Modivo S.A. (MDV) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

I'm very pleased to be able to welcome you to our conference. Today, we'd like to talk about the results and do a recap of 2022. We would like to talk about the prospects for 2023. I'd like to give the floor to the CEO of the group, Marcin Czyczerski.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. So today, the financial results -- finance -- financial results were published today for 2022. And this is a good opportunity to sum up last year, the past year, but we're going to want to go through -- we'll have the summary, but we want to immediately give you a trading update and talk about where we are with the prospects. We want to tell you a little bit about the transformation over the course of our 3-year journey, and so the transformation of our business model. We'll talk about the prospects for the upcoming 12 months. We're going to give you some guidance about where we'd like to -- what we'd like to achieve in terms of our earnings. So to recap briefly what we're going to discuss. So if you think about the results of Q4, they were slightly better than what we reported in the prelims. I'll talk about that in just a moment. I also mentioned -- what's happening with this quarter. This -- we can say that only half of April remains -- or far beyond halfway. So we can talk about the revenue, and we'll dwell on this greater during the course of the presentation. We'll tell you a little bit about the transformation of the business model, what things look like, what are the further prospects, how this transformation process is running. And we'll think about the objectives we have for our sales set up for 2023 as we want to strengthen the balance sheet, changing the financing structure, and we're reducing debt by leaps and bounds, and we're optimizing the financial structure. And as we'll talk about this on upcoming slides, we can go ahead and take a quick look at the prelims and what the reported results are. As I mentioned, there's a slight difference. So the reported results are slightly better, thanks to a higher margin of around PLN 11 million in the eobuwie business line. Again, we had costs down by PLN 13 million in the CCC line. This more than offset the additional impairments we took in the quarter. So we have an EBITDA that's up by PLN 6 million, so it's up by 7%, so this is versus the prelims. And so the adjusted result, having in mind further one-offs, so it's up by PLN 24 million. And this is a result of better performance on the cost and higher margin, but Q4 is a history where we have that behind us. We're now -- we're wrapping up gradually first quarter and had a variety of moments. In the various months and 10-day periods during the month, we had a variety of impacts on the business results up until the mid of April. So we had an 11% increase, and we said that was going to be the most demanding of the quarters in this year. So the beginning of this year is going to be a more difficult start. And so sales grew in every brand. Only eobuwie was slightly below. But we also see that this line of business, eobuwie, by the end of the quarter, should be in the black. And we've noted your comments that these 2 lines of business, eobuwie and Modivo, are complementary. And Modivo is also selling footwear. And so this is several tens of percentage points. And so they had a positive growth rate in footwear sales as they're combined. So the Modivo Group -- so eobuwie and Modivo have a 5% growth rate, mostly because of the Modivo growth which was nearly 45%. In CCC itself, we would draw your attention to the strong growth of e-commerce of nearly 40%. That's not so obvious, if you look at peer groups, and how they -- what they've reported. So others have either flat growth or negative growth. Whereas in CCC, we continue to see growth that has fuel to continue driving that growth. What's impressive is we have a 113% growth in HalfPrice, so the triple-digit -- so very high like-for-like, 25% expansion of like-for-like sales. And so that means that this business is growing very rapidly. So the gross margin of the group is down 3 percentage points. And the 2 main -- if you look at the mix of the various brands, the quickest grower is Modivo and HalfPrice, much faster than CCC. But they have a lower margin defined in percentage points. And so this is partly because of the mix. Then we also have a slightly lower margin because of the competitiveness of the market and what our competitors have. And so weather has also been described on this slide. So winter lasted longer, so we were selling winter collections for a longer period of time. And so we were able to sell the spring/summer collections at record-breaking levels. And so it's going to be higher. And so we can say the -- well, only from this week where we'll start to feel the real start of the spring. So we'll be able to stimulate that. And so the margin was down 2 percentage points, but we can see that this has been made up entirely -- or offset entirely by the cost performance, by 1.5 percentage points. And so in CCC, we've been able to offset that through our cost performance. So if we look at the growth rate, we've been doing better than the market. And based on these observations, we can see that we continue to push up our market share. Let's take a look at the midterm and long-term prospects and what's happened in the company up until now. Over the last 3 years, we've been working very arduously on doing a very profound transformation. We have 4 strong brands, and the last missing element in our transformation that we mentioned in go 2022 and go 2025 (sic) [ GO.22 and GO.25 ] is deleveraging the company and coming back to double-digit profitabilities in the new model. And this is our ambition. This is our goal for this year. And this is something that will happen, will transpire this year. How the CCC Group has evolved from 2019 to 2023, so this is where we are in the time line today. So we started as a mono category business, with footwear representing some 90-odd percent of our business. And then we had 2 channels of distribution, so CCC and fixed brick-and-mortar sales. And then we had mono channel -- 2 mono channel lines of business. We had a traditional business of CCC where we have the brick-and-mortar stores. Then the group has evolved and now we have 4 very strong lines of business. CCC and eobuwie continue to work with us. And we have now a very desirable omni-channel approach. And then we have off-price Modivo, which have extended the markets. We have home category. We have apparel. We have 10 new categories, and we've diversified these categories to include ones that are less driven by the weather. The group has been successful. Each one of these lines of business, Modivo, HalfPrice is generating revenue of nearly PLN 1 billion in revenue. And so HalfPrice has extended its operation with full price. And so this is a very -- a good -- a market with good prospects. And so we have a portfolio of brands, and we've extended that to include Gino Rossi, Badura. These are very well-known brands in Poland. And we've made a major change in terms of how we do product management and procurement management. And you can see what we've done based on the inventory turnover ratio and actually the decline in the level of inventories or stock. This is something we'll continue. We're monetizing the customer base. So we had the loyalty club with a large number of customers. And we've extended -- we've nearly doubled the number of customers. And what we know about customers is state-of-the-art and we're managing that relationship, and we're navigating customers through various channels and lines of business. These are things that are happening at a market level, and we see potential to monetize our customer relations. And this is something that's been happening over the last 3 years. The last 3 years, however, we're not in a vacuum. We had some uncomfortable conditions. We had COVID for a number of years. We've had the war in Ukraine, plus we had macro slowdown. So over the last 3 years, we've been able to double the top line. We have a textbook balance sheet between e-commerce and brick-and-mortar sales. So we've been able to double e-commerce as a percentage of total sales over this period. And we have a new addressable market, which is 4x larger than it was originally. We have 10x more categories, and that means people who are buying shoes from us, we can propose to those customers other product categories. And then we have a strong relationship with customers and a stronger customer database. And that means that this is working well and can work even better. So we have Karol who will say a few words about what the individual lines of business have been, how they been performing.

Thank you, Marcin. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I have 4 quick slides. We want to drill down and tell you about what's happened in 2022 and in the -- in various brands and our growth drivers and what we're going to be doing this year. CCC, the graph on the left shows you what we've gone through, how profound the transformation has been. So if we -- this is sales density per square meter, and you can see how major this transformation has been. And so we have the omni-channel sales number in a good trend. This is not the end. There's a lot of reasons for us to say that we're going to continue moving in the right direction. A few numbers illustrate that. So 30% of our sales is digital sales, 1/10 is generated in cooperation with customers in our stores by having that digital cooperation. So we have the traditional work, our men and women who are working in our stores. And this is combined with our inventory, our stock. So half of our digital sales is generated using good stock that has been showcased on the digital channels. And nearly half of our sales -- of our e-commerce sales comes from our internal applications. And so this -- we have high conversion, high loyalty rates. If we think about the customer, what CCC is offering is much more attractive than what it was offering a few years ago in every respect. Our market share is growing. As you can see on the middle graph, the number of people who are club members, the loyalty club members. It continues to grow. We're basically present across the market. We have a 6% increase in number of club members. Even though we already have a strong presence and footprint in Poland, we have increases also in the cities. We also see Romania where we have 60% growth. That's half the size of Poland. We want that to grow as fast as possible. So some 49% of our customers, we use a jargon here, they have become omni-channel customers. They've purchased at least once through the omnichannel. The other half of customers we'd like to convert into online sales. We'd like them to do one sale and a second sale. So we continue to drive omnichannels, and we believe this is the best model of development for us and will give us competitive advantages. And so people who track that were certainly aware that we have a very good model to continue developing in the future. What you see on the right side of the graph, we have a strong focus on improving our efficiency. So if you think about inventory or stock management, the entire team has done a huge amount of work to shave down our stock. This was not an easy thing to do over the last 3 years. The market wasn't favorable. But we've lowered our stock to such a level that we're amongst some of the best retail companies. That means we've improved our cash flow. We've been able to invest that in HalfPrice. And HalfPrice is here on this page. Many people had put a question mark around HalfPrice. They thought there was an early stage of development in this new format. Many people thought that it was questionable what was going to happen. So 1 year down the road, we can see this is a very strong growth driver for the entire group, and it's an important strategic element. We can talk about that a little later during the course of today's presentation. This is a very good investment. And you can see that quite readily on the middle graph, the likes -- like-for-like sales results in stores that have been up and running for more than 12 years, they're above 20%. So people who come back to our stores once a month, so 15%, 20%, so these customers become regular customers, and this will boost the like-for-like sales figures we have. This is a profitable business. This is a very young format. It's already profitable. And so we can ascribe to it all of the benefits coming from the platform. We use the retail platform that the CCC Group has created. And without this platform, this wouldn't have been possible. This has worked. It's a profitable business. And every [ newsworthy ] of revenue is going to be generating more and more revenue -- more and more profit. Now our objectives, well, sales density is still below the level we'd like to achieve as set forth in our strategy. We also think about customer migration, or sales -- cross-sales -- cross-selling were more or less at 1/5. So we're thinking about here active customers who made a purchase last year. We're only at 1/5. But we believe that there's a lot for us to do if we think about sales and HalfPrice. So we're going to want to bring in new customers from CCC. So our wallet share amongst these clients will grow as our CCC customers come into HalfPrice. And then, of course, as the economies of scale grow, then we'll be able to generate higher returns [ pre-RFS ] and will be similar to the HalfPrice formats across the world. Another brand or business is eobuwie, which, let me remind you, is the top e-commerce seller, and it's now an omni-channel seller. It's not just a pure e-commerce player in Central and Eastern Europe, it's #1 in Poland, #1 in Romania. It's got more than almost 8 million active customers, PLN 3 billion in sales, growing every year. So this is a big business. And of course, what you see inside. Well, here we can see the challenges the entire market has faced. eobuwie, as well as all of the other players in the market, we were on the same boat as the other companies. And you can see the stock increase versus top line. We would probably prefer to be further on the right, but we're on the left. We're going through a period of major challenges, but we believe that entire team at eobuwie and Modivo is highly motivated and is doing quite a bit of work. It's good that we had this. It's a good thing we had this crisis. We had this in CCC as well. And crises strengthen you. So we've been able to go through this experience. We're focusing all of our energy across the group that Modivo is going to be a stronger company, especially if we think about what happened in the latter half of last year. And we -- a lot is happening with the relationships with our suppliers. And of course, the Chairman has been personally involved in cultivating those relations in terms of -- you saw, of course, that we had excess inventory. The negotiations were successful. And if you look at the margin on our new stock, it's much higher than in the past. So we have to basically sell off the old stock. And if you think about the costs, a lot of work has been done by the team. We'll come back to your question. And if we think about technology, last year, a lot was happening and it's still the case. We have the old platform that's being redone into a new platform, a lot of resources, time, concentration, focus, were allocated to that. And all of this was expended by the Modivo team. And to a large extent, the technological work, well, is never completely done, but the most important things, so migration to new markets. And Poland in May should be completed, and that means the entire technology team at Modivo will be able to focus on what the new platform can produce. It gives a lot. It will give us higher conversion, better customer service, the ability to bring changes to the market more quickly, so time to market, and so a lot of things that are pro business. The mobile app, it's hard to prepare a mobile app in parallel. But this will be facilitated and this would mean that we'll be able to loyal-ize customers in Modivo to a greater extent. We were waiting quite a bit for that in Modivo, and then we'll be able to bolster the growth here on the technology side in the Modivo and the eobuwie group. So the last slide, we have the sister business of the platform for eobuwie. And this -- we see synergies on the customer side and the supplier side and we've been able to access them. And so we have entered a market that's 4x larger, so apparel. So the capital you need is basically working capital. And we can see on the middle graph that the growth is very prominent. And it's a clear strength or growth driver from Modivo. At the same time, we're not slowing down in terms of technology, what can support us. Well, our team last year introduced the marketplace. So we had the 3P model done to Modivo, and we have good traction in terms of attracting new merchants. We have a super -- a seasoned team. So the customers haven't seen or noted any negative changes, only positive changes. That means the offering is much broader. And so 1 year from today, we think that we'll be able to do quite a bit more, thanks to a broader community of merchants, and we'll have other profits generated as a result. So I'll give the floor to Marcin.

So here's a very important slide that illustrates how these lines of business penetrate one another. Our business model is a [ whipping wheel ] in terms of how a conglomerate of 4 lines of business operate. So we have the omni-channel approach that operates very efficiently. We've shown that several times. And this is very important in order to understand what the group is in this new set of circumstances. As you can see on the left side, we have the brands. We have the suppliers. And we have -- we can achieve economies of scale as a result. This is pretty new to us. So the various lines of business, our contacts with suppliers, we can say this was managed individually or locally. Now the Chairman of the Supervisory Board has consolidated that. And we're cultivating more profound relationships. We already have better margins for the group. And so our value chain of owned brands, then we have strategic brands for various regions around the world, then we also have licenses, we'll talk about the licenses within our summary. And in terms of quality and numerics, we'll be able to create an offering for growing numbers, swelling numbers of customers. So the base is nearly doubled. We have 1 million customers that have converted to -- already. So we have 2 models -- or 2 brands that we've built, so HalfPrice and Modivo, and we're just part of the way there. So we're going to be able to convert and migrate customers from CCC into Modivo, into eobuwie, as we intensify our cooperation with suppliers, and then we add the marketplace for Modivo. And then we have -- we don't have to use our own balance sheet. We don't have to borrow money to buy something. We can use the marketplace. And this gives us the ability to penetrate different customer groups and segments, target audiences. And that means we have a better and better product offering. And this is something that basically mutually drives the business forward. Well, thanks to that line of price -- full price. So Modivo, eobuwie, CCC, well, they can count on as HalfPrice grows its size, we'll always have good, fresh products because HalfPrice is where we'll sell, of course, the ends of collections. And then we'll have these omni-channel synergies, and that's how we'll be able to combine these reciprocal relationships. And this will give us better and better results. And the results we anticipate in 2023 are as follows. We'd like to share with you our prospects, and we're going to give this as a range. What we want to achieve, we want to have top line of around PLN 11 billion in the group with a double-digit EBITDA result across the group. We want to -- we'll see a decline in CapEx. What does that mean? That means we have gone past the peak in our transformation. And now we're monetizing the technology investment, the work we've done on our customers in our various lines of business. If you think about intakes in the summer period, we're going to be able to improve our margins. We'll also see declining shares of cost as a percentage of revenue. We continue to optimize our cost base. And then we have the operating leverage and economies of scale. And that means we don't need to add additional costs. We're going to be able to do all of this on the basis -- the cost base we already have. So this is a normal year, but a demanding year. Provided that we don't have any other black swans, we'll be able to achieve a double-digit EBITDA result. All of this will be accompanied by a deleveraging program for the company. And now Karol will say a little bit about the deleveraging program.

We've said a lot about the transformation -- business transformation that our group has gone through. We want to deleverage our balance sheet where we started the pandemic period with this leverage, and there is no real good time in order to accomplish that. Now it seems we're poised and ready in order to orchestrate that. And you think about our balance sheet and you see it it's a pretty complicated multifaceted animal, and you're generally right. But if we look at this on the slide, we can see that we have a very clear plan. At CCC and HalfPrice, this is where the debt -- we have refinancing. So we can leave eobuwie alone for a moment. We'll come back to that. So at CCC and HalfPrice, this is where we have our main consortium, PFR and bonds. We have PLN 1.4 billion in net debt. That's the starting point at the end of January. Our plan is to issue stock rights for PLN 0.5 billion. And we're moving forward on the sale leaseback for warehouse, and this was a way to finance the debt. And we've been able to recover roughly PLN 400 million as a result of the sale leaseback of CCC warehouses. So that should mean that in the latter half of this year, we should be able to refinance the remaining debt as quickly as possible and as best as possible. And then in the meantime, we should be able to improve our business performance, the EBITDA. And even if we will not be able to achieve our targets by the middle of the year, we should be able to refinance our debt pretty simply, pretty easily. So what these figures don't include, we have the potential Marcin will talk about with these factoring lines. This is for retail. Because of COVID and our debt in COVID, we couldn't have these lines of [ corporate ]. We're not talking about the IPO of Modivo. We're going to put that to the side. But if something happens, this would provide some cash support. We're also in the process of securing a dedicated financing instrument to develop -- to drive the development of HalfPrice because we want to speed that up and accelerate that, so if there is a minus in the financing, if that were to happen. So this is more or less the map, the picture, the road map, of what we want to do with our balance sheet. And essentially, we want to deleverage the balance sheet very strongly in the latter half of this year, and we're pursuing this path, this plan, step by step. And we're in the process of executing that below the green line, which is called ring-fencing. We have the balance sheet and the debt position of Modivo. The bulk of this debt is a convertible equity instrument for SoftBank. This is a result of our initiative. So we treat this as quasi-equity. And then we have the net debt, which is relatively small, under PLN 100 million, at the level of Modivo. Having in mind that we have excess stock, there's no real problem related to Modivo debt, well, without considering covenants and some prospects from the point of view of financial institutions in terms of what needs to be recalculated and SoftBank's instrument. Formally, it's treated as debt, in fact, it's quasi-equity. So we do not see a problem of debt in Modivo at all. And then we can come back to CCC. Now as Marcin said, we can talk about factoring. This also reflects or pertains to Modivo business units to a similar degree. So if you look at this picture, you can see that the upper 2 lines were more or less a textbook case. We've increased top line by 30%. And at the same time, the stock or inventory has fallen. So you know very well how inventory was managed in the past, it wasn't an optimum approach. We talked about that at great length with the Chairman of the Supervisory Board. And basically, we have to stop talking about it and start doing something. And basically, we've been able to reduce the inventory by PLN 0.5 billion. And so you have HalfPrice there additionally. So we can say that we have spectacular outcomes in terms of our inventory management. Unfortunately, we can't brag about that in terms of our liabilities, our payables, to suppliers. Here, we're far away from market practice. The market practice is to finance stock through payables to suppliers and using factoring lines. The level of factoring lines is equal to the stock or inventories. And at the end of the day, you have a net cash. As you look at this graph, we have the opposite path to one that CCC went through in terms of financing suppliers. And we've been saying quite clearly this has to change, and this will change, because there's an unnecessary shadow cast under the company. This is not good for the company nor for financial institutions, and it's not good for the suppliers. So for them, the factoring is a positive -- or is a clear tool, and they use it. And the factoring limit has been falling consistently. This is a result of the [ rotten ] compromise that was made during the Ida Hurricane. During COVID, we had to sign a formula -- or an agreement with 7 banks, syndicates, that would address all of the needs. And that means we have the regular reduction in the factoring limit. So this is the total opposite path that modern trade is following. So if we look at inventory minus the factoring limit, so every other entity other than CCC would finance this with factoring at the expense of suppliers. And so if we could move that debt to the suppliers in a typical way, a way that would be acceptable to them, and here it's our debt. So we have PLN 1.1 billion in debt. This is because this model doesn't operate the same way it does everywhere else, it does in Polish trade, has global trade. We've mentioned this many times, one of the important things that we're working in terms of deleveraging the balance sheet. And at the end of the day, we should see the company as a cash positive entity, and that means we should come back to factoring. And we want to increase factoring several times over the upcoming 12 months. Let's move on to the recap and highlight what we've done and what we want to do. So we're closing Q4 with EBITDA higher than the prelims. So CCC, we used to say that we had worse results than the prelims. Now it's the third time in a row that we have results reported that are higher than the prelims. And we've -- if we adjust for one-offs, it's up by PLN 24 million. And so our revenue is up by 11% year-on-year. By the end of the quarter, thinking about what's happening in April, we should have higher value figures than lower figures. So we have nearly 25% in HalfPrice like-for-like sales. And this is the strength of our e-commerce. That's not something that's obvious based on what's happened elsewhere in the market and amongst the peer groups. And if we link what has happened over the last 3 years, we've done a profound transformation. And despite a very difficult circumstances in the market, we have 4 strong brands, and each one of them is generating nearly PLN 1 billion in revenue. So that means we've been successful in creating 4 growth drivers that are profitable. And so we want to have PLN 11 billion in revenue and double-digit profitability in terms of EBITDA. And we have a priority of deleveraging the group. And we want to change the structure of finance, and we want to have more factoring. And that means we would have a radical change in where we are with respect to the balance sheet. And the process of deleveraging will be supported by the issuance of stock. And the Chairman of the Supervisory Board has announced that he would participate. And I would like to give him the floor at this time and ask him to sum up the overall conference. Thank you very much.

So essentially, you've said everything. So we are a company that is not using all of the instruments that other players have. We don't really use factoring. We don't have banking guarantees or insurance guarantees and that means it's harder for us to work. But we've been doing a lot to overcome the difficulties. And so people trust us more than they trust the market. Some of the problems we put behind us. It's difficult to see and say what might happen on the market. The war is ongoing. Inflation is high. Customers are softer. We also have businesses that are resistant. So CCC is seen as a lower price point than Allegro and HalfPrice has proven itself to be a rocket. We should have in mind that we've been selling a lot of our own stocks in HalfPrice, and so our results can even be better once we start selling products of the global players. We've established relations. And so quarter-to-quarter, we should improve our results. So we have 60% to 80% like-for-like sales performance in our flagship stores. So we want to have stores in the bigger cities. And we can see that every single one of our openings was successful. So we've been successful. Not everybody has been successful in terms of an off-price. We have a good team that's experienced. We've been able to acquire a good team to work with us, and I'm proud that we thought up a new strong model. Marcin talked about the model and how the products are used across the lines of business. We are a complete partner. We have full-price channels. We have premium channels like Modivo. And we have eobuwie, we have CCC, where we can have capsules with brands. And we also have off-price, which cleans up the stock from the premium channels. And I can promise you that we won't be giving such discounts. So we did discounts of PLN 1.2 billion in previous seasons. That's roughly at 20%. We have to limit that, curtail that. Discounts are much smaller than they were in the past. And so we have high margins. You can't see it. In the first quarter, we wanted to sell down old stocks and the protracted winter allowed us to sell down some of our winter offering. Historically speaking, we have the lowest level of winter stock from previous quarters, and the margins will be visible. We don't have the problems that we had with cost of transport, which we had in previous years. There's EUR 50 million. So 5,000 containers by $8,000 plus customs, duties and the dollar exchange rate at 4.9. So inflation, they're lowering U.S. dollar price. Freight costs are falling, and that means we're going to be able to generate much better returns on our own products. Some others have raised their prices. And so our prices -- or sorry, products are attractively priced. So we think that our margins will be up by several percentage points in CCC. And if we think about that reciprocal penetration, we don't have to sell anything at -- doing 50% or we can give a smaller discount and that should be enough in the off channels. So if it's not sold at 40% off, then we can move it into HalfPrice, and it's sold very well amongst other brands. What else can I add? Marcin and Karol have given such a great presentation that there's not that much I could add. I really believe in what we're doing. As you know, we don't have any sporting activity anymore. We don't have any nonprofitable markets, Switzerland, Austria, Germany. The Russian market has been closed. It's in our costs. We have clear objectives. We're improving our results year-on-year without those markets. So we had to cover that gap. So now we're catching up. So we're producing better and better results. So we were able to beat that even though there is COVID. So I guess, e-commerce was growing very fast, and that was something that was -- created success for us. And so we had 60% growth. We can say that thanks to COVID, we were successful in achieving quite a bit, especially in terms of renegotiating all of our lease agreements. So 40% of our agreements are OCRs. So it's 11%. And so we have the margins that we want to have at 60%. So this is a very safe model. So the cost of labor is something that can always be reduced, and we can also change the amount of inventory we have, but we pay lease fees at a safe level. And we've been able to do more and more here, thanks to HalfPrice which is now in galleries, shopping galleries. If we have a large CCC as well as HalfPrice, we can take some 10% of their space. So in the retail business, we've been doing quite well. And we didn't have money for that, but all of us want us to come. They're giving us big fit-outs. If you look at the new stores, whether it's HalfPrice or refurbished in [ Terrazza or Kladia ]. We want our stores to look nice, the goods that are there, the brands. Customers who come in not to buy shoes, but they're coming in to buy emotions, to buy apparel. We talked about Lasocki, Jenny Fairy, DeeZee, Sprandi, all of these brands speak to customers now. This was not the case a few years ago. We spent a lot of money on marketing. And it's tough times. But we knew that was totally needed for us to do. We had to do that because as we spend more on marketing, we don't have to give as large discounts. And now we're going to be able to collect the fruit. I think there are some questions in the room about the new approach to procurement. I can tell you that there is no soft approach now on the market. Nobody can allow himself to -- in terms of international brands, they can't just tell us their conditions and just take it or leave it. But the market has strong -- Russia is no longer present for many brand owners. We have stagnation in Germany. A large number of companies are reducing their purchases or starting restructuring. So it's tough. Some companies -- I'm talking about big companies. You know the problems of the large players. Well, basically, the shrinkage has been 30%, 40%. So we have a customer. We have the shelf. We manage our customers, and that means the suppliers can't dictate conditions to us. We did ruin things a little bit in Modivo and eobuwie because we wanted to onboard as many brands as possible and the breadth of the offering. That was a mistake. We have to admit. It's not the breadth of the offer, but it's the depth and the quality of the offer. So we had too many products and too many brands that weren't going to rotate. We thought that each one of these new products would give us additional sales, but they weren't well known. So I can say that 10% of the brands in eobuwie give us 30% of the sales. And so basically, we're cleaning things up with our suppliers. We're looking at the conditions and payment terms that we have. Also, we have some brands that have 70% returns where the average is 30%. And that means we have to have a very high bar for suppliers for the next quarter. And so there's -- we have 600 brands in eobuwie. After revision, we're down to 370. But that's only doing 6%. The problems that we have there, it's not 1/3, it's 70% of the problems to sum up. So this goes through my desk now. So we want to make sure that we have less problems. Maybe some questions now from your side.

So we would invite you now to pose any questions. I understand that you're going to distribute the microphones, if somebody have some questions.

Let me add that we're working well with banks. We got better conditions from the suppliers. If we talk about bank guarantees, we, as a company, should we give a banking guarantee if we have very -- shopping gallery, if we're going to take 15% of the space there, basically, the shopping gallery should give us a banking guarantee that we're going to have the right amount of traffic because of the mix of renters there. Well, the tenant mix, I want to guarantee that we're going to have the tenant mix for the next 3 years. I'd like to have a guarantee from suppliers that they're going to deliver goods on a timely basis because during COVID, not everybody was able to deliver on a timely basis; that it's going to be good products; that the customers will buy it. I'd like to get some guarantees from others. We want to change the entire business model. And as part of Europe, well, this is something that we can do because we have a 40% market share. And it took us a lot of hard work to achieve that, and that's what we're going to now execute. So questions now? Any questions?

I have several questions. Is the customer looking for cheaper products? The second question, what does it mean to have additional capital in the HalfPrice brand? The third question, I understand that the margin has fallen, what sort of EBITDA margin will you have? You assume that it will grow a lot, starting in which quarter should that start happening?

I guess it's not going to be the first quarter. Well, we were always complaining about the weather. I didn't complain about the weather. We sold a lot of goods, winter goods, at discounted prices in January and February because you remember that it was cold. Now it's cold, too. And we're stimulating demand through promotions. Everybody is doing that. There are discounts everywhere across the market. I think yesterday was the first sunny day in Warsaw. So we have 15 more days of sales in April. So we'll be able to catch up. So the dollar exchange rate is more attractive. And so we think it will be visible starting in the second, third quarter. We're also signing licensing agreements. I'm not going to tell you which ones. Part of that's secret or confidential. We have some strong brands where we anticipate that we'll have similar margins like to our proprietary products. So we think about the completeness of our strategy. Well, these brands -- well, all of the brands would be involved in the distribution. So we have well-known brands in all of our channels. Provided, of course, that the prices are properly positioned, we can say that we'll have a higher margin. We promise it will happen this year, but this is something that will transpire over the upcoming quarters.

Maybe I could add in terms of capital in HalfPrice, it's a little early or premature. We don't have anything to report at this time. This is something we're working on. We don't have anything specific to say. We're working. We see some potential in HalfPrice, for it to develop more quickly than we had planned. We see that it's a very good market for us, and it's a good business decision, but we want to make sure that we have the proper capital base. We might find the growth, having the capital we have within the group or some other financing. But in terms of customers, there was a question about customers, what sort of trends we see. Well, some of the customers have pulled back from making purchases. We see a large number of young customers. This is something that's totally different from what we saw 3 years ago. So the repositioning that we've gone through where we have a complete offer for people from the youngest ages to the older ages, this is working well in the large cities. And so we've been able to observe that amongst the customer groups. So we feel quite good in terms of our clientele and the market consolidation. We talked about that prior to the market or prior to the conference. And this is something that's conducive to us. And that means, well, if you think about footwear, this is a place where people, they can't pass us by. We've talked about that. And you can see we have an incomparable collection in terms of the breadth and the proposals we have for customers. We can say that a lot of work has been done. In every subsequent season, things are even better and better calculated, and it's all developing quite nicely.

I'm from WOOD & Company. I have a question about working capital. We heard that you would like to use factoring to finance some of the stock. You had talked about a 100-day turnover period. What is the plan for this year?

It's between 160 and 180 days for CCC. We're improving the turnover ratio in Modivo. You should anticipate that we'll be able to optimize the stock by PLN 300 million, PLN 400 million. That's more or less the extent to which it is excessive. That's Modivo itself.

I'm from mBank. My question is about working capital in terms of the turnover of payables ratio, so will you be tapping into factoring limits this year? Is this a goal for subsequent years? And what sort of level of payables turnover ratio would you like to have across the group?

The fundamental assumption is that it should be a little higher than the inventory turnover period. So it's harder to optimize stock. We have to change the mix of financial products we have. We have to have instruments that are better aligned to how the trade operates, and we anticipate that this will happen this year.

I have a question about the company's debt. You mentioned that it's PLN 1.5 billion on the slide, and then PLN 400 million in the warehouse. Why didn't you show the PLN 1.1 billion in EBITDA that you would generate this year? Well, this would suggest that you would have cash for all of this next year if these figures are delivered. And assuming that we're optimistic, what might you do with that cash in a year from today? The question is, is this an allegation or is it a matter of modesty??

This is a matter of modesty. We didn't want things to be too optimistic. Well, if we continue developing off-price, that's clear. What's very important is to obtain financing as quickly as possible. We're doing everything we can in order to get ourselves released from this brace. And we wouldn't have any difficulties with growth. We can always find money if we can continue that growth.

If we look at the next couple of years, does the company see itself still being on the stock exchange? Or are you going to consider other strategic options?

Of course, we see ourselves on the stock exchange. That's why we're going to do a new rights offering. That's why we're obtaining new financing, and we're focused on growing the value of the company.

So any additional cash you would generate, you would want to reinvest?

I think it's a little premature. Let us deliver the plan that's been illustrated here. And if we obtain the financing and we'll have specific factoring limits, which would help us with our working capital, then we have some type of surplus, and the shareholders can make decisions what they want to do with surplus capital. I think we're more or less 6 months ahead of that. So let's wait 6 months to respond to this question.

Our clear goal is to deleverage the company and the financing structure and the reengineering, the convertibility of the debt from SoftBank. So all of this has too big of a negative shadow -- cast too big of a negative shadow, having in mind these 4 lines of business that are growing. So we have to deleverage the group. And then later we can talk about writing the future.

I think we could add that we have the asset in the form of eobuwie and Modivo. It's a little bit to the side. We saw the value there prior to COVID. We see the value during COVID. And now we've pushed it back in time by another year. And at that point, we can think about doing the IPO, but we're looking for other alternatives. We don't want to cash out on high [ price ]. We're looking at other ways in which we can recapitalize the company and doing the lease contracts on the warehouses. This is the best thing we can do. We have big businesses that are leaders in the region. Better do this faster sooner than later, but this will have and does generate value. Because here in the region, we don't have players that generate USD 3 billion in sales. So there are very few of them. So we have relations with American partners, and we can say there's no company similar to us where we have 300 stores that are digitalized, that are omnichannel, with a lot of knowledge about our customers and with a very good product and high margins. And if we want to do PLN 11 billion in revenue. We have to start earning money, and we won't be doing any provisions on business lines that aren't profitable because all of them will be -- probably wouldn't have any impairments because of FX or figures or because of freight, because freight costs are down. And this is -- these are the things that we're working on. This year's EBITDA will be up with the IPO of Modivo. These are additional drivers that can surprise us positively.

So ladies and gentlemen, if there are no other questions, we'd like to thank you very much for your time and for your attendance. And we would like to invite you to continue talking with us behind the scenes. This is the first meeting we've held face-to-face in 3 years. And so we have some refreshments for you, so on the right side when we leave the room. Okay. Thank you very much once again. And we'll see you time. [Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]