Temple & Webster Group Ltd (TPW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Temple & Webster Group Ltd Annual General Meeting. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Chairman and Independent Director, Stephen Heath. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Bernadette. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Annual General Meeting for Temple & Webster. My name is Stephen Heath, and I'm the Chairman of the Board of Directors. It is now 10:30. And as I am advised that a quorum is present, I declare this meeting open. Today's meeting is being held as a virtual AGM in the interest of the health and safety of our shareholders and our people. I'm joined virtually by Sue Thomas, nonexecutive director; Conrad Yiu, Co-Founder and nonexecutive director. And with me here today is Mark Coulter, Co-Founder, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer; Mark Tayler, our Chief Financial Officer; and Michael Egan, our company secretary. Belinda Rowe, who is also a nonexecutive director, has had a family emergency this morning and can't be with us today. She sends her apologies. Also attending is Graham Leonard, partner at EY, the company's auditor, who is available to answer questions on the accounts at the appropriate time. The Chairman and CEO AGM speeches have been released to the market. Whilst it's disappointing that we are not together physically, we do encourage shareholders to participate in the meeting online. You'll be able to participate in real time, submit questions and cast your votes. I would like to outline the technology and procedural matters for this meeting. As explained in the letter attached to the Notice of Meeting and online virtual meeting guide, which explains how shareholders may participate in the meeting, it's on the company's website, www.templeandwebstergroup.com.au/investorcentre. If you are participating via the AGM online platform, you will see a screen showing the presentation slides on the right. At the bottom of the screen, there are 3 boxes. These allow you to get a voting card, ask a question and download relevant documents. Thank you to those shareholders who submitted questions prior to the meeting. We will speak to those when we arrive at the relevant items of business. If you have a question that you would like to ask today, you may type questions into the online platform. [Operator Instructions] Questions that are relevant to the business of this meeting will be advised to me. We may aggregate questions if we receive multiple questions on the same topic. We will address each question when we arrive at the relevant item of business. And I'll now summarize the voting procedures. All items of business will be voted on by poll, which is now open. If you did not cast your vote prior to the meeting, you may cast a live vote using the online platform. Please click Get a Voting Card and follow the prompts. You may cast your live vote at any time during the meeting. Emma Khoury of Link Market Services is the returning officer for this meeting. Live voting on the online platform will close 5 minutes after the close of the meeting, and you must be logged into the online platform to cast a live vote. I confirm that where undirected proxies have been given to me as the Chairman, I will vote in favor of the resolution. During the meeting, we'll display on the presentation slides the number of direct and proxy votes received prior to the meeting on each resolution. The final results will be released to the market as soon as they are available. If you experience any difficulties using the online platform, a help line number is displayed at the top of the page. After my introductory remarks, Mark Coulter, our CEO and Managing Director, will take you through the 2021 financial year in more detail, including our year-to-date trading update. We will then proceed with the formal business of the meeting to vote on the resolutions. While the financial year ended June 30 was a year that many Australians will remember as one of great change and disruption, I was quite sure that as the year was drawing to a close that most of us thought that lockdowns were becoming a thing of the past. How wrong could we have been. I think what we have learned over the last 3 months is that we all need to be flexible and be able to adapt to new ways of working and living and that online economic, social, entertainment and communication platforms will be helping us to facilitate the changes necessary. The team at Temple & Webster has worked hard to be well positioned to service the changing needs of their newly migrating online customers and for the regulators who are shopping to make their homes more functional for their changing living and working routines. Key highlights for the year ended June 30 include a very strong year-on-year growth with revenue growing to $326.3 million, which was up 85% on the prior year; record EBITDA, which was up 141% on the prior year to $20.5 million; NPAT of $14 million, which on a normalized basis, including (sic) [ excluding ] deferred tax adjustments, was up 165%. And as a result of a successful capital raise and our record profit, we ended the year with $97.5 million in cash, and we remain debt free. Whilst the directors are happy with the year and the progress made against our plans, it is worth noting that we are still at the start of our journey, albeit that have accelerated by the impacts of the lockdown. We operate in the $16 billion furniture and homewares market. However, less than 10% of that market has moved online. This is well behind other international markets such as the U.S., which is up to 25% online penetration and showing no signs of slowing down. This structural shift towards online will be supported by millennial shoppers as they enter their core furniture and homewares buying years. In addition to our core market, we also operate in the commercial furniture and homewares and home improvement markets. These markets significantly increased our total addressable market to more than $30 billion. This market size, coupled with our online market position and the consumer trends that we are seeing, are the reasons why the Board believes that Temple & Webster will be a high-growth business for many years to come. During the second half of the year, we reaffirmed our commitment to a reinvestment strategy to ensure that we are building the go-to brand in our category for the next generation of shopper. Investments will be made in areas such as marketing, technology, data and logistics as well as in other key areas of the business. As a result, we have guided the market to expect an EBITDA level of between 2% and 4% in the short term -- short to mid-term to allow us the flexibility to make these investments. We believe that by making these investments now, the group will be well positioned to expand its market leadership position, and the benefits from scale will naturally flow. During the year, Belinda Rowe was appointed as a nonexecutive director of the company. Belinda is an experienced marketing professional and successful business executive who will help us to achieve our goal of becoming the first place Australians turn to when shopping for their homes, and we welcome Belinda to the team. On behalf of the Board, I would like to thank our CEO, Mark Coulter, our CFO, Mark Tayler, and the broader management team for their achievements in a busy and challenging operating environment, which has been made even more challenging by moving in and out of the office during lockdown periods. While it's great to see sales and customers grow so fast, it has resulted in a relentless year for the team, and we thank them for their passion and dedication. I'd also like to take this opportunity to extend my thanks to my fellow directors Sue Thomas, Conrad Yiu, Belinda Rowe and our company secretary, Mike Egan, for their contribution and stewardship. And finally, on behalf of the Board, I would also like to thank you, our shareholders, for your continued support. I'll now hand over to Mark for his address.

Thank you, Stephen, and good morning, fellow shareholders. Before taking you through some of the highlights of the year, I would like to acknowledge the incredibly difficult period that we collectively lived through over the last couple of years. While COVID has certainly presented challenges to our business, our goal has been to keep delivering a great experience to our customers and hopefully have them enjoy their homes even just a little bit more. As Stephen said, once again, Temple & Webster has delivered a record set of results. Our growth was across all major categories, geographies, channels and demographics. Our market is massive and subject to accelerating tailwinds, and we are well positioned to capitalize on our online market leadership. Importantly, we were a high-growth business before COVID, growing 30% to 50% annually. And while the lockdowns have no doubt accelerated the underlying shift to online shopping, we remain bullish about our long-term growth for many years to come. Our job is to give our customers a great experience, to get them to continue shopping online and more relevantly, keep shopping with us. The great news is that orders from repeat customers continues to grow significantly, with orders from repeat customers overtaking orders from first-time customers during Q4 of FY '21. This higher repeat rate partially led to a 12% increase in annual revenue per active customer, which is now over $425, which is very healthy for a large e-commerce business. Unfortunately, the consequence of another record period has led to third-party logistics network issues, which I'm sure many of you have been reading about in the press. We've been working tirelessly to add customer care resources, adding new logistics providers and working with our current partners on smoothing scaling issues and using technology to improve the customer experience. However, the unfortunate reality is that scaling this quickly is hard work. While our Net Promoter Score dropped below our target levels during the year, it is worth reminding ourselves that even at our lowest point, our NPS is still very good for a retailer and means, by far, most customers are rating us a 9 or a 10 out of 10. While we are constantly innovating our product and service offering, it's worth calling out some of the notable milestones for the year. Our owned inventory program or private label has been a strategic focus for the business, and it's great to see its share of revenue grow from 19% to 26%. This was done by increasing our buying and merchandising planning teams; diversifying our factories outside of China; adding multiple warehouses, including now in Sydney; investing in data and analytics to improve forecasting accuracy; and expanding our quality and compliance team. We now have apps in both app stores with early feedback tremendously positive. We now have thousands of reviews, and both our iOS and Android apps are rated 4.8 stars out of 5. The app customer is a more engaged customer with a higher conversion and a high repeat rate. During the year, we launched artificial intelligence interior design service. The AI-powered service is another feature unique to Temple & Webster, again, designed to make shopping online easier. It is in partnership with an Israeli startup, in which we've made a second round of investment after a successful pilot of the service. We love this service as it exposes our huge range of beautiful products across our many categories in an inspirational way. It helps customers visualize products, giving them even more confidence to shop with us. We will continue to look proactively at the market for innovative technology, products and services as that has been a core part of entrepreneurial DNA. After a difficult end to the previous financial year, it was great to see our business customers come back in full force during FY '21 with our Trade & Commercial division growing 110% year-on-year. It's worth noting that these are great customers with higher repeat activity and large order sizes. This year, we also made significant progress in our commitment to make the world more beautiful from an environmental and social point of view. We've engaged external sustainability consultants and begun the work at identifying and capturing carbon reduction opportunities. We kicked off multiple new responsible sourcing initiatives and submitted our first Modern Slavery Statement. We've continued to support our charity partner, Women's Community Shelters, an organization that provides community-based emergency accommodation and support for vulnerable women and children. We've also begun our journey to progress the goals of reconciliation with the commencement of a Reconciliation Action Plan. And of course, the key task of the year was recruiting, onboarding and training 180 new Tempsters across Sydney and Manila to handle the huge increase in orders from Australians turning to online shopping during these extraordinary times. So where to from here? Well, we have a simple and consistent strategy. We want to have the biggest and best range, having everything you need for the home. Importantly, the best bit of this means we won't list everything. We want to be seen as a place for quality at an affordable price. We want to be a source of inspiration and the place customers go to when they want to make their home more beautiful. And we want to create a seamless customer experience when shopping, including our customers' delivery experience to their home. And with scale comes benefits such as being able to forge closer relationships with suppliers, obtaining better terms and exclusive product ranges, making bigger investments in areas like technology and data and expanding our logistics capability. In effect, the bigger we become, the better and stronger our customer proposition comes, which is the flywheel effect. This in turn will lead to an increase in our market share. We believe that now is the time to invest and scale our online market leadership. This is the period where customers are choosing the trusted brands, and we want to be that brand. This year has started strongly with a year-on-year growth of 56%. That's for the period July 1 to October 15. We expect full year EBITDA to be within the stated 2% to 4% range However, it is anticipated that H1 EBITDA will be higher than this level. We continue to experience strong tailwinds, including the ongoing adoption of online shopping due to structural and demographic shifts, and COVID has accelerated these trends. A buoyant housing market and the temporary reduction of travel spend are also supporting the growth of our sector. While the end of lockdowns will no doubt have the world return to a more normal distribution of discretionary spend, we would remind our shareholders that there is still significant growth ahead of Temple & Webster as we continue our march up the online adoption curve. Temple & Webster is a long-term growth story, and periods of above and below average are to be expected. Finally, many of you will be wondering about the global supply challenges currently facing Australia. Once again, the inherent flexibility and diversity of Temple & Webster's business model and supplier base is proving fruitful. We source from over 100 factories through our private label division. And our drop ships are sourcing from thousands of factories, meaning we can adapt to the changing supply chain environment very quickly. Our inventory weeks of cover for our best sellers, both drop shippers and private label, are at a similar position or better than this time last year. While we'll no doubt see individual products move in and out of stock, we expect to see customers substitute into other similar products as we witnessed last year. Finally, I'd like to say a big thank you to the team. The last couple of years have been relentless, as Stephen said. However, you managed to deliver an amazing set of results to an overwhelmingly happy customer base and mostly from your homes. While it has been difficult and stressful, you have set the business up for decades of growth and success.

Thank you, Mark. I'll now move to considering the formal matters as set out in the Notice of Meeting. As set out in the explanatory statement for today's meeting, as Chair, I intend to vote all undirected proxies in favor of each resolution. Item 1. As required by the Corporations Act, the financial report, directors' report and auditor's report for the year ended 30 June 2021 are set out in the annual report. There is no requirement to approve these reports. Shareholders have been asked to lodge questions to Graham Leonard, partner at EY, the company's auditor, about the conduct of the audit and the preparation and content of the independent audit report. No questions were received by the time that questions were to be given. Notwithstanding that, does anyone have any questions on this item at this time? I'll wait for about a minute to give people a chance to type questions. Okay. Thanks, everyone. There are no questions for Graham on the item of accounts. We'll move to the first resolution, which is the remuneration report. Resolution 1 is for the adoption of the company's 2021 remuneration report, that the remuneration report included in the directors' report provided to the shareholders as part of the annual report of the company for the year ended 30 June 2021 be adopted. Proxy votes are shown on the screen. Does anyone have any questions on this item? Okay. There are no questions come through on the remuneration report. We'll move to resolution 2, the reelection of Belinda Rowe as a director, which is to consider and, if thought fit, to pass the following resolution as an order resolution that Belinda Rowe, being a director seeking reelection in accordance with rule 67 of the constitution of the company and being eligible, offer themselves for reelection, be hereby reelected as a director of the company. Proxy votes are shown on the screen. Does anyone have any questions on this item? Okay. There's been no questions on resolution 2. We'll move to resolution 3, which is the reelection of myself, Stephen Heath, as a director: to consider and, if thought fit, pass the following resolution as an order resolution that Stephen Heath, being a director seeking reelection in accordance with rule 68 of the constitution of the company and being eligible, offers himself up for reelection, be hereby reelected as a director of the company. Proxy votes are shown on the screen. Does anyone have any questions on this item? Okay. There are no questions. On that item, we'll move resolution #4, which is the nonexecutive directors' total aggregate maximum remuneration: to consider and, if thought fit, to pass the following resolution as an ordinary resolution that, for the purpose of ASX Listing Rule 10.17 and all other purposes, the total aggregate maximum remuneration to be paid to the nonexecutive directors be increased from $400,000 -- by $400,000 from $700,000 to $1.1 million per annum. Proxy votes are shown on the screen. Does anyone have any questions on this item? Thank you. There are no questions on that item. We'll move to resolution #5, the issue of securities to Stephen Heath: to consider and, if thought fit, to pass the following resolution as an ordinary resolution that, for the purposes of ASX Listing Rule 10.14 and all other purposes, the issue of restricted rights for the issue of 1,946 fully paid ordinary shares in the company under the Temple & Webster Group Ltd NED Equity Plan to Mr. Stephen Heath, a nonexecutive director of the company, be approved on the terms set out in the explanatory statement, which accompanies this notice. The proxy votes are shown on the screen. Does anyone have any questions on this item? Okay. There are no questions on that item. Thank you. We'll move to resolution #6, which is the issue of securities to Belinda Rowe: to consider and, if thought fit, to pass the following resolution as an ordinary resolution that, for the purposes of ASX Listing Rule 10.14 and all other purposes, the issue of restricted rights for the issue of 1,946 fully paid ordinary shares in the company under the Temple & Webster Group Ltd NED Equity Plan to Belinda Rowe, a nonexecutive director of the company, be approved on the terms set out in the explanatory statement, which accompanies the notice. Proxy votes are shown on the screen. Does anyone have any questions on this item? Thank you. There are no questions on that resolution. We'll move to resolution #7, the issue of securities to Mr. Conrad Yiu: to consider and, if thought fit, to pass the following resolution as an ordinary resolution that, for the purpose of AX Listing Rule 10.14 and all other purposes, the issue of restricted rights for the issue of 5,837 fully paid ordinary shares in the company under the Temple & Webster Group Ltd NED Equity Plan to Mr. Conrad Yiu as a nonexecutive director of the company be approved on the terms set out in the explanatory statement, which accompany the notice. Proxy votes are shown on the screen. Does anyone have any questions on this item? Okay. There are no questions on that resolution. Thank you. As previously noted, the results of the polls will be released on the ASX market announcements platform later today.

Before closing today's meeting, we do -- we will deal with a couple of questions that we have received outside of the resolutions. The first question that I've got here is, despite the headline number, EPS fell from $0.1167 per share in 2020 to $0.1075 in 2021, and NPAT was $14 million versus $13.9 million last year. Would you care to comment? That's a good question, and I'll hand over to our CFO, Mark Tayler, to answer the question. Thanks, Mark.

Yes. Thanks, Stephen. Really good question. Look, the main reason why, if you look at the statement of profit or loss, comprehensive income in the annual report, you will see that the tax line for FY '20 actually benefited quite substantially from a one-off tax recognition of deferred tax assets, which meant that the income tax line for that year had a one-off benefit of around $8 million, a bit over $8 million. So if you normalize for that one-off tax credit in that line, you'll actually see that the EPS on a normalized basis actually grew and grew substantially. The approximate -- probably the best proxy in terms of comparing FY '21 and FY '20, if you look at profit before tax as opposed to profit after tax, and EPS obviously is driven off net profit after tax. But if you look at net profit before tax, FY '21 was $19 million versus a profit level of $8 million in FY '20. So if you normalize sort of that one-off tax event, your EPS on a normalized basis was -- actually grew substantially relative to FY '20.

Thanks, Mark. Hopefully, that answers the question adequately for that shareholder. We have one additional question that has come through. Is it likely that a dividend will be paid in the near future? I can deal with that. As you would have heard in our addresses, both myself and Mark Coulter, our focus very much is in the short term continuing to make investments into the company but also to ensure we've got some balance sheet to consider any inorganic investments opportunities that come our way. So on that basis, we don't foresee declaring dividends in the short term. And hopefully, that answers that question. Before we close, are there any other questions that anyone would like to ask? I'll give you 1 minute to post any final questions. There have been no additional questions coming late. I would like to thank everyone for your attendance and participation, and we certainly look forward to coming together as a group in person for our AGM next year. There being no further business, I now declare the meeting closed, and thank you, everyone, for your attendance.