Zalando SE (ZAL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and a warm welcome to our Capital Markets Day. My name is Patrick Kofler. I'm heading the IR office here at Zalando, and I'm your host today. We would love, of course, host you personally here in Berlin today, but of course, health and safety remain the first priority to us. The good news is, as always, we have been a digital company since day 1. So we are delighted to fully host you an Investor Day today. Most of the content based on health and safety has been prerecorded. But of course, we will be live with our Q&A session after each of the sessions. So let me shortly show you today's agenda. We kick off the day with our strategic update by our 3 co-CEOs, Rubin, Robert and David. After a small break, our senior leadership team will present deep dives on customers, so how to build great customer experience and then also on brands. And then at 2:00 p.m., our CFO, David Schroder, will conclude today's [ meeting ] with their financial section, and we'll also have some closing remarks at the end. But first, let me start with some housekeeping. The day will be streamed on our platform. You have the possibility to directly type in your questions on the screen on the right-hand side. The tool is already live and open for your questions from the beginning of each section. Now it's time to let our 3 co-CEOs, take the stage and give a strategic update.

Good morning, and welcome to our Capital Markets Day. Preparing these events is always a ton of work, but it's also really exciting because we get to look back, and you will see this company is in a remarkable position may be stronger than ever before. We get to talk about our path forward, and you will see we can lay that out with quite a lot of clarity. And we get to discuss about our goals and ambitions for the future. And you will see, once again, we have set targets that would be truly remarkable achievements. So that's what we want to talk about today. And after today, the team will go back to make all of that reality. As you know, I will only be part of this management team for a few more months. But I'll continue to be a supporter and shareholder of the company, and you can believe me, I'm just as excited as always, about the future of this business. So this is the agenda for today. We'll start looking back then we will talk strategy, and then we'll talk about our targets. So I would just like to make 3 points upfront. The first one is that during COVID, this team has shown that we can lead the company through uncertain times. When the pandemic hit us, it was a surprise to all of us. So we had to act fast and decisively. We prioritize securing the safety of our employees to make sure that we can actually continue to operate our business during the pandemic and keep everybody safe. Secondly, we work to safeguard the financial security of our company, especially at a time when it was still unclear if this would become a headwind or a tailwind to the company. And then thirdly, we try to be part of the solution, and that's maybe most important because the fashion industry, our industry was hit hard. And we had the strategy and the tools to be helpful to many. So that's what we try to do. And I think it has changed our standing in the industry quite significantly. The second thing I would like to point out is that over the last years, Zalando has become a true European company. In 2020, more than half of our GMV came from outside of the DACH region. Also in markets outside of our home market, we have established clear number one positions, for example, in the Nordics, where we passed EUR 1 billion GMV in 2020. At the same time, our fastest active customer growth has come from the Southern European markets. Well, and the third point I would like to make is really to highlight the incredible track record that this team has when it comes to grow the company. Looking back to our IPO in 2014, since then, we have quadrupled the scale of the business, which corresponds to a CAGR of more than 26%, which is north of the already ambitious corridor that we guided to 20% to 25%. It also means we have outgrown the European online fashion market by a factor of 2 to 3. We have delivered on our goals consistently, not only on our annual guidance but also on the long-term targets. So in 2017, we told you our goal is to cross the EUR 10 billion mark by 2020, which we have reached. In 2019, we told you we aim for EUR 20 billion by 2023, '24. We are not quite there yet, but we are on a clear trajectory to meet and exceed also that target. Well, and during all of that time, we also have been consistently profitable. So why am I saying this? Well, firstly, yes, COVID has been an economic tailwind to the company. But it's important to understand that the roots of our success go much deeper than that. And secondly, when we come to talk about the future, about our goal to double and triple the company once again, I think we can have confidence because this team has already shown that it can do it. And with this, I hand over to Robert to kick off the strategy section.

Yes. At the heart of the presentation of the Capital Markets Day 2019 was our vision to be the starting point for fashion. And as an outcome, the idea is pretty simple. It's to be people's one and only choice for fashion. So in the digital consumer space, this is really the ultimate price to win. The starting points they earn their consumers' attention through a very holistic and all multi-proposition, and they don't have to pay Facebook and Google to send traffic. So people really come directly as they know that it covers all their needs at once. And starting points, they don't compete, left and right with services, they just offer a subset of the service they do. So for example, Spotify is a starting point for music or Booking is a starting point for hotels. And even Google itself is a starting point for search. So for example, if you search something on Google and you don't find it, you don't go to Yahoo! because you want to look what they have to offer. You just assume that you have not searched well enough. So this is our ambition for fashion. Where do you go when you think of fashion, no matter what you want or need, it is Zalando. And our answer, how to claim this position is very simple. We need to have the most extensive assortment. So ultimately, we need customers to think when a brand or a product or a size is not available on Zalando, it probably does not exist at all. So there's really no point in looking somewhere else. And it's the most convenient way to get an item. There's no option to get an item faster, easier or better anywhere else. And the experience needs to be tailored exactly to you. So it is your personal gateway to the entire world of fashion. It covers all your needs and wants. So in bottom line, there's no point in really having any other app for fashion. You just need Zalando. Here you can start your journey, here you can end your journey. There's no need for anything else. And we have come a long way since last Capital Markets Day, and we have a really strong position already today. So our visits have grown by 72% since 2018. So 5.4 billion visits last year, we were the most visited fashion destination across Europe by far. So Zalando is the most downloaded fashion app across Europe, and 57% of our orders are already done by app. So we are a true app business, and we are the leading app business across Europe with big distance. We served about 39 million people across Europe as customers of Zalando. So that's about 10% of the population in the markets that we serve. And they order 4.8x with Zalando, so all these numbers have gone up, 47% more customers, they buy more often with us, they spend more with us. Then all this is a great testament that we have made great progress to be indispensable starting point of fashion for the European population. Looking at 2020, this was an exceptional tough year for the fashion industry. But within fashion, what it produced a step change in the online penetration from 17% 2019 to 24% in 2020. So when we look ahead, we expect the online penetration to rise from this very high level. It won't go back anywhere to pre-COVID levels. So when we look at our cohort data in some more detail, this gives evidence for that. So customers that we acquired during lockdowns last year, they consistently performed stronger than all the cohorts. So irrespective if any stores open in summer. So you see here on the chart on the right-hand side, with the orange line, the purchase activity of the cohort, March, April 2020 versus the March-April 2019 cohort in gray. Even in summer when stores reopened, they bought more frequently with us than the 2019 cohort. So the orange line is consistently above the gray one. So COVID really produced a step change in online shift. It's not a ping pong that goes back. It's really the baseline for the new growth to come. So speaking of growth, we have a substantial leeway for further growth now, both in our existing markets, but as well now by expanding our footprint. So let's look at the population penetration for a moment. So that's the percentage of the population in the market that shop with us last year. We see the big potential when we look 1 level deeper of the 10% average that we have. So in the top five markets, where we already have a very strong local position, among them, some Nordic countries or the Benelux, already more than 20% of the population is an active customer of Zalando. And the markets where we are investing now strongly in the local proposition, our penetration is far lower, for example, in Italy or in France, but it's growing much, much faster. So 70% since 2018. And the catch-up potential is still huge. In these markets, we have a 6% penetration versus 21% penetration in our top markets. So the local investments into our proposition really pays off, and the potential is huge because we know we can already achieve 21%. And additionally, we are now expanding our footprint and reach. There's about 100 million people living in Europe that don't yet have access to our starting point. We're going to change this now by expanding our footprint. So our first step is now to launch in 6 new markets and 2 more are going to be launched. So there's plenty of growth ahead of us, both in our existing footprint and as well by expanding our footprint. So we capture our growth potential by continuously investing into our customer proposition. So that is the basis really proclaiming us as the holistic starting point for fashion in creating very deep customer relationships. So we particularly believe that the investments in innovation and in our digital experience is an accelerator for our growth to be really your personal gateway in the fashion universe with all your potential wants and needs. So particularly, we see now already how our innovation in the core experience is really well off. So we pivoted from a transactional experience now towards being more engaging and more entertaining and more personal. So this is really a catalyst for the increase in traffic that we absorbed of the 72% since 2018. For example, a recent feature we launched is allowing our customers to follow brands they like on Zalando and brands to engage with their fans on our platform with their content and with their stories. So since launch 5 months ago, there are already 7 million people that follow a brand, and they visit Zalando 2.3x more often. Another highlight where we invest is elevating our distinct propositions we offer in the fashion universe, like beauty, like preowned designer or lounge. So we innovate in these propositions very deeply and catering to the needs and wants of customers within this proposition. And at the same time, we as well invest in making these propositions more accessible for our customers in the core app. And the payoff of that is huge. For example, when customers shop at Fashion Store and shop at Zalando Lounge they order 2.6x more often with us. So Jim and his team will capture this in much more detail in our exciting customer proposition deep dive today, and I encourage you to really watch this presentation. And with that, I would like to hand over to David.

Now we come to the second part of our strategy. In order to achieve the starting point for fashion, we need to transition to being a true platform business. Let me quickly recap why the platform model is so important for our vision. Through the platform approach, we create strong benefits for our customers, partners and Zalando. And so customers get access to an almost unlimited assortment way beyond what we decided to buy or what we physically have on stock. Customers should get all the brands she loves, all the styles that are relevant to her. And of course, the size should be available. If customers fell in love with this special edition outdoor jacket, we want to be able to tell her that the last piece is available in the store in Hamburg and ship it to her next day. Our partners on the other side, get access to 39 million active customers and counting. And so we connect partners to their specific audience throughout Europe. And partners can leverage our capabilities and infrastructure. For example, a brand wants to succeed in Switzerland, they can use our fulfillment capabilities to ship there, use our marketing capabilities to build a brand in a new market. And finally, Zalando benefits as the platform adds scale. We do not have to think about inventory risk, but rather focus on improving the customer offer and experience all the time and also invest into further capabilities. So this, again, makes it more attractive for customers and partners, and that is the virtuous circle we are aiming for to create this true win, win, win. So let us have a look of how far we've come with our platform. Since we met for our last CMD in 2019, we made quite some leaps forward. And of course, we've also received an additional acceleration through the COVID dynamics. Our Partner Program has made a big step. We have grown Partner Program share from 10% to 24%. In Germany, it's even 34%. And our Zalando Fulfillment Solutions have grown from 25% to 51% item share. That means that more than half of all platform of our Partner Program items are fulfilled through the Zalando infrastructure. And also, our Zalando marketing services have more than doubled from 0.7% to 1.5% of the total GMV. And we expect ZMS to grow stronger in future as brands engage more and more with the direct-to-consumer model. And I think this strong progress along all those dimensions shows that we are very well on our way to reach our longer-term expectations. So now let's have a look at the dynamics on the partner side. As customers rush to digital channels, so do brands and retailers. And while this process started a long time ago, the past 12 months have, for sure, created more and more need to speed up for many partners. And yes, I think we had the solutions for them in place to do so. So we saw tremendous progress in 2 dimensions. First of all, more and more partners are coming to our platform. We saw a record level in partner interest, finding more than 3x as many contracts as we did in 2019. And at the same time, we retained 100% of our top 50 partners. The results for our customers. In the past 2 years, we doubled the number of brands to 4,000 brands available on our platform, and we grew our assortment to around 900,000 articles. So ultimate goal remains. You cannot find it on Zalando, it doesn't exist. The second dimension, partners engage more and more with our platform. Our top 50 partners increased the number of articles they offer by 23%, making a larger and larger share of their assortment available. And also the number of market launches doubled since last year. And that means partners accelerate going internationally through our platform. And this deep engagement of partners and also the trusted relationships behind show how we complement partners and can really play a core role in their own digital strategy. Even more impressive is the development of stores connected. Connected retail is our path to -- for stores to connect their inventory to our platform to connect to a digital audience and to sell directly to them. We have expanded that network to almost -- almost fivefold to 2,400 stores by the end of 2020. And if we look only at this year, yes, we added another 1,000 on top just by the end of February. At the same time, the GMV generated by store has increased over-proportionally by a factor of over 12. That means that the average GMV per store has almost tripled since 2019. And in Germany, or by far, most developed markets, connected retail contributed 12% of the fashion store GMV in Q4. And yes, of course, lockdowns have accelerated this engagement as we are able to provide opportunities to stores that basically lost customers coming in. But we don't expect these numbers to continue at this very same pace, but we also receive a lot of feedback and see that this is not only a short-term relief in times of need. The combination of offline and online is very powerful and also very actionable for stores as a path forward. So we'll work hard to -- on providing the right tools and services for stores to make onboarding and steering business on our platform as easy as possible and also bring long-term value-add to the stores. And if we think connected retail further, you can imagine a huge potential. I mean, there are 300,000 stores across Europe. It represents over 75% of the fashion revenue. So we're tapping into merged market between offline and online, and we're just at the beginning of that. Until the end of this year alone, we aim to expand to 13 markets and triple the number of stores. So the reason why our platform approach is successful is that we support our partners' own strategies. There are hugely diverse brands, retailers, stores out there. But all of them have in common that they want and they need to be successful with the digital audience. And they need capabilities and the customer reach, it is almost impossible to reach only with wrong e-com. We saw 3 major challenges for them. The first challenge, they have to be online where the customer is. So we enable them to go direct-to-consumer. Our Partner Program and Connected Retail are our way to put them out there. And we see this deeply rooted in our partner strategy. So far, we expected 40% of our GMV coming from Partner Program by 2023, but actually seeing such strong engagement, we upgrade this to 50% by 2025. As a second step, we offer partners to leverage our infrastructure and to reach all markets. Zalando Fulfillment Solutions is a great lever to boost reach without having to invest in your own infrastructure for the brands. So we expect 75% of Partner Program items shipped by ZFS in the long run. And then at the next level, we enable partners to speak to their audience and leverage our data, our reach to drive the business, but also to position their brands. And the long-term target here is 3% to 4% of our GMV will come from Zalando marketing services. So we will deeper -- we'll dive deeper into this and also like what it means from a partner perspective in the partner session later on. But with that, I would hand over back to Rubin.

Thank you. Well, the third element of our strategy is that in order to win the hearts and minds of our consumers, we want to build a truly sustainable platform. Currently, COVID is dominating the public debate and that's for a good reason. But all of us know, the planet has another problem, which might turn out to be just as deadly. Science tells us that until the end of the centuries -- of the century, temperatures might rise by up to 4.8 degrees. And all of you know that anything above 1.5 degrees already is a big problem and might lead to drastic consequences. Now the fashion industry is part of this problem because it accounts for about 4% of global emissions. To put that into context, that's the same as Germany, France and the U.K. combined. And it's also twice as much as the sector of global aviation. Now if the fashion industry is part of the problem, we are as well. And more and more, our consumers demand to see a change because customers want to shop at brands where they trust that they can help them to align with their values. So we are convinced if we want to build the starting point for consumers, if we really want to win the hearts and minds, we have to become part of the solution. Also, the talent that we look to hire expects us to be part of the solution. And also we, ourselves, want to build a company that is part solution to the sustainability challenge that all of us face jointly. So this is why already in 2019, we formulated our sustainability vision to be a sustainable platform with a net positive impact on people and the planet. In this, we highlight platform because we want to emphasize that we have the opportunity to design mechanisms and set incentives that encourage both customers and brands to make more sustainable choices. And we find that exciting because it means we can have impact beyond the boundaries of our own company. And we highlight the target to be net positive, which means we want to give back more than we take out of society and the environment. So this is a truly high ambition. But we think we cannot really aim lower if we want to leave a lasting impact and want to make a sizable contribution. This vision already has proven to be a big source of motivation to everyone in the team because it leads us to really apply our capabilities to a problem that truly matters. In order to make it more specific, we have also added 6 focus areas climate change, packaging, sustainable fashion, circularity, human rights in our supply chain, and upskilling. You can read about all of those and our progress in the sustainability report that we published today. Now in this presentation, I will talk about 3 examples of our work. So to start with climate. Our climate aspiration is to be carbon neutral in our own operations and contribute to a 1.5 degrees pathway in line with the Paris Agreement. So our work has 2 areas. The first one is our own operations where we are driving with force for fast and significant reduction. Since 2017, we have reduced our own emissions by 64% which means if you think about during that time, we have doubled our business and cut our emissions in half. So we have effectively decoupled our own growth from the growth of our emissions. Our goal by 2025 is to reduce by 80% compared to 2017. Everything that we cannot yet reduce, we are already offsetting, which means that already today, we are climate-neutral from our own operations plus delivery and returns. So I think this is remarkable and exciting progress. Now let's look at the second area, which is our supply chain. This includes the production of merchandise, services we acquire and also our customers wearing and washing the merchandise. So you can see this is really a broad scope. So it is more challenging because we can only influence it indirectly, but it's also exciting because it shows you how broad our influence actually might be. So our target is that 90% of our suppliers, measured by emissions, set science-based targets by 2025. From our own discussions about our own science-based targets, we know that is something that is difficult to do. It is a tough commitment to make. And that's why we will be focused on helping our partners setting the right incentives. Because we think, ultimately, having a science-based target will become a requirement to do business on our platform. Now the second example I want to talk about is our sustainable product aspiration, which is to enable customers to make more sustainable choices. And I think it is a great example of how powerful incentives can be. So we have introduced the sustainability flag, which we use to highlight products that meet clearly defined and transparent criteria, for example, by using recycled input factors. So by that, we make these products more attractive to our customers and set an incentive for brands to meet these requirements with more and more products. So we work closely with our partners, the large brands that are shifting their assortment towards more sustainable, for example, Adidas but also onboarding smaller brands that are incredibly focused on sustainability, brands like [indiscernible] from Spain. With that, we have been able to triple our assortment in this area to more than 80,000 products that we have online today. Now as a result of this, we also grew our GMV from these products. In 2020, they made up 16% of our business, which is EUR 1.7 billion, that is up significantly from 7% in the year before. This fast progress has encouraged us to further increase our target for 2023 from 20% to 25% of our GMV. It is important to highlight, though, that at the same time, we are committed to continue to raise the bar on the criteria. For example, this year, we are raising the bar on the content requirement of recycled products from 20% to 30%. The third example I want to talk about is circularity. Our aspiration is to move the industry from a linear to a circular pattern. Today, our industry is almost completely linear. We take resources, we produce a product, and then it goes to waste. Only 1% of fashion is recycled into fashion again. So let me give you one example of what this could look like already today. And I will talk about 1 Sweatshirt from our circularity collection from our private label sign, which, by the way, also commercially was a great success. So in the design and manufacture phase, we try to make sure that this product is designed to be durable and to be ultimately recycled, for example, by using a very simple design and only one organic input material. When the product arrives at the customer, it carries a QR code, which the customer can scan and get to a microsite, where they will receive information on how they can get the most use out of this product and how they can take good care of the product and repair it even. So you might ask who would use this QR code? It turns out actually 50% of customers went to this microsite, which is huge engagement. Now when the customer doesn't want to use the item anymore, we come to reuse, where we offer our customers to conveniently trade them in via Zalando circle and make them available for other customers to buy and to continue to use. Ultimately, when the product life comes to an end, we intend to close the loop. So we commit to take back this product and make sure it gets recycled into new fashion. So we are at the very beginning of this. But we think we have a great position to help the industry on that journey. We can take a role in every step along the entire supply chain, along the entire loop. We have relevant infrastructure, for example, our return logistics, and we also see it as a great opportunity to interact more deeply with our customers and to create meaningful touchpoints and engagement. So our commitment is that by 2023, we extend the life of more than 50 million products by using 1 or more of the mechanisms I have talked about. So I hope it comes across that we see sustainability not as an additional cost, but as a true investment, an investment to bring our customer proposition to the next level, to truly reach our starting point vision, to change the industry for the better because we are convinced that's the right thing for us to do. So let me quickly sum up the strategy section. First of all, we said our vision is to be the starting point for fashion in Europe; secondly, we said, to achieve this vision, we are transitioning into a true platform business; and then thirdly, in order to win the hearts and minds of our customers, we want to build a truly sustainable platform. Now let me hand back over to Robert to talk about our targets.

Thank you, Rubin. So how do we translate all this what we have said into our long-term opportunity. Well, in 2017, when we had a market share of the European fashion market of about 1%, we talked for the first time of our long-term ambition. And we said, in the very long term, we're going to achieve a 5% market share of the overall fashion market as we assumed the online market share to eventually become 25%. So that was at the time in 2017 there was quite a tickly feeling for us, and it felt very ambitious and it felt very steep. But now 4 years later, we look back, and there's a lot of things that have happened. So we continuously execute on our growth strategy and essentially double the company. In 2021, we are about to approach a 3% market share already now. And now 2020 has showed us 2 very strong insights. First, that the COVID pandemic was really an acceleration of a long-term trend and has really blurred as well the boundaries that happened between offline and online. So for example, bricks-and-mortar stores invest in capturing online demand by delivering as well out of their stores. So customers connect digitally with bricks-and-mortar stores or click and collect many things more. So it's not anymore about offline or online, it's really about how they interact with each other. And the second insight is that our platform strategy was exactly the right move to anticipate this what now happens. So our platform is equipped to play a role in the entire fashion industry, both offline and online. So enabling brands and retailers e-com or their stores to connect with customers on our starting point. So this all makes us reconsider our potential. So we know we can execute on our targets. We know we can scale our organization and our capabilities. And we have the right strategy that captures where industry trends and where the history is essentially going. So when we now look at the future, it is eventually not anymore about offline or online, so it's about the entire fashion market. And our potential is that we can serve more than 10% of the overall fashion market in the very long term. So it's tickly again, but we know we can do it, and we will do it. Now I'd like to highlight some of the more important milestones on this way towards our long-term ambition. And I would like to talk specifically about our path to 2025. So while we previously aimed to double our business to EUR 20 billion by 2023, '24, we now essentially aim to triple our business to more than EUR 30 billion in GMV by 2025. So we essentially make an outlook 1-year later, and we add EUR 10 billion on top, which essentially is the size of Zalando today. So throughout this time, we expect to grow at a CAGR of 20% to 25% between the years of 2020 and 2025, so that's essentially 2x or 3x faster than the online fashion market overall. So by 2025, this would mean there will be equivalent of around 7% market share of the overall fashion market, and that makes us the biggest player in fashion in Europe, both offline and online. And what does it mean for the margin trajectory? So as mentioned, our primary focus is on capturing this immense growth opportunity ahead of us. So to do so, we'll continue to make growth investments into our business, into our propositions. So in long term, we can reach a double-digit profitability that we have explained as well in the past. However, this will now happen at a much higher scale than we've explained in the past. So David Schroder, our CFO, will go much more into detail on the updated guidance session later today. So we have a strong balance sheet. And we are in a great position to invest into the tripling of our business in the years to come. And our advantages are unique. They're highly scalable, they're very powerful. So on the customer side, we have -- we have a tremendous reach with being the most visited fashion destination in Europe. And we have the most downloaded app in fashion, serving already 39 million people across Europe. And we will continue to drive further investments in here, adding new customers to our platform and deepening the relationships with the existing ones, by investing into our proposition in the new markets and as well in the existing markets. On the partner side, we have an unmatched scale of access on fashion choice, from global fashion choice from our brands, from retailers and from stores. And these choices, they ultimately build upon our trust-based relationships we have built in the past, and we continue to invest in here. And the base of our platform scaling is our underlying capabilities and the infrastructure. Our own logistics network is the biggest purpose-built logistics network for fashion with 10 sites across 5 countries. And we've already invested in here about EUR 1 billion into this network, and we're adding 2 new fulfillment centers now in Madrid and Rotterdam throughout this year. And last but not least, our technology and data assets. We have a team of more than 2,000 software engineers and data scientists, and they only focus on the challenges within the Fashion & Lifestyle space. And there are many fold. Ranging from size and fit challenges to building buy now pay data propositions and payment. So in summary, our advantages, they are powerful, they're unique, they're highly scalable, and we have a great track record to invest into them into these assets. And while we focus on organic growth, we as well seek the support of selective M&A, such as our recent acquisition of Fision. To execute our growth ambitions and following Rubin's announcement to leave us after the next AGM, we will now introduce a new management board setup going forward. David Schneider and myself will continue to lead the company as co-CEOs. David continues to set a strategy towards our brand partners, and will focus more on sustainability and as well on the [ NI ] strategy. I will be responsible for strategy and corporate affairs and communication, and we jointly continue to lead the management board going forward. Now we welcome Astrid Arndt to the newly created position as Chief People Officer. So the roll-off work in society is changing. In the past year, especially highlighted that Zalando has a unique culture and entrepreneurial approach that are key assets for us. So for tripling our company going forward, we need to retain our best and key talent. We need to find the best ways of working, and we need to continue to attract key tenant at scale. And Astrid has proven that she has a deep understanding of our people and culture with a great business acumen. We are as well creating a new role of the Chief Business and Product Officer. Jim has done an amazing job as CTO to look forward to him leading now our efforts to develop and grow and market our consumer offerings and innovation. David Schroder continues to oversee the financial development of the group as Chief Financial Officer. And at the same time, the best-in-class capabilities as our logistics and as well our payment infrastructure. David has done an amazing job as CFO, and being your primary point of contact especially throughout these very uncertain times in the pandemic. So this setup is not going to change. Under the AGM in May, we're very happy and grateful that Rubin continues to support us in this transition until his departure. So we have a strong management board team in place that has a very strong track record in our continuous execution. And this new setup enables us both to go very deep but as well to focus on the long-term horizon being the starting point for fashion in Europe and eventually serving more than 10% of the European fashion market. So summing up, I'm coming to the key takeaways of our note. So what are the key takeaways? Number one. We have a very clear strategy, and our #1 priority is growth. The starting point, that's the ultimate price to win, and we continue to invest here; second, over the last couple of years, we have done tremendous progress, and we consistently delivered on all our targets that we set ourselves; and three, the opportunity for Zalando is immense. So making us very, very confident that we can reach more than EUR 30 billion by 2025 and the long-term even capture and serve more than 10% of the entire fashion market; and number four, we continue to drive investments that will catalyze exactly this long-term growth for our business. Thank you very much for listening. And now we would like to go towards the Q&A.

Welcome back here, live in Berlin. I'm with our 3 co-CEOs, David, Rubin and Robert, all tested this morning, so all fine, and we can, therefore, directly jump in our Q&A. I already got the first question asked by David Holmes of Bank of America. It goes to you, Robert. What gives you the confidence that 10% market share is achievable in the long term? And are there markets where you already have this market share?

Yes. Yes, thank you for the question. So as I said in keynote, I think looking back, we have always achieved our targets, and we've always perform very well on the growth side. And now when we're looking into the situation, especially how last year developed. We now, even more, see how it actually has accelerated -- has provided a step change in online penetration, how actually online offline come together. And as a platform, we are in the right place to really capture on all these potentials. And when we look towards our business, our platform, we see basically a unique asset and potential everywhere on the customer side, on the partners with many thousands of offerings that we continue to onboard in the logistics side by just improving and adding and increasing our footprint in logistics and on the data technology side. So there's opportunities everywhere that we feel very clearly about that we can and should execute on them going forward. And yes, and I think when we look at the market share data, already see that in DACH region, we are at a 5% market share and seeing heavy growth and seeing heavy potential. So that makes us very confident that we can achieve a 10%-plus market share in the long term.

Thanks, Robert. Already the next question coming from Marco Baresi from Lombard Odier. It goes to you, David. When we listen to Adidas and Nike's B2C strategy, it seems they are pushing even harder to sell directly to their clients. How do you manage the potential assortment conflict of interest between the key partners here?

So we don't really see a strong conflict here. I think it goes even the other way around because we encourage brands a lot to indicate that's what our whole platform targets at. We give them that platform to connect all their inventory. They can even connect stores. We opened up like our logistics infrastructure. We provide data services. We allow them to target their audience with messages. We even go into like brand followerships to really build like a longer-lasting relationships to customers. So actually, we think we are pretty close to the core of the brand's strategies, if they want to go more direct-to-consumer, and I'm also pretty sure that if they -- what they raise out ambition levels that we are like what we do in our platform, through Partner Program that's very much included in their ambitions. I think it goes rather into now the discussions on how do we actually serve the customers jointly in the very best way? How do we make it more seamless as they also know that we address customers in the multi-brand environment? We have this very broad reach. Customers buy 18 brands per year on average. So I think that's I think it's a different way of targeting customers than in a mono label environment. And I think that's what we're working on and then rather thinking about like how to add the capabilities to make this even better in the future.

Sherri Malek, RBC. I think that goes to Robert again. Could you please explain the further geographical expansion opportunity, the timing of the decision to expand to those 8 markets? And how much is expected to contribute to overall growth? Also where do you see the highest growth opportunity in your existing markets?

Yes. So maybe first in terms of timing. So it's always an execution question, and we feel like we have another execution capacity to enlargement towards these markets. And we -- based on the results that we have also seen in Poland and in Czech Republic that we know we will achieve there this similar starting point as we do in the existing footprint. So that in terms of the timing. How it contributes to the overall growth? The biggest growth is obviously still coming from the existing footprint, but we expect as well a sizable share of growth coming from these markets. Where we see the biggest growth potential in our existing markets? As I highlighted in the keynote is in markets where we have the lower penetration percentage of our customers, which are markets such as in Southern Europe, such as France, Italy. These are markets where we see particularly a lot of traction with our -- with regards to our investments into the local proposition, local assortment and communication.

Thanks. Then there's a question on sustainability to Rubin from José Rito from Caixabank. It goes on sustainable products. Is the sales evolution higher on products with the sustainability? And can you give any further color in generally on your sustainability assortment?

Sure. So on our sustainable assortment, we have seen a number of factors driving growth. I would say the most important one is that we have worked together with brands to make sure that we can offer even more products in this category for different reasons because they are produced with sustainable materials because they are produced from recycled materials. So really the focus has been to reach out to brands and grow that assortment. On the customer side, we have seen huge interest in this category. And from the data that we see that has even been enhanced during COVID, even though the pandemic obviously takes a high share of mind from all of us. I think it also emphasizes this idea that we have to take care of our planet, and we have to think about sort of the future and take the right decisions. So we have seen a high demand for these products. We also see conversion rates of these products being very healthy and very positive. And yes, that really emphasized this idea that in order to be the starting point, we need to drive the sustainability idea, and we need to be credible in this regard. And I think it has been very encouraging to see the interest in these products.

The next question is on Connected Retail, David. What's the typical profile of the stores you're connected through Connected Retail? And what GMV contribution do you assume from Connected Retail?

If I start with the second part of the question. In Q4, last year, we were at 12% GMV share in Germany. I think that was a very extraordinary number. Also, we do not expect that to grow at the same pace now because, of course, it's a special situation that we had a very, very strong demand online and stores, of course, were closed down and had that inventory. So we do not expect that at the same pace. On the other hand, we also see like so much more potential because we really see how each of those stores also increases GMV and is very engaged. We are now at 3,500 stores, but there are like 300,000 stores across Europe. So that's why we definitely see a very good potential. And I mean to the typical store, I think there is no such thing as a very typical store because it is a very, very diverse set. And we can be open to fairly to many of them. I think maybe 1 category is brands that connect to our platform, and we work very closely with. I think for them, it makes a lot of sense to connect their stores additionally to provide more value add. I think we have very strong retailers that have a special niche or like are specialist in certain areas, have great assortments, great stories to tell, great curation to customers. I think that is great. But then we also have local players and can just add, of course, like just assortment access and in the long run, like a super speedy delivery. So I think we can, over time, we'll build on more like these additional customer benefits out and therefore, engage also with those partners on different levels.

And the next question comes from Nizla Naizer. It goes on about M&A. So it goes to you, Robert. There has been media reports on Zalando being interested party in Flaconi, which belongs to ProSieben at the moment. What are your thoughts on this? And how do you view M&A as a target your EUR 30 billion in GMV? And how important are other verticals such as beauty in this EUR 30 billion target?

Yes, thank you. In terms of the media reports are rumors, I think we don't comment on rumors. Our view on M&A is not like a preconceived one. So we see it as 1 tool of how we execute on our plans. Our first preference is mostly on organic. But if we actually see there's some capabilities that we can achieve through M&A, then we consider M&A as 1 way of our 2 box. But I think Fision is such a great example where it actually nicely adds technology capability that would have otherwise kind of had to build up by ourselves. What was the last piece of the question, sorry?

Beauty. And how much on the beauty is included?

So beauty as a category, I think we -- it's one of the newer categories. We're very happy with the progress that we've seen. So 3-digit percentage growth last year. There's only 400 brands now on -- that we are engaged with on the beauty category. So we are we're very happy with the progress that we see, and we -- particularly, as you will hear later today as well, we'll invest into the customer proposition to make the beauty assortment even more attractive to our customers to see even more potential from the beauty category going forward.

Thanks. There's another question from Olivia Townsend. I think that also goes to Robert regarding the geographic expansion strategy over the next few years. Specifically also including increasing our market share more meaningfully and the needs to change if you want to make any marketing ranging fulfillment in order to do this in the U.K. area?

Yes. I think when it comes to the U.K., I think we -- the plan that we are executing on is mostly geared towards our existing footprint where we serve U.K., but our focus is very much on Continental Europe. For the U.K., the plans have not changed. So we continue to be active in the U.K., we continue to make progress. But the big proportion of our growth is obviously coming from the Continental Europe.

I think we have time for 1 more question, which comes from Simon Irwin, Crédit Suisse. It goes to Rubin about our logistics footprint. And the question can you explain why on a longer -- announcing your logistic footprint as you have done so in the past?

Announcing our logistics footprint. So I mean our logistics footprint continues to be a big, big part of our strategy because the whole platform idea builds on the theme of providing infrastructure to an entire industry. And that consists of data and technology of capabilities like payment and also importantly, logistics, right? And I don't think that any single brand could invest into such a vast logistics footprint as we have. We operate about 10 sites in 5 different markets, which goes way beyond the e-commerce footprint that any individual brand could build. It's the second largest logistics footprint after Amazon in Europe, and it's something we are really proud of. We are -- we just took live in new sites in Spain. We will take live a new site sort of end of this year, beginning of next year in Netherlands. We continue to look for new lots to really invest into our footprint. In the past years, we have invested about EUR 1 billion in CapEx. And going forward, given all the growth we are planning and given how important fulfillment solutions have become for the Partner Program, for sure, that will continue to be a big investment theme of the future as well. And I think also a big differentiator in what we are trying to achieve.

Thanks, Rubin. Thanks, Robert. Thanks, David. That concludes the Q&A session. And stay tuned for the next deep dive session on customer with Jim, Anne and Martin, and will continue with our agenda at 12:30 CET. Thanks, and see you soon. [Break]

Welcome back. So let me first share what you have learned so far. We have been sharing our new growth ambition until 2025 to reach EUR 30 billion in GMV. We learned that partners as well as customers are essential part of this journey. We currently have 39 million active customers, which is the population of the State of California. Let's now see how we build a great customer experience for all of them. And I, therefore, now hand over to Jim, Martin and Anne. With that said, please, Jim, go ahead.

Welcome to the customer deep dive. Today, we want to talk to you about our vision for building a great customer experience. I'm joined by Anne Pascual, Head of Design, and Martin Rost, who leads Offprice. And together, we're going to share with you our ideas about building a great customer experience. We also want to share with you some of the progress we've made since the last Capital Markets Day, but also the progress we want to make before the next one. So as Robert mentioned, our vision is to be the starting point for fashion. As an idea, that's pretty simple. We want to be customers' first choice whenever they consider or purchase fashion. But what does it really mean? And what do we need to do? That's the question we hope to answer with you today. And first and foremost, we believe we have to continuously improve the experience we already offer, as customer expectations are constantly rising. But we also have to anticipate and innovate by understanding what future needs and wants from our customers will be and meeting those. So let's take a deeper look. Improving the core experience. This includes endless choice, seamless convenience and a tailored experience for fashion. But innovating to address future customer needs means we also need to introduce our customers to new ideas, to new propositions. A customer proposition being something that has distinct benefits that we can market to our customers and introduce to them. And on that side, we have our work around Pre-Owned, Beauty, Zalando Lounge, Designer and Zalando Plus today, and we'll have many more ideas coming in the future. Turning to endless choice. We're offering our customers more and more choice and a fresher and fresher assortment. As you can see, over the last 2 years, we've made significant progress on both dimensions. First of all, we've grown the total SKUs to 890,000, which is a huge increase over the 530,000 we had 2 years ago, 68% growth. In addition, we've also accelerated the freshness of the assortment, going from 1,500 per day on average to 2,300 per day on average, so a 53% growth. And this is a really important aspect of our experience. But on the other hand, we're also focusing on specific categories. So we're super excited to have added many special brands over the last year. I would call out ARKET, a new win on the fashion side. We've also onboarded Ralph Lauren and Jil Sander, on the beauty side. And through one of our retail partnerships, we've also been able to add ICHI. So we're diving deep into specific areas, and we're really building out credible and compelling assortment, but we're also growing the overall assortment. Convenience has long been a hallmark of the Zalando experience. And the last 2 years have been no different. We have really focused on making payments, delivery and returns all easier and better. In 2020, we continued on this journey despite the significant hurdles that we faced, as did all other e-commerce companies. For example, we were able to extend the offering rate of our buy-now-pay-later experience by 5 percentage points to 70%. This is one of the most loved experiences on Zalando. And the reason is clear. Customers find what they want online. They receive them in the comfort of their own home, try them on and only then decide what to keep and what to pay for. You can see from the NPS value of over 90, the customers love how we offer payments that really are fit for fashion. In addition, we've increased convenience from a pickup and returns perspective by growing the number of pickup points we have. This is an experience customers really love and value. So having those 153,000 pickup points, which we've grown by 84% over the last 2 years. These are the kinds of things that make it much easier for our customers to shop apparel online and also creates a lot of loyalty, since it's such a great and seamless experience. We can't talk about convenience without acknowledging what a significant challenge 2020 was for all e-commerce companies, including us. But we've been working hard to make our network more scalable and more resilient. We've onboarded over 40 last mile service providers to introduce flexibility and resilience there. We've also worked super hard to introduce the right safety measures for our staff. We did over 40,000 COVID tests in Q4 alone. And to me, it's truly amazing the work that has been done in this area and all the collaboration and cooperation and problem-solving that has gone into ensuring Zalando can ship more parcels than ever at the same great service level as always before, and thereby preserving one of the truly foundational elements of our brand that we're a great way for customers to experience fashion due to this seamless convenience. So I want to thank all of our frontline employees for the tremendous impact they've made for us in 2020. Now when it comes to the digital experience, you're going to hear a lot more later, but I'll just say that we've been introducing improvements there as well and also seeing them pay off. Over the last 2 years, we've seen a 6 percentage point increase in a metric we feel is very important, which is what percentage of our customers visit us 5x or more per month. That's what we're shooting for, that highly engaged customer. We've also invested a lot in our app experience. Our app experience is where customers engage with us the most deeply, and we've been able to continue adoption of this 15 percentage point increase over the last 2 years and visits on our app. So really great progress there. And how does it all come together? Our customer base is growing. They're visiting us more often, and they're happier than ever before. And I think this is truly amazing, 46% increase in active customers, 72% increase in site visits. This is some really accelerated development. And to see that, that's also resulting in an all-time high on NPS is really great to see. This has been a tremendous effort from all our teams under really difficult circumstances, and I personally want to thank them all. So we've been able to improve the fundamentals of our experience quite a lot when it comes to endless selection when it comes to seamless convenience and when it comes to that digital experience tailored for fashion, many improvements and quite great outcome when it comes to our customer engagement. Now what I'd like to do is ask Martin and Anne to tell you a little bit more about how we deepen customer relationships by innovating in the core, but also in elevating distinct customer proposition.

Thank you, Jim, for the introduction and for summarizing the progress we made in 2020. I'm very excited to share with you what we have been working on in 2020 and share also how we're going to evolve and innovate our experience in 2021 and beyond. We want customers to open the Zalando app whenever they think about fashion and beauty and come back again and again. And that's why we want to create a truly exciting destination that they love. The 2 dimensions we're going to talk to you about is, on one hand, how we've been improving our core experience; and second, how we plan to elevate distinct propositions that answer specific customer needs. In 2020, we've been repositioning our mainly transactional experience to become a lot more engaging and differentiating by delivering 4 core marketable benefits we want to be known for and customers associate Zalando with. They are, on one hand, how to discover your brands; how to make the Zalando experience your own; how you change for the better; and how you get the plus treatment. Let me now introduce you to each of these benefits and improvements in more detail and how they answer specific customer needs. Jim mentioned earlier the increase of our selection, which can be quite overwhelming to some of our customers and also boring to scroll through a grid of products. As of today, 65% of the time spend of our customers are actually on catalog pages, which is obviously not a small problem to solve and improve, but that's why we're going to introduce a whole new way to explore the entire assortment of Zalando in a more visual, intuitive and enjoyable way. So we're going to go beyond offering a category tree and search by providing visual entry points to fashion-specific dimensions, which you can see here on the visual, little cards that introduce customers to specific aspects. Let's pick an example, like dresses, which if I go to Zalando today, I get 20,000 results which I would have to go through. Instead, with these new entry points, I can take distinct elements of dresses and drill down into the assortment, reducing the amount of items to down to 1,000, 600 or sometimes 50 items that are a lot more relevant to my needs. So for fashion-savvy customers, we provide more distinct dimensions and ways to browse the assortment. For less fashion-savvy customers, we'll provide a more diverse set of products. We are very excited to launch these improvements for all our customers in all markets on all devices later this year. Customers are not only browsing for individual products. They also seek inspiration coming from brands that match their style and values. This is why, in 2020, we introduced a new way to showcase individual brands. Let them tell their stories and celebrate the products they offer in exciting ways across the entire customer experience. Customers can now also start following the brand, like here, New Balance, for instance, or North Face, where they get notified about new products and offerings as they come in. Active followers visit our site 2.3x more often than active customers that don't follow brands, which is clearly an indicator for an increase in engagement. So once you have found a product or brand you love, you obviously want to find clothes that fit you. But that's not totally easy. And in this case, here, some of us end up buying the same pair of jeans for the last 5 years because they simply fit perfectly. We have been investing a lot over the last couple of years to solve the size and fit problem by providing algorithmic solutions that provide size advice on individual products. As of today, 50% of all items ordered include size advice. This has been driving down size-related returns significantly and has been avoiding unnecessary returns for customers, the environment and Zalando. In 2021, we want to allow new and returning customers to submit their size preference, increase the availability of advice across the assortment so that every customer will have their unique version of Zalando. No tedious actions to be repeated, no need to reenter information again and again, and we're going to also add personal preferences for brands so that customers can discover and service products from brands they love and follow. This tailored experience is relevant beyond in single visit. It welcomes customers repeatedly and make Zalando truly their own. Zooming outdoor, we want to offer more and mean more to our customers. We want to build on the strength of our core experience and elevate on top a set of distinct propositions that respond to specific customer needs in a marketable way. Let me show you some concrete examples and propositions in more detail. There's a growing interest in pre-owned fashion across Europe. It matches our commitment to sustainability that we want to have the net positive impact we seek to make, as Rubin pointed out, in the keynote. Pre-Owned has been the category that attracted the largest number of first-time shoppers since restrictions on public life were put into effect. And this is especially true for the younger audiences, Gen Z and millennials that are seeking for affordable and sustainable fashion, yet also expect flawless quality and best-in-class e-commerce convenience. Today, customers can easily discover pre-owned items in our experience and also get to upload products they no longer want to wear and want to trade-in. We see a 25% category repurchase rate, which is significant higher than in other categories. There's still another example of a distinct proposition we want to offer, which is beauty. Beauty is a very personal topic. Like this customer here from Italy who mentions that putting up a beauty product is a moment of joy in self-care, which particularly in the pandemic, became more important and helped also to accelerate the general transition to online shopping by the Gen Z audience, and we believe opens up the opportunities providing a distinct beauty experience. If you think about it, beauty is really a multisensory experience, given the different textures, the color shades, individual skin types and fragrances that products have and that customers want to know more about. And that's why buying a beauty product requires inspiration, guidance, assurance and testing before a purchase decision is made. We want to showcase the different subcategories of beauty products by providing the right kind of information and storytelling, drawing customers in so that they understand what does the product contain, how will my skin react, will the color fit my dress. Beauty is also the space where more and different forms of advice are much appreciated. We aim to provide a tailored experience and level of advice, allowing customers to assess their skin profile. So looking at these visuals, you see how we're going to have experts and enthusiasts sharing what they can't live without and also share their tips and routines, which relates to everything from ratings, reviews, to tutorials, could be about bedtime face time routines, easy 3-step, skin time routines or how to combat dryness of your skin. So from then on, customers don't need to go to 2 stores. It's as easy and pleasant as taking the escalator in a department store and go from one floor to another. As described here, beauty -- a beauty-focused experience entails differentiated functionality and communication, but really, customers can benefit from seamlessly transitioning between them. Both Pre-Owned and Beauty show us how creating a more distinct and marketable proposition to our customers, they become more engaged and loyal to Zalando overall. So we offer more reasons to come back to the Zalando beyond individual purchases. And through this, Zalando becomes the first choice for Apparel, Pre-Owned and Beauty. When it comes to engaging customers more deeply and frequently across propositions, we can learn from and build from the great success of Lounge, Zalando's shopping club experience. Lounge has seen phenomenal growth in 2020, proving how its unique engagement model deepens customer relationships. I'm very excited to have Martin now talk to you more about Lounge.

Thank you, Anne. Let's recap here. So to deepen customer relationships, we can make each proposition better and we can also get our customers to engage with multiple propositions. As you're probably aware, fashion is a very diverse space. It supports many different ways of engagement, and we can create specific propositions for our customers. One of these propositions is Zalando Lounge, our shopping club. What we do at Zalando Lounge? Well, we offer fashion products at a discount up to 75% in daily sales campaigns. And it's that special offer that creates a special kind of love from our customers. The thing about the engagement is, we launch these sales campaigns at 7:00 a.m. in the morning. And our customers really love the fun of checking out the new offering and finding great deals. In fact, what they oftentimes tell us is, "I just bought an amazing piece that 10 minutes ago, I didn't even know I actually wanted to buy." Because we have these campaigns up for 72 hours, our assortment is constantly refreshed, and that lets our customers come back often. It's not only an amazing opportunity for our customers, but equally also for our partners, who really love Lounge. It's a great way for them to manage their inventory in a way that protects their brand equity. Let's look a bit deeper into the specific engagement model that we have with Zalando Lounge. So as explained, we launch these campaigns at 7:00 in the morning. And what we clearly see here on the slide, the peak of engagement is between 7 and 8 a.m. in the morning. And our customers are really keen to not miss out on the new offer as soon as they get out of their bed. What's the easiest way of checking out the new offer? Well, it's our distinct Lounge app that customers can download and use to access our newest offer on a specific day. And for our most loyal customers in Lounge, the app becomes their starting point for fashion in the morning. What we see is that this service, the distinct proposition that Lounge is, it is extra popular in price-sensitive markets. For instance, in Poland, which is our second biggest market already today at Zalando Lounge. What we can say is the combination of value-add for our partners and the joyful fashion discovery for our customers turns into a great business, and that business has contributed EUR 1 billion of GMV last year to our platform. Mind you, Lounge is not just a shopping club. It's actually one of these propositions that Jim and Anne have been talking about, and it's an exciting proposition for our most loyal Fashion Store customers. And combined, we can create a flywheel of engagement. What we do for the fashion -- our customers is we serve their need for exciting fashion deals with daily touch points. And what we see is if we manage to get customers excited about Lounge, we get a level of engagement that is far deeper than what any traditional measure could achieve. We actually have a proof point here on the slide. So as you see customers who ordered on both Fashion Store and Lounge last year, placed an average 12.3 orders. That represents a very significant uplift compared to the 4.8 orders per active customer on average in our platform. Naturally, this improves value contribution, but more importantly, it deepens the relationship and it minimizes churn. The good news here is Lounge is not the only distinct proposition that allows us to do this, and that helps us deepen the relationship with our customer. Let's talk about Zalando Plus. What is Zalando Plus? Well, it's our subscription model that gives customers the best service and the best experience we have to offer in exchange for an annual fee. Internally at Zalando, we tend to refer to this as they get the Plus treatment. And so far, the main benefit has been prioritized shipping, which naturally has been a highly appreciated benefit during the pandemic last year. If you wonder how that materializes, last year, Plus members, 3/4 of our Plus customers received their parcel within 2 days of placing the order, which compares to only 1/3 of non-Plus customers receiving their parcel. It's, therefore, no surprise that we see a significant uplift in customer loyalty. And as you can see here, we are happy to report a double-digit increase of 10 points in NPS for these customers. It's clearly a sign of their love for our service and experience. And that actually also shows financially. So Plus customers, they visit us twice as often, and they spend 3x as much as a non-Plus customer. So it really deepens the relationship with our most valued customers. You might wonder how significant is Plus already today. Well, we have 0.5 million paying members in Germany. Last year, we have seen them contribute 9% on of GMV in Fashion Store in Germany, which is twice the share compared to 2019. That gives us the confidence to expand benefits and scale it internationally this year. So what we're going to do is, as you can see here on the slide, we're going to launch an assortment benefit that lets our Plus customers shop Zalando's hottest assortment before anyone else. And we are going to bring that service also to other markets, starting with Netherlands and France and a third market later this year. And there's even more good news about Plus. We are actually turning Plus into a cross proposition experience by introducing it on Lounge, also with an assortment-related benefit. And the thing here is it's not just about creating a better experience for our Plus customers on Lounge, it's actually about turning Plus into a marketing flywheel that lets customers discover other propositions. So imagine, once a customer is on Plus, we have an amazing opportunity to highlight the benefits she has on other propositions. Let's sum it up here. We constantly innovate and improve our core experience, as we have heard from Anne before. And we have distinct propositions. We have Pre-Owned, we have Lounge, Plus, Beauty and Designer, and they create value for our customers and they complement each other. If we get our customers to engage across multiple propositions, there is significant upside in terms of engagement, loyalty and ultimately, customer lifetime value. So in a nutshell, Zalando is the starting point for fashion for our customers. Now before Jim closes our presentation and opens up to your questions. Let's see how it all comes together. [Presentation]

As we've said, our ambition is to be the starting point for fashion for our customers, to be their #1 choice whenever they consider or purchase fashion. How are we going to get there? Two ways: first, continue to improve the core experience we offer today; and two, introduce our customers to new elevated propositions that drive deeper engagement and longer-term loyalty. We launched Pre-Owned last year. This was much more successful than we had predicted, and we're rapidly scaling Pre-Owned. We also have had continuous effort into Beauty and Designer, building out our brands, our portfolio of assortment. And we're also now focusing on how to elevate those customer experiences and solve for distinct customer needs in those areas, as Anne mentioned. Further, as Martin mentioned, we feel like we have a formula with Lounge that drives daily engagement, something that we can build upon and extend further. And Plus really brings it all together. Plus is an area where we elevate each of our different customer propositions and offer our customers more in exchange for a subscription. We're really just getting started with most of these, as we're illustrating in the chart. We can grow our business by expanding internationally, acquiring net new customers in existing territories, all through our core customer proposition, but we can also deepen those customer relationships by having these new elevated propositions, driving awareness and adoption of these new areas. We feel like we're well on track to exceed our ambitions for 2025 and that we have a lot of room to grow, both with existing and new customers. Thank you very much.

Welcome back here in Berlin, live again with our 3 presenter, Jim and Martin. And we directly can jump into Q&A. Let me start with the first question. It's about size advice, Jim. This question comes from [ Marco Baresi ]. How do you reduce the impact of high return rates with smart fit advisers?

Thank you. As you know, we acquired Fision last year. This was based on the strength of the team's computer vision algorithms that allow us to build on 1/2 of the equation for reducing size-related returns. So reducing size-related returns really involves both article or product intelligence, as well as customer intelligence. And we're excited about the potential impact for computer vision and what improved smartphone cameras can do in terms of the customer intelligence dimension. And we think this will help us much more quickly get to know the customer's proper sizing and make those size advice recommendations much faster. Today, customers are already helping us get that customer intelligence through telling us about articles that fit well from their wardrobe. But this will just really help us speed this along.

Thanks, Jim. There's a question coming on brand followership, Anne. And the question is coming now, I'm still looking for it. On -- yes, from Rocco Strauss from Arete Research. With people following brands coming to Zalando 2 to 3x more often, do they tend to buy more than 18 brands on average? And do the higher site visits translate into higher GMV for those followers?

Yes. So indeed, customers who come visit Zalando more often, hence, open the app more often get to see more products, explore brands more regularly, spend more time with us and hence, also purchase more over time. So indeed, we see this positive effect.

Cool. Thanks. Then there's a question on Zalando Plus for Martin, and it's about our -- on clarification on the Plus memberships. And Plus, we mentioned 500,000 in Germany, standing for 9% of the GMV. So is Plus the 9% of total GMV? Or is it just the German market figure?

Yes. Thank you. Happy to clarify. So right now, we offer Plus only in Germany, and hence, the 500,000 paying customers or Plus members are in Germany. And accordingly, the 9% of GMV is the contribution to the Fashion Store GMV in Germany. And as we mentioned, we have plans to expand internationally, go into additional territories. So we expect over the course of this year to change the GMV contribution from Plus customers substantially.

Thanks. As just a follow-up on Plus, so we stick with you, Martin. Does the incremental GMV generated from the Plus customers more than outweigh the more expensive fulfillment cost? And do you need to further improve the fulfillment proposition to make next-day standard? You mentioned 3 or 4 customers getting delivering within 2 days. Question is coming from David Holmes, Bank of America.

Yes. Thank you. Good question. Maybe to touch on the last point first. So naturally, last year, it was all about reliability and resilience of our fulfillment network, as Jim explained, and we are proud to report here that especially our Plus customers had the benefit of a consistent and reliable fulfillment experience. So far, as explained, Plus has a convenience benefit at its core and we're continuously reviewing that. While we also, as explained, start to add additional benefits around assortment this year, but we are doing continuous research there to understand what do fashion shoppers really want and how can we make their experience on Zalando, on the platform, even better. And we see the investment, speaking of the cost that are mentioned here in the question, that expense, we see that as an investment into the customer relationship. It's our initial contribution to create a deeper customer relationship. And we see that this pays off, as we have seen last year, with 3x as high GMV contribution.

Thanks, Martin. There's next question on Beauty. Anne, I think that goes for you. And like, what proportion of Beauty purchases are combined with other categories? Was asked by Olivia Townsend from UBS.

Yes. So we do see an overlap of beauty and fashion customers. So 40% of all Beauty purchases also contain a fashion item, which really provides evidence that there's this overlap and complementary need that we're answering for our customers.

Then there's another question from Charlie Muir-Sands, Exane BNP. It goes to Martin again on -- this time it's on Lounge. How much of the Zalando Lounge supply comes from Zalando Fashion Store surplus inventory versus brand partner campaigns?

Sure. The good thing is, here, we do both. So we consume stocks that are provided internally via the platform. So coming from the Fashion Store, from the wholesale program that we have in Fashion Store, but also from partners. And obviously, over the course of the season, this varies. So towards the end of the season, typically, we have a relatively higher share of stock coming internally. I think what's really exciting about the platform opportunity for us is we have services for merchants such as ZFS, for instance, where we have just started to build an offer where these ZFS partners can also manage their inventory using Lounge campaigns. So it varies, and we're happy to report that we tap into both supply pools.

Thanks, Martin. There's another question for Anne on size advice. This time, Rocco Strauss from Arete again. Did size advice meaningfully affect lower returns in 2020, beside from the product mix? So this is -- is this something offsetting the normalization of return rates in 2021 to a certain extent?

Yes. So what Jim mentioned earlier is the continuous positive development we are seeing by providing size advice for our customers with a wide range and availability, really driving down size-related returns. When it comes to offsetting the normalization of return rights, no, because this is actually really driven by the category mix. So again, by combining the size advice also with brand preferences, the advice gets better and better and has this positive impact on lowering return rates overall.

Thanks, Anne. There's a question on Pre-Owned. I think I'll take it to Jim. Jim, how has the Pre-Owned business progressed so far?

Yes. Thank you. It's progressed surprisingly well. We started out in October. And from October to February, we've already almost tripled the amount of articles available online. We definitely see a situation where demand outstrips supply in terms of where we are right now. We see some amazing stats. For example, about 25% of the articles we list are sold within 2 days. So we're very focused on continuing to scale this. And we think that customers really love the convenience and the trust factor and how we've approached Pre-Owned on the Fashion Store.

Well, thanks. Thanks on that one. There's also a follow-up just on Pre-Owned that's like, how do you assess the value of the items the customers would like to trade in?

So if I understand the question, this is about the trade-in credits that we provide. So we do a combination of things there to assess the value. For one thing, we look at just the -- we basically look at the brands and the historical sales price in the secondhand market for these articles. And there are different, essentially, pricing curves for different brands, different category types and so forth. So certain articles hold up value much more than other articles. If we feel an article is not something that we could offer a good price to the customer in return for that article, then we won't offer to buy the article. So we also pay attention to how much value we're creating for the customer. In addition, though, I would say the way we look at it as a company is we see that this expenditure on these trade-in credits is also an alternative form of marketing spend for us, where we can engage with our customers and channels outside of paid marketing channels. So for us, we're excited to provide that service to the customer. We're excited to provide them some value, and we see additional reasons to invest in the value of the articles themselves.

Well, thanks. Thanks, Jim. I think we have a quick one for Martin on from Aneesha, coming from Bernstein. How do brand partners view Lounge versus their own off-price business?

Well, for them, it's their access to the -- to online Offprice as a category -- as a segment, I should say. So what we actually see is that brands collaborate. Especially last year, we saw a strong inbound interest from brands to collaborate with us, specifically to manage the inventory as they had challenges to engage with customers off-line. And from a platform perspective, our idea is, ultimately, we want to create a portfolio of services that we can provide to any brand that is out there and that is looking to collaborate with us. And Offprice as an opportunity is just one of the many services we have in that portfolio.

Thanks, Martin. Thanks, Anne. Thanks, Jim. That concludes the session on our customers. And please stay tuned for the next -- the deep dive on partners, which will start shortly. [Presentation]

Back again. And after hearing how we're going to treat our customers and what a great experience we are building for our customers, we also want to dive deeper now into like, what we're going to do for our partners. We are building a platform that provides a scalable solution for the brands, retailers and store. We have currently more than 4,000 brands on our platform offering around 900,000 SKUs, which is an increase of roughly 70% compared to 2 years ago. Let's take now a look on how we build a platform that is relevant for all of our partners. Video on.

Yes, welcome, everybody, to our partner deep dive. I'm excited to host the session for 2 reasons. Number one, I always get excited when we talk about our platform approach and how it's supposed to create this virtuous circle between customers and partners. But it's even more exciting if we can actually show how it actually is working and is accelerating. And the second reason, this time, we dedicate most of the time looking at it from a partner perspective. And so I brought some voices from our partners. I'm delighted to have [ Christoph ] from TB International here for Q&A. We have some partners sharing the view per video. And it's also great to have Diana here, who is collaborating a lot with our partners as she is responsible for our Zalando Marketing Services. So I think it's really great to take the partner perspective as we are really proud of the relationships we've built. We think they're really inspiring, and they have brought us quite far. So let's start with a really short summary of why our platform approach is so important for our ultimate goal to be the starting point for fashion. We talk a lot about endless choice. And having the endless choice in fashion is the winning argument for all customers. An endless choice means for me having all brands almost endless choice of styles and a great availability. And our platform model enables us to make really big leaps forward along all these dimensions. We increased our assortment from 2,000 to 4,000 brands within the past 2 years. We increased the styles we offer. And here, the ultimate goal is that you can say, if it's not on Zalando, it doesn't exist. And we also increased the availability for our partners tremendously, be it from brands, retailers and stores that connect additional inventory. EUR 690 million GMV, just coming from backfilling existing styles to our partners. And it's very clear to me that we cannot get all those access on our own. If we buy in wholesale and manage it ourselves, that limits us in terms of management attention, inventory risk and also processes. Instead, what we do is we build out capabilities and propositions that are highly attractive for partners and incentivize them to bring the best what they can offer to the Zalando customers. And of course, partners get something in return that makes the partnership a win-win and really builds trusted relationships. So first of all, we give partners the key to a huge and very relevant audience. I mean 39 million active customers, very interested ones, and the customer range is growing more and more. And all of them are there for fashion and discovering new things. Second, partners seek complementary capabilities. Being successful digitally requires capabilities around tech, data, logistics, marketing, et cetera. And so partners can tap into all of our investments and leverage our capabilities to complement them. So it's really a kit of tools and business models. Partners can integrate to focus on their own core strength and their own strategy. And thirdly, partners can easily use our tooling to improve their offer to their customers. I will provide tools to steer performance, also tools that generate unique insights and help partners getting better and better for their customers. And finally, our business models and service mixes are highly flexible. And partners can leverage our offers according to their own strategies and capabilities. Let's say, the Nordic brands. One brand wants to win over a large female audience across Europe. They can choose a high mix of partner program to drive their offer. They can even connect stores. They can leverage our logistics capabilities to ship internationally. They can decide to invest in ZMS to build out their brand and tell all their stories. So -- and that is just like a very rough view of what we do, and it goes a lot deeper. And we developed like what we offer to partners very much in collaboration with them. We appreciate very highly like the strong relationship we have built up with partners and believe in the power of bringing different capabilities together. So I think we can truly boost each other and are quite proud of what we've built jointly. So now it's really time for me to hand over the mic to our partners and let them tell their view. And I can tell you, we have such a diverse set of partners, which is very inspiring. But what they all have in common is that they want and need to be successful online. There are 3 major challenges for partners to do that. Number one is selling direct-to-consumer, so you have to make your product available online; and number two, driving internationalization, which requires capabilities; and number three, it's deepening the relationship to your very specific audience. But before we dive into these challenges, let's turn it over to some of our partners that have gained the experience of how to leverage our platform. [Presentation]

I have to say it's very motivating for us to see our partners speaking about our platform and also to see how all the ideas we have become reality and how those relationships really boost each other on both sides. And with that, I would love to hand over to Diana, who can walk us through the key challenges and tell us how partners actually overcome them.

Thank you, David. Very excited, indeed, to see those testimonials from our partners. So as David said before, Zalando platform helps our partners overcome their main business challenges. In the next section, I will walk you through how we support them and illustrate it with a couple of examples. Let me start with the challenge number one, with enabling them to actually sell online, enabling direct-to-consumer or actually, in most cases, as well, accelerate their online business. As consumers shift towards online more and more, it becomes increasingly important and, also at the same time, expensive for our partners to acquire and retain new customers in an owned direct-to-consumer model. The Zalando platform business models enable direct-to-consumer at scale. And it actually offers our partners 4 main advantages. The first one is that they get access to the #1 fashion destination in Europe with 1.5x more daily users than competition. The second is that those customers they get access to, they actually buy multibrand. Actually, more than 50% of the orders already contain more than one brand. And also those customers like to have choice, and they actually buy around about 18 different brands on average per year. These customers also have Zalando at their fingerprints with a usage of the app of more than 57%. So how does the platform business model look like. We offer 2 major direct-to-consumer business models to our partners, and they can complement their own channel mix, it's partner program and connected retail. Partner program is designed to support brands and large multi-brand retailers, who, in most cases, have their own e-commerce solutions and operations and whereas Zalando also can complement with Zalando Fulfillment Solutions. And connected retail. Connected retail is tailored for the challenges of brick-and-mortar stores. Independent, franchise brands, and both of our models help our partners to increase their online footprint, ultimately give more choice also to customers. Let me walk you through the great example of Wöhrl, traditional German retailers with 29 stores in Germany that accelerated its business through Zalando platform and connected retail. You've heard it in the video from its enthusiastic CEO. And actually, the picture over there is the store Nuremberg that I really like and know quite well. So since Wöhrl started and enabled their business through the Zalando platform via connected retail, they tremendously did boost their top line. They have shipped more than 4,000 parcels to customers all over Germany. And in Q1 2021, they already reached a year-over-year growth of almost 90%. This is quite impressive. Additionally to this, they are also partnering with us very closely to develop the filter interfaces of a use case of retailers that we would offer in the future. And with that, Wöhrl has joined a network of more than 3,400 connected stores to date. So now our platform -- our partners are live on the platform through partner program or connected retail. So naturally comes the next challenge, or maybe I shall say the next opportunity for them, which is to expand and internationalize their footprint across Europe. Opening up new countries comes at times with expensive operation, complicated processes, long lead times for our partners. Zalando offers a turnkey solution for alleviating these problems and really allow them to sell in more countries and capture this opportunity. Our Zalando Fulfillment Solution allow exactly this, an easy plug-and-play solution for our partners and brands to access more countries. The main benefits are: fast and easy internationalization in just one contract. So no more complicated paperwork for them; major savings in bundling multi-brand orders in one parcel, so you actually share the cost of shipping on more shoulders; and last but not least, a seamless customer experience. One fast delivery and convenience for return for our customers. To best illustrate the benefits of ZFS, I'd like to highlight the Mango case, a vertically integrated fashion brand from Spain with having already a strong footprint across Europe, who was onboarded into partner program in 2018 with initially their own operations. Mango actually did overcome the main challenges of internationalization since they had a strong footprint across Europe. However, they still face 2 major challenges with their own operations. One was unfavorable drop shipment fulfillment costs, and also difficulties to reach the standards of the Zalando convenience proposition. ZFS allowed Mango to sustain a more profitable growth in improving efficiencies and convenience, which led to improving customer satisfaction. And I think, David, you have good memories about that case?

Yes. I really think Mango is a phenomenal case. I remember very well that 2 years ago at the CMD, we presented the case and we gave you the outlook for 2019 back then. And around the same time, we sat down together with [ Roger ], you saw on the video. And we discussed how would it look like if we really went all-in with all assortment across all price points and also on the same markets. And I think that's exactly what we did afterwards. And where you can see in the graph how they leveraged actually ZFS to do so. And since then, we actually triple the business with them, which I think is very impressive.

Absolutely. Great, great case. So beyond Mango, actually, we have more than half of our partners already in partner program using ZFS certain extent to fulfill their orders. In fact, 51% of partner program items today are shipped via Zalando Fulfillment Solutions. And this ranges from different profiles of partners from entry price level type of rents like Bershka, for instance, but also the brands with higher, more expensive price points like, for instance, the French brand The Kooples. Looking at the map, you can see in the darker orange, the countries that are, at the time, most favorite for our partners to internationalize. Now that we help our partners to sell online with partner program or connected retail, we allow them to capture the opportunity to internationalize their business and conquer new markets. Now comes the last challenge, which is for them to deepen the customer relationship. And for this, our Zalando Marketing Services help them to actually overcome that challenge. Zalando Marketing Services enables our partners to connect their brand to 39 million customers, the largest fashion audience in Europe. We consult partners on their marketing strategy and offer the wide range of marketing services. Let me start with insights. If there is one lesson that marketeers have learned from the COVID situation is that listening to data and understanding customer is key and the starting point for their marketing and business strategies. Zalando Marketing Services enables them to exactly do that, providing them with insights from purchase behavior, demographics, up to understand how consumers would react to a new launch of certain products. Based on data and insight, we offer the possibility to create inspiring content and stories. For our partners to drive business growth and secure product visibility in the catalog, we also offer performance-driven campaign solution like sponsored ads. We also allow our partners to go for a wider brand marketing type of campaigns, further engaging with the customer on Zalando and beyond Zalando. Now let me show you the great example of the North Face. You've heard it from Amanda. The North Face is one of our partner for a very long time. The North Face is a well-known performance outdoor brand from the U.S.-based VF Group. And it's quite interesting in the sense that it showcase how a partner can leverage the different services for solving their marketing challenges. So the North Face wanted to convey a completely new brand story to an entirely new brand audience. They have the challenge to acquire new customer, but also deepen that relationship with them. In fact, they wanted to attract this younger female customer where they have lower brand consideration for purchase. And additionally, in times of COVID, they also had the challenge to produce content. We'll help them exactly to do that. First, we started to help them understand who is the consumer behind, what expectation does the young female customer have and really to help them sharpen their positioning. Based on these insights, we also ideated and produced a marketing campaign tailored for that specific audience. And finally, we reach the audience through a 360 marketing activation along the consumer journey. So with this, I'd like to hand over back to David for closing the session.

Yes. Thanks, Diana, for these great examples. And I think they show very well how partners leverage our platform to tackle all those challenges of going direct-to-consumer. And for each partner, we actually see great progress. The more the partners use our services, the more they can go in with all their assortment. So it's a wider range of assortment, also, the more markets go live and the more inspirational content we have for customers to engage with. So we see this traction with all the partners that come to the platform and establish themselves. And then there are so many more partners that are coming online and that are on-boarding and go through -- also go through the adoption of these services. So we're quite excited to see this kind of acceleration and very much looking forward for the years to come. We very strongly believe in building these strong complementary partnerships, where both sides really want to invest as we jointly create this very best place for fashion online. And with that, we can close the session and switch to Q&A.

Welcome back. Here live are David and Diana with me in this Q&A section. We are also joined by one of the partners you have seen earlier in the video. TB International represented by Christoph Dorsch today. Hello, Christoph, and a warm welcome here from Berlin into the middle of Germany. Why don't you start off and tell you first about your company and how you leverage the Zalando platform. And of course, for the remainder of the time, you can also ask questions directly to Christoph afterwards. So Christoph, the word over to you.

Thanks for having me. Here, as mentioned, I'm Christoph Dorsch, Sales Director of TB International. And we are a B2B wholesaler, which was founded in 2005, and we, at the moment, carry around 10 different brands. And we are a so-called never-out-of-stock supplier. So all the products can be ordered at any time from us and are being capitalized as long as they sell well. And we started doing business with Zalando probably in 2012, 2013, and at this time, we are purely on the wholesale side. But once we heard about the partner program, which was in 2014, we decided to give it a try. And at that time, having in mind the possibility to make additional sales to show the end consumer a wider range of products simply by putting up SKUs which have not been bought by the Zalando buyers. And it became a success, quite early, to be honest, just being able to test additional products, launch products in between seasons or, yes, simply having more products online. And we were always using this hybrid model consisting of wholesale on the one part and partner program on the other hand, and it complemented perfectly for us. An easy example would be having a top seller, which was being bought by Zalando team in the wholesale department, and we were just adding extra colors to Partner Program. And due to the success, we decided around 2 years ago, jointly with Zalando, to make a switch to be a 100% partner. That means we are using Partner Program and Zalando Fulfillment Solution exclusively basically. So we are not having a wholesale business with Zalando anymore. And due to this new hybrid model, it became an instant success. Actually, we have tripled our turnover on Zalando the last year. And this was mainly due to Zalando Fulfillment Solutions because we were now able to have this wide range of products which we only could show on partner before. And now, we can show it to all the different countries because Zalando Fulfillment Solutions offers us to ship to more countries Europe-wide. And also with the addition of Zalando Marketing Services, we're able to steer the product or reallocate the money that we spend there to different products. And that's really great for us because we can highlight the product that we want to highlight at whatever kind of season we're having now.

Thanks, Christoph, for the introduction, and we can directly jump into Q&A. I think the first question goes to David. Can you achieve the goal of being the starting point of fashion and the EUR 30 billion in GMV, even without getting H&M and Zara core brand to your platform?

Okay. We never miss that question. I actually -- I even get that question at home from my daughter frequently. So I think one thing is clear. We want to be a starting point for fashion. And yes, in the long run, we would love to host all brands that are relevant, and of course, H&M and Zara are highly relevant to customers. So I think that, of course, we'd like to get there at some point. I can also say, I think we -- also without that, we can get quite far. I mean, I think we have established like a pretty big assortment with the 4,000 brands and like around 900,000 styles. And we can offer like a lot of things that are very, very relevant for customers and, of course, continue working on that. And then when it comes to those big partnerships. I think one thing for us is very important to really build like trusted, long-lasting relationships. And I think with those -- with Inditex and with H&M, I think we have built up a pretty strong business. We're working on several brands. With the Inditex brands, it's quite a few brands we work with. H&M as well, like we just launched ARKET, for example. And I think that collaboration is going very successfully. And even beyond that, we even work on other topics. For example, with H&M, we discussed a lot about joint ambition levels around sustainability or exchanged of thoughts on diversity and inclusion. And I think that, for us, it's more really driving strong partnerships. And I think over time, I think we can more and more collaboratively join and rather think about like how do we add together those different capabilities we have.

Yes. Then just a follow-up on the EUR 30 billion target we gave out this morning. Does this also include newer categories such as the beauty and home or just fashion?

So in the EUR 30 billion, yes, this also includes like expanding to different categories. And I think the nice thing is like all categories they all contribute nicely to the growth. I think we don't see for any category like any ceiling. I mean, we're growing very strong on demand side. We're going super strong on like be it sports or kids or premium luxury, beauty, of course, coming from a lower base, but triple-digit growth. So we see all of them contributing very well to that target.

Thanks, David. There's a question on ZMS, Diana. Could you share your expectation for ZMS in terms of what share of campaign money will be spent on either platform, video, sponsored listing ads, versus off-platform ads, Instagram or Pinterest, et cetera?

Thank you for the question. That's a very precise question. Let me answer in a nutshell. So overall, we see roughly 50% coming more from the performance-driven type of products, and another 50% that will be coming more from the branding, so engagement with our consumers.

And then a quick follow-up. How do you -- how do we price the ZMS service for the services you just mentioned?

So from a pricing perspective, we follow industry standards. So depending, as said, on the objective of the campaign, we may have different ways to price. But overall, we will follow cost per click, cost per view. And also our performance campaigns will be targeted with a return on advertising spend.

I think there's another question on our split between wholesale and partner program and a question on like the split of volume. And I think also the second question goes down to Christoph on like how do economics compare for brands across both channels? So perhaps David starts off and then hands over to Christoph here.

So the question is how the shares exactly is developing? Yes. So I mean, the long-term expectation is that we will have around 50% coming from Partner Program and Connected Retail. I think it's also important to know that this is not like a strict target. Yes, we have, but it's more like an expectation where we think will come out, because it's not that we dictate this or like we really tell brands, "Okay, that's the share you have to do." It's rather like jointly discussing with the brands, how do we actually get to the very best customer offer. And we don't want to limit any partner. And then when it comes to like how do those different models, how do they work out for the partner. I mean, from our end, now I can say, again, like we care most about like really creating the customer benefit and value. Then, of course, if you look about -- look at the economics, it's more of like an overall picture because we look at, of course, how they also invest into like those different services, be it ZFS or ZMS. And it's more of like -- when we talk about customer lifetime value, it's a similar principle like we say like, okay, how does it actually work like with the partners? And maybe Christoph, I mean, you experienced both wholesale and partner program. Maybe you have a comment on how that works out from your perspective.

Well, in the end, you want to be profitable, and this is something we could definitely achieve both ways. And this is at the very beginning, what we did our calculations on saying, okay, what kind of different parameters we now have to look at, and this is something we had to learn from the very beginning because being a B2B wholesaler, we do have to look at different metrics now supplying end consumer through the partner program, for example, and having to deal with things like partner share, which were unknown for us. But once you figure it out, you can be very profitable on the platform. And this is what makes it actually quite easy for us to use the platform, whether it being wholesale what we did before, or now being a partner.

Thanks. I think we still have room for one question. That goes to David again on Connected Retail with regard to ZFS. Do we plan to make ZFS available to connected retail partner as well, and if so, when could that become reality?

It's an interesting question because I do think we can add a lot of capabilities when it comes to logistics. A, overall, I think that's one of those big assets and one of those big advantages that we can invest so much into this network and actually have partners leverage that. On the Partner Program, also, as Christoph explained, for example, I think that also proves very helpful when it comes to stores. I mean, we started offering return solutions or shipment solutions then. That is actually easy to get out and also return packages. And I think we can also think that further and further to have them actually tap into like what we can offer in terms of logistics and also allow them, therefore, to have a broader reach, maybe even go international and so on.

Super. Thanks, David. Thanks, Diana. And special thank you to Christoph for answering the questions. We will continue with our next session at 2 p.m. CET. We'll conclude today's CMD with our financial section and with our CFO, David Schröder. Until then, please stay tuned, and be back in around 10 minutes. [Break]

Welcome back to our last session of today's Capital Markets Day. To keep your awareness high, again, we decided to host our financial section at the end of that CMD. But before we start, let me shortly remind you that we also initiated a small poll on our platform and would be appreciated if you could chip in there and make some marks. That will also help us going forward. With that now said, I will now hand over to David, who will explain you how our strategic plan will unfold in our financial. And with that one, I move on to David. The floors is yours.

Welcome to the last session of our Capital Markets Day 2021. In our keynote today, we shared again our vision to be the starting point for fashion. And we also explained to you that the transition to a truly sustainable platform business model will act as its key enabler. In the customer and partner sessions that followed, we provided you with more insights on our key strategic initiatives to improve and innovate our customer propositions and our partner services. And now, I'm going to explain to you how our strategic plans and key initiatives will drive financial value creation going forward. But before we talk about the future, let's take a moment to briefly reflect and recap the targets that we set at the Capital Markets Day 2019 and the achievements that we have delivered since then. Two years ago, we shared mainly 3 things with you. First, we talked about the immense market opportunity. The European fashion market was forecasted to grow to EUR 450 billion in size, and the secular demand shift from off-line to online was supposed to increase online penetration to more than 25% from just 15% in 2018. Secondly, we reiterated our long-term ambition to serve more than 5% of the European fashion market long term, an ambition that we had first communicated at our Capital Markets Day 2017. And last, we shared our midterm growth ambition to reach EUR 20 billion in GMV by 2023, 2024, signaling that we are still at the very beginning of our journey and that we'll continue to stay focused on driving strong and profitable growth. As you already heard in our earnings call this morning, we've consistently delivered on our mid-term targets since. Back then, we expected 20% to 25% GMV growth. And we delivered close to 24% growth in 2019 and more than 30% growth in 2020. We also expected flat margin development, driven by the ongoing platform transition and continued growth investments. And we consistently delivered around the upper end of this range, even when adjusted for the temporary return rate benefits that we have seen last year. And lastly, we expected negative cash flow driven by continued growth investments in logistics and technology, and we were actually able to deliver positive free cash flow throughout the period. All in all, we are very happy with this extraordinary performance of pre and post-COVID. Based on our starting point vision, our platform strategy and our strong track record so far, we approach the coming years with even more conviction. Looking ahead, we are convinced that we can further accelerate our strategy and continue to deliver strong and profitable growth. We previously communicated to achieve EUR 20 billion GMV by 2023, 2024, and we now aim to triple our business again to more than EUR 30 billion by 2025. This means we extend the time frame of our midterm targets by just 1 year, but we add more than EUR 10 billion of additional GMV. This also implies a CAGR of 20% to 25%, meaning that we would continue to outgrow the European online fashion market by a factor of 2 to 3. By 2025, this would get us to a market share of close to 7%, making us the biggest fashion player in Europe, both off-line and online. Our upgraded GMV ambition also translates into a higher revenue target, and we now aim for EUR 20 billion in revenue by 2025, implying a 20% CAGR for the 5-year period. This continued strong growth will be driven by focusing on 3 key strategic priorities: first, growing our active customer base by increasing the penetration in existing markets and expanding our footprint to more countries in Europe; second, deepening customer relationships by further improving our core experience by elevating distinct propositions and by working towards becoming truly sustainable for people and planet; and third, driving the platform transition by enabling the direct-to-consumer business of our partners by supporting them to internationalize and by providing them with the right tools to engage with customers across Europe. As a result of these efforts, Zalando will become even more relevant for a broader audience of customers, but we also expect to forge even stronger partnerships with fashion brands, retailers and stores. We've seen an increasing adoption of Partner Program and a tremendous acceleration of the Connected Retail program in 2020. But more importantly, we see an immense potential going forward, and therefore, we now aim at 50% partner share by 2025, 10 percentage points more than previously targeted for 2023, 2024. To enable this ambitious growth trajectory, we'll continue to leverage and invest into the core infrastructure and the key capabilities that power our platform. Let's start with our unique access to fashion supply. Already today, we are able to connect to all relevant inventory sources across the whole fashion industry. We can source directly from brands with our wholesale model. We can tap into the brand stock sitting in their regional warehouses with the Partner Program, and we can also leverage off-line fashion inventory via our Connected Retail program. 2020 has shown us how valuable it can be to rely on multiple ways to access supply, particularly in times of disruption, and therefore, we will continue to further strengthen and leverage this unique capability going forward to offer endless choice to consumers and to scale our business in a more flexible and efficient manner. But great products alone won't do the trick. We'll also need to be able to deliver these products to customers, and that's where our European logistics network comes into play. It's the key enabler of our superior convenience experience that we offer to customers. Over the past decade, we have invested more than EUR 1 billion to build the leading fulfillment infrastructure for fashion e-commerce in Europe. We did that having 2 goals in mind. First, we wanted to offer better convenience for our customers; and second, we wanted to enable the continued fast growth of our business. Today, we operate 10 different sites across 5 countries in Europe. And this year, we'll add another 2 sites in Madrid and in Rotterdam to get closer to our customers in Spain and Benelux and to further increase our fulfillment capacity to EUR 14 billion worth of GMV. However, enabling our upgraded midterm growth ambition will require us to build even more warehouse capacity. Our midterm growth ambition is to reach more than EUR 30 billion GMV by 2025. We expect that 75% of that volume will be fulfilled by Zalando, and roughly 25% of that volume will be drop shipped by partners. And therefore, we plan to invest another EUR 1 billion of CapEx to add 7 more warehouses by 2025. Next to the physical infrastructure that powers our platform, our company's success equally rests on our digital infrastructure, i.e., our technology and data platform. As already mentioned in our keynote, we've made significant investments in building a scalable, proprietary, cloud-based technology platform that really covers the whole value chain of fashion commerce for us and our partners. This platform also enables us to drive data-based value creation. For example, by offering superior size and fit advice to our customers or very targeted marketing services for our partners. Another key yet often overlooked element of this technology platform is our payments platform. Payments has been a key driver of Zalando's customer satisfaction growth and profitability since the very beginning. When we combined free delivery with free returns and a "buy now, pay later" solution, we created a dressing-room-at-home experience for our customers across Europe. We started building our payments platform back in 2010, and today, that platform combines a best-in-class "buy now, pay later" offering in 11 countries, which by now, enable more than 70% of all orders on our platform with a portfolio of more than 20 local payment methods. In 2020 alone, our payments platform processed EUR 20 billion for our customers and partners. Let's now talk about how all this translates into our financial trajectory over the next 5 years. Our new midterm guidance until 2025 reflects continued strong and profitable growth. For growth, we plan to continue to grow our GMV 2 to 3x faster than the European online fashion market, targeting a CAGR of 20% to 25% over the next 5 years. This is in line with the level of growth that we have consistently delivered ever since our IPO in 2014. And we even expect to significantly exceed this level of growth in 2021, targeting GMV growth of 27% to 32%, which would mean that we would grow at the same accelerated pace as in 2020, driven by an ongoing strong consumer demand especially in the first half of this year. For profitability, we made a promise to you back in 2019 when we said the platform transition and the increasing scale of our business will result in an increasing profitability over time. Today, I would like to come back to this promise and tell you that we target 3% to 6% adjusted EBIT margin for the time period 2021 to 2025. We will continue to reinvest a major portion of our platform benefits and our increasing economies of scale to drive growth. Whereas we start at 3.5% to 4.1% adjusted EBIT margin in 2021, we aim to approach the higher end of the corridor by 2025. On cash-related items, we will continue to invest into our technology and logistics infrastructure to enable growth, yet we also remain committed to scale the business in the most capital-efficient manner, and therefore, we aim for neutral free cash flow, negative net working capital and CapEx in the range of 3.5% to 4.5% of revenue. We remain laser-focused on driving the platform transition to enable the starting point vision and deliver continued strong and profitable growth. Let's now take a closer look at the immense long-term value creation opportunity we have ahead of us. Back in 2017, when we held our Capital Markets Day, we had a market share of around 1% of the European fashion market. And we told you about our aspiration to reach more than 5% market share long term. And thanks to our continued strong growth, we've already reached around 3% market share by the end of 2020. Now based on the recent step change in online consumer demand and the increasing focus of the whole industry on going digital, our platform strategy sets us up for an even bigger aspiration. Therefore, we upgrade our long-term market share ambition to more than 10% of the total European fashion market. Now you might ask how we plan to get there. To achieve this, we will continue to focus on growth, aiming to significantly outperform the European fashion online market. We will reinvest our increasing economies of scale and platform benefits to further innovate and improve our customer propositions and partner services. And quite frankly, we would be more than happy to continue to grow our business at a fast pace definitely, way beyond 10% market share. But I guess it's also true that no matter how long we can stretch it, eventually, our growth rate will approach online fashion market level growth. And when that happens, we will see our platform business model deliver double-digit margins and strong cash generation. So let's now take a look at our target margin profile in more detail. This slide may look very familiar to you since we already showed it to you back at our Capital Markets Day 2019. It creates transparency on the profitability potential of our business model in the long term. We reiterate our long-term profitability ambition today, but on a higher level of scale. In the long term, we continue to expect 10% to 13% adjusted EBIT margin in percent of revenue. Our wholesale business is expected to contribute 6% to 8% margin. Our Partner Program business will be significantly more profitable at 20% to 25% margin. Since the overall target margin is significantly higher than the margin we deliver today, let me briefly walk you through the key drivers to get there. We expect our gross margin to increase compared to 2020, driven by the ongoing platform transition and increasing economies of scale. And I'm more than happy to provide you with more details on the different platform services and their margin impact on the next slide. But before we go there, let us briefly talk about the other cost lines first. Fulfillment costs are expected to increase compared to 2020 levels, mainly driven by 2 factors. First, we expect the reversal of the positive but temporary return rate benefit that we observed in 2020. And second, we want to make continued investments into our convenience experience to enable premium next- and same-day delivery for Plus customers and to offer more sustainable logistics services and packaging solutions for all our customers. Marketing investments will decrease in relation to revenue over time as our starting point vision unfolds and the share of existing customers increases, reducing the need for costly new customer acquisition or existing customer retention measures. Admin expenses will further decrease as we continue to create overhead efficiencies and will benefit from increasing economies of scale. As promised, let me now spend a bit more time to discuss the margin impact of our platform business. The transition to a platform business model is the key lever for our long-term value creation since it drives the overall growth and scale on the consumer side, but it also creates high-margin revenue streams on the partner side. Our partner business consists of 3 distinct revenue streams. Partner Program and Connected Retail are our core partner services, enabling partners to list and sell on our platform. The pricing of these programs is based on a standardized commission table, ranging from 5% to 25%, depending on the specific category and price point. By definition, such a model has relatively high gross margins. In the long term, we aim to serve 50% of the fashion store GMV through either Partner Program or Connected Retail. ZFS is an optional service on top of Partner Program, giving partners access to our European logistics network. Pricing there follows a cost-plus approach. As a result, ZFS stand alone represents a relatively low-margin business. But let's not forget that it acts as an important enabler of the Partner Program, it drives superior wholesale order economics, and it also improves the customer experience. And therefore, we aim to fulfill 75% of all Partner Program items via ZFS in the long term. ZMS is an optional marketing service for wholesale Partner Program and Connected Retail brands. With ZMS, we mostly monetize the existing traffic on our platform through a campaign-based auction model. ZMS represents a highly profitable advertising revenue stream driven by a high gross margin as evidenced by major global e-commerce platforms. We aim to generate ZMS revenues of about 3% to 4% of group GMV long term, and we, thus, expect it to represent a significant share of overall platform profitability in the future. Please note one thing, though. The different partner services can scale in parallel, but they are typically adopted by partners in a certain sequence, as you've heard in our partner deep dive earlier. Partners typically first onboard via our Partner Program or Connected Retail. Once they see early success in these programs, they leverage ZFS to internationalize and create an even bigger growth opportunity for them. And sooner or later, these same partners will look for mechanisms to promote their products or build their brand on our platform via ZMS. Therefore, it does not come as a big surprise that we see Partner Program, Connected Retail and ZFS scaling much faster initially, while ZMS will follow as more GMV on our platform gets generated by an increasing number of partners. To conclude this presentation, let me once again summarize the key messages of this financial section for you. We have a very strong track record in executing our platform strategy and delivering strong and profitable growth. This is making us even more confident about what we can achieve as a team going forward, and we, therefore, significantly upgrade our growth ambition and now aim to reach more than EUR 30 billion worth of GMV in 2025 and to serve more than 10% of the total fashion market in the long term. We also reiterate that at scale, our platform strategy will result in an attractive financial profile, characterized by double-digit margins and strong cash generation. We are convinced that this path is the right one as it maximizes value creation for customers, partners and shareholders. Thanks for listening, and with that, I would now like to turn it over to Q&A.

Welcome back to our last Q&A session. With me is not only David but also our co-CEOs -- co-CEO, Robert. And we already have the first question, so we can directly start into the question, and I would hand the first question to Robert. And that goes about long-term EBIT margins. Are previous references still in place, namely the 6% to 8% for wholesale and to 20% to 25% for our Partner Program?

Yes. Yes, our view hasn't changed. So in the long term, we believe in the 10% to 30% margin that we can achieve at scale and the 6% to 8% for wholesale, and 20% to 25% percent for Partner Program still holds in place as David as well has outlined in the financial section.

Thanks, Robert. The next question goes directly to David on warehousing. At a GMV of EUR 30 billion, how many warehouses do you think you need? And is there a change in the hub-and-spoke strategy?

Yes. So as briefly outlined in the presentation, we think the EUR 30 billion GMV target will roughly mean that we need to process 75% of that, so EUR 23 billion roughly in our own logistics network. And in order to get that to that level of scale, we need to build another 7 warehouses, and expect an investment of roughly EUR 1 billion in CapEx to build that network. When we look at the topology of the network, so hub and spoke, our plan is actually to build more hubs in the future because we think that also, at this level of scale, that's the most efficient way to scale our footprint going forward.

Thank you. There's the next question on margins. How do you think about margins and about sacrificing them in order to drive the growth you are targeting. David?

Yes. Maybe on that question, I can try to offer a different frame to think about what we are doing. Because on the one hand, you can say we are sacrificing margin short term, but you can also see it in a way that we're actually prioritizing growth and are prioritizing to get to a certain level of scale because by doing that, we can actually create the long-term margin potential that Robert just reiterated. And I think in a platform model, it's clear that such a strong margin will only materialize once we reach a certain scale. On the consumer side, that's true because only with a certain scale we can actually then fully call ourselves the starting point for fashion for customers and be less dependent on companies like Google and Facebook, and therefore, reduce our marketing investments significantly. And on the partner side, the scale of the platform really opens up high-margin revenue streams that significantly contribute to our long-term margin trajectory. So I would argue we are not really sacrificing margin. We are rather doing everything we can to create a very attractive model long term.

The next question goes on the split between Partner Program and wholesale of -- regarding the 2025 split of 50% to 50%. Can you break down what you expect the wholesale and the Partner Program divisional margins to be at this point, please, given that you only expect a margin of around 6% by this point?

I mean, maybe the 2 data points that I can provide is that very long term, as you've heard, we target 6% to 8% margin for wholesale and 20% to 25% for the Partner Program or the partner business, and that already, today, our platform business is margin accretive on a group level. And obviously, as we move further along and we achieve a higher share of the Partner Program and Connected Retail program, a higher ZFS penetration and also more revenue in ZMS, we'll move closer and closer to the 20% to 25% target margin.

And there's -- we're sticking with profitability. Profitability in 2022 until 2025 is the 3% to 6% target, assuming the same level of returns when compared to 2019. Are you factoring in any improvements? And any details you may have are highly appreciated.

Yes. So when we look at the next few years, obviously, we do not take 2020 as a baseline because you know that we've seen temporary return rate benefits that also, to some extent, are in place until today. So also in Q1, we said this morning in the earnings call that we continue to see some return rate benefits. The further we look out, we think we are going to return to the more structural trends that have been in place before 2020. So overall, a return rate around 50% for the group. But on a positive trend, i.e. reducing return rates over time, mainly driven also by our expansion into geographies outside of DACH; and by our category mix, which now includes beauty, which typically shows lower return rate than fashion; and last but not least, also driven by our deliberate investments into size and fit, which we think actually will prove the most valuable structural driver long term and also really sets us apart compared to our competitors.

Thanks. Then there's another question on Connected Retail and our long-term targets. Why are we sticking to our initial 50% long-term targets for GMV coming from marketplace, while we also recently launched Connected Retail?

Well, I think first, it's important to note that when we set that target 2 years ago, we already had Connected Retail in place. It was just not at the level or at the stage yet where it could really scale. And we are really happy that, that happened last year, and we saw some tremendous growth in the program and also expect to see continued strong potential going forward. What we also did today is, I think, we actually increased our ambition for the partner share by 2025. Previously, we targeted 40% for 2023, 2024. Now we target 50% by 2025, actually paying tribute to that acceleration that we've recently seen and also the potential that we see in Connected Retail. And then the last point I would like to make again is that we don't really think about the 50% as an exact target, right? So we don't need to reach exactly that number for our model to work. We definitely think we have the potential to get there, but it doesn't need to stop there. Ultimately, we want to work with our brand partners in the best possible way and also in a way that works best for them. And I think we've heard in the partner session that, that can be the case equally for wholesale, but also for Partner Program and Connected Retail, depending on the partner.

Thank you. We are moving on to payments. Opportunity to use our "buy now, pay later" technology as a service to brands in the partner program. Could that be a source of monetization going forward? How do KPIs of our "buy now, pay later" technology compare to other solutions in Europe?

Yes. So in general, we are really excited about our payments platform, and I shared a bit of more color in the presentation and especially emphasized that we are already, today, processing a EUR 20 billion worth of transaction volume for customers and partners on our platform. That also means that all partners, by definition, get access to our "buy now, pay later" solution when they try to sell to customers across Europe. And I think it's actually also helping them to drive sales and satisfaction on our platform the same way it helped our own business in the past. And if we think further ahead, I think we can definitely also see potential to develop that capability further, and at some point, maybe even externalize that capability so that we can also help them power their business outside of the Zalando platform.

We are moving back to warehouses. David, another question for you. What about the margin units of economics of the next 7 sites you just mentioned? Are they either located in cheaper countries, and/or how our automation making these better return on investment than the current 10 plus 2 sites?

Well, first of all, the question sort of insinuates that we don't have a good return on investment on what we already have, which I clearly reject. So I think also these investments made a lot of sense for Zalando. They enabled our growth, they increased customer satisfaction in many countries, and I think they also actually helped us to grow efficiently when we look at our fulfillment cost development over the past decade. But if we look further ahead, I think the 7 new warehouses, they will definitely help us to even more leverage the advantages that we've seen in automation technology. Every new generation of warehouses is more advanced and allows us to go to a different level when it comes to productivity. And therefore, actually, by now, we have more flexibility in choosing our next location for a warehouse because, whereas in the past, there might have been some good reasoning to also build some more capacity in the eastern parts of Europe to benefit from lower-cost structures there. I think by now, thanks to the increasing automation, we are also very comfortable to go and build new sites in Western Europe as also evidenced by our site in Rotterdam, which will open over the course of this year and which will feature the latest generation of automation.

Thanks, David. I have one more for Robert before we conclude today's CMD, and it's about like the target model behind the EUR 30 billion figure we've released today. So how is this stacking up from the 2 main dimension? Dimension number one, geographic mix. Is there any additional expansion factor in also ex Europe? And secondly, what's the category mix behind your ambition on the EUR 30 billion?

Yes. Thank you for this question. So there is no big magic in this number, so there's no -- so we see actually this potential in existing footprint of the markets that we have launched or that we have also launched. So there's no big magic as well on U.K. So it's very much -- it's in Europe. It's the new markets that we launched. And from category mix, it's the categories that we have talked about, fashion, premium, beauty. That's it. So -- and the rest would then come on top in case we do it.

Thanks, Robert. Thanks, David. And that concludes the Q&A session for now, and I would now like to hand over back to Robert for his closing remarks on today's session.

Yes. Thank you very much. As this Capital Markets Day is now coming to an end, we would very much like to reiterate on the main kind of key takeaways and the main kind of messages that we wanted to send today. So number one, we have a very clear vision, and we have a great working strategy, and our key priority is really growth. And the second, I think you have heard us all over today, we have made tremendous progress in the past. And we've consistently delivered on our targets since the IPO, all through this year and as well the last 3 years. So our opportunity for Zalando is immense. And it makes us very confident that we can reach more than EUR 30 billion of GMV by 2025, and in the long term, even serve more than 10% of the fashion market at Zalando. And number four, in order to do so, we continue to drive investments that will propel this growth that will drive us in this growth going forward. And at scale, our financial profile is highly attractive, characterized by a double-digit margin and as well as strong cash generation. With that said, thank you very much for listening, for tuning in. Thank you very much for these great questions. Yes, and see all of you probably in future road shows coming soon. Thank you very much.