Komplett ASA (KOMPL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to Komplett Group's quarterly presentation. My name is Vebjorn Torsetnes, and I'm pleased to be here to present the group's second quarterly results. Joining me this morning is our CFO, Thomas Rokke. Today, we will review the highlights of the past quarter and give an update before presenting the group's financial performance in more detail. Lastly, we will provide a summary of the key takeaways and leave you with an outlook for the upcoming period. After the presentation, we will be happy to answer your questions from the audience here in Oslo and from all of you following us online. In the second quarter, we were pleased to see a resilient revenue growth even though the gaming components categories remained under pressure. Growth was supported by strong seasonal demand and good momentum in customer electronics, supported by sales and campaign efforts as well as positive phasing effects. Our gross margin held up relatively well, though it was affected by changes in product and segment mix and effects from pricing rebalancing. On the cost side, cost and restructuring measurements are yielding positive results and operating expenses came down, also helped by currency effects. Sales growth with continued cost discipline drove a solid year-on-year improvement, adjusted NOK 39 million EBIT. We reduced our inventory position during the quarter and active inventory management contributed in improving net working capital levels. Our leverage ratio was 2.4x at the close of the quarter, representing a marked reduction compared with 3.8x last year. Overall, our financial position remains solid with strong liquidity and significant improvement in leverage. The strength of our brand, customer satisfaction and brand loyalty provide a solid foundation for our building a market presence. Now let's go through the recent operational development in our key consumer brands, starting with Komplett. Let me start with one of the most exciting development during the quarter, the launch of Komplett Gaming Hub, bringing together players, creators, teams, partners and fans in the heart of Komplett ecosystem. It's a platform for content creation, community building, live shopping that is very important for our sales, e-sport events and brand activation. The hub has already become the home of Komplett Gaming League championship. Exciting pipeline of events ahead, including collaborations with well-known gaming profiles and major community-driven activities. The team has also signed an exclusive agreement with Red Bull as the main sponsor for all gaming events that will be hosted in Norway in the upcoming years. So this also sees as a strong value for the platform. Moving on, we continue to improve the commercial experience and customer journey across our channel. These initiatives make it easier for customers to discover products, making informed purchasing decision and interact with us through the buying process. We also strengthened our service portfolio during the quarter. This including the launch of circular trade-in offer. This expands the value of providing to the customer with also supporting sustainability and extending our presence across the larger part of the product life cycle. Finally, our high level of customer satisfaction were once again reconfirmed during the quarter, reflected in an improvement in the leading position in the Norsk Kundebarometer survey. So we actually moved the position a bit. So we are still on the top 10 brands in Norway and our position is #7. And for our brands, we are #1. So we are very happy with that. So now moving on to NetOnNet. During the quarter, seasonal assortment continued to drive demand across several categories. This was supported by targeting campaigns and strong category execution, helping us capture sales during trading periods. We also onboarded a new third-party logistic partner. This is an important step that will improve scalability as their business grows, while also supporting greater cost efficiency across logistics operations. Another priority has been the future development of our private labels portfolio. We have strengthened the offering in execution categories and expanded into new ones, providing customers with more attractive alternatives while supporting margins. Finally, we continue to make progress on our cost efficiency program. The initiative implemented across the organization and delivering -- are delivering benefits, helping improve operational efficiency and maintain a disciplined approach to managing the cost base. Then moving on to Webhallen. Looking at the category performance. Growth in our non-computing categories continued to offset the impact that -- from weaker innovation cycle in the computing segment. This demonstrates the benefits of having a broader category mix and more balanced revenue base. We also completed the implementation of our new checkout solutions. Customers can now choose between standard and express delivery, making the purchasing process more flexible and improving the overall consumer experience. Another highlight during the quarter was the opening of the Cardboard Collective. This is already making a footprint in the trading card games community and helping strengthen our position as an engaged and growing segment. Finally, we continue to see the positive effect from consolidation measures implemented across the group. Combined with disciplined cost management, this initiative contributed to improved efficiency and a lower cost base during the quarter. I will now hand over to Thomas, who will guide us through the financial results for the period.

Thank you very much, Vebjorn. Good morning to you all, and thank you for taking the time to join us here on a hot day in Oslo. It's my privilege to guide you through some of the financial highlights for the quarter. As you can see from the numbers, we had a healthy growth in Q2 of 4.2%, which also were affected by translation effects in the numbers, which means that the underlying growth was even stronger. The underlying market development, as Vebjorn alluded to, I think we perceive to be still positive in the sense that the statistics may vary from month to month, but overall, over the period, it has remained positive, and it has been supported by improving household economics. On additional side, we have also done quite a lot, and I will elaborate on that when you come to the individual segments in strengthening our categories and strengthening our sales efforts, which obviously also have been helped by certain one-off elements like World Cup has not been detrimental and the hot weather has also obviously contributed to giving us some tailwinds, but also we're having headwinds from last year in the sense that we had several important launches affecting our revenues for that period. On the positive side also is that we see solid growth across all the segments, not only one, but healthy growth both in B2C and B2B and last but not least, a very strong growth in the distribution segment. And that fact contributes to also affecting the margin. As you can see, the margin declined slightly versus last year. And that means we can't translate all the additional sales into an additional gross profit. One of the contributing factors is the segment mix. The distribution segment, which grew strongest of all, both had an adverse mix effect internally, but also its weight in the revenue mix just makes it mathematically difficult to balance. If you look away from that effect, we also have seen some active rebalancing in segments, which we will allude to. And on the overall, some positive and negative remix effects in the revenue stream, which are fairly complex, but on the balance, quite positive. The cost side, as you can see, has improved and contributes very positively to lifting the result. It is mainly the measures we undertook last year and up to Q4 to reduce these costs, but obviously also supported by the same translation effects that actually affects the other numbers. Overall, a bit more than half of it is relating to the structural efforts we're doing, and this is obviously an area that we keep strong management on going forward and at all times. The net effect of that is obviously a significant uplift in profitability of NOK 39 million and even stronger if we exclude the one-offs, which have been significantly reduced versus last year. The -- good positive news on that is also that both the B2B and the B2C segment contributes, whereas the distribution segment remains stable based on these mix effects I alluded to. But overall, the B2C segment is the one contributing the most. And as you can see here, it's also the segment being most affected by the translation effects. But there is a kind of threefold mix on the revenue side here. Overall, we have done quite a good preparation on the commercial side to develop our categories outside the gaming segment. That supported by improving market developments in Sweden and also sustained good market developments in Norway has enabled us to grow outside the gaming segment. The gaming segment obviously remains a more difficult area to address. It has several elements to it when it comes to the demand side. One of them is obviously the innovation cycle, which means that we have less innovations this period, but we also saw in Q2 last year, several important new launches affecting the revenue, i.e., additional headwinds on that side. On top of that, as you probably have taken from both our discussions last quarter, but also the newspapers is that the memory prices are rapidly increasing and obviously affecting demand and affecting demand in various areas. First and foremost, the adjacent categories, while the memory components themselves actually is developing quite nicely, obviously, the ones being adjacent, i.e., CPUs housing, motherboards, et cetera, are being affected and affected negatively, obviously. Also, the pricing on some of the gaming elements is also going up, affecting, obviously, the willingness of the buyers to buy these things. However, in a quarter characterized both by positives, i.e., the television and the air conditioning, et cetera, being positively affected and the headwinds, we came out quite nicely ahead. And in particular, it is pleasant to see the growth in the Swedish market has returned, as we can see with a very strong growth in Sweden and a lower one in Norway, also obviously reflecting the exposure to the gaming segment, but also a slight recovery in Sweden from the difficult combination of the warehouse and logistics operations there last year. On the margin side, we have used the rebalancing of certain price elements, in particular in the telecom segment to support the underlying sales, also contributing to a good growth in that segment. You may recall from our last year's presentation that we had a significant uplift in that margin. And we have basically rebalanced to regain some of the growth momentum in that. On the other hand, it's obviously also here the memory challenges affecting us, lower volumes in certain categories obviously reduces the margin on some of the adjacent categories on the memory chips. The willingness of buyers to buy PCs also put some pressures on certain of our offerings in the gaming segment. And last but not least, we do have some transition effects on top of this when it comes to gaming, where when you transit -- when you move from one price point to another in this segment, some are -- some competitors are having different inventory positions. Some are having different price policies, et cetera. So you will have some friction moving up to a new price level. We are obviously working very hard to mitigate this. On the sales side, as Vebjorn alluded to, we have been doing quite a lot on the marketing. We have been doing -- improving the offering around this. Also the self-service and the customer journey when it comes to ordering our own PCs, for instance, have been improved. And we also have tried on the price side, mitigating through positions on the inventory and also preorder. But despite of this, not all of that could be compensated for, leading to a moderate drop in the margins for this segment. However, this is also the segment where the cost savings are the largest and also therefore, contributing strongly to the profitability uplift. And particularly positive is obviously that this uplift is mainly contributed by the Swedish operations. Both of them have made a significant contribution to the uplift in this quarter. The B2B business has also shown a fairly strong growth, and this is mainly related to our own sales efforts. As you -- the market -- underlying market has been relatively stable. That is we have not seen neither any negative effects yet, but we have also not seen the major positive effects reported elsewhere of customers preordering or taking precautionary buys. What we have seen is our effort in building the customer base, increasing the revenue for the period with some slight early deliveries when it comes to the more educational segment, but not material. That has combined with an improved margin, margin management, in particular, but also slightly positive mix effect have supported the margin increase combined with some additional services mix into this has enabled us to invest somewhat in the sales efforts. And therefore, this is one of the few areas where the OpEx slightly increases, but we think that has been well spent. And as you can see, the profitability year-on-year has improved also in this area. The distribution business is, as we say every quarter, very dependent on individual customers and contracts. This quarter, it went in our favor. And as you can see, the increase in revenue is fairly large, but it also then reverses the decline you saw in the same quarter last year. This has been driven by both some of our big brands that we are distributing for, but also some of our big customers, and some contracts being won by our end customers. The net effect of that is obviously a fairly strong uplift in the revenues, but it's also a fairly combined negative mix effect on the margin, which declined fairly significantly in the quarter. But combined with certain cost adjustments, it also enabled this segment to remain stable for the period. Going over to the cash flow. As you can see, we have a positive operating cash flow in the quarter, mainly driven by the uplift in profitability, but also the reduction in working capital, which is a combination of an inventory reduction being taken actively down and also a corresponding then adjustments to the payables, which have not materially changed in payment terms, which we have been working on very heavily in the previous periods, but obviously here reflecting the changed purchase pattern from the build down in inventory. The receivables, which you would expect to go up during a quarter where we deliver so much on the distribution side has remained relatively stable. And for this period, we also have increased the factoring volume to NOK 385 million, which is not then obviously included in our balance sheet, which is up from last year, where the phasing of this segment was different. On the investing side, as you know, we have a -- as in previous period, an investment of approximately NOK 36 million. And most of this goes into the IT maintenance and IT improvements, including the customer journey measures that Vebjorn was alluding to. On the financing side, the cash flow is mainly reflecting interest payments, repayments of lease liabilities and also the repayment of the Swedish tax deferral scheme contributing to this total. And in the cash flow statement, you will see these figures gross, which makes it a bit unclear, but definitely no new facilities or any new arrangements have been included or taken up during this quarter. On the working capital levels, the inventory has been reduced and is now significantly down versus last year, which also then includes that we have a slightly higher or lower payable side. This has been the result, obviously, of a fairly active inventory management and positions us better for the coming quarters to handle the uncertainty there. But it also still contains the precautionary positions that we have been discussed previously. So like-for-like, the decline is even stronger. And that said, obviously, this inventory position is benefiting slightly from large deliveries then from the distribution segment into this quarter, where you have a fairly high inventory level for the revenues. In total, this enabled us, as Vebjorn also alluded to, to have a relatively stable liquidity position exceeding NOK 1 billion, and we consider that fairly solid. We also have managed to reduce the leverage relatively significantly by 1.4 points on the leverage multiple. It's a combination of a reduction in the net interest-bearing debt, which is reduced from the fact that we have repaid another amount on the Swedish deferred tax scheme. But predominantly, it's driven by an increase in the underlying financial performance, i.e., the profitability. And this basically continues the trend apart from the seasonal variation that you can see on the graph on the left-hand side. On the equity side, we are relatively stable, a slight improvement versus last period, but down from last year. And as we have discussed now in a couple of quarterly presentations, that is mainly driven by the impairments on the Swedish entities we did in the Q4 report. So on that note, I give back to Vebjorn to give you some more summary and outlook.

Thank you, Thomas. Before opening for questions, I want to briefly go through what we have presented today and leave you with an outlook for the coming period. We are pleased to report that the adjusted EBIT improved by NOK 39 million, driven by strong seasonal demand commercial actions and sustained cost discipline. Looking ahead, the outlook is mixed. While macroeconomic conditions remain generally positive, we still expect to see continued headwinds and market uncertainties. Higher memory prices continue to affect demand and innovation cycles in our core categories are expected to stay muted near term. We are navigating this condition by continuing to strengthen our commercial propositions across both core and growth categories. This includes improving the customer journey and expanding our private label assortment. In parallel, we remain focused on driving profitability through disciplined pricing, margin management and operational efficiency. Now I've been with the Komplett Group for a full quarter. I have a clearer picture for the opportunities ahead and the work still required to fully release the group's potential. With significant progress has been made, I believe we are still in early stages of unlocking the full potential of the group. Building on the progress achieved, the emphasis now is on accelerating the pace of execution and extending the benefits across the broader part of the organization. Supporting by strong brands, high consumer satisfaction and scalable Nordic platform, the group is well positioned to navigate the market's uncertainties. Thank you for spending time with us this morning. We will now open for questions.

Thank you. Let's first see if there are any questions from the room here in Oslo.

Sigurd Flaa, Nordea Equities. Congratulations on the good results. Could you elaborate a bit about the different geographical performance in the B2C segment? What's driving the strong growth in Sweden?

Yes. As mentioned during the presentation, the differences are mainly related to the exposure of certain segments. We are stronger in the seasonal segments. We are strong in consumer electronics and also a bit stronger in the telecom area or larger in Sweden, all of which contributes to driving the growth there. Obviously, the Norwegian figures are reflecting the fact that. Our Norwegian business or Norwegian brand is strongly related with the gaming and computing segment, which is also the area where we are seeing the strongest headwinds, both innovation-wise, but also price-wise from the memory prices or the [indiscernible] as it's called in the industry.

And maybe if you could also give some flavor about, as you mentioned, [indiscernible], about how you see the impact in terms of volume versus price increases? I know we're still like early in the phase in terms of repricing in the market, but do you see some -- if you could give some flavor about the impact so far?

I think it's playing out quite in accordance with what we discussed during the Q1 presentation and also partly the Q4. I think we've seen kind of the first wave, which is increases in the memory chips themselves, strongly affecting the adjacent categories, as I said, and they're driving down the volumes. The memory prices or memory chips themselves are doing quite nicely just given by the price increases. So it's mainly hitting the adjacent segments where people are then reluctant to buy and build their own PCs. It has also affected the gaming segment. You saw Xbox coming out with price increases now, but also when it comes to our own produced gaming PCs, we are seeing some difficulties in passing prices on there. So in both these areas and in particular, the component side, we're seeing some fairly strong volume drops, which are partly increased or compensated by price increases. Looking forward, what we're seeing is obviously, and Apple was kind of the frontrunner now and the most visible one is obviously these price increases spreading to other product categories. Apple with its form was the first. You will see also when the suppliers launch new products, they will also be repriced depending on how they actually deal with it. And finally, it will also start entering to a larger extent into the PC prices after a while, which also is going probably to happen during the next 6 months. The assessment of how this plays out in price and volume is extremely difficult. First and foremost, there are 3 kind of variables that you need to look to. One is kind of the price increases themselves. And the suppliers have different policies and different mitigating actions for actually dealing with this. You can buy early like we have done with precautionary positions. You can change the designs on your products to actually use less memory. You can eat some of this into your own margin and so forth. So actually, the extent of price pass-through by the different suppliers is very different and partly also a bit difficult to predict. The price elasticity, which will then be the other component to this is also highly variable by-product segment, and also variable by report and source you use. But it can go from 0.5 with some estimates around telecom products to 1.5 in other categories. But nobody really knows and nobody have really tested this on a broad basis. This is based on changing prices. But if all the prices change and if you know that your PC next year is going to cost 20% more, maybe you buy it now anyway. So actually, the net effect of that is also extremely hard to predict. And finally, obviously, we need to maintain our margin, which will be affected by the competitive environment. And while we think the most industry players will protect the margins. We have also seen during transition phase that some players are in different inventory positions. So during that phase, it's going to be very interesting to see how that plays out. So you kind of have 3 variables that is very hard to predict and also, therefore, very hard to kind of forecast.

And maybe on the last one here with how much of the cost initiatives are currently being taken out? Is there -- is it finalized? You mentioned...

I think we are a bit careful on kind of discussing the concrete cost initiatives. We have a cost agenda that is ongoing and being adjusted depending on the trading of the company. I think from the effects what we have seen on what's been undertaken and discussed previously, we are seeing now kind of the run rate we are aiming for, but we will obviously reinforce or adjust as things evolve. And we just remain vigilant and, as we've been saying before, aim towards a stable cost base while revenues increase.

Any other questions from the room? We will then move on to the questions from our online audience. First one goes to you, Vebjorn. You've now been CEO for 4 months. How would you sum up the experience so far?

It's been great and very interesting. I've been working close to our employees, our brands, our customers and some of the big suppliers. It's been very interesting. And we also worked with having the phase of the initiative already on -- that is all running just to make sure that we don't lose speed. But then I also say that we have more potential that we will work with the next year, and we will also try to speed up some of the initiative across the borders that we have been working with for the last period.

Thank you. Next one is from [indiscernible]. He has 5 questions, so I will read them one by one. How much did the World Cup related TV sales lift Q2 revenue versus a normal quarter? And what are you seeing in Q3 now that the tournament is over? Pure pull forward or net incremental demand?