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

Okay. I think we've just waited for an extra minute just to see if there is any late comer. I think we're right to go. So good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the 2023 Annual General Meeting for Temple & Webster Limited. My name is Stephen Heath, and I'm the Chair of the company. It is 11:00 a.m., we have a quorum present, and I therefore declare the meeting open. Thank you for attending today. In accordance with our usual practice, cameras and recording devices are not to be used during the meeting, and I'd like to point out the fire exits in the event of an emergency or evacuation. We have one over here in the corner or turn we just used the door that you came in from at the back behind you. Before we begin, Temple & Webster Group would like to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of country throughout Australia. We recognize their enduring connection to the lands, the waterways and the skies. We acknowledge the Gadigal and Wangal people on whose lands our corporate head office is located as well as other First Nation countries we operate across. We pay our respect to elders, past, present and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. I'd like to start by introducing the members of the Board and our Company Secretary. I'm joined in person by Managing Director and CEO, Mark Coulter; and Directors Belinda Rowe, Conrad Yiu and Melinda Snowden; and Company Secretary, Lisa Jones. Also with us today is our CFO, Mark Tayler; and Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer, Adam McWhinney, along with other Temple & Webster staff. The company's auditor, Graham Leonard from EY is in attendance and will be available to address any questions you may have about the audit of the financial statements later. Also joining us is Rachel Rudman from EY, who will assume the role of lead audit partner from FY '24 when Graham retires by rotation. I also welcome Emma Khoury and [indiscernible] and [ Terry Hackett ] from Link Group. Temple & Webster share registry provider, who will conduct the final voting poll. The purpose of today's meeting is to do with the formal business as set out in the notice of Annual General Meeting. I'll deliver the Chairman's report, and then our CEO, Mark Coulter will present a report on the financial year 2023 and give an update on the broad strategic intent around the future growth prospects. Then consider the resolutions set out in the notice of meeting. I'll outline the voting arrangements ahead of that section. There will be an opportunity for shareholders to ask questions during the formal items of business as they relate to the resolutions being considered. As we announced in August, I'm pleased to report Temple & Webster delivered a strong FY '23 result with revenue of $396 million and returned to growth in the fourth quarter. These results mainly retained around 90% of the FY '22 revenue, which was boosted significantly by strong e-commerce demand during the pandemic. It is great to see the group back to growth now that we have finished cycling COVID-19 impact periods, especially given the current macroeconomic climate. The 2023 financial year saw tougher conditions emerging for Australian shoppers with a number of interest rate rises and other inflationary pressures. In this environment, we anticipate that customers would be looking for enhanced choice and value, and we successfully adjusted our range, promotional activity, pricing and on-site merchandising to reflect these changing customer needs. Against this backdrop, the flexibility of our business model helped deliver an EBITDA result of $14.8 million for the year, up 80% on the second half compared to the same period in FY '22. We finished the year with a cash balance of $105 million, and we remain debt-free. The strength of our balance sheet enabled us to initiate an on-market buyback of up to $30 million of Temple & Webster shares. By the end of the financial year, the business had bought back 2.7 million shares at a cost of $12.3 million. The Board considers the buyback program to be an effective capital management strategy that also allows us to retain flexibility to pursue future organic and inorganic opportunities as we -- as part of our growth strategy. We anticipate the buyback will continue post the AGM. We continue to invest in our future growth horizons of trade and commercial and home improvement. We also continued to advance our market-leading digital capabilities, including the use of artificial intelligence. We see significant potential for AI to increase conversion and customer experience and to help us achieve productivity gains to lower our fixed costs as a percentage of revenue as we scale. The current economic cycle will no doubt present challenges for some retailers. However, equally, opportunities will also present themselves to those who can combine capability and financial strength with strategic and operational agility. Our focus during this period will be to execute on our key strategic priorities to increase our market share. Mark will shortly talk to our strategic plan in more detail that this is an important step towards our goal of becoming the largest retailer of furniture and homewares in Australia. We believe that by coming the top of mind brand in the category, having the best and most exclusive range of products, developing market-leading capabilities around technology, data and AI, lowering our fixed cost percentage and building scale through adjacent growth plays will establish Temple & Webster as the destination brand for buying products for the home for generations of Australians. We are the leading pure-play online retailer in a market that is poised to grow substantially over time. The Australian furniture and homewares market is worth around $19 billion annually, but only about 18% of that market has moved online currently. Compared to the 27% to 28%, we see in markets such as the U.S. and the U.K. As we have seen previously, we expect Australia to catch up to these markets over the coming years, driven by demographic trends, independent of macroeconomic factors. Millennials are overtaking baby boomers as the largest population segment, and these are the first digital natives to enter core furniture and homewares [indiscernible]. Internally, we are already seeing the millennial cohort is one of our fastest-growing segments. This year saw a few changes to the composition of our Board. In November 2022, we farewell Sue Thomas, Non-Executive Director and Chair of the Audit and Risk Committee. He retired after 6 years of service. Sue made a valuable contribution to the Board and the group and on behalf of the Board and management team, I express my sincere gratitude to Sue. We're delighted to welcome Melinda Snowden in June as a Non-executive Director. She will also serve as Chair of the Audit and Risk Committee. Melinda's extensive experience in legal and professional corporate advisory roles makes her an ideal addition to the Board and ensures we have the right mix of skills and experience to execute our growth strategy. On behalf of the Board, I would like to thank Mark Coulter our CFO -- sorry, our CFO, Mark Tayler; and our broader management team for their hard work and dedication in what has proven to be another challenging yet successful year for Temple & Webster. Separately, this year, as part of ensuring that we are set up for success, we reviewed the structure of our executive team and added a Chief Marketing Officer, Joana Barros, an experienced cross-channel marketer who has worked in e-commerce for many years, including roles in the competitive market of online travel. Additionally, Tim Charlton, who was running our supply chain team was promoted to Chief Operating Officer; and Kate Perkins, who leads our category management and sourcing teams has been promoted to Chief Merchandise Officer. I congratulate you both on your promotions, well done. In closing, I'd like to extend my thanks to my fellow directors for their contribution, commitment and stewardship. And finally, 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. CFO is a job I definitely do not want. Good morning, everybody. As Stephen outlined, Temple & Webster delivered a strong FY '23 result with revenue of $396 million and a return to growth in the fourth quarter, driven by growth in both repeat and first-time customers. Our EBITDA result of $14.8 million was within our stated margin range of 3% to 5%. This performance reflects the resilience and flexibility of our business model in a difficult trading environment as cost of living pressures impact household budgets, shoppers increasingly search for quality at affordable prices. And it is clear our agile range is resonating with customers. I'd like to take a moment to call out a few highlights of the year. We managed to retain around 90% of our peak COVID-19 customer numbers, and over half of our orders were from our repeat customers. The 6% increase in repeat in revenue per customer, which you can see on screen, was driven by an increase in average order values, which benefited from mix shifts towards less discretionary items such as furniture. While the conversion rate slightly dipped since the high-intensity years of COVID, we still have the leading conversion rate among large retailers dedicated to the home. One of the key drivers of our strong conversion rate has been the deployment of our iOS and Android apps. And by the end of FY '23, we had over 0.5 million lifetime downloads of these apps. We were also able to pass on most of our inflationary pressures in our cost base, particularly around shipping, marketing return on investment held despite inflationary pressures, which provides headroom to increase our brand spend to drive market share. And lastly, our customers satisfaction remains one of the highest in the category. One of the drivers of our increasing customer satisfaction and NPS has been the launch of our scalable asset light Temple & Webster delivery service, which is now in multiple metro and regional markets throughout Australia. So where to from here? Well, as we progress into FY '24, we understand that the macro turbulence of the last 12 months isn't in the rearview mirror yet. However, we are well positioned to manage these headwinds and believe this environment provides us with an opportunity to actually gain market share faster and more efficiently as well -- as less well-capitalized peers struggle with market conditions. As Stephen touched on, our sites are firmly set on exceeding $1 billion in revenue over the next 3 to 5 years. This growth will come from both the core business, which is our furniture and homewares, B2C; and new growth horizons, such as B2B and home improvement. We believe at this scale point, we will firmly entrench our competitive moats around range, brand, data, AI and tech. To do this, we'll be focusing on 5 key strategic priorities: firstly, becoming the top of mind brand in furniture and homewares. We currently ranked seventh in unprompted awareness for furniture and homewares among Australian shoppers, and only 22% of Australian furniture and homewares shoppers have even visited our site. Research shows customers switch brands, to a greater extent, when times are tougher as they seek more value. Advertising becomes more efficient due to macro conditions. As such, we believe now is the time to build brand equity and salience to gain market share. In FY '23, given the strategic importance of brand and direct traffic, we focus on building out our internal and external capability, including, as Stephen said, adding a CMO. In FY '24, we launched -- this year, we launched our first multichannel, multi-city above-the-line campaign. As the business scales, so will our marketing budgets, allowing us to keep adding brand awareness points with the goal of becoming the top of mind brand in the category over the next 3 to 5 years. We want to be famous for having the best range in the country, a site with an incredible range of high-quality products at great prices, which can't be found elsewhere. To do this, we want the majority of our sales to come from exclusive lines, and this will involve growing the share of revenue from these products from around 40% in FY '23 to 70% over the next 3 to 5 years. Thirdly, as an online-only business, we are well placed to benefit from the, frankly, revolutionary potential of new technologies such as generative AI. Our dedicated internal AI team is looking at how we implement AI tech across all of our customer interactions and internal processes. Early initiatives include using generative AI to power or presale product inquiry live chats. We've also used AI to enhance product descriptions across more than 200,000 products. This has led to an increase in conversion, products added to cart and revenue per visit. In FY '24, we're targeting all first-time customer interactions, logistics routing and exception handling, pricing promotions and recommendations. Our fourth strategic goal is to significantly decrease our fixed costs as a percentage of sales over the coming years. Given we do not have physical store costs, our fixed cost base can be leveraged across a greater scale, significantly reducing our fixed cost percentage as our revenue increases, especially as most areas in our business can be disrupted by AI. In FY '23, around 16% of our revenue base was from trading commercial, which we call B2B and home improvement. Our 3- to 5-year plan is to have more than 30% of group revenue coming from these new growth horizons, plus potentially new opportunities. This will diversify the revenue mix of the group and also allow us to gain further leverage of our fixed cost base. The B2B division has been structured to provide a full-service offering to business customers, including a newly established design projects division responsible for the design, procurement and installation of life scale projects. We are targeting combination, residential and SME office market this year, whilst the sales specialists focused on the specific requirements of each sector have been added. Ongoing design and sourcing of commercial-grade product offerings to service these industries will result in large-scale range expansion this year. Additionally, we are still very bullish about the home improvement category and have made the decision to focus on Temple & Webster as a single brand for both furniture and homewares and home improvement. This has enabled the redeployment of The Build team and marketing budget to Temple & Webster. Going forward, we will continue to build out our high-quality range and keep investing in the complementary markets we've identified future growth. So as we return to our growth strategy as Category disrupter. FY '24 and FY '25 will be focused on accelerating our growth and market share gains. Our strong balance sheet gives us the flexibility to take advantage of what is a once-in-a-generation shift from offline to online, which will rebalance -- this -- internal rebalance our earnings profile in the near term, but then get us to our longer-term goal more quickly. An additional 2 to 3 points of revenue will be invested to marketing, spread across brand and performance channels to increase awareness and build out our brand strategic moat. We expect EBITDA margins to start incrementally building from FY '26 towards our longer-term EBITDA goal of over 15%. This will be driven by increasing scale benefits with suppliers, more private label and exclusive orders, improved logistics efficiencies and, of course, the benefits from our investments into AI. In FY '23, we continue to progress our commitment to being a responsible and sustainable business. We established key baseline ESG metrics, which will allow us to track and measure the progress of our sustainability goals while providing valuable insights to inform our long-term strategy in key areas such as procurement and capital allocation. Importantly, we remain committed to reducing our carbon emissions by 45% by 2030. We recognize the importance of carbon offsetting to achieve this goal, but are firmly committed to reducing and removing carbon emissions from our own operations where possible. The procurement of our range remains the area where we have the most potential to drive positive change throughout the value change. Our procurement teams continue to work with our suppliers to offer more products that have been responsibly and ethically sourced with a key focus on due diligence and verification of sustainability claims. Furthermore, we recognize the importance of supporting our people and the broader community. Diversity, equity and inclusion has always been a fundamental element of our business and values. We are committed to advancing reconciliation with First Nations peoples, taking steps to make our workplace more inclusive, and ensuring our employees are provided with the opportunities and resources to grow. Sorry, trading update, the year has started strongly with sales from the 1st July to the 27th November up 23% year-on-year -- the year at 16%. So we have seen an increase in growth rate. In fact, Q2 has seen an acceleration of growth with revenue up 42% year-on-year, which is the period 1st of October to 27th of November, which in part has been supported by the launch of our above-the-line campaign in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane which commenced on the 22nd of October. We will see some tired faces around here because of the Black Friday-Cyber Monday trading period, which just finished, continues to grow in importance as customers bring their Christmas shopping forward. This year the 4-day period delivered $17.4 million in sales, which is up 101% or more than double the same period last year, which included multiple record days. We continue to grow our market share at a time when the overall furniture and homewares market is down, reflecting the resilience of our business model and flexibility of our merchandising strategy. Growing our market share is a key strategic focus, which you've just heard, which supports our goal of becoming Australia's largest retailer of furniture and homewares. To update our buyback, we've bought 3.9 million shares at a total cost of $19.9 million to date. Our cash balance remains above $100 million which provides significant flexibility to accelerate both organic growth and potentially inorganic opportunities and we reaffirm our EBITDA margin guidance for FY '24. Like I said, a huge thank you to the Temple & Webster team. Your commitment, adaptability, and resilience and some of you here, looking at all of you, is as inspiring as ever. We wouldn't be able to fulfill our vision of making the world more beautiful one brow at a time without you, so thank you.

Thanks, Mark. Some good numbers in those updates. Okay. We now welcome questions or comments from shareholders holding a yellow or blue card in relation to my report or Mark's report. Before asking a question, please state your name and whether you are a shareholder in your own right or whether you're attending as a proxy for one or more shareholders. If you are attending as an attorney of a shareholder or proxy, please state your name and the names of the shareholder or proxy you represent. Any questions? No? Everyone's happy. Okay. Thank you. All right. So we'll move now on to the formal part of the meeting. As set out in the Notice of Meeting and explanatory statement, there are 4 items of business today, which are displayed on the screen behind me. Item 1 is for consideration only with no vote required. All other items involve ordinary resolutions, which require a shareholder vote. Upon registering for the meeting this morning, you will have received either a yellow, blue or red colored admission card. Those who received a yellow or blue admission card may speak and ask questions. The persons entitled to vote are all shareholders, representatives and attorneys of shareholders and proxy holders who hold a yellow voting admission card, which will also be used as poll voting cards. If you are attending in more than one of those capacities, you will have been issued with as many yellow voting admission cards as you have separate capacities. If anyone believes they're entitled to vote in any capacity and does not have a yellow voting admission card, please raise your hand now and a member of the Link Group will assist you. Everyone happy with the cards they've got? Great. If you are a proxy holder, a summary of the votes to which you're entitled has been attached to the yellow voting admission voting card. If you have already voted, you will have been given a blue nonvoting admission card. Red cards have been assigned to visitors other than shareholders and do not carry rights to speak and ask questions when the business of the meeting is being conducted nor has the right to vote. If you have a question, please hold up either your yellow or blue admission card and state your name prior to the question being asked. Please direct any questions you may have to me as the Chairman, and I'll deal with the question or decide who is best placed to answer the question and respond. We'll do our best to answer all relevant questions raised. As Chairman of the Meeting, it is my intention to cast any undirected proxy votes in favor of all resolutions. I declare the proxies held by me at the start of each resolution by showing them on the screen. As you'll see from the Notice of Meeting, the board recommended voting by direct vote for all resolutions. Direct voting enables shareholders to vote without attending the meeting or appointing a proxy. Voting on all items of business will be conducted by a poll. The vote by poll will be conducted by Link Group, and I now declare the poll open for each of the resolutions in the Notice of Meeting. Emma Khoury of Link Group will conduct the poll as returning officer. Your voting cards will be collected by Emma at the conclusion of the formal business. If you need to leave early, please complete your voting card and present it to a staff member of Link Group at the doors just around the corner. As Chairman of the meeting, I'll ensure that there are opportunities for separate deliberation concerning the items of business at today's meeting. Discussion will be invited on each of the items. It's important, however, that comments and questions are succinct and restricted to the subject matter of the business and resolutions set out in the Notice of Meeting. Details of proxy and direct votes for each resolution will be shown on the screen at the conclusion of the discussion. A copy of the Notice of Meeting and explanatory statement containing the resolutions to be considered today were provided to shareholders last month, and I'll take that Notice of Meeting as read. I now move to the formal agenda of the meeting. The first item of business is to receive and consider the annual financial report of the company for the financial year ended June 2023, together with the declaration of the directors, the director's report and the remuneration report and the auditor's report. The reports are contained in the annual report, which was released to the ASX on the 28th of September 2023. I will take the reports as read and now formally lay them before the meeting. Shareholders were invited to submit questions in advance of today's meeting to our auditor on the conduct of the audit, the preparation and content of the auditor's report, the accounting policies adopted by Temple & Webster relating to the preparation of the financial statements and the independence of the auditor in conducting the audit. Are there any questions on the annual report or audit opinion for either the auditor or the Board? Great. Thank you. There is no requirement for vote on Item 1, so I now move to the items of business, which require a formal resolution. But before I do that, I just want to recognize Graham from EY. As I mentioned before, Graham is retiring at the end of this financial year. Mate, we've really valued the contribution. You've been an integral member of the team and always upheld the highest of standards. So congratulations and well done. Rachel, big shoes to fill. Congratulations on your appointment, and we look forward to working with you into the future. Okay. Resolution #1, adoption of the remuneration report. Resolution 1 is advisory nonbinding resolution required by the Corporations Act in relation to the adoption of the remuneration report, which forms part of Temple & Webster's annual report released on the 28th of September 2023. The remuneration report is set out on Pages 37 to 58 of the annual report and provides information concerning executive and director remuneration. The resolution is displayed on the screens. I'll now be happy to answer any questions or receive any comments you may have on the remuneration report. Okay. Any questions? No? Okay. Details of the direct and proxy votes that have been received are displayed on the screen. I hold 59,089 undirected proxies, and as mentioned, I will be voting in favor of that resolution. Resolution 2 is the reelection of the Director, Belinda Rowe. The resolution being considered is displayed on the screens. Belinda's credentials have been outlined in the explanatory statement attached to the Notice of Meeting and are outlined in the annual report. I'd now like to welcome Belinda to say a few words.

Thanks, Stephen. Good morning. I'm Belinda Rowe. I'm here to ask for your support for my reelection in order to actively contribute to the next 3- to 5-year strategy and growth plan. I have extensive experience in leading companies in marketing, digital and the media industry for a number of global U.K. and Australian companies. I currently serve as a director on several publicly listed companies, including ARN Media, an Australian media and entertainment digital audio company; 3P Learning, an education technology company across 4 regions; and Sky New Zealand, a broadcasting and technology company. I'm also on the Board of Sydney Swans. In my executive career, I held senior executive roles at Telefónica O2, now Virgin Media O2, leading its brand and marketing communications with a focus on customer transformation. Prior to this, I was on the Global Executive Board at Publicis Media and leading Zenith Media globally based out of the U.K. This is one of the largest media communications companies, and I partner with significant global companies like Nestle, L'Oreal, Telefonica, 21st Century Fox, Oracle and UBS, with a focus on unlocking revenue growth through markets, customers and digital transformation. I also launched and led a unique global content and sports business at Publicis Media, bringing together content, technology, data and digital across 32 countries, integrating several content marketing acquisitions. I believe my extensive experience and insights from technology, consumer, digital, retail and telecom markets enables me to actively contribute to the current and future strategy of Temple & Webster. Thank you.

It's a pretty impressive resume, isn't it? Does anyone have any questions on Belinda's reelection before we move to sentencing? No? Okay. So if there's no comments, we'll move on. Details of directory proxy votes are on the screen. I hold 44,989 undirected proxies, and as indicated previously, I'll be voting those in favor of the resolution. I'll now move on to resolution #3. Election of Director, Melinda Snowden. Melinda's credentials have been outlined, the explanatory statement attached to the Notice of Meeting and are outlined in the annual report. I'd now like to welcome Melinda to say a few words.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Stephen. I was very excited to join the Board of Temple & Webster in June this year. I'm also Chair of the Audit and Risk Committee. I've been a professional director since 2010 and have extensive experience in audit and risk committees across a range of industries, including retail, technology, property and wealth management from over a dozen broad roles. My background includes 28 years' experience in financial markets, including 16 years in corporate finance and investment banking roles at Grant Samuel, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs in Sydney and New York. In my early career, I was a corporate lawyer at what was called then Freehills now Herbert Smith Freehills. In my role as Director at Temple & Webster , I bring to the Board my deep understanding of financial markets, valuation principles, commercial and strategic insight and experience working with high-growth companies. From my governance experience, I also bring the financial discipline and rigor to the Audit Committee and help, in the Board room, ensure that the company is focused on long-term value creation for shareholders. My other current directorships include a cloud technology business, Megaport and Newmark Property REIT. My prior directorships include Best&Less, WAM Leaders, Kennards Self Storage, MLC and Mercer. I hereby offer myself for reelection as a Non-Executive Director to Temple & Webster and happy to take any questions if anyone has any. Thank you.

Thanks, Melinda. Does anyone have any questions in relation to Melinda's election. No? Great. Thank you. I was once told as a young guy surround yourself with smarter and more intelligent people than yourself. I think I've done a pretty good job. I am holding 44,989 undirected proxies, and I'll be voting those in favor of the resolution. Resolution 4, the final resolution is the renewal of the proportional takeover provisions in the constitution. The details are set out in the explanatory statement attached to the Notice of Meeting. Would anyone like to ask any questions or express a view on this item? No? Great. Thank you. I'm holding 45,650 -- sorry, 45,695 undirected properties and will be voting those in favor of the resolution. I now ask shareholders, proxy holders and corporate representatives holding yellow voting cards to complete the card, if you have not already done so, to finalize your poll votes. Would Emma come around and collect those cards? I've got one here, too, Emma. Thank you. [Voting]

Does anyone have a yellow card that they need a pen or a pencil to complete? No? We're all good? Okay. Great. All right, that means there aren't more cards around. All right. Thank you. I now declare the polls on the resolutions closed. Emma will forward those cards to the share registry for the completion of the poll. As you can see, I think all the numbers are gone, but the direct and proxy were votes received. All resolutions will be passed with a very large majority, so I think the shareholders are in large support for the resolutions. Before we close, are there any other general questions from the floor that you'd like us to address? No? Okay. All right. So I would like to thank you all for attending today. It is an effort to get to [indiscernible] St. Peters, so I recognize that. So I want to thank you for making the effort, especially when you can log on and listen and access the information on a later date. So I really appreciate the effort that you make in coming. I want to thank all the shareholders and our customers, our executive leadership team and all the staff of Temple & Webster, the company's advisers and auditors and to Link Group for the management of today. And that concludes the business for today, and I now declare the meeting closed. Thanks, everybody.