Verkkokauppa Com Oyj

Good morning all and welcome to verkkokauppa.com Q3 presentation. Today, joining with me and available for questions, CFO Jesper Bumster and investor relations manager Maria Mäkinen as well. If you have any questions during the presentation, please feel free to send them to investors at verkkokauppa.com and questions will be answered at the end of the presentation. So as always, I will start my presentation with market development and business environment. Then I have a few highlights out of the report of this morning. After that, strategy execution update. And at the end, we will have outlook on rest of the year and key takeaways. If we start with the market development and the business environment as such, we haven't seen major changes throughout the year and the quarters. Maybe to a small surprise, the consumer confidence slipped back into the negative trend after a few positive months behind us. And this consumer confidence starting to decline has always an immediate impact on discretionary shopping and purchasing decisions, which impacts our line of business directly. Why is this so? We see that consumers' confidence here in Finland have slightly weakened according to their own economics and own employment. We have seen many change negotiations, layoffs and also bankruptcies in the Finnish market. And we believe that this is impacting the consumers' confidence at the moment. The time for discretionary shopping is seen extremely unfavorable at the moment when asked the consumer. And if you look at the consumer electronic market as such, we did see an expected price fight. heavy campaigning, all operators in the market are forced to make sure that inventory turns and they are not sitting on obsolete stock. So typically in these times and environments, we see heavy price fight and campaigning activities increasing. Then if you look at the total consumer electronic market in the Finnish landscape, according to GFK, the whole market clearly dropped again by over 4%, whereas our sales in those categories was almost at the same level as previous year. So gaining aggressively market share during that quarter. And this has been For certain period of time, if we now take the official fiscal figures that are filed from the three biggest companies in Finland selling consumer electronics, we see that Verkkokauppakom again defended market leadership position. We lost revenue slightly less than the second biggest player. Also on a positive note, we see that we did the best EBIT. in last fiscal. So let's jump into the report of this morning. If we start with the revenue development, actually the revenue development was quite okay, taking in consideration the heavy price fighting. We lost revenue by 3%. If we then look even closer in our strategic important area of the business online business we were even closer to previous year levels only losing by two percent and in b2b segment we were even able to get some growth out of that segment so one percent growth which is nice to see that that line of business is slightly recovering it is also good to understand that business refurbishment decisions can be postponed to a certain point of time But after when things and equipment get broken, businesses are forced and needed to get new equipment. And that's the reason why the underlying demand is slightly more stable than in the consumer landscape. Then looking at the margin, there we see also a significant drop to previous quarter, also significant drop to previous year's level this is mainly due to negative margin negative business in certain categories especially in seasonal categories and especially in electric bikes categories also we have done conducted active inventory turn measures to make sure that we stay on a healthy level and we are not risking obsolete stock And also all of the good work in better terms, in more effective campaigning, we were forced to invest again back into the pricing to make sure that we stay competitive. So that ate up the positive impact on those initiatives. On a positive note, we were really successful in selling our own brands, sales growing significantly by 53% and on a record level internal share of sales over 8%. So consumers are really happy and willing on stepping into our own brands and preferring those in more and more cases over an A brand. The discretionary shopping is heavily seen in certain categories. For example, in televisions and gaming, we see the market being really tough. On the other hand, we were able to gain growth again in home appliances, for example, in IT, in mobile. It's good to understand that like in B2B, in home appliances, a certain normal demand is underlying. So when equipment and certain devices get broken, the consumer is basically forced to refurbish, renew that certain item. So if we then look at the profit and loss calculation, we talked about the revenue development impacting the gross profit. Mainly impacting gross profit was our lower gross margin. On a cost position, in total, we were below that of previous year levels. In personal cost, we saw some increase, mainly due to the reason that in the comparison figures, we have one-offs, layoffs. In other operating expenses, there was deferred price provision, which was released, and that's the main reason for the delta to previous years. But all in all, mainly due to the reason we lost gross profit, operating result was clearly below that of previous year, just on a positive side, 0.1 million and comparable EBIT by minus 0.7 million. The active inventory measures that we took and wanted to make those decisions also during the third quarter had a positive impact on our inventory levels. In contradiction to previous year, we were able to lower the levels of inventory from second quarter to third quarter going into the main season by over 5 million and also significant drop to previous year levels, minus 9%. And we can state that our inventory levels are as healthy as they have not been for a long time. So we are really good prepared for the upcoming season and next year to have decent margins out of normal business. Positively, that impacts our gas position, slightly improving from previous years level on a solid level. Gas flow was a positive one, slightly below that of previous years. Investments, not heavy investments needed in our line of business. We are always implementing new technologies and new features on our site, on our platform, in our technology stack, but no big investments needed. So all in all, if we look at the financial situation of the company, it is in good and solid hands. So let's change subjects and go into the strategy execution. Our main goal is to accelerate online transition throughout fast deliveries. And this is exactly what we are doing. Our fast delivery reach is on a record high. During the summertime, we released all of our stores to be able to fulfill fast deliveries. So 1.7 million consumers can utilize this service. Many of those are already utilizing this. The sales out of fast deliveries is growing significantly in the third quarter. by 34%, also share of fast deliveries of online sales over 16%. So it's getting increasingly important also for our line of business. And what's even more important, the service levels are on the highest level when looking at NPS. The consumer is extremely happy about the fast delivery capabilities and the service we are providing. NPS of 83 is really record high and market high. Also, what we have said in our strategy, we need new growth initiatives outside the Finnish market. We are the market leader already. We see that growth at the moment only throughout market share. We are gaining market share, but it's costly. It is always tied with margin investments. So we need new markets, new partnerships and new platforms, especially to distribute our own brands. After the attack war of Russia, we lost big part of our export business, we have gradually been able to find out new markets, new partners in the Nordics, for example, in Denmark, for example. It's nice to see that the EU business is gradually growing again and during the third quarter by 8%. We are making this line of business as lean and cost efficient as possible throughout the platform. So we are basically a supplier for those partners that are then distributing the products to end consumers in different markets. Thirdly, sustainability has been always incorporated in our values, in our business, always on customer side, selling for a cause, for a need, long-lasting products, making sure that customers' needs are fulfilled and after customers' rights are looked after. According to a large study More and more customers are willing to make sustainability a driving factor in their purchase decisions, especially in consumer electronics. So we need to make sure that our line of assortment, our line of A brands and own brands as well are linked with these needs and desires. more and more customers are willing to purchase a reused recycled device what we have done throughout the last year we have expanded our reused assortment significantly all of the products need to be repairable, serviceable. We are working obviously heavily on that and making sure that the products sold are long lasting for a need and we can maintain the market leadership in lowest returns in the market below 1%. So if we then have a look on the last part of the year, maybe slightly also into the next year. It is fair to say that market recovery is postponed. We are not expecting any major changes. Sadly, the confidence actually took a small hit during the third quarter. It takes some time before the confidence is built up again. We probably need to see the purchase power clearly to be increasing, interest rates going down, clearly to be incorporated in personal loans, and maybe the uncertainties to slightly be milder, to have another, a different kind of market environment. And this is not expected to happen this year. What we do expect due to this reason and due to all operators being forced to drive out inventory, We will see probably the most price fight Black Friday and season sales ahead of us. We are well prepared for that. We have done good negotiations. We have done a good selection and we believe that we can really be there for the customers with the right prices, right products and also make that profitable. We do believe that we have done the right choices, the right actions, which were needed last year and this year. We just conducted our change negotiations. We will organize ourselves even more cost efficient, but even more focused on the strategic cornerstones and the growth drivers. And we believe that we will be ready when the market pickups. We have the right strategy in place. We have been investing in right initiatives. We have a lot of leading indicators, which state us that when the market turns, we will be ready for acceleration. We slightly updated our guidance. We previously said that we expect revenue And comparable EBIT to be below that of previous year, unless the market recovers during the second half. Well, it's easy to say that the market has not recovered and will not recover during the last part of year. So we skip the last part of that sentence. So the new updated guidance states we expect revenue and comparable EBIT to be below that of previous year. So if we conduct the presentation and the points from my presentation, first, the slightly tougher market environment than maybe anticipated, consumer confidence lower than anticipated, uncertainties slightly increasing around own economics, own employment, impacting discretionary shopping. We made needed decisions to secure our position, to secure market share gains and also make sure that inventory turns and we are not in the risk of obsolete stock going into the most important time of year. We also saw actually some successes. Own brands continuing extremely strongly, growing significantly. B2B on a growth path, again, certain categories doing quite good as the demand is there. We have also done changes in our ways of organization, organizing ourselves, even more focusing on the strategy. And we do believe that we have the right strategy, which is future-proof, as retail keeps on going online throughout fast deliveries. Thank you. And we'll look into the question corner. No questions at this point. So thank you all for joining and have a great day.