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

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Verkkokauppa.com Q4 presentation. Today, joining with me and also available for questions, CFO, Mikko Forsell; and Investor Relations manager, Marja Makinen. So I will start my presentation with the market surroundings, then we will go through the financial performance of the company, strategy execution, outlook for this year. And then at the end of the presentation, if you have any questions, please feel free to send them to investors@verkkokauppa.com, and the questions will be then dealt at the end of the presentation. So let's kick it off with the market environment. The market pretty much maintained challenging as it has been throughout the year. Uncertainties, especially in the consumer landscape, flavoring consumer decisions, and on top of that, we see increasing interest rates and inflation really kicking in and decreasing the purchasing power and the consumption as such. During the last part of the year, during the season sale, we see that the consumer was quite active, but decisions were -- was quite hesitant in making any purchasing decisions. And if deciding so, more than ever, they were focused on campaign products, low-price products and low-margin products. The uncertainties that we see in the consumer landscape now also flavoring our B2B business, especially in small and midsized businesses. On a positive note, we see that the online shift is permanent. And during the last quarter, over 1/3 of all consumer electronic retail was conducted online. So if we start with the revenue development, the markets around -- the surrounding is really impacting most channels and segments, overall revenue declining by 8%. And for the first time in near history, we saw that B2B, historically, our growth driver, hasn't been growing. And it decreased by 3%. The hesitance and probably also postponement of purchasing decisions is most clearly to be seen in our core categories. Those categories' revenue was down by 11%. On top of that, as a positive highlight, we can mention that our export line of business, export channels, were growing by 5%. If we then look at the margin development, 2 main reasons for the decrease. First of all, the company's decision to streamline the assortment and take a one-off write-down of EUR 1.6 million, impacting it heavily. Without that one-off write-down, the gross margin would have been at 15.2%, so quite close to the previous year's level. In a price fight market surroundings consumers focusing on campaign products, the sales mix was unfavorable as well. And like said, if driving down inventory levels, which we did quite significantly, typically, we take pricing activities at hand, and those also had a negative impact on our gross margin in general. On a positive note, we saw that these new private label products and lineups were quite successful and sales in those categories increased by 9%. So if we then sum up the EBIT, obviously, biggest downfall we see from decreasing volumes and decreasing margins. If we look more closely into the cost side of the business, in personnel expenses, we see still a growth by 15%. We have been adding on strategic capabilities in IT development, for example, or data analytics at the beginning of the years. On the other hand, if we look at the other operating expenses, we see that we were able take them down according to the market surroundings mostly also due to marketing optimization, but also due to outsourced warehouse operation costs impacting positively as the inventory levels were significantly below that of previous quarter. If we then look at the financials on top on the graph, we see that we have been struggling with the higher inventory levels throughout the year. Now for the first time, we see a clear decrease on those levels, getting it down by EUR 20 million or by 21%. Below, you see our investments conducting during the last year. We are executing our strategy as planned, and those big investments at the moment conducted and ready, and we will be closely looking on what kind of investments we need to do in these market surroundings. On a positive note, we see that cash flow significantly better than previous year, also cash position slightly improving to a solid level. Equity ratio is still quite low, and this is a topic that we will address during this year. So if we sum up the highlights from the operational part, we have now successfully concluded the marketing -- the warehouse automation project. We have also successfully included and integrated the first acquisition of the company and the positive impact can already be seen in our export business and private label business. From a sustainability point of view, we are quite proud of our return rate. Last year, it was historically low, 0.7%. And also what we have conducted during the last year, we are offering to those consumers who decide so also recycled and reused products on top of the new ones as well. And maybe the last highlight out of the operations also from the service portfolio side, just over a year ago launched [ Verkk's ] account. It has been really successful. And at the end of the year, we had 32,000 account customers and counting. So I think that will be also a positive kind of service that we can provide to our customers. From the total financial, the revenue ended up at EUR 543 million decrease to previous year by 5.5%. I mean if you look at the market, all the turbulences, uncertainties, I think it's a decent outcome for the revenue. What we are -- what we can not be happy about at all is the EBIT operating profit development, and that's also the reason why we started the profitability program and disclosed it also some weeks ago. We talked about the investment inventory taking to a decent level also impacting positive the cash position, which is, at the moment, solid for the company. So let's go to the strategy part. I think the plan for this year is quite bankable and clear. We have also disclosed we will focus on getting the profitability back again to decent levels. We are focusing on 2 main topics: the operational part of the business and the commercial part of the business. In operations, we are going quite clearly and thoroughly through all our costs, personnel costs, marketing, indirect spending and taking needed structural measures on those ones. We have also already identified quite significant of amount of small processes that we can improve when looking at our supply chain operations. On the commercial part, we actually did already a quite big change in our historic way of operating our assortment. We will be taking down most of the unprofitable assortment. We took a one-off write-down according this, and this is a topic that we will be working on closely throughout the year. Then on top of that, we are working on dynamic pricing capabilities. And I believe that in customer acquisition loyalty, we have also room to improve. So all in all, that's a package of around EUR 10 million improvement, of which we expect this year to yield somewhere between EUR 5 and EUR 8 million. We are not forgetting about the long term as well. We are working also how to improve EBIT and revenue and gain new streams going further, for example, in our private label operations or in our service portfolio, financing services and life cycle services trading, for example, and we see also a lot of potential in retail as a media because of our size and platform. The long-term strategy creates value through our value proposition. And out of this, we also steer the company's development work. Here, a few highlights. On the dynamic pricing project, we are now in the integration phase. We expect this work to be done during the first half of the year and the benefits in margin optimization is expected to be seen at the latter half of the year. In speed of flexibility and supply chain, I said we have identified already significant number of process improvements, and we will probably also take some new last mile partners on board during the first half of the year. Our brand is strong. It is still on a positive level. It is robust when comparing to our competitors. And I think the return percent alone also states that we are doing many, many things right. I would like to take a small quick look closer to the experience part, one of the major part in every retailer and e-commerce player. We have done already numbers of improvements to our site. When looking at our ratings, product facets have been introduced. Just for example, the biggest work is still to be conducted during the first half of year. We will basically renew all of the site, the homepage. All navigation will be updated. All category pages will be updated. So basically, it will be a new site launch, which will be then released during the first half of the year, and we expect that obviously to have a positive commercial impact on our business. So let's go to the last part and the market outlook. If we talk about the consumer landscape, it is likely that it will stay challenging. The uncertainties might get down at some point, but still the big -- 2 biggest drivers pushing down the consumption, decreasing the purchasing power, meaning interest rates and high inflation are there to be seen probably throughout the year, and that these kind of things also will impact negatively B2B business and small and midsized businesses. On the other hand, we believe that online shift will continue. And throughout that, we are able to maintain and gain market share. We believe that this shift is permanent and long term and our business model is in the right position. And we strongly believe that we have a solid bankable plan how to get to profitability on a good level and make some structural changes on the way. Our guidance for this starting year, we slightly taken another approach. Historically, we have always given a bracket out of numbers in revenue and EBIT. Now we change into a verbal one, we expect revenue to decline from previous year. But on the other hand, we expect operate -- comparable operating profit to improve from previous year. Also stating that we are highly focusing on the profitability for this year. What the Board also has decided, taking in consideration last year's financial performance, to deviate from our current dividend policy, and the proposal is not to pay any dividend from last year during this year's time. So if we sum up, market continuing expected challenging. Also, these challenges now flavoring the B2B market. On a positive note, in a declining market, getting down inventories by 21% and still having somewhat a decent margin is a good performance from the company. We need to work on our profitability. We have a clear structural bankable plan, which we have also disclosed, and we will execute that to take the company back on the level where it should be and take also our competitiveness in our core business to the level what we wanted to be. So thank you all, and have a nice day.