Westwing Group SE

XETRA:WEW

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q1

[Sebastian Säuberlich, CFO & Member of Management Board]

Yes. Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our Q1 2021 earnings call today. Before we start reviewing our Q1 results, I want to highlight that we will host our 2021 Capital Markets Day at 3 p.m. today. The focus of our Capital Markets Day will be our strategy and the targets for the coming years, followed by Q&A. If you would like to join, please visit our IR website, where you'll find all the details. With that, let me start our Q1 2021 earnings review. I will start with a brief business update before I then will discuss the financial details of Q1. Afterwards, we will go into a Q&A session. In summary, Q1 2021 was again a very strong quarter. We realized revenues of EUR 138 million in the first quarter which is a triple-digit growth of 105% year-over-year. This strong growth resulted also in a very strong profitability of EUR 20 million adjusted EBITDA with 14.2% adjusted EBITDA margin. We continue to generate strong cash flows from our operating profit. In Q1, we delivered EUR 14 million of free cash flow, which brings the last 12-month free cash flow to EUR 60 million at a very attractive 12% free cash flow margin. By now we serve 1.7 million active customers across Europe, and we have grown our active customer base by 74% year-over-year. This growth continues to be driven by existing customers, who show increased repurchase rates, and a very strong new customer acquisition. Let me also give you an update on our Q2 trading. We currently see Q2 to date GMV growth rate of approximately 15%. So even against the very strong Q2 baseline from last year, we are still growing well, actually a bit better than we had expected. But it's also only the first 40 days of the quarter. I want to emphasize that in our current environment, quarterly growth rates have only very limited potential to be extrapolated for the full year growth. Growth rates are currently very volatile and very much depend on the baseline from last year as well as external factors; and specific, the further development of the pandemic. We internally are rather looking at actual GMV levels these days and see typical seasonality patterns of our business, where Q2 is usually not quite as big as Q1. So 2021 is continuing on the good trajectory of Q1 in terms of absolute GMV levels. Based on the strong Q1 and the good Q2 to date trading, we are confirming our guidance of EUR 510 million to EUR 550 million of revenues at 18% to 27% year-over-year growth and an adjusted EBITDA of EUR 42 million to EUR 55 million at 8% to 10% adjusted EBITDA margin. Let us now dig into some of the details of Q1. Let me give you a quick update on the COVID situation. As the situation continues to be serious in Europe, it is improving. We're all now very optimistic that we will be able to return to normalization in the coming months. At Westwing, health and safety remain our #1 priority. Customer safety is of utmost importance to us. To live up to this priority, we operate with wide-ranging hygiene measures in our warehouses, together with our freight carriers and also in delivery. Our warehouses and photo studios operate with highest hygiene standards, also social distancing measures and stringent testing routines. Furthermore, the majority of our office teams are mostly working from home. We also continue to proactively manage the risk of this COVID crisis. We take comprehensive safety measures to minimize the risk of a temporary warehouse closure, yet, as always, a risk remains. We also proactively check how and when we can support the vaccination campaign as a company. Overall, we continue to manage the special COVID situation well with a focus on health and safety as the pandemic hopefully winds down over the coming months. But we also need to acknowledge that some relevant risks remain as long as the pandemic is globally not fully under control. Coming now to some details of Q1 2021. The e-commerce adoption in the European home and living market remains very dynamic, and we continue to have a very strong customer momentum. We are now at 1.7 million active customers, and we were able to add over 700,000 active customers over the course of the last 12 months. And remember, these are all customers that we can work with in our loyalty-driven business model. In line with customer growth, also GMV growth developed very strongly in Q1. We realized a growth rate of 92% year-over-year, bringing us to an absolute GMV of EUR 164 million for Q1 2021. The very positive aspect of this growth continues to be that it's driven by both our existing loyal customers and strong new customer acquisition. In Q1, we more than doubled the number of new customers we acquired versus the year before, further demonstrating how well our organic and content-focused marketing model is working at scale. Moreover, and equally important, the new customers we gained in the special year of 2020 are very high quality, and their repeat purchase behavior is even slightly better than the one of the pre-COVID cohorts of 2018 and '19. Thus, these customers are likely to become also long-term loyal Westwing customers who will contribute to our future growth.The other portion of our growth was driven by our loyal existing customers. Existing customers continue to show higher engagement and repurchase rates. The average orders per customer, for example, increased from 3.3 orders to now 3.9 orders for a 12-month period, which is roughly an increase of 20% year-over-year. All in all, our loyalty-driven business model is currently stronger than ever. We are not only able to monetize our already very loyal customer base better, but we were -- but we are also able to acquire a significant number of new customers who have the same or even better loyalty pattern. With that, let me now turn to our financial results. As mentioned before, we realized EUR 138 million of revenues in the first quarter. This was around EUR 70 million more than last year, a growth rate of 105% year-over-year. It is very positive to see that growth continues to be driven by both our segments. The DACH segment reported 110% year-over-year growth to EUR 79 million of GMV, while the International segment also reported very strong growth of 98% to EUR 59 million, not GMV but revenue. Q1 2021 was again very profitable. For the first quarter, adjusted EBITDA was EUR 20 million or 14.2% adjusted EBITDA margin. This strong profitability continues to be driven, on the one hand, by the new scale we have reached and, on the other hand, structural margin improvements we have realized. Let me give you some color around that as I move down the individual P&L lines. On gross margin, we were able to improve by 3.9 percentage points, which was mainly driven by structural margin improvement. We were able to increase our Westwing Collection share and realize better margins through improved supplier terms and adjusted pricing strategies. Yet, on gross margin, we continue to benefit from very low inventory obsolescence costs. But we have taken a decision and partially already implemented to invest more into our inventory to improve customer experience through better availability and shorter delivery times for our bestseller products. We expect inventory-related costs to go up slightly going forward. On fulfillment, we were able to improve by 3 percentage points based on higher efficiency, mainly in our warehouse processes, and scale effects, also mainly in our warehouse. Our warehouses run currently at very favorable utilization rates. Yet, in order to manage future growth reliably, we will invest into more warehouse capacity over the coming years. In today's Capital Markets Day, we will provide you some more details on these plans and how we will realize our warehouse expansion in a CapEx-light manner. We also continue to benefit from low return rates. Our return rate in Q1 was significantly below historic levels as we have seen a very similar downward development like other e-commerce players over the last 12 months. The improvement in gross margin and fulfillment ratio then resulted in a 7 percentage point year-over-year improvement of our contribution margin. With that, we have realized a very strong contribution margin of 31.2%. While we know that given the effects described before our current contribution margin levels of 31% cannot be considered as the new normal, we are still very proud of the improvement and keep focusing on a healthy contribution margin to facilitate even more growth investments or ultimately higher profitability going forward. Coming now to our marketing and G&A expenses. Both were a little lower than we planned this quarter, which is mostly timing related as the pace of our growth investments is only now picking up. In terms of marketing, we are now at 7.4% marketing ratio, which is lower than previous years. But in absolute terms, we're actually spending almost EUR 4 million more compared to Q1 last year. We will increase our marketing investments over the coming quarters further as we see attractive opportunities at high paybacks. In terms of G&A, we continue to see how well our business model works at scale. We continue to show very good operating average. Our G&A ratio is down by 7.9 percentage points and is now at only 11.8% compared to 20.1% a year ago. Yet, also here, you can expect that our growth investments will lead to increasing G&A cost levels going forward. Just to correct, our G&A ratio is not down by 7.9 percentage points but 8.2 percentage points. Sorry for that. Overall, this brings us to the strong profitability of 14.2% adjusted EBITDA margin, which is an improvement of almost 16 percentage points versus last year. This strong improvement in profitability happened in both our segments, which are by now firmly adjusted EBITDA positive. The DACH segment that leads the way in our company is now at a staggering 19.9% adjusted EBITDA margin versus 2.4% in Q1 last year. Our International segment has achieved 6.7% adjusted EBITDA margin, being still in an earlier stage in terms of our fully rolled-out business model. Now moving to cash flows, starting with our net working capital and CapEx figures. Our net working capital continued to be negative in Q1. The increase in net working capital compared to last year is nothing that worries us as we typically experience some fluctuations on a quarterly basis. We remain committed to maintain a structurally negative net working capital going forward. Our CapEx ratio, which is mainly driven by internal software development, was only at 1.6% in Q1 2021 as we continue to realize significant scale effects here. However, as we consider our technology investments as a major growth driver going forward, we will -- we expect that we will return to around 2% to 3% CapEx ratio midterm, which is still a comparably low CapEx ratio. As a result of the strong profitability, combined with our best-in-class cash conversion, we realized a free cash flow of EUR 14 million in Q1, which is a plus of EUR 20 million compared to Q1 2020. Our free cash flow margin is now 12% for the last 12 months, proving that our profitability results in true financial value creation. Consequently, also our net cash position further increased. We now have a net cash position of EUR 116 million, which gives us massive strategic opportunity and comfort. With that, let me give you quickly an update on our current trading and guidance for the full year 2021. As mentioned in the beginning, Q2 to date GMV growth rate is approximately 15% year-over-year as we start to compare against the peak baseline from last year. That relative growth rates are going down to that level is fully in line with our expectations. We're actually growing a little better than we had anticipated. Based on our current trading for Q2 and our very strong Q1, we confirm our guidance for the full year 2021. We expect, for 2021, strong growth to EUR 510 million to EUR 550 million of revenue at 18% to 27% growth and a very attractive profitability of EUR 42 million to EUR 55 million adjusted EBITDA at 8% to 10% margin, while we, at the same time, take decisive growth investments with a long-term horizon. Yet, in the context of this guidance, let me emphasize again that these are very special times. Growth rates will remain volatile as we now start to compare against the strong peak baseline from last year. Also, the uncertainty for the coming months is still relatively high. As the pandemic hopefully winds down over the coming months for good and the economy will be fully reopened, it is not clear yet how this will impact our business short term. As we are very confident on the mid- to long-term outlook that can happen, we see some negative effects on our top line in the short term. To increase transparency about recent developments and also to put relative growth numbers and to drive context, we want to show you a metric that we use internally a lot, our daily average GMV. In 2019, you can see our normal seasonality. Q1 is strong and we slowed down a bit in Q2, Q3 due to the summer seasonality before then moving into seasonality -- into the seasonally strongest quarter of the year with Q4. As you can see on the chart, 2020 was not following this pattern as Q2 was much stronger than Q1. There was an extreme peak in Q2 last year. If we now look at 2021, we are seeing again our normal seasonality, where Q2 is slightly below Q1 levels in absolute terms but still on a -- but in absolute terms still on a very high level. So the expected seasonality, in combination with the outlier baseline in Q2 2020, leads to much lower relative growth for Q2 2021. Our total GMV and thus the long-term growth dynamics are very much intact. Overall, we are very happy with the start of Q2 and 2021 so far. When we think about Q3, we see that the baseline of 2020 is not as strong as Q2, but we also expect that people will just spend a lot of their time outside traveling and enjoying their social life in restaurants. So there might be a short-term shift of expenditures away from home and living. As we had expected, Q2 and Q3 will be volatile, choppy and with very sudden changes in growth rates. For Q4, we are then expecting return to more normal times, which makes us very optimistic given the seasonality and the high number of active customers we have. Before we open the lines for Q&A, let me quickly highlight again our Capital Markets Day today at 3. We will talk about Westwing's strategy and the targets for the coming years, and presentations will be held by Stefan, Delia and myself. I think we have put together a really interesting and worthwhile session. So if you would like to join, please visit our IR website where you'll find the link to access our webcast. With that, I would like to open the lines for questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Christian Salis, Hauck & Aufhäuser.

[Hans Christian Salis, Equity Analyst]

It's Christian from Hauck speaking. And congrats to the outstanding results once again in Q1 and also the upgraded mid- and long-term targets. Looks -- everything looks fantastic. I've got 3 questions, please. So on the new markets, on the reopening, I would be interested in what kind of consumer behavior have you observed in the markets where the reopening has already started. For example, in Austria. And then secondly, maybe on a, yes, longer-term question. So -- have you seen then the most important operational improvements at Westwing in the past 12 to -- let's say, 12 to 18 months apart from COVID? And then finally, could you please comment on current input cost inflation or also rising freight rates, please?

[Sebastian Säuberlich, CFO & Member of Management Board]

Yes. Sure. Thank you, Christian. I think about the reopening markets, so far we don't see any patterns yet. We also looked into that last year quite intensively when they can -- for example, Spain and France opened earlier. And also, we haven't seen any patterns there. We also looked into some other geographies, let's say, Australia and the U.S., to come up with some news there. We see that their e-commerce trends seems to be lasting. So no big insights on that but also no negative insights on that. With regards to the operational improvements, I think that there are several things to mention. I think if you look at Westwing, let's say, the Westwing of 2018, 2019 wasn't the Westwing of 2021. It's fairly a big difference. And I think that's a little longer thing to answer the question, but let me focus on the key things we have improved. I think one is we have very much focused the whole organization on our unit economics and margins, and we went through a big program where we kind of really looked into every driver of our margins and tried to improve it, be it price with our suppliers, be it pricing towards our customers, be it like really like making sure we have better inventory turns, that we sell our returns at higher prices and so on. So kind of there was really a very big program going on to focus the company on our contribution margins. I think that showed very good results already pre-COVID. And then with COVID and the tailwind and the larger scale we had, we see now the full benefits of that. And I think that the other effect, and we're also going to discuss this a bit more in the Capital Markets Day that's kind of also in our operational areas, we are benefiting from the scale because basically, we are running with roughly the same warehouse capacity in our business that is almost twice its size as before. So we just see better utilization of our asset base. But again, I think I will comment -- or we will comment on that in more detail this afternoon. Last question on cost inflation. I mean we see especially container costs from China going up. I think rates are roughly 4 or 5x what we've seen before. Currently, we believe we can pass a lot of that on in prices, on the one hand. And also, we only see it as a temporary kind of peak that we are taking. We expect there will be some impact in Q2, Q3 on margins but not that high. But also, that's why we're saying you can't extrapolate the 31% of Q1 for the remainder of the year. Then other than transportation costs, we also see some cost inflation in base chemicals that's driving then phones and stuff like that. But I think it's too early to have a clear view on that, how much of that will really end up in price increases by our suppliers. But in general, we are also confident that we can pass the majority of that on to our customers.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] We have not received further questions at this point. I will hand back to the speaker.

[Sebastian Säuberlich, CFO & Member of Management Board]

Okay. Great. Only question from Christian. I hope, well, we're going to meet this afternoon in our CMD. And there, we also have an extensive Q&A. So if you have further questions there, just let us know. And then, yes, see you all there. And then have a good day and thank you, everyone, for attending this call. Goodbye.