Westwing Group AG, Q1 2020 Earnings Call, May 12, 2020

Westwing Group AG XTRA:WEW
FQ1 2020 Earnings Call Transcripts

Tuesday, May 12, 2020 8:00 AM GMT
S&P Global Market Intelligence Estimates
-FQ1 2020- -FY 2019- -FY 2020-
CONSENSUS CONSENSUS CONSENSUS
EPS Normalized (0.40) (1.46) (1.23)
Revenue (mm) 67.50 267.00 279.00

Currency: EUR
Consensus as of May-12-2020 7:41 AM GMT
- EPS NORMALIZED -
CONSENSUS ACTUAL SURPRISE
FQ1 2019 - - -
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Contents
Table of Contents
Call Participants .................................................................................. 3

Presentation .................................................................................. 4
Question and Answer .................................................................................. 11
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WESTWING GROUP AG FQ1 2020 EARNINGS CALL - PRELIMINARY COPY | MAY 12, 2020
Call Participants
EXECUTIVES
Sebastian Säuberlich
CFO & Member of Management
Board
Stefan Smalla
Founder, CEO & Member of
Management Board
ANALYSTS
Graham Ian Renwick

Joh. Berenberg, Gossler & Co. KG,
Research Division
Hans Christian Salis

Hauck & Aufhäuser Privatbankiers
AG, Research Division
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Presentation
Operator
Dear, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Q1 2020 Earnings Call of Westwing Group Ag. At our
customer's request, this conference will be recorded. [Operator Instructions] May I now hand you over to
Stefan Smalla, who will lead you through this conference. Please go ahead.
Stefan Smalla
Founder, CEO & Member of Management Board
Thank you. Welcome to the Q1 2020 Earnings Call for Westwing. I'm Stefan, Westwing's CEO. And I have
with me Sebastian Sauberlich, our CFO. These are certainly unprecedented times for all of us. I hope you
and your families are well, which has never felt more important than these days.
Before we dig it into our earnings results, let me extend my heartfelt thanks to all our teams all across
Europe and in China. In the worst of times for society, we have seen our teams deliver at the very best.
With passion, with commitment and with a strong drive to serve our customers, you have pushed through
rapid changes in recent couple of months and keep making us proud. It is extremely appreciated. Thank
you very much.
With that, let's focus on our earnings. I will now give a business update covering our Q1 highlights
and focus a lot on the events and actions of the first 6 weeks of the second quarter to. And after that,
Sebastian will dive deep into our financials. And after a brief summary for me again, we will go into Q&A.
In terms of summary, our results for the first quarter of 2020 was strong. We have now delivered a third
quarter in a row that's improved versus the first half of 2019. We have seen double-digit growth of 10%
year-over-year driven by strong customer momentum both on the loyalty side of existing customers as
well as the new customer momentum driven by increasing marketing results from higher investments
since the middle of last year. In Q1, we have also demonstrated strong unit economics and contribution
margins, strong cost discipline and consequently have significantly improved profitability versus the same
quarter last year. This has also led to free cash flow improving by EUR 10 million in this first quarter alone
versus the same quarter last year, showcasing our continued march towards free cash flow profitability.
We also have a very strong net cash balance of EUR 65 million at the end of the quarter, giving us stability
and strength in times of duress. We have never felt better about our good cash balance than now. So Q1
was a really good quarter.
And by the end of that first quarter, we were, like the whole world, deep in the middle of dealing with the
COVID-19 situation. I will provide much more details on this in the coming minutes, but a brief summary
upfront. We have focused first and foremost on health and safety of our customers, teams and partners.
We have tightened cost discipline, cut some paid marketing and have set ourselves up with a defensive
stance for the second half of the year when the recession might hit us. In the meantime, however, we
have seen astounding growth across all customer cohorts, indicating a fast forwarding, rapid acceleration
of the secular shift to online and e-commerce. We have seen growth of circa 80% year-over-year in the
second quarter to date. Consequently, most of our efforts right now are in delivering that growth across
our full business model, from ramping up logistics and customer service to increasing volumes with our
suppliers. We are glad that our customers are trusting us even more now in these times to make their
homes more beautiful, homes which they spend much more time in these days than they did before.
While dealing with the COVID-19 situation, we have not let go of our focus areas for the year, and we
see strong progress here, reaching the nice milestone of 1 million active customers in early April already.
We're also seeing our operations and our technology teams handle the increased volumes amazingly well,
a testament to the scalability of our platform and to us being well prepared as designed for the year, now
leverage over higher growth. In terms of guidance, we remain with our full year 2020 guidance for now, as
Sebastian will explain in detail later on.
Providing you some more details on a customer perspective, we are happy that the disruptions in the
first half of last year, we're back to strongly growing our active customer base and our top line. By the
end of the first quarter of this year, we had served 986,000 active customers, so customers that have
done at least 1 order in the last 12 months, and have been able to grow our GMV by 12% to EUR 85
million, so slightly above our full year guidance range already in Q1. So we were already doing well before
COVID-19 came and had a structurally improved business in Q1. And that was because we focus on our
customers. We are a growth company. In order to live up to this strategy, we set one key initiative for
2020, which was more customers. Keeping our loyal customer base engaged and happy while adding new
loyal customers is our key to build a successful company. Improved results over the last quarter proved
that this is the right strategy, and we will continue to pursue this strategy and focus all our actions around
this topic. The unique loyalty-focused business model that we run, we also only around customers. Once
we had rolled out our full business model to all our countries in the last year, we are now focused on
bringing more customers into this attractive business model, which will bring growth from those customers
buying as well as increasing profitability from the operating leverage.
This focus on more customers is driven by 4 major themes this year. With our highly engaging organic and
content-focused marketing, we're building assets that both drive new customers as well as make existing
customers even more loyal. Taken Sugan, for example, whereby now we are serving more than 3.5 million
followers, and we do that with pretty much the same team size and cost base than when we were at 2
million followers earlier, and we're doing it better actually.
In our sites and in our apps, where our typical customers come 100 times a year to us, we inspire
and engage them ever more. Our creative teams think of fresh ideas every day, and we have even
increased in recent months to focus on rich content, on video content, on more content that merges
with the merchandise into our shoppable magazine, with which we continue to separate further from the
competition to provide something extraordinary and unique.
In our operations and technology, our customers deserve to be served well. Despite recently increased
volumes, this continues to be done at a strong level, and all our indicators show us that our customers
continue to be very satisfied by it.
Last but not least, we are pushing with strong energy our Own and Private Label offering, where we can
provide our customers with gorgeous products at attractive prices in our Westwing Collection. And at the
same time, we benefit from this by much higher margins the ability to control the full value chain and
quality and marketing synergies.
All together, Westwing remains at the forefront of e-commerce innovation with our shoppable magazine,
and the loyalty of our customers proves that this is the right strategy for Westwing. Yet, we are far
from satisfied here. We believe that in all of those areas, we can improve even way beyond where we
are today. For instance, in our marketing, we are working on a variety of new organic channels. In our
shoppable magazine approach, we are developing new content formats all the time. In our operations,
we are focused to dive deeper into how to serve customers better in the future, i.e. faster deliveries,
higher quality deliveries, better customer service, as well as technology-enabled next-level experiences
like augmented reality and mobile-first content. And in our Own and Private Label, we are driving both
the presentation of our products driven by a technology setup that is new in our site as well as the
development of new products to excite our customers.
Let us now look in detail at how the COVID-19 situation has evolved for us, how it has impacted our
business in Q2 and how we have been acting. As a first and major priority, we are focused since the
middle of February on the health and safety of our customers, our teams and our partners. We've
implemented an array of new measures and have heightened existing measures. Most importantly,
in our warehouses, we have adjusted lots of processes, have implemented distancing as required,
we've implemented temperature checks, have run more shifts, have been sourcing personal protective
equipment via our recently opened China sourcing office and have been using that in our warehouses.
And we have heightened already strict hygiene standards further. Our warehouses continue operating
fully operational, thanks to the tireless work of our frontline employees,who have quickly adjusted to a
number of new processes and procedures to ensure we continue to serve our customers while keeping our
people healthy. In our offices, we have moved almost 90% of our teams into working from home office
with only those remaining in rather empty offices, which job cannot successfully be conducted from home.
This transition of almost 1,000 people to home office has worked remarkably well, with productivity levels
remaining strong,and team spirit actually quite upbeat given the situation. We have also surveyed our
worldwide team anonymously a few weeks ago, and more than 95% of our employees are confirming that
Westwing is doing a very good job or a good job in ensuring the health and safety.
Looking forward on the health and safety side, we will keep all those measures in place for now for as long
as needed and likely even beyond that. Being careful here is the basis of our business, of course, and it is
what we owe to our colleagues, to our customers and to the communities we operate in.
Turning to the demand side. What has happening -- what has been happening since late March is an
astounding, incredible pulling forward of the secular shift of the huge online -- huge home and living
market into the future and online shopping. Customers either want to go to off-line stores right now
nor could they for a long time. And they don't want to really because it's not as pleasant an experience
as it was in the past, now with mass distancing, long lines and general concern of the population in
closed spaces. In addition, customers are much more at home right now, and home and living is one
of the categories of spend that customers continue to want because the need has never been bigger.
Consequently, we have seen unprecedented growth, really an acceleration of online penetration shows. We
have seen circa 80% of revenue growth in quarter 2 to date. This elevated growth, most importantly, has
happened across all our customer cohorts. So we are seeing our existing cohorts dramatically growing,
and we are also seeing marketing delivering many more new customers.
The elevated growth has also happened across all our countries, with non particularly lagging or standing
out, as well as across our whole product portfolios in all categories. And we are not just experiencing this
growth. We're also pushing this growth and the loyalty of our customers especially in these dynamic times.
We have adapted our communication and marketing and offering to the change type guys. We're talking
about home cooking. We're talking about home office, home gym, staycation at home, et cetera, et cetera.
Our daily shoppable magazine enables us to communicate with the flexibility and real timeliness that
has never felt more advantageous. We are right there with our customers as they are navigating a new
environment and are starting new projects in their homes.
When we look forward, we, however, have very limited visibility, like I believe nobody has much visibility
and what definitely are unprecedented times. But I can share a few things how we are thinking about
this. We believe that our demand was structurally and long-term benefit from the current situation.
Many customers have their first taste of Westwing or they have rediscovered their love for Westwing.
And given our loyalty model, many of them will stay with us. In addition, customers of all age groups,
especially older folks, are subjected to e-commerce for the first time, and we believe this will be one of
the key structural levers in our markets online acceleration and afterwards the market's growth from a
higher baseline. In addition, our brand partners, will need to shift to online even more especially in this
fragmented industry of home and living, where they often do not have a chance to sell on their own that
much. And we are a unique platform for them to push growth.
At the same time, the upcoming recession will put a dent into customers' willingness to spend. In addition,
once stores reopen in full and customers might feel better growing there, some of the extraordinary uplift
might disappear. What the net result of those contracting trends will be, nobody knows right now, we
certainly don't know right now. So what we are doing is to continuing to be anticipatory and react at the
same time to the changing site guys to what our customers want and to continue to communicate with
them through our shoppable magazine. And when we zoom out further, then, of course, we're humbled
by the current growth and certainly very happy that our customers rely on us so much to make their most
better place, their homes, more beautiful and become inspired by us, yet we are not blinded, nor are we
becoming overly confident by these revenue run rates. We remain cautious for now and keep our cash
first, cost defensive approach until we have gained further visibility.
Yet we are also aware of the long-term impact and the chances of the current situation. It provides a
unique opportunity for Westwing to serve our returning and new customers and to do our own part to
further accelerate the channel shift towards online in our category.
On the supply chain side, we have seen some disruptions especially from Asia. And we are managing
those well by stocking more, by establishing new sources, by developing workarounds, by implementing
container shipping alternatives and by staying in very close contact with our suppliers. While those
disruptions are a lot of work for our team, we are handling them well, as you can see by the elevated
growth numbers. Yet, this is one of the key issues for the remainder of the year which we must focus on.
The continued availability of the bestsellers of our Westwing Collection. We expect some disruptions here,
for instance, in rugs, due to the India lockdowns but feel that, overall, the impact should only slightly
impact our growth rates going forward.
The flexibility in our business with more than 5,000 suppliers and our daily themes model actually being
inventory less as well as the international character of our local setups coming to play very well here.
And certain suppliers are out of stock, were not operating or temporarily not operating, we are shifting to
others. We believe this will continue throughout the year, and we're well prepared.
The positive side of all of this change is that our suppliers have never needed us more. We are open for
business. We can serve customers safely. And we are providing growth for supplier brands in a time when
other channels are not open or not growing. We have seen new brands approach us significantly more
than in the past, and we are leveraging that into a very strong offering. We have also seen existing brands
offer more and better-priced products to us, which we are using to serve our customers better.
On the operations and logistics side, I'm impressed especially how our frontline team members have been
delivering the elevated growth so well. We have not seen any major issues here at all. All our warehouses
have been operating without chaos throughout this situation. The apps, our sites are holding up, and our
carrier partners have been working very hard to ramp up in a timely way. It's a true testament to the
strength of our platform. While there might be risks going forward on the carrier side, on the wireless
operations side and on the capacity side, we are taking the necessary measures to make sure we continue
to deal well and serve our customers in a world-class way.
In addition, we are starting to plan scenarios and capacities for the seasonally strong fourth quarter, where
we might need to make some investments if growth were to persist on the current levels. We are not there
yet, though, and we'll have news for you on that in the next quarterly earnings call.
Let me end this business update by giving you an update on the 5 strategic focus areas that we have set
out for 2020. We are doing well here, as described before. More customers is the initiative that obviously
is running the best right now. With a good Q1, with the tailwinds from the recent weeks, our increased
marketing investments over last year in the first quarter and strong offering catapulting us into active
customer levels that we had only expected for later this year.
On the cost side, we have a leaner and better organization than last year. The restructurings in Italy and
France are fully effective in our cost baseline, and we run a leaner organization with the merger of our
Private Label Westwing Collection, permanent assortment Westwing Now businesses into one. Operating
leverage is the #1 driver of future target profitability, so we are laser-focused on keeping costs low even
if you might have to invest slightly through the year if growth were to persist on the elevated levels. Any
of those potential investments would be way below growth rates, so high operating leverage is a clear
expectation going forward.
On the Private Label side, we have launched our new Westwing collection in Q1, and we continue to sell it
very well with strong feedback from customers and the press. Although the recent elevated growth will be
challenging in terms of availability for some products in the recent months and the next month, we think
we continue to do well here.
On the operations side, our warehouse footprint is now fully implemented, and we are not expecting major
disruptions or moves for the near future. Where we might make selective capacity additions and add
selective costs in our existing setup, depending on how demand will develop in the coming months, these
are not structurally changing anything in our footprint.
On the COVID-19 side and mitigating that crisis, I have discussed in detail before, we are utilizing the
opportunities of the situation well. We are managing the challenges and risks at the same time, and we
are prepared for whatever might come in the future either on the upside or on the downside.
So overall, the good first quarter of the year, a very strong start into the second quarter and strong
performance across our strategic priorities, yet,limited visibility into the second half of the year and being
prepared for all scenarios.
With that, I would like to hand over to our CFO, Sebastian, to provide you with all the financial details.
CFO & Member of Management Board
Thank you, Stefan. Good morning, everyone. First of all, let me tell you that I'm very excited today to
present our Q1 numbers as this is my first earnings call as Westwing CFO. Overall, I would also rate the
Q1 as a good quarter, showing progress on all important metrics driven by our tireless execution of the
plans we have initiated last year.
I will start with our top line. Q1 we achieved group revenues of EUR 68 million. That's a double-digit
growth for the group driven by strong customer momentum, as Stefan highlighted in the first part of the
presentation. While our GMV growth accelerated in the last 2 weeks,of March significantly, as we have told
in April, please recall that we only book revenue once an order is delivered to our customers, and hence,
the vast majority of this momentum will benefit Q2. Good news is also that both our segments have been
contributing to our Q1 growth.
The DACH segment, accounting for 56% of our revenues in Q1 was growing year-over-year by 12%. And
our International segment has continued to grow for Q1, showing a year-over-year growth rate of 7%. Our
top line growth continues to be driven by the combination of new customer additions and continued very
high loyalty from our existing customers.
Next, to double-digit growth. In Q1, we also achieved a strong adjusted EBITDA, which is the result of
many initiatives aimed at bringing us back to strong profitable growth. I think worth mentioning is that
basically, all the effects we see are before any positive effects from COVID-19 as they will only materialize
in Q2.
By going down the P&L and giving you some color on our gross margin and the expense line items, I will
explain now how this improvement in adjusted EBITDA was achieved. Our gross margin improved by 4.3
percentage points to an all-time high of 46.7% based on the ongoing retail margin discipline and a higher
private label share. We have improved our fulfillment ratio, which reflects our logistics, customer care
and payment costs by 1.4 percentage points compared to Q1 2019 as we are by now running an efficient
logistics setup, with all our warehouses up and running smoothly. Also, the Q1 fulfillment costs were
impacted negatively by our warehouse move, which was not [indiscernible] anymore this last quarter. Our
warehouse costs reduced significantly here over compensating year-over-year increased freight costs.
As a result of higher gross margin and improved fulfillment costs, we were able to improve our
contribution margins significantly, reflected by an increase of 5.7 percentage points to 24.3%. Going
forward, we must ensure to protect these attractive margin levels and further improve step by step. We
would consider the Q1 levels a normal level of contribution margin from which we will further increase
mainly by growing the share of our more profitable Own and Private Label products.
The marketing ratio increased by 2.3 percentage points to 9% as we have increased our spending since
H2 2019 and have continued to do that in 2020. That this increase in marketing cost is well invested is
proven by our strong customer momentum in Q1 and enables us to cost effectively acquire and retain
customers as well as build our own brands. When we decided for higher marketing ratios in 2019, it was
our plan to finance this with a better contribution margin. And so far, this plan pays off well.
G&A costs, which primarily consist of salary and wages, were another bright spot in the quarter, going
down by 0.8 percentage points, thanks to ongoing cost discipline and operating leverage.
The combination of the top line growth, strongly improved contribution margin as well as managed cost
structure resulted in strong bottom line results in Q1 as adjusted EBITDA improved by 4.5 percentage
points to minus 1.8%. In absolute number, we had an adjusted EBITDA of minus EUR 1.2 million versus
minus EUR 3.9 million in Q1 2019.
Moving to the cash flows. We operate a highly capital-efficient business that positions us well to generate
positive free cash flows once achieving adjusted EBITDA profitability. As of March 31, we had a negative
working capital of minus EUR 5 million. This significant lower net working capital compared to the previous
year was driven by inventory discipline and high customer prepayments driven by the accelerating GMV
growth at the end of March.
Overall, we have a very low CapEx ratio, and our CapEx is mostly capitalized internal software
development. In Q1 2020, our CapEx ratio decreased by 1.5 percentage points to 2.8% of revenue versus
previous Q1. These are mainly accounting effects and do not reflect a decrease in our technology spending
or repurposing. We continue to invest heavily into technology as a backbone for growth and profitability.
As a result of our improved bottom line and reduced net working capital, we have improved our free cash
flow for the quarter by a strong EUR 10 million versus Q1 2019 to a negative free cash flow of minus EUR
6 million. Our free cash flow margin based on last 12 months improved to minus 4.5% in Q1 2020 with
a positive momentum. This free cash flow as well as the financial cash flow that is by now mostly IFRS-
related lease payments of negative minus EUR 2 million led to a strong cash position of EUR 65 million
by the end of Q1. As Stefan mentioned, I think in current times, we could not highlight enough our cash
position as a key strength, allowing us to navigate the uncertainty ahead of us.
After having looked back at a solid Q1, let me now turn to our financial year 2020 guidance. As we
currently see so many parameters changing over the last weeks, short term, as described mostly for the
better and we feel a high uncertainty going forward foreseeing multiple trends, some of them in a positive
direction, some not so much, like on the positive side, an acceleration of the shift to online; on the not
so positive side, off-line stores reopening as well as an imminent recession, we are not amending our
guidance for the full year 2020.
Just to be clear, I'm not going to give any further guidance now, but I want to give you some color around
how our P&L might be impacted by a much better top line. As Stefan mentioned, we currently see roughly
80% revenue growth in Q2 to date. Before going into the details, I want to highlight again that we are
making very good progress towards our guided target of achieving positive adjusted EBITDA by 2021, as
confirmed by our Q1 numbers. To be clear, this confidence is not driven by a few days of stronger top line
in Q1 but by us managing well our margins and cost and executing the plans we had made for 2020.
We always said that the main driver towards our target P&L is further growth driving operating leverage
while we are also targeting a steady but moderate improvement in gross and contribution margins. So we
would expect the incremental revenue to create significant additional profitability in Q2. Let's go through
our P&L and discuss line-by-line the impact of additional top line growth.
Starting with gross margin, we would expect no impact either way. Our fulfillment costs, which are largely
variable expenses, we would also expect to be stable as a percentage of revenue. While we might see
some greater efficiencies due to scale and some fixed cost leverage on overhead and warehouse costs,
we also see temporarily slightly higher cost operating in the current times due to the additional safety
measures and capacity squeeze.
Looking at marketing, we have taken a conservative stance on paid marketing and, hence, would see
our absolute marketing expenses slightly lower than what we have originally planned, giving us strong
leverage on relative marketing costs short term. Mid and long term, we still believe to build the 20%-plus
profitable growth company that we will continue to invest in the range of 8% to 10% of revenues.
Now moving to G&A., which you can consider mainly fixed cost in the short term. We have built a very
strong team over the past years that is able to deliver the current growth. As we are still cautious with
regards to the economic outlook in H2 and 2021, we are currently executing our plan to have roughly
stable absolute G&A costs. Obviously, we see growth continue at this pace, we will have to make selected
further investments in some teams as well into our technology but would still see significant operating
leverage.
While we currently see tailwinds but we don't know how long these trends will persist, we have to stay
cautious on spending and continuously work on all the measures we have put in place before COVID-19
to improve our company and to deliver sustainable growth, profitability and free cash flow. I am very
confident that we are on the right track with our strong cash position, are well prepared to weather
various economic scenarios ahead.
Now I would like to turn the call back to Stefan before we take your questions.
Stefan Smalla
Thank you, Sebastian.
In closing, what has become very clear is that we have built a pretty good business model for the current
times, and the reasons why all of us continue to work very hard is or now even heightened belief in the
strength of our business model and the secular shift to online. And the opportunity remains massive. The
market is EUR 117 billion in just our European markets with a very low e-commerce penetration. And the
current situation has passed forwarding the secular online channel shift rapidly into the future. We clearly
believe we will benefit from this not only short term but also in the long term. Our loyalty-driven business
model is both effective and efficient. We are now at more than 1 million active customers, and we remain
at more than 80% share of orders placed by repeat customers. This loyalty business model is not only
the right thing and a great way to build the business overall, but due to its high marketing efficiency and
the margin opportunities from pricing power, it enables us to have a very attractive financial profile. Our
Westwing Collection, the Own and Private Label part is a perfect strategic driver for this, where we provide
bestseller products and high-quality and good prices which are perfectly tailored to our customers and
provide us with superior profitability. For us, Private Label, it is not just another initiative, it is one of the
top differentiators of Westwing.
Our business is also constructed with a very strong cash profile. We have neutral to negative net working
capital.
[Audio Gap]
So do not need to prefinance growth with very, very low CapEx. These are only our capitalized technology
costs, and we rent our warehouses.
And we have a strong balance sheet with EUR 65 million of net cash end of last quarter. And we clearly
expect not to use very much of it until we reach permanent cash flow profitability.
Last but not at all least, we have a highly attractive target P&L, targeting around 10% adjusted EBITDA
and 7% free cash flow margin, which mostly will be achieved through operating leverage from growth.
As Sebastian has just indicated cadence, Q2 will be a strong indicator how this can play out at a higher
revenue levels.
So while society is under duress and our business is strongly changing due to the hard work of our team
and the loyalty of our customers, we believe we are set up well for whatever the future may bring. And we
are intent on shaping that future to continue to build a profitably growing company for the benefit of our
customers, our team, our partners and our shareholders.
With that, we're happy to take your questions.
Question and Answer

Operator
[Operator Instructions] And the first question is from Graham Renwick, Berenberg.
Graham Ian Renwick
Joh. Berenberg, Gossler & Co. KG, Research Division
Just 3 questions from me, please. Firstly, as stores start to reopen in some of your markets, namely
Germany, are you actually starting to see that very impressive 80% growth rate start to decelerate? Are
you able to give us sort of a sense directionally on where the momentum has started to abate a little bit
into May.
Secondly, just on the cost of experience, which is very important in this environment, given the very sharp
increase in order volumes, how are you managing the risks of any operational issues in the supply chain
or logistics to ensure that you still are offering a very good customer experience? Because at least on the
marketplace side, you're still reliant on supply and logistics where you have less direct control.
And then lastly, just on marketing, Wayfair had recently talked of some lower advertising costs as off-line
players start to scale back on marketing. So I was wondering if that was something you were also seeing.
Did that help your marketing efficiency in Q1? And would you expect it to in Q2 or beyond?
Stefan Smalla
I think to start with the question on momentum and what we're seeing, so far, we're not seeing any
momentum changes. The reopening of the stores is only going on very selectively in the time frame, I
think, not long enough yet to draw conclusions from that. So what we see is that those stationary offline
stores who opened again also have to deal with difficulty like long waiting lines, map, et cetera. So we
don't think the traffic has not been going back to pre pandemic status. But overall, so just to be very
clear, we're not seeing momentum change for now. And -- but overall, long term, while we believe that
customers will return to offline stores again in the future, we think this will still be a slow process and
might not end up on the level of before. So we believe the acceleration in the online channel share will,
to some degree, remain. Customers have seen how good it works to order from Westwing and believe
most of them will remain. But again, we don't know that and we don't plan with that for now, so we plan
conservatively. But for now, the momentum is the same as it was in April.
In terms of customer experience and how we're dealing with that, I think there's a variety of parts of the
customer experience to start with the immediate kind of technology and what customers experience when
they go to the site, et cetera. That's been very strong. I mean we see strong increase in traffic levels, and
our technology platform has held up very well. So our team has done a very strong job. We've talked long
-- I used to be a CTO in a former life, so Westwing is a true technology company from the core. And we
see that everything is holding up very well. So that part is perfectly fine. And we are constantly working
on improving that further.
Then on the product and availability side, so you have 2 models addressing. One is the daily themes model
where we actually don't hold inventory. So that's actually perfect for the situation because, obviously, we
see some suppliers having stock outs, some suppliers not being able to deliver for some time, then we
really should switch to another supplier. We have more than 5,000 active suppliers. And we just work with
another one. And a lot of the other ones actually have a lot of stock because their other channels are not
working well right now. Their stores are not taking order or their own network is not taking products. So
we do see that a lot of our suppliers actually have stuff that they can offer us at attractive conditions. And
so we're in this daily themes model, where we're niching very well and actually see benefits from that.
On the private label and the permanent assortment side, it's a little bit different. There are some products
which are on demand, like a lot of sofas, where we basically just have to help our suppliers to get, for
instance, new fabric for sofa, where the fabric comes from China, then we help them to switch to a
different fabric. And then we have the products which we directly source, mostly in our private label
partner Westwing Collection from factories. And there we see different stages of countries, right? So for
instance, China has reopened already, and we're receiving orders from China again. So there were some
disruptions, but that's okay. In India, we will see some disruptions, so especially our rags, I highlighted
that before, because even when India is starting to reopen and the monsoon season will start and it's not
so easy to produce rags during this time, so we will see some selective stock-outs there. We're mitigating
that by getting more buffer stocks right now. We're already -- since mid-February, we increased our buffer
stock. We raised it in our last earnings call. And we are also trying to shift around to similar products that
we can use, but there's probably going to be some impact which we, however, will mitigate.
Then the next part would be our warehouses, right? Once the order has come through there because,
like Friday, Q4, just a Christmas season for us is already very strong. Our teams are used to ramping
up capacities and dealing with more shifts, et cetera, quite fast, so that's what's happening. We've been
short-term hiring some more people so our warehouses are dealing very well with this. If, as I said,
growth were to persist, we would need to build some selective additional capacities for Q4, but that would
be done with a mindset of flexibility and low cost because, obviously, we don't know that yet.
Then on the carrier side, so delivering those products, there, we had seen some capacity challenges. I
mean it's obviously very hard for our carrier partners to deliver all that growth immediately and pretty
much unforeseen. So some of them have struggled a little bit in the beginning. But for now, we're seeing
that everything has delivered very well. We have seen some weeks of slightly higher delays but not
significantly.
And then the last but not the least, our customer service operations, where our customers can call if
there's like they want to return something or there's any questions, and that has been ramping up. And
we have ramped up both internally with hiring new team members and adding capacities from external
agencies, so -- which in some other areas of their business don't have as much demand right now. So
overall, we're dealing quite well with it. When you look midterm forward, what's going to be the biggest
challenges. I think the 2 biggest challenges might be the availability of our products, like I just explained,
like rags in India. So there will be selective products where it's going to be hard for a few months for us
to get them. So we're working very hard right now to increase our buffer stock. Our sourcing teams are
ramped up. We actually just put a significant amount of team shifting into availability management and
getting products. But overall, that's still not a major part that would impact our growth even if we were
not able to successfully handle it because, again, in most of our other business were actually be quite
flexible. And the second part going forward, where we have to work is the potential capacity additions in
our operations, if growth were to persist through Q4. So overall, that customer experience is working very
well right now, actually, surprisingly well, but we have to do some more work, and the teams are working
very, very hard at this.
And then the third question was marketing and what do we see. So for us, our marketing model is a little
bit different, right? So we have mostly our organic marketing. And we always said that asset building
and organic marketing is great. And we do see exactly that because social media usage has exploded
through this crisis. And we actually continue to serve our customers on social media but even more in
the engagement higher, we see every metric on social media trending up. Our teams, our marketing
teams are producing content from their homes or our influencer producing content from their homes.
So we have seen that this model actually scales extremely well during this time. On the paid marketing
side, which is really low part of our marketing, I could -- I think we have seen the similar things, but it's
small for us, but I wouldn't dare to speak for the whole market. And actually, because we want to be
cash conservative and are also a little bit worried still about whether the recession in Asia who have a
good -- have a negative impact for us, we've actually taken paid marketing further down. So while there
are theoretical opportunities, we focus on our opportunities very much on organic marketing, which is
producing extraordinary results right now, and it's going to be with us
[Audio Gap]
we gain in our loyalty model, obviously, no matter what happens in the second half of the year.
[Audio Gap]
So I hope that answered the 3 questions.

Graham Ian Renwick
Joh. Berenberg, Gossler & Co. KG, Research Division
Yes. That's very clear. Just one quick follow-up. So you talked there about ramping up quite a few teams in
Q1 like customer service, et cetera. Just coming back to Sebastian's commentary around the drop-through
in Q2, should we be broadly assuming that Q1 SG&A is the same as going into Q2? Or should we actually
assume that there is a little bit of growth in SG&A or other costs given some of the ramp-ups you talked
about?
CFO & Member of Management Board
No, roughly the same because the ramp-up are mostly in operational teams that you would see in
contribution margin.
Stefan Smalla
We might, going forward for Q3 and Q4, slightly increase also in SG&A, but that would be ever so slightly
that I don't think that would be a material effect, and so we would inform you in the next earnings update.
But so far, in our SG&A part, we're not seeing increases. We actually had talked about for the full year in
the cash cost of that, right, because you see accounting effects which are also a little bit confused by D&A,
like the cash cost part of that, we're actually slightly going down because we want to be even leaner than
we've entered the year. But -- so nothing what you asked will happen. We see stable cost for Q2 as well,
and we will only see, if so, very slightly increasing costs in Q3 and Q4.
Operator
The next question is from Christian Salis, Hauck & Aufhäuser.
Hans Christian Salis
Hauck & Aufhäuser Privatbankiers AG, Research Division
Congrats to the great results and the strong current trading, really. So yes, a couple of questions were
already answered, but maybe you could share some color on new customer growth in Q2. So I think in
Q1, new customers were up 6%. So maybe you could update us with the figure, what you've seen in the
last 6 weeks here.
And then secondly, so given that you're obviously seeing a strong operating leverage on the back of this
very strong top line momentum, so would it be fair to assume that you're going to become positive in
terms of adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow already in Q2? That would be very interesting.
Stefan Smalla
Okay. I will answer question one. Sebastian will cover question 2. In terms of new customer growth,
so actually what you refer to, I think, is active customer growth. So that's a metric that we use, which
is basically everyone who has taken at least 1 order in the last 12 months, it's an LTM metric, so it
changes gradually over time. And it went to 986,000 by the end of Q1. And as we had indicated, it went
to more than EUR 1 million already in early April. So that number is going up quite dramatically. And
the interesting thing when you look deeper into it, it's not just new customers, so first time customer
growth accelerating for marketing. As we said, we see tremendous growth from our existing cohorts,
which mathematically means that also our reactivation, so people who had churned in the past, is growing
a lot. So we see growth in those active customer numbers quite dramatically. And that's really a testament
to both how the model works because we always say that there's a lot more people
[Audio Gap]
let me just highlight, I think all the additional revenue multiplied with our current contribution margin
would be what I would consider on top of adjusted EBITDA for this quarter. So I mean the operating
leverage will kick in, in the marketing ratio, as we explained, and the G&A ratio you can reduce those
significantly with the higher top line. So I'm not answering your question, but I think if you do the math,
you will come to a positive result.
And on cash, we always guided our free cash flow to be roughly 3 percentage points lower than adjusted
EBITDA. I think there, we will have a special effect in Q2. With our negative working capital kind of
additional growth, we will see very positive impact in our net working capital. So the 3 percentage point
might not be true for the Q2 because we will most likely see positive working capital effect due to the
growth.
Operator
At the moment, we have no further questions. [Operator Instructions] As we have no further questions, I
would like to hand back to you gentlemen for some closing remarks.
Stefan Smalla
Thank you very much. Thank you very much, everyone, attending the call. I hope you stay healthy. I hope
you stay safe. And talk to you soon very much. Goodbye.
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FQ1 2020 Earnings Call Transcripts

CONSENSUS CONSENSUS CONSENSUS

EPS Normalized (0.40) (1.46) (1.23)

Revenue (mm) 67.50 267.00 279.00

CONSENSUS ACTUAL SURPRISE

Call Participants .................................................................................. 3

Graham Ian Renwick

Hans Christian Salis

Question and Answer

So I hope that answered the 3 questions.

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