Cdon AB

STO:CDON

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q3

[Fredrik Norberg, executive]

Hello, and welcome to the earnings call for the third quarter for CDON Group. With me today, we have, as usual, our CFO, Carl Andersson, but also a special guest. We have our CTO, Atra Azami, who will guide us through the platform migration that we finished this quarter.

So to summarize the quarter, I'm very relieved to announce that all 4 CDON markets are now integrated to the shared platform on time and on budget. We still have a negative GMV development versus last year. However, we have a sequential improvement month by month within the quarter. And I'm really happy that we now again have a positive EBITDA of SEK 5.5 million versus last year of SEK 3.2 million. But now we will -- into the platform migration and I will come up, Atra.

[Atra Azami, executive]

Thank you, Fredrik. Yes. Hello, everyone. I'd like to briefly introduce myself. My name is Atra Azami. I'm the CTO here at CDON Group. Prior to this, I was the CTO at Fyndiq for about 4 years prior to the acquisition of Fyndiq by CDON. At Fyndiq, I was the architect behind Fyndiq's second-generation platform and I also led the migration back in 2020 from Fyndiq's first to its second-generation platform.

And today, I'm really happy to say that we have now completed a few weeks ago, the migration for CDON to this very same platform that we did back in -- created back in 2020. This is a very complex operation. And to quote Fredrik, our CEO, it's kind of like performing a heart transplant on [indiscernible] midrace. And I'm happy to say that we did that not only on time, but also without disruption to our customers. This is something that I'm extremely proud of that it really shows the power and what we're capable of in our organization today.

This platform consolidation was also one of the most important objectives of the CDON and Fyndiq merger to unlock synergies, drive cost savings, but also to increase efficiency. And by increasing efficiency, what I mean is that we now have 1 platform, but 2 different brands, CDON and Fyndiq. So every time we make a new tech investment, it will benefit both brands. And in addition to that, we are now prepared with our new and modern scalable platform for the future growth of the whole CDON Group.

With that, I'd like to also talk a little bit about the platform itself that we have migrated to. So this new platform is a modern cloud-native, microservices-based, state-of-the-art marketplace platform designed for scalability. Compared to our old platform, it means we now have a much faster time to market for all new tech initiatives.

What that means is that every new opportunity that comes up, we can quickly capitalize and be very agile and respond to changes in the market very quickly compared to the old platform. In addition, we have better maintainability, which means that we can put more of our resources into actually creating business value.

In addition, one more feature of the platform is that it's completely event-driven. What that means is that everything that happens in the platform creates a corresponding event and we can use these events to enable data-driven decision-making on a whole new level compared to what we could do before at CDON.

The next thing I want to talk about is AI. Now AI is one of those things where a lot of companies today are using it, but it's often a side project or something that's not at the core of the business. But for us, with our new marketplace platform, AI is at the very heart of everything that we do. We use it for product data enhancement, which increases conversion rate.

It's better for [ SEO ]. And as an example, we're using this to solve what I think is one of the most important problems for e-commerce in specifically marketplaces, which is product categorization. We've used AI to solve this problem at a cost that is much lower than our competitors.

And finally, I'd like to say that this AI-powered future, we are exploring a lot of different projects in this area and there's a lot more things to come. So please stay tuned for more updates from us in this area. Back to you, Fredrik.

[Fredrik Norberg, executive]

Thank you, Atra. And the whole organization is now really switching focus from just moving stuff, but also now building new features and innovating, which we have been longing for.

Looking into our results. As I mentioned before, we are back on positive numbers and we now plan to stay on this side of the line. As you can see here also, we have our important fourth quarter ahead of us, where we have a lot of the sales, but also the profit for CDON centered around this quarter. We have a GMV growth of minus 8% for the whole quarter for the group. However, we can see here that we have a sequential improvement month by month.

And looking into the CDON segment, it's still in total negative growth versus last year. But on Fyndiq, we have a slight improvement and we have a slight growth compared to last year. This growth is partly derived from the non-SE countries, Finland, Denmark and Norway. And looking at this graph, you can see the pink line is the GMV from non-SE countries to Fyndiq and the dotted line is our supply for sales. And here we can showcase the correlation between improved supply, increased supply and increased sales.

In addition to this, we have also strengthened our management team with a true A player when it comes to supply. His name is Vesa Jarvelainen and as a new CSO, he comes with experience of 17 years from the Finnish verkkokauppa.com. Verkkokauppa is the leading consumer electronic retailer in Finland. And Vesa was -- has been part of this journey from their turnover of EUR 90 million up to EUR 580 million, where he the last 7 years were part of the management team. And we're really happy to utilize Vesa's experience and knowledge about driving consumer electronic business online.

We remain committed in our long-term goal to become the leading marketplace in the Nordics and we still believe in the core elements of the marketplace model, supply and happy customers. We also believe that what drives GMV growth and customer satisfaction is spelled as improved supply.

With that said, I would like to hand over to Carl and dig into the financial performance.

[Carl Andersson, executive]

Thank you. Great to be back. Let's dive into some hard numbers. Starting with reported figures, we do see signs of progress and we return to positive EBITDA. We have a negative GMV development of 8% versus last year and similarly, a similar development on net sales.

Our gross profit is down only by 1%, thanks to an increase in take rate during the quarter. We did see higher marketing costs, reducing our gross profit after marketing by 10% in the quarter. Our gross profit after marketing margin is also down slightly to 10.5% versus 10.7% in 2023.

All in all, we do report a positive EBITDA again of SEK 5.5 million and also adjusting for costs associated with closing of our Malmo office of SEK 1.8 million, an adjusted EBITDA of SEK 7.3 million in the quarter is quite some improvement from previous quarter and last year.

Looking into our 2 segments and looking into a quite challenging Q3, a quarter where we see other peers in the industry and retailers struggling, we are continuing to close the gap in the CDON segments. We report minus 12% GMV in the quarter over last year, but that is a sequential improvement, both on a quarterly basis, but also on a month-by-month basis within that quarter.

We have all reason to be optimistic about the future, but we will not be satisfied until we are back in growth territory across both of our 2 segments. Fyndiq did return to growth in this quarter. We're happy about that and we'll come back to that shortly.

We have seen a continuation of the performance in our Swedish market, the largest segment for both of our brands. But what is driving the development recently is very strong performance in the other Nordic countries. That is especially true in Fyndiq. And we do see the power and the effect of adding quality supply in those markets. Improving supply is the driver of our future profitability development.

We have seen relatively stable take rates during the quarter and over some quarters now. It's down slightly in Fyndiq, but up in the case of CDON. We have not made any real changes to our commission model, but it's rather some small mix effects, a lower share of 1P business, but also a lower average order value in the quarter that explains a take rate difference.

Gross profit after marketing is down more than our GMV development is down. CDON segment, we see a consistency of minus 12%, similar to that of GMV. But in the case of Fyndiq, we have a higher or more rapid decline. Our gross profit after marketing -- sorry, our gross profit increase did not offset the higher marketing costs, which we will dive into on the next page.

All in all, we see our GPAM margin declined to 17.1% in the quarter, down from 18.9% last year. And it is marketing cost which is driving the development. In the case of CDON, it's just a slight increase in the quarter and we do see marketing cost jumping around a little bit as we always experiment to seek maximum GPAM.

But in the case of Fyndiq, it comes down to the markets outside of Sweden, where we're very happy to see great traction and positive GMV development, but with a higher dependency on paid traffic channels, less earned traffic. That essentially explains why marketing cost has increased. That said, we do see consistency in our return on investment in paid traffic channels. So it comes down to the mix between countries affecting our gross profit after marketing margin.

We are back to positive EBITDA and we believe the strong and positive momentum in the Nordics in combination with tight cost control is what is driving this. It is a significant improvement compared to last year, but most notably compared to the previous quarter of almost minus SEK 9 million.

Adjusting for the Malmo closing, we see an adjusted EBITDA of SEK 7.3 million. We are truly back in black and we are looking forward to a strong holiday season sales with Black Friday on November 29 as the main event.

We have seen lower OpEx in the quarter, really confirming that we are on the right path in terms of reducing our OpEx cost base. Despite being an intensive quarter with the platform migration, we have been able to reduce our costs already this quarter. We can now focus on further cost reduction in terms of platform run cost and legacy system cost without having to balance the actual migration work.

The costs associated with closing of the Malmo office are expected to be in line with the estimates that we have provided before of SEK 7 million to SEK 9 million for the full year. Year-to-date, we have seen costs of around SEK 6.9 million with some small costs in Q4 expected as well.

We do, therefore -- we're therefore very confident in that we will reach the lower OpEx run rate in 2025 that we've spoken about so many times before. Minus SEK 40 million versus the time of the acquisition of Fyndiq is within our reach. And even though Q3 is a quarter with slightly lower OpEx than others due to the holiday effect, we believe that the recent quarter definitely confirms that we are moving in the right direction and will reach that OpEx run rate.

We can also report positive operating cash flow before changes in working capital. After 2 negative quarters, it's good to be back in positive territory as well. However, changes in working capital and CapEx related to the platform migration led to a negative cash flow within the quarter, leading to a cash position of SEK 67 million. That is solid and we're confident in that. And from here on out, we are looking into Q4, where we should be generating cash from early November onwards in the year.

That said, back to you, Fredrik, to sum this up.

[Fredrik Norberg, executive]

Thank you. To summarize this, we are now finally live with both segments on all markets on our shared platform. We are back on positive EBITDA and we continue to have our main focus on massively improve our supply. And don't forget, do your Christmas shopping now on either CDON or Fyndiq.

With that said, we open up for questions from the audience.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Nicklas Fharm from SEB Equities.

[Nicklas Fhärm, analyst]

So my first question would actually be to ask you to comment a little bit on the numbers this week -- earlier this week on Monday from sort of a market perspective suggesting a quite significant growth in at least Swedish e-commerce development in the month of September, I believe, plus 28%. I should say we've discussed sort of the quality of this market data before, but it would be great to have some sort of discussion from you on sort of where you think the market is actually, please.

[Fredrik Norberg, executive]

Sure. We have discussed this before. We had a little bit hard time, honestly, to verify these numbers. I think it was up 28% this month. Last month, it was plus 1% and the month before that, around 3%. It's extremely volatile. When we are looking into the numbers, we see though that [indiscernible] is much more reliable. And the last 2 quarters, it's just been above 0. So I would say that's more in line with our view and also in line when looking on other peers, what they have reported.

[Nicklas Fhärm, analyst]

Can I have a follow-up question there? Is there any sort of indication, even though, let's say, the market is actually more flattish, is there any indication in terms of, say, that you notice a particular growth rate in any sector or category or anything that suggests that actually the market is turning around for the better that is?

[Fredrik Norberg, executive]

In our case, it's quite complex because we have 2 different segments with 2 different positions. In Fyndiq's case, we can see that we are being nurtured by people having less money in their wallet. When it comes to the Fyndiq segment, we can see that we are getting quite substantial growth in the Nordic countries. When it comes to CDON, it's still very early days. We just did our migration, and we just want to come back to par now. So more info than that is quite hard to say or give, I would say.

[Nicklas Fhärm, analyst]

All right. And final question for now and then perhaps I could come back into the call. I was just looking at sort of just taking a step back and looking at EBITDA in the CDON segment, which is, excuse me, pretty much unchanged year-on-year, right, negative SEK 1.5-ish million. And as you already pointed out, you had a significant increase in gross margin.

You have a continuing increase in take rates. We have been discussing through a slight increase in marketing spend, absolutely. But could you elaborate anything on sort of what maybe I am missing on the cost side then for why the operating leverage is not necessarily there the way people like myself could hope for or estimate, please?

[Carl Andersson, executive]

I mean, to me, I think looking at the group combined is perhaps telling you the full picture and focusing on the combined leverage, I think, is more relevant. And there, we do see -- and I mean, Q3 was still a very intense quarter as we spoke about with the migration happening and we do expect that to happen sort of here and onwards.

So we will now focus on takeout costs related to legacy platform and system costs, run costs from consultants and so on. And that should really start to materialize from here onwards, especially on a group level.

[Fredrik Norberg, executive]

Yes. And just to add on that, it's -- I mean, we don't put hundreds of hours of finding the perfect ratio between the 2 segments. We believe though, of course, that the perfect view is on group level when it comes to OpEx compared to last year.

[Nicklas Fhärm, analyst]

And a bit difficult to answer perhaps, but I'm going to try to ask anyway without providing any sort of guidance whatsoever. But I mean, let's just say that instead, you had a 9%, 10%, 11%, 12% positive delta in GMV in the CDON segment or on the group level, if you like. Is there any reason to believe why the operating leverage should not be there?

[Carl Andersson, executive]

Well, no, not really. I mean, as we have seen, our take rate has been stable for some time and I think we have reason to believe it's going to be stable. Gross profit after marketing, obviously, depending a bit on cost. I think the underlying performance of our marketing spend and sort of the return on investment there is steady.

What has, in the case of Fyndiq really driven the higher marketing spend and reduced margin comes down to our Nordic traction. We have prioritized gaining market share and building a customer base over defending a specific margin. I think also over time, when those markets mature, similarly to the case of the Swedish market for Fyndiq, margins should come up again. I can't really say when, but I think structurally, that's how it would work.

[Nicklas Fhärm, analyst]

Wonderful. And just one hygiene question, just so I got you right, Carl, before. You were saying that year-to-date, you charged your P&Ls with SEK 6.9 million out of the SEK 7 million to SEK 9 million expected cost for integration of the platforms and Fyndiq and the move from Malmo. Is that correct?

[Carl Andersson, executive]

So the SEK 7 million to SEK 9 million was only relating to the closure of the Malmo office, nothing to do with the platform migration and the SEK 6.9 million...

[Nicklas Fhärm, analyst]

Sorry, my bad. Yes.

[Carl Andersson, executive]

Yes, no worries. And the SEK 6.9 million you were referring to exactly is the year-to-date spend there and we expect the sort of final number to be very much in that range with Q4 still having some spillover, but rather on the small side.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions and closing comments.

[Fredrik Norberg, executive]

Good. Thank you.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Nicklas Fharm from SEB Equities.

[Nicklas Fhärm, analyst]

So if it's all right, maybe I can have a few more questions --

[Fredrik Norberg, executive]

Yes. Sure.

[Nicklas Fhärm, analyst]

-- after all. So I was very interested in reading up on your press release on the successful integration and the pitch earlier in this call this afternoon. Could you give us some more sort of details on how this will actually transform your consumer offering and your internal backbone going forward, please?

[Fredrik Norberg, executive]

Yes. It's several aspects that Atra touched upon. I mean, to start with, we don't need this vast amount that we have had before of developers to run 2 separate platforms built on separate languages and so on. Now we have one platform shared that we can monitor and run 8 different markets. So that's one aspect of it. We also see since it's a newly built platform, we will increase the velocity of our feature development, which is also very important now.

And I think last but not least is something that Atra touched upon lastly is that we can now really built in AI in the backbone of this platform. This is not something we need to brute force into an own platform and rebuild it and so on. This is now purpose-built from day 1, including AI in everything that we're doing. And this is now a paved path to be able to really leverage the AI revolution that we have ahead of us.

[Nicklas Fhärm, analyst]

Very interesting, of course. Another follow-up question. If we look at sort of visits versus conversion rates, the trend is still there, right? You have quite a significant jump in conversions, but traffic is still down quite a bit actually, much more than GMV, as a matter of fact. Could you elaborate a little bit on sort of what are the driving forces behind any positive growth in 2025? What needs to change here? What is going to drive what, please?

[Fredrik Norberg, executive]

I can start just to make it clear also. So I'm guessing when you're looking in your tools, if you're looking on the CDON segment, be aware that we have done the migration. So some year-over-year numbers aren't really super correct. For an example, it could be that we now are getting rid of a lot of bots that we had last year. That would decrease our traffic now, but increase our conversion rate. So just be aware a little bit on the CDON segment when going year-over-year. Fyndiq, however, should be quite comparable year-over-year.

What's driving the growth for next year, we see from our part is the improved supply. We have also really strengthened the organization now with Vesa in place, one of the really A players in the Nordics when it comes to consumer electronics. And also, we will get a tailwind when it comes to the general economy also. But the main pusher is going to be our improved supply that we're putting a lot of focus and resources on throughout the year and we continue to do that.

[Nicklas Fhärm, analyst]

And any comments on sort of take rate levels going into next year? Do you expect them to flatten out where you are right now after a fairly significant increase actually over the year so far?

[Carl Andersson, executive]

I mean, I think we have been talking about fairly steady take rates for quite some time now. And also going back to a year ago in our Capital Markets Day, we also spoke about the time of when to push gains within the parts of take rate. I don't think now is necessarily the time to push too much towards our suppliers.

Now it's about finding the right return on the gross profit that we're able to generate and over time, grow -- growing or increasing our take rate is one of our main goals over time. But I believe there is every reason to believe steadiness going forward, but we can't really go into details about when we would expect major shifts in it.

[Nicklas Fhärm, analyst]

And final question for me. Just looking at the cash flow statement, I think there's one item which is standing out a bit on the negative side, which is obviously the increase in receivables. And just for the record, is there a specific reason for why the change year-on-year is so much greater in Q3 this year than compared to Q3 last year, please?

[Carl Andersson, executive]

No, we don't have any specific negative reasons standing out or any associated risk with such increase in receivables. It's something that we continuously monitor and will address going forward on how to manage our working capital even better.

That said, there was a reduction in cash during the month -- or sorry, during the quarter. And Q4 will be a cash-generating quarter. So we feel very confident in the levels or in the level going forward and the sort of continuous cash level for the company, especially when we return to growth and if we were to close the gap in Q4, then we are in a very solid and very healthy position from a cash perspective.

[Operator]

There are no more phone questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions and closing comments.

[Fredrik Norberg, executive]

Yes. Thank you. We have a couple of relevant questions here that we can answer on also. I'll start with the first one. There is a lot of negative press on Temu currently. Do you think this is a potential tailwind Fyndiq can benefit from as a trusted and domestically based platform for popular TikTok items? And are you considering on building on that by integrating gamification features?

Very good question. So we think one part -- I mean, I was running Fyndiq when Wish came in and with the storm, as you say in Swedish, many years ago. What happened is today, they are no longer existing. What they really failed with was that people got fed up with getting broken products and getting spam with, okay, cheap products, but bad products, bad quality products.

Temu seems to have done their homework and are focused on quality and delivery excellence and so on. But still, it is too many products, too many merchants and they have problems with their quality.

On the contrary, on Fyndiq, we are so focused on the quality. You should get the quality you can expect when -- even though it's a really bargain, it should be -- you should be able to use it for a long time. And this is something we are monitoring every day to get rid of bad products and bad merchants. So this really focus is that we want to be a bargain store for Fyndiq, but at the same time, a qualitative bargain store. We believe that this position is strong and over time, this can be a very strong position versus Temu.

At the same time, I think as you're implying here that their gamification and how they are working with their site is very interesting. It's an innovative take they have with a lot of gamification. We can though see that it's a little bit cultural difference between the Chinese market and maybe the Swedish market when it comes to a lot of gamification. We don't want to be too aggressive on that. But definitely, when it comes to more moving videos and more TikTokification of the experience is something we're looking into and probably will evolve even more further on.

[Carl Andersson, executive]

And also building on that, I think this really proves the value of having 2 different marketplaces in there. We have seen strong performance on Fyndiq second half of 2023. We've had a bit of a tough one, the first half of this year, but we are returning to growth in Q1. So I think definitely, we have not suffered or been hurt by Temu's massive growth in the Nordics. We've rather benefited from it. And I think as you say, if we can do it even better in some aspects, I think we should definitely be able to leverage the development from here.

[Fredrik Norberg, executive]

Yes. And we strongly believe that we want to divert the experience from both segments. When you're buying a dancing cactus that you've seen on TikTok, you want one different specific experience when shopping that product. But when you're buying something for SEK 15,000 a new TV, you want a separate, more trustworthy experience. And this is why we are separating the whole experience on Fyndiq and CDON even more going further on.

Next question, Carl, I'm looking on you -- here at you. Maybe this could be interesting. Our running platform cost was SEK 41 million in the quarter. Is this the level we will see going forward? Or do you expect to bring it down further? And what will be the estimated quarterly running cost after platform merger and fully equipped organization?

[Carl Andersson, executive]

I think that's -- it's a good question. And I think that's ballpark a reasonable figure. We were talking about a OpEx cost base of around SEK 195 million, SEK 200 million at the point of integration and working backwards from that, one would arrive at around SEK 40 million a quarter.

[Fredrik Norberg, executive]

Lower.

[Carl Andersson, executive]

Yes. And also in absolute terms, SEK 40 million per quarter.

[Fredrik Norberg, executive]

Yes.

[Carl Andersson, executive]

Correct.

[Fredrik Norberg, executive]

And the second question was, will there be any material seasonal effects in the running platform costs -- or will it be pretty stable over the quarters?

[Carl Andersson, executive]

I mean, certainly, some software cost is derived directly from scale. At the same time, all of our fixed costs associated with it are fully leverageable. So yes, we will see -- definitely see some seasonality in it. And as I mentioned, Q3 being a seasonally sort of lower from an OpEx point of view, there will be some fluctuation within the year. But I mean, just to sort of emphasize the point from [ Mata ] earlier, it is a purpose-built and modern platform that we have built to really benefit and leverage scale.

[Fredrik Norberg, executive]

Yes. Another question we have here from [indiscernible]. Congratulations on doing an impressive job, Fredrik and team. Thank you.

My question, how do you view up-and-coming marketplace competitors such as Temu and Amazon that they see? Do you think they are eating CDON's growth? And how do you position yourself against them?

So we touched upon that just recently. And I can go back a little bit to Fyndiq and Wish as well. When Wish came into the market, everybody was talking about this will be the death of Fyndiq. And here we stand today, Wish is not here, Fyndiq is here. It was the same when it came to Amazon. The day Amazon will enter into Sweden, both Fyndiq and all the other ones will die, including CDON. It hasn't happened. And now we are close to growth on top line and definitely, we are profitable in our business model side to side with Amazon.

We also -- we have a lot of examples in both France and in Holland, where you can -- the local marketplace are growing next to Amazon and have been doing that for many years. And examples of that is Bol and Cdiscount. So we feel quite confident that we have and will have very specific positions for the 2 segments that fill their purpose in the market.

Yes. I think that was pretty much it. Thank you, everybody, for your questions and your attention and see you in 3 months again. And don't forget, do a Christmas shopping on Fyndiq or CDON. Bye-bye.