Verkkokauppa.com Oyj (VERK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to join Verkkokauppa.com Q3 presentation. Sorry for the short delay. So in my presentation, I will in the first part, walk you through the highlights out of the report of this morning. And in the second part, we will concentrate on strategy execution and outlook for rest of the year. At the end of that, we will have questions if there are any. So please feel free to send them to investors@verkkokauppa.com and questions will be then handled at the end of the presentation. Today, joining with me and also available for questions, CFO, Mikko Forsell, and Investor Relations manager, Marja Makinen. So let's kick it off with highlights out of the report. All in all, a tough quarter for the company in turbulent market surroundings. Overall revenue declined by 2.3%. Mainly the market turbulence impacted our consumer businesses and our e-commerce businesses, which declined by 3.5% mainly due to the uncertainties that we see in the consumer market. Discretionary shopping is low, consumers' confidence in their own economics is at the lowest point that it has ever been. And actual inflation and price increases in electricity and groceries, for example, are really decreasing the purchasing power at the moment. And this is expected to continue going towards the end of the year. A positive growth driver throughout the year has been our B2B segment and contributing again with a positive outcome, growing by 5%. Although we will -- we are seeing at the moment, similar kind of market surroundings in the SMB sector that we are seeing in the consumer business, meaning that small businesses at the moment are postponing their purchases and investments. And this is the reason why the B2B growth is slowing down. The discretionary way of consumers' behavior, we see most clearly in our core categories, in consumer electronic categories where sales decreased by over 5%, while at the same time, still the megatrend of retail going online shows positive effects as we are gaining market share and growing in our untapped and new categories. And then export business back on track. As a reminder, when the war started, we stopped doing any trade to Russia. Now during the spring, summer and fall time, we are -- we have been able to find new markets and new partnerships in Nordics and Europe, which is overcompensating that loss. And now we are back to the levels that we were previous year. But the bigger problems we had with the profitability. So first, if you look at the margin development, we were not able to improve our margins, although we have taken measures to get the margin to healthy levels. The environment and price competition is pushing down our margins. And on top of that, we are still running our business with too high inventory levels, which also tie up margin and puts pressure on margin going forward. From the cost position, the overstock comes with 2 effects on our costs. First of all, warehouse and storage costs are high because of outsourced warehouse operation and also handling in those operations have been increasing. So because -- and due to these reasons, we ended up with operating profit of EUR 2.1 million, which is significantly below that of last year period. Worth to mention that in these figures is included, e-ville B2C contribution, which is a negative 1 of EUR 0.6 million. So we are also facing in those business areas, the same kind of difficulties that we are in our core business. So if you look at the P&L, once again, so revenue development we talked about. And you can see clearly that gross profit is impacted throughout the revenue and the gross margin as well so gross margin, not on the same level as it used to be also due to the reason that our sales was slightly more distributed in lower-margin categories, channels and segments. In expenses, personnel expenses are slightly above that of previous year. We have been investing in key competencies and resources in regards of strategy execution. In other operating expenses, which are actually almost 15% up, the main reason comes out of the too high inventory in outsourced warehouse operation and the handling regarding it. So if we take this all together, if we only look at the revenue level, I think it is acceptable taking in consideration the market surrounding, but it came with a too high price. It came with a too high inventory. And due to these reasons, the profitability is not where we want it to be. But if we look at business performance in long term and company's position, we are still in a good position and it was no surprise that the Board of Directors decided to pay out a quarterly growing dividend to be paid out at this EUR 0.063 per share. So thank you all investors and owners for your support and trust. From the KPIs, we actually talked already about the main metrics on sales. Below right, you can see that our cost ratio to revenue is not on the same level as last year, and we are quite far away from our long-term target. So we really need to address this issue as well. Balance sheet reflects a high inventory in different ways. First of all, EUR 15 million more inventory or capital tied up in our inventory at the moment and it has an effect on our cash flow. It has an effect on our cash position and equity ratio as well. Investments on the same level as last year. So finalizing the big logistical -- internal logistical project, which I will get later back to. And the last highlight out of the report, we conducted a large survey in our customer base and got over 18,000 feedback from our customers. So obviously, a topic which is important and relevant. So a few themes rose. First of all, our consumer is extremely, let's say, gives value to long-lasting high-quality durable products. This has always been close to our core in our category management, and this is a way that we will also keep on focusing and expanding the assortment. Second thing that rose up that the customer is more and more willing and in the need of additional information regarding sustainability when choosing products over another product. So in reaching product information, adding attributes that the consumer can use while choosing and making sustainable choices is things that we have been conducting throughout the last years and things that we will keep keeping focus on. And maybe the last theme that arose as well, it is getting increasingly important for consumers to have the choice to utilize circular economy and purchasing products that always have been or has been in use. So we have had some tests in the couple of years back, we are testing at the moment. Some ways of partnerships, and this is a topic that we will focus more and probably come up with our solution in the coming years as well. So sustainability is tied up closely to companies' development work and strategy as well. So if we then go directly to strategy execution, as a reminder, these are the 4 topics, the main themes, many -- main value drivers throughout the companies develop according to our strategy. And within these themes, there are a few initiatives. I will not go through them all. Maybe a few worth mentioning while if you look at the assortment, we have got the additional capabilities with acquisition of e-ville to have an on-site team, own product development team for sourcing, for getting new ideas and new innovations and get those kind of products to our platform. The first products will be shown at the end of this year and then going forward from next year onwards even more. Second capability that we have now conducted this drop shipment. It is getting increasingly more important to have this kind of capability when going further with our category expansion. If you look at the inventory levels at the moment, we are not willing to take all in our own warehousing, in our own internal logistic flows. So drop shipment is a good way of expanding assortment and not tying more capital into the inventory. Experience in this year, I already said that we are going to renew our site to be even more inspirational to take to customers and segments purchasing need more in consideration. And also, we want to work on the back end to be able to be more flexible on content delivering and developing, that work is ongoing. And if you look at speed and flexibility, maybe closer, now we are finalizing the company's history is 1 of the biggest investment programs regarding warehouse automation. The Autostore system has been now up and running. Since the beginning of year, it is providing the higher fulfillment that we expected it to be and also better availability. On top of that, we have just ramped up and taken operation, our packaging automation, providing expected faster fulfillment. And on top of that, it is actually generating less weight. So it is good from a sustainability point of view. And last part of that good flow is our pickup lockers in Jätkäsaari store, so pickup will be even more flexible and there will be no time spent in queuing in the store for getting your orders picked up. So strategies going forward as planned. We are getting the investments done and this will yield them later on in higher profitability. So if you look at the outlook, what is expected to happen, consumer business and environment is expected to stay quite cloudy. Consumer confidence in own economics is at the low point. It will -- we expect it to stay there. And now we actually see that purchasing power is decreasing, and this will impact our business for the latter part of the year. Inflation, not helping, and I think that will be also a topic going next year. And in the bigger picture and macroeconomics, what is easy to say that estimation gets harder and harder, nobody knows what happens with the Russian war, how that impacts energy prices and supply chain issues, et cetera. So next year will be also quite hard to estimate at this point, and we see first since that B2B business will also be having some part of headwind. But on a positive side, things that we have now discussed in our estimation are locked to certain kind of time period. There is no structural thing that has happened. The underlying megatrend retail going online is still valid, and it is also likely that, that will enforce after the crisis is done, and we get back to normal. Now how do we as a company bridge the time from these uncertainties and how do we ensure that the company is in a stronger position after the crisis is done and after markets open up again and after growth is the more focus for companies. We have decided that we will focus on our core businesses, divided in 2 topics. We have the operational part of our business and then the commercial part of our business. If you look at the operational part of our business, we have actually been investing and developing logistics and supply chain operations quite much already. This is expected to yield a better profitability going forward. We have been working around inventory optimization throughout the year, it is honest to say that we have not -- we are not there where we want to be. We cannot be satisfied what -- with the performance of the company, and we need to address this in a certain manner to get the inventory levels matching the revenue levels. And the third part, obviously, we will look into the operations and make sure that we have cost efficiencies throughout our operations. Second part is the commercial part. Category management is quite manual. Historically, we have been adding products to our site, getting data from the market, getting data from consumer behavior and always searching for new products rather than, let's say, optimizing the category management and the current assortment. So this is a shift that we will be doing for the upcoming year, concentrating on even more systematic and profitable category management. Second part, strategic pricing. We have almost 90,000 SKUs in our assortment and mostly pricing is done manual. So it is time consuming and dynamic is quite far away from that. So that is a topic that we are at the moment looking at and probably investing also in capabilities and tools to be in a better position and that will yield in higher margins going forward. And the third part is about how can we get more value out of the customer base that we already have. Customer acquisition is quite costly. It makes sense also to concentrate on the customers that we have. How can we increase loyalty? How can we increase retention? And therefore, get more value out of our current customer base. But although, we are short term looking at core businesses and focusing on that as a company, we need and we want to have also long-term strategic themes to build up new revenue or profit streams. B2B has been doing well. We have identified in enterprise and public sectors that we have room to grow. But besides that, we can try out new ways of offering services, for example, sourcing services, et cetera. So we have their room for improvement. Services as such, have been quite in a small role in our company. We have financial services which we will take further. We have also possibilities of offering stand-alone services or life cycle services, like I mentioned before. So in total, the service portfolio could be more enriched going forward. And the last part, we are also looking in total new ways of conducting business, how could we utilize our platform not only to attract customers to buy products, but utilizing the size of the platform, for example, in retail as a media opportunities. So what is the expectations from figures? We updated our guidance this week on Monday. We have done it a few times this year. We want to be fast and transparent. And when we see something is changing, we want to give that information right away to the market. So what has changed? The consumer behavior and the consumer purchasing power will be lower than we expected and probably that will be more concentrated on price-heavy campaigning, which will yield in margin being under pressure and also our B2B business, which is still performing good, but we see the growth slowing down, mainly due to small and midsized segments. So these things have changed when we look back to the summertime. So the expectations for revenue, we took down the upper bracket and now the revenue is expected to be between EUR 530 million and EUR 560 million. And the EBIT bracket, we took down the upper and the lower limit that the expectation at the moment is between EUR 5 million and EUR 9 million. So let's wrap it up, a tough quarter. Revenue levels acceptable. It came with a too high price. We need to work on our inventory management. We need to work on our profitability. There are some positive sides. B2B is still doing good. Export business is growing, but these are not big enough to help us have profitable growth at the moment. If you look at long term, the company is in a good position. We are executing our strategy like plant, we are getting investments done, and those will yield at some point in higher profitability. But during the time that we will have uncertainties in the market, and there will be turbulences, as a company, we will focus on the core business and make sure that we are even stronger when we come out out of this crisis. Thank you. And as it seems, no questions at this point. So I wish you all a great day. Thank you.