On Holding AG

Good day, my name is Dennis and I will be your conference operator at this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the on holding ag first quarter 2024 results conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise after the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad to withdraw your question press star one again. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jared Peter, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, good morning, and thank you for joining on 2024 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. With me today on the call are Executive Co-Chairman and Co-Founder Caspar Capetti, CFO and Co-CEO Martin Hoffman, and Co-CEO Mark Maurer. Before we begin, I would briefly remind everyone that today's call contained forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These forward-looking statements reflect our current expectations and beliefs only and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to our 20F filed with SEC on March 12th for a detailed discussion of such risks and uncertainties. We will further reference certain non-IFRS financial measures, such as adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin. These measures are not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with IFRS. Please refer to today's release for reconciliation to the most comparable IFRS measures. We will begin with Caspar, followed by Martin, leading through today's prepared remarks, after which we are looking forward to opening the call for a Q&A session. With that, I'm very happy to turn over the call to Caspar.

Thank you for joining us today. Martin, Mark and I are in great spirits as we had a fantastic start to 2024. With net sales of 508 million Swiss francs in the first quarter, ONN for the first time surpassed the half billion mark in a single quarter. We have continued to grow very substantially, just shy of 30% on a constant currency basis and made great progress in every region, channel and category. What makes us especially proud is that we are achieving this growth at an ever increasing higher profitability. Our gross profit margin of close to 60% in the first quarter underscores the power of our strategy to be the most premium global sports brand. Allow me to shine some light on the progress that ON has made in our core strategic areas. At ON, everything starts with running. The lightning and rain strategy, winning on the race course with next level innovation and gaining market share with everyday runners, continues to deliver for the ON brand. Three weeks ago, Helen O'Berry won the marathon in Boston for the second time, the first woman in two decades to go back to back. She was running in ON head to toe, including groundbreaking new footwear technology, which ON will reveal in Paris this summer. We would like to congratulate Helen and also thank our innovation team for the incredible work in developing the fastest race products. The rain element of the strategy means converting the credibility of our innovations and athlete successes to market share gains with everyday runners enjoying their local running routes. In our new global run count, we are seeing very positive results across all regions with market shares of more than 10% in cities such as Tokyo, and Berlin, and across key cities in the US, from Boston down to Nashville, and from San Francisco down to LA. The market share gains are clearly driven by the success and fast adoption of our latest high performance running franchises, CloudMonster, CloudSurfer, and CloudRunner. We are also seeing a very positive effect of the local run clubs that we are organizing from our own stores, particularly in key cities like Tokyo, Berlin, and Los Angeles. Which brings me to an update on our own retail expansion, which is progressing well and delivering outstanding results. In Q1, we opened stores in Berlin and Portland, Oregon, which brings us to over 50 stores globally, 34 of which are owned and operated by ONN. Stores in Paris, Champs-Élysées, Milan, and Austin, Texas, will open in the coming months. On the wholesale side of the business, we continue our disciplined strategy of being very intentional in choosing the right partners and adequate door footprint, with a clear focus on performance and young consumers. On our road to becoming the number one running brand, we continue to win market share and run specialty stores. Valdix Sporting Goods provides us with access to high school and college athletes, who ON resonates with particularly strong. In Q1, we went live with Zalanda in our EMEA markets, an important digital marketplace in the region to connect the ON brand with additional younger consumers. Last but not least, we have also made strong progress on our apparel initiatives. Through resizing our entire collection to fit more customers in a consistent way, we have significantly increased our addressable market. Just a week ago, we introduced FKA Twigs as a new creative partner and the face of our upcoming training collection that will be launched in August. Over the past weeks, we have also rolled out our first apparel collection in tennis, and fans can now wear the same key looks as seen on Ben Shelton particularly apparel showed extremely strong demand in our d2c ecom and our own retail channels with apparel contributing around 25 of purchases at for example our paris center store you can tell that after such a strong start we are very optimistic for the remainder of the year with many more highlights to come not least being the olympics in paris Before I hand over to Martin for the financials, I would like to point your attention to next week's annual shareholders meeting. We are very excited that Laura Miele stands for election as an addition to our board of directors. As president of Electronic Arts, Entertainment and Technology, we feel that Laura can bring a lot of expertise, creativity and technology insights to our board. We look forward to receiving your support on our election and the remaining motions proposed by the board. Over to you, Martin.