Ceconomy AG (CECV.F) Q3 FY2025 Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Ceconomy Q3 and 9 Months Results Webcast and Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Fabienne Caron, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Sharon. Welcome, everyone, and a very good morning to you all. We're excited to present our Q3 results today, and I'm joined by our CEO, Dr. Kai-Ulrich Deissner; and our CFO, Remko Rijnders. Just a brief note before we explore our performance. Please be aware that we'll be discussing certain forward-looking statements. For more information, please refer to our disclaimer, and you'll also find the full presentation available on our website. This call is being recorded and will be posted on the website later today for your reference. With that, I'm delighted to pass the call over to Kai, who will guide us through the key highlights of our third quarter. Kai, it's all yours.

Thank you, Fabienne. Good morning, everyone. I imagine in the middle of holidays for most of you and thank you for joining us today for the presentation of our Q3 and our 9 months results. Of course, with many of you, we've been in close contact over the past few weeks because of the latest developments in our company. As you know, we have signed an investment agreement with JD.com and JD in parallel has announced a public offer. While today is all about Q3 and 9 months, there is a link between the 2. I think is we're coming from a position of strength. We've already achieved a lot over the past few years, and that has made us an attractive partner for JD. As you will see, our third quarter shows this clearly as well. And so, then this partnership will give us the chance to further accelerate our development in many areas, even more. With it, we will not just be able to follow the trends in European retail, but to shape them and drive them forward. That means growth and new opportunities for all of us, for us as a company, our employees, our partners and of course, first and foremost, for our customers. Before we now go into detail on Q3, let me emphasize one key message. We have been growing for 2.5 years quarter after quarter after quarter. That's 10 quarters in a row now. But we're not just growing. We have actually accelerated our positive development in some areas, and that's despite, as you know, challenging market environment in retail. Behind all of that, our sizable growth businesses have kept expanding again. This is a valuable extension of our core retail business and fundamentally broadens the basis for our whole company. At the same time, we're making tangible progress, as you will see, in leveraging our data capabilities. We do improve in this way, the customer experience, personalize our approach and make every interaction with customers more relevant. Throughout all of this, we've kept a sharp focus on cost management, liquidity and profitability. This then ensures a strong foundation for sustainable growth. Again, as you know, following our positive performance, we've already specified our growth outlook for the financial year '24-'25. This once again underpins our confidence in the road ahead. Let me now begin with the summary of our results. Starting with Slide 3. In this quarter, we've once again strengthened our promise to put the customer in the center of everything we do. One important building block of that is our logistics. We do want to ensure smooth delivery and fulfillment processes for our customers. Now in the past quarter, we've opened new regional fulfillment centers in Germany to deliver to that promise. These fulfillment hubs are already making our delivery network more efficient and responsive effectively faster for our customers in their areas. And secondly, in the Netherlands, we've introduced same-day delivery, but not just same-day delivery, but same-day delivery for bulky items, what we call 2-man handling items, a significant enhancement that responds directly to customer needs. We do ensure speed and convenience. And speaking of speed, we've also expanded our customer service with our delivery in 19 minutes. We're now live in 5 countries. We started in Germany and in Spain, Hungary, Poland and since May, now also Austria. Effectively, this instant delivery is a favorite among our customers, and it helps us strengthen our customer service and actually outperform many of our competitors. And thirdly, our loyalty program has reached a major milestone, hitting 50 million members now. Reaching that number, we're ahead of our initial plan. As you may remember, we initially planned to reach 50 million only at the end of the next financial year. So, we're 5 quarters early. And we further want to improve our loyalty programs. In Germany, for example, we've now merged the 2 formerly separate programs, my MediaMarkt and my Saturn to ensure an even better and smoother customer experience and raising our efficiency. These are only highlights, but they do show that we're consistently working on delivering best-in-class customer experience. Let's now have a quick look on our financials on Slide 4 before Remko will go into more detail a bit later. Sales grew 5.1% to EUR 4.8 billion in the third quarter. On a like-for-like basis, that equals 4.4% growth. Adjusted EBIT has also improved by EUR 20 million, as I said, the 10th consecutive quarter of year-on-year growth. And our NPS, most importantly, reached a new all-time high of 63. It is in light of these positive developments that we specified our outlook, as you know. We now expect and we reiterate that here, an adjusted EBIT of around EUR 375 million for the full financial year '24/'25. All of these results show we have built significant momentum in Q3. We deliver sustainable profitable growth even in a challenging market environment. And that's because our Experience Electronics strategy gains more and more traction because we always, always have the customer in focus. As I already mentioned, our results picked up momentum in the past quarter. This positive development was especially driven by our growth businesses. Service & Solutions income increased strongly and Marketplace GMV as well as retail media income also kept their growth momentum. These still new noncore retail businesses do make us stronger each quarter. And secondly, we see our efforts are paying off in growing omnichannel sales. Our bricks-and-mortar sales grew by 3%, while our online sales were up by a strong 12%. Thus, our online share was at almost 25%. That's growing 240 basis points year-over-year. Then let's take a different look. Let's look at the countries. We posted strong sales performance in Turkey, Switzerland and Spain. In Germany, to be fair, the market was still very volatile, yet our profitability improved in Germany. And this is also the case for Netherlands, Spain and again, Turkey. This then led to an overall increase in profitability by EUR 20 million in EBIT. Our EBIT margin grew even by an impressive 40 basis points year-over-year. And as I said, the number of our loyalty members has now surpassed 50 million. This is an important milestone for us as it means we've reached another one of our goals for the upcoming financial year ahead of schedule. And then all the way down the P&L, our reported earnings per share was up EUR 0.10 in Q3, and our free cash flow improved by an astonishing EUR 132 million. Let's quickly turn to Slide 6. That's the key table we share every quarter to track progress on our key pledges. And in Q3, as you can see, we again made substantial progress across all relevant KPIs. The 50 million loyalty customers, which you find on this page are, of course, essentially a valuable asset to us. Let me go more into detail here on the next slide. This strong loyalty base helps us to understand customer behavior. With that data and our AI knowledge, we continuously improve the shopping experience. Let me give you 3 examples from the past quarter. First, we now use AI for faster and more accurate problem solving in our customer service. We designed a dedicated solution and rolled it out in May in all our 11 countries, and the efforts already paid off. We saw a strong increase in our relevant NPS here. Secondly, thanks to AI, we can now assess and create our trade-in products more efficiently and more accurately. This helps us to increase client satisfaction as well as margin. And thirdly, we put our data to work to address our customers in a more targeted way. Our personalized campaigns are really well received and did lead to an increase in revenues. Let's take one more closer look at 2 of our strategic growth businesses. That's Retail Media and Marketplace on Slide 8. Both of those continue to show momentum in the past quarter and helped us to unlock new opportunities. We're bringing new retail media products to the market to further grow this business. What I'm talking about is audience extension, and it leverages valuable shopper insights and helps us to reach similar audiences, not on our website and our app, but on external websites and apps. With this, we effectively enhance the effectiveness of our advertising offer for partners. It's currently live in Germany, Austria and Italy, but we're working on further rollouts in the next quarter. In-store advertising, also as part of Retail Media is another area of progress. We do use the high traffic in our stores also for creating advertising space. This offer is now available in 8 countries. And then to the marketplace. Our marketplace is also expanding after Germany, Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy and Belgium. Poland is now the seventh country in which we went live with our webshop platform. Overall, this means that the marketplace covers an area of roughly 85% of our presence if you base it on revenues. What's missing are Switzerland, Turkey, Hungary and Luxembourg. So, we've come a good way to cover an astonishing part of our overall footprint with marketplace already. And our offering is constantly growing. We're seeing great success in new categories outside consumer electronics core, for example, fitness or e-mobility. I wanted to focus on these developments because they demonstrate the power and the flexibility of our growth businesses. Retail Media and Marketplace are 2 real engines for our group with accelerating success. As you can then see on Slide 9, our growth businesses continue to drive profitability. All of them contributed substantially to our gross profit growth in the past quarter, and they now represent already nearly 40% of that gross profit. Then turning to sustainability. I'm really pleased to report that we remain firmly on track. Both on a Q3 and on a 9-month basis, we did see a positive development throughout our KPIs. One of them that I wanted to single out is our better ways sales share, which is now at 26%. That's already 5 percentage points above our midterm goal for the end of next financial year '25 and '26. And with a number of strategic initiatives behind this, we further drive growth. In Germany and Hungary, we've introduced what we call green ambassadors in our stores. These are our sustainability experts on the shop floor who walk customers through very practical sustainability-related questions from what should I buy to how can I make this last longer or what services can help me get more out of my device. And if you go to one of those stores, you will recognize them, but they are green shirts unlike our usual proud red shirts. A particular highlight this quarter is the strong growth in our refurbished segment. Customer demand for refurbished products is rising constantly. We cater for that. Hence, we're also exploring new ways. I take Spain as an example. In Spain, we've launched a new refurbished in-store offer with third-party vendors. So effectively marketplace vendors that offer refurbished products in our stores to our customers. And finally, I'm particularly proud that we recently achieved an A rating in the CDP Supplier Engagement assessment for the very first time. This is a recognition that honors our overall commitment to climate action throughout our entire supply chain. It shows that we're not only keeping track of our own emissions, but also successfully supporting our partners in taking shared responsibility for climate protection. The bottom line is, once again, sustainability impacts everything we do from our operations to our product offerings and our business models. Let me finally turn to Slide 9. The momentum which we generated has translated into a strong performance over the first 9 months of the year, if you look at this. We've delivered consistent sales growth over the last 3 quarters. Our operational improvements and focus on profitability have led to sustained EBIT growth, making this once again the 10th consecutive quarter of growth. From our perspective, the results of the first 9 months demonstrate the resilience of our business model and the really successful execution of our strategic priorities. As we now look ahead to the final quarter, we're confident that this momentum will support us in achieving our full year targets. Now I want to hand over to Remko to take a closer look at our Q3 and of course, our 9 months financials. Remko?

Thank you, Kai, and good morning to all of you. I'm happy to guide you through the first figures for Q3 and the 9 months view, as Kai already mentioned. Let's start with sales and EBIT on Slide 13. We grew our sales in Q3 by 5.1% adjusted for currency and portfolio changes. And we grew omnichannel, so both brick-and-mortar and especially our online sales increased. On a reported basis, sales came in below prior year, but this is only due to exchange rate effects and technical effects of accounting for hyperinflation in Turkey. Per country, sales last quarter were particularly strong in Switzerland, Spain, Hungary and Turkey. On a 9-month view, both reported, and FX adjusted sales were clearly up year-on-year with a 2.2% and a 5.5%, respectively. Our adjusted EBIT showed an improvement of plus EUR 20 million in Q3, which is a great performance. I can proudly repeat what Kai already mentioned. This is the 10th quarter in a row with EBIT growth. And with a plus of EUR 56 million in the first 9 months, we are definitely on track to reach our specific guidance. Also, profitability increased, adjusted EBIT margin was up 40 basis points in the third quarter, mainly driven by Western and Southern Europe. These results continue to come from robust sales growth in our retail core from successful contributions of our new business models and from relentless discipline on cost. I will go in all 3 of those areas later in the presentation today. Now let me turn to our operational performance on Slide 14. You can see that Western, Southern Europe, along with DACH and the segment Others were the main drivers of our profitability this quarter. Starting with DACH, sales declined in the quarter with minus 2.6% like-for-like. Consumer demand in the region remained soft, particularly in Germany, yet we saw an improving trend towards the end of the quarter. Hungary and Switzerland performed well in terms of sales. On profitability, adjusted EBIT increased by EUR 6 million, which is a great performance, the soft -- related to the soft performance of the top-line. I'm proud to say that all countries contributed. As a whole, our adjusted EBIT margin increased 20 basis points in the region, thanks to clear improvement in gross margin across all countries. In Western and South Europe, we recorded a solid like-for-like growth of 3.3% after a softer second quarter. All countries contributed except for the Netherlands, where our marketing campaigns were not as affected as expected. There were -- there we are convinced to regain a top-line momentum in the coming months. Spain continues to stand out with an outstanding like-for-like, and we are pleased to see that Italy posted positive like-for-like. On profitability, our adjusted EBIT increased by EUR 10 million and our margin by 60 basis points. Moving now to Eastern Europe. The sales increase was again driven by Turkey. Although in Poland, online sales were up year-on-year, this could not compensate for weaker brick-and-mortar sales. Our turnaround efforts are ongoing here, but as I said last quarter, the recovery will take some time. Our adjusted EBIT was stable in the region with EUR 4 million. Last but not least, our segment Others. The sales improvement is mainly attributable to Imtron, our private label company. Our EBIT was positively impacted by exchange rate impacts. To sum it up, on Slide 15, we see the 9 months view. All segments contributed to the sales growth. Looking at the adjusted EBIT, as expected, Western and Southern Europe as well as DACH segments are clearly above the previous year, while Eastern Europe is slowing down as expected. We now stand at EUR 258 million adjusted EBIT for the 9 months or EUR 56 million above last year. With this tailwind, we feel confident to deliver our newly specified guidance of around EUR 375 million adjusted EBIT for the full year. Moving on Slide 16. Let's look at our Services & Solutions business. In the third quarter, it made a strong contribution to our profitability with almost 10% sales growth and 14% in the first 9 months. As a result, our income share, which is one of our key KPIs, increased 20 basis points in the quarter to nearly 6%. The main drivers were warranty extension and financing solutions. Those numbers highlight that we are successfully enhancing our service offering. We are pleased to see the increase in NPS in this area as well. On Slide 17, you'll see that regarding online sales, our third quarter was in line with our 9-month development, both showing more than 12% growth. The third quarter performance was driven by an increasing number of purchases but shows the great attractiveness of our online offers. Including marketplace, our online sales share was up 240 basis points in the third quarter, reaching almost 25%. Speaking about marketplace, with Poland as a seventh country now live, the number of SKUs available grew by 75% year-on-year to 2.8 million SKUs. That's an amazing assortment extension. So let me return to our EBIT development on Slide 18. As I already pointed out, when talking about our regions, the gross margin improvement was really strong this quarter. This was, on the one hand, boosted by our growth business, upfront Service & Solutions and Retail Media. And on the other hand, we also saw great improvement in our logistics cost. Looking at OpEx, we saw a slight increase in Q3, which is mainly due to labor agreements in Germany. This increase was somewhat mitigated by lower location costs, optimized marketing spend and increased marketing effectiveness. We remain focused on the cost and expect some OpEx improvements in Q4. Turning to the full overview of adjusted EBIT to net profit on Slide 19. We improved our adjusted EBIT by EUR 20 million in Q3. Still, the absolute number is negative as usual due to seasonality of our business. We recorded EUR 47 million of nonrecurring items. The EUR 90 million increase year-on-year is mainly caused by the need to account for Turkey as a hyperinflationary country, our efficiency and restructuring measures going on at a lower profit share of Fnac Darty. Consequently, our reported EBIT came in roughly at prior level with a minus of EUR 78 million. Our financial result is almost stable in the quarter with a minus of EUR 56 million. Regarding tax, we recorded a EUR 20 million income in Q3. The improvement on the year-on-year comparison is mainly technical impact due to increase of IAS 29. Still, our underlying tax rate, so without Fnac before IAS 29 and without the impairment in Poland remains at a low at 19.3%, which is a great level. All in all, our reported EPS is up EUR 0.10. And excluding the nonrecurring effects, on an underlying basis, our adjusted EPS is even up EUR 0.11 year-on-year. Slide 20 summarizes our financial performance in the first 9 months in the same logic. Overall, due to high nonrecurring items and higher financial results, our EPS for the 9-month period reached a minus EUR 0.01. On an adjusted basis, our EPS comes in at EUR 0.10. Now moving to our free cash flow on Slide 21, where we see a clear increase compared to prior year of over EUR 130 million. Now from left to right, our EBITDA increased EUR 4 million. Our net working capital development was impacted by normalization of our payables over the period. The tax line helped us here in terms of cash. We received tax refunds from previous years and the development in Poland led to lower tax payments. The other operating cash flow improved significantly year-on-year. We recorded a higher cash in from VAT receivables as well as some cash in from insurance payments and of lower reversals of the Fnac Darty results. In terms of cash investments, we spent EUR 18 million more than last year, predominantly improving in IT and logistics infrastructure. Still, our forecast for the year of a positive cash flow remains. With lower lease payments than last year, this resulted in a lease adjustment free cash flow of minus EUR 29 million. Our free cash flow improved by EUR 132 million in the 9-month period, which is a strong improvement compared to H1 and highlights the strong cash contribution in Q3. Now one more thing that I would like to add. For those of you who have not seen it, our rating agencies, Standard & Poor's and Fitch both placed our rating on credit watch positive as the transaction with JD is expected to have a positive impact on our credit worthiness. And with that, I would like to hand over back to Kai.

Thank you, Remko. Now let me turn to our guidance for the full financial year '24, '25 on Slide 23. As you know, we just specified our guidance on July 16, but let me reiterate. We're still expecting a moderate increase in FX portfolio adjusted sales with all segments expected to contribute to this growth. Adjusted EBIT is now expected to reach around EUR 375 million. That is mainly from improvements in DACH and Western and Southern Europe. This compares with our previous guidance of clear increase. Now let me wrap up. Our results show we are strong, and we grew substantially over the past years, oftentimes even against the overall market trends. At the same time, we're conscious that this is not the end of the road. We keep on pushing and will drive this transformation of our company to reach our midterm targets by the end of the next financial year. However, the track record of the last 10 quarters gives us some confidence and energy to achieve those objectives. And it increasingly encourages us to be bold in our marketing and our go-to-market strategy. Let me give you some recent examples. We've just launched a new advertising campaign that clearly highlights our unique strength as an omnichannel platform compared to pure online retailers. It emphasizes the distinctive value we offer to our customers from services to instant delivery or our private label. Another important milestone for us in the past months was the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2, being the go-to store for gamers throughout Europe was really important for us. And the preorders and sales exceeded our expectations. We sold over 250,000 units throughout Europe, 150,000 alone in Germany. We really wanted to make the whole shopping experience special. So, for example, we organized some exclusive events like the Big Switch 2 launch night at our Lighthouse store in Berlin. And even here, we played our omnichannel strength and delivered to customers in that particular area even in the early hours during that night. These unique customer experiences also create huge benefit for our suppliers. They increasingly acknowledge our transformation and see us as their key strategic partner for these sorts of exclusive events and major product launches in Europe. That makes us a go-to destination for innovation in all consumer electronics. And by the way, we didn't just sell the Switch 2 itself. Cases, games and many more accessories were also in high demand, especially our private label products. So, we also strengthened one of our growth businesses, and by the way, our margin. Let me now sum up today's presentation for you. In a volatile market, we continue to improve our momentum. Our growth businesses continue to expand, and they already have a decent size. We continue to improve our profitability for the 10th quarter in a row. We're consistently focusing on cost, liquidity and profitability. Continue to leverage data to improve our customer experience. So, we are on a growth path, and we intend to continue our journey. Our clear strategy, experience Electronics is our North Star. We keep the focus on the customer, on sustainable growth, operational excellence and delivering value for our customers, partners and shareholders. Thank you for your attention this morning, and Remko and I now look forward to your questions.

[Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from the line of Clement Genelot from Stifel.

Two questions from my side, if I may. So, the first one is on the growth businesses. So, with like-for-like being negative in DACH versus an improving margin in Q3, I assume both cost savings and new businesses have contributed to this margin expansion. So, can you give us an update on the development of Retail Media and Marketplace? And my second question is more higher level one around AI. So, this year marks the emergence of what we call Agentic AI. So, what is your initial view on these agents and how we could reshape your digital operations? I mean, would it force you to rebuild your website accordingly and move away from paid search?

Thank you very much for your questions. This is Remko. I will answer your first question related to DACH, and then Kai Deissner will answer your second question around AI. Thanks for the questions. So, first about DACH, you're right. The improvement was mainly driven by gross margin. I mentioned already in the second half of the third quarter, we saw a positive trend, especially also in Germany, in the DACH region, but still negative. And therefore, we were very much focused, of course, on our growth areas like retail media, but also marketplace. And of course, cost, as already mentioned in the presentation. Cost, we had it under control. We saw substantial savings, especially in logistics, advertisement and with rig negotiations also on the logistics and location cost. A bit of background, especially on Retail Media, we saw a very strong uplift in the DACH region when it comes to income, low numbers, EUR 4 million, EUR 5 million roundabout.

Good. And Clement, this is Kai speaking. Let me talk about AI. Now you're right, of course. Agentic AI is not just a buzzword. Anybody who's been shopping online recently will have been confronted with Agentic AI. If you enter into your browser, your usual search string, you're actually getting in most cases or in many cases anyway, an agent that replies to you. So, it's a topic that may seem small, but it's actually very much on top of our minds. However, we look at it not so much from a cost perspective, but from an opportunity perspective. Since roughly mid-June, we opened our websites quite explicitly in a controlled way to these AI, let's call them crawlers in Germany and in the Netherlands because we wanted to understand their behavior and impact on our servers, traffic and load and cost. We did this for 3 weeks and closely monitored it. And pretty simple, we concluded this is very well manageable. There's actually not significant cost increase, and it's well offset by sales. So, we opened it up to the other countries as well. And if we now -- these are early indications, yes. But if we now look at that particular traffic, this agentic traffic, let's say, the conversion rate is actually relatively good compared to other traffic sources. And it's increasing, which is good news. So, you're right in pinpointing this trend. And while it's too early to really come up with a summary, the first indications that we have are very positive on this. I hope that answers your question.

[Operator Instructions] And your next question today comes from the line of Alessandro Cuglietta from Kepler Cheuvreux.

I just have 2 quick questions. One on the DACH region and the -- I mean, the expected growth in the region. Just curious to know if we could have some color on the consumer sentiment in the region. And when do you expect this particular region to return to positive growth? And the second one is on the JD.com deal. I was curious also to know if you can give us some details on the key regulatory steps and approvals that are required for the deal to go through.

Alessandro, this is Remko. Let me come back to your question related to DACH coming back to growth. So quite well-explained, already on Q3. I want to add one thing. So, we still see a soft sentiment in the market in DACH. That being said, we also see our gross profit increasing. So we are, for sure, also not chasing unprofitable sales, especially in Germany specific because Hungary and Switzerland are growing like-for-like. So that being said, as already mentioned, we saw in the last month of Q3, our Q3 that the sentiment also in Germany became more and more positive. Nevertheless, we still see a lot of customers or consumers trading down. So, our campaigns are also focused on this. So, we have a quite moderate stable outlook also for the last quarter of our fiscal year when it comes to Germany. But the overall market is still soft, and therefore, we are very rigorous when it comes to our growth opportunities, our growth levers like Retail Media, Marketplace, Service and Solutions, where we are all growing and of course, on our cost. So, it is a stable outlook now for the last quarter when it comes to Germany. But our campaigns are very much focused on this consumer sentiment as we speak.

And then let me pick up from Remko here, Alessandro, and speak about the regulatory perspective on JD. Now we need to distinguish very specifically 3 different trajectories here. There is merger clearance by the antitrust regulators in many countries where we operate, and this will be done on a country level. That's topic number one, merger clearance. The second is subsidy control. And this, we expect to happen on an EU level. And then thirdly, there is foreign direct investment by the regulatory bodies also on a country level. These 3 different angles from our understanding, will need to be cleared. And as I said when initially announcing the transaction, we're confident that we will be able to close this in the first half of the next calendar year.

There are no further questions at this time. I will now hand back to Kai Deissner, CEO, for the closing comments.

Okay. Thank you all for your time today and your questions. We do realize, of course, that it's a holiday period for most of you, and we have spoken intensively, of course, over the last few weeks or days even. But hopefully, as you've seen, we are constantly working on our strategy and our ambition. Of course, our new strategic partner, JD will help us accelerate even more once the transaction is closed, which we expect, as I just said, for the first half of 2026. But until then, we're motivated from the fact that our work here has already translated into reliable results. And we firmly believe that we're on the right path and will continue towards our goals. Now if you would like to engage with us again through our official channels, we are very happy to continue the conversations and please also mark December 19 -- 17, I apologize, December 17 in your calendars, when we will present to you our full year results. And of course, we'll continue to update you on the progress of our partnership with JD as it unfolds. Until then, Fabienne, Remko and I wish you all the best, and have a good holiday, and we'll see you at the other end of summer. Have a good day now.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.