Zalando SE (ZAL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

David Schroder and Rubin Ritter will again report jointly on the past fiscal year 2020. I give the floor to Rubin Ritter.

Thank you very much. Good morning, dear shareholders. On behalf of the entire Management Board, I'd like to welcome you to this year's AGM. Thank you very much for joining us virtually. David, Robert and myself would like to talk about 3 topics in our presentation. First, the report on the financial year 2020. Then we'd like to talk about our strategy. And thirdly, the goals and ambitions we've set for the coming years. I would like to begin with the report on the financial year 2020, and I'd like to take the opportunity to look back to 2014, the year we had our IPO. In the 6 years since our IPO, we succeeded in quadrupling our GMV, the Gross Merchandise Value as it is called because it also covers all of the sales made by partners on our platform. So we have an average annual growth rate of 26%, which is above the ambitious growth goals we set ourselves at the IPO, which was 20% to 25%. So over the course of these years, we grew 2 to 3x as quickly as the European online fashion market. Along this entire path, we achieved many of the important targets in 2017. We set ourselves the goal to achieve EUR 10 billion GMV, and we succeeded in doing that. We even surpassed it in 2019. We set ourselves the goal to achieve EUR 20 billion GMV until 2023, 2024, and we're on the path of doing this, and we were able to raise that target. Along the entire path, we were always profitable despite the high investments into further growth of the company. Why is this important today? I think it shows that our success in 2020 has deeper roots than the economically beneficial conditions during the COVID pandemic because the foundation for the success was laid in the years prior to it. Secondly, we also like to talk about our ambitions for the future. And when we look back, we can be full of optimism that this team is able to achieve long-term goals, ambitious long-term goals and maybe even surpass them. For us, the year 2020 was dominated by the COVID pandemic, and we have set ourselves 3 clear priorities that define the year for us: first, to ensure the safety of our employees. Since the beginning of the pandemic, more than 90% of the office working days were moved to the home office. And in the fulfillment centers and warehouses where home office isn't an option, we were able to continue operations in a safe way. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we carried out more than 0.25 million tests. Our second priority was to safeguard the financial stability of the company. At a time when it was still unclear whether COVID would be a headwind or tailwind for Zalando, we set up the biggest savings program in the entire history of the company and proved our ability to act. And as you know, no jobs were lost and our scalability was not limited in the second half of the year as well. We also issued a convertible bond during the summer to be financially flexible and to be able to continue to invest in the long term even in times of crisis. Our third priority was to be part of the solution and to help the people and the company. You know that the entire fashion industry was hit severely by the COVID pandemic, continues to be hit in particular, brick-and-mortar stores. I think we had the right strategy and tools in place to be helpful. For example, our platform enabled us -- or our platform enabled many branches and stationary retailers to at least be partially operational. Connected retail is an important example here where we help stationary retailers to sell on our platform throughout many parts of the last year without financial compensation for this. So it was an emotional year for all of us, professionally and private. And the 3 of us would like to take the opportunity to thank all of our employees for their work, for many of them, for many of us in home office where we try to bring the professional and the private lives together, home office, home schooling. But also in the fulfillment centers, the logistics work, where one of the foundations was laid to have this successful year. Thank you very much for that. Now looking at the development, I'd like to point out 3 things. In 2020, we really became a European company. For the first time, more than 50% of our revenue was generated outside of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In Scandinavia, we clearly surpassed the important yardstick of EUR 1 billion GMV and have become the strongest platform for fashion in this geographic area. In Southern Europe, we have seen the fastest growth as far as customers are concerned. In 2020, we have become even more of a platform, our transformation into a platform has accelerated in the fourth quarter of 2020. The partner program has already been responsible for 25% of our GMV. And as you know, this is going to increase in the long run. And thirdly, we became more sustainable. In 2019, we set ambitious goals. And in 2020, we have seen the first performance here in science-based targets, goals that are in line with the Paris Climate Agreement. Our own CO2 emissions were reduced by 64% as compared to 2017. So over the course of this time, we doubled our business volume-wise, but at the same time, we halved our emissions. In addition to this, we provide 80,000 more sustainable products to our customers, which made up 16% of our revenue, which is twice as much as in the previous year. The successful implementation of our strategy and the special situation of the year 2020, also -- are also reflected in our financial figures. You know that we continue to focus on growth and the additional market shares. We were able to increase our GMV by more than 30% to EUR 10 billion, so our growth as compared to the previous years could be considerably increased. We were able to increase our reach considerably. In late 2020, we had 39 million active customers. So 1 out of 10 Europeans during 2020 purchased with us. During the same period of time, we had 5.4 billion site hits mostly on mobile devices. Our adjusted EBIT as opposed to the previous year could be increased clearly to EUR 420 million, which corresponds to a margin of 5.3%. And here, I'd also like to point out the overall profit of Zalando SE, which in the previous financial year amounted to EUR 369.6 million. Both Supervisory Board and Management Board proposed that the net retained profits of Zalando SE for the past financial year 2020 be carried forward in full to a new account. This year and in the coming years, Zalando is not planning on issuing a dividend because in the future, the focus of our strategy continues to be on growth and future expansion of our business. And the income is to be reinvested into the business because we are convinced that these investments will pay out in the long run. And I think that this is the perfect point in time to pass to David to talk about strategy.

Well, at the latest since our Capital Markets Day 2 years ago, there's one topic that is clearly in the focus of vision of being the starting point for fashion in Europe. I can give you a brief review on why this is so important for us. Starting points are characterized by being able to holistically cover an important area for clients. Starting points do not have to pay others to generate traffic on their own pages. Users come directly and start there with whatever customer concern they have in that area. Just like Spotify for music or Booking for travel or Google for online search. If they don't find something on Google, they probably don't look it up on being on Yahoo! anymore. Instead, they assume that you haven't searched well enough. And that's exactly what we want to be for fashion. If a customer can't find something on Zalando, it's best for them to assume it doesn't even exist. To realize the Starting Point vision, we rely fully on our platform approach. In doing so, we create benefits for customers, partners as well as for people and the planet overall. Our customers have access to an almost unlimited range of products, far beyond what we buy ourselves and physically have in stock. A customer should get all the brands they love, all the styles that are interesting to them. And of course, their size should be available. Our partners, on the other hand, get access to around 39 million active customers. And this number is growing all the time. We connect partners with their specific target customers across Europe. And partners can use our capabilities and infrastructure. For example, if a brand wants to be successful in Switzerland, then they can use our fulfillment center to deliver there or use our marketing expertise to build a brand in this new market. But if we really want to win over our customers and continue to retain the best talents at Zalando long term, then our strategy must be truly sustainable and have people at the planet essential components. We want to give back more to the environment and people than we take. Let me now the following elaborate on each area a little deeper. Let's start with our customers. The key figures show us that we're already very well positioned today and well on the way to becoming the starting point for fashion. Since 2018, the number of page impressions has increased by 72% to 5.4 billion views last year. We are, by far, the most visited fashion destination in Europe. Zalando is clearly an app business. 57% of our orders are placed via the app. We are the fashion app with the most downloads in Europe, and that by a wide margin. Last year, we were able to serve around 39 million Zalando customers across Europe. That's about 10% of the total population in the markets where we are active. On average, our customers order 4.8x per year. So all our numbers have increased significantly since 2018. 57% more customers who, in turn, buy from us more often and make a growing share of their fashion spend with us. This all shows that we are the starting point of fashion for more and more people. Now let's take a look at our partners and how far we've already come with our platform model. Here too, we've made significant progress over the last 2 years. Last year, we achieved around 1/4 of our GMV in the fashion store through partners. In Germany, this year was already as high as 34%. In the long term, we can achieve half of our GMV through our partner program as Zalando Fulfillment Solutions are now used for more than half of the partner program items. 2 years ago, this share was only 25%. In the long term, we want to fulfill 3/4 of our items from the partner program via around logistics centers. Zalando Marketing Services more than doubled its share of total GMV in 2020 from 0.7% to 1.5%. We expect ZMS to grow even more in the future as brands move more and more towards a direct sales model. The strong progress in all these dimensions shows that we are on a very good path towards achieving our long-term platform goals. The third area of our strategy is people and earth. And for this, I present to you today our new strategy for diversity and inclusion, do.BETTER. Where do we want to go? We want to be the starting point that welcomes all. We strive to be inclusive and promote diversity among our talents, leaders, customers and partners. We see the topic as an opportunity because we are firmly convinced that it will make us more successful in the long term. It will lead to more innovation and creativity within Zalando. It will deepen our relationship with our broad and diverse customer base, and it will allow us to engage more diverse partners and connect them with the right customers. D&I is not something that can be driven by individual teams or people. Rather, we want to lead, by example, and bring this vision to life with a voice from 138 countries. And we want to leverage our reach to our 39 million customers in Europe as well as those of the more than 3,500 brands and partners on our platform. To this end, we set ourselves goals in 4 dimensions. First, talent, we want to attract diverse talent who share our beliefs about inclusion. And we want to offer them all equal opportunities to shape their careers, be themselves and bring out the best in themselves. Secondly, leaders. We aim to make our leadership diverse and inclusive. Different perspectives make our decisions simply better. And then customers, we want every customer to feel respected, included and valued in their Zalando experience. And finally, partners, we want a very broad and diverse set of partners who share our values and work with us on inclusive experiences. Even though transformation takes time, and we're still at the beginning of this journey, our progress shows that we are moving in the right direction. With the launch of our do.BETTER strategy, we've committed to work on this for the long term. And we will transparently prepare and explain the progress we're making towards our goals every year in the D&I report. So alongside Diversity & Inclusion, sustainability is a central component of our corporate strategy because we are firmly convinced if we really want to win female customers over and if we -- and more customers in total, if we want to retain the best talent at Zalando, then we have to be part of a climate solution. Here, we already presented a clear sustainability agenda 2 years ago to use our role as a platform to introduce mechanisms and incentives that promote more sustainable decisions and thus have an impact beyond our own corporate boundaries. Overall, we want to give back more to society in the environment than we take. And this requires ambitious goals, which we are resolutely pursuing in 6 focus areas: climate change, packaging, sustainable fashion, circular economy, human rights in the supply chain and training. In March, we therefore published a separate sustainability report for the first time, which provides details on all areas. So much for the Zalando strategy. Robert will now explain how the strategy will be reflected in future growth.

Let's look at the ambition 4 years ago. In 2017, we had a market share of about 1% on the European fashion market. And for the first time, we talked of our long-term ambition. We said we wanted to achieve a 5% market share and the market share of online and fashion should be 25%. At that time, these goals sounded very ambitious but a lot has happened. We consistently focused on our growth strategy and now have a market share of 3%, and we gained a lot of insight last year. First, the COVID pandemic was an acceleration of a long-term trend towards online, and it has really blurred the boundaries between online and off-line bricks-and-mortar stores, invest in capturing online demand and delivering out of their stores. Customers connect digitally with bricks-and-mortar stores for click and collect. It's not about either offline or online. These 2 parts merge, it's about interacting. Secondly, our platform strategy has anticipated this development. Our platform is equipped so that it can both off or online play a role in the entire fashion market, the enabling brands and retailers to connect with customers on our starting point. We recalibrated our approach in the long run. More than 10% of the overall fashion market can be serviced by us. And this again sounds like a very ambitious target, but we know that we can achieve it and we know that we will achieve it. Now we want to achieve important milestones on this way and triple our business until 2025 to more than EUR 30 billion GMV. This is what we already announced at the Capital Markets Day in March, but this mostly means that we will continue to focus on growth. In order to achieve EUR 30 billion between 2020 and 2025, we want to grow 2 to 3x faster than the online fashion market overall and want to achieve a 20% to 25% growth of our CAGR until 2025. This would be equivalent to a 7% market share, making us the biggest fashion player in Europe, both offline and online. In order to achieve this target, we will continue to invest in our growth, and we want to achieve a 2-digit margin in the long run, but definitely on a higher level. Now this was the ambition we presented in March. And in early May, we showcased during the first quarter that we made the first step to bring our ambition to life. We showed clear evidence of the accelerated pace. We now have around 42 million active customers, which is a 30% increase compared to last year. Our business grew considerably. Our GMV grew by 55.6%. And I would also like to point out that we were able to accelerate our growth in Q1, even when we take into consideration the low comparables of Q1 2020. Our platform transition continued at high speed. We were again able to double our previous year figures. We achieved a strong adjusted EBIT of EUR 93.3 million in Q1, which represents a 4.2% margin. So all in all, clear proof that the accelerated speed of our starting point is moving along. As we have already said on May 6, 2020, our forecast for 2021, our guidance was upgraded. Reasons for this are continued high growth driven by a strong new customer growth and a high engagement of the existing customers. We regard this as a potential early indicator that consumer sentiment is improving. And this, in combination with the slow reopening in many European countries, leads to a stronger demand for fashion. Although there still is significant uncertainty regarding the development of the pandemic throughout 2021, we continue to assume a gradual return to the new normal in the second half of the year. Based on the stronger-than-expected start to the year, the continued strong demand momentum in Q2 and a stable outlook for the second half of the year, we, therefore, expect GMV to grow between 31% to 36% for 2021. We expect revenue growth to trail GMV growth as the consequence of an accelerated transition towards a platform business model and an increasing partner program and Connected Retail share, resulting in revenue growth of 26% to 31%; adjusted EBIT in the range of EUR 400 million to EUR 475 million, reflecting the strong business performance year-to-date; our upgraded growth expectations for the rest of the year and higher-than-expected temporary benefits from lower return rates. In addition to this, we maintained our previous net working capital and CapEx guidance and plan to invest EUR 350 million to EUR 400 million to fund our ongoing investments into our European logistics network and into our technology platform. Now let me close this presentation by reiterating on May 5, 2021, we announced that the Board on that same day decided to repurchase shares. These repurchased shares lead to our obligation to set up programs for employees and Board members of Zalando. The company has up to EUR 200 million of shares that it wants to rebuy. The repurchasing program started on May 7 and will end on July 30, 2021. The Supervisory Board gave its consent to this decision, and it is happening based on the approval of the AGM on 23rd June 2020. Until the evening of May 18, 189,000 -- roughly 189,000 shares of the company were repurchased, which amounts to a share of 0.8% of the shared capital, EUR 83.87 was the share price. Information on the repurchase can be found in our annual statement 2020 for the financial year 2020. No additional own shares were repurchased apart from that. Now this brings me to the end of my presentation, and I'd like to reiterate, with our starting point for fashion and our platform business model, we are ideally positioned to capture the immense opportunities. We want to serve even more customers. We want to build deeper relationships with them, and we want to create more growth opportunities for our partners. Thank you.

Thank you. Now this was the seventh and last AGM presentation in this composition. So we wanted to take the opportunity, Robert and myself to say thank you to Rubin. So I'm looking over to his side. Rubin, we had 11 incredible years. When in late 2009, you joined us, our structure was not yet as perfect and professional as it is today, and you really helped us to turn the start-up into a strong company to really tap into all of the potential that we saw back then. And I would say one of the real highlights on this voyage was the IPO. It was your -- you prepared the company for it. You open new gates to us to become more long term in our thinking, more strategic. And with regard to longevity, you focused on sustainability, holistic approaches that will characterize the company for the years to come. And personally, I think it's important that you didn't only strengthen the business, but you also had a strong personal impact on us. We grew together. None of us had a lot of experience prior to Zalando, and we really complemented each other perfectly. And over the years, we supported each other, and I can honestly say that we learned a lot from you on a personal level. And what I think is even more important, our friendship grew over time. We started Zalando as friends. And I can say, we grew even closer over the years. And with such an intense time, this is anything but self-evident. So from the bottom of my heart, I would like to say thank you very much on behalf of Zalando, but in particular, from me and from both of us personally.

Yes. This is difficult to put this into words. In the past 11 years with Zalando, we raised a child together basically, and we've become real parents in the past years as well. So I think it is quite emotional that we already had some parallels here. In the beginning, our baby Zalando wasn't able to walk or look after itself so we fed it, we looked after it, we nurtured it and we taught it the first steps. And then later, it went into its teenage years and did a lot of nonsense as well. So we were strong, we were strict, and we disciplined it and we were able to really get it into the higher schools, i.e., the capital market. And now it's graduating, it's optimistic with regard to the future. It is venturing out into the world as we are, and you prepared it for the challenges of the future and you confronted it with the necessary questions. Similar to many parents, when you look at your own child, you see a lot of personal traits as well. When we consider Zalando as our child and look at it, and we see a lot of trades from you when we see how it works and how it is built. When you look back at Zalando 10 years from now, we want you to still see your traits, hopefully, a lot bigger than today. We will miss you, your wisdom, your good advice, your strong value focus, and your Mickey Mouse sweater that you very often wore when we had business meetings. You leave Zalando in the best state possible. It has a good path forward with Jim, David and Astrid. We have strong peers who help us to set Zalando on the right track. And we will stay closely connected, and you will remain one of the people we will call most frequently. We wish you all the best, and hopefully, you will have the time for all of the things you want to do in future. So let's not be sad about what we do not have any more. Let's be happy about what we had in the past. So thank you very much for the many, many great years.

Well, thanks so much to the 2 of you. Thanks for these words. This is a very special to me -- special AGM to me as well, a very hard moment of bidding farewell. And there's a lot of reason for me to say thank you today. First of all, I would like to thank the 2 of you, David and Robert. First of all, thanks for giving me the chance in the first place to be a part of this unique story. Thanks for taking me on board. Thanks for the many things we went through together in the course of these years. My life has become so much richer in the time I spent with Zalando. My grandchildren will still remember this. And just like you said, the most important thing is the fact that our friendship during all this time, with its highs and lows, became stronger and stronger. And I don't think that this comes as a given that after so many years in which we had to be so strong and be the CEOs, we still get along so well. So thanks so much to the 2 of you. And Cristina, I would also like to say thank you to you for these nice words of farewell, which you said at the beginning of the AGM. Thanks for your strength and your support in the hard times. You really, really help me a lot. And thanks for the clothes that you passed on to me from your own children to me in the sense of following us -- our circular economy model in the last time. So we personally did something to really achieve these goals also in our private lives. And thanks to you, thanks, dear shareholders, for your trust. Thanks for the good collaboration. And thanks to the whole Zalando team, which made me be a part of this unique journey. Zalando to me was always much more than just a job. It used to be my life, the center of my life. So I really hope that in the next years and in 10 years' time, while we don't know where the company will be at that time, but I hope to look back with pride. And now looking forward to what life has to offer me outside Zalando, I hope that we will meet again. And until that's the case, I would like to say thank you.

At this point in the name of the Supervisory Board and the Management Board, I wish to say thank you for the good work and committed cooperation during the 2020 fiscal year. Since the beginning of our cooperation, and I would really like to say this to you, Rubin Ritter, I would want to wish you all the best for the future. Since the COVID-19 pandemic started, the continued health, safety and well-being of Zalando employees has been a top priority for the Management Board. The Supervisory Board appreciates the effort and constant commitment of the management Board, senior management and Zalando employees. The mutual commitment we saw in the teams was inspiring. Our thanks for the successful year also naturally goes to all members of staff because everyone in whatever role made their own contribution. [Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]