Pepco Group N.V. (8UX.F) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everybody, and welcome, and thank you for joining us today. As just said, I'm Stephan Borchert, I'm the Group CEO of Pepco, and I'm joined here by Willem Eelman, the Group CFO. I will first take you through our strategic highlights and current trading and then hand over to Willem, who will outline the strength of our financial position post Poundland as new Pepco Group. And we'll then open up to your questions at the end. As usual, with that, let's begin. 2025 was a year of transformation for us. I'm very pleased with the swift decision-making and the pace of execution our teams across the business have delivered. We have delivered positive like-for-like growth in all our key regions in H2, including returning to growth in Poland, a key milestone for us. At the same time, we have expanded gross margins beyond our expectations outlined at the CMD, driven by the growth of Pepco and its higher-margin clothing and GM general merchandise focus. We've made strong progress against each of our strategic objectives, not least the quick progress we have made towards our goal to simplify the business and exit FMCG, which I will come on to more later. This progress has enabled us to deliver such a strong performance this year and positions us for further exciting progress in the year ahead, particularly around digital. Lastly, I'm pleased to say that we are on track to deliver full year results in line with the guidance set out at our CMD in March with EBITDA on the top end of our guided range. We are pleased with the turnaround in Poland, as I said before, returning to like-for-like growth in Q3 and generating increasing momentum through the second half. This was driven by our continued focus on our market-leading price proposition, which resonates strongly with our customer base and improves operational excellence, really focusing on making sure the right products are always available in stores and consumers want them, both of which led to strong volume growth. We also invested in turning around our weakest performing stores, which positively impacted like-for-likes. We are also performing well on a profit base with 99% of stores in Poland now operating profitably, which puts us in a very strong position moving forward. Performance was further improved on an excluding FMCG basis as we repurposed the snake at the checkout counters from FMCG to GM products, drive additional higher-margin sales growth. It's also worth mentioning that this turnaround is not unique to Poland. CEE as a whole returned to positive like-for-like growth in Q1 2025 already and maintained a strong positive like-for-like performance throughout the year. Western Europe, by which we are focused on Spain, Italy and Portugal, performed very well for the year with like-for-like growth of 6.7%, although the pace of growth in H2 was slightly impacted in Q4 with sales growth impacted by sustained warmer weather in autumn and the phasing. The successful reformatting of Pepco Plus stores to our standard store format enabled us to repurpose space previously allocated to lower-margin FMCG products to higher-margin clothing and GM products, driven even stronger -- driving even stronger performance on an excluding FMCG basis. These reformatted stores are delivering an EBITDA margin uplift of 12.6% points. This reallocation of space also drove a significant increase in gross margin, which was up 410 basis points at the end of August. And I'm pleased to say that each of Spain, Italy and Portugal are all profitable on an underlying EBITDA basis with average store EBITDA margin up 6.1 percentage points on fiscal year '24. Going over to the strategic highlights. We have made significant strategic progress this year, executing quickly to transform the shape of our group. Our FMCG exit is near complete. The sale of Poundland, which I will touch on more in the next slide, brought us a big step closer to achieving this goal. We have also successfully completed the Pepco Plus store formatting at the end of August, in line with our plan, which means Pepco has now fully exited FMCG. The last remaining piece is deals, which is now operating almost completely independently with its own distinct management team. As previously outlined, we will continue to manage deals for value until an appropriate sale can be reached. The turnaround in performance in Poland and CEE has been really encouraging. It's important to make sure we get it right in our core markets, and I'm very pleased with how quickly we have restored like-for-like growth here. Lastly, we've made huge strides on our customer proposition with our coupon-at-till pilot demonstrating impressive results with redemption rates and sales uplift beyond our initial expectations. We've also been focused on the digital aspect of our proposition, and the teams are working hard to finalize our mobile app, and I'm excited to get it out to customers for launch in early 2026. On Poundland, Willem will provide more detail on the transformation of our financial position post the sale of Poundland later, but let me first give you a high-level overview of what it means for our business. This was a key step for the group post our CMD and a real milestone for the business, which we were able to achieve quite quickly. The sale of Poundland only furthers our progress towards simplifying the group and exiting FMCG, but allowing increased focus on our high-margin core business, Poundland was also a significant drag on profitability and free cash flow, as you know. Having exited the business now puts the entire group in a much stronger position and means we are far better placed to deliver greater value and returns to shareholders going forward. So, in recap, 2025, as I hope you can see, has been a real inflection point year as we focused on driving significant change across the entire business. We are now firmly focused on Pepco as our core asset, and we're making really strong progress in driving the growth of this brand. And as you can see from current trading, revenue was up 8.8% for the first 51 weeks of the year, driven by store expansion and like-for-like revenue growth. Pepco banners and the OpCo continues to perform well with like-for-like growth for the 51 weeks of 2.7% up and accelerating momentum in quarter-to-date four with like-for-like growth of 3.9%. Our measured store expansion plan has progressed well with 218 stores opened year-to-date. We expect to finish the year with 248 new stores, in line with our CMD guidance. Let me now hand over to Willem to provide a more detailed overview of the New Pepco Group financial performance post found that. Over to Willem.

Thank you very much, Stephan. Before I go into the slides and focus on how the New Pepco Group has performed, excluding Poundland and providing with more transparency on the impact of the Poundland separation, I want to make a comment first. This September trading statement is very different from what we've done in the past. And we're providing an exceptional level of detail on the business performance on a three-quarter basis to really provide you with the insights needed to understand the New Pepco business going forward. Clearly, on December 10, when we do the full year results, will then complete the journey, and we'll be able to talk freely about full year results and achievements. But this is an exceptional release of information that will not be repeated, but we feel it's urgent and needed in order to bring transparency to the market on how New Pepco is really performing. So I appreciate your appreciation for that. So let's go to the slide. New Pepco Group has shown consistent growth. This slide is a clear representation of why we took the decision to refocus the group on our Pepco banner and exit Poundland. As you can see, New Pepco Group, which is primarily driven by Pepco has delivered very strong growth across all headline metrics in the period '22-'24, with this growth trajectory continuing on a nine-month year-on-year basis and in line with our guidance. With consistent top line growth at 19% CAGR and margins expanding 522 basis points in the same period, New Pepco Group has generated increasing levels of profitability, resulting in an EBITDA CAGR of 28% in the period '22 to '24. Conversion to net earnings also continues to improve with New Pepco Group generating EUR 199 million profit after tax in fiscal year '24 and on track to generate a continued strong growth this year, having already achieved EUR 196 million of profit after tax in the nine-month fiscal year '25 period, a 19% growth on quarter 3 '24. This is driven by improved finance costs as we're focusing on our balance sheet and a sustained reduced ETR, reflecting focus on balance sheet optimization and reduction of loss-making units and turning into profit in a number of our markets. This has had a sustainable tailwind to drive our ETR down and has already resulted in these numbers in cumulative nine months. The next slide. The Poundland exit has really transformed the financial profile of our business and gives a much stronger base to grow from moving forward. These next few slides hopefully draw your attention to the contrasting performances of New Pepco Group and Poundland, highlighting the drag on performance of all Pepco Group experience and the much stronger growth potential we have going forward as a new group. New Pepco Group, let me summarize, is generating significantly faster revenue growth higher gross margins has larger -- large white space opportunities to continue to drive growth and whilst delivering solid like-for-likes. Next slide. While on the last slide, you could see Poundland generating EUR 2 billion of revenue. This slide is really powerful because you can see Poundland EBITDA growth was declining, down 12% in fiscal year '24, with even greater deterioration at profit after tax levels, resulting in a profit after tax in fiscal year '24 of minus EUR 37 million. Differential in performance of New Pepco Group versus Poundland is clear to see with New Pepco Group generating strong profit driven by the enhanced gross margin performance of Pepco and its clothing and GM focus as well as the positive like-for-like growth delivered across the Pepco business. The results shown here demonstrate the benefit of simplifying our group structure to focus on Pepco and exit FMCG. One of the most significant impact is to our net earnings performance, which was greatly hindered by the negative profitability of Poundland and ongoing negative cash injections required into the business. Going forward, New Pepco Group has enhanced earnings potential, which I will touch upon once more later in these slides. New Pepco Group is also highly cash generative, closing fiscal year '24 with pro forma unlevered free cash flow of EUR 271 million. Poundland previously required financing support from the group, which hindered our overall cash generation. However, at New Pepco Group, our model is set up to support consistently strong and growing free cash flow generation. This enhanced free cash flow profile will enable us to deliver greater returns to our shareholders. You've already seen this start to come through with our maiden dividend on fiscal year '24 paid out in April and our EUR 200 million committed share buyback program running into fiscal year '27. We have already executed EUR 50 million of this and announced a further EUR 50 million tranche to commence in October. In 2025, we have returned in total EUR 86 million to our shareholders, underscoring our strong free cash flow generation. We are well on our way to our midterm ambition of EUR 200 million in levered free cash flow per year guided from '26 onwards, and we will continue to return excess cash to shareholders through ordinary dividends, share buybacks and specials as appropriate and in line with our capital allocation policy. On this slide, you can see the breakdown of our nine-month fiscal '25 pro forma cash flow. And important to call out here is the funding support the group was still providing to Poundland in the first 9 months of the year. Despite this support, New Pepco Group still generated strong cash growth from EUR 307 million at the beginning of the year to EUR 356 million at the end of quarter 3. That's a growth of 16%. Further cash improvements expected in the remainder of the year with good free cash flow generation, already reaching EUR 167 million at the end of quarter 3 '25, ensuring we're well on track to meet our midterm ambitions of over EUR 200 million unlevered free cash flow. Going forward, we expect increasing level of cash generation and conversion in line with our virtuous circle model outlined earlier at the Capital Markets. Day. Please note that in quarter 4, we executed the first tranche of our share buyback of EUR 50 million, which is not in these numbers because they are cumulative quarter 3. The newly announced SBB will be effective in quarter 1 fiscal year '26. I won't talk to this slide too much, but here you can see the pro forma performance of fiscal year '25 and the nine months. For those of you who are interested, there is also a pro forma historic table in the annex with details on fiscal year '22 to '23. The key thing I would like you to take from this slide is the hugely beneficial impact on the nine month '25 from EBIT down with New Pepco Group generating significant greater profit before tax, profit after tax and earnings per share without the drag from pound. However, let me call out a few notes with regards to profit after tax, which you need to take note of. There are a few one-off impacts to call out when considering our profit after tax delivery for the first nine months of the year and the full year as it will be completed. Hedging gains on intra-group cash and debt balances resulted in a ForEx gain of EUR 20 million in the first nine months. Now normalized through balance sheet optimization, this will not recur. There is a beneficial -- sorry, and as a result of our refinancing plans, we expect to incur a one-off charge of EUR 10 million in quarter 4 of fiscal year '25 that will impact our full year profit after tax. This is related to an amortization of the historical issue cost on the bonds that we then need to accelerate and interest penalty on the called EUR 175 million tranche of the full bond. It's important that you take this into consideration and do not simply extrapolate the nine months into the full year number. Financing. On to financing. Our April '26 term loan is now current. And as a result, we are focused on refinancing our loan portfolio. We have called EUR 175 million of our bonds on the 22nd of September. And as I said, this will drive an acceleration of the write-off of the issue costs that we still have on our balance sheet and an interest penalty related to the calling of the bonds. Although this will impact fiscal year '25 profitability, we expect the savings in interest to deliver a profit uplift from '26 and onwards. We're in active discussions with our banking partners regarding the remaining EUR 200 million as well as the Term Loan B. By calling the 45% to 47% initially, we ensure that we retain the flexibility needed to obtain the best possible pricing whilst ensuring sufficient liquidity headroom in this period. A new senior facility agreement to repay the EUR 250 million term Loan B is expected also to be completed in October. What is -- what will this deliver to Pepco a material improvement of the maturity profile of our outstanding external debt and a reduction of the external cost of capital. Guidance. Lastly for me, I'm pleased to say that we are delivering in line with all metrics as set out at the CMD in March, if not overachieving. We're ahead on gross margin, and we're at the top end of the range in EBITDA growth whilst delivering all other metrics well within the range. Gross margin is actually tracking ahead of guidance. We have seen significant improvements through the year driven by Pepco, and we expect to report growth at our full year results. EBITDA growth for the year is expected to come in towards the top end of our high single-digit guided range, as already mentioned by Stephan. And EBIT growth is tracking in line with guidance as is the performance of deals. We appreciate that this -- all of this, and I'm referring to the whole financial disclosure today, that all of this is a big change to how Pepco is performing and in its underlying numbers and figures, both P&L and balance sheet. Therefore, we will be available for further clarification and questions between today and our next formal engagement on December 10. And I will hand over back to Stephan.

Thank you, Willem. A lot of good content. Now let me quickly summarize before we turn over to your questions. As you can see, we discussed our strategic framework at the CMD in March. As outlined in this presentation, I hope you can see that we are making very strong progress against each of these objectives. The first 3 in particular, are clear to see in these results, while the work on the latter 2 will become more visible through the course of '26 in particular. We'll provide a more detailed strategic update at our full year results in December, as already mentioned by Willem. To summarize, Pepco has performed very well in fiscal year '25 as the effects of our new strategic framework have begun to show through. The return to positive like-for-like growth in Poland and CEE as well as the early momentum we have achieved in Western Europe delivered like-for-like growth across Pepco of 2.7% for the first 51 weeks of the year with an increasing tenancy in quarter 4. The sale of Poundland not only takes us a big step closer to our goal of exiting low-margin FMCG, it significantly improves our free cash flow profile. As I hope it has come through clearly during the presentation today. The completion of our Pepco Plus reformatting in August has delivered great results as we have reallocated that space to higher-margin clothing and general merchandise products. We have remained focused on shareholder returns during the year, completing our first EUR 50 million SBB in August and as Willem just said, announcing our second EUR 50 million tranche, which will launch in October this year. We are on track to end the year strongly and deliver full year EBITDA in New Pepco towards the top end of our high single-digit guided range. More exciting still is the future strategic progress to come in fiscal '26, including continued store expansion, which we will progress in our existing markets and in some new bolt-on markets like Kosovo and North Macedonia. We will launch our mobile app, a big step forward on digital customer engagement strategy, and we'll do so while maintaining a key focus on operational efficiency in our stores. I hope you can see from our performance so far this year that New Pepco Group is focused on delivering consistent strong growth and sustainable value creation. We are executing at pace to ensure we deliver against that ambition. With that, I'd like to hand over to your questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question this morning is coming from James Anstead from Barclays.

I have three questions, if that's okay. Firstly, you called out that the weather was clearly unhelpful for deals in the -- well, effectively July, August, September. But at the same time, Poland seems to be getting quite a bit better. So is it fair to say that you've had a good performance of Pepco despite the weather in 4Q in Poland. You might have even done better if the weather had been helpful. You understand my question? That's kind of point one. The second one is, I presume, I mean, can you comment about whether you're quite happy with how you're exiting the year in terms of your stock position? And finally, I just noticed on the pro forma numbers that the central costs are already higher for the first nine months than they were for the whole year last year. I wonder if that's the new normal run rate or whether there are quite a few, let's say, unusual items at the central cost level this year, and that's a number that can come down in the years ahead.

James, thank you for the great questions. Yes, first -- I'll take the first two and Willem will comment on the third. Look, on weather deals, this is very particular. We've seen on the deal side, very -- how can stronger softening in the soft drinks area, but also in health and beauty. So it's very particular, Pepco has not seen this problem. So in Q4, we have seen good trading so far. And so therefore, this is a deals-related topic really. On the stock position, I've said that as a major part of our transformation has been and is continuing to be in the supply chain part. So we feel better, feel better positioned that our supply chain accuracy and operational incidence there will also lead to sufficient stock position for the quarter, if you want, the Christmas season. So that's probably what I can say to this side. And then on the corporate costs, there was a question.

Yes. I will -- let me take that one. This is a tricky topic because, of course, you have to reflect that in the '24 accounts, costs were still allocated to Poundland fully pro rata. And so the share that you -- the corporate costs that you see in the '24 comparator excluding Poundland is a significant -- a pro rata portion of the central costs were, of course, allocated and charged out actually to Poundland. On the nine months number, since June, we have no longer been charging group costs out. So, in a way, this is an apple and app number comparison. What I can say, however, is that last year's corporate costs were particularly high in quarter 4. And we're looking at a run rate corporate cost at an aggregate budget, which is trending well down on prior year, and that trend will continue. And corporate costs for just everybody's understanding, it is share-based payment linked provisions. It is a small group of staff in the London office. It is all the audit fees that we have with the external auditor. It is treasury and banking and investor relations fees and it's corporate legal. That sits in our corporate cost definition. Did I answer your question, James?

Yes.

[Operator Instructions] We now to Alison Lygo of Deutsche Bank.

Two from me, please. The first is really on the return to like-for-like growth in Poland, which is encouraging. Just wondering if you could talk a bit about what you see as underpinning that, what you've changed in terms of ranging pricing? And also just as to what kind of categories that's coming through? Is it kids clothing? Is it more kind of taking some growth share in adult clothing or general merchandise? That would be really helpful. Any color you could share there? And then the second one is just on interest and the interest cost level. That is clearly coming down as you're working on the refinancing and generating a bit more cash flow. Wondering if you could give any color as to how much more you think there might be to go for as we look into next year?

Thank you very much. I'll take the first two on the Poland related, and Willem will then comment on the interest side. Yes, look, we are indeed also very, very pleased. As I stated in around summer, we were not happy with the development in Poland, and we make this a real focus area for us. And that's all based on the belief that our core customer value proposition remains very strong also for Polish customers. And it really is driven by a strong focus on operational excellence, to be honest. We did a whole suite of refocusing around size availabilities, stock in store, attention of staff to customers. We adjusted the marketing a bit. We kept our -- and sharpened a little bit, but kept basically our price positioning, which continues to be leading. And we had a particular special focus on the bottom 20 stores, 20% stores, not bottom 20% stores really, which were basically dragging the entire country performance down significantly. So, there is a -- very pleased to say there's a quite strong turnaround happening. We looked at everything from teams to as I said, availability, supply chain stress and so on. So the whole company was focused on getting that in place. We see this is a healthy return to positive like-for-like. It's a volume-driven return. Transactions are up, and it's really across the entire suite of categories, to be honest. I mean we have within our category portfolio, obviously, some weaker, some stronger, but we are pleased to see strong resonance with customers in the core categories we want to be. This is kids, baby and adult wear, but also. So it's really across the board. I just think we've lost a little bit of focus on the pedal here, and this is now very high CEO care also, as I guided the last time already in summer on this. And we are pleased with the results. We feel we are back in Poland, and that's where we should be actually at Pepco.

On the interest charge, we have identified a significant reduction opportunity but that will gradually be realized in the period '25 to '27 as we refinance the components of our loan portfolio, where we will be providing more transparency on this in our December full year disclosures as we will have completed the program as well as any one-off charges relating to this and the interest -- the external interest savings that we were going to be realizing. So, more to come, but we have identified a significant opportunity to, on one hand, deliver a significant extension of the maturity curve of our debt portfolio, whilst at the same time, reducing the external debt cost materially.

We'll now move to [ Alice Rosnay ] of JPMorgan.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

I just wanted to ask another question related to the refinancing of the capital structure. So, I just wanted to know if you plan to retain a structure with bonds and loans or just plan to transition to a simpler structure with just bonds or just loans going forward, if you can disclose?

We will tap into all the instruments available to us. We are considering novelties here, but it's too early to disclose.

As we have no further questions at this time, Mr. Borchert, I'd like to turn the call back over to you for any additional or closing remarks. Thank you.

Yes. Thank you very much. Thanks for your interest in our company in this call. As Willem said, this was an exceptional update to you. We thought and we found it was very important to do so, and we've kind of indicated this already last time when we disclosed our intention to sell Poundland. I hope you are with us that it clearly demonstrates that this strategic move was the right one. It demonstrates a super strong situation from our platform from which we're now going to operate over the next years. And we are looking forward to see you back on December 10 with the full year results. And for more questions, then, of course, also strategic updates that will be a bit more detailed then. So, thank you very much for your attention and your interest.