MYT Netherlands Parent BV ADR

And welcome to the MyTheresa fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Today's call is being recorded and we have allocated one hour for prepared remarks and Q&A. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Martin Beer, MyTheresa's Chief Financial Officer. Thank you, sir. Please begin.

Thank you, Operator, and welcome everyone to Mitrice's investor conference call for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2021. With me today is our CEO, Michael Klieger. Before we begin, we would like to remind you that our discussions today will include forward-looking statements. Any comments we make about expectations are forward-looking statements and are subject to risks and uncertainties, including the risks and uncertainties described in our previous annual report. Many factors could cause actual results to differ materially. We are in no duty to update forward-looking statements. In addition, we will refer to certain financial measures not reported in accordance with IRFS on this call. You can find reconciliations of these non-IRFS financial measures in our earnings press release, which is available on our investor relations website at investors.mytheresa.com. I will now turn the call over to Michael. Thank you, Martin.

Also from my side, a very warm welcome to all of you, and thank you for joining our call today. We will today comment on the results and performance of our fourth quarter fiscal year 2021, which thus also completed our full fiscal year 2021. There are three clear messages that I want to leave you with today. First, the fourth quarter showed again outstanding results, completing an extraordinarily successful fiscal year for MyTheresa. We delivered again excellent growth and consistent profitability. This confirms, in our view, the unique position of MyTheresa in the luxury digital platform sector. Second, our strong performance was neither based on the outbreak of the pandemic, nor is it driven by the end of the pandemic. Surely, the pandemic was a catalyst for accelerated change and made the difference between the good and the not so good more pronounced. But the long-term success of MyTheresa is based on a fundamental change of consumer behavior that has only started. and a superior business model as evidenced by many of our performance KPIs. We view the performance of the last year as a strong affirmation of our superior value proposition for both customers and brand partners. But we have actively used the last couple of months to build a very strong foundation in the business to continue it and consistent future growth. Let me now comment in more detail on these three key messages for today. First, in the fourth quarter, we grew our net sales by 36.1% compared to Q4 fiscal year 2020. and for the full fiscal year 2021 by 36.2% over fiscal year 2020. This is significantly above our continued long-term guidance of 22% to 25% annual growth. Our success as a curated luxury multi-brand digital platform continues to be based on a sharp luxury customer focus, strong brand partnerships, and the focused profit-making business model. This is best exemplified by the fact that for the full fiscal year, we were able to deliver outstanding growth while keeping our gross profit margin stable at 46.9% for fiscal year 2021 compared to 46.7% for fiscal year 2020. In our view, this makes MyTheresa unique. Second, our multi-year strength is evidenced by the two-year growth rate in net sales of 60.5% in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2021. In the last four quarters, we have delivered two-year growth rates in net sales of 58.4% in Q1, of 60.4% in Q2, of 66.1% in Q3, and now of 60.5% in Q4 of fiscal year 2021. Over the corresponding quarters in fiscal year 2019, While we benefited from the pandemic, we believe the fundamental drivers for our growth are the changing consumer behavior in luxury shopping and our superior business model compared to many of our competitors, so that we could take advantage of the impact of the pandemic on consumer behavior. Based on the recent study, By Bain and Company, it estimated that over 30% of the personal luxury goods spent will be online by 2025. So while the shift of consumer demand to online in luxury has been significantly accelerated by the pandemic, we clearly believe this trend will continue, probably at a lower pace in the post-pandemic world, but it will continue. independent of new customers coming to us as stores were closed or existing customers spending much more as opportunities for going out and travel came back, we grew our net sales in all regions in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2021. The clear highlight was again the United States, where we grew net sales by 133.3% year over year in Q4 fiscal year 2021. All this affirms our belief that we offer a superior value proposition. Third, we believe that we have achieved again many significant proof points over the last quarter that establish a strong foundation for significant future growth. As explained before, our business focuses on a highly curated multi-brand offer attuned to the big spending wardrobe building customer segment, which provides us with the best customer base and luxury and one that is very difficult to attract without a curated multi-brand offer. We have significantly expanded our LTM active customer base by 38% year over year to now 671,000. This was again fueled by exceptional new customer growth. In Q4, we attracted over 110,000 new customers. In this context, it is good to note We continue to see that all cohorts of new customers acquired in Q2 of fiscal year 2021 show better repurchase rates also now in the fourth quarter compared to the Q2 cohorts of fiscal year 2020 and their behavior in Q4 of fiscal year 2020. But most importantly, we grew our top customer base by 64% in the fourth quarter over the corresponding period in fiscal year 2020. And still, the average spending of our top customers grew by 10% year over year in Q4 of fiscal year 2021. To further enhance our value proposition for our top customers, we launched an exciting partnership with Vestiaire Collective in Q4 of fiscal year 2021, offering a unique resale service for bags and soon also for shoes and ready-to-wear. The preferential service for our customers provides them with a very simple and streamlined process for reselling items, and they receive immediate payment in the form of MyTeresa store credit. A key driver for attracting multi-brand wardrobe building customers is our privileged access to exclusive products and pre-launches through our outstanding brand partner relationships. We were again honored with outstanding support and trust from our brand partners in Q4 of fiscal year 2021. We launched exclusive collections and styles as well as executed pre-launches with brands such as Alexander McQueen, Loro Piana, Jacques Mus, Missoni, Brunello Coccinelli, Roger Vivier, Valentino, Christian Louboutin, and many more. We also ran our first beauty pop-up on our website featuring key brands of Estee Lauder companies in Q4 fiscal year 2021. While we were still not able to execute many physical events in Q4 for our top customers, we still had high-impact events in Beijing and in Paris in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou. Another exciting development in terms of brand relationships is the innovative evolution in how we collaborate with some major brand partners going forward, which will allow us to further strengthen our unique value proposition. Under the so-called curative platform model, we will closely integrate with the retail operations of some of our brand partners. This means that we will be part of the inventory management of the brand partner affording us much better access to highly desirable product and in-season replenishment compared to today. This will be greatly appreciated by our customers. Our control over the assortment building, marketing, and customer relationships will not change vis-à-vis today, while our capital efficiency will improve. The inventory remains in the ownership of the brand partner until it is sold by us to the MyTheresa customer. We will therefore book under this model a platform fee as our net sales going forward. This model will already start to become operational in fiscal year 2022 with some key brand partners. Finally, We demonstrated again in the fourth quarter the consistency of our operations and performance. We maintained business continuity across all operations with focus on health and well-being of all MyTheresa employees as the top priority. This highly correlates with the very high customer satisfaction measured internally with a net promoter score of 85.6% in Q4 of fiscal year 2021. The health of our business was also demonstrated by our stable gross margin in the fourth quarter on the basis of a high full price share and little dependency on promotional activities. With all the above, it should come as no surprise that we are very proud of our achievements in fiscal year 2021 and extremely confident to continue achieving strong results in fiscal year 2022. And now I hand over to Martin to discuss the financial results and guidance in detail.