of platform resources and lot of those resources turned out to be external consultants in various European countries. And they are not recognized as staff but are capitalized as development costs. We consider this trend to continue, most likely throughout the year, as we will use external hires to complement our own platform team, which will also grow in 2018. Also worth mentioning is that, in general, we expect the CapEx to increase in the second half of 2018, as we will implement the second phase of our AutoStore setup. So in total, we expect the investment in fixed assets to be around SEK 45 million for the full year 2018.On the left graph, you will see the operational cash flow , which actually improved quite a lot with approximately SEK 90 million. A lot of it has to do with the EBIT, not adjusted, but EBIT improvement, as we had a lot of movement caused last year, but also the changes in working capital was much more neutral this year than it was last year.If we turn to the next page. So all in all, Hermann had mentioned at the start, the Q1 result in combination with a solid performance of the first half of Q2 leads us to adjust the net revenue outlook upwards to exceed now more than 33% as opposed to 30% when previously communicated. The guidance for the adjusted EBIT margin remains unchanged as well as our medium-term targets for net revenue and adjusted EBIT margin are unchanged.So this concludes our presentation, and I will now hand it over to the operator for the Q&A session.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from Niklas Ekman from Carnegie.

[Niklas Ekman]

Just a couple of questions if I may. First, the weather impact. Is there any way that you can quantify how much that affected your sales in the quarter? I assume you have seen a rebound in April, so you should have a fairly good grasp of how much that affected your growth in the quarter.

[Hermann Haraldsson, Chief Executive Officer]

It's a very difficult question, of course. We can try to model what if -- we can see that the second quarter has started quite well. And obviously, some of it has -- comes from lost sales in Q1. But it's-- I would hate to try to speculate also. We are now in the middle of the second quarter, and then we certainly will start to guide on the second quarter. So I would rather not answer that question, Niklas, to be honest.

[Niklas Ekman]

Okay. Fair enough. It's worth a try. And second question is on the EBIT margins. If you look at the rolling 12-month EBIT margin and exclude the mono-brand business, it seems like that margin has been fairly flat, around 2% or 2.4% now for the past 4, 5 quarters. And I was wondering kind of when you expect to see this improving or when you expect to see leverage on the stronger sales. And I'm aware that you have signaled that this will be kind of a year of investments. But do you see this margin still gradually trending higher throughout the rest of the year?

[Hermann Haraldsson, Chief Executive Officer]

Yes, definitely. The first quarter here was -- margin was lower than expected. And it was quite obvious why that was the case because of the weather, also because of the relatively lower amount of campaign goods, which you also saw in the working capital. We are still growing quite fast, and we still have a very high new customer intake. And as we have said before, as long as we can continue the growth and keep on getting new customers that actually are loss-making in the first year, we will not see the big jumps in EBIT margin. But also going into Q2, there are strong signs that we will be able to -- or we have -- we are confident that we will be able to meet the EBIT guidance that we've made for the full year. So obviously, that means that for the rest of the year, EBIT margin will increase.

[Niklas Ekman]

Okay. Can you explain this more in detail why are margins lower because of fewer campaign goods? Is the campaign goods typically with a lower margin?

[Allan Junge-Jensen]

Allan speaking here. I can try to explain it. So if you look at the Q1 and split it up in two, so you have the first half of Q1 and the second half of Q1, then this year in 2018, the first half of the quarter was impacted by that. We did not have the same amount of campaign goods as we did relative to last year. So the campaign goods came in a little later than last year, and that has affected the overall sales of campaign goods. In general, you can say that compared to regular discounted items, the campaign goods actually contribute to the gross margin development. So lack of campaign goods actually has an expected negative effect on gross margin.

[Niklas Ekman]

That's -- I guess, that makes sense. And regarding these new initiatives you've launched, you talked about the Booztlet now, and then we saw that the sales growth picked up quite a bit. Is there much more to come there, you think, in terms of launching new initiatives and selling more assortment straight to Booztlet? And the same question for, I guess, Sports/Athleisure and Kids where I know you have a lot of initiatives during the year. I was just interested in when you expect these initiatives to play out during the year or going forward.

[Hermann Haraldsson, Chief Executive Officer]

Booztlet is basically on track. It's been launched and is very strong. We are increasingly buying goods from the suppliers and sending it directly to the Booztlet outlets. And so we are pushing very hard on that segment. And we actually see a huge potential in that segment also because the brands like that we have these quality outlets with a quality service where they can clear the stuff in an environment that they can feel that it's under control. So that's strong. With regard to the Sports/Athleisure, we won't launch adidas and Reebok until after the summer. So the big Sports/Athleisure launch will be in Q3 where you also will see a redesign of the site. Basically a new Sports/Athleisure experience on the site, alongside with some new brands next to adidas and Reebok. So you won't see any effect from the big sports launch until after the summer. Kids has actually been picking up quite well, obviously, especially in Q2. So kids is growing again. Our new kids -- our kids initiatives, they will also be launched after the summer. We will launch Polarn O. Pyret at the very end of this quarter and fully in Q3, plus some new brands, also plus a new site experience. So a lot of the initiatives that we have been working on, they will come live after the summer.

[Niklas Ekman]

Excellent. And a final question here. The CapEx guidance you gave here for SEK 45 million, that's for fixed assets -- intangible assets. Is that something that will remain on par with the, I think, SEK 6 million you reported here in Q1?

[Hermann Haraldsson, Chief Executive Officer]

It -- expectedly, it can grow slightly. It a little bit depends on the mix effect between internal hires and the use of external consultants. But the overall sort of CapEx guidance is that it's going to be around SEK 20 million to SEK 25 million.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] And we have a question from Fredrik Stenkils from Danske Bank.

[Fredrik Stenkil, Analyst]

Yes. I'm wondering if you could get -- give us some flavor of how the beauty has developed during Q1 and sort of what the outlook is on that one?

[Hermann Haraldsson, Chief Executive Officer]

The beauty has developed steadily -- slowly but steadily during the quarter. We can see that we are increasing the share of beauty sales. And we expect again when we launch M.A.C., Urban Decay and Kiehl's that we will have quite a good uplift. We launched Elizabeth Arden actually yesterday. And also we will launch the hair care category at the end the quarter. So there we will see a higher uptick, but actually it's moving slowly, maybe a bit slower than we had hoped for but steadily. So it's quite promising. The good thing is that even the sole beauty orders have actually quite good average order values. So it's actually already now quite a profitable segment.

[Operator]

And as there appear to be no further questions, I will turn the conference to you.

[Hermann Haraldsson, Chief Executive Officer]

Okay. Thank you very much, and have a good day.

[Operator]

Thank you. This now concludes our conference call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect your lines.