CCC SA

WSE:CCC

Earnings Call Transcript 2018-Q4

[Marcin Czyczerski, executive]

[Foreign Language] I'd like to welcome you to the CCC company presentation conference. I don't know if you can hear me well. If you might need to regulate, of course, the earpieces. Well, in any case, we'd like to begin unconventionally. We'd like to thank our team for the very intensive work they have done on the financial statements to prepare them as we want to thank our auditors for the work they have done as well and our supervisory board and the Audit Committee.

In the company, a lot has happened last year, the standards have changed, the accounting standards have changed. And we are raising the bar in terms of fast closing of the reporting. And so basically all of the parties involved have been able to discharge the duties. So on behalf of the management board, I'd like to thank all of them. We can go onto the results of CCC for the 2018. So we want to say goodbye to the winter, say goodbye to 2018, which was an exceptionally unfortuitous year. And well, we can say 2 seasons, key seasons didn't work out spring/summer, fall/winter, but the year has ended so we should recap it.

So we are now looking forward to the future results of the company. So as a matter of tradition, we want to tell you a little bit about what's influenced the results. We'll show you Q4, and we'll show you some of the events that we've done, some of the projects we've done, how they will affect future years, future quarters. So some of the key events, the highlights. We have 2 extremely different phenomenon and so we have the disappointing performance, sales performance of minus 9% in our stores. We'll give more color on that later. E-commerce is up 65%, in line with the management's expectations. And having in mind how difficult a year was for the group overall and for the overall industry, this was not so obvious. So if we look at the -- over a quarter, we had revenues up by 25%.

If you look at the right side of the slide, we can talk about some of the foundations for the future. The company through organic expansion added 102,000 square meters of space. This is a record-breaking year because of structural changes year-on-year. So it's an increase of 40% net of Germany, but having in mind the sales performance is softer than we all anticipated and expected. So at the very end, profitability per square meters or sales density is the most important thing, and so having a big impact on cost per square meter, we've been able to reduce cost, we reduced them by 10%, we've been doing this year-in-year out quarter-on-quarter. We can also brag that we've been able to fill out the white space in terms of managing capital in the company. We're talking about working capital management. We have the fourth quarter in a row that we have improved our working capital management.

So with respect to trade receivables -- trade payables as well as with respect to inventories. So if you look at 23 countries, not much has happened since the last time, what changed and would require some comment here. We have more stores of eobuwie, so we have the first stores of -- first stores coming into the like-for-like base. So this can confirm the business case with respect to the stores for eobuwie, we've got substantial growth. We've a new color on the map. This is a little bit linked to history. This is our operations through our associate company. The management board made the decision to discontinue operations in Germany. And at the end of January, we finalized that decision by selling CCC Germany to another company. And so that company, we ceased operating into that model in Germany.

We call this as a stop loss transaction. If we look at the company, a lot has been happening in the company, and we wouldn't have enough time to walk through all of the projects we financed -- we finalized in the last quarter. What I would point out, most of these projects are either finished -- at the final stage or they're already entering the production stage. We have to wait for some of the outcomes to be delivered by the projects. We have some new things that showed up in Q4. We will talk about them.

The first thing is launching a phenomenal solution, you will see that in a few minutes. So this is scanning the parameters of key interest to customers. So doing scans of their feet, and this has been quite successful, this is esize.me. So the technology of scanning in the industry is considered to be the second most important revolution following the Internet, and we are pleased to be the leader in this innovation, this technology. The second important information is what I mentioned, was the change of model in Germany, the sale of Germany. So we have a stake of 30% in the company. So it's going to be an associate company. So this is another step towards building the image of the company as a responsible company, and we're going to promote the company's image. We're one of the partners in UNICEF. I'll get to that in just a couple of minutes. And we also joined the RESPECT Index. So in December 2018, we did another step to integrate with Gino Rossi, this brand was important to us. We communicated that from September in terms of adding some new product categories to what we offer. Perhaps is not the proper word to use, premium here but looking at what's going to be in the stores. But it's going to be an addition to the key brand, Lasocki. So we have 150,000 scans of feet. So we have these scanners available in all the stores or in islands, and we've got a higher value of the basket, smaller number of returns. So the conversion rate is quite good. We have a large number of clients being served through this technology.

Our cooperation with UNICEF. I would say a couple of words about that. We don't want to talk about the plans. We're going to tell you about some of the specific results in terms of building the image of the company as well as the financial results that will come from this.

We've been -- we bucketed it in terms of sports and charitable activity and business. We tried to bring them all together. This is what I'm trying to convey. We have extensive collaboration with UNICEF. Based on our knowledge, this is either the largest or one of the largest from the world and certainly the first from Eastern -- Central and Eastern Europe. We want to support this activity to make sure that it's clear to our key target groups, our consumers. And this will be visible, I think, quite strongly from Q2 of this year. And what we continue to show, well, to reinforce this message, perhaps you don't know the company so well, so I want to tell you, regardless of what we do, this is a factor that we don't have much influence over, it's not the case so we don't have any influence, we can adapt to that.

This is weather itself, this is a factor that's important to us. As you know, we've communicated this in a variety of interviews. So the key month, October, when we launched the fall collection in our stores wasn't supportive. You see the red color, that's the temperature in 2018, gray is 2017, and this line shows you the average for the last 30 years. So we have upside potential in October, couldn't be worse as we said, but it turned out that life taught us that things could be worse than we thought. And that had an impact on Q4, it's not the sole contributing factor. We don't avoid the discussion in terms of what we should improve in the company, in order to generate and deliver better results, but as we talk about the results, 1 key aspect of the company.

The company can brag about the fact that it has 4 different results because we report according to IFRS 16 with and without that, then we had the sale of Germany, we have to report this as discontinued activity according to another IFRS rule. So it was difficult to interpret the results in previous year, as I said, because we have a matrix of 4 different categories' results. As you can see, these results differ from one another strongly depending on the standards you use. To ensure comparability, we use continued results, results in continued business without IFRS 16. So we have a comparative base for 2018. So next year, we will show only results according to IFRS 16 with 2 exceptions. One would be the KPI for EBITDA with respect to the pro forma method of calculation having in mind the management program. So we wanted to follow that without taking into consideration IFRS 16.

The other thing is bank covenants, our agreements are written in such a way that we don't incorporate IFRS 16 in terms of the treatment of lease contracts. So as of 2019, we will only use continued operations on IFRS 16. But today, this year, we're going to do this without IFRS 16 for continued operations. And so the company in Q4 had an EBITDA of PLN 214 million, and so the results we've broken down. So as I told you previously, we have a record-breaking growth in space. We have 113,000 square meters of newly opened space. We had to close quite a bit. You asked us whether or not we're going to close. We always close 7,000, this year 11,000 square meters. So this is tens of stores. It's not the case that we're just opening stores. We analyze stores in terms of their profitability. And those stores that don't meet our requirements and don't portend to do that, we actually close them.

So the greatest growth dynamic was in the 2 areas we showed you that's strategically important to the company. So Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine, where we had 100% growth and the second best part of Europe which is South Europe -- Southern Europe. So we had Serbia and Romania. Serbia was 102%. We had a much higher base in Romania, 30% up. So Romania is quite important to us. During the question -- Q&A session, we'll have more time perhaps to discuss this. If we look at like-for-like sales, as I said, we completed the quarter at minus 9%. So Central and Eastern Europe, well, we have Germany netted out, we had -- it would be minus 18. With Germany, minus 13. So this confirms our being right in terms of discontinuing operations in Germany. The positive aspects are the growth in e-commerce sales, some 65% up. So eobuwie is, of course, the most important channel, but we are selling through DeeZee and Vögele and so the number of Internet channels will grow sharply.

If we look at quarterly review -- revenues, and what the split is, a breakdown in e-commerce, and so it was up to 20% at the end of the year in Q4, and this was in line with what we told you was our objective and what we wanted to achieve as a management team. If you look at eobuwie alone, you can see that it was growing at a pace of nearly 60%.

While we can see that the share of Poland continues to fall, even though the growth of sales is coming in at around 50%, we can see that eobuwie is growing very fast in Poland. So we're pushing upwards and outwards those results. So new markets are markets where we've been operating for 12 to 15 months, Greece, Sweden, France. So these are markets where we see the most dynamic growth. Of course, this is being paid for with having higher marketing expenses, and we'll have an opportunity to talk about that. The P&L itself. As I mentioned, for continued business, we have PLN 170 million compared to where we were last year. We were down by 17% compared to last year. And so the 3 primary aspects we should have in mind, if you look at our P&L. So the factors affecting sales, 2 positive factors were gradually building upside for the future. This is the amount of space and the growth in e-commerce business and what was negative in Q4 in parallel happened, which was the negative like-for-like figures.

Because of organic growth, we had structural expansion, this led to some costs, and we have the new part of the P&L, where you have the operating losses from discontinued operations in Germany. If we look at the segments in turn, you can see that Poland even though we have more sales area, the sales are quite flat. We had not only the issue of weather, but we also had the Sunday trading banned -- ban. So this was an impact, a big impact on the revenue. And that's why we can say that when you look at these results year-on-year, the results are flat. It looks quite different in Central and Eastern Europe, where we don't have the Sunday trading ban. We have increased in the loss in Austria from PLN 5 million to PLN 11 million and then we have Switzerland, where we have an EBIT of PLN 8 million, profit of PLN 11 million. And so e-commerce is doing very well in terms of revenues, but its profitability, we can say there is a lot of growth happening here.

So as you can see, our gross margin is under control, and we've been able to improve it gradually, but when you enter new markets, it costs a lot of marketing spend without generating large amounts of revenue since the very beginning, that means that the share of marketing in total costs or as a percentage of revenue is quite high. We're investing in stores, we're investing in the new technology for esize.me. And so that's why we have suppressed operating margins in eobuwie. And I think you will be able to observe this year how that changes. If you look at gross margin there, it's quite stable in all of our sales channels. In retail, we have a minimum improvement, but as a result of the change in volumes and the direction of eobuwie, in e-commerce, 20% as opposed to 16%. We're talking about the dilution of the gross margin as a result of the sales mix.

So a few words about costs. So the costs have grown from [ PLN 440 million ] to [ PLN 676 million ]. So they are up by [ PLN 217 million ]. So it is up by 41%, there are 2 major blocks. We have higher costs because of organic expansion. So the variables for eobuwie and then the cost of additional square meters, so you have the cost of stores functioning. And we allocate them to the stores, the payroll regionally. And then the second block of increased costs is linked to structural growth. We should have in mind that for the last 2 quarters, we added Vögele and Romania. If you look at Vögele, please remember, we'll add in the first and second quarter. But in Romania, we'll add in the first quarter and a portion of the second quarter. And after that, then the cost base will be stabilized.

If we look at the other costs, if we look at the numbers, they are under control because they are quite flat. Marketing costs are on the rise in eobuwie because of new markets, new stores, esize.me. So the marketing costs are very flat in CCC. The other costs linked to service, legal service of the transactions that we've executed linked to the IPO of the eobuwie as well as some of the salaries and payroll, employee benefits. We also have cost of stores, head office, cost centralization of certain procurement processes for Poland, but starting this year, we'll also start doing this for other companies in the group, where we can see the clear point, positive point is that we've reduced cost per square meter.

And if you net out the M&A expenses, you can see that the costs are stable. And so we're able to show a very positive trend. So we've been reducing costs by -- quarter-on-quarter by 10%. And so payroll expense is down by 20%. So this effect is something that will continue to accompany us in Q1 and then later this base will flatten, but we're going to observe over this year, we're going to have changes in rental cost per square meter. We're not renegotiating all contracts at once. So this is going to be a gradual change. So the new rental costs we have are substantially different from the costs that we've had in previous years. So we anticipate that we're going to have some improvement here. If we look at stock or inventories, it's under control.

So in our brick-and-mortar network, you can see that they are down. So it's down by 9%. And if you add to this the fact that we have a new product range, so for example, sports brands as well as luggage, and for several [indiscernible] and if you add to that, that we have subtracted Germany and we're not adding Switzerland, and if we take into consideration all of these factors, then our performance is much better, but we know that we still have a lot to do here. And this is something that we're going to work on. So debt is under control, net debt is at a stable level, net-to-EBITDA, because this is the fourth quarter, you can say that this parameter is always low in Q4. So it's at a very safe level. So working capital continues to improve and the financing of basically the payables and liabilities here [indiscernible]. We've been able to extract PLN 300 million from working capital base, that's not a small result. Having in mind that the company historically had swelled here, we've been able to reverse that trend, and we have generated positive results. So the operating results are quite good, along with the discontinued operations.

So as we sum up and continue into my portion. So if we start from the bottom, there are some negative factors. The company continues to be sensitive to weather. So in September and October, we saw the weather impact. So in terms of our work starting to, we started with Puma, Reebok, Adidas, these athletic brands, and so they have had a strong beginning, this is just the beginning. And so we can see that we have bigger and bigger stores, but the product offering is starting to catch up to the growth in store numbers. We still have more to do than we've done already. So we don't have any profitability in the DACH countries. So we've ended our operations in Germany. We don't have Austria under control. Switzerland needs to be converted into a profitable country. So we have ambitious objectives to do this quickly.

So of course, we have the Sunday trading ban as a negative effect. Then we have the positive effects such as stop loss in Germany, effective growth of sales channels, especially our omnichannel. And so most of the IT projects are acting as underpinning elements. So they've been launched, and they strengthened our position -- we strengthened our position through acquisitions. We continued to improve working capital and this is not so obvious having in mind some of the inflationary characteristics, and we're focused on expansion plans. We've done it well. So it's -- we've actually achieved the 100,000. So if we look at the prospects for the next quarters -- upcoming quarters, we anticipate in 2019 that we're going to have double-digit sales growth. We're not guiding on that. We know that a lot depends on the weather. We're focusing on our tasks and projects. And so we're working on improving our gross margin.

So we can see a lot of potential to improve here. Naturally, we have to look at like-for-like, weather and other things and not everything comes together that we would like. We have an increase in the working capital or in the sales area and continuing to improve our working capital. And so if we plan better, it will be easier to do half of this. Some of the other things can be just done by planning. But these are things that are doable within the longer term. The integration of the companies we've acquired, and then we have the standing commitment that we're fully focused on the existing business and continuing to upsize it. We're giving clear instructions that we're going to improve the things that have become part of CCC to ensure that the company operates well. We can see further opportunities to enlarge the offering. We'll have sports, then we'll have in fashion, premium, other third brands, accessories. Then we can also have additional electronic channels for customer interactions and so mobile applications, esize.me in our stores, then we have the new sales channel, MODIVO, and so we'll do this in existing markets, new markets.

And so for example, in the Persian Gulf, we're going to use synergies. So we can see how we can go to our suppliers with better prices as a bigger group, and we want to use the new IT architecture to better reduce some risks. We talked about opportunities and sometimes you say that we've forgotten about the risks. Well, the list of risks that we analyze, there is tens of items. Of course, weather writes its own scenarios, also the third Sunday trading ban, Sunday, and then the potential impact on FX and then declining consumption. Right now, we see positive elements. But we're not the ones in charge of steering this, but perhaps we don't see something that might just be looming out there around the corner.

But we treat this as risk, 100,000 square meters. This decomposes into Central and Eastern Europe. And so on top of the 100,000 square meters, in 2019, we want to go to the direction of full omnichannel approach. You can see the MODIVO application, the website, it's already up and running.

So it's available to friends and family, people who're testing this in eobuwie. And so in the near future, we'll go broader to our customer base. Then investment expenditures. So PLN 150 million for space, logistics and IT, primarily our e-commerce, PLN 100 million for that. So 80-20 is the split there. And then taking over the 30% share in the German HR Group is around PLN 110 million. So now we have Karol, who can sum up the acquisitions.

[Karol Póltorak, executive]

So to be brief, you can see who we invited.

The question is whether or not we're going to be able to integrate. There's a lot here. We understand the question. We're going to be able to do that. We are able to do that. The first 2 acquisitions or purchases, Adler, Express. These are businesses that are fully integrated. They are contributing to our EBITDA. We're quite happy. So they're in Romania, so we're speeding up the development there. It's a very large market, half the size of Poland, so it's going quite well for us there.

If we look at the other 4. DeeZee is a small company. So it's not really a topic for integration, it's something that just sort of happens on its own. But it's adding value. So the knowhow in social media, and so every additional leg we have in e-commerce is giving us a benefit. The Germans, we're going to focus on product cooperation. We've parked this topic, so we're not going to spend any topic on that.

So product cooperation is a big area of learning for us, and maybe will increase and augment our opportunities in the future. In Switzerland, we're concentrating on that. We want to make sure that the result is going to be above 0 in EBITDA this year. This is what we stated that we would do. We can have different opinions, whether or not you can do it faster or better. They had a tough 2018. We have a concept in how to do that. We're in the process of implementing it. So we can see that for Deichmann and Zalando, this is a very strong cash cow. I think we've got more positive elements than Deichmann or Zalando has individually, and then we have Gino Rossi. We don't want to comment on this because we're in the midst of the transaction, you already know why the main reasons we want that. And so -- and this company will be profitable at some point. We'll help the company improve. And so we're -- in the fall, as we stated, we're going to able to have these products on our shelves. So we're capable of doing this, and it's not going to take any more time than it's needed.

So ladies and gentlemen, before we come on to Q&A, I'll ask our CEO, Mr. Milek, to say a few words by way of summary for 2018. We've already outlined most of the stuff, so...

[Dariusz Milek, executive]

So welcome, ladies and gentlemen.

I'd like to thank you for your confidence. As you know, I have, in fact, tendered my resignation. Maybe I've given a full declaration that 100% of my time, I will dedicate to the company. So the representation of the management board will change. I will continue to do my job. I don't intend to leave the company or work less or sell shares, nor do I have any ideas about new business interests. Basically, we want to integrate everything that what we've prepared.

You know, as the management team, I can tell you briefly that Karol, as you know or surmise, he is involved with integration efforts, new technologies in stores, like esize.me, that will be done before the vacations 1,600 stores. We're going to try to collect data from our clients, that's such a major edge over the competition. We're going to be able to show -- sell shoes that are already pre-sized, and so we have the e-commerce project in CCC, where we're going to sell not only our own brands, but other brands. We also have MODIVO, which is developing eobuwie. So we have quite a few new ideas. And this is an area, where Karol feels great. Perhaps, I'm a little more backwards in new technology. Of course, Mariusz is dealing with production here in Poland. So he has production in Polkowice, but also in Slupsk and then logistics and warehousing are also reporting to Mariusz. We've enlarged our warehousing capacities, and we're building huge logistics facilities in Zielona Góra, and this will cater to all of our brands in e-commerce. So we're going to try to become a technological company and e-commerce company in the near future. So I think by next year, we should be able to sell 30% of our wares through e-commerce.

And then we have Marcin, who has been with us for the last 2 years. He is the youngest in the management team. So we're betting on him. He is a very well-structured manager. His candor impresses me and how quickly he operates. So he'll do better managing the company, then when -- so I became the President when -- the CEO when I -- when we went onto -- when we went public and Mariusz was saying that the company is me and so I couldn't step down, and this could have an impact on the share price. I am happy that everybody understood my intentions. And that the share price that my -- you can see that the share price even bumped up when I stepped down. So a little bit to the opposite. I want to focus on making sure that the most important screws are totally screwed in. I don't want to deal with everything. And I so want to concentrate on the product because expansion is something that we've basically completed. We don't intend to buy, integrate anything new, but we can see how we can expand our product range, work on products themselves and margins.

We're the largest producer in Europe. And this year, we wanted to sell 90 million pairs of shoes, that means 1 big -- 1 mistake at the production line could mean a much bigger problem than it once meant. So it's hard to make -- it's easy to make a mistake if you have such a big business. So maybe a few words about everything that's happening. We started to cooperate with UNICEF. This is the largest -- probably, the largest partnership in the world, and certainly in Europe. We're not talking about a large amount of money here, it's a global contract. It applies to all of the brands in the group. I can say officially, $6.6 million. And so for 3 years, well, we should jointly with [ RENO ], we should do $6 billion -- sorry, EUR 6 billion, that's 0.0001% something like that. But it means a lot for the company because we're going to put it on our bags, and we're going to have the shirts, people wearing shirts that say we support UNICEF. So we're a company that's responsible -- socially responsible as a corporate citizen. So either you like a brand or you don't like a brand. So we want to be a likeable brand, an affable brand. So we went into this without doubt for a big scale. The same is true of the cycling project. All of our marketing activities, so advertising campaigns, cycling and I would net out eobuwie. We don't spend more than 3%. Everything that we're doing is going to be within around 3%, other brands, sport brands allocate even to offers in above. So we've been keeping everything strongly under control, so 3%. So some might say, we've gone mad, but that's what we do.

So we have the 100,000 square meters. We're going to start working in the Arabic countries. We'll see if that's going to be working for us. But this is all being done at the cost of our franchisees. We're providing the products. So I'm going to go to the supervisory board. I can promise you that I'll visit with you at least once a year, probably at the end of the year. And if you want, I can come a little more frequently for special events, but I don't anticipate any special events for the next 2 years, but I'm available in the company. And if you want to come, you can come and look and see if I'm actually at my job. I'm in Warsaw now and again, nothing is going to change in terms of my ability to have contact with you.

So we're looking for some harmony in what we're doing. A lot has happened in the company. And so I can guarantee you that my main objective is to find harmony to bring everything together. And we see a lot of potential upside in terms of margins and revenues and costs can be improved and this is our major objective. And we're going to try to squeeze out what we can. So Gino Rossi won't be a profitable company in the first half of the year. Vögele also. We know the products we're producing, so the second half of the year should be pretty good. And then 2020 should be the essence of what we've been doing.

So forgetting about weather, we -- everybody has the same condition. So we're all in weather -- everybody has the same weather. We have to be aware of the fact that when you look at our results and results of other public companies, they didn't have a lot to brag about because the weather basically forced a lot of companies down. We see what's happening in purchase orders in Asia. Orders were down, so it's been the tough period for the industry. We've been able to survive that. And so I think all of the good things await us.

I'd like to congratulate the President. So I'm going to vote I guess as well on this, so congratulations to the President.

Okay. Thank you very much. So I'd like to congratulate also the Chairman of our supervisory board. Your promotion -- I'm treating this is as a promotion. I always wanted to be the Chairman as opposed to the CEO.

So I still have the same boss, so nothing is really changing. So now you can see that we have quite a bit of time. So we can go on to our Q&A session. So we'll start with questions from the room, and then we can look at the questions coming in from the Internet. So I'll go ahead and -- we'll go ahead and open it up for -- right now for questions. We're going to give you the microphone.

I can't hear the questions being asked at this time, so -- I even have my response prepared. So it's on the last page now.

[Unknown Analyst]

[indiscernible]

[Dariusz Milek, executive]

So I'll say in my own words. Perhaps we could have expected this question.

[Unknown Analyst]

[indiscernible]

[Dariusz Milek, executive]

Decisions in terms of the direction we're going go, but these decisions haven't been made. So when we were thinking about this project, like, Zalando, also, they were losing tens of percentage of points of their value. During individual trading sessions, we were a little bit frightened. So we believe that the valuation of the company is much bigger than the final prices. So we decided to wait, not a quarter, we are talking about 1 or 2 years, maybe more. We have a lot of projects to do, like esize.me, 1,600 stores. This is where we're going to be advertising, basically, their products. We have to work on the warehouses. All of the companies in the group are going to be involved. We're talking about Gino Rossi. We're talking about DeeZee, Vögele, RENO. We're talking about CCC. So the distribution past -- base in Zielona Góra will serve all of that. And so it's going to be less expensive because we are going to put the miniature model there. We are not going to do everything in Polkowice. We're going to do everything in Zielona Góra. We have to price on that, and it might be -- take a little bit of time to get it right, but for now, we have a lot of work to do. So I think this company will be worth much more in a year or 2 from now. If you look at the growth that they had in January, February, March, it's even worse. So everybody was supposed to say that I made a mistake by making this purchase, but it turns out that it's not the case.

I think we have a question from the back of the room, [indiscernible] Kuzawinski.

[Unknown Analyst]

[indiscernible]

[Dariusz Milek, executive]

Of course, CCC is on technology wave e-commerce. We believe that we are going to be representatives of retail, and so e-commerce will give an additional boost of 10%, 15%, but we don't want to overlook at it. Eobuwie is going to be an e-commerce channel, and it's going to have a small add-on of retail trade. So the stores -- we opened 10 stores last year. This year, we're going to open another 10-or-so, and the like-for-like in sales are surprisingly robust. So we're opening another store in [indiscernible] close to Warsaw. We won't be able to do that for April because we just reached an agreement. We will have a full offer. So basically, I think within 2 or 3 hours, people in Warsaw will get their shoes. I think they're going to be delivered by scooters or something like that. So Michal, you have a question?

[Michal Kuzawinski, analyst]

I'm from JPMorgan. I have a question. Whether or not you have a better understanding of the reasons. Well EBIT fell by PLN 100 million in Poland, that's 70% of that deterioration year-to-year and that was Poland? If we look at your like-for-like sales in the report, you are showing minus 8% in Poland. In Central and Eastern Europe, you have plus 7%, that's a difference of 15%? You had weather there and here more or less unfavorable. It's hard to imagine that 15% is the deterioration coming from Sunday trading ban. Do you have a deeper understanding of why sales are so simple and they were poor?

[Marcin Czyczerski, executive]

We didn't have bad results. Maybe from your side of the table, they are poor. There were good because we were comparing ourself against the industry. If we look at other entities, they had even worse results. Of course, the weather is never exactly the same. And Budapest or Warsaw, we have 2 different worlds sometimes, but I'm not talking about Bucharest or Bulgaria or Sofia, but it's another thing that's important. Poland is a mature market. We have that double-digit like-for-like sales figures behind us, whereas the other markets are growing quite strongly in the early years. It's hard to make a direct comment on that, but I can say that 9% was basically sort of a mild penalty because we had the Sunday trading ban coming in March and we still had 15 degrees in September. So we had the hottest or the coldest periods of the year. So we can say this is history. Well, you can't say that everything was bad. I know companies that are down 20% like-for-like in direct competition. So the crisis was there, but we've come out of that quite strong. I think we have to look for some of the positives.

Are there any other questions?

[Michal Kuzawinski, analyst]

If I could continue. If we look at the summary of your acquisitions, I have a question, in particular, about Vögele, where they had a loss of PLN 35 million, where they doubled the cost of acquisition. I'm trying to think whether that this was part of the plan? And a question for the future, how do you see the result of this business next year? What's the risk that when you analyze this loss that this will be subtracted from the improvement that you mentioned as a result of discarding Germany -- divesting from Germany?

[Dariusz Milek, executive]

As we said previously, our target is for this business to be above 0 this year. That's the way the budgets of the company has been formed. That's our trajectory. In the first half of the year, we believe that this is going to be a period when this business will be catching on. Our product is going to Switzerland. We are overcoming some of the logistics' difficulties, but the second half of the year should be substantially better on an operational point of view. Since we see that our product has been received well and our new concept has been accepted well by the local consumers, so it seems that we got all of the puzzles -- pieces of the puzzle put together for the business to become profitable. Whether or not 2019 comes out this way, we will see. This is what we're trying to do. We think it's realistic, but of course, life at the end of the day will tell us. We don't have any reason to believe that we would have structural problems like the ones we had in Germany. We have scale. We have a brand. We have consumers. We have products for this customer. So we're hooking up the final elements to ensure that this orchestra will be able to play well as an ensemble.

[Michal Kuzawinski, analyst]

Can we expect any new acquisitions?

[Marcin Czyczerski, executive]

No. Until we put together Switzerland, we won't have any new acquisitions. I think if we put -- bring everything together in Switzerland, this will be a good reason to think about it. Well, we, in Switzerland, have everything. We've got a strong brand that's 98 years old. Switzerland is like Upper Silesia. We had 300 stores Vögele and then we had 100 stores for Vögele clothing. So basically, an Italian company bought their clothing brand. They changed the brand, and then they didn't survive for 2 years. So we were the beneficiary of some of these losses. That's the history.

Charles Vögele and Vögele Shoes were cousins that were actually renting out locations together. And some of the locations were rented by us, some of them by others, and so we had to allocate some of those losses they actually went under. And so we didn't anticipate the additional losses. We have to bring it -- get our heads around it because we bought the company for CHF 10 million. It had equity of more than CHF 50 million. And so we're planning to sell more than -- shoes for more than 600 million. So that's roughly 12% of our total volume, and Poland is 37%. That's the scale we're talking about. So it's 1/3 of Poland can be done in Switzerland. If you put everything together for it to be profitable. We know from another side that all of the entities that we're working with, like RENO, that is where they have the most profitable business, and this is not an exceptional business. It is not something that is exceptionally well structured.

So we've opened a couple of our stores, and I can tell you -- so the stores got trading volumes that's twice the size of our best stores in Poland, so -- and not all of our shoes were actually delivered. We're using their old shoe stocks. So it has something nice I think that shines. You've got the beautiful mountains there and beautiful meadows, but there the shopping centers don't look like they have a mood. We have problems to put in furniture. They have 2.5, 2.7 meters high. So basically nobody is developing because it's a big event if you do something in the city or in the neighborhood. So this is the direction we're going to follow in terms of marketing.

We are opening up or changing few -- it's being done under Vögele, and this is the problem we made -- the problem we had in Germany. The Germans walked in, they didn't see their own favorite brands like SALAMANDER, which they have been buying for 50, 60 years. They saw one of the Lasocki. They were unable to pronounce that, and this is probably why we didn't work out, and nobody needed a fifth sort of drug store.

So I am repeating this, in Poland, we got [ Rosalind ] and then sometimes you might go into FABI, but nobody is going to go into the direct store, and the same is true with fuel stations, your 2 to 3 favorite brands, and then you have big problems. If you want, you have to do something with a lot of pomp and circumstance, otherwise, you're just one of many. Switzerland is a market where no new brand has been successful. Other brands, Carrefour and others entered the market then left because people follow their patterns for many years. So we know more or less how to do this on other markets. We are too young and maybe inexperienced when we went to Germany, that's why it worked out not very well.

So perhaps if we do it, well, then in a couple of years, we can think about acquiring companies that have a good market recognition but aren't doing so well. Then we can add the logistics, joint purchasing, procurement. So I think that this procurement center is something that's going to be quite good for us. So we are the largest buyer in Europe. Of course, our biggest competitor doesn't buy other brands. So we wanted to get the best prices, and you have to wait a bit for the results because what we're negotiating right now is something that we will be in the stores in 8 months, so we will have the results about that next year. So you have to have a little bit of patience.

[Michal Kuzawinski, analyst]

And my last final question. On Slide 12, you show your EBITDA from continued operations without IFRS 16, and you have PLN 216 million (sic) [ PLN 214 million ]. What would the amount have been for the full year, and not just the Q4, based around PLN 500 million? On Page 76 of the report, you have PLN 576.8 million, but you add it PLN 204 million depreciation?

[Marcin Czyczerski, executive]

I'll walk through that. I can't reconcile the figure's, since we're a little bit behind.

I saw 2 other questions. Let's put one more question from the room and then a few questions from the online audience. We always have some questions from other countries that they feel a little left out. So a couple of more questions.

[Unknown Analyst]

I'm Jacob [indiscernible]. I'm from [indiscernible]. You showed the 4 major risks that you see for 2019. So whether Sunday trading ban and the possible decline in consumption. Number 4 is the FX risk. So this is the easiest risk to manage. So what's your hedging policy for 2019? And how do you intend to hedge this FX risk? Do we intend to hedge?

[Dariusz Milek, executive]

We have a relatively low exposure to the key currency dollars compared to other companies, which is around 35%. So any exchange rate below 4 is good for us. So we did, last year, a lot of hedging, and then we had some deferred payments. This was something that helped us. So we benefited technically from these exchange rates last year. Even current exchange rates, it may be less favorable than 3.3, but it's still favorable. We transfer the prices to the customers. So we have the products before the season. So we can -- we have to pay the customs duty so we can pay, change the prices before the products go into the stores. So we can always decide to go left or right. It doesn't really look like gambling.

If we believe that the dollar is very inexpensive, then it would go down; then it's worthwhile to secure it, but we don't have a lot of discomfort in terms of hedging. So we partially hedge. So 4.0 is where I value the shoe, and anything below that is -- so we've been going into the -- we've been going into the local currencies and trying to get rid of the dollar. So we tried to have settlements in local currencies, rubles or whatever and trying to get out of this dollar. Well, Marcin probably mentioned the weather. Could it be worse than last year? Probably not, but I made a bet about last year's autumn turned out to be quite warm. But for us, the strong -- we get stronger when we have a tough year. If you look at Gino Rossi, all of the cost to acquire that company are under 1% of the total value of the group. So it's nice to have Gino Rossi brand in our stores. It can help us sell more.

Gino Rossi could be in our wallets, backpacks, luggage, things like that, offer affordable products. So at CCC, you're going to have the Gino Rossi name and you're going to have high-heel shoes for PLN 300. So we have the scale. They were doing 1,000 pairs for a model. We're going to do 20,000. We're going to buy more leather. We have a special leather just for us. Special prices for lower production costs. We'll put some of the production into India or Bangladesh, and so we've got some good quality production capacities there. So we are going to have production costs of PLN 80 and PLN 740. And so we have a large number of these ideas. And you won't see the difference, especially in men's shoes. Whether or not this was done -- the shoes were manufactured in Poland or Bangladesh or India. At one point in time, you would have noticed that, but I can put my head on the block and say you won't be able to notice the difference. So the cost of production roughly represents 60% of the local cost, and so we've got a strong brand. We have 2 strong brands, Lasocki is a strong brand as well. It's differently positioned. We've got strong distribution channels in e-commerce and the brick-and-mortar network. Now we just have to bring everything together.

We would now ask -- we have one lady here who wants to ask a question as well. So let's give her the opportunity.

It has to be with the microphone because it's actually being translated, so...

[Unknown Analyst]

I have 3 questions, but I have 2 short questions. The first one is about your gross margin. In 2019, we have pressure from the dollar, but in 2018, it was unaffected. So the question is, is there a place for growth in terms of your adjustments for profitability? Is it possible to go into profitability? And the third thing is the MODIVO project? So if we can ask you to basically unveil some of the -- what are your revenue targets, costs of inventories, in terms of margins?

[Marcin Czyczerski, executive]

As you've noted, we are changing our stores, look nicer. We give bigger promises. We've got more selection. So I don't think it's a big problem to raise the margins. Basically, stocks were the biggest problem. So we had the pressure to reduce the margins by doing campaigns to sell stocks. So because of the weather, we yielded PLN 400 million to shoe buyers, that's a lot. We also didn't do PLN 400 million in sales. We have too many shoes. So we want to basically master the inventories. So then in terms of Austria, well, it's a similar example, you got -- in Austria, you've got the strong Deichmann. And so it's a little harder to get into the market with our stores because we don't have the brands, but as a group, we now believe that CCC in Austria is going to have the right presence. We're going to have a brand product, and this would be more expensive than this would push us up. And then maybe Karol could say a couple of words about MODIVO.

[Karol Póltorak, executive]

I really wouldn't want to say too much, because with MODIVO, we're starting in April. So this is a project under eobuwie. And we have said just go ahead and do it. We anticipate PLN 100 million in revenue from that. We're going to sell, of course, branded clothing. So we want to sell clothing shoes. And so we're going to do some marketing tricks to sell there, but in terms of targets, we're not stating any official targets. We don't want to give rise to any expectations. We are well prepared as a group and eobuwie as a company. And so we're kicking off so go ahead and observe and buy, and you can see how good that product is. What eobuwie has done, and this will be very good once it's connected to customers who are buying from various platforms. That's what we're counting on that the sales per client will be much higher. So you know our customer service.

We're very good in e-commerce. We're winning contests, so if they like us and they know that everything is going to go well and the brands we have. Marcin has this contacts with these brands. Well, they want us to sell also accessories and clothing apparels. So the idea came from the outside world. We have the capital. We have the warehouses. We have the logistics, so we can introduce -- so I think we have more than 90% chances of being successful. We can always say 2 years down the road that we're -- that we made a mistake, but we want to try, I mean, we're experts in shoes and not clothing, but we're going to give it a go. Like all projects, it begins with some pains. We have to press the -- iron the clothes, and you have to iron the clothes on mannequins. I mean so there is some details that you -- just like in every project you encounter problems.

[Dariusz Milek, executive]

Now we have several questions from the Internet users.

So we see the traditional trade is moving into the e-commerce field. How much would you anticipate this happening?

Well, I'm going to say, the idea for us is not to be -- Board or the management has to do something both being serious. If you open a store 5 years ago and now, well, it's roughly half the price. So in Poland, we received very good terms of trade. They're financing the opening. So this is something that I quite like, because we vis-à-vis changed the old concept into the new concept, and if it doesn't work, then I'll close it. So we can say, we have contracts 3 plus 3 plus 3; and big projects, you have 5 years. So oftentimes, the store is prepared under -- as a turnkey. I don't see big risk for expansion.

Are we cannibalizing ourselves?

Yes. Because we're opening things, and we're closing things, that's always going to be the case. So you build new department blocks first having taken down old ones. So we have to select the best locations. So you will see our stores in another 6 months in Warsaw. And if you compare it from what it was 3 years ago, you will see the difference.

Next question. You enlarged your warehouses by 18,000 square meters. To what -- how long will this last for?

[Marcin Czyczerski, executive]

It's enough. It's enough for us to have. Right now, we're trying to separate B2B, B2C, CCC, Polkowice. We're going to be focusing there on B2B. And so we can have 25 million pairs of shoes there. So we have to do 2.5 cycles of rotation. If we look at the orders, the transportation, we can send out 200 million pairs of shoes in the B2C e-commerce. Well, eobuwie will do this. So Gino Rossi's B2B won't be taken. So -- well, in CCC, things are happening within eobuwie. We're not going to build new warehouses in Polkowice. We rent nearly 30,000 in [indiscernible]. And so this will be completed to the end. So then we're going to work and invest in Zielona Góra, not to be surprised.

Any other questions from the Internet?

Should we anticipate slowdown or maintaining the pace from last year?

Last year was exceptionally weak or poor, so this year we'll do better.

[Audio Gap]