Esprinet S.p.A.

Good afternoon, this is the Coruscall conference operator. Welcome and thank you for joining the EspritNet first quarter 2022 results presentation. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Should anyone need assistance during the conference call, they may signal an operator by pressing star and zero on their telephone. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Miss Giulia Perfetti

Good afternoon and welcome everyone. Today we are pleased to comment with you the Q1 2022 results and we are sharing the business outlook for 2022. Before we start, please note that this presentation contains a forward-looking statement, so I would like to draw your attention to the recommendation note on page 2 of the presentation, which provides all the details. Let me remind that after the call, we will post the presentation and the podcast on the ESPRIT website in the investor section. I'm Giulia Perfetti, investor relations manager of ESPRIT, and with me is Alessandro Castani, CEO of ESPRIT. Now I pass the call to Alessandro to present the Q1 2021 results. Alessandro, over to you.

Thank you, Giulia, and welcome, everybody. I hope you're all fine. We're here to present our Q1 2022 results, and I would definitely skip immediately to slide number four and dig into the numbers. This slide represents the results in a snapshot. And if you remember our comments back in February when we presented the full year results and gave a flavor of what was our focus for the year, we forecasted a very tough Q1 because of the supply chain issues we all know. waiting for a slightly better Q2 and definitely a strong improvement in Q3 and Q4. Well the year kicked off better than expected, better than our expectations against the backdrop of continued disruption and I would say of even bigger disruption than expected, mostly arising from the effects of the war as well as the inflation. But on this, let's look into the numbers. Let's remember that Q1 2021 was a record quarter for us. So we had a very tough compare year on year, but Q1 2022 P&L performance, in our view, was very good. The sales were down 2% against last year, but advanced solutions, our, I imagine, areas where we have a lot of focus in our investor plan, in our strategic plan, was up 8%. The most important piece of news for us was the continuous improvement in our gross profit margin, which reached the 5% barrier up to 5.05% compared to 4.81% of Q1 last year. And that gave us a significant boost to profitability because this gross profit margin have to offset the decline, the slight decline in sales volumes. And what's more important is not only we add a better product mix, more skewed towards higher margin product lines, but more or less all product lines marked an improvement in profitability. So we're really pleased on what's happening. as I said, in a rather tough environment. The adjusted EBITDA was down 3%, even if the gross profit in euros was up against previous year. Last year, we made 56.1 million euros of gross profit. This year, 57.6.