Hello everyone, and a very warm welcome to our earnings call. My name is Marcus Lindqvist, and I'm the interim CEO of CDON until the 1st of May. As we yesterday announced, is when our CEO, Kristoffer Väliharju, will return back to his duties. As we have many new investors with us on this call, we will start by giving you an overview of our marketplace business and how we look at the dynamics in the market. With that, let's jump into the presentation. Could we move to slide three, please? Over the last 20 years, CDON has been a pioneer within Nordic e-commerce. Over the last couple of years, we have made a transformation from a vertical e-commerce retailer to become a leading local marketplace in the Nordics. In just two years, we have gone from having a 20% of our business being third-party sales to now having almost 80% of our sales coming from merchants. We have 2.3 million active consumers as customers, and more than 1,700 merchants are now live in our platform. Next slide, please. Analyst reports tells us that marketplaces have a 50% share of all e-commerce business on a global scale. When we look at the Nordics, the marketplace economy does not account for more than low single digits, which is interesting if compared to other markets such like the U.K., Germany, and the Netherlands, for example, who all are on the 30% level. In perspective, the Nordic economy is equal in size to more populated European markets, and the Nordics also have a GDP that is almost two times the European mean. As the Nordic e-commerce market will mature, we at CDON aspire to take a leading position. We see a great opportunity to further grow as the market matures. We do not believe that the Nordics will be a winner-takes-it-all market, as we can see that in most other regions, there are more than one successful marketplace. Let's move to slide five, please. Why do over 50% of global e-commerce business go via marketplaces? At the marketplace, customers get access to a large assortment of products and merchants get access to new customers. With that, they can drive their sales more efficiently. What we at CDON want to be is to be the starting point for shopping in the Nordics for consumers, and for merchants, we want to be the best partner to drive their sales. Let's move to slide six, please. What do we mean by being a sales engine for merchants? Over the last year, we have focused at creating a good merchant offering. We have developed tools for merchants to make it easier to onboard and drive their sales. We now have tools for automatic onboarding, data insights, monitoring of pricing, and content optimization. We have also invested and grown our merchant onboarding team to give an even better local support for our merchants. As a result of this, we can now see that we have a good momentum in our onboarding team, showing a steady inflow of new merchants. Let's move to slide seven, please. Customers, on the other hand, go to CDON for our wide assortment and great prices. By shopping at CDON, the customer can choose from products from more than 1,700 merchants with one single checkout. To be successful at the marketplace, you need to have an excellent experience for both the consumer as well as the merchant. Even though we have a wide assortment and great pricing, we're not happy with the customer experience that we have today. Therefore, we have started to, and we continue to accelerate our focus, investments, and efforts to improve our consumer experience. Next slide, please. We're still in an early phase building the best possible experience and have a lot of work cut out for us. If we succeed, the upside is very attractive for CDON. To give you an idea of the opportunity, looking at the Netherlands, which has a similar population and culture as the Nordics, the leading marketplace, bol.com, has captured approximately 20% of the market. Should CDON in the future reach a similar position as bol.com as the market matures, this equals to SEK 55 billion in GMV. How do we get there? Let's go to slide nine. When you're building a successful marketplace, this follows a well-known and established playbook. As you grow merchants, you increase your assortment and improve prices. This adds to the customer experience, which in its turn drives more traffic and sales, making the marketplace more relevant for even more new merchants to join. When you get all of these four components of the flywheel in place, you can accelerate investments in merchant and customer acquisition, with the best possible return on investment. Let's move to the next slide. At CDON, we will always prioritize the weakest spot in our flywheel. Our current strengths are in the assortment and our broad consumer and merchant base, which creates the critical mass necessary to run a marketplace. This is also, in our view, the toughest part of the journey when you build a marketplace. CDON has achieved this critical mass over the last couple of years, and as our aspiration is to be the leading Nordic marketplace, we will now need to intensify our focus on our weakest spot, which is the customer experience. Slide 11, please. As I previously mentioned, CDON has reached a favorable position as we now have a critical mass of liquidity in our platform. Since this is now reached, we will increase our efforts to optimize our business. Coming important steps include an upgrade of the checkout and simplified navigation and categorization on the site. We expect gradual improvements in these areas, both short-term and on a continuous basis, as we are establishing an organization and leadership in the business to maintain rapid improvement in these specific areas. A part of this work is to optimize and position the organization according to our current technical development needs. For example, as our new platform allows for a higher degree of automation, we have during the quarter redesigned parts of the organization to increase our capabilities to focus on the customer experience. As we see our customer cohorts improving, we will then gradually ramp up customer and merchant acquisition accordingly. Slide 20 please. With that, let's look at the summary on the first quarter. During the quarter, we had the highest merchant intake ever, with more than 200 new merchants joining our platform. We could also see a continued marketplace growth, where our marketplace business in the quarter grew 25%. During the quarter, we also changed our ERP system. I'm happy to say that this was done without any disruption to the business. We also made several investments directly linked to our efforts to improve our customer experience. On the negative side, we still do have some challenges linked to the release of our new platform back in October last year. Those were mainly related to merchandising and indexing of products in our traffic channels, which in its turn have had a negative effect on our traffic volumes during the quarter. With that, let's now jump into the financials. Niclas, could you please go ahead? Yes. Thank you, Marcus. Let's move to slide number 13. Here we can see the transformation that we have done in the past year. We have successfully built a marketplace with sales, a number of merchants that has reached a solid liquidity. In the meantime, we have also phased out our CDON Retail business. Looking at the quarter, we can see a continued GMV growth from CDON Marketplace of 25%, and total sales amounting to SEK 380 million. In total, now 80% of our GMV comes from the marketplace business. Moving to the next slide, please. Our income statement. We can see that the growth of GMV for marketplace resulted in a net sales of SEK 41 million, an increase of 20%, and a gross profit that increased with 20% to SEK 38 million. The commission from merchants grew 29%. Lower ads and financial income is the main reason for net sales and gross profits not growing in line with GMV. CDON Retail declined with 39%. We see an increased gross margin related to the remaining part of the business as a higher underlying margin structure. As a result of the rapid change in business model, total net sales declined with 29%. This also impacts our gross margin as we increased high-margin third-party volumes and reduced lower-margin retail business. This resulted in a gross margin that increased with 12.5 percentage points in the quarter and amounted to 36.5%. In the quarter, EBITDA amounted to minus SEK 9 million. We did have increased operating expenses in the quarter. This is related to further investments in new competencies, but also a one-off cost related to a reorganization of SEK 1.6 million and currency effect versus last year of SEK 1.6 million. EBIT was minus SEK 14, which is SEK 1 million better than last year. Last year, we did do a write-down of an intangible asset of approximately SEK 7 million. Moving to next slide, please, and looking at some of the drivers of the business. Starting with traffic or number of visits, we did see a decline of 9%. We did, as mentioned before, have problems related to the platform, which did impact our visits negatively. Total number of orders were flat versus last year thus the growth of GMV came from a higher average order value. Our customer base, as mentioned before, continues to grow, and in total now 2.3 million customers have purchased at CDON in the last 12 months. Momentum of adding new merchants is also good. We have 54% more merchants compared to Q1 2020, and in total, 212 merchants joined us in the quarter, which is all-time high. Moving to next slide and looking at the cash flow and the balance sheet. As a result of the CDON Retail business being phased out, we continue to decrease our inventory accordingly. It amounted to SEK 21 million, which is SEK 41 million lower than last year. The cash flow from operations during the seasonally weak quarter amounted to minus SEK 100 million, compared to minus SEK 126 million last year. This is mainly driven by large outflow of payables to suppliers and merchants during January, coming from high season with very large volumes. In the quarter, we invested SEK 6 million in CapEx, which is about the same level since last year, which resulted in a total cash flow of SEK -107 million and a cash balance of SEK 63 million, which is SEK 18 million higher than the same time last year. With that, I hand back over to you, Marcus Lindqvist. Thank you, Niclas. Let's move to slide 17, please. What should you take away from today's call? The Nordic marketplace opportunity is attractive, and it is up for grabs. At the same time, we have reached the tipping point of critical mass in marketplace liquidity. We will now further accelerate our pace of development and investments, meaning that we will use the room for investments that our cash flow from operating activities allows to accelerate the pace of development. In the near term, our focus will be on improving our customer experience. With that, we're ready with the presentation, and we are now ready to answer any questions that you might have. Operator, do we have any questions? Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you do wish to ask a question, please press 01 on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw your question, you may do so by pressing 02 to cancel. That is 01 to register for a question. Please note that the Q&A session will finish at 3:00 P.M. Swedish time. You are allowed to ask two questions at a time before you can reenter the queue. We have a question from the line of Nicklas Fhärm from SEB. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Thanks, operator. Good afternoon, everybody. My first question actually goes to the advertising and service-related income. I was just going to ask you if the 1,700-odd merchants now on the platform, are they all now paying the SEK 299 monthly subscription fee? Hello, Nicklas. Hey, Marcus. Quick question to begin. I was kind of expecting more, but yes, they are. Yes. Perfect. To follow up, I was going to ask you if you could share with us the levels of advertising and other non-take rate sales in Q1, please. Yes, as I did mention, the main revenues that we have there is the advertising that today is from very low levels, and the financial income. That is the main two, apart from the take rate and the subscription fee that we take from merchants. Yeah. Would it be fair to say that the actual take rate on 3P GMV was slightly lower in Q1 this year compared to Q1 last year? We don't disclose the exact take rate, but as I say, it grows 29% compared to a GMV of 25%. Yes. Thank you. My final question would be, when we look into the remainder of this year, do you expect to keep up the growth rate in the number of merchants added to the platform in Q1 also for the remainder of 2021? That's a tough question to answer, Nicklas, but we have a good momentum, and we have had for quite a while now. As Niclas also mentioned, our intake in the first quarter was on a very high level to look at it historically. We believe we can do more, of course, but cannot really disclose on what levels we will grow that during the year. We have continued to have and see a good momentum also at the start of this quarter. Wonderful. Thank you for answering all these questions, and maybe I can come back later into the call. Thank you, Nicklas. I remind you that if you want to ask a question, please press 01 on your telephone keypad now. Please remember you are allowed to ask two questions at a time before you can re-enter the queue. We have a question from the line of Adam Wyden from ADW Capital. Please go ahead. Hi, guys. Thank you for taking my question. Congratulations. It looks like you guys are making great progress. Definitely really appreciate your marketing materials and investor presentation. I think that probably covered my first question. I think you guys laid out nicely if you guys get some more penetration in a market like Netherlands, you guys are looking at a SEK 55 billion opportunity in terms of GMV. Obviously, the rates of gross margin, if your take rates are better, you'll probably make even more gross profit. That's really helpful in terms of framing the scale of the opportunity. My question really revolves around how you get to what I would call comparable growth in the early evolution of marketplaces. I think you talked about, you have these early adopters, and now you need to improve the customer experience so you don't have merchants log on and then log off, and then you never get them back. I think that was what I was interpreting through the slide. That means that you guys want to do investment on the customer experience, which we love, because obviously, when we have fans, not customers, they keep coming back and basket size goes up. You still haven't really gotten your cost of capital. I noticed you guys put on Savneet Singh as a board nominee, and obviously, he's had great experience in terms of getting the market to understand the value of the platform and raising capital around that. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about what I would call burning cash or spending money in excess of EBIT so you can accelerate product development to reinvigorate GMV growth such that we get back to 50% or 100%? Because reading through the lines, it kind of feels like you guys have, not hit a wall, but you're growing at a nice clip, but you want to make sure that you grow healthily and athletically in a way that you can serve your customer. And in order to do that, you've got to reinvest a lot more, and the market has not really availed us the opportunity of raising capital to finance this opportunity. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, sure. Let's try to get a little bit more into that. As we mentioned in the presentation, we will increase our investments when it comes to bettering and making our customer experience better. The levels that we will invest into that will be on what we can finance out of the operations. As you know, any kind of further investment is more of a discussion for the board and for the owners to have at the AGM and so forth. I will stay out of that and not speculate on that level. The kind of cash flows, if you look at it over a cycle, actually allows us to do quite a lot if we put that money in the right place. That's why we're trying to get more of that into the customer experience, making sure that we fix some of the low-hanging fruits so that the investments, when we then start to more drive new customers and new merchants into the site, actually make sense, following the development on our customer cohorts. I cannot be more precise than that, Adam. That's the kind of thinking around it. You guys don't plan on spending more than what you're internally generating is kind of the plan as it is today, but that's obviously subject to change? Yes. That's subject to change, but it's specifically a subject for the board and for our shareholders to discuss. It's nothing I want to speculate in what that discussion or might-be discussions will eventually unfold for us. What we can plan as a management team is what can we do with the means that we have, and that's what we're doing now. Just reading between the lines, you guys think that with the means that you have today, that you can see GMV growth go back to levels that we saw last year, substantially higher than where we are right now? That's kind of a timing discussion then, Adam. What we are focusing now and what we'll focus on now is to invest in our customer experience. That needs to improve, and then it's going to prove then to start to more move that investment into customer acquisition. Then, of course, you should see a steady growth coming out of that investment. We're allocating at the moment more into fixing customer experience than allocating for growth for the sake of growth. When we have the cohorts that we have, it doesn't really make sense to put that money into growth at the time being. It is also always a prioritization, and priority now is to put that money and put those investments into fixing the customer experience. Then following that, we, of course, believe that we should be able to continue to grow. We have done that before, and we don't see anything hindering us to continue to do that, but we need to fix the customer experience first. Sure. Yeah. No, look, the merchants grew 54%, certainly that is. Yeah a leading indicator of future GMV growth. Yeah. For sure. All right. That's it for me. Thank you, guys. Thank you, Adam. There are no further phone questions at this time, so I hand back to the speakers. It looks like we have a call on the chat there, right? Yeah, we have an incoming on the chat here. I can read it out. It is a question from Brad Hathaway. It is around when we expect the new platform to be optimized. It is a very good question since we have had some issues with not the platform itself, but parts of that during the quarter. Just to reiterate what has been the problem. Well, one thing has been our traffic feeds that has not worked the way we should like it to do. That has had a negative effect not only on the traffic itself, and we're then talking about paid traffic, not organic traffic, but on the paid traffic. That has caused a lower-than-expected traffic as well as a little bit higher marketing cost to drive that traffic. That is something we're working very intensely to fix, and we have done a lot of progress during the quarter. We will continue to work on that. We see that is a problem that we are on top of and that we will manage. The other part has been merchandising that has been automated on the site itself, and that merchandising has worked, but not in the way we wanted it to do and in the way we wanted it to be. That was something that we actually already addressed, and that merchandising is now working. We see that we make a lot of progress when it comes to optimizing the platform as we go, and we are in control of what areas that needs to be fixed. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer than you would like it to do, but it is under control. It's not the entire platform, as I said. It's our traffic feeds, and it's been the merchandising on the site. Any more questions on the line? Yeah, we do have a follow-up question from the line of Nicklas Fhärm from SEB. Please go ahead. Thanks again, operator, and thanks for allowing me one more question. I just wanted to follow up. I think obviously the questions we've discussed, in particular relating to 3P and the possibilities going forward are clearly the most important. Here and now, I just note that in terms of costs, looking at, for example, selling to sales and admin to sales, it's obviously quite a leap year-on-year in cost ratios. Even if we sort of adjust for the slight but still one-off non-recurring item that you report in the quarter, admin is up to pretty much 20% of sales and selling costs are at 25% of sales. My question is really, do you think, and I realize it relates to what you actually produce in terms of sales, but do you think there are some particular reasons for why we should expect these cost ratios to perhaps come down a bit over the coming quarters? What would that be in more detail? Do you think that you will have to maintain these cost ratios in 2021? Right. When it comes to what I believe you refer to as admin costs, those costs are, of course, operations for the platform as well. It's not kind of bookkeeping altogether. No. It is operations. Also it is directly linked to our onboarding team that supports our merchants. And in those areas, we have increased our spend, or you could say we have invested more when it comes to resources in order to ramp up the pace of development when it comes to customer experience. We foresee that we will continue to be on these levels or a little bit higher during the period ahead, because it is an investment that we believe is really worth putting money into. As we then start to kind of accelerate growth, we will see that the business will scale, which we have also shown previously. We are increasing the costs or the cost levels in the company, but that's related to development pace and improvement of customer experience. Once we get that kind of on a higher level, you will see that the business will scale when it comes to sales to cost ratios. All right. Without putting words back into your mouth, to me, it reads like we should expect somewhat continuing higher cost levels reflecting these investments that you just laid out for this year. Is that about right? It is right, there's kind of two sides of that. That is one thing. It's also that we are kind of redistributing resources internally so that we can move resources more into working with our customer experience. It doesn't necessarily mean that when we say that we will increase our investments in customer experience, it's all new hires. It's also redistribution of the teams internally, that way we really put an effort on that to get that to a better or higher level. Yes, you should read that correctly, that we will be on slightly higher or higher cost levels because we need to invest in this area. Excellent. Marcus, thank you so much. Niclas and everybody else, thanks for taking all these questions. Thank you, Nicklas. Thank you. We have a question from the line of William Parmar from Foundation Partners. Please go ahead. Hey, guys. Congratulations on your progress so far. I think you've laid out a very compelling vision for what this business could look like, given the size of the opportunity, and it sounds like you're making all the right investments in customer experience. Could you lay out what is your vision of what great customer experience looks like? If I'm a Nordic consumer, how should I be able to experience CDON a year from now or whenever these investments are made and bear fruit? Vis-à-vis what it looks like now. I believe that it's a little bit of a stepwise journey. At the moment, we are kind of on the level where we are disappointed with our own customer experience. That means that we need to sort out categorization, navigation, search on site. We need to sort out delivery, and ability to choose your delivery method in the checkout. That's the kind of obvious things that we will work with near term. That, of course, will mean that the customer has a very much easier way to navigate and find products on site, which is part of the kind of first step. Looking at it a little bit long term, we will continue, as we mentioned before, look into, for example, fulfilled by solutions. That is something we're looking into to making an ecosystem for our merchants and our customers around delivery times, preciseness of delivery. Those are kind of things that it's a little bit long term or on the horizon to work with. Here and now, it is the kind of in-store experience. It's the checkout. It's the delivery part that needs to be improved. Yeah, that's helpful. I guess, looking at the growth you've had so far, obviously, we've had some boost from COVID, but you've still been able to grow very nicely even before these investments have borne fruit. The CDON of today doesn't look that different from the CDON of, let's say, a year ago. Should we read from that one would expect as the customer experience improves substantially, because these are not two-month out investments, I assume, that we could see meaningful acceleration of growth as people experience a new CDON, and then you're able to sort of really get the flywheel going with better customer experience, driving conversions, as has happened everywhere around the world where marketplaces have been successful? Is that the right way to think about it for the next few years? I believe so. First of all, if you have a customer experience that is below what you kind of should expect, that of course, hinders sales, and it is affecting the cohorts and repurchase rates. When we kind of sort that out during the year and the years to come, because it's a never-ending kind of work. You will see repurchase rates and customer cohorts improving, and that will drive sales organically. On top of that, it also then makes sense to invest more in customer acquisitions, which will then fuel sales even further. It's kind of a two-way street on that. Right. Okay. It sounds like we have barely started scratching the surface of the opportunity. It would be a mistake to simply linearly extrapolate from today's numbers, that things look like they could get much better over time as these things materialize. Yeah, for sure. We see the opportunity in the market. We understand and see that there is a land-grabbing opportunity to take. We need to get our customer experience to a better level. Based on that, we can then start to be really aggressive when it comes to driving new customers and new merchants into the site. Yes, for sure, we see that opportunity. Very exciting. Thanks a lot. Thanks. We have a web question from Brad Hathaway, who wonders, "What is your view on long-term take rate? Our take rates today, or we can say that we don't see any major changes from where we are today on the levels that we see. Our take rates diverse depending on the product mix and what sort of the categories that we sell in. I would say that the fluctuations over time will more depend on which categories that we grow in. So far, the rates or the levels that we see today, we don't see any major changes to that going forward. Thank you. We also have an audio question from the line of Charles MacDougall from Keyman Wealth. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Hi, guys. Could you maybe discuss the cadence of monthly, year-over-year marketplace GMV sales growth in recent months, including April? Is April similar to Q1? Is there any acceleration? The second part of that question is it a goal for you guys to list in the U.S. over the long term to get that cost of capital right? Thanks, Charles. On the first question, the sales over the first quarter month-over-month has been pretty stable, even though we started out on a low level when we had some larger issues with our traffic channels. That kind of implies that first part of the quarter was a little bit lower, and then the rest was kind of equal. When it comes to April and forward, we don't really want to disclose and talk about trend into that. What I said is that our merchant onboarding team is continuing to do a good job. It's too early to have a say on where we are in the quarter with the sales. I'm not going to comment on that. When it comes to listing, that's once again, something for the board and for our shareholders to discuss, not really something that we as a management team can speculate on. Okay, thank you. Okay, thanks a lot. There are no further questions at this time, so I hand back to the speakers. Thank you, operator. Let's then end the call. I really want to convey a big thank you for your interest in CDON and for your participation in today's call, and for all the interesting and very good questions that we got. We look forward to speaking and hearing from you again soon in the future. Thank you very much.
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