Hello and welcome to SMCP 2023 full-year results. My name is Melissa, and I will be your coordinator for today's event. Please note this conference is being recorded, and for the duration of the call, your lines will be in a listen-only mode. However, you will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation. This can be done by pressing star one on your telephone keypad to register your question. If you require assistance at any point, please press star zero, and you will be connected to an operator. I'll now turn the call over to Amélie Dernis, head of investor relations. Please go ahead. Thank you. Good evening, everyone. This is Amélie Dernis in charge of investor relations speaking. Thanks for being with us today for the publication of SMCP full-year results. I'm here with our CEO, Isabelle Guichot, and our CFO, Patricia Huyghues Despointes. I'm sorry we had an issue on our website, so I sent you the presentation via email. Do not hesitate to send me email during the presentation if you did not receive it. As usual, we will go through the presentation, and then we'll have the Q&A session. Before I hand it over to Isabelle and Patricia. I invite you to go through our usual disclaimer on page two. I think we can start now. Thank you, Amélie. Good evening, everyone. Thank you all for joining us today to talk about the 2023 full-year results, with first the key highlights on results and then business initiatives. Then I will hand it over to Patricia, and she will detail our performance. Finally, I will go through our main initiatives for 2024 and coming years. Moving on to page four of the presentation, you can see that our full-year sales came out at EUR 1,231 million an increase by 4% at constant exchange rate and 3% organic. Second semester is nearly stable despite a challenging environment with consumption slowdown and persistent inflation. Here are the key messages from these full-year sales. Sandro and the other brands perform well with a mid-single-digit growth, and margin remains stable versus last year. The pursuit of a full-price strategy, which is a key pillar of the group strategy, with a nearly stable discount rating season despite good comps and a challenging environment. Our digital share remains at a satisfactory level at 22% and gained 1 point versus 22. The net new increased by 40% net, which means the result of openings minus closing in key areas. Page five now. You will find here the performance by region. Patricia will get into more granular detail later in the presentation. Just a few highlights. By region, APAC gains 2 points versus last year, resulting from 2022 impacted by COVID restrictions. Symmetrically, America and France decreased by 1% each from 2023, with a more challenging economic environment. By brand, homogeneous performance between Sandro and the other brands during the year Maje slightly below, especially in H1, while H2 trend was similar between brands. By channel, no change. You know that we have mainly dominantly retail business. 92% of our business is coming from our retail network and 8% coming from wholesale, mainly from partners and a few off-price players. Page six now, a few highlights on our Q4 sales at the level of EUR 326 million. They remained stable at constant exchange rate versus 2022, decrease of 1% organic, explained by the consumption slowdown in Europe and particularly in France, and a quarter in China less dynamic than expected. U.S. are more resilient and remain positive at constant foreign exchange rate. The trend is homogeneous across Sandro and Maje. Other brands are more exposed to France. The network is growing by 26 points of net openings during the quarter. Page seven now. Some key P&L figures now. Management Gross Margin, which remained at a satisfactory level with a strong improvement in the second semester, and it was a common goal for the different brands to achieve this. Profitability has been impacted by the complex environment. The Adjusted EBITDA landed at 6.5% of sales, as we released and anticipated during our information at the end of January. Financial strength has been maintained with a good cash flow generation in the second semester, enabling us to improve net debt compared to year-end 2022. Page eight. We are proud to share with you some 2023 major achievements in terms of sustainability. We strongly improved our Sustainalytics rating. As a reminder, Sustainalytics is a leading independent ESG firm involved in corporate governance research, ratings, and analytics. They analyzed more than 50,000 companies with a grade of 13.9. We came out in their top 10% in terms of rating, and we gained 20 ranks versus 2022. Now, let's dive on our three pillars that you're all aware of. In terms of products, 59% of our Fall/W inter collection have been made with more sustainable materials and products. I remind everyone that it means that they've been produced with more than 50% of their components being more sustainable, which is a strong improvement versus Fall/W inter 2022, which was at 45%. As far as planet's concerned, we're really proud to have obtained for our carbon footprint strategy two very good results from SBTi validation seal. First, we strongly improved our CDP scoring rating from B in 2022 to A- in 2023. On top of that, our strategy for carbon trajectory has been validated by SBTi, the Science Based Targets initiative, meaning that our carbon strategy is in line with the Accords of Paris and is based on strong, reliable assumptions. Finally, regarding people, we standardized and deployed across the world our diversity and inclusion strategy. For example, under this new strategy, parenting policy is now aligned in all the countries where we operate to the most favorable countries. Clearly, these 2023 achievements in CSR mark a milestone for SMCP. The three external ratings and recognition we have received from CDP, Sustainalytics, and SBTi are very strong and put us in the upper category of the not-so-many companies having achieved very good progress recently. Now, let's move on to brand desirability, which, as you know, is the key pillar of our group strategy. We're constantly reinforcing that brand desirability. For Sandro and Maje, a few examples of Creative Windows, Harrods Windows Takeover, Maje celebrating its 25th anniversary with a dedicated capsule and specially designed windows to celebrate that. If I move on to page 10, a very nice shooting for a master ski capsule for Claudie Pierlot. And for Fursac, more and more KOLs wearing the brand, Rami Malek on the left side, for instance. Key openings in Q4. We open, as I mentioned earlier, we open stores in America with two stores in Meatpacking District in Manhattan. And we also open in a very beautiful Californian mall, Westfield Topanga. We opened two stores. APAC, which means in this case, Malaysia and Australia that we took over last year, some nice openings with two new stores in Malaysia and two in Chadstone, Melbourne, that we reopened and have been very the APAC region has been one of the best-performing regions for the group in 2023. We kept on also expanding in new countries with partners. Some a few examples that you can see on the map. We opened new stores in Saudi Arabia, in Riyadh Park, where we already present in the country, but we expanded our presence. In Mexico, where we're already present, and we opened some new corners at Mexico Palacio de Hierro. And in Malta, where we kept on opening stores to start initial opening. So it's a good performance. It's always a very interesting activity for us to keep on opening with those partners. As you know, and I will speak about it later, we have a major milestone with the opening of India next year, this year. That was this week. Finally, we continue to expand our digital presence with both our own website and through marketplaces. As regards our own channels, Sandro Secondhand is now live in Germany, Spain, and Netherlands, combining digital presence and circular economy development. Fursac accelerates digital European extension on its own website, now serving customers outside France and on marketplace. We have added three brands of our portfolio, Sandro, Maje, and Claudie Pierlot, on Zalando in Spain and Italy. And our faithful partner, El Corte Inglés, is now we're operating on marketplace on their website. And we've also joined 24S on the marketplace with our brands. As I just mentioned earlier, future opportunities. Among them, a few words on our development that we announced at the end of 2023 with exciting opportunities of entering India, thanks to a partnership between SMCP and the number one Indian distributor, Reliance Brands Limited. India is a remarkable country, not only in terms of culture and population of size, but its relationship with garments is very vibrant in terms of color, material, craftsmanship, style, and fashion at large. It's a very educated market, and we are very optimistic and confident in our potential. Our collaboration with Reliance would be crucial to enter this market, and we have a profound respect for their expertise and excellence in the execution. Openings are scheduled now in H2 in Mumbai and New Delhi for Sandro and Maje, and we're drawing the plans as we speak. I will now let Patricia present you 2023 figures in more detail before coming back for conclusion and action plan for the coming years. Thank you, Isabelle. Good evening, everyone. Let's start with the sales on slide 17. With France first, with sales of EUR 413 million, flat versus previous year with a high business comparison in 2022. The second semester has been impacted by a slowdown in traffic, especially in December. We can, however, underline some positive features of our brands for 2023. By brand, good figures for Sandro and the other brands, positive in France in full year. By channel, with a solid progression of digital sales with a high single-digit growth. 12 openings during the year, mostly in digital on our websites or via marketplaces, as Isabelle just explained earlier. EMEA now with sales at EUR 389 million, progressing +3% organic driven by Like-for-Like network, explaining half of the growth, which is quite a resilient annual performance made up of a strong first semester and a second semester more impacted by persistent inflation, leading to traffic slowing down. Several EMEA markets performed well, like Germany, Spain, the Middle East, while the year was tougher in the U.K. and in Switzerland with lower touristic flows. The network remained nearly stable with one net addition, the openings being offset by the final closure of the point of sales of the former partner in Russia. In America, on page 18, sales at EUR 173 million for the year are slightly negative versus previous year at -3% organic. But it's important to remind that this follows an outstanding performance of two years in a row. U.S. sales are quite resilient and show a sequential improvement in the second semester with a Q3 performance above H1 and a Q4 better trend than Q3, this quarter having a positive organic growth both in brick-and-mortar and in digital. To be noted also that Canada is back to growth in Q4. Network increased by 17 net additions with nice openings in strategic spots such as California. In Asia, sales to that EUR 255 million for the year +13% organic with nearly all markets above 2022. Growth was mainly driven by mainland China with a double-digit growth from 2022 with a quite low basis of comparison. But we have also good performance in Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Malaysia. All Southeast Asia benefits from good local dynamism but also touristic flows within the region. As a reminder, Asia-Pacific benefits also in 2023 from the integration in retail of the Australia and New Zealand partners. In Asia, the network increased by 17 POS, and you saw some in the previous slides. Now, let's move on to the P&L on slide 19, and we'll start with management gross margin, which is at 73.8% of sales in 2023. The main point we want to underline on this topic is the improvement in the second half of the year from 73.1% in H1 to 74.4% in H2. So in line with previous year in the second half, supported by a continued strict discounts policy. The in-season discount rate has remained at a very sound level despite very competitive and promotional environment. It remains under 25% in season. Now, let's talk about operating expenses on slide 20. You had seen the figures in H1, and you remember that our goal, considering the complexity of the environment, was at that time to limit as much as possible the growth of OPEX in the second half. This is what we did, and the graphs that you can see on this slide show a strong deceleration of the trend in H2 compared to H1, both in store costs and in SG&A. The increase in store costs, despite inflation of rent and staff costs, was divided by two in the second half. As far as SG&A are concerned, we managed to maintain them stable in H2 versus +9% in H1, thanks to a savings action plan that went much farther than what we had initially planned. On slide 21, this led to an adjusted EBITDA margin improvement in H2 by one point, 7% in H2, and 6.5% in total year. Slide 22, as far as the net result is concerned, the evolution versus 2022 mostly derives from the decrease of EBITDA, of course. It's accentuated by some higher interest expenses. This is partially compensated by a lower income tax charge. We had also some impairment entries in the context of inflation in the P&L of the stores and also in the context of higher interest rates that reduced the value of some intangible assets. So we booked EUR 14 million more impairment compared to 2022, as you can see in the graph. In net-net the net result is EUR 11 million but stands at EUR 37 million before those non-cash, non-recurring bookings. On page 23, some figures about balance sheets and cash. First inventories, which had significantly increased in 2022, were reduced by EUR 10 million in 2023. This helps us control the variance of working capital, which does not significantly change compared to previous year, whereas the increase in 2022 versus 2021 had been much more significant. As far as CapEx are concerned, the level of investment is in line with usual percentage of the sales at 4.5% of revenue. Free cash flow generation after a first semester with a EUR -9 million consumption of cash is positive in H2 with a generation of EUR 23 million. This cash generation enables us to reduce our net financial debt on page 24 by EUR 20 million in the second semester, landing at EUR 286 million with a strong improvement of the trend over the year. On the right, you can see the usual split by line of financing, no big difference compared to what we shared during the half-year publication, as all the reimbursements of debt are performed in H1. As we had already shared, the debt extension with all big lines, state-guaranteed loan and term loan and RCF, now ending in 2026 or 2027. The ratio net debt divided by EBITDA is just above 2.5 at 2.54-something. This slight deviation has, of course, been shared and authorized by our lenders. We'll pay the highest attention to the level of net financial debt throughout 2024. This point is a very important one in our action plan for 2024 and onwards that Isabelle will now present. Thank you, Patricia. Let's move on now to the action plan. After a tough 2023, SMCP will accelerate its midterm action plan to foster growth and protect profitability with four key priorities. Our action plan is articulated as follows. You can follow it on slide 26. First action would be to reignite growth and gain market share because you can keep on gaining market share even in a tough environment, to mitigate risk across geographies, improve efficiency, which means not only cutting our spending but spending more efficiently and having expenses that are more contributing to the business improvement, and protect profit, cash, and liquidity. I will present you the three first priorities, and Patricia will explain the last one. Moving on to slide 27. First, in challenging market conditions with a lot of uncertainty, SMCP has many assets to reignite growth and gain market share. First asset would be our brand desirability and constant brand relevance and positioning. The priority is to voice out louder and clearer the specificity of our brand to foster the desirability by sharpening further brand singularity and personality and make it resonate to relevant audiences. Adapting product architecture and merchandising, which means increase the share of carryover and updated products to reduce fashion risk and leverage novelty to animate collections, and also reinforce accessory and men contribution. Developing qualitative marketing investment with more local diffusion by localizing content creation while ensuring global consistent messaging, increased share of diffusion, and focus on digital support, obviously. Second point would be to maximize our product offer by becoming an accessory destination, especially in Europe, would be a key growth driver for the group, mainly for Sandro, Maje, and Claudie Pierlot, obviously. For example, we boost the bags, belts, footwear, and smaller goods launches and marketing support. The recent launch of the new Miss M bag at Maje is a perfect example of a women-winning formula. We also want to boost the men business by several initiatives like, for example, leverage the gender fluidity in collection and communication, expand internationally, and adapt the network to take into account local specificities, for example, being on the right floors of the mall for men activities. We will continue to enrich our product offer with new categories like, for example, channel teams have a true passion for lifestyle and home products, and they are contemplating new product additions and new interesting launches. Third priority regarding the boosting of digital opportunities. We are determined to take advantage of the global replatforming we are rolling out as I speak on our DTC site, which will start in March. This will enable us to fully exploit omnichannel capabilities and mobile function. We'll also keep on working on international development such as CrossBorder, which will help us to serve under-penetrated countries by shipping from adjacent countries. We'll also continue to address local specificities like in China, for instance, which has, as you know, its own digital ecosystem and take advantage of live streaming capabilities on Chinese platforms such as Douyin and Little Red Book. And that's only one of the examples of the many options that we have in the digital Chinese ecosystem. Fourth priority, we'll finish with initiatives to enrich our business model. In the same time, we will enrich our business model and seize new retail opportunities offered by retail partners and travel retail operators, for example, in European and American airports. And of course, we'll continue to integrate organically sustainability in our business model with the acceleration of traceable, certified, responsible collection and also circular business acceleration that we've already started with most of our brands. Moving on to Slide 28, geographies now. The main message on this slide is about rebalancing. We have to seize opportunities everywhere and avoid depending too much on some markets. We have had a strong focus on China over the past few years with an extensive development in more than 40 cities. While we continue to believe in the huge potential of this market, we also have the capacity to rebalance our geographical footprint by shifting focus to other potential development areas, as I mentioned before, while enhancing partner-centric expansion in key markets. After more than 10 years of fast-paced expansion in China with more than 200 stores, this is now the time to optimize our exposure on this market in order to adapt to new market conditions. After a complete review, we have decided to resize the network by closing the less profitable point of sales, circa 30 in 2024, approximately 15% of the network, to focus on the most profitable stores. Of course, we will keep the capability to rebound in China when the market will get back to solid growth rates. Globally, we have the agility to rethink our presence and to challenge the business model in areas where the cost of operation and the complexity are not in line with expected profitability. In this case, we have three options: better mutualize between brands, switch to partner operation, or close as we do in China. In parallel, we are accelerating opportunities in geographies with obvious potential. We have local partners, for example, Middle East, India, as I mentioned before, or South America that we're exploring as I speak. We'll also address new countries with CrossBorder and digital, as I already mentioned, in order to test the market before entering into either a partner format or a direct format. And as far as travel retail is concerned, we're also working on a rollout in Europe after a good proof of concept in some airports in Asia. Third priority is about efficiency. As you can understand in this slide, this is not all about cutting. It's also about optimizing, allocating, or reallocating, and challenging. It will encompass several aspects, processes first. We are already a group with a lot of mutualization in many functions, and this has been a part of the success story of SMCP. We'll go a step further, and we're currently looking into how we can accelerate in this respect. This will, of course, have a favorable impact on the cost side. We are currently conducting a very thorough review of all categories of spending to investigate and negotiate all possible improvements of conditions with our partners. Second, inventories. We have developed tools and policies in the past to enhance inventory management, and we have made a lot of progress. But we know that we can go deeper in the efficiency by optimizing the number and productivity of references and by relying even more on planning, forecasting, and better clustering in our very important network. Third, CapEx. We'll challenge our design, project roadmap, and conduct of projects, be it in stores or in information systems, to save money, of course, and gain agility thanks to a fine-tuning of the dimension and scope of our projects. All the previously mentioned actions are focused on an essential goal, which is to protect profit and cash generation, as indicated on slide 30. We will continue the strict monitoring of OPEX that we had initiated some months ago. Now, our goal is to ensure that year-over-year, we manage to maintain such savings not only by one-off cuts but also by making sure that we identify the correct way of working, enabling us to secure that savings will last. We will give priority to the most productive investments, especially in stores. For example, in 2024, we will overweight in our store projects the opening in corners in department stores, which are at the same time lighter in terms of CapEx and also safer in terms of variable costs. We have also engaged in important reflection on how we can adapt the business model of smaller brands to accelerate their growth and profitability. In the way we work, our goal is to keep supporting them thanks to our central teams but being more agile, for example, in their participations or not to group transversal projects. In the way we develop them, we will adapt their business model, and they will benefit from the initiatives we described earlier on retail and non-retail developments with partners but also with a bit of wholesale. Ultimately, this will serve cash generation with a goal to continue to reduce the net debt of the group. Thank you, Patricia. I confirm that what we've just presented, the underlying principle is to secure the return to a continuous path of profitable growth. I know that you will ask for figures about this plan, but it's a major plan with a lot of topics with organizational impact and network adjustments, meaning that we are still in the process of quantifying the various options that we have identified and will be more granular during Q1 publication at the end of April. As far as 2024 is concerned, what we can see so far is that the market conditions are quite similar to Q4 2023, meaning that 2024 will once again be an area of two different stories with still a tough H1 and an expected improvement in H2. We lack visibility on economic perspective, so we won't give a guidance for 2024. I thank you for your attention, and now we will take your questions. Thank you. Operator, I think we have one question. Thank you. As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question on today's call, please press star one on your telephone keypad to register your question. If you'd like to withdraw your question for any reason, you may press star two. You will be advised when to ask your question. Our first question is from Marie- Line Fort with SG. Please go ahead. Yes. Good evening. Thank you for taking my questions. First question is about India. What kind of contribution can we expect from your new partnership, and how is the deal structured? Will you consolidate turnover on EC? First question. The second one is about the write-off you passed on the 2023 full year earnings. I suspect that it corresponds to the closure of China's stores. Will you need to anticipate another impact for 2024? I would like to know also how was the sales period because I know that January was pretty difficult, at least in France and probably in Europe. Do you expect some impact on your gross margin? And last questions, just in terms of figures for our model. Is it possible to get the personnel expenses for 2023? Thank you very much. India. India, I mean, it's not going to be extremely material in 2024. We are going to open four stores, and we're really excited about the development and the way it's going to roll out. We have two other openings that are planned for end of 2024 and early 2025. So we think it's going to be only the beginning of a story, and we think that it can be among the three, four important partners that we have with Korea and the Middle East. So we have a strong expectation about India. The other point I could answer is about the sales. Usually, Q1 has a strong weight of end-of-season sales for winter, which means that the beginning of the year remains in the same trend as December. As you mentioned, January has been a complicated month, but you wanted to know the impact on the gross margin. What we can say is that what we see in February is a good takeoff of our spring, summer collections, which are now more really rebalancing the full winter end-of-season sales in our stores. It's a very encouraging sign. For the timing, we see since mid-February a good takeover, I would say, of the spring, summer collection. That's what we can say at this stage. I will take the two other points. Good evening, Marie-Line. Regarding the write-off, I guess you were talking about the non-recurring expense. It's not about the closures in China, actually. Regarding the closures in China, we close the stores at the end of the leases, and it's quite easy in China because the leases are short. So the stores are amortized, so the cost is very limited. Now, what you have below the EBIT is more the application of the testing of stores in general and key moneys and intangible assets of the stores. This results from the usual exercise that we do each year. For example, in 2022, I think we had EUR 12 million depreciation on that. It's a bit higher in 2023, mostly from the fact that with the increase of interest rates, the WACC is also higher. Hence, the value of the assets is lower. So to talk about 2024 is really difficult. It will depend on the evolution of interest rates, which are, it's not me speaking, but just reading the press, expected to stabilize or even decrease a little bit. So let's hope so. And SG&A expenses, you have the total on page 37. It's a +7.% something compared to full year 2022. And it benefited just like the rest of the OPEX of a pace of growth which was more contained in H2 compared to H1. Thank you. Operator, do we have another question? We do. Our next question is from Gilles Crespel with Alizés. Please go ahead. Good evening, Patricia. Good evening, Isabelle. Can you hear me? Yes, yes. All right. Great. Thank you for the presentation. Thank you for taking my question. I would have two, if I may. One is, could you give us an idea on the e-commerce side about what was the total sales amount for the year or for Q4, just to have an idea? You used to communicate on that. The second point is on the OPEX for 2023. Could you give us a split in terms of well, there was a strong impact, a strong increase of those OPEX, and you mentioned it was mitigated in the second half of the year. Could you give us an idea how rent versus staff evolved? What was the, well, the largest impact? What will be the actions taken to mitigate further growth in, well, 2024 on, well, rent or staff costs? Okay. Maybe I can just answer on the figures, and I will let Isabelle elaborate more. As we mentioned, digital is 22% of sales, so it's about EUR 270 million or something like that. The share does not. There's no reason why it should change in certain quarters versus others. Just it can evolve depending on the timing of some e-commerce operations or commercial operations. But no major. No major difference. Significant difference across. In terms of rent and staff, the average increase on staff costs per head was something, let's say, depending on the sanctions, from 3%-4% in 2023. The rent, it depends on where you consider it. But to give you an example, which is a big one, in France, the rents in freestanding stores are there is an index, the public index, which was +6% in 2023. Which obviously affected only our freestanding store and not the. It's about the same team in Europe. And not the commercial centers or department stores. Mitigation of those expenses, it's obviously the plan that I mentioned earlier, which is about spending better, readjusting the network, and finding some way of reducing the network where we have some dilutive effect, and definitely also finding a way to operate better and using the strength of the group to be able to mutualize and optimize some costs. And the review, obviously, of all our contracts that Patricia mentioned earlier, the ability to really review all our contracts from logistics to traffic building, all the contracts or store construction. So it's that ongoing work that we're doing to be able to mitigate those effects. Thank you. I think we are done now with the questions, so I wish you a very nice evening. Thank you very much. That concludes today's conference. You may now disconnect.