Zalando Se Ord

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the publication of the Q1 Results 2026 conference call. I am George, the course call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be little or remote and the conference has been recorded. The presentation will be followed by Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star N1 on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star N0. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Patrick Coffler, Director, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning and welcome to our Q1 2026 earnings call. Today, I'm joined by our CEO, Robert Gantz, and our CFO, Nadimitrova. Robert will kick us off with a business update before handing over to Anna to walk you through the financial development of the quarter. Finally, Robert will discuss our outlook. Both will be available for question afterward. As usual during the Q&A session, we kindly ask you to limit your questions to two, allowing for an efficient discussion. This call is being recorded in both the live webcast and the replay will be available on our Investor Relations webpage later today. Robert, over to you for the first live.

Thank you, Patrick. Hello, and thank you for joining today's call. We've achieved significant milestones over the past year, and we continue to do so in Q1. We've successfully executed our strategy and met our financial goals. And we've made substantial progress again in the first few months of 2026. Progress across our team of apps to drive our platform's distribution, custom frequency, and monetization apps. Progress as well with advancing our technology platform, which powers our B2C and B2B businesses. and progress with our AI capabilities to drive efficiency and growth for our business. Our addressable market is huge, with €500 billion in European session, so we relentlessly worked on our strategy execution to achieve a larger coverage of it. Our C1 performance was strong, it confirms that we are well on track with our full-year targets, and it is yet another step towards our mission goals. There are five key highlights that demonstrate our overall progress in Q1, which I will show you now on the next page. Number one, we've delivered a strong financial performance in Q1. At group level, we delivered strong double-digit growth. Reported GMV grew nearly 22%, and group revenue is up nearly 24% compared to Q1 last year. And we increased adjusted EBIT by 39% year-on-year, to 65 million Euro. That brings our adjusted EBIT margin to 2.2%. Number two, as well as Q1, we have advanced our AI capabilities, bringing further traction to both our B2C and B2B business. We continue to be impressed by what benefits AI can bring to both efficiency and growth of our business. And I come back to some of our most exciting developments later in the course. Number three, in B2C we delivered strong growth in Q1 across our team of consumer apps. We had a strong start into the spring-summer season. And about due and launch, achieved even double digital growth rates of GMBs. In our core app, Zalando, our loyalty program is a central engine to drive growth. We now have more than 18.5 million members. We recently launched new exciting benefits by adding food delivery subscription VaultPlus as a partner benefit for our members. Number four. In B2B we recorded continuous strong double digit growth. We have launched ZEOS with the first ZSF partner in Norway and we added two new sales channels. This expansion means we now serve a total of 26 markets and 20 sales channels via ZEOS. And number five. In summary, we're well on track to meet our whole year targets. Despite the ongoing geopolitical instability and economic volatility in our market, we confirm our 2026 target. Overall, I'm very happy with the performance of our team in the quarter. Now, we will first talk about the progress on the AI developments before Anna slides into the financial performance. So in March, during our full year updates, we highlighted how our B2C and B2B signals are driven by a shared data and infrastructure engine that is now supercharged by AI. This engine is constantly getting better every day and every second. This continuous improvement is fueled by the growing engagement of consumers using our apps and is going to increasingly integrate with our ecosystem. We strategically drive the distribution and the usage frequency of our platforms across consumers and merchants. The result of this expanding scale is an accumulation of more high-quality data, which in turn continuously refines and improves our solutions. AI is a powerful catalyst for both growth and efficiency. It will successfully use data and algorithms to drive our business for over 15 years now. Yet in recent years and months, AI has released their scale, and the positive impact on our business has been accelerating. Let me give you a few examples of what we saw now in the recent months. So firstly, we're making great progress to evolve our AI-based system from a chat tool into a true lifestyle companion at the forefront of agenda comments. A key reason I saw last quarter was the upgrades to provide advice beyond fashion. We now cover sport and, very recently, as well, beauty advice. So ask the assistant for highly specific advice, for example, for hydrating, care and skin care, or running shoes for over-pronation, and the assistant can now point you into very helpful directions. Numbers-wise, an impressive 10 million customers last quarter have interacted with our AI assistants. And this is up from 6 million in the whole of 2025. So secondly, we now see how AI enhances the efficiency of our logistics backbone. We're proceeding with the rollout of AI-powered robots across our European fulfillment network. And already today, 2 million items a month are being autonomously handled by our growing fleet of warehouse robots. And now, based on the early success of flow optimization and model training, we're rolling this impressive technology out across our network. This will improve throughput, scalability, and efficiency of our entire fulfillment operations across Europe. And thirdly, we recently achieved impressive speed and quality increase in our partner article onboarding through AI. We introduced a computer vision solution that automatically detects and corrects image backgrounds of articles. We also correct about 6,000 articles' pictures daily and enrich missing material composition information through AI. As a result, up to 85% of articles are now ready to go online in less than three days. And this is an impressive accomplishment in both speed and quality. And it reduces organizational coordination costs between us and the partners. So not a great win-win for AI. Those are the three examples which demonstrate our continuous traction of applying AI in our business. And I'm very much looking forward to sharing many more of these examples with you in the future. Now I'd like to hand over to Anna for the financial performance.