Good day and welcome to the Home24 Q1 2022 Trading Update Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Marc Appelhoff. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you very much, and good morning, everyone. After many record quarters in the last two years, we are today sharing our progress and financials in a much less favorable market and macro environment. We are focused on ensuring a sustainable supply chain environment for our customers, for our operations and retaining short-term profitability perspective. While at the same time, delivering upon key strategic priorities like the Butlers integration and the launch of a curated marketplace still within Q2 of this year. This is basically also the main highlights that we will present to you today. Starting with the management summary, I think overall, we can also sum it up by saying we're progressing well on our key strategic projects in a weak consumer sentiment environment, where in line with markets in recent weeks, we report a decline in order intake and revenue for Q1. In Q1, revenue declined 14% while we reduced marketing spend by EUR 6 million. We do react to the environment and ensure we keep our return on investment on our investments into customer acquisition. We also focus on safeguarding our profitability goals to trading off short-term growth with profitability. Nevertheless, the Q1 revenue base is still significantly higher than pre-COVID, with 61% against Q1 2019 and 42% versus 2020, which is a reminder of the scale we have reached and the operating leverage we will be able to tap into over the long term after we've mastered this temporary environment, on the macro side. It's important to note that Q1 still excludes Butlers’ financials as the transaction only closed on the April 1, and thus our sales and EBITDA development obviously as of Q2 will be significantly influenced also by integration of Butlers. The profitability in Q1 suffered from the more difficult macro environment, meaning margin pressure on the supply inflation logistics side. Also that, our cost base will only reverse back to prior year levels as of the H2 of this year, as we have already shifted focus to profitability and spending discipline to best navigate the market environment, both in Europe and in Brazil. Especially in Brazil, post IPO investments, that were executed on the warehouse space side, on mega store retail side that drove CapEx and OpEx, which are now easing in Q2 and ending as of H2 of this year. A key focus will lie on best managing the working capital now in these volatile times. In addition to best reacting to external factors like inflation by pricing these in, primarily, we are glad to be able to have two short-term, high-impact strategic projects that will start having impact as of the Q2 of this year. We will today share with you some initial successes on the Butlers integration and also lay out the timing and the next steps of our curated marketplace launch, still expected to be launched in a soft launch phase in May. Lastly, we will share our thoughts on the current trading environment, which is obviously terribly difficult at the moment, but we also will lay out why we confirm our guidance as we have already built in certain level of conservativeness on the demand side at the time of setting that, just, six to seven weeks ago at the end of March. That's we believe that we'll be able to show growth combined with profitability gains and obviously, with the Butlers business contributing significantly to that development throughout the year. Now, moving to the business update. I just need to flip through the slide control to reach the right slide. Starting with the demand side. We wanted to bring you also just a very high level view on why we believe we are doing the right thing in the right moment in time. We don't need to explain what's happening in the macro environment, I guess, yeah. We want to share our thoughts on the effects on our industry. Consumer sentiment obviously is hit hard and we prepare for it to not recover in a hockey stick way and we do focus on resilience. Both by pricing our private label softly into full value in line with price increases happening across the board in the market. But also by reviewing the best end-to-end procurement locations globally for any given private label products we're offering. We're focusing on loyalty and retaining customers we have won over the past years, that might, at the moment also be considering to postpone purchases of or investments in larger furniture in the current situation. Therefore, we are strengthening our range of entry-level items that require lower spending. B oth through the acquisition of Butlers, where we've expanded our range to include a large number of lower-priced home accessory items. We're also strengthening our own-brand expertise, but also on the marketplace side. We're now obviously in a position to move much faster to fill gaps, especially also in the range of home accessories and smaller-ticket sizes. Thus, it's also not a surprise that these two strategic projects are the deep dive of today's presentation. Starting off with the marketplace. Now, what are the key benefits of introducing a curated marketplace next to the two existing pillars of the Home24 model with a short tail, very selected private label investments, and then also the curated, third-party partnerships we have created over the last 10 years? In a nutshell, it's speed at asset-light execution that will allow us to better monetize our existing and future customer relationships, adding more value to our customers, but also amortizing customer acquisition investments significantly better going forward. Let me take you through each of those points mentioned on here because they're all relevant. Now, firstly, we can scale assortment faster, especially in the complementary long tail that would not be focused internally with the highest priority, but are still relevant for our target customers, as we position ourselves as the online destination for home and living. Especially also for our less mature markets in Europe. T hinking about France, Italy, Netherlands. There is many localized offerings that we will be able to better localize and increase engagement by offering full room solutions and more inspiring solutions for the entire home and garden, and not just the Home24 core categories. All that obviously shall build customer loyalty and increase the destination attractiveness and appeal to our customers, so that they think first of Home24 whenever they start a home and living journey, and that they come back to the Home24 platform much, much more frequently. Let's not only think why we believe it's attractive strategic pillar for us, but why would sellers want to partner with us, yeah? Also here, the key benefit will be that we provide massive reach across continental Europe, that's not available in the home and living space, in any comparable platform. With a clear home and living focus and expertise, and also our key intention to not sacrifice NPS efficiency, our customer value proposition that in the end also culminates in low return rates and high customer satisfaction. Yeah, we therefore say it's a curated marketplace. We tightly control who we let on. We have strict KPI management on the performance afterwards. And therefore, sellers who meet those expectations will benefit from our value and delivery experience and reputation management, resulting in similar low return rates and success for their own sales potentials. This curation is not meaning we're not taking a mass approach because, as you can see on page 16, we've not only, taking this seriously by hiring a dedicated marketplace team, setting up the technical requisites in a very professional way with testing ongoing before launch, et cetera. We've also filled the funnel and already signed more than 100 sellers that have already created more than 30,000 products that are ready for go live. Obviously, the pipeline of those 100 sellers is much broader afterwards. We focus on the complementary assortments that will add value both for our customers and ourselves, or hopefully, immediately. We also start filling gaps in complementary offerings for seasonal offerings like for example, garden, which, well, we're still in the garden season, so we're very curious to see how that will complement our existing offering, which is much more focused on the private label side for Home24. After going live in Germany with a soft launch still planned in May, primarily for learning and then only once we have successfully ensured the end-to-end process works well, we will launch the German marketplace also with marketing and external communication events. We will then launch the French marketplace in the second half of this year as we see most potential outside of Germany there. That's also why of the partners we are approaching and signing up, we do focus on multi-country competence so that the partnership we're entering to is then paying off not only in one of our countries, but multiple countries. As you can see, more than 70% of the currently signed sellers can also ship to France. With that, moving to the Butlers acquisition. We have talked about the rationale of the deal before, and obviously the deal was signed prior to the macro environment significantly worsening, especially also with the situation in Ukraine. We are, as a company, taking the macro environment very seriously. Butlers has franchise partner stores in Ukraine that we had to to close. Rest assured, we are not only focusing on the future strategic benefits of a combined group, but we also focusing very much on the day-to-day and, the short term maximization of benefits as well. Zooming out again, why is this, a winning combination in our view? It's not only the strengthening of the platform, but it's primarily the extension of the competence of the private label offering through the Butlers accessories and decoration home textiles. 20+ years expertise, and the fact that Butlers owns three profitable channels with more than 40 million visitors a year, and that we can start monetizing those customers jointly and also ensure that the Butlers offering meets many more customers online by introducing that to the Home24 platform. We will both accelerate the Butlers’ digital growth, but also gain share of wallet in existing Home24 and Butlers customers, yeah, by offering furniture on the Butlers side, but also the accessories on the Home24 side. Today we want to show you first successes after just five weeks of being a combined company. Obviously, we're not there yet. We haven't executed on all our strategic potential, but we're steadily progressing and, you know, gathering the momentum of a combined operation, while at the same time ensuring we execute well in the current market environment. The Butlers product selection that is valid for Home24 offering is live. It's live, webshops in Germany and Austria, Switzerland for the moment. We see it gaining traction. We're starting joint campaigns. We are basically labeling that together it completes a home. Yeah. In German, "home" is what you like. Yeah. Butlers is now bringing the home dimension that we really are inspiring for full rooms, as we've also shared with the graphics at the time of signing of the deal. Yeah. We've also taken trade-off decisions, and we're trying to move fast to reduce complexity and focus on the biggest potentials, which is demonstrated by the fact that we've discontinued the Butlers France independent webshop and are diverting the traffic of Butlers France to the Home24 French website, to a shop-in-shop, where the brand is now celebrated in a similar way. Given the lower brand awareness, we felt that a joint market approach in France is the right thing at the current time. Next to those online or promotional efforts, there's also already tangible experience that you could experience and, for example, if you come to Berlin next time, the Butlers store, which is located across from the KaDeWe in West Berlin in Tauentzienstraße, is now our first co-branded store where we experiment, where we learn, where we've intentionally moved fast to iterate how to best combine the Butlers offering with the furniture offering of Home24. You see that there is now a dual branding on the outside wherever that's possible with sufficient size. That's definitely an option we are continuing to explore. For most of the Butlers stores, that will not be possible, but at the same time, we will be introducing glimpses of the furniture offering that's possible now also for Butlers. We'll obviously try to get into the shopping bag, and tap into cross-marketing potential as soon as realistically executable. There is more to come, and we will continue to share the progress in our next updates. The next one, mid-August. With that, I pass over to Philipp to take you through a more detailed financial update. Thanks a lot, Marc. Let's start with a view on our order intake. As you can see, the weaker year-over-year development in order intake is visible in both segments in Europe and in LATAM, with a decline in Europe of approximately 20% like for like being slightly more pronounced. The inflationary effects are visible in the development of our average order value, as price increases from suppliers have been passed on to a significant extent to our end customers. As can also be seen in the AOV development, the effect of those price increases across all categories outweighed the effect that we also see at the same time that consumers tend to slightly lower price points within a category. Also, clearly visible is a positive FX effect in Brazil. The negative GOV growth in constant currency of 11% translates into positive GOV growth of 1% in real currency, as can be also observed in the significant basket size increase, which is largely FX-driven in Brazil. On the active customer side, we see a decline that could be expected from the GOV development. Looking at the drivers a little bit in more detail, the decline can be attributed to a larger extent to significantly lower new additions than usual, and in contrast to churn or dropouts being on expected or regular levels. If we then turn to revenue growth or revenue development, as could be expected from the order intake, the effect of a weakened market environment paired with very strong previous year comparables is also reflected in the year-over-year revenue development of negative 14% in constant currency. If we look at it from a two-year or three-year development, as Marc already said, this is still in line from a long-term trend perspective, as can be derived from growth rates of 42% on a two-year view and 61% on a three-year view, all in constant currency. The more positive development of revenue year-over-year versus order intake year-over-year signals the significantly faster revenue realization compared to last year, and proves that we took the right decisions throughout the year on desired stock levels and available buffer stocks to ensure high level of availability to our end customers. Looking at today's inventory level, also supply chain disruptions as currently visible as we had in the last weeks with Port of Shanghai, et cetera, should not meaningfully impact customer experience. The average FX rate from the Brazilian real changed significantly, as already mentioned, from 6.6 to 5.8 in Q1 2022 compared to Q1 2021. As a result, the slightly negative growth in real currency could be overcompensated by FX effects, and Mobly finished Q1 with a positive real currency growth rate of 4%. Now, what does it mean in terms of profitability? Of course, as a result of the lower top line, we also see a decline in our adjusted EBITDA to negative 4%, with Q1 being usually a seasonally weaker quarter in terms of profitability within a year, in a similar way as it is in Q3. The decline in profitability can basically be attributed to three effects, all broadly of a very similar size. The one is the missing operating leverage from the lower top-line level. Second one is the slightly lower profit contribution margins, post-marketing expenses. The third one is the higher fixed cost base for overheads and OpEx. Looking even closer at the unit economics in detail, we see a relevant decline in gross profit margin year-over-year of around 2.6% as a result of incurred price increases and higher import container costs, but with a positive trend. Q1 2022 actual gross margin is already slightly above Q2 2021, and it is also increasing step by step for the Q2 in a row. Despite the fact that we increased in the gross profit margin, the devaluation of our inventory position from Q4 2021 to Q1 2022 by EUR 1.2 million, so EUR 1.2 million negative one-time effect for Q1, due to the increased inventory reach and the safety stock levels as a consequence of the ongoing uncertainty of global supply chains and consumer demand. Marketing expenses as a percentage of revenue are 1.6% below previous year Q1 and show the lowest% of revenue value in the Q1 since we do IFRS closings. This clearly reflects what Marc was also already mentioning, the commitment to focus stronger on profitability improvements and very careful marketing spendings, compared to yeah revenue targets in a market environment that is just very, very difficult to predict. The increased overheads and OpEx is attributable to a significantly larger extent to the LatAm segment compared to Europe as a result of the investments undertaken in Brazil post-IPO, and then in Europe, partly the decision to strengthen specific functions like commercial shopping experience. The results of these investments are already partially visible, yeah, as you can derive from the marketplace initiatives and the assortment extension. There's also a strong pipeline of further webshop improvements that will pay off through higher conversion rates and higher customer satisfaction ratings over the next months and quarters. In total, it remains our clear management focus to bring profitability levels further up on a standalone basis, with Butlers going to fuel profitability further once figures are to be consolidated as of Q2. Now lastly, turning to cash. The group's cash and cash equivalent remain high at more than EUR 100 million, while the adjusted EBITDA contributed roughly EUR 6 million to the overall quarter-over-quarter decline of EUR 30 million. As you can see, the main effect arises from delta working capital. We usually have some seasonal effects in the transition from a high season revenues to low season revenues. Due to the market environment, the market demand, this effect came in earlier this year. Therefore, net working capital in the first quarter was significantly impacted by that effect and the effect of expanded inventories. The balance sheet position of our inventories increased by EUR 8 million within Q1, with the aim of increasing resilience to uncertainties in the supply chain and the inflationary trends that we see. Better to have the inventory now at probably cheaper levels than this could be at a later stage, more expensive. The cash outflow from investing activities are, as usual, largely related to investments in internally generated software and fixed assets in the warehouses. In this EUR 9 million, there's an addition, a EUR 3 million loan granted to Butlers ahead of the acquisition to be able to maintain sufficient liquidity for higher inventory levels prior to the finalization of the acquisition, in a similar way that we as Home24 steer the business. With that, let me briefly hand back to Marc for the final outlook. Yes, it's not much of a surprise that we will continue to, remain focused on taking advantage of the opportunities arising from Butlers acquisition, the marketplace launch, because those investments are done. We want to now fully leverage these. At the same time, we are facing reality that the market environment is not favorable at the moment and will likely remain challenging. From all we hear, we are faring quite well, also compared to competition. We're continuing to take market share, but we won't overpace. We will prioritize profitability over short-term sales growth, to ensure that we come through this year, with the profitability level that we need at the end of the year. Current trading remains in line with the H2 of Q1, also for now, April and May. Obviously, we all hope it will improve faster, but we are also concentrated on the same trends bearing on for quite some time. Therefore, also looking at guidance, we're reiterating the guidance voiced five weeks ago. We have obviously reviewed scenarios and looked at the current market trends also over the last five weeks. We believe we've built in significant headroom in a way that external factors like at the moment, inflation, geopolitical tension, supply chains, and consumer climate should not prevent us reaching these, especially as of April, the Butlers financials will add to growth and profitability. Nevertheless, strict working capital management will definitely be a theme throughout 2022 and remains a high focus for us. Obviously also managing the insecure global demand and supply side, beyond 2022 to best exploit the massive growth opportunity ahead of us. Certainly without jeopardizing our profitability, which is now the base of everything that we work for and yeah, the starting point of then the years to come. In sum, yeah, we all obviously all would want to wish we would be in a different macro environment, and rest assured we're doing our homework and we're taking the situation seriously to ensure we continue to meet our goals. Thank you very much. With that, handing over to Q&A. Thank you. If you wish to ask a question today, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Please ensure the mute function on your telephone is switched off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Again, please press star one. We'll pause for a moment to allow everyone to signal. As a reminder to ask a question, please press star one. There appears to be no questions over the audio at this time. Thank you very much, then. Very efficient morning. We wish you all the best in the current times, and stay safe, stay healthy. If there is follow-up questions, as always, you know how to reach Philipp and myself. Hopefully convening with a more favorable market environment, whenever we speak next. Thank you very much, and have a great day, everyone. Thank you. That will conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. Ladies and gentlemen, you may now disconnect.
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