Westwing Group SE

XETRA:WEW

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q3

[Operator]

Good day, and welcome to the Westwing Group SE Q3 2022 Earnings Call. Today's conference is being recorded.

At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Mr. Andreas Hoerning. Please go ahead.

[Andreas Hoerning, executive]

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Today, we will review our year-to-date and Q3 results and provide some information on what we plan going forward. Joining me on this call is our CFO, Sebastian Sauberlich.

As a reminder, Westwing's mission is to inspire and make every home a beautiful home. With that, let's go to the agenda for today. I will begin by providing key updates on our business, after which Sebastian will be sharing the details of Westwing's financial performance of Q3, before we then get to Q&A.

I will begin by providing an update on the current state of Westwing. There are 4 key points that I will elaborate more in detail after the overview.

First, our top line for Q3 was in line with expectations shared with you last time. We achieved a compound annual growth rate, or CAGR, of our GMV since 2019 of plus 13%. Year-over-year, that's minus 14% GMV. Current trading for Q4 shows an intact seasonal top line uplift.

Second, preserving contribution margin and restoring overall profitability is our top priority. On unit economics, we're making progress based on Westwing collection share increase and new shipping fees. We're also preparing to reduce our warehouse footprint.

Beyond unit economics, Q3 was weak on profitability due to still high cost base. We've been acting decisively against this, achieving a total of EUR 30 million in annual run rate savings across SG&A, marketing and CapEx. I will get to the details of this shortly.

Third, managing liquidity is of utmost importance. I am pleased to report we maintain our strong cash position of EUR 64 million from last quarter and significantly improved our net working capital by more than EUR 10 million versus Q2 2022.

Fourth, as said in our last earnings call, we are further evolving our commercial model to unleash Westwing's full potential. We're making very good progress here. We are improving our customer experience on our sites further.

Regarding our teams, it gives me great pleasure to announce that our Chief Creative Officer, Delia Lachance, returned full-time from parental leave in September. And we also have Rik Strubel, a seasoned marketing executive joining us as Chief Financial -- Chief Marketing Officer in January 2023.

Let's now deep-dive into some details on points 1 to 4. On point 1, top line. Group GMV and number of active customers that you see here developed in line with expectations. We are still confronted with a challenging macroenvironment and low consumer sentiment, plus a lower online share versus 1 year ago. This resulted in minus 14% GMV year-over-year.

Compared to 2019, we are a much larger company, though, as we were able to keep many customers that we gained during COVID times. The compound annual growth rate, or CAGR of our GMV was plus 13% or plus 14% on revenues. Very importantly, based on current trading for Q4, we see an intact seasonal top line uplift. But as you know, Black Friday, which determines Q4 results to a large extent, is still to come.

Moving on to the second topic, profitability. We are focused on steering Westwing in a financially responsible manner through this period. Our focus is on retaining our unit economics, and we are achieving this through a combination of tactics, including the following.

We increased our high-margin Westwing Collection share to all-time high of 44% of our GMV. We increased our retail prices to account for cost increases further. We are managing our high inventory levels via selective and reasonable discounting events, but still at okay margins.

We've introduced shipping fees on all shop orders with a further surcharge on orders which involve 2-man handling. We are also looking at introducing fees for bulky items.

Lastly, we made the decision to reduce our warehouse footprint by closing one facility in 2023. We will fulfill these orders from other existing warehouses. In addition, we continue to gain fulfillment efficiencies in our existing operations.

In order to adjust the cost base to the current top line level, we have implemented annualized cost reductions of EUR 30 million to enable our return to adjusted EBITDA profitability and positive free cash flow in 2023.

On the chart on the left-hand side, you see that the annualized run rate, post implementation of cost reduction, consists in CapEx, that's mostly internal intangible software, marketing and SG&A reduction. We identified and implemented a further EUR 15 million additional cost savings to the previously announced cost savings of EUR 15 million last quarter. This results in a total of EUR 30 million implemented savings.

The breakdown of the EUR 30 million cost savings is as follows: We're reducing our workforce by around 250 full-time positions across SG&A and marketing. While overall difficult decision, it was absolutely necessary to streamline our cost structure and business operations in the currently challenging macroenvironment.

Hence, our cost savings and marketing come from targeted structural fixed costs as well as lower paid marketing and reduced organic marketing investments to increase our return on marketing investments.

Additionally, our CapEx savings are driven by lower costs for internal software development. All 3 components, so CapEx, marketing and SG&A, pertains personnel costs, hence, the 250 FTE reduction.

On the third topic, liquidity. To briefly recap, the steady increase in our working capital position since the beginning of the year has largely been driven by higher inventory levels due to lower-than-expected top line.

Through decisive net working capital management, we improved our net working capital position by more than EUR 10 million versus Q2. We did so by different things: Having a clear focus on selling existing stock and reordering conservatively, lowering our purchase order volumes and negotiations with suppliers also helped us to reduce inventory prepayments, implementing a new trade financing solution which brought us a positive impact of EUR 4 million in Q3, additionally, a natural seasonal top line uplift was beneficial for customer prepayments.

As a result of these actions and based on further optimization initiatives, we confirm our target of neutral to single digit million net working capital by the end of full year 2023.

Supported by net working capital optimization, our decisive liquidity management allowed us to compensate for operating losses and stabilized our strong cash balance at EUR 64 million in Q3.

Here, you can see that net-net, we ended the third quarter with the same level of cash and cash equivalents as Q2. Stabilizing our cash balance has been a significant achievement, and we expect our strong cash balance to be a great leader in navigating these turbulent times.

Coming now to our progress on Westwing's full potential. Westwing has always strived for outstanding customer experience. One initiative to improve our customer journey further is OneWestwing. With OneWestwing, we will provide our customers a seamless customer journey across our business model, significantly improving convenience as well as attractiveness of our websites. Let me shortly describe this in more detail.

Today, we operate the Westwing brand under 2 websites and apps, WestwingNow and Westwing, that is the shop and club sales as shown on the left-hand side. In order to make shopping with Westwing a full round of experience, we piloted integrating shop and club sales under one domain and under one new Westwing header. And you can see a schematic picture of our Dutch website on the right-hand side.

OneWestwing is expected to create a better and more intuitive customer experience, leading to lower bounce rates, higher conversion and GMV over time, increased traffic for our shop and highly profitable Westwing Collection and overall traffic between the different business models.

Enable non-digital brand marketing, thereby acting as a door opener for new target customer groups, and last but not least, improving tech efficiency as we only have to develop features once for both models running on the same system. This is just one of many initiatives at Westwing to improve the customer journey and experience.

Talking about Westwing's full potential, I'm also excited to share 2 updates on our management team. Delia Lachance has returned full-time from parental leave and resumed her position as our Chief Creative Officer, and I'm thrilled to be working with her on the future of Westwing.

And another exciting announcement, Rik Strubel will be joining us as new Chief Marketing Officer in January 2023. Rik brings 20 years of diverse marketing experience across some of the biggest names and large corporation, and we will be driving the marketing strategy at Westwing together.

With that, I hand over to Sebastian to present Westwing's financial results for the third quarter of 2022 in more detail.

[Sebastian Säuberlich, executive]

Yes. Thank you, Andreas, and good morning, everyone. Before we go into the details of our Q3 results, let me quickly provide some thoughts on [ where we stand ] from a financial point of view in these volatile times.

As Andreas said earlier, in the first 9 months of 2022, we faced tremendous macro headwinds, which overall led to a very low consumer sentiment and subsequently put pressure on our top line. The lower top line in combination with the investments we took in 2021 back then in anticipation of a much stronger top line development resulted in adjusted EBITDA loss for 2022 year-to-date.

We have explicitly said before that negative profitability is part of our ambition, and therefore we took necessary actions to adjust our cost base accordingly.

In addition to addressing profitability, we also took decisive cash management measures, in specific, aiming for lower inventory levels. As a result of our net working capital optimization, we were able to keep our [Technical Difficulty] stable with Q2.

While we continue to focus on navigating the current turmoil, which have weighed heavily on us, as well as our peers, we remain very confident in the long-term success of our business. The Home & Living e-commerce market potential remains massive. Our loyalty and inspirational driven business model is intact. We have a clear strategy to work towards.

Last but not least, we are equipped with a very strong cash position of EUR 64 million by the end of Q3, which provides the basis to emerge even stronger from this downturn.

With that, I will now walk you through the details of Westwing's financial performance, followed by our expectations for the remainder of the year and the priorities for 2023.

Starting with our top line. As we illustrated last quarter, the underlying structural growth can be explained best by comparing Westwing's performance versus the pre-pandemic size of Westwing. In comparison to the 2019 baseline, Westwing's top line in the third quarter of 2022 grew 14% on a 3-year CAGR since Q3 2019, in line with our expectations, but also significantly slower than what we've seen in Q1 and Q2.

On a year-over-year basis, however, revenue for Q3 decreased by 14%, clearly impacted by the very low consumer sentiment. In Q3, the DACH segment generated revenues of EUR 50 million, while International segment generated EUR 39 million, all growing roughly equally versus 2019.

Coming to the P&L for Q3. Up first, our gross margin for Q3 was 47.8%, which is 1.2 percentage points lower than Q3 2021. The decrease in gross margin is mainly driven by inflationary cost increases and stock sell-offs, which we're able to mostly compensate by passing through price increases as well as a shift towards our higher-margin Westwing Collection products with a share of 44% of overall GMV in Q3.

Fulfillment ratio for the period increased by 0.7 percentage points, mostly due to less scale and hence, lower utilization in our operations. Workforce cost increases due to inflation and cost increases from our freight carriers.

We were able to partially compensate for these cost increases through efficiencies and we'll continue to work against cost increases through efficiency and also by adjusting our warehouse footprint.

Overall, the slightly lower gross margin with rising fulfillment costs resulted in a contribution margin of 24.4% for Q3, which is down 1.9 percentage points compared to last year.

With that, let me come to our marketing and SG&A costs. We are, as a management team and as an organization, focused on taking the steps needed to reach positive adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow in 2023. We took a sharp look at our cost structure and took decisive action in order to balance our cost structure with a lower trading environment.

Overall, our decision to get our cost structure under control drove EUR 30 million in annualized cost savings. The EUR 30 million in annualized cost savings is composed of EUR 15 million additional cost savings in the area of SG&A, marketing and CapEx on top of the EUR 15 million savings announced in our Q2 call, which consisted of headcount reductions as well as OpEx savings.

It's also important to note that we will reinvest some of these savings carefully into our mid to long-term growth so that the net savings will be somewhat lower than the EUR 30 million total cost saving measures.

In terms of marketing, we have brought our marketing expenses to the bottom end of our target range of 9% to 11%. Most of the improvement you see here is the result of structural fixed cost reductions we did end of Q2, as well as lower performance marketing investments.

Coming to G&A ratio. Our investment decisions from 2021 in combination with the lower top line increased the G&A ratio for the period by 7.3 percentage points versus last year.

It is important to note that the impact of our cost-saving measures is not yet showing the financial benefit in the P&L. We will see a more pronounced reduction of SG&A costs from Q4 2022 onwards and expect the majority of our savings to be fully effective in H1 2023.

We will continue to remain extremely cost cautious for the foreseeable future and expect significant operating leverage once we return to top line growth.

These described developments resulted in a negative adjusted EBITDA profitability of minus 5.1% for the third quarter. Please note that we decided to adjust our EBITDA for non-recurring restructuring costs caused by the workforce reduction in the amount of EUR 2.9 million this quarter.

Taking a closer look at profitability on segment level. DACH profitability was at minus 1.6% adjusted EBITDA for the quarter, while International reported a minus 9.3% adjusted EBITDA margin for the same period. As discussed, the lower profitability is mostly driven by the lower top line, paired with our investments that we now corrected.

Moving on to cash flows. Our net working capital position at the end of Q3 stood at positive EUR 14 million, which, although still in the positive territory, improved significantly by more than EUR 10 million versus Q2.

Our CapEx ratio was 3.8% of revenue and thereby relatively stable versus previous year. Our CapEx spending for the quarter is mainly composed of internal software development.

Looking into net working capital development in more detail. Overall, net working capital improved by over EUR 10 million versus previous quarter based on the decisive measures we have taken.

Most notably, we aim for a continued reduction of inventory through a clear focus on selling existing stock as well as reordering new stock very conservatively. Since our inventory peak in Q1, we have already reduced inventory by more than EUR 7 million.

Our lower order volumes, in combination with supplier negotiations, then also resulted in structurally lower inventory prepayment levels.

In addition, we introduced a trade financing solution to optimize our net working capital and its seasonal fluctuations. This had a positive effect of EUR 4 million by end of Q3 and is shown in trade payables, accruals and similar liabilities.

Last but not least, the seasonal uplift and top line is beneficial for our contract liabilities or customer prepayments. Having said that, we are not satisfied with our current inventory and hence, net working capital position, and we will continue to focus on further improvements.

As a result, we expect a lower net working capital for Q4 and a neutral to single-digit million net working capital by the end of 2023.

Our cash and cash equivalents position was EUR 64 million by the end of Q3, which provides us with reassuring strategic optionality in current challenging macroenvironment. I'm very pleased to report that we maintained our cash position from last quarter, even though the third quarter is a seasonally difficult quarter with low profitability.

Additionally, we secured 2 financing lines, a revolving credit facility of EUR 10 million, which is non-revocable till the end of 2024 as well as the trade financing solution with a total volume of EUR 8 million, of which we utilized EUR 4 million per the end of Q3. This brings us to EUR 78 million in total liquidity available, so we are well-financed to navigate the current market conditions.

With that, I move on to the details of our outlook for the remainder of 2022. As we have observed, the seasonal uplift in Q4 is factored into our guidance. We confirm the guidance we gave on August 10 on revenue and profitability.

We strongly believe that we are well-positioned to navigate back to growth in profitability. Yet, as stated in the beginning, our current profitability levels as well as cash flows are not meeting our own ambition level, and we are committed to steering Westwing back into financially stable territory.

Therefore, we have set clear short-term priorities for 2023. We expect a neutral to positive free cash flow again. This is mainly driven by an improving profitability and a neutral to single net working capital position.

We remain very confident in the long-term Home & Living e-commerce market potential and Westwing strategy. We are certain that with growth, returning and bringing scale, we can achieve a very attractive long-term target P&L with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 10% to 15%, combined with a strong cash conversion.

We have proven that our model works immensely well at scale. And the long-term target reflects this through a combination of greater operating leverage as well as continued contribution margin expansion. This margin improvement will be driven by scale effects in fulfillment and share gains of our highly profitable Westwing Collection.

With that, I will pass back to Andreas to walk you through our investment highlights before we jointly address your questions at the end of this call.

[Andreas Hoerning, executive]

Thank you, Sebastian. Quick summary of our investment highlights. One, the opportunity ahead of us is massive. The European Home & Living market has a size of EUR 120 billion and is still very early in e-commerce, which provides exciting growth momentum based on dynamic online adoption for years to come. We target about 70% of the overall market by converting more and more customers into home enthusiasts.

2, customer loyalty is at the core of our business. We create superior loyalty base on our differentiating and inspirational core. As a result, we achieved best-in-class repeat order share of 80%.

3, our Westwing Collection then perfectly leverages the loyalty to our love brand at over 10 percentage points margin upside, and our strategic target is to bring our Westwing Collection share to greater than 50% of GMV. As of Q3, it is already at an all-time high of 44%, as you've heard.

Fourth, we have a strong cash profile. A strong balance sheet provides us with ample liquidity and strategic optionality to navigate through the current challenging market environment. 5, lastly, based on this highly profitable consumer love brand strategy, we have an attractive long-term profitability target of 10% to 15% adjusted EBITDA.

With that, Sebastian and I are now happy to take your questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] We'll take our first question from Volker Bosse from Baader Bank.

[Volker Bosse, analyst]

Volker Bosse, Baader Bank. I have a couple ones. I would like to start with the sales trend by countries. I know you do not break it out, I think, on a country base. However, which countries are outperforming, underperforming, perhaps the trend across Europe can be seen and showed. So it would be helpful to get a better understanding of the dynamics across Europe.

Second is a sales trend by product segment. What are the best sellers with more accessories, smaller items. I guess bigger items are out of favor, but perhaps some more light on that front would be helpful.

And another question would be on the opening of your physical retail store in Hamburg which you did not mention in the presentation. However, is there more to come? And it's more interesting what drove you to -- for you to open a permanent store after you had already pop-up stores, for example, in Munich. So what was the learning and so what was the decision here in the front.

And another question would be on the warehouse. You said you adjust your warehouse footprint, a bit more detailed. Do you close the warehouse or you reduce warehouse capacities? Or how do you manage that?

Last but not least, on the inventories positioning, how do you look at the inventories? And do you expect a more promotional environment to come in the first quarter in next year as I think there is too much inventory in the overall market, yes. [indiscernible] that would be helpful. Sorry for the high number of questions.

[Andreas Hoerning, executive]

No problem. Absolutely, no problem. Super happy to answer those 5 questions. So I will be taking questions on product segment and the retail store and Sebastian will be answering questions on countries, warehouse, capacity and inventory.

I'll start with the product segments. So you were asking what the mix is looking like. The mix is, we don't see a huge change in the mix. What we do see is that we benefit from having as well items with low absolute price points as well as a large furniture. So this is something that differentiates us from the competition also driven by our shop and club that has a very high share in home textiles, decorative items, et cetera. So we're benefiting from this mix a lot at the moment.

But that being said, our large furniture is also working out pretty well at this point in time after a normal slowdown in summer. So that's much to product segments.

And then the question on the retail store, yes, we didn't feature it in the presentation, but it is a small development that we are doing right now. You were asking about the learnings from the pop-up stores that we had beforehand. What we're doing now with this store in Hamburg, which is a permanent store is based on the learnings that we gathered by the pop-up stores.

We actually had a very positive effect and the store itself, of course, doesn't contribute largely to top line, but we see beyond those top line effects from the store itself, we also see uplift in the area where we have a store in our online sales.

So based on those experiences with the pop-up stores, we are now opening this one store in Hamburg that's actually going to open on the 17th of November. It is a test because, there's obviously a difference between running a pop-up store and a permanent store. So we will be testing this. And then based on the outcomes from that first store, we will then be deciding on the strategy to come.

Overall, why do we believe this is good for our customer experience? Because we are not just the retail brand, we are also a product brand with our Westwing Collection. And as you know, in Home & Living, there's still a relatively large share of offline sales, and we believe that having a physical presence will connect us more to our existing customers as well as enable us to gain new customer segments.

With that, Sebastian, on the other 3 questions.

[Sebastian Säuberlich, executive]

Yes. Hello, Volker, thank you for your questions. I think sales trends by country. We see DACH and International roughly growing the same size. There are nuances and differences also between the country portfolio, but nothing, I think, to highlight. So you can expect the mix also within the countries and the International segment to be quite stable at this point in time. So there are no -- nothing to report here.

On the warehouse footprint, I mean, as you can imagine, we have planned our infrastructure this year for a significant higher top line. So currently, we are underutilized in our warehouses. And we have the opportunity as one contract is running out next year to close down that warehouse and just run the operations from existing other warehouses. And we want to take that opportunity, obviously, to reduce fixed cost in our fulfillment costs.

In general, I mean, we're just currently working one shift in most of our warehouses. So you can imagine that we can at least double the throughput, probably if we go to 3 shifts even more.

Inventory position, yes, I think we've seen more promotional activity to get rid of our old stock over the last quarters. Already, we're going to expect that to continue in Q4. And we're also going to expect to have some effect also over the course of 2023 as we still need some time to sell off that stock.

What we don't want to do is kind of do crazy down pricing and reduce margin significantly because we believe that the stock is not getting obsolete, right? So we have time selling it at okay margins. But obviously, we want to increase the inventory turn and the cash flow generation from inventory, and hence also except to a certain degree, lower margins on those products, but nothing significant.

[Volker Bosse, analyst]

Can you share the name of the warehouse which you are going to close with us or going to be…

[Andreas Hoerning, executive]

No. At this point, we don't want to disclose that -- the name of that warehouse.

[Volker Bosse, analyst]

Okay. By the way, I think, to integrate or to launch the OneWestwing on one platform is a great idea. I mean looking back why you are hesitant to do it earlier? I think it's a natural idea to have one platform, you decided to go for 2 platforms, but that now you've tested it in the Netherlands to integrate into one, why are you hesitant to do it earlier? And yes, that's the backlog. Yes.

[Andreas Hoerning, executive]

Yes. I think why we are implementing this earlier, the OneWestwing?

[Volker Bosse, analyst]

No, not earlier. I mean, I think it's a natural idea to have one app for both. Yes? You decided to go via 2 apps, but now you tried in Netherlands, why do you think so to do so?

[Andreas Hoerning, executive]

Why didn't we do it earlier? I think it is a natural development going forward because, as you say, it has a much easier customer journey actually on the site, and in the end then also on our app, because instead of 2 apps, we will be having one app. So it provides a better customer journey and for tech efficiencies because we only need to have one site and one app.

Why didn't we did earlier? Well, precisely because moving there is actually a quite significant investment. So it takes a lot of time. We've implemented now one step of it in one country, and there's still quite a lot ahead of us.

So it's actually a pretty large project. And obviously, what you do is you have to prioritize that kind of project versus other things that also drive benefits for customer experience for the company. And the decision was simply not made in the past because of different prioritization. Now we believe the time is right and we're moving decisively forward to create a better customer experience, easier navigation and also higher tech efficiency.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] We'll take our next question from Christian Salis from HAIB.

[Christian Salis, analyst]

It's Christian speaking from Hauck. I hope you can hear me all right?

[Andreas Hoerning, executive]

No, no.

[Christian Salis, analyst]

[Technical Difficulty] Okay. I've got 3 questions, please. So first of all, on your top line development, so you mentioned to have seen a seasonal pickup in Q4 so far. So if we look at the 3-year CAGR in Q3, which was 14%, as you also mentioned. So would it be fair to assume that this is going to be quite stable in Q4 or should we rather expect a further deceleration of 3-year CAGR?

Then on your cost savings. So could you maybe provide us with the timing impact of these savings over the coming quarters? So when will be the first quarter when we should see the full impact of the savings?

And then thirdly, on your inventory levels, the private label share has significantly increased to 44% now, which is already close to your mid to long-term target, I guess. So how should this impact your inventory levels? Because I would think the inventory turn should rather remain below historic levels with this high private labeled share? Maybe some words on this, please.

[Andreas Hoerning, executive]

Thank you, Christian, for those 3 questions. I will be taking the first one and Sebastian the other 2. So the first question was on seasonal top line development right now. Yes, as you said, 14% CAGR over 2019 and Q3. Do we see something like that in Q4? Something similar to that. So it's more or less in line with what we see in Q3. Yes. But as you know, caveat always to that, when talking in Q4, the main part of Q4 is determined by how Black Friday goes, and that's still to come. Sebastian, the other 2 questions.

[Sebastian Säuberlich, executive]

Yes. I think timing of savings, I think -- I mean, first of all, you already see some of the effects, if you look into the marketing line. I think there we have taken the steps earlier. So [ marketing team ] we have already reduced. But also in marketing, as Andreas and I explained, there's more to come as well as in the other lines, especially SG&A and CapEx. And that we're going to see starting from Q4 onwards, and the full effect should be there by end of Q2 next year.

On the inventory levels, yes, I agree. I think shifting more business to the Westwing Collection has an impact on inventory. But as we see, I mean, currently, the levels of inventory we have are way too high, and we can also, with size and the assortment that we have, achieve an attractive inventory turn on the Westwing Collection. But if you compare that back to kind of year, I don't know, 2019 or something, you're absolutely right. But we have to cover that then with better working capital management. Be it turns on the one hand, that's inventory, but also kind of increasing accounts payable by negotiations or other solutions we can put so that we believe we can still achieve attractive net working capital levels despite the higher share of Westwing Collection.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions. I will hand the call back to your host for any additional or closing remarks. Sorry, sir. We do have one question queued up. The next question comes from Catharina Claes from Berenberg.

[Catharina Claes, analyst]

Just one last question from my side. You mentioned that the cost savings will be met by some sort of investments into growth as well. Can you explain what that can be? And then what could be the extent of the net savings of EUR 30 million?

[Sebastian Säuberlich, executive]

Yes, thank you for that. I mean what could that be? For example, I think something further discussed, I mean we're going to now open our first store. That store comes also with some SG&A, right? It will bring top line. But in the SG&A line, you're going to also see some cost of that.

We're also investing into some areas where that we think bring short-term growth, for example, in B2B business. So there are examples where we are still investing. And I think what could you expect net of that very much depends on also how much we spend on marketing next year. And I think that's also driven by the ROIs, we're going to see.

So I would not like to put a full number out there. I think what we have said is we want to achieve adjusted EBITDA profitability next year. We want to achieve free cash flow positive next year. We have taken out significant costs now, giving us the room to get there. And I think that's all we can comment at -- on at this point as we're also still in budgeting and then we're going to see how that ends up when we guide for next year.

[Operator]

The next question is from Mr. Volker Bosse from Baader Bank.

[Volker Bosse, analyst]

Yes. Sorry to come back, but if there are no further questions, I would like to take the opportunity. Its regarding your guidance, please remind me, you said earlier that you want to be EBITDA positive in '23 and free cash flow positive then 1 year later, so in '24. So again you are stating free cash flow positive already in '23, which would increase, of course, also a positive EBITDA in '23. But is there any shift in guidance in terms of timing of free cash flow breakeven, perhaps given the more intense cost reductions, which you outlined. So is there a change in your wording or in your perception on the free cash flow outlook and that would be interesting to see it here.

And the second question would be on the new marketing officer. So what are you missing in your current setup in regards to marketing? So what do you expect him to bring to the table to improve your performance?

[Andreas Hoerning, executive]

Thank you, Volker, for those 2 questions. I'll be taking them. First one, thank you for giving me the opportunity to clarify this in case it was not clear. So there's no change in the guidance. We said beforehand that actually, we will be free cash flow positive in 2023, not in 2024, and this guidance remains in place.

Second part on CMO, you were asking what we were missing. Actually -- so we believe that we have been doing a great job in marketing. We've been building our brand. We have our love brand. We've been building our organic marketing model, and we will continue to do that. With bringing in Rik, we expect to continue on this path and to further build our brand in a very, very decisive manner as a favorite Home & Living brand for all home enthusiasts. And Rik is exactly the right person to do that because it's proven that as many other brands that he's built up over time.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions at the moment. I will hand the call back to your host for any closing remarks.

[Andreas Hoerning, executive]

From my side, thank you for your questions, and thank you, everyone, for joining the call. Goodbye.

[Operator]

And this concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.