Geox S.p.A. (GEO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good evening. This is the Chorus Call conference operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining the Geox First Quarter 2024 Sales Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Luca Amadini, Investor Relations Manager of Geox. Please go ahead, sir.

Good evening, everybody, and thank you for joining our call today on Geox first quarter sales results. This is Luca Amadini speaking. Let me introduce you today's call speakers, Geox Group CEO, Mr. Enrico Mistron; and the CFO, Mr. Andrea Maldi. Mr. Mistron will start providing us a brief overview of our first quarter performance, and then Andrea will delve deeper into the sales results. Following that, Enrico and Andrea will be happy to take your questions. I need to remind you that this presentation may contain certain statements that are made to reported financial results and on other historical information. Any forward-looking statements are based on the group current expectations and projections about the future events. By their nature, forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and factors that could cause results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in these statements, many of which are beyond the ability of the group to control or estimate. Let me now hand over to our CEO, Mr. Enrico Mistron.

Good evening, everybody. Thank you for joining us today to discuss the first quarter 2024 sales results and trends expected for 2024. It's my pleasure to be here, leading my first conference call at Geox S.p.A. Let's start by saying that the first quarter of 2024 has proven that the period is extremely challenging and complex. The quarter was cauterized by two different pieces in terms of sales deliveries, reflecting each channel dynamics and their specific market condition. As highlighted by numerous market indicators that emerged towards the end of last year, the wholesale channel delivered weak performance that has led to a sharp decline in total quarterly revenue by 13.5%. We acknowledge that the decline is significant and able to impact full year 2024 results. However, there's a couple of things that I want to emphasize because are the results of a clear strategy and the perfect execution of our management team. Regarding our direct-to-consumer channels, I would like to highlight that both brick-and-mortar and digital have shown a positive like-for-like performance by 8.4% in total across all our product categories, included women's, men's, kid's, apparel and accessories and across all the markets, Italy, France, Spain and all the others minor region. Women's category, in particular, has been confirming the positive trend recorded in last quarters, being supported by the marketing and product investments carry out in order to further elevate the Geox brand perceptions towards the premium segment. In this regard, we are pleased and proud to announce that the continuations of the collaboration with Penelope Cruz, in her role as global ambassador for Geox also for the upcoming fall/winter '24 season. At the same time, we are achieving a very impressive results from the direct managed digital channels. In the last month, we launched across a large part of our markets, the new version of our Geox.com website, collecting very supportive feedback from our consumers. Concerning this, we are pleased to remark the positive outcomes of our loyalty program that we call Benefeet program, which significantly support the growth of our direct-to-consumer sales. Currently, almost 54 [ per season ] of our direct-to-consumer sales generated from active loyal customers indicate an increased trend, the percentage raise up to 61% if we look at only our Geox.com sales. Specifically, sales derived from these loyal active customers represents a very high value-added sales, accompanied by enhanced KPIs compared to non-loyal customers. For instance, the average transaction value in the first quarter experienced an increase of 18% increase for loyal active customers. These results consistent with Geox' omni-channel strategy, highlight the quality of the investments made in these directions and provide us with further confidence for our futures and headers. Finally, I would like to make a comment on my first half of my 100 days. Number one, definitely I received a very warm welcome. I found a group of people, energized, open mind and engaged. They all did contribute to accelerate my induction plan. Number three, it has been a very intense period and I had the opportunity to know better the organizations to understand processes, management routines, practices. All these positives things and environments came collectively to define that definitely we need to make a change, that definitely we need to make a discontinued plan. And we came out with the idea that is nowadays complete because we are launching right now that we need to do strategic plan for 2025, 2026 and 2027. I think that we all have the idea to what we have to do, we define and we collectively make the decision to be supported by a primary strategic company that supported the process and would help us to make even more clear the idea that we have in mind. All the management team will be engaged, empowered and very busy in the last -- in the next three months. And we will be able to share with all of you by the end of the year what would be our investment plan for the next coming three years. Having said this, I'm now happy to hand over to Andrea Maldi for a deep dive in the first quarter 2024 results.

Thank you, Enrico, and good afternoon, everybody. So let me try to deep dive a little bit more into the financials of the first quarter. I think that just to set a little bit as usual the tone of discussion as Enrico already mentioned, the first three months of 2024 have been a tough period, mainly with the double speed of the two different channels, mainly within wholesale channel, which has suffered a little bit of the performance compared to last year, while our retail direct-to-consumer both in the line of the digital and physical brick-and-mortar have performed very well and are continuing to perform very well also in the current trading in April and May. As you can see in international, the net sales amount to EUR 194 million as of March 2024 with a decline compared to last year of about 13.5%. Net financial position simply moved from EUR 93 million on December '23 to EUR 135 million as of March '24. And the net working capital amounted to EUR 163 million, the equivalent of 23% of our net sales compared to the EUR 116 million of December '23. The change of the period is mainly due to the seasonal of our business in our industry -- in our company, so it's quite common. If you look a little bit into our distribution network evolution, despite we can confirm that our rationalization process of our shops and doors has been substantially completed in 2023, you can see that we move from 655 shops in 2023 to 637 shops at the end of March 2024. So we had another small final conclusion of our plan of closing our doors in the shops where we were not efficient and productive of about 20 shops in the period. The negative perimeter of the DOS, our retail doors is in the range of EUR 5 million -- EUR 4.6 million in the first quarter, which means that clearly effected performance. But if we look at the total value. But again, if we look at the performance of the like-for-like in the period, we set a very high level -- bar of performance moving to 5.1% compared to the first quarter. If we try to look at the sales by channel, Basically, you can see that we confirm the EUR 30 million drop, 13.5% in total. If we look at the wholesale, which is still counting 55% of our business, we moved from EUR 136 million to EUR 107 million at the end of the first quarter, which is clearly explaining the fact that this is almost 99% of the decline in the performance of the period, while our DOS, as we said, despite in absolute value is actually down are significantly high in terms of like-for-like performance, more than 4.4%, which is basically the storytelling of the first quarter. And I think that it's useful to remark the fact that, again, looking at the current rate of April and the first week of May, our retail shop are still doing quite well in comparison with last year and almost in line with our budget expectation. If we look at Page 7, where we can have a snapshot of the sales by region. Again, you can see that almost all the regions are slightly down. Italy is clearly the most important one with a minus 13.2%. And where we have a decline in wholesale and franchising double-digit negative. And again, we can see that the DOS, both in line of the brick-and-mortar and the digital delivered positive performance in the range of 3.8% compared to last year. Europe is down 10%, I think that it's worth to remind that we have one important market, which is quite tough in which is Germany. Despite we are focusing our attention on Germany and on the revamping of Germany on the wholesale as well with specification that will clearly deliver the benefit to the end of 2024 and mainly from 2025. The story is almost the same for North America and for rest of the world, where despite the percentage are quite significantly, you can see the number are pretty small. So we can, for example, in the case of [ North America ], talk about almost flat but the fact is that clearly the market is affected again in the -- by the rationalization of the big key account and the wholesale is offering specifically in the market as well. A quick shot on Page 9 on the financial working capital and net debt, net financial position. As you already mentioned, our working capital is about EUR 163 million at the end of March 2024 compared to EUR 116 million at the end of December 2023. The -- We increase the change of EUR 46 million is lower than the one that we had from December 2022 to the first quarter of the March 2023, given the fact that this is a normal trend that we have in our company in terms of capital and cash absorption and the working capital increase during the first quarter. The bank debt as of March 24, more increase of EUR 46 million. And clearly, this is in line with our expectation and is in line with our budget expectation that is promising to deliver a net financial position in the range of EUR 210 million at the year-end. I think that clearly, if we look at the macroeconomic environment, and if we look at the geopolitical environment where we had different areas of, how to say, conflict that might impact our business. At the end, we are -- if we look at 2024 outlook, we are able to confirm our marginality and even to confirm and improve our marginality of about 50 basis points. And at the same time, given the performance of the wholesale, we still believe to be able to deliver strong sales but in the range with, let's say, a decline of low mid-single-digit reduction compared to the year 2023. It's all from my side, and we are happy to take questions, if any.

[Operator Instructions] Gentlemen, there are no questions registered at this time.