HelloFresh SE (HFG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. Thank you all for joining today. This is Daniel Alvarez with the Investor Relations team at HelloFresh. As you would have seen, we published an ad hoc disclosure last night after market closed. We are, of course, 3 weeks away from the publication of our Q2 2023 earnings when most of the KPIs will be discussed in detail, but we wanted to nonetheless give you the opportunity to ask any immediate questions on the press release over this very short call. Just as a reminder, we are allowing one question per analyst. So please be mindful of that because we want to keep it short and brief for everyone. I will now pass it on to Dominik Richter Co-Founder and CEO of HelloFresh, for a few words before we can kick off the Q&A. Thank you. Dominik, the floor is yours.

Hello, morning, all. Just a quick note and giving some context on the numbers that we pre-released yesterday, given the strong adjusted AEBITDA outperformance. Starting from the top, I think top line very much bang on with consensus, but the drivers were slightly different. You see record high AOVs and order rates, I think, really showcasing the stickiness of our existing lower base. But then offset by somewhat lower active customer numbers, which, in large part, is a result of the timing of our investments, which then on the flip side, on the bottom line, we benefited on the one hand from genuine outperformance and faster margin progression in pick and pack in ingredients, et cetera, but also from lower marketing spend, which we then aim to deploy towards the third quarter in the back-to-school season. Why did we shift some of those growth investments? First of all, severe capacity constraint is a factor. We even ran at too high utilization and had to dive back from the baseline of our investments for a number of weeks. We're also seeing the heaviest travel season at the moment and usually, during travel season, see rather poor ROIs on new customer acquisition. And we're planning for a very strong back-to-school push towards the end of Q3 in all markets with now much better underlying profitability. So as margin progression comes through, that also gives us a better ROI on our growth investments. Overall, I think that puts us in a pretty good shape for H2. Just to sort of like also remind you, if you now compare H1 '22 versus H1 '23, sort of like we're ahead now for the half year on AEBITDA. We're pretty much bang in line a little bit ahead of sort of like revenue growth from last year. I think when you compare year-over-year numbers, always keep in mind that there's also like an FX impact. I think you've seen that in some of your notes, not already reflected. So I think there's around about a EUR 50 million negative drag in euro-denominated currency from different FX rates than last year and about a EUR 15 million to EUR 20 million AEBITDA impact also by the euro-denominated reported currency, so just keep that in mind. But overall, I think, are in a good spot to then deploy very profitably our growth investments towards the second half of the year.

Thanks, Dominik. Moderator, we can open it up for questions now. If you want to remind everyone what the instructions are.

[Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from Marcus Diebel.

One question is just what gives you the confidence for the second half? Could you just tell us a little bit more how we should read the -- again, customer number? I know you stated in the past that it's not for you that the key metric, but it would be great to understand a bit more what do you think would drive the stabilization of customer numbers in the second half, it would be great.

I think over the last couple of months, we have really improved some of the underlying economics. So we have cracked down on some of the sort of like more fraudulent customer behavior that we have seen. We have, I think, opened up a number of channels where we see really profitable customer acquisition. We just weren't basically comfortable to put a lot of budget against these already now in a seasonally sort of like rather weaker quarter. I think you might have seen there were like a number of nodes out travel activity was as high as it has never been before. So against that, I think we sort of like consciously pulled back some of the investments towards the second half of the quarter, but we aim to sort of like deploy these in Q3 and Q4. If you think about the ROI on our marketing investments, it's obviously also a function of what's the margin that we clip on each dollar, et cetera. And so that is something that just gives us confidence that we're going to be able to acquire more profitable and then also take more of the new customer growth to the bottom line. So generally, opening up of new channels, I think, being stricter on some fraudulent behavior that we see some timing issues. And then when factor, we really had to pull back in the last month or 2. So all of these should go from headwinds to now tailwinds, and that generally makes me positive that with the, I would say, muted expectations baked in that we can meet or exceed them.

And maybe just as a follow-up, maybe as of today, could you tell us how you see the ramp of new capacity in RTE in the U.S. from now on? Are we talking about October and then a relatively fast ramp-up to full capacity, or how do you actually see that in the U.S.?

So starting soft launching mid-Q3 and then we usually have a number of scenarios, how quickly we can scale it up. Hopefully, as back-to-school season arrives and then into Q4, we should really be able to scale that rapidly. There is always sort of like some margin of error in scaling that up despite the fact that we have scaled up 50 different centers. I think it's always a couple of weeks, give or take. But generally, we're quite comfortable that we already in sort of like the back end of Q3 and then strongly into Q4 to show very strong growth in our RTE business.

The next question comes from Nick Coulter.

Maybe just a follow-up on that last point. Could you give a sense of how much of a tailwind the RTE capacity coming online in Q3 and particularly in Q4? So what kind of quantum in percentage your customers that should boost your numbers by, I guess it's the same sort of sentiment in terms of trying to understand the building blocks for you turning positive in terms of customer growth in the fourth quarter, please?

Hello, Nick, it's Christian. As you know, we're not guiding on a per-brand basis and we're not going to change those.

Well, it's just -- I don't really want per brand. It's just the impact that, that brand or that might actually have on the overall. So if you're able to guide on the overall profile, then that would be appreciated.

Yes. We are not taking that on.

And the next question comes from Roman [indiscernible].

And just a question on your contribution margin. What were the key drivers of -- from the contribution margin in the second quarter apart from higher average order value? Have you observed any improvement occurring on fulfillment or procurement side as well? And is it mostly internal operational efficiencies or external tax such as [indiscernible]? And do you presume any sustainable improvement trends here in the second half? And if so, while raising AEBITDA range on the lower end by EUR 10 million only. And like do you prefer to remain conservative here.

Yes. It's Christian, let me take that. The contribution margin expansion really cuts across the key line items. So both on the procurement side, so what we paid primarily for Ingredients, we have improved year-on-year as well as on the fulfillment side. And then our production is the biggest driver of that, where we optimize our processes, rationalize our production footprint, but the U.S. is a big contributor to that. And that has really driven the north of 2-point margin points uplift that we have realized on a contribution margin side. So we are somewhat ahead of what the market expectations were here on a contribution margin expansion, and we continue to drive that potentially not by the same extent as you've seen from us now in Q2, but also Q3, Q4, you should expect that we will be up north of a 100 basis points versus the prior period from a contribution margin perspective. Now, how does that fit to our AEBITDA guidance for the full year, I would say a couple of things. One is, when you -- for illustrative purposes, it's in the midpoint of our AEBITDA guidance that definitely sits quite a bit above what market expectations were going into this call. So from our perspective, this is an uplift and then also keep in mind what Dominik mentioned upfront, so that whilst we, from our perspective have consciously take a little bit on some of our growth investments in the second quarter, we expect a robust back-to-school activity and look forward in terms of our gross marketing spend at that point.

And the next question comes from Andrew Gwynn.

So firstly, just could you clarify the 50 million, that's a drag on AEBITDA, not revenue, just want to make a 100% sure that's the case. And then just on my kind of key question, the back-to-school is obviously is more pronounced. We're only really partway through it. Mindful then also just at the beginning of Q3. So Q3 could be quite soft from a revenue perspective, but you'd expect Q4 to be pretty strong. Is that really what we should take away here?

So maybe I can take off on the FX drag, just to make sure there's no misunderstanding from my revenue FX perspective. The difference between constant currency and euro-reported is a touch note of EUR 50 million because of the stronger euro versus the dollar, but also some of our other non-euro currencies and then that translates into a euro-reported AEBITDA drag of somewhere EUR 15 million to EUR 20 million. And then as of -- great. And then in terms of sequential revenue growth for the second half. So obviously, we're in the middle of the summer, but you should expect for Q3 already a year-on-year reacceleration versus basically Q3 2020 -- 2022, i.e., the Q3 year-on-year growth rate from a revenue perspective should be a touch of what you've seen now for Q2 and then a further acceleration into Q4.

And just on a very cheeky last one, the customer count for Q2. Are you sharing that?

So effectively, what we said in the release yesterday night, so down higher single digit. And the exact number, I want to keep you on your tours until the 10th of August in order to come out with the full report.

And the next question comes from Nizla Naizer.

Just curious to understand more about your existing customer behavior. I mean, clearly, if the order rate was up again and the order value was up, there's been more activity with them. Could you help us understand why is it because of certain promotions that you were doing to them, for them? Or is it because there were some downtrading where people weren't going out to eat as much and they're using more HelloFresh, some color on behavior would be great. And connected to that on the AOV growth, was there some price increases also that sort of helped that high single-digit year-over-year growth? Some color there would be great.

Hello, Nizla, let me take a stab at that. I think customer base is generally showing as you pointed out or remarked very stable or increasing order rates. I think that's a function of us really trying to improve the offering. That's something that's starting now in the first half of the year, and you will see a lot more in the second half of the year and next year. We've put a big focus on. I think that is rewarded by customers, and we generally see that they tend to show better order behavior when both on the product side as well as on the service level side, we make improvements. I think that's a story that has been ongoing since the early days of -- or since even pre-COVID. If you remember our Capital Markets Day, I think we showed that some order rates on average increased by about 14% over the last 3 years, and we actually see that this continues to increase as we build out the product. Building out the product is not only our core menu but also our HelloFresh marketplace, which we have started to roll out into more markets that has been one driver of the AOV. If you look at sort of like sequentially, if you look year-over-year, you'll see that we did some price increases sort of like last year, in the second half of last year. More recently, we haven't really executed on any additional price increases. I think as we have more visibility on the cost that we have in the supply chain as we navigate much better through the inflationary environment. And we basically feel that we're at a good price level and rather want to kind of like really create additional value for customers.

Yes. So on the AOV side, exactly as Dominik said, so what we see there in terms of, let's say, price effect or really just the full run rate effect of some of the measures we've taken during the course of last year. On top of that we basically have a further increase -- slight increase from already very decent levels in terms of order rates of our customers. And on top of that, customers even further expand the number of news per order that they take from us. And on top of that, our market offerings, such offerings get more and more popular. So all of that is compounding and that has helped us to further expand AOV in the second quarter.

The last question comes from Emily Johnson.

I was going to do the cheeky thing of asking one quick follow-up to Nizla's question and then asking my own. And it's a quick follow-up, is there any impact from the mix of customers between full price and promotional on the AOV number given the kind of lower active and from what you said around the slightly lower customer acquisition sounds like a gross adds rather than a sort of existing customer traction? And then my second question was around marketing. You mentioned the kind of pullback versus your expectations in Q2. Has it been being led by ROI? Is there any change in the customer acquisition cost or is it really a case of customer behavior has been slightly different to expect it and the traction that you're getting with the product at this exact moment in time is different. Any color on the kind of customer acquisition cost evolution is helpful.

Emily, it's Christian. Just on a follow-up question that you had, the answer is yes. So in a quarter where the mix is more weighted to existing customers, the impact of price incentives that you typically get as a new customer is then comparatively less and that further helps AOV, yes.

And on the marketing question, in the end, it's something that's in our realm. So we continue to have the same hurdle rates or actually even like a little bit higher hurdle rates than we had previously. That's why we actually decided to shift some of those investments because we're also better at understanding what the ROI is by seasonality of our marketing spend. We tend to see sort of like a strong tax, nothing has changed in that. And it's more about making sure that over the course of the year, we're actually able to spend at the right time of the year that maximizes ROI. We've become a lot better at that and also better at attracting sort of like the right audiences and making it clear sort of like duplicate accounts, fraudulent accounts, et cetera, that we're much, much stricter with those. So that actually should increase basically should have been a higher hurdle rate and overall better ROI and profitability on the growth investments that we make. In Q2, I think we've laid a strong infrastructure for that, and we expect to benefit from that as we shift the timing of those growth investments to the second half of the year.

I'm sorry, just to clarify that last comment, the higher hurdle rates. Is that a reference to something you're doing specifically with regards to seasonality? Or is it overall you have since you updated at the Capital Markets Day kind of increased your payback period again?

So we basically decreased our payback period. So if you think about how fast we make back what we invest, then a higher hurdle rate implies that we're getting it back faster.

All right. Thank you, everyone. I don't see any further questions. So I think we can stop it for today here. Thank you, Dominik and Christian. Thank you, everyone, for joining. Appreciate it.