Pierce Group AB (publ) (PIERCE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to the Pierce Group Q3 2023 Presentation. [Operator Instructions]. Now I will hand the conference over to the speakers, CEO, Göran Dahlin; and CFO, Niclas Olsson. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. This is Göran Dahlin, CEO of Pierce. And with me in the room here in our office in [ Hagersten ] is our CFO, Niclas Olsson. So let's start with the Q3 summary. During the third quarter, we continued to face challenging market conditions. Our assessment is that the online market declined with roughly 5% to 10%, similar to Q1, Q2, and this was an effect of the macroeconomic headwinds. The decline was not as negative as in Q1, where we assessed the market to decline 15% to 20%. We have continued to increase our prices, and we are prioritizing margin improvements over order volume due to our solid cash situation. Together with the soft market, these 2 factors led to negative revenue development versus last year of 1% or 9% in local currencies. During the quarter, we have adjusted the assumptions underpinning depreciation of inventory, resulting in a significant adjustment of the inventory provision for slow-moving stock in the quarter. The purpose of this was to reflect today's market situation and our increased focus on shorter product life cycles, thereby creating a more attractive customer offering. Due to our focused optimized pricing and a positive impact from lower shipping costs, excluding these extra inventory provisions, gross margin increased versus last year with 3.7% and with 0.6% versus last quarter. Excluding the extraordinary provisions, adjusted EBIT improved from minus SEK 9 million in Q3 2022 to minus SEK 2 million in Q3 2023. The EBITDA is progressing in the right direction, but of course, we're not satisfied that we're not making a positive results for the quarter. We have a solid cash situation with SEK 171 million, primarily driven by a conservative approach for purchases to ensure a strong liquidity position. We estimate the demand continued to be weak. And so far in the fourth quarter, we assessed that the market development is in line with the last few quarters. We will continue with our conservative approach for purchases both for Q4, including Black Week and for quarter 1 in 2024. Looking at the KPIs. To the left, we have the Trustpilot scores. We use them to track customer satisfaction, and they continue to be a high level across Europe. We continue to drive improvements in the customer experience. We have, for example, implemented free returns until the end of the year, and we have also implemented a more generous approach to claims. We believe this should influence our customer satisfaction and retention positively. To the right, we have the development of the private brands. Our private brand products continue to show good resilience in the challenging market. In Q3, our private brand share was 44% compared with 41% in Q3 last year. This is despite the price increases that we have applied to our private brand range, and it shows that we have a compelling value proposition with our private label. Some other KPI highlights. As you can see here from the chart on the left, the active customer base is down versus last year, which is mainly due to less demand and less activity in the market. Both organic and paid traffic were down, and we saw less activity from both new and returning customers. On the right-hand side, you can see that the number of orders last 12 months is down in line with the reduced revenue levels, but the average order value continues at a good level. We have grown average order value primarily due to price increases and the fact that we have been able to keep the basket size up also in volume, and this helps to drive efficiencies in the supply chain. With this, I will hand over to Niclas.

Good morning. This is Niclas Olsson, and I'm Pierce's CFO. During the third quarter, our revenue declined with 9% in local currencies. We estimate the development to be in line with the total online market, and we see significant variances between different countries in Europe. During '23, we have focused on improving margins and in the quarter, our prices to customers has increased with approximately 5% compared with last year. The changed focus can be seen in profit after variable cost that has increased with nearly 5 percentage points, if we exclude the additional provision for slow-moving inventories. As Göran said, in Q3, we changed the assumptions in our model for calculating obsolete stock. This resulted in a significantly increased provision for slow-moving inventories of approximately SEK 44 million. Going forward, in the financial section, I will comment [ EBITDA ] development, excluding this effect. Adjusted EBIT in the quarter was minus SEK 2 million compared with minus SEK 9 million last year. Our positive trend with increasing gross margin and decreasing variable cost continues, but we do not reach Black figures as in Q2 because the third quarter has lower sales due to the seasonality. Looking at the gross margin trend to the left, we see that our margin continued to increase compared with previous periods. The positive development was driven by price increases and lower shipping costs, but some offset by higher purchasing prices. Shipping costs in relation to revenue continued to decrease and is 2 percentage points lower than 1 year ago. We expect this development to continue for some more quarters. Excluding the adjusted provision, the net working capital decreased with SEK 58 million compared to 1 year ago, and we also see a minor decrease versus last quarter. Due to the increased provision for slow-moving stock, the equity decreased to under SEK 700 million, but our financial position is solid with also over SEK 117 million in the net cash. I will now hand over to Göran to finalize the presentation.

Thank you, Niclas. So the road to improve profitability over time remains. This illustration has been included for some quarters now. And please note that this is not an outlook or a forecast, but a more of a graphical and conceptual illustration of the key profitability drivers. The dark blue on the left was the situation in Q1 and before with an EBIT loss. Important to mention that we believe that the several of the negative gross margin drivers are temporary in nature, and the P&L will benefit from a normalization. Container prices are, for example, back on pre-pandemic levels, and we expect the online shift to affect market development in the future. So looking at shipping, the prices are back on pre-pandemic levels, and at that time, the cost was 3% in relationship to revenue, so we expect some further improvements here. Purchasing by the end of 2022, we made an effort to negotiate commercial terms with our suppliers, and we seek further opportunities to negotiate with suppliers for improved terms, and we are working on this every day. There is also still an overstock situation in the market. And given our strong cash situation, we have a position to make more clearance deals even though that we are trimming our stock levels downwards. We've also talked about that we've implemented a new pricing engine that is more surgical in optimizing our pricing throughout Europe. We are already seeing effects of this new tool, and we're working hard to further develop it and -- as well as our process is to leverage the large opportunity we have in improved pricing. As part of the improvement program, we have done several changes with the marketing. The marketing machine has been trimmed and our ROI targets have been revised to improve marketing efficiency, especially within Performance Marketing. We still have a lot of work to do to improve, and we are driving customer loyalty and generally to improve marketing efforts by leveraging our customer data even better. And finally, scale. Several areas within the company is prepared to increase volumes with limited marginal cost, but we have still a large potential to simplify our processes and the way we are working through the usage of lean and to further digitize our operations. Again, please note that this is a long-term illustration of our path back to sustainable profitability, and it's not an outlook or a forecast. And as said, we do expect to face continued challenging during the coming quarters. As I mentioned in my previous quarterly call -- in our previous quarter call, we have been conducting a revision of our strategy, and I would like to go through the main points here. Short term, our focus #1 is to keep our strong cash position and gross margin improvement. Market conditions are uncertain and a solid cash position and gross margin improvements will be prioritized for market -- before market share growth. When it comes to our long-term ambition, it is to become unquestionable leading pure play -- pure online retailer in the European market for gear, accessories and parts for motorcycle riding. As a part of this strategy revision, we have recalibrated our growth strategy. 24MX is by far, the largest online retailer in Europe within the smaller but more profitable Offroad segment. Despite us already having a leading position, we still have a very large potential to grow. Consequently, we aim to enhance our specialist position to consolidate and grow our market share within the Offroad segment. We have an excellent position with strong own brands and external brands that we will leverage further. XLMOTO, that is a challenger within the much larger but in general, less profitable Onroad segment. And we are adjusting our approach here, more clearly prioritizing profitable growth. We'll be more selective in which brands we partner with, what markets we invest in and which specific customer segments we choose to target. In the current overall soft market, customer relevance and retention are more crucial than ever. Therefore, we have made increased customer retention and loyalty to one of our absolute top priorities, and we will take several important steps to increase sales from recurring customers during the coming quarters. We're also taking steps to simplify our operations. To start with, we will be simplifying our go-to-market model gradually by consolidating our 39 local sites into 3 global sites, among other initiatives. This will help us streamline our work processes and create better customer experience through enhanced personalization. We're also consolidating our portfolio of own brands that will enable us to focus our brand investments to fewer brands. This, we expect, will accelerate our brand building initiatives with the aim of developing our private brands into market-leading value-for-money brands. During the quarter, as we said before, we have also adjusted the assumptions underpinning depreciation of inventory, which has resulted in a significant adjustment of the inventory provision. Finally, our goal is to implement a more team-based operating model with fewer managers and greater individual mandate and responsibility. Accordingly, we plan to initiate the process with the unions and employees according to local rules in countries where we have operations during the fourth quarter that may affect approximately 50 employees. To support this organizational simplification, we will improve our core processes through the implementation of lean methodology across the company, accompanied by increase of digitization and automation. The ambition for the planned operating model is to generate annual profit improvements of approximately SEK 25 million, which will affect earnings already from the first quarter of 2024 while the corresponding effect on cash flow will be generated gradually during the first half of 2024. The change planned to be implemented will entail nonrecurring costs during the third and fourth quarter this year. The adjustments to the assumptions of write-downs of slow-moving inventory will affect the third quarter by SEK 44 million. While the consolidation of the brand portfolio will entail cost of approximately SEK 20 million in the form of accelerated depreciation in the coming years, including a possible write-down in the fourth quarter. Finally, the planned organizational change is expected to entail a cost of approximately SEK 15 million during the fourth quarter. Upon the successful implementation of all these planned initiatives, focusing on our customer relevance across our 2 main segments in addition to the overall simplification and digitization of the operational setup, we are all set for a new and exciting journey onwards. With this, we're finished with our presentation, and we open up for Q&A. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Niklas Ekman from Carnegie.

Just a couple of questions from my end. Firstly, you talked about that there have been great variations between markets here during the quarter. Can you elaborate a little bit more on this? Where are you seeing the greatest challenges at the moment and vice versa? Where are you seeing the strongest development right now?

Okay. As we know, Sweden is performing quite badly, and it's still for us a quite significant market -- so that's the market we see that we have most challenges within. We also see that Norway is not doing as well. On the positive side, we see, for example, countries like Denmark and Switzerland doing really well so -- and also Poland, for example. So yes.

Excellent. And the reduction of staff that you are announcing today of headcount of 50. Where exactly are you looking at? I mean you're going into negotiations now. But where will the focus be? What kind of areas are we talking about? And is there any risk that this could negatively impact your sales in the coming quarters as well?

We are reducing in -- basically all departments across all sites where we have offices, and it's primarily a white collar reduction program. And this is with a surgical thing that we're doing. So we expect this not to influence our sales in the coming quarters.

Very good. Also, this inventory write-down here of SEK 44 million. I assume this is a write-down that basically should have a more or less equal positive impact on your gross profit in the coming quarters. So am I missing something here? Because you're basically making a write-down that otherwise would have -- probably inventory that otherwise would have hampered your gross margin. Isn't that correct?

I don't think we should expect a significant improvement of gross margin in the coming quarters. But in the long run, this will, of course, help us where we will be able to not discontinue as much products, et cetera. So there should be a positive effect, but there will be no significant changes in the next couple of quarters.

Okay. Okay. Fair enough. And also -- and pardon me for maybe not being fully up to speed here, but this strategic recalibration that you're talking about. Is this a new strategy or something you've announced earlier? And can you tell us a little more about this. It looks like you're talking about an increased focus on Offroad, but maybe withdraw from some Onroad brands. So yes, this is new or something you've talked about in detail before.

This is work that we've been doing in the last quarter, and we have finalized this in the end of October. So this is a recalibration of a strategy, which means that there are several elements here that are as before, but there are also important changes. For example, in the Onroad that we're focusing more on profitable growth, which, as you mentioned, will mean that we will be more selective in which brands we partner with, for example, that is a change.

Does that also mean that you are maybe pulling back a little bit from certain markets and focusing more on others?

It's not black and white. So -- but we will focus more on the markets that are more profitable.

Okay. Okay. Fair enough.

[Operator Instructions] There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

Thank you very much for listening in to the Q3 call, and we wish you all a great day.

Thank you very much. Bye-bye.