Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the DOUGLAS Group Q4 Full Year 2023-2024 Earnings Call. I am Youssef, the conference call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Sander van der Laan, CEO. Please go ahead. Thank you, operator, and good morning to all of you from a rainy Düsseldorf in Germany. We are happy to share with you the financial results of our financial year 2023-2024, which ended on the 30th of September. In addition to that, we want to give you some highlights about last year and also want to give you a feel for the strong start of a new calendar year. As you know, we will do this between Mark, our CFO, Mark Langer, and myself. I will start with business highlights. I will then hand over to Mark to talk about our last year's performance and the Q4 numbers, then I will come back with a short strategy update, peak season, before we wrap up and are open up for Q&A. On the next page, we can see the results of our most of our fourth quarter. So we delivered a strong number, full year sales number of almost 9%. But we also finished strongly in the last quarter of the year with 8.3% sales growth in stores and 9.5% sales growth on the e-com channel. You can see that we have been able to translate that into EBITDA growth, not only in absolute terms, but also we were able to deliver a margin expansion of 30 basis points in the quarter and 50 basis points for the full year. Clearly, the fourth quarter in our case, we have a seasonal business. So the fourth quarter is EBITDA-wise below the full year number, but that is very normal in our industry and in our business. You know that we have IPOed the company earlier this year. As a result of that, we are happy that we can also report a very strong net income development, which is clearly driven by the operational improvements, but also by the debt reduction and other elements. Mark will come back on that as well. Last but not least, we have launched our not new strategy anymore, our current strategy a year and a half ago, that's Let it Bloom. That strategy is in place. We have implemented a number of steps, a lot more to come. I will also give you a further update in the course of this presentation. Many things went well at DOUGLAS in 2023-24, so there will be a lot more highlights to talk about versus today. We've just chosen a few to give you a feel for what has happened. First of all, we are focusing on omnichannel. That means that we want to grow our stores. We want to grow our e-com business, but more importantly, we want to grow the combination of these two. But we have made very significant progress on the store side with some significant new store openings, a bit more than 50 new stores we have opened in the last year. We opened or refurbished roughly 130 stores across the markets. We had a fantastic opening or reopening of our, let's say, flagship luxury store in Vienna. That is actually the picture on the right, an 800 sq m store, but already now our number two store, let's say, in the total store network across Europe. But we also had many more, let's say, spectacular openings. Our first store in Leuven, Belgium, a flagship store in Zagreb, just opened a few weeks ago. And last weekend, we opened finally, I would say, our flagship store in Pompeii in a very large-scale brand new shopping center in Italy. It is not only on the store side where we are investing because we also are making significant investment on the e-com side. So we have made, let's say, a step up in the positioning and the design of our online shop, our website and app. You know we are in the premium beauty industry. So we also want to make sure that both our store experience and our online experience is aligned with each other. Hence, we have implemented a new design, more quality, more beauty. You could say, in a way, a little bit less price communication. That doesn't mean that price is not important, but it's a function of our overall positioning. And we made the first steps of this redesign. There is more to come because we will do this in certain waves, not only geographically, but also from a time perspective. So important progress. In addition to that, we have, and that has also impacted our e-com business. One of our strategic initiatives is the rollout of our global tech stack. We've historically a very fragmented, let's say, IT application landscape with too many applications in our business. And we want to move towards a more harmonized, let's say, application landscape with significantly less applications. And we've chosen a number of applications which we consider the group standard. And one of that is the Commerce Cloud platform from SAP, which we already have active in some of our bigger countries like the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and Austria. But we have now replaced the legacy infrastructure at Nocibé and the legacy infrastructure in Czech and Slovakia by basically the group standard, which basically enhances the customer journey and also it enhances the sales. And it also simplifies our application landscape. In France, we had some startup, I would say, challenges in the beginning, which has negatively impacted our sales development in the fourth quarter. And Mark will also say a few things about that, but I just wanted to give you a heads-up on that already. There is a lot more, let's say, IT application implementation in the pipeline going forward because it will take a number of years to fully transform to this kind of this group-wide tech stack platform. Another highlight is the continued growth of our DOUGLAS Corporate Brand collection. So we have four brands: DOUGLAS, Dr. Susanne von Schmiedeberg, Jardin Bohème, and one.two.free! And here you see an example of a brand campaign. The title of the campaign, "If You Know, You Know." And we've made some pretty, I would say, innovative and well-designed and developed communication statements in the markets with strong results. As you can see in the bottom left, you see some of the sales results in our biggest markets. You know why we are in premium beauty. We are focusing on five core beauty categories. Fragrances is historically our biggest category. It still is. Fragrances is, by the way, showing a very healthy growth. But in the other four categories: skincare, color cosmetics, haircare, and accessories, we would like to go a bit fast to grow a bit faster because clearly we want to be less dependent on fragrance only. I'm also happy to see that skincare and haircare is growing disproportionately faster versus fragrance, which also creates more stability in our portfolio going forward. Also, skincare and haircare are categories where the store and the added value of the beauty advisor plays an important role, especially with skincare. People are seeking advice. They want to try it before they make the purchase. And this is where our business model, our omnichannel business model, is working well. In addition to the deployment of Commerce Cloud in three of our important markets, we also have implemented the first phase of SAP SuccessFactors. You, being an analyst, have heard more about SAP SuccessFactors going forward. We currently have only in the HR domain 80+ applications, so 80+ legacy applications across the group. A lot of those applications are going to be retired because they will be replaced by SAP SuccessFactors. This is one of the first implementations where we've been able to implement SAP SuccessFactors as a step one in all our countries. That is a pretty big step for DOUGLAS. We've learned a lot from that, and we're going to do more of that in the future. I'm happy with this first major milestone. Then also in the HR domain, we've made another significant investment or step. We have developed what we call the Douglas Academy. The Douglas Academy is basically our internal education institute where we want to train, to develop, to inform, and to motivate our 18,000 beauty advisors across the markets. We want to do that more and more by using modern digital tools. We've launched an app, the Douglas Academy App. And that app is approachable for all our BAs, beauty advisors, either on a desktop or on their own smartphone or at home if they would like to do so. And in that app, we are giving information and training elements for our BAs. We're doing that in their local language. So here the technology is again helping us because we have no translators translating into Estonia anymore. This is all, let's say, machines which are doing that. An important step, which is technology enabled, which is also I'm happy to share. And then last but not least, we are extremely proud that just a few months ago that we were informed by Forbes, a well-known international magazine, and Statista, that Douglas has been chosen by 100,000 women across the entire world as the top company to work for in the retail and wholesale domain. So in retail and wholesale, we've been seen by 100,000 women as the number one place to be. Across all industries globally, we were elected number three. And in Germany, we were, I guess, by the German women in this case, being elected as the number one place to be for women as well. So very, very happy and proud. We know that we have a large female customer base. The vast majority of our employees are also female. Well, we have a few men like Mark and myself, but we in that sense are a very company which very much embraces females. And I'm extremely proud that it's being recognized by many, many women outside DOUGLAS because the women at DOUGLAS hopefully already discovered that before. Like I said, much more to talk about. I will come back a little bit later with four specific strategic updates. But before that, I'm happy to hand over to Mark Langer, our CFO. Thank you, Sander, and warm welcome also from my side. Ladies and gentlemen, today I'm very happy that the fourth quarter of last fiscal year was just another in a series of successful quarters, both in terms of top-line growth and profitability. The sales momentum that we have seen throughout the financial year also continued in the fourth quarter. This is based on the success of our attractive omnichannel value proposition with a large product range and in-person and digital beauty advisors that are valued by our customers. Overall, we were able to welcome more customers in both channels. In contrast to last quarters, our group like-for-like sales were higher than the reported sales. This is fully attributable to the investment of Disapo, as the Disapo sales are no longer included in our e-com sales. Like-for-like sales growth accelerated again in the fourth quarter to 9.4% versus previous year. As we were able again to pass on price increases to our customers, our gross margin remained virtually stable. Despite the fact that we employed more personnel in our expanded store network, increased wages last year to mitigate the impact of high wage inflation, we improved our personnel cost ratio. This was partially supported by the integration of the former separate parfumdreams warehouse. We will speak about that a little later. While our logistics cost ratio improved, we consciously spent more on marketing. In total, we translated a sales increase of 8.7% into an adjusted EBITDA increase of 10.9%. Let's take a look at how our five segments contributed to this group success, starting with our largest segment, DACH NL, comprising Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, and Belgium on the next slide. Within this segment, we saw double-digit growth on reported and like-for-like level. This growth was driven by both channels with an even stronger performance from our e-com business. We continue to see a strong increase in footfall and customer numbers in our stores, despite the fact that 26 of these stores have been refurbished. Our customers increased the basket sizes and the net sales per item significantly while keeping the number of items in the basket stable. In the e-com part of the segment, we saw similar trends. The number of orders increased as well as the baskets. The result was more than 15% of sales increase. As a result of that strong development, the e-com share in the segment rose to 37.8%, far above the 13.6% group average and the highest among our omnichannel segments. When it comes to adjusted EBITDA, operational effects as well as year-end closing entries are to be mentioned. On the operational side, we are able to pass through price increases. We received more marketing contribution from our suppliers and also spent a bit more on marketing. Staff costs increased on absolute level, but decreased in relation to sales. The logistics costs decreased in absolute terms and in relation to sales. With regard to year-end closing entries, the release of voucher liabilities for vouchers not redeemed as well as for Beauty Points which expired contributed to the overproportionate increase in adjusted EBITDA. In total, this drove the strong uplift in adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin for the segment. Moving further west on the European map, we come to our second largest segment in the group, France, a segment with significant one-time effects in the fourth quarter. The footfall on our French stores decreased as well as the conversion rate, leading to a lower number of customers. As we have refurbished 13 stores during the quarter, we expected a temporary decline in visitor numbers. Significantly higher basket sizes and especially higher sales per item more than made up for that and led to this slight increase in sales. In e-com, we saw a temporary dampening effect from the start of the rollout of the new platform that Sander already introduced to you. This led to notably less orders and smaller baskets. The e-com share in the segment therefore decreased to 17.1%. Alongside the platform rollout and the necessary IT support, our IT costs increased. In a competitive environment with high promotional intensity, we received more marketing contribution from our suppliers, but also spent more, so that the marketing ratio increased. In contrast, our personnel cost ratio was lowered, and alongside the lower e-com sales, also the logistics cost decreased. In addition, there was a one-time effect in the prior year from rent reimbursement, mainly in context of COVID-19. Moving south to our segment, Southern Europe, on the next slide. In our store business, a much higher number of visitors were attracted by our offering. The concluded refurbishment of 14 stores did not materially dampen this. With a nearly stable conversion rate, many of the visitors became customers. The segment was the only one where the basket size decreased due to a lower number of items per basket. There was no downtrading. The sales per item increased slightly. On our last call, I already reported an upward trend in our e-com channel in Southern Europe. This trend has continued, and we are back to sales growth. It was driven by a significantly higher number of orders as well as larger baskets. The share of our e-com business increased to 12.3%. When it comes to adjusted EBITDA, the positive development seen in the past quarters continued. We were able to fully pass through price increases, thereby improving the gross margin. Also, we received less marketing contribution from our suppliers and spent more on marketing. The higher sales led to a lower marketing cost ratio. At the same time, we reduced the personnel cost ratio while the logistics costs as a percentage of sales increased partially due to the strong e-com business. As a result of these effects, the adjusted EBITDA rose by nearly 9%, and the adjusted EBITDA margin remained virtually stable. Making a jump to the east and coming to our fastest growing segment, Central and Eastern Europe. This segment once again achieved the highest level within the group with regard to sales growth and overtook Southern Europe in terms of size in the fourth quarter. In the store business, we recognized a strong higher footfall in a large number of our stores as we opened 28 new stores since the beginning of the fiscal year, and despite the refurbishment of 13 stores in the fourth quarter, the slightly lower conversion rate was more than offset by the increased footfall and led to a higher number of customers. In contrast to the other segments, this was the only one where the sales per item declined. As the number of items per basket increased to a much higher degree, the basket sizes were larger. Our e-com was particularly attractive to many customers. We saw significantly more orders with larger basket sizes. This combination drove the sales increase in e-com. As this performance was stronger than the one of the stores, the e-com sales contribution rose to 21.1%. We did experience a higher promotional intensity in these markets. Suppliers also contributed more to marketing, leading to a nearly stable marketing cost ratio. This led to a decline in the gross profit margin of the segments. Following last year's wage increases and an increased headcount due to the store openings, our personnel costs increased in absolute terms, but were offset in relation to sales. Despite significantly higher sales, our logistics cost ratio improved. As explained on earlier occasions, the opening of new stores is a temporary dampening factor for margin as it takes time until the store is fully operational and the customer becomes familiar with the new location, bringing it to the expected footfall and sales level. Refurbishments bring along temporary store closures with no contribution for the time of refurbishments. All effects combined led to the decrease in the adjusted EBITDA margin despite the higher absolute adjusted EBITDA. Now to the fifth segment, our segment, parfumdreams Niche Beauty. On our last call, we discussed the temporary effect of the transfer of the former separate parfumdreams warehouse to our central warehouse operation in Hamm in Germany. Now this integration has been successfully completed. The segment has resumed its growth trajectory at sales level. We received more orders with higher basket sizes. As part of our strategy, parfumdreams is positioned for highly price-sensitive customers. We made some price investments to win back customers who were affected by last quarter's lower product availability and spent more on marketing. In addition, there was a one-time effect from the derecognition of a purchase fee in the prior year. On full-year level, the structural profitability of the segment shows healthy profit expansion. Following the closure of the former parfumdreams warehouse and the reduction in headcount, our personnel costs went down in absolute and relative terms. However, the before-mentioned effects led to the decrease in adjusted EBITDA. Let me summarize how the development at segment level has added up per channel on group level. Please go to the next slide. Our stores welcomed a significantly higher number of visitors, also supported by the net opening of 38 owned stores in the fiscal year 2023-2024. We converted a large part of them into customers with an average higher basket size, more items per basket, and higher sales per items. E-com grew for the 10th consecutive quarter. The channel benefited from more orders as well as on average higher basket sizes. E-com had a sales contribution of 30.6%, almost unchanged from last year's Q4. Let's move on to the next slide to review the major developments in our P&L. On our last call, I showed you a pro forma P&L. At this point in my presentation, this is no longer necessary as Q4 is the first quarter in which we see the full effects of our IPO, the refinancing, and the related benefits from the lower leverage as well as the absence of IPO or other exceptional costs. For the full year, you will find a pro forma P&L in the appendix. Thanks to our pricing strategy, which allowed the pass-through of input prices, increases our customers, and combined with purchasing abilities, we increased gross profit and kept the gross profit margin stable. The main influencing factors to the upside in our net operating expenses this quarter were higher marketing spend. Both our suppliers and us, we invested more in customer activation. On the other hand, the personnel cost ratio and logistics costs improved. As the increase in net operating expenses was lower than the sales increase, our EBITDA increased stronger. Adjustments to EBITDA played a minor role and had a positive impact on the reported EBITDA number. The financial result improved significantly thanks to our new financing structure. At the income tax level, we benefited from a one-off effect from the capitalization of deferred tax assets on losses carried forward. But even without this effect, the net income for the quarter would have improved significantly. On a pro forma basis for this fiscal year, net income stood at EUR 244 million. Turning to net working capital and CapEx on the next slide, our average net working capital was EUR 234.4 million. This resulted from higher inventories to support the strong business as well as trade bonus and marketing receivables. As a percentage of LTM sales, the working capital amounted to 5.3%, unchanged to Q3 in 40 basis points better than last year. With the warehouse moved to Germany and the continuous use of the AI-based inventory management software RELEX in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and Poland, DIO decreased by four days. As planned, our CapEx was significantly higher with a strong focus on store refurbishment and store openings, mainly in Central and Eastern Europe. Main investments related especially to the 72 stores that were refurbished as well as the 15 store openings in this quarter. Furthermore, we continue to invest in the establishment of a group-wide uniform e-com platform and further investments into our IT stack as well as our international e-com as part of our Let it Bloom strategy. Let us now review our cash flow and liquidity position, starting with the free cash flow bridge on the next slide. As usual, this is year-to-date view. As we have already discussed most of the positions, I will only explain the position others in M&A as we haven't touched on them so far. The cash inflow from the position others resulted especially from value-added taxes. The divestment of Disapo went along with some consulting costs as well as a dowry payment to the buyer reflected in the cash outflow from M&A. Thanks to the positive development in adjusted EBITDA and despite our investments, our free cash flow after EBITDA adjustments amounted to EUR 524 million and an increase of 9%. The next slide shows our liquidity and leverage. Our net debt, including IFRS 16 liabilities, amounted to EUR 2.3 billion carrying amounts and was significantly reduced by the IPO proceeds of EUR 850 million and the equity injection of our major shareholders prior to the IPO. Further supported by our strong business development, our leverage ratio decreased to 2.8 times. You will find the cap table in the appendix. We aim to continue our deleveraging path by focusing on strict cross-discipline in cash management and by capitalizing on our strength. Let us now move on to our outlook on fiscal year 2024-2025 and let's turn to the next page. Based on our omnichannel success, the expansion of our store network, and the continued improvement of our e-com capabilities, we expect to achieve sales between EUR 4.7 billion and EUR 4.8 billion in fiscal year 2024-2025. We intend to grow profitably, thereby increasing our adjusted EBITDA to a range between EUR 855million-EUR 885 million. Through sustained improvements in net working capital management, we aim to decrease the net working capital to be below 5% of sales. Based on the improved adjusted EBITDA, the better financial results following the refinancing, as well as EBITDA and tax rates at levels comparable to the average of the previous years, we aim to achieve a net income between EUR 225 million-EUR 265 million for the next fiscal year. All this will help us to move towards a leverage ratio of 2.0 times at the end of calendar year 2025. Ladies and gentlemen, with that, I conclude the financial part of today's presentation. Thanks for your attention, and I'll hand it back to you, Sander. Yes, Mark, thank you very much. As already said, I now want to give you a brief update on our strategy development and deployment. A bit more than a year and a half ago, we have launched our strategy Let it Bloom, which is based on four pillars. As you can see here, we want to be the number one beauty destination in all our markets. We want to offer the most relevant and distinctive range of brands. We want to deliver the most customer-friendly omnichannel experience, and we want to build an efficient and focused operating model. Those four strategic pillars are translated into 20 strategic initiatives, as you can see on this slide. In line with what we've done in previous quarters, we've chosen today to give you an update on four, and these are the four highlighted initiatives. So, the first one I would like to talk about is our store network development. Mark and I have already said a few things about it. So, that's going well. We continue to expand and to modernize our store network. We are trying to build, to integrate the customer journey more and more, let's say, omnichannel. We are steadily approaching our target to open 200 new stores net in a three-year timeframe and to refurbish, sorry, 400 of our existing stores. The focus of our expansion sits predominantly on Central and Eastern Europe, although in most of the remaining countries, we also have opened a few stores, but the focus is in CEE. And from a refurbishment perspective, we did 70 refurbishments in Q4, but the focus very much sits on DACH, on France, and on Italy. This is basically where we have 70% of our existing store network. We are very happy with the recent openings of some flagship stores like Zagreb a few weeks ago, Pompeii just before the weekend, and there is more to come. So, we're going to open a fantastic store in a prime premium location in Antwerp, Belgium. We're going to open a beautiful new luxury store in Berlin, and we're also going to open a premium store in Salzburg, but there is a lot more in the pipeline. So, gross, we've opened 54 stores net. It was, let's see, 35, if I say correctly, 34, because we closed 20 stores. A number of those stores were, by the way, franchisee stores which were closed, and we've refurbished 144 stores in the full year. So, I would say we are well on track, and you can also really start to see the benefits of this in our like-for-like developments. In the second year, we will see the benefit of this in our like-for-like developments. The second area I wanted to talk about is about CRM. So, as you know, in premium beauty, it's extremely important to know your customers, and you want that our customers know us. We have by far the largest premium beauty customer database of Europe. So, we have currently 59 million people who signed up for our Beauty Card program across Europe. In most of our countries, that program is live. We have fully redesigned the, let's say, the strategy and the plan going forward, and we will start to implement this redesigned program as of the beginning of 2025, starting with the Netherlands, with the objective to basically transform the program in all the markets to this new group standard. We're going to introduce a tier-based loyalty system, basically with different tiers, and the key objective is to improve loyalty. The challenge in premium beauty is a customer might be a customer of DOUGLAS and visits our stores online or offline once or twice per year, but the big opportunity is to improve frequency. A customer who buys at DOUGLAS five times per year, that would be a great customer, and once the frequency is going up, we also want to make sure that the spend per trip is going up, and what we really see, once a customer has migrated to being a single channel customer into an omnichannel customer, that has a significant positive contribution to the spend per customer on an annual basis, so we are well on track to expand and develop, let's say, our Beauty Card program. The third initiative is about Retail Media. Retail Media is a rapidly growing advertising channel, and we do see that a lot of the fast-moving consumer good brands, but also the premium luxury brands, are shifting a lot of their advertising money into Retail Media. In many countries, Retail Media is already bigger than the TV advertising market. And in the premium beauty domain, we are basically leading the pack. So, we have a team of roughly 40 people today. The team has been expanded in the past year, and we will expand it going forward because here we do see that the investment in an FTE has a very, very, very short payback. This is an extremely attractive revenue stream. We have significantly margin accretive, so the EBITDA of Retail Media is significantly above, let's say, the EBITDA on our omnichannel business. We have recently introduced our new self-service platform, which basically means that the brands can basically book the media themselves, which is especially interesting for the smaller brand partners because that will require less FTEs on our side, and we also have started with the initial phase of data collaborations with the trade desks, where we basically are leveraging data also outside the Douglas-owned, let's say, communication channels. Retail Media has grown in the past financial year with 34%, so this has been helping both the top line, but it also has been helping, let's say, EBITDA percentage. And we believe there is a lot more in the pipeline, both top line and bottom line. The fourth initiative I want to talk about is on ESG. Clearly, sustainability is an important theme. Let's say, in our society, it's an important theme for the governments and for the EU, but it's also an important theme for companies. And we, being the largest premium beauty retailer across Europe, we feel a responsibility to take this very seriously. We do, as a minimum, clearly want to comply with current or future legislation, but our ambition goes beyond that. We have developed a plan, and we talked about it before, also as part of the prospectus, which is based on three focus areas: people, planet, and products. And in each of those focus areas, we have initiatives in place. Some of the achievements is that we have been chosen as a Great Place to Work, so we are now officially certified. We have a very, very high share of women, not only in operational jobs, but also in leadership jobs, and clearly extremely proud about our selection as the company to be for women across Europe. In the planet domain, we have a number of initiatives in place to reduce our Scope 1 and 2 emissions. We have a significant energy reduction program in place in our stores, which is also starting to become material and becoming visible in our P&L, certainly in combination, let's say, with the more positive development of energy prices recently. We are currently rolling out smart meters across all our stores in all the countries, which gives us the opportunity to monitor, let's say, energy consumption not only locally, but also from a central perspective. We also have committed ourselves that with those international landlords who have that to sign up for green lease agreements, which basically means that both the landlord and DOUGLAS are committing themselves to further improvements, which will basically improve the sustainability of our store in a respective shopping center. Last but not least, our products. We are ultimately a retailer selling brands and products. We have implemented or are implementing our new sustainable packaging policy for corporate brands. We have set clear targets for our corporate brands, and we also have assessed already 70% of the brand range from an ecological footprint perspective. We will report on this in our financial report 2023-2024. That section is going to be bigger going forward because there is a lot more of what we need to do and what we are also working on going forward. With that, I wanted to conclude on kind of the strategy updates and a few words on the peak season. So, our financial year starts on the 1st of October 2024, and clearly, the last quarter of the calendar year is a very, very important quarter for our business. There are three big moments, commercial moments, Singles Day, Black Friday, which we call Beauty Friday. Both Singles Day and Beauty Friday went very well. We reported very strong results, or we've not reported that. We've seen strong results internally in the company across markets and across channels. So, in that sense, we started well. The Christmas season is still going on. We are five days before Christmas, so the peak of our Christmas sales is basically starting right now. And clearly, we are also curious to see what the end result will be. The answer will be clear to us on the 1st of January, and we will communicate that to you in the course of February. But we started well into the new financial year. A few things about Beauty Friday at, sorry, a few things about our campaign and Beauty Friday. So, clearly, when people think about a gift and about beauty, they should think about DOUGLAS. And in many countries, DOUGLAS is not only a synonym for beauty, but also a synonym for gifting. And that is why we have developed a campaign, Gift the DOUGLAS Feeling, which is a campaign which we've launched across all over Europe in all channels, both Douglas-owned channels, but also above-the-line channels. And I'm very happy and proud to see the development of that. And then a few things on Beauty Friday at DOUGLAS. So, here you see some numbers. I'm not going to talk about all the numbers, but what you do see is that the peak time for customers to shop is 10 o'clock at night. These are not customers visiting our stores, at least not our brick-and-mortar stores, because they are closed. So, you can also see that the e-com channel is disproportionately big, let's say, during Beauty Friday. 25,000 orders per hour at the peak moments. But also very proud to report to you that in Germany, the Douglas App was the number one downloaded and used app in the shopping domain, let's say, in the German retail market. So, clearly, the sales numbers and the EBITDA numbers, we will come back on that later, but we had a strong Beauty Friday event, let's say, behind us. So, I think it is time for me to wrap up before we're going to open for Q&A. In summary, DOUGLAS has reported a very positive business development in 2024. You've seen the numbers, and you've heard the voiceover from both Mark and myself. You have read the press release, and you will also read our annual report. DOUGLAS started well into the new financial year. Omnichannel, sorry, we also closed 2023-2024 with results which exceeded not only our original guidance, but also our raised guidance. We believe that in premium beauty, omnichannel is the way forward, and the DOUGLAS Group is very well positioned in both channels to grow our omnichannel business in the years ahead of us. Our Let it Bloom strategy is in place. We have already achieved major milestones, but there is a lot more in the pipeline and to come. We are giving guidance today, as Mark already said. From a sales perspective, we believe that we can deliver between EUR 4.7 billion and EUR 4.8 billion of sales. Our Adjusted EBITDA will be between 855 and 885, and our average net working capital will move to a percentage below 5%. We also believe, as a second, let's say, part of parameters, that it will be possible to increase our net income to the range 225- 265. And by the end of the calendar year 2025, we believe that we have further deleveraged to a ratio around two versus 2.8 for the end of last financial year. And I do believe that from a commercial, strategic, and financial perspective, that not only today, but certainly by the end of 2025, we are in very good shape and well positioned for the years beyond that. With that, I wanted to give the opportunity for you to ask questions. Ladies and gentlemen, we'll now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the queue, you may press star followed by two. Participants are requested to only use handsets while asking a question. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. The first question comes from Sreedhar Mahamkali from UBS. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning, Sander and Mark. Thanks for taking my questions. I've got three. Maybe I'll just go one at a time. I think in DACH NL, Mark, you talked about some voucher liabilities and loyalty point releases impacting the segment positively. Can you give us a sense of magnitude? Also, was this prompted by any change in assumptions? And do you anticipate any such further reversals in 2024-2025? That's the first question. Shall I go through other questions, or do you want me to pause here? No, maybe if you could just go through the three topics and then. Yeah, okay. So, the second one is on France. Again, I think you've talked about the impact of tech platform on sales. Any chance you can give us an idea of what kind of impact you've seen, or maybe put it another way, in the new quarter as it actually returned to growth online in France? But you also seem to have indicated some adjusted EBITDA impact, adjusted EBITDA impact also in France from the platform rollout. Anything you can help us in terms of how to think about the impact there? And the last one is CEE. I think the margin dilution from new stores already started, just to recall, probably in Q2 this year. Do you anticipate, once we annualize that from Q2 in the new financial year onwards, margins to actually start progressing forward given the strong growth and operating leverage? Thank you. Yeah, thanks, Sreedhar, and I think three very relevant questions that you raised. Let me start with the beauty points and the voucher reversal. So, in general, talking too much detail, Douglas has a very generous redemption strategy. So, if you're still running short on Christmas presents and you opt for DOUGLAS vouchers, which we clearly highly recommend, whoever receives your gift say that doesn't have to redeem until New Year or Easter. Typically, we will hold these valid for a period of up to 10 years. There are some sometimes local legally deviating rules to that, but as Sander has highlighted, part of our CM program similarizes to the validity of beauty points, but also vouchers that we are moving to a more standardized approach to it, also which allows us to work on a more standardized tech platform, which administers not only one, but ideally 22 markets. So, that's one. Please see what has been reflected now in the full year numbers as part of our way to move to a more standardized practice across the group. Secondly, also in previous, both the review on the aging structure on vouchers is a typical year-end move that we do. So, we review it with our auditors as part of the end process. The number was slightly elevated. To answer your question, it was in fiscal year 2024 about a mid-single-digit euro amount that were recorded as a deviation to previous year, which is slightly elevated to previous years. But we think that's maybe a slight positive deviation to what we expect here. It's a bit difficult to forecast because if you know better than I do what will happen over the next 12 months in terms of redemption, then I could give you a more precise answer. Clearly, we will update that one. There is a certain assumption embedded clearly in our forecast in terms of redemption and ultimately forfeited vouchers in the next 12 months, but we believe this is realistically and cautiously guided or embedded in our guidance for the next year. On the tech impact for. Sorry, Mark, just to clarify, was it a mid-single digit euro million above what you were expecting? That's how I should read it. Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay. Thanks. Then on France, clearly, we're moving exactly in the direction where we want to take this company. If you compare the capabilities in terms of what the new website will offer, and it's not only we highlighted that at the standard presentation in the look and feel, which is far more premium and appreciated by our brand partners on the new Nocibé website. But this is now one tech stack which allows us now to be far more efficient in terms of updating new functionalities that we might have tested in market A and bring it not only to all EPP markets, as we call them. Without going into too much specific on our first quarter, we will not give you more trading insights than what we have done so far. We are very happy with the improvement of e-com sales into the first quarter in France. Clearly, French consumers, we have a very loyal customer base, many repeat consumers, not only in stores but e-com, they need to get used to the new navigation layout of the website. So, we did expect a phase of changeover, which we clearly, as you can imagine, put into the fourth quarter because that's, as we mentioned at the beginning, commercially not as relevant as Q1, and we're absolutely confident that we did it at the right time with the right execution. We will start to see the benefits on that in the first quarter in France. We will not give you more specific guidance on the commercial development in France in the first quarter, but overall, we are very happy with the e-commerce development in France post the change in the platform, which is now four to five months behind us. Maybe, Mark, if I can add. So, because separate from the e-com implementation, it's also good to know that the French market is currently pretty tough. We do see that premium beauty continues to grow strongly in Europe with 6%, 7%, 8%, depending a bit on the countries, but France is an outlier to that. So, in France, the premium beauty market is under pressure, recorded almost no growth in the past few quarters. So, in that sense, the environment has also not been very helpful in addition to the e-com element, which we have basically implemented ourselves. Maybe on the CEE topic and Sreedhar, as you know, we have to look at it from two angles. First, the region remains despite the slight deterioration in relative profitability, so in profitability versus previous year, far above the profitability from all other segments. Keep in mind that the DACH profitability was a bit distorted by what we discussed as your first question. So, on average, if you look at on a full-year basis, CEE has an EBITDA margin that's 300-400 basis points above other omnichannel segments. And this is still true. We will not slow down refurbishment and expansion in those regions despite the fact that we recognize and acknowledge that some of these new stores are not yet in the first six, 12, 18 months at the profitability of the existing one. And clearly, that's not static. Also here, we see good development. But clearly, new stores tend to close the gap quicker than the existing base is improving it. So, overall, we expect that the dilutive impact over the three years expansion period, you remember the 200 net stores that we will add, have 40% of that roughly in Central and Eastern Europe. We'll have also in the quarters to come maybe a dilutive impact, but it's only dilutive to maybe historical performance. It's always accretive to the group overall contribution. I think that's important to keep in mind that the group impact from the expansion in CEE is accretive to the profitability to the total group, all other things equal. Thank you. Thanks, Sreedhar. Thanks for dialing in and thanks for your questions. The next question comes from Warwick Okines from BNP Paribas. Please go ahead. Thanks very much. Hi, Sander. Hi, Mark. Yeah, three from me as well, please. So, the first one is, what was the price passed through in Q4, and what are you expecting price inflation to be in the market in 2025? The second question is, could you give us a sense of what you think the fragrance market might grow at in 2025? Appreciate other categories are faster growing, but that important category, what was the growth you expect? And then the third one is, could you just give us a sense of your expectations for CapEx and what guidance could you give us on the tax rate next year? Is it going to normalize? Thanks very much. Okay. Shall I take the second question, Mark? Yeah, take the other two. Okay. So, maybe on fragrance, we recently got a report from Circana on the recent development, and basically, you see that all categories are growing. Fragrance, I'm not talking about DOUGLAS, I'm not talking about the market, is growing slightly below. But since it's a big category, if the growth is slightly lower, it still adds up significantly in the DOUGLAS numbers. So, we expect a continuation of this growth going forward. We also see that still the niche segment, the really, really luxury and premium brands continue to grow faster despite the tough economic environment. And from an inflation perspective going forward, let's say if you talk about cost price inflation, because inflation is a difficult term, let's say in DOUGLAS to measure, but let's say from a pass-through, if you talk about the brands, we see normalized, let's say, price increases from the brands. So, 2%-3%, I would say, is what we basically see across the board versus high single-digit or low double-digit numbers, let's say, in more recent years. So, we continue to see this premiumization effect, Warwick, that we explained to you. So, on comparable products, it's exactly what Sander has said. But clearly, the industry is still launching and pushing for premiumized fragrances, improved products with higher and more expensive ingredients when it comes to skincare and color cosmetics. So, I think the combination of these two factors, but they also make it easier for us to pass through clearly these price increases to the end consumers because there's strong storytelling behind that. Well, if you walked on Regent Street, as most of you are based in London, you will see that also Dior, Chanel, Charlotte Tilbury are putting a lot of new advertising, not only in our stores as part of retail media and others, but also in TV and social to create awareness on these product innovations which typically come at a higher price point. In terms of the CapEx and tax, no major deviation from what we guided you to expect. You know that we are slightly behind our targeted expansion plan. So, there's some catch-up to be done to deliver on this around 200 net openings. So, this will, all other things equal, because some of these projects were just purely delayed due to some building permit issues in some markets. So, we will expect clearly a higher number in terms of net openings in the current fiscal year compared to fiscal year 2024. So, it will be north of 3%, but clearly below 4%. I think that's where we see CapEx for fiscal year 2025. Tax rate, yes, I see it as a very positive sign that we were able to benefit from the deferred tax asset that we highlighted in Q4. But when I refer to the embedded or assumptions on the net income development, this should be around a 25%-28% normalized tax rate also for fiscal year 2025. I hope, Warwick, that answers the question you raised. Yeah, that's great. Thanks very much. Happy holidays, guys. Same to you. Thanks for dialing in. The next questions come from Vandita Sood from Citi. Please go ahead. Hi, morning, everyone. So, I just had two questions. So, firstly, you've previously said that exclusive brands make about 10% of your sales. So, how important are these exclusive arrangements to your business model in terms of footfall? And could you give us a view of whether this has trended upwards in the year and any partnerships you're particularly excited about? And also, I can see you've grown your loyalty scheme very encouragingly from 55 to 59 million members. Just wanted to understand if this growth is coming from your newer markets or across the board, and if you think you can do more in terms of advertising to people when they've got points left over and any edge the membership gives you when you're sort of advertising your Retail Media business to your clients. Okay. Well, thank you, Vandita, for your questions. This is Sander here, and I will answer them. First of all, exclusive brands is an important pillar of our strategy. The common denominator between corporate brands and exclusive brands is that we are unique, and you cannot buy those brands at another retailer. In our strategy, we want to significantly grow our share of exclusive brands. In order to do that, we have established a group exclusive brands team with four people who are entirely focused on our corporate brands, sorry, exclusive brands. We today have a very significant number of exclusive brands, but the level of exclusivity varies quite significantly. We have brands like Billie Eilish or Kylie Jenner, which are basically exclusive across Europe, but we also have exclusivity in certain markets. We want to focus on a smaller number of bigger exclusivities going forward. So, we clearly want to drive exclusive brands as a percentage of sales. The financial benefit of that is that we will be less exposed to price competition because there's nothing to compare with. So, that gives also more stability from a gross profit, let's say, perspective. So, we are well on track. We are not disclosing the absolute growth numbers which we have in mind going forward, but it should drive the top line, and it should also enhance the bottom line. That's the idea. On the loyalty program, we see growth of loyalty cards across the board. So, this is not that in CEE that most of the growth sits in the CEE. It sits in our existing markets, and it also sits in some of the new markets. To be honest, in a number of the new markets, we actually underpenetrated with our loyalty program because we do not always have the same technology platform out there, and we also have less developed marketing teams and marketing campaigns, so I actually see the CEE as a development opportunity, let's say, from a loyalty card perspective, and that's one of the reasons why we've redesigned the program, and well, Mark already talked about the release of vouchers, let's say, in DACH and NL at the end of the last year. Clearly, there are a lot of accumulated bonus points, and our ability to collect them differs by market, but with the launch of this new tier-based scheme, we do not only want to incentivize customers to collect points, but we also want to motivate them to redeem them. And we have provided for that from a gross profit perspective, but we believe this motivation to redeem them will certainly lead to more sales and more loyalty. So, that is one of the core ideas behind the redesigned loyalty program. Brilliant. Thank you. Happy holidays. Okay. Thanks, Vandita. Thanks for dialing in. The next question is from Jürgen Kolb from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead. Thanks very much, indeed. Three questions from my side. First of all, on the logistics side, I was wondering if you could maybe update us if the transformation to the OWC, is that continuing and performing as planned, and/or have you made the decisions where the locations for the two planned new locations for the CEE region will be and what the situation is there? I guess, obviously, included in the CapEx guidance. Second thing, on the Retail Media, I understand you will probably not give us more details as to how big the business is, but maybe with some additional information in terms of, have you increased the number of customers that you're dealing with, or have the existing customers increased the number of projects with you? And lastly, in terms of phasing of the coming quarters, Easter in 2025, I think, will be in April. And I was wondering if you could give us a little bit of an indication how much that might impact the phasing of sales and earnings. Thank you. So, Mark, I think number one and three are typical Mark questions. Thank you. You want to start with having more detailed colors on Retail Media? Yeah. So, thank you, Jürgen. So, when you talk about Retail Media, it is correct that we're not going to give you a quantification of the absolute sales number, let's say, in the last financial year. It is significantly growing, and it's significantly EBITDA enhancing. That's what we want to say about it. And we also are not going to disclose the growth of Retail Media each and every year. That's a bonus element, I would say, for today. Why is Retail Media growing within DOUGLAS? There are a few growth drivers. First of all, we have not yet launched Retail Media in all our markets. So, the bulk of what we realize today is actually driven by the largest markets, and certainly by Germany, and to a lesser extent by France, Poland, and the Netherlands. But there is really a significant opportunity in the smaller markets, although Retail Media is not yet as big in CEE as it is in Western Europe, not only within DOUGLAS, but also in the market. So, there is a geographic element in there. Secondly, existing customers on average have ordered more, but we're also able to attract new customers and, let's say, new brand partners investing in Retail Media. And that's also one of the reasons why we launched these self-service programs because on the big guys like L'Oréal Luxe or Dior or Chanel, we can talk to them on a one-to-one basis, but we are not sufficiently staffed to talk to 800 brand partners. And that's where the self-service element is basically providing an entry point for them. But we are optimistic about our ability to further grow and develop our Retail Media offering. Mark. Thanks, Sander. Yeah, on the first one, let's start what we have accomplished, but we'll benefit from the full run rate improvements now also in fiscal year 2025. That's the integration of the separate parfumdreams operation that we just continued in summer, fully integrated in the fourth quarter, and we see, as we highlighted when I talked about the PD segment, that this is now PD, and the DACH NL region is now being served from one of the largest and most, in terms of performance, capable warehouse. That's also a beneficial factor for the capabilities that we see for parfumdreams to act across Europe as a more price-aggressive player in our portfolio. Secondly, this has led to sustainable cost savings. We were able to make more than 100 people that we just don't need anymore in the highly manual warehouse at parfumdreams redundant. This was executed last fiscal year. And as a group, we will benefit from the consolidated impact. It is a very nice quick payback from the consolidation. In terms of the warehouses to come, we have selected the location. We are in advanced negotiations now to building the so-called Nova. That is a nucleus for a larger operation serving basically the northern part of Central and Eastern Europe, arguably a multitude of markets stretching from the Baltics all the way down to the Czech and Slovak Republic. This will be a multi-stage go-live process, but we are very happy in terms of the progress that the team is making in terms of selecting sites, partners. This will be more advanced, and we will talk more about it latest after our Q2 numbers as we plan to go live with the operation in Nova, at least for some markets and some functionalities in the course of the first half of 2025. As I think Warwick asked earlier about the CapEx development, this is clearly covered and reflected in our CapEx guidance. Keep in mind, we are not building on ourselves. So, we're working with 3 PLs. But clearly, the move from the old CDC setup to the OWC will require some IT investment that's embedded in our CapEx guidance for 2025. You're right, Jürgen, that it might play a role on the timing of Eastern. So, we have reflected that in our internal financial planning. Since we are not giving now specific quarterly planning, I suggest, Jürgen, that we'll come back also for you as part of your modeling on a more quarterly basis when we report the important fourth quarter back when we speak again in February. But we will not give quarterly guidance or phasing at this point in time for fiscal year 2025. So, please bear with us. But as you said, it will have a slight top-line shifting effect, but clearly, it doesn't change our full year numbers, whether it's late March or early April. But it might affect our Q2 numbers. We are fully aware of that. Very good and very much understood. And maybe allow me a quick follow-up. Again, very easy modeling question. In terms of the non-recurring elements in 2024, I think it was like EUR 78 million. The guidance that this number will come down significantly in the current fiscal year is still holding, I guess. So, that's going out and fading out over the next two years as already guided. Yeah. that this number will come down significantly in the current fiscal year is still holding, I guess. So, that's going out and fading out over the next two years as already guided. Yeah. that this number will come down significantly in the current fiscal year is still holding, I guess. So, that's going out and fading out over the next two years as already guided. Yeah. Yeah. You have seen that we actually had more releases of the positive impact from non-recurrents or adjustments in the fourth quarter compared to last year. I think it was 1.X million positive versus zero point something negative. If they exist, we will clearly report that, and they will be not negative and then not be zero. But as you rightfully anticipated, and I think most analysts have included that, it will be a far more marginal amount, and you've seen, I think that's very important to stress again. The company is giving a reported net income guidance for full year. You should also read that as our confidence that we will have a clear grip on a very small amount of adjustments to be expected in fiscal year 2025. Absolutely understood. Okay. Merry Christmas. Safe year. Happy festive season. Ciao, ciao. See you soon. Bye. Adam. The next and last question is from Adam Cochrane from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Good morning, guys. Had to dig deep to come up with three questions after all of those ones. So, hopefully, quite quick ones. But firstly, in terms of the Beauty Club, you've seen the increased number of members. Are we still seeing that the Beauty Club average spend per member is higher? And are your Beauty Club members the rate of growth amongst them higher than the average? So, you're still attracting a good cohort of consumers to the Beauty Club, and they're growing faster. Secondly, in terms of the customer demographics, have there been any changes at all across the last quarter or even bigger picture across the year? Are you attracting more younger consumers? Are consumers shopping with more frequency, smaller pack sizes, etc.? Just a sort of view on the consumer. And then thirdly, it was going to be on Retail Media, but I think you've had enough of that. So, how's the overall competitive environment? I know we've talked about pricing competitors online in the past and things, but has it become a bit more rational, would you say, more recently? Thanks. Yeah. So, thank you, Adam. I will try to answer each of those questions. And if Mark wants to add, please do so, Mark. First of all, when you look to the Beauty Card, let's say the program is growing. Let's say the number of Beauty Card members is growing faster than the top line as we have reported because during the IPO, I think we reported on 55 million cardholders, and now we report 59. Once somebody has signed up for the program, that customer is growing faster. We do see that somebody who is a member of the program is growing faster. Clearly, we really want to drive the frequency, and that will then create an acceleration. By the way, once a customer is part of the Beauty program and has downloaded the app, that is kind of the Valhalla for us because then there is really an acceleration of the growth. More Beauty Cards means more sales, disproportionately more sales growth. That's one. Secondly, when you look to demographics, so it's not that we register all of that very quantitatively, but what we clearly see, first of all, that we have significant growth in terms of traffic across our online and offline network. Many, many brick-and-mortar retailers, certainly who are based on the high street, have a challenge in, let's say, traffic. We don't have that. We have significantly grown from a traffic perspective. And what we also see visually is a disproportional growth of younger customers. So, there are more younger customers in our stores. And that is also really driven by the success of some brands. So, especially a brand like Sol de Janeiro or a brand like e.l.f. is really attracting younger customers, in this case, often younger women, let's say, into our stores. And clearly, we are happy with that. So, let's say the demographics, at least from an age perspective, are growing or changing, sorry. And the impact of that differs a bit by market. From a competitive landscape perspective, what we clearly see on that, first of all, what we do say that in Europe, we are by far the largest omnichannel premium beauty retailer. The number two in Europe is the number one globally, but we are two and a half times bigger than the number two in Europe. We do see that there are not a lot of successful brick-and-mortar-only players out there, and not a lot of our competitors are making investments in the stores only. We are really, let's say, differentiating us in that respect. And then, in addition to that, we do see that some pure players are growing. A few of them are growing quite aggressively. But we believe that our omnichannel answer to that is strategically the right answer. And the evidence, I would say, sits in the numbers because today, we are the number one in Germany in online and offline. And today, we are the number one in continental Europe in online and offline. Clearly, we need to balance our pricing and promotion, let's say, between the two channels. And when you are a single-channel operator focusing on pure play only, for instance, you don't have to take care of what happens in the stores. We do. But we believe that we are well positioned, let's say, to gain ground from the competition. Does that answer your questions, Adam? That's brilliant. Congratulations on the results, and have a great, well-earned break. Okay. Well, with that, we are coming to an end of the results update today. On behalf of not only the management board, but also all our employees, we want to, first of all, thank you for your support and for your attention today. Christmas is around the corner. The stores are still open for the next five days in all our markets. Online never closes, so you can always order online. Our purpose is to make life more beautiful. So, hopefully, you will do that as well over the course of Christmas and New Year. And we're looking forward to see you soon in probably February when we release our Q1 numbers. Merry Christmas to all of you, and make life more beautiful. Ladies and gentlemen, the.