Westwing Group SE

XETRA:WEW

Earnings Call Analysis

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q3

[Operator]

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Westwing Group SE Q3 2023 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Let me now turn the floor over to Andreas Hoerning, the CEO of Westwing Group SE.

[Andreas Hoerning, executive]

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our Q3 Earnings Call. My name is Andreas Hoerning. I'm the CEO of Westwing. Sebastian Westrich, the CFO of the group, is joining me on the call.

Looking at today's agenda. After I guide you through our general business update, Sebastian will be presenting the details of Westwing's Q3 financial performance. Then we will be happy to take your questions.

Let's take a look at the overall state of Westwing. Firstly, I'm pleased to report that we have returned to growth with our fourth profitable quarter in a row. Specifically, in the third quarter, group GMV increased by 5% year-over-year to EUR 107 million. At the same time, there are various indications that the overall and online home and living markets are in decline. Nevertheless, we expect our growth to continue in the fourth quarter.

Secondly, Q3 was another profitable quarter for us. In this seasonally weaker period, we still achieved an adjusted EBITDA margin of plus 3%, which is 8 percentage points better than in the third quarter of last year, partially due to a strong contribution margin. What is also very important, we were able to maintain a negative net working capital even in the seasonally weakest quarter and despite the discontinuation of trade financing.

We were able to generate a positive free cash flow of EUR 3 million. As a result, the company is in a very strong financial position with net cash of EUR 69 million as of the 30th of September.

Thirdly, turning to operational metrics. I'm glad to share that the number of active customers returned to slight growth for the first time since the end of the pandemic. In addition, the average GMV per active customer increased by 6% year-over-year in the third quarter. We are also pleased with the performance of the Westwing collection. Its share of the group's GMV increased to an all-time high of EUR 0.48.

Fourthly, in parallel with these developments, we continue to make progress on our strategic projects and launch new ones. The implementation of our strategic initiative OneWestwing is completed in DACH and mostly completed in other countries in line with our plan. More recently, we've refreshed our brand and launched a brand awareness campaign in Germany. Also a project to use a lot more Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS, versus legacy in-house technology has started.

Lastly, our expectations for the remainder of the year are as follows: we've raised our full year profitability guidance on the 6th of November. This update is mainly driven by a better outlook for the fourth quarter, based on stronger-than-expected preliminary October results. We now expect to achieve an adjusted EBITDA of EUR 13 million to EUR 19 million, with a margin of 3% to 4% previously, EUR 4 million to EUR 13 million with a margin of 1% to 3%.

Let's proceed with a closer look at our Q3 top line. The third quarter was still characterized by a challenging market environment. As you can see in the chart on the left, consumer confidence remained at low levels which is impacting spending in various retail sectors. Despite this, we were able to grow our GMV by 5% in the third quarter, meeting the expectations we shared with you during our last earnings call.

It is also worth noting that our year-over-year performance improved from Q1 to Q3, while we started the year with minus 8%. We are now delivering healthy growth. This growth is quite remarkable when looking at the development of the online home and living market. Germany's Federal Association of e-commerce and mail order estimates that online sales in our category fell by 8% year-over-year in the third quarter. Over the same period, our DACH segment grew by 4%. We seemed to be clearly outperforming the market. We see more confirmation by comparing our top line performance to our listed peers that recently published their Q3 numbers.

Let's now have a look at our profitability. Even in the seasonally weaker Q3, Westwing was once again clearly profitable in terms of adjusted EBITDA. Our margin improved by almost 8 percentage points year-over-year. As mentioned earlier, Q3 marks the fourth profitable quarter in a row. Returning to financial stability and profitability was a clear priority of ours in 2023, and we are delivering on this commitment.

With GMV up year-over-year, profitability is benefiting from operating leverage. Even more importantly, we significantly improved unit economics through further growth of the high-margin Westwing collection and continued efficiency gains in fulfillment.

In terms of G&A cost savings, the measures that we initiated last year were successfully completed in the first half of 2023, and we continue to act cost consciously with high discipline. In light of these positive results, I would like to emphasize that this is only the beginning of our next phase of profitable growth.

Our strong contribution margins, combined with the prudent scalability of our business, provide for a solid foundation for our long-term P&L target of 10% to 15%. So while we are pleased with our performance in the third quarter, especially given the challenging market conditions, we will continue to strive for further improvements in profitability.

Important business KPIs, I would like to highlight are the number of active customers and GMV per active customer. The number of our active customers amounted to 1,262,000 at the end of the third quarter, representing a slight quarter-over-quarter increase for the first time since the end of the pandemic. On the right-hand side of the slide, you can see the GMV per active customer, which improved by 6% year-over-year. This metric reflects how much each of our active customers purchased from us on average over the last 12 months.

I see this increase in our customers' share of wallet despite the low level of consumer confidence as a good illustration of the strength of our premium brand strategy as well as the attractiveness of our Westwing collection offering.

We measure the attractiveness of our Westwing collection offering by the share of our own collection in the total business. I'm delighted to report that it accounted for 48% of the group's GMV in the third quarter, thus continues to expand. With that, we are well on track to achieve our long-term share target of 50-plus percent. In order to get there, we will continue to expand our assortment and increase visibility across all channels. The Westwing collection is at the forefront of our next growth phase. For Q4, we expect a seasonally slightly lower share.

Now a brief update on OneWestwing. As a reminder, this strategic initiative aims to create a seamless customer experience across our business models, making our websites and apps more convenient and engaging for customers. Following the rollout of the OneWestwing webpage and the merged app, I'm pleased to announce that OneCart and OneCheckout are now live in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. This means that both shop and club items are added to one single cart and the merged cart leads to a single checkout.

First results confirm the strategic rationale of the project. One metric we look at is the app share of total shop visits. It increased significantly after implementation from 33% in July to 56% in October. This is due to the fact that all club app users from past got the shop offering at their fingertips, simply through an update of their already installed app.

Future steps include the consolidation of the backend technology of Shopping Club and rolling out OneCheckout to the remaining countries. This will happen together with the SaaS technology project I will talk about in a minute.

Overall, it is great to see the pace at which the team is driving this important change, and we are excited about the ongoing potential of OneWestwing to create a much stronger foundation for customer experience, enhance our business.

Let's move from customer experience to how we market our brand. We recently refreshed our brand appearance with new visuals. This leads to a modernized logo, typography as well as a premium and vibrant color scheme. The new design is part of our strategic initiative to clearly position Westwing as the leading European premium brand for Home & Living. This is also supported by the brand awareness campaign, Live Beautiful, that we've just launched in Germany.

On the current slide, you can see some examples of what it looks like. We believe it's the right time to cautiously invest into our premium brand. This brings about an increased marketing ratio but will also support profitable growth in the future.

On the next slide, we see another important initiative that will help us to further improve customer experience and profitability in the future. In a nutshell, we will increase the use of external software-as-a-service, or SaaS, to make Westwing technologies back more modern and efficient.

Let me give you some background on this decision. The technology environment in our industry has changed dramatically over the past years. Many e-commerce processes are standardized today and do not offer much potential for competitive advantage. At the same time, various SaaS providers now offer reliable and scalable e-commerce platform.

Also, specialized vendors provide access to a wide range of additional features. On top of that, the pace of technological innovation is accelerating, driven in particular by artificial intelligence. This is why in 2024 and 2025, we will migrate from our internally developed e-commerce platform to a solution largely based on SaaS preparations for implementation already underway.

At the same time, tools that uniquely provide for a differentiated customer experience will continue to be developed in-house. Implementation costs will be incurred in the fourth quarter of 2023 and in 2024, 2025. On the other hand, from 2025, we expect much shorter development times for new features and lower G&A cash costs. I'm very excited to announce this project as it will not only reduce our costs but will also put us in a much better position to grow our business.

I now hand over to Sebastian, our CFO, for more details on our financials.

[Sebastian Westrich, executive]

Thank you, Andreas, and good morning, everyone. Let me start with the details of our revenue. Revenue developed in line with GMV in the third quarter and amounted to EUR 93 million. This represents an increase of 5% over the same period last year. The International segment is growing slightly faster, up 7% year-over-year, while the DACH segment is up 4%, as Andreas has already mentioned. So we see positive developments across the board.

Let's now look at what this means for our bottom line in the third quarter of 2023. I'm pleased to report strong improvements in most of the P&L lines. In the third quarter, our gross margin increased by 2.4 percentage points compared to the previous year. As a result, we achieved a gross margin of over 50%. One of the key drivers is the higher share of our Westwing collection, which comes with better margins.

We also improved our fulfillment ratio by 1.5 percentage points compared to the third quarter of 2022. This was mainly driven by further efficiency gains in our warehouses and improvements in freight costs. All this lead to a significant improvement in our contribution margin of almost 4 percentage points compared to the third quarter of 2022.

Moving down the income statement. You can see that our marketing ratio increased by 2 percentage points compared to the third quarter of 2022. This was caused by investments into customer growth as well as investments into our brand relaunch and the preparation of our brand campaign Live Beautiful. As Andreas mentioned earlier, we expect the marketing ratio to remain slightly elevated in the fourth quarter as well due to the same drivers.

Looking further down, we made significant progress in our G&A expenses. The ratio improved by almost 6 percentage points year-over-year, driven by our clear focus on efficiency improvements and cost reductions. All of this contributed to the fourth profitable quarter in a row with our adjusted EBITDA margin improving by 7.6 percentage points year-over-year to now 2.5% in the third quarter of 2023.

Looking at the profitability of our segments, we see healthy developments in both DACH and International. While DACH continues to lead in terms of profitability, the International segment is improving even faster by more than 9 percentage points year-over-year. Overall, in the first 9 months of the year, we achieved an adjusted EBITDA margin of 4%, another significant improvement year-over-year.

Turning to our net working capital. I'm pleased to say that we have continued to keep it in the negative range. As of the 30th September, it was minus EUR 2 million, an improvement of EUR 16 million compared to the previous year. It is also worth emphasizing that the healthy level of net working capital was maintained despite the negative seasonal effects and the full repayment of the trade financing facility in the third quarter of this year. As a reminder, at the end of the third quarter last year, we had almost EUR 4 million of trade financing. And if we adjust it from net working capital, the like-for-like improvement over 12 months would be EUR 20 million instead of just EUR 16 million.

Capital expenditure also remained at a low level. The year-over-year improvement in CapEx was mainly driven by the successful cost reduction in our technology organization as we capitalize a significant part of technology development costs. In addition, we didn't have to make any major investments into our warehouses as we have secured sufficient warehouse capacity in recent years.

As a result of the positive development of our P&L, net working capital and CapEx, free cash flow was also positive in the third quarter, amounting to EUR 3 million. In the first 9 months of the year, we generated a positive free cash flow of EUR 13 million, a significant improvement of EUR 44 million year-over-year.

Our financial position remains very strong with EUR 69 million of cash and no debt. In the third quarter, we used EUR 7 million for the repayment of the previously mentioned trade financing facility and EUR 1 million for the shares buyback. The strong balance sheet position gives us the ability to continue to manage the business with a long-term perspective despite an unstable and still uncertain backdrop environment.

Finally, let's have a look at the outlook for the remainder of 2023. The full year revenue guidance is confirmed in the upper half of the EUR 390 million to EUR 440 million range. Of course, there's still some uncertainty regarding our top line development as our most important sales season is just about to start. However, we currently expect that we will be able to continue growth in Q4 2023.

Looking at our profitability, we have raised our full year adjusted EBITDA guidance as of the 6th of November. We now expect to achieve an adjusted EBITDA of EUR 13 million to EUR 19 million. Previously, we expected an adjusted EBITDA in the upper half of the initial guidance of about EUR 13 million, which is EUR 9 million to EUR 13 million. The improvement in our adjusted EBITDA expectation is mainly driven by a better outlook for the fourth quarter based on the stronger-than-expected preliminary October response results despite the challenging market environment.

The group guidance does also includes the investment into our brand awareness campaign and also some one-off cash costs related to the SaaS project, as Andreas mentioned. We also expect some negative noncash effective accounting effects in Q4, caused by the SaaS project as we will have to reverse the capitalization of some software development costs of previous periods.

Due to the nonrecurring and noncash character and the relation to previous periods, we plan to adjust those accounting effects in our management accounts.

To sum up, we are well on track to deliver our top line guidance with a return to growth and an improved profitability in a challenging market environment. And we have maintained a strong cash payments despite the payment of the supplier finance arrangements based on net working capital improvements and positive free cash flow. So overall, I think we closed the third quarter with good results and a positive outlook for Q4 2023.

With that, I would like to hand it over to Andreas for a brief summary and our Q&A session.

[Andreas Hoerning, executive]

Thank you, Sebastian. As always, we are closing the update with a brief summary of our investment highlights before moving to Q&A. First of all, what is Westwing in a nutshell? It's Europe's leading premium one-stop shop for Home & Living. This is what we are building.

The opportunity in front of us is massive. The Home & Living market in the countries where we operate have an estimated annual turnover of EUR 130 billion and is still in the early stages of e-commerce with exciting growth prospects for years to come. In addition, Westwing is situated in a highly attractive premium segment. And Westwing is already a Love brand in this market. We have over 10 million followers on our social media channels. The repeat purchase rate is reaching over 80%. And we are loved by rather young customers with high Home & Living spend.

Our Westwing collection is a strong driver. It already generates 48% of total GMV. Creativity and brand loyalty enable a margin uplift of more than 10 percentage points. Our business model has proven to be scalable as already operate successfully in an 11 countries. Further growth is possible without significant investments into physical infrastructure. We also have a strong balance sheet, which provides us with ample liquidity and strategic optionality to navigate through the current challenging market environment.

And finally, based on already best-in-class contribution margin, the proven scalability of our business model and our love brand, we have an attractive long-term profitability target of 10% to 15% adjusted EBITDA margin.

Now Sebastian and I are happy to take your questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] And first up is [indiscernible].

[Unknown Analyst]

Congratulations with the great results. I have a couple of questions. One is the percentage of customers for you that are linked really to retail. And is there also a large amount of customers that may be driven by offices, doing renovation projects, remodeling projects, et cetera, and you can give an idea of what the sort of the end of month breakdown is?

Second question is how will you get to your 10% to 15% EBITDA margins? And the last question is a bit more linked to your SaaS rollout program. What it really means and will you be able to offer customers also crypto payments facilities like Shopify does? That's it. It is it.

[Andreas Hoerning, executive]

Thanks a lot, and thank you for your comments on performance. So I will answer the first and the last question of yours on the percentage of B2C and I think and question on the technology platform and Sebastian will take the question on how to get to the target margin.

So in terms of the retail versus business-to-business, what you mentioned, kind of office furnishings, et cetera, our clear focus is on B2C. This is where we come from. Nevertheless, we believe that there is an attractive opportunity for us in B2B, and we have actually started that to drive it further. We've set up a small team, and they are generating leads successfully in this market, but it is a very small part of our business overall. So in the low single-digit numbers, but it is growing actually very successfully.

Your last question related to -- and I didn't get the specifics of it. You have the background noise in the channel.

[Unknown Analyst]

Yes. Sorry, I've got it. I can't help it. I mean in the room here with a colleague so.

[Andreas Hoerning, executive]

So in terms of features, I -- so we don't answer on which features we will exactly have after the transition. But what is clear is that we already have a very attractive size and app for our customers, and we want to build that out further. That's actually one of the important drivers why we are running this whole project because we want to get to faster development times and faster implementation times of new features.

So we will focus heavily on customer experience, on speed and all these aspects with a new platform, and we believe that we will be able to get to improvement faster, also leveraging a lot more artificial intelligence in our systems. Does that answer your last question?

[Unknown Analyst]

Yes, sort of does except from the crypto thing that you can pay with Bitcoin, like there's many companies now that are developing also in the luxury goods market that are allowing people to pay with cryptos and that's it. Yes, it could be a great new source of revenues or so.

[Andreas Hoerning, executive]

Yes, yes. I understand these payment options with some other retailers. I can't say right now when we will have which payment options added to our platform. But for the time being, I don't think that, that provides a significant uplift for us. We are in the premium market, not in the luxury market. Of course, we will offer anything that our customers actually are interested in for conversion, obviously. I'll hand over to Sebastian for the second question of yours.

[Sebastian Westrich, executive]

Hello.

[Unknown Analyst]

Yes, Thank you, Sebastian.

[Sebastian Westrich, executive]

You asked for how to achieve the 10% to 15% adjusted EBITDA margin?

[Unknown Analyst]

Yes. How are you going to get there?

[Sebastian Westrich, executive]

So I mean it's -- of course, we need more scale. And I think we need at least like around EUR 600 million and maybe more to realize the scale effects, but we also see potential to further improve efficiencies and to reduce costs. And this across almost all. So it will be a mix of growth and in combination with efficiency, improvements and some cost reductions in other areas.

And of course, we will also see, when you look at our gross margins, some additional effects from our increase in the Westwing collect share, which comes with a higher margin. I mentioned this also in the earnings call before, that's already a driver, and I think that will also be a driver in the future, further increase our gross margin and thus profitability.

[Unknown Analyst]

Start to come down again, linked to supply chain and sort of anything that has been sort of disruptive during the COVID period and the coming out of it?

[Sebastian Westrich, executive]

Can you please repeat?

[Unknown Analyst]

No. A lot of companies suffered from very high energy costs and from supply chain-related issues that led to margin depression or margin compression in the last couple of years. Are you seeing a reversal of that coming through, improvement?

[Sebastian Westrich, executive]

Our [ compression ] already improved, also driven by improvements in our fulfillment ratio. And we have, for example, closed 1 warehouse in the first half of this year because we had too much capacity. But we still see that we can do further on this, and we also benefit from cost improvements.

[Operator]

Next up is Alexander Zienkowicz from AlsterResearch.

[Alexander Zienkowicz, analyst]

I wanted to ask if you can quantify the reversal on the capitalization of your software development in Q4. And if there will be more in 2024? And secondly, can you give some color on the implementation costs for your tax back? And maybe on the incremental improvements, it would bring on your SG&A.? Yes.

[Andreas Hoerning, executive]

Thanks a lot, Alexander, for your question. I hand over to Sebastian.

[Sebastian Westrich, executive]

Yes. Thank you for your question. So I mean, the reversal of the -- or the accounting effects that relate to the reversal of capitalization of development costs of previous quarters to specify this will relate to 2022 and 2023. There will be -- or we expect no additional effects in 2024. So it will be limited to our Q4 quarter. And it's just a reversal of amortization, so we have to put it back into our P&L. It has no cash impact. It's just an accounting effect.

And with regards to the savings. And so overall, we will see some implementation costs in 2024 and 2025. And of course, we expect some savings from it. And actually, we assume that we will have a short payback time on the project. We won't specify on any specific G&A savings on the project. But overall, I think it's a very attractive return that we will see. And we assume that after implementation, which we assume for 2025, we will be able to pay -- to have a payback on the one-off implementation costs within one year after full implementation of that project.

[Operator]

And next up is Mark [indiscernible] floor is yours.

[Unknown Analyst]

Congratulations from my side also to strong Q3 results. I would like to ask 3 questions, if I may. The first one with regard to G&A expenses. I mean, you did comment a little bit on that, but could you just maybe give some color on your efforts to reduce G&A expenses overall. So what measures have you taken apart from the FTE reduction? And could you also maybe indicate what would be the impact that you expect on your annual G&A expense run rate going forward 2024 and beyond?

The second one regards the OneWestwing initiative. So you did also mention it, but could you notice any changes in terms of customer acquisition, customer retention and also basket size increases that can be traced back to this initiative specifically? And then lastly, I would appreciate if you could just comment on the SaaS implementation and the companies, the providers that you will partner with and from whom you will receive the software services?

[Andreas Hoerning, executive]

Thanks a lot for your questions, and thank you also for commenting on our performance. So I will be answering the second and the third question of yours. And I will hand over later to Sebastian for the first one on the G&A spend. So the second question of yours was related to OneWestwing and where we see specific impact on customer acquisition, retention and basket size. So we do see many of those -- all of those metrics actually improving. So customer acquisition is up. Customer retention is up and basket size is up. All 3 are up.

And because of our rollout procedure country by country, we actually do see some effects in countries that got OneWestwing earlier. We do saw those effects also earlier in those countries. We -- it's very difficult to differentiate the effect from OneWestwing from other effects, though, for instance, from our marketing activities, et cetera, around it. So it's a bit -- the answer is kind of that we are convinced that it has an impact on those.

We do not exactly know which part of the impact is -- stems back to OneWestwing. What we also measure is indicating KPIs, of course, on traffic, et cetera. And there, we see actually very strong direct links to OneWestwing, because there, we see the changes actually directly after the switches that we've made.

So in a nutshell, some of the KPIs we see directly linked to Westwing -- OneWestwing and others are actually a mix effect of several things. We believe that the OneWestwing effect is pretty strong in that. And the best indication for that is actually the country-by-country effect that we saw in the rollout.

Then to your third question, which was on SaaS and technology, which vendors, et cetera, we are partnering with. We do not comment on this for commercial reasons at this point in time, but we will partner actually with several providers of software for different parts of the technology environment that we need. And very importantly, also, we will continue to build features that really differentiate us, especially on the front and in-house because customer experience is at the core of what we do for us as a premium brand -- a premium love brand that's even more important than for many of our competitors actually.

For the first question, G&A, I hand over to Sebastian.

[Sebastian Westrich, executive]

Thanks for your question. So I think there were 2 parts. First, which cost reduction measures we took in the past besides FTE reductions and an estimate for SG&A savings for 2024. So with regard to 2024, we don't give a guidance yet on next year. We will do them few times. So that's okay. With regard to the measures of the past, we delivered cost savings of about EUR 30 million and the cost reduction was completed in the first half of this year. And this did not only relate to G&A, but of course, also to reduce fixed cost with regard to our fulfillment operations. And I already mentioned that we, for example, closed 1 warehouse.

And of course, we also looked into different OpEx spending and try to reduce it. And we will continue to do so in the future. We also sublease parts of our offices, the space that we don't need. And of course, we also implement, for example, AI-based tools with regard to content production to really increase efficiency wherever we can. So it's not a single measure. We really look into everything and try to increase our profitability with reasonable measures to really improve profitability and to further bring down our costs.

[Operator]

At the moment, there are no further questions. [Operator Instructions]

[Andreas Hoerning, executive]

Thank you for the questions so far. I think we can then close the conference call.

[Operator]

Yes.

[Andreas Hoerning, executive]

Thanks a lot for tuning in and speak next time on the next earnings call. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

[Sebastian Westrich, executive]

Thank you. Bye.