Oesterreichische Post AG

VSE:POST

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q1

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome, and thank you for joining the First Quarter 2023 Results Call.

[Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the conference over to Harald Hagenauer, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

[Harald Hagenauer, executive]

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to this Conference Call of Austrian Post. Today, we will discuss the first quarter volumes, revenues and figures. So here with me, is our CFO, Walter Oblin and I would like to directly hand over to Walter.

[Walter Oblin, executive]

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure to have the opportunity to present to you our Q1 results for 2023. As a summary upfront, in a very challenging environment, Austrian Post has had a good start into the year. Good strong revenue growth and despite significant headwinds, I think we can look confident into the full-year 2023. Page 2, reminds you of the 3 segments that we operate in and that we report. Mail, our incumbent Austrian Mail business. Parcel & Logistics, our portfolio of Parcel networks in 9 geographies in Austria, Southeastern Europe and Turkey. And our segment, Retail & Banking, including our Post office network and our bank99. Moving to Page 3. We are operating in a challenging macroeconomic environment with 3 strong drivers impacting our business. First, we see a weak sentiment of consolidation in e-commerce, but also a weak environment in stationary -- long stationary retailers. Second, we see inflation across our cost structure, not only affecting staff cost, energy cost, but pretty much all elements of our cost structure.

The third particular driver, given that we have a quite strong exposure to Turkey. Turkey still shows high inflation. At the same time, the exchange rates to the euro has been surprisingly stable which has led to strong growth numbers coming from Turkey in Europe. But at the same time, this also means there is a risk, once the Turkish lira depreciates, purchasing power is adjusted again. Moving to Page 4. Page 4 gives you an overview of the first -- the highlights of Q1. I'll talk about the numbers later on. I think the summary is double-digit growth, both top line as well as bottom line. Significant challenges are addressed by multiple efforts, both on the cost side as well as on price management. And overall, we do confirm the outlook we have given a few months ago with revenue target -- with a target of revenue could increase in the mid-single digit range, was depending on the Turkish lira exchange rate, still a strong CapEx here with CapEx spending in the order of magnitude of EUR 160 million to EUR 180 million. And an earnings target where the objective is to get close to last year's earnings level. Page 5 gives you a multiyear representation of Q1 revenue split. I think there are 2 messages. Message number one is, we do have a strong profitable and resilient Mail business. And I think message two is, over the years, we have built up a strong second leg, our Parcel & Logistics business, which is the growth driver, and which, after a year of consolidation, is back in growth mode again with revenue growth of 15.5%. I think third message, there is a Financial Service business, which is also growing again after concluding the operation with BAWAG P.S.K. in 2020. And building up our own bank99. We now see a strong growth in the quarter-by-quarter comparison from last year to this year. Moving to Page 6. Our revenue has -- we have seen a quarter with strong revenue growth, as I already said, 10.5%. Roughly half of that is coming from Turkey, where the -- already mentioned a combination of strong inflation with a relatively stable Turkish lira has led to a very strong growth in Europe, almost 70%, 66% roughly. Still without Turkey, I think a growth of 5.5% is a very good number, given a structurally declining Mail business and a relatively weak sentiment, both in e-commerce as well as in stationary retail. Our Mail business has grown revenues by 3.3%. Price changes have overcompensated decline in volumes. Parcel & Logistics, plus 15.5%, roughly 5% excluding Turkey in the Retail & Bank segment, growing by around EUR 10 million or 42%. Page 7 gives you the overview of earnings last year of EUR 39.6 million, this year plus 18.7% to EUR 47 million with our core business, Mail and Parcel, in absolute terms, pretty stable, which even growing revenues means there is some visible margin pressure as we are not -- as it is challenging to forward all the cost increases that we see across our cost structure to the market.

Still, I think, overall, decent margins in both businesses. Retail & Bank with a very strong improvement of EUR 12 million, the first breakeven quarter after 3 years. Please do not expect this to be in a breakeven situation for the next 3 quarters as significant migration expenses will weigh on our results in this segment over the next quarters. But I think still it gives us a good sign, a very encouraging sign that our bank99 is on a good way. Corporate down a little bit from last year and overall, again, EUR 47 million. Page 8 reminds you of our strategy, 3 business directions. Number one is defending our market leadership and profitability in our core business, which means our core Mail and Parcel businesses. Priority number two, profitable growth in near markets, meaning international growth, but also growth along the value chain. And priority number three is to further develop offerings for consumers and SMB, bank99 is one of the biggest measures and the green arrow in the middle, we do aim to be a leader in sustainable logistics and diversity and customer focus complement this strategy element. Let me now, along the strategy framework, update you on the developments in our core business lines, starting with addressed Letter Mail has shown to be a very resilient element of our business throughout the pandemic. The biggest acceleration of digitization in our society, which happened as a result of the pandemic has not led Mail volumes to decline significantly faster than in the past. Also Q1 2023 with a Mail decline on a daily basis of minus 4% shows a continued stable relatively moderate decline.

We have raised prices significantly, moving to Page 10, last year, in 3 steps. The ECO products in July, the quality product in October and pretty much all other products in January of this year. With these price changes, we remain one of the cheapest Mail markets of significant size. You see here the comparison, we are committed to a strategy of high quality at moderate prices and we believe this has contributed to the moderate decline that we have seen in the past. At the same time, in a high inflation environment, constantly working on the price side remains a priority and there are further measures for later this year in the pipeline. Page 11, Direct Mail remains a strong element of our Mail business portfolio. Direct Mail and Media Post last year, totaling EUR 427 million in revenues. This has been the business which has suffered significantly during the pandemic and has not, and probably, will not recover fully from the pandemic as we have seen a strong shift towards e-commerce away from stationary retailers and stationary retailers are the core customer base of this business. Strong pressure continues to weigh on this product and on our customers in this field in addition to high paper costs, providing very challenging combination for Direct Mail. As a result, we have seen Direct Mail volumes decline by 11% this year. We see an increasing number of industry exits and insolvencies in that field. But still, we are working hard every day to keep this advertising, to keep this important element of the marketing mix of our customers relevant and invest also in digital marketing as a way to extend the traditionally paper-based Direct Mail products. Moving to Page 12 to our Parcel business in Austria. Last year has been a year of consolidation with Mail volumes declining slightly, but modestly. This year, we are back into growth mode as already in the second half of last year plus 5% volumes in Q1 2023. And also, in particular, in the last weeks, we have seen a good momentum in our Parcel volumes. We continue with our investment program. 2023 will be pretty much the last year of a major expansion program in our Austrian Logistics infrastructure. The last big project we are currently working on is an extension of our historically most important sourcing center in the South of Vienna.

This is planned to go live, go into operations in the second half of this year. Together with substantial fleet investments, IT investments and investments in businesses outside the core Austrian business, our investments this year, our CapEx spendings will total roughly EUR 160 million to EUR 180 million. Q1 has -- pretty much every year has been a relatively weak start into the CapEx here. Page 14 shows you the investment program that we started in 2018. We see here that with the logistics center in the South of Vienna, the last big project is now under construction. After that, of course, we will continue to adjust and improve further this logistics network plus this last big sorting center, we will have pretty much tripled our sorting capacity over the last 5, 6 years. Hopefully making us fit for further profit growth over the next years. Page 15 shows you the development of our staff structure. We think the message here is the transformation towards the new collective wage agreement being the dominant element in our workforce and civil servants and the old collective labor agreement employees continuing to decline. This transformation continues.

Second message is we have improved efficiency over the last 12 months, despite growing Parcel volumes, we have managed to get through Q1 with almost 600 FTEs less than last year. I think, a result of efficiency improvement measures and more stable operations and also a result of the investments we have done over the last years. Moving to our International Parcel business. Again, here, good growth again after a consolidation last year. Volume growth in Eastern Europe of plus 12% in Turkey, plus 8% price improvements in CEE, a little bit more challenging in Turkey, given the high inflation. Of course, a lot of price changes. You can see on Page 17, some more details about our Turkish business. Aras Kargo is, again, growing substantially also on a real base, if you try to find a measure for that, but also taking into account that there is substantial inflation. We do see, as I already said, Parcel volumes growing at high single-digit numbers and the company operates on a good profitability. Moving to our third strategic pillar, our retail businesses here, the strongest investment, of course, has been our investment into bank99. As I said, the first pretty much breakeven quarter after launching these banks, 3 years ago, in particular, interest income has increased substantially, given the changes, the steep changes in the interest rate environment, interest income on a quarterly -- for Q1, increasing from EUR 7 million last year to almost EUR 60 million this year. You see this increase over the next 2 quarters in Q4. Already last year, we had already included some significant interest rate changes. With that, as I said, a breakeven quarter over the next, roughly 5 to 6 quarters, we expect significant integration and migration expenses as we now have made the decision to how we will integrate the 2 core banking systems and this migration project we're starting these days. The other big priority these days is to make sure we remain attractive for customer deposits by introducing also savings on products, of course, without paying too much interest on that. Moving to Page 19. This gives you an update about our self-service solutions. We continue to invest a lot in self-service solutions. It's not really big money that we spend here, but it's -- we think this is an important element of -- an important source of differentiation in an increasingly competitive Parcel market, these solutions are well accepted by our customers, there were -- costs provide convenience to our customers and significant volumes already are processed through such service solutions. Talking a little bit about our progress on the sustainability front, 2 important priorities in our sustainability programs are e-mobility and photovoltaics with 3,000 vehicles end of last year. We operate by far the largest fleet -- electric fleet in Austria. We do have a target to eliminate the last combustion engine in our last mile fleet by 2030. End of this year, we plan to have more than 3,800 vehicles, next year, more than 4,600 vehicles.

So this is well on track. The other priority where we have accelerated our investments and activities is photovoltaic, given the price changes in the electricity market, we have substantially accelerated our PV expansion program last year, added roughly 1.5 megawatt peak. This year, we will double -- almost double the installed capacity on a little bit above 4 to around 8 megawatts peak, and for next year, we do have a pipeline that should lead us to 15 megawatt peak, 15 megawatt peak is a capacity which should generate roughly 20% of the electricity that we need, including the electricity for our electric fleet from renewable sources. Our various sustainability efforts, I think, are well appreciated also by different rating agencies where we typically come out best-in-class or among the players in our industry, several awards that are shown on Page 23, both on our efforts as well as on our reporting also demonstrate, I think, the recognition of our efforts.

Let me now progress with some more details on our financials. Page 24 shows you the -- a few financial KPIs. So I have already commented on revenues both margins, EBITDA as well as EBIT above last year. As you are all aware that Q1 '22 was a difficult one. So it's partly also a recovery. Earnings per share and cash flow, I think, on a decent level for Q1 operating free cash flow of EUR 75 million, that order of magnitude, I think, we're in a good way of earning enough free cash flow from operations to be in a good position to propose another attractive dividend for the current year at the end of the year. Page 25 shows you our group P&L. I don't want to go into details of that, let me rather proceed with going into the individual segments on Page 26. Starting with the Mail Division, the core Letter Mail business, including our business solutions activities showed a revenue increase of 5.6%. As I mentioned, relatively stable decline in volumes of around 4% plus significant price changes led to this revenue increase the Direct Mail side, the volume losses, and this is a combination of unaddressed and depressed Direct Mail losses were, again, compensated by price changes so the revenue impact was, in total, relatively small, minus 0.8%. With those revenues and very disciplined and cost-focused approach in our operations, we were able to secure decent margins in Mail with a total EBIT of EUR 41 million and an EBIT margin of around 13%. Page 28, moving to Parcel & Logistics here, revenues are up 15.5%, with all regions contributing to this growth, Austria, Turkey and Eastern Europe. I already mentioned Turkish lira inflation -- Austrian Parcel volumes up around 5%, revenue is up 8.3%. We see significant mix changes here, which partly dilute our price increases same development, even more pronounced in Eastern Europe, where we have 12% volume growth, but only 2.3% revenue increase. There is also a change in the way we account for in a cooperation with one big customer in Slovakia. So we changed from showing the full revenues to a provision based way of invoicing. So part of that lower than volume revenue increase is the impact of this. In logistics solutions, we show a decline in revenues. This is coming from one-off revenues from the pandemic that were still included last year in Q1 which are not present anymore. We're talking about test logistics that we provided for the largest Austrian COVID testing corporation as well as for a Austrian school testing. Page 29 shows the segment P&L, the pretty much stable EBIT in absolute terms, the loss of special pandemic-related logistics services here overcompensating the increase in absolute EBIT generated by the other activities. And as a result, a small EBIT compression from 6% to 5%. Page 30, moving to Retail & Bank here, revenue growth of 41.8%, predominantly coming from the from the top line growth in bank99 plus almost plus 60%, roughly EUR 10 million in top line growth in the bank. And as I said, on Page 31, you see that here, we can show the first full quarter with this segment breaking even after 3 years and of course, we hope to see more such quarters in the future. Page 32 updates you on the structure of our balance sheet. We continue to operate a healthy and conservative balance sheet with low level of financial debt with banks. So EUR 150 million on loan. Conservative accounting, which is demonstrated by high level of provisions, in particular, staff related provisions, low level of intangible assets and goodwill and quarter-by-quarter increasing balance sheet, which is driven by the growth of bank99. Page 33, updates the usual illustration of our cash flows. We try to focus on the column in the middle, operating free cash flow before growth CapEx. This is where we have the target to generating operating free cash flow that well covers the dividend with EUR 75 million in the first quarter. I think we're in a good way.

Let me finish with the outlook on Page 34 which is pretty much confirming the outlook we gave 2 months ago. We continue to see a challenging market environment with strong inflation and weak consumer sentiment. In this environment, we target a mid-single-digit revenue growth, with the growth, again, coming from Parcel & Logistics. Mail for the full year, probably, a slight revenue decline. And in the Retail & Bank segment, we will continue to see revenue increase, driven by the improved interest rate environment. On the CapEx side, we confirm the EUR 100 million -- roughly EUR 100 million maintenance CapEx, plus EUR 60 million to EUR 80 million growth CapEx. And on the earnings side, despite significant inflationary challenges, leading to increases in staff cost and cost across the cost structure. The target for 2023 remains generating earnings at about the prior year level. With that said, I'm ready to take your questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions]

The first question is from Pavel Kirjanovs of Bank of America.

[Pavel Kirjanovs, analyst]

Pavel Kirjanovs from Bank of America in place of Muneeba Kayani. Two questions from our side for you. First, on guidance. Could you give a bit more color on why revenue guidance for the full year increased from low single digit, mid-single digit to simply mid-single digit? Where are you seeing confidence? And is that all driven by strong performance in retail.

And as a follow-on to that, same time, for EBIT guidance, that remains unchanged. You're targeting about same level as last year. Is that driven by cost increases coming in from July? Or are there other elements at play here? And for our second question, I wanted to check on Parcel volumes. Those are evidently quite strong seem to be better than your regional peers and likely better than what you expected. Could you give a bit more color on what's driving that and what the expectations are for the rest of the year? I believe you mentioned previously you expect to see a bit of growth in Parcel volumes in '23. Has that changed at all or not?

[Walter Oblin, executive]

Thank you, Pavel, for your questions. Let me start with the guidance. Yes, I think there is some increased level of confidence that we will see good revenue growth for the full year after what we've seen in the first 3 months. I think we are still cautious, given that there is a very strong influence of the Turkish lira, which is even made stronger by the hyperinflation accounting, which was basically, it's always the end of the period, which is used to translate revenues into Europe. So I think we're all aware that tomorrow, there are elections in Turkey, and I think it will be interesting to see what happens after that. Turkish lira has stayed, as I said already, surprisingly stable over the last 12 months. And so I think there is a caution on our side on what happens with the Turkish lira. And also on the rest, I think, we still have high volatility in our business. We have good months followed by less good months. I think there are different predictions by different economists and they're revised constantly. So I think visibility, overall, is still low, but I think we're confident with the guidance we've given on the revenue side -- so much on the revenue side.

On the EBIT side, yes, it is -- it remains unchanged since last time. And the question why -- if I understand the question is, why do we, for the full year, we're not more optimistic. I think you gave the answer in your question. We will have -- we just negotiated a collective wage increase. We always negotiate that for July 1 as an effective date. I think we came out with a very good result, given the economic context that we were faced with an inflation rate of nearly 10% for the relevant last 12 months, we came out -- for an increase -- it was an increase of 10%, which will only be fully effective as of January 1 next year. And for the next 6 months, we'll use an instrument that the Austrian government provided, which is both tax free and free of social security expenses for both the employer as well as the company, which, in effect, will provide the 10% income increase for almost all employees on the lower income side, even more on a net basis, while the company will save significantly the 2-digit million euro figure on basically social security expenses. Still, this will mean that in the order of magnitude of EUR 35 million to EUR 40 million of additional staff costs will hit our P&L in the second half of this year. And of course, this will weigh on Q3 and Q4 results. Of course, we are working constantly on implementing price changes, particularly the end of the year is in many contracts the date where prices change. So despite some projects in the pipeline on the Mail side and also continuous work by our sales force on individual customers. I think you should expect, for Q3 and Q4, some weaker results, given the increases in staff costs. On Parcel volumes, yes, I think we saw good momentum probably above what we had expected in the first 3 months. And also over the last weeks, this continued to remain quite good. I think we have to remind everybody that we're comparing us with quite weak Parcel volumes in the first months of last year were a combination of the Ukraine war and other reasons led to quite strongly consolidating Parcel volumes.

I think in the relevant geographies in Austria as well as in Turkey, we also seem to be gaining somewhat market share. Again, here, the outlook is -- or the visibility is modest, but we are optimistic that we will see single-digit volume growth shortly.

[Operator]

The next question is from Marco Limite of Barclays.

[Marco Limite, analyst]

So coming back to what you just said about additional EUR 35 million, EUR 40 million of additional staff costs. Just want to clarify that figure relates to just half year, not on the full year. And therefore, when I think about 2024, when there will be a 10% salary increase, but of course, you won't pay the one-off or, let's say, in the base, you have got a one-off and therefore, the base clearly needs to be cleaned up. The question is how much additional staff costs we should expect in 2024, taking into account that in 2023, you're paying, let's say, one-off amount, that's the first question. And the second question is about pricing power or price increases in a way. I guess, in the Parcel business, you can clearly increase parcels according to what you think is the best strategy, but what shall we expect in terms of Mail price increases going in 2024?

And the final question, if you could clarify, please, what you're expecting in terms of EBIT for the banking unit for the full year.

[Walter Oblin, executive]

Thank you for your questions. So to clarify, the EUR 35 million to EUR 40 million is probably -- rather EUR 35 million and EUR 40 million is a figure for the second half of the year. It's not a full-year figure. We're talking about roughly EUR 1 billion staff costs in our Austrian core business, and that's what we negotiated about. And this is the gross increase, of course, as you saw and as I pointed out in my presentation, we are working on efficiency, and we are reduced the number of staff compared to last year. We also have this sector cost effect of an ongoing change from civil servants to employees under the new collective wage agreement. Absolute numbers here, of course, changing become smaller, but still typically, we are talking about on a cost per productive hour basis of having them, if we would -- civil servant by an employee under the new collective wage agreement. For next year, the 10% is kind of the like-for-like salary figure that will come into our P&L. And so we have to expect gross impact of roughly 10% of our staff costs. And again, we will continue this transformation, lower number of civil servants, higher number of employees under the new collective wage agreement will increase. Of course, we're working throughout the company to save costs to reduce overhead costs, and with that we will try to minimize this figure. But I think order -- in terms of order of magnitude, this is what we have to expect. Pricing power, of course, this is a priority in a high inflation environment is to forward cost increases to customers. On the Mail side, we are talking here about work with the regulator. The regulator has typically allowed us over the last years to increase prices in line with inflation, which has been very low when inflation was low, which now, of course, is higher and given that end of the year, the last -- we're already middle of the year, the last price changes in the Mail portfolio will start to be 12 months already in the past. As I already said, we do have measures in the pipeline to increase effective prices in the Mail side, still this year in the course of the second half of the year. On Parcel, there is a -- I think if you look at our figures, there are also, of course, efforts to raise prices. The result given different purchasing power of customers is somewhere in the mid- to higher single-digit figures. At the same time, we have a significant mix change where we have an increasing B2C share in our portfolio with lower average prices. And we have also customers down buying from premium products to more simpler products. So pricing remains challenging, but we are consequently working on it. We are, of course, also trying to add value-added services on the Parcel side, same-day services, evening delivery, also to command premiums. On the banking side, to answer your question, I think, we always said the aspiration for this year is to reduce substantially losses from the EUR 30 million that we roughly showed last year and the year before. So given the substantial migration expenses that will start to come in over the next weeks and months. I think we would currently expect a result in low double-digit negative numbers for this segment.

[Marco Limite, analyst]

And if I can briefly follow up on pricing in Mail. I just wanted to check if you're actually kind of discussing with the regulator for let's say, bulky price increase to be introduced, I don't know, at the start of next year or yes, maybe in the second half of this year.

[Walter Oblin, executive]

Yes. Please bear with me I'm currently not in a position to provide more details than I already provided. I think what I said, we're working on pricing measures in Mail. The target is to introduce some price and product changes still this year and we will update you whenever we are ready with the regulator to be able to communicate.

[Operator]

The next question is from Nikolas Mauder of Kepler Cheuvreux.

[Nikolas Mauder, analyst]

Three questions, if I may. First one is on the acquisition spend of EUR 12.9 million flagged in the free cash flow bridge. I wasn't able to find anywhere what that money was being spent on. Secondly, I noticed, and maybe I'm seeing ghost, but that the number of Parcels reported for Aras Kargo has been revised down in all reported years between the fourth quarter reporting and the first quarter reporting. Maybe you can tell me why that was the case.

And thirdly, I noticed that customer deposits have stopped growing on a quarter-on-quarter basis. Do you expect to raise deposit interest rates further to attract some growth here again? Or would you prefer to sort of have that nice gap with the ECB deposit facility.

[Walter Oblin, executive]

Well, thank you for your questions. The acquisition is the -- EUR 12.9 million is the purchase price -- the initial purchase price for a company called Agile Actors based in Greece, which we communicated, I think, end of February that we acquired 80% of the shares of this company. It's basically a near-shoring IT services provider where one of the core targets is to build a strong POST team in Greece, given the shortage of our key experts in Austria and our appetite -- our growing appetite for them. But of course, the target is to continue to have this company being active on the market, and this is a profitable business model and it will also add to our bottom line. So I hope, I clarified that question and there is communication on that available. And I think, I have to present it to you. Parcels on Aras Kargo, I think there is -- thanks for your diligence. There are basically 2 types of products that we deliver in Aras Kargo one is real Parcels and the other is what we call documents, documents are kind of express mail. And now we are just reporting the Parcels where some of the peers -- have rightly seen which differ from this also included express mail documents that are also delivered through our network, yes. And sorry for the questions we raised, was showing different numbers here. And I think your last question was on bank deposits. Customer deposits in bank99, correct me, if I got it wrong. Yes, we -- of course, you know we are now as every bank on a weekly basis, we have to navigate through the question, what is the right level of interest to be paid on deposits and in particular, savings products, to make sure we attract enough deposits and avoid outflows of deposits, while at the same time, not increasing interest rates across the whole deposit base more than necessary in order to optimize our net interest margin. I think our banking has done a good job so far, basically stabilizing deposits.

There has been some little outflow in January, which we'll be able to stop through some modest measures and through some fixed rate deposit products that being saving products, that we introduced and with short-term interest rates further increasing, of course, we will add further savings products in a truly -- keep the deposit.

[Operator]

The next question is from Teresa Schinwald of Raiffeisen Bank International.

[Teresa Schinwald, analyst]

I have 2 questions more aimed at gauging on potential one-off effects, although you said that there weren't that many in the past. Could you still remind us of the impact of the 2 most recent regional elections in Austria and Lower Austria and in Salzburg on revenues. And coming to the government announcing fighting inflation with an emphasis on fees and also on energy. If utilities have to offer monthly invoices. And given the potential system changes that the retail electricity is facing. Could there also be a one-off impact from this change in fee and contracting structure on revenues? And if yes, how high could this be?

[Walter Oblin, executive]

I think on the regional elections, yes, what happened -- regional elections in Lower Austria, Salzburg and Carinthia in the first quarter. We had good turnout of Mail, both -- still is a relatively small absolute number. I think compared to previous year where we also had some elections, we're talking about maybe EUR 1 million. So this order of magnitude, additional impact. And at the same time, we have other one-offs missing that we had last year, we will still have some pandemic mailing -- pandemic-related mailings. So I would not say this is -- you could also see this among a series of one-off volumes that we have in almost every quarter. On the fee energy side, if I understood your question correctly, you were talking about the government measures that were announced over the last days. I think it's still a little bit too early what they really mean. To be honest, I don't think they will have an impact for us, but maybe there is a positive surprise. We typically secure -- we make forward contracts on electricity. We also, last year, were well hedged against the price hikes that we saw in the electricity market.

We have contracts with a substantial part of our energy for this year already. My understanding was not that this is relevant for large corporate customers of utilities, but we will be positively surprised. Our strategy is to save on energy. Actually, we were quite successful in the second -- gas this winter, we saw, month by month, minus 40% gas consumption, given a series of measures that we implemented, in particular, turning down temperature in our logistics centers, and the other direction is to increase PV.

[Teresa Schinwald, analyst]

And maybe to clarify, it's more about utilities having to inform retail customers about changes in the contract terms. And if the government, as they announced, want to change the terms to more monthly billing, then I would expect more customer contact from the utilities. But maybe this is one of the positive surprises going to happen.

[Walter Oblin, executive]

So you're talking about some impact on our Mail.

[Teresa Schinwald, analyst]

Yes, on the mail volumes.

[Walter Oblin, executive]

No, no, I got this. Yes. But we have seen, of course, communication around electricity prices, 3, 4x going up last year, some Austrian utilities canceling hundred thousands of customer contracts. This has already supported and hopefully will continue to support Mail volumes also over the next months and hopefully, electricity prices. Yes, so I think there will be some impact. But again, we've seen it last year, and we see it more on a constant basis.

[Operator]

There are no further questions at this time. I hand back to Harald Hagenauer for closing comments.

[Harald Hagenauer, executive]

Thanks, ladies and gentlemen, for this call. If you have some more questions or things to clarify, don't hesitate to call us the next day. Thanks, and have a good weekend. Bye-bye.

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded, and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you for joining, and have a pleasant day. Goodbye.