Good afternoon. This is the Chorus Call conference operator. Welcome and thank you for joining the Moncler Full Year 2018 Financial Results Conference Call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions.
At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Ms. Paula Durante, Investor Relations and Strategic Planning Director of Moncler. Please go ahead, madam.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for joining our call today on Moncler's full year 2018 financial results. First of all, as usual, let me introduce you to the executive team on today's call: our Chairman and CEO, Mr. Remo Ruffini Luciano Santel, Chief Corporate and Supply Officer Roberto Hacks, Chief Marketing and Operating Officer Andrea Tieggi, Head of Retail and Sergio Boggiovanni, Executive Board Member. Before starting the presentation, I need to remind you that this presentation may contain certain statements that are neither reported financial results nor other historical information.
Any forward looking statements are based on Moncler's current expectations and projections about future events. By their nature, forward looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause results to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by these statements, many of which are beyond the ability of Moncler to control our estimates. I finally remind you that press has been invited to participate in this conference in a listen only mode. Let me now hand over to our Chairman and CEO, Mr. Remo Ruffini.
Good evening, everyone, and welcome to Montclair's full year 2019 results conference call. 1 year has passed since we present the Moncler Genius project and 15 years since I bought a small brand, I believe a lot of it. Today, this brand has reached result he was not expecting when we start this journey. In 2018, Moncler generated more than €1,400,000,000 in revenues, reached €500,000,000 of EBITDA and had in its balance sheet more than €450,000,000 of net cash. Last years, around these days, we were having our Capital Market Day to explain Moncler's future strategy and in particular, the Moncler Genius Evolution.
Now is the time to draw some comments on the project. But before, let me say again something very important. Thank you. Thank you to all our stakeholders, to our shareholders, to our Board, to our supplier and all to all our partners. But in particular, thank you to the over 4,000 Moncler people around the world, which made all this possible.
Thomas Edison said, vision without execution is just an hallucination. I believe we must be really proud of what we achieved. Moncler Genius has been a success. All collection have been highly appreciated. Of course, some of them had wider audience, but with all of them, we have been able to talk to many customers, 50% new to the brand, different in age, attitude and habits.
Moncler Genius is a digital native project. Collection has significantly outperformed online, generating high traffic on our website. In 2018, traffic in monclade.com increased more than 30%, with peak during all Genius launches. It has been our 1st omnichannel exercise. We have been able to coordinate in a full integrated way all our division, all our distribution channel and all our touch point.
We have set our new standards. It has been a superior clienteling tools. Every launch generate high traffic in store. Our client advisor have been able to engage with existing and with the new clients. In sum, Genius created new energy in our brand and made it stronger.
But we can do better. Many things are still to be fine tuned and improve. We need to explain more this project to our clients. We have to work more on the timing of the deliveries and on the advertising phase. We can reinforce all our digital tools to attract new customer and engaging them with the brand.
I know that the world is becoming an even more difficult and volatile place, but I'm confident but I'm confident on Moncler's capacity to continue to do very well. Thank you and let me leave the floor to Roberto and Luciano for more comments. Thank you.
Good evening. Roberto, ex Chief Marketing and Operating Officer. I'm very happy to have the possibility to comment the fantastic results we had 2018. Let's start by the overall result that we had. My comments will all be made at constant exchange rate.
We reached in 2018 a total turnover of EUR 1,420,000,000 which is a +22% compared to 2017. 17. The result per region have been all very positive. All region grow at double digit figures. First comment is on Italy, where the results have been at plus 12% for the full year with a very good last quarter of the year, mainly driven by our retail business.
EMEA in total grew 17% in 2018 with the result driven mainly by the German and the UK market with, as you know, as you are aware, some difficulties on the French market linked to the yellow vest. But despite that, we managed to achieve a double digit growth on the French market also for 2018. Asia has been, as usual, the region that has been driving the growth. Most importantly, they grow at +28%. Here also, in our 3 sub region, APAC, Japan and Korea, we have been able to grow double digits both and they're also in both channels.
Finally, the U. S. Or what we call Americas markets, where we have 2 main markets, which are Canada and U. S. And here also, we have been able to grow double digit in U.
S. And in Canada, both in wholesale and in retail, with a total result for the year of plus 23%. If we look at the result per channel, we first have been the growth have been driven on the retail side by amazing results of 18% comp sales during the year. Big contribution has been also given by the launch of the Genius project in June last year. E commerce has continued to outperform the retail channels with a growth rate which is almost twice the pace of total retail.
And wholesale has achieved the highest growth that we have since we got listed at the end of 2013 with a plus 13% driven by the e tailers, driven by the opening of shop in the shop and driven by the overall Genius project that has also generated a lot of energy in our wholesale channels. I would like to make some comments on the opening we have had last year. In total, we opened 18 doors in retail. In the last quarter, we have had 4 new openings in the O. S, one in Italy, Bologna, one in Switzerland, Lucerne, which is a strong destination for Asian customer.
We opened Prantan Louvre in December, and we opened a new market, Mexico. This is the 3rd market we opened in 2019. You remember probably that we opened the Middle East with a store in Dubai in March, and we opened at the end of August our Norwegian market with a store in Oslo. In total, this has been 18 openings, and we have had 16 openings in wholesale with shop in the shop. I would like to make some comments on the fact that we will report during the course of 2019 a double counting on the OS and on shop in the shop.
You see we had a way to count until end of 2018, department store or in mall as it was single store. What we have been doing in the course of 2017 'eighteen, we have changed the way we manage the stores. And where we had before 3 store managers, for example, in Galeries Lafayette, where we had the corner for the Enfants, for the women and for the men. We have rationalized this through one head, unique head, which is 1 store manager. And we believe according also to the rules and the way this is accounting with other companies in the luxury sector, that will be better to account for just one door when we have multiple store at the same address and with the same department store or mall.
The impact, as you see, is a reduction in the new way of counting of roughly a little bit more than 20 doors when we account with the new accounting method. So if we in the last in the past way of counting, we had 2019 retail stores with the new way of accounting just having one store for one address, we will have 193. And the same similar impact, we have it at wholesale level with shop in the shop where the previous way of accounting, we had 75 shop in the shop. And now having just one store with 1 store manager at one address, we'll have 55 at the end of 2018. We will continue to report these two ways of counting for the full year 2019 and then switching definitively at the end of the year to the new way of accounting for it.
I pass the word to Luciano for the financial comments.
Okay. Thank you, Roberto, and good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for attending our call today. We are now at Page 11, where we report our income statement that shows a top line of EUR 1,400,000,000 already presented by Roberto in full detail. And the gross margin for the first time ever over EUR 1,000,000,000 EUR 1,100,000,000 gross margin with a margin of 77.4 percent, better than the 76.9% we reported last year and not only because of the channel mix as usual, but also because each individual channel reported better, slightly better gross margin. So very healthy gross margin.
Notwithstanding not to forget the negative impact of FX that impacted our top line, as you know, for about EUR 40,000,000 Selling expenses, very, very healthy, unusually better than last year, 30.2% against 30.6%. I say unusually because you know that some expenses include the or mostly the expenses associated with our retail network. And consider that our retail business grew significantly, we could expect a higher percent. But because a strong part of our retail growth came from organic growth from a strong comp that, as you know, is was 18%. This helped our stores to improve their productivity.
G and A, 9%, substantially in line with last year, but with about EUR 20 million more in expenses, all of them invested in our organization to make it stronger and ready for the challenges we face. Marketing expenses, we barely touched the EUR 100,000,000 with a 7% incidence, higher than the 6.7% we spent last year, already planned by the management team and anticipated to the market. Also because within this amount, we include all the communication expenses we incurred in 2018 for the launch, for the implementation of our Genius project. Stock based compensation more or less in line with last year at 2.1% and an EBIT of 29 0.2%, that net of stock based compensation, that is noncash expenses would have been over 31%. Financial results, I will say, in order with a much better control on effects on currencies than last year and the tax is with a very, very low tax rate of 19.3%, much lower than what we planned at the beginning of last year, but in line with what we communicated in November after we signed the Patent Box agreement with our fully controlled subsidiary, Industries SPA.
You may remember that in December 2017, Moncler signed the Patent Box Agreement and 2018 in November also Indusys SPA signed the same the equivalent agreement. Of course, the taxes for 2018 include the benefit for the previous 4 years and this is the reason why tax rate is particularly good. At the end, net income of EUR 332,500,000, 23.4 percent margin and with a growth rate of 1 third, 33% as compared to last year. Last but not least, our EBITDA. EBITDA, probably we report this year EBITDA for the last time after the introduction of the new IFRS 16, we will talk about in a couple of minutes.
EBITDA of EUR 500,200,000, 35.2 percent margin, higher than ever. Okay. Let's go now to Page 12, where we report our CapEx. CapEx, EUR 91,500,000, still in the region of 6%, but higher EUR 20,000,000 higher than last year and also on a percentage basis, a little bit higher. And with expectations that we can anticipate now to the market to spend over EUR 100,000,000 in 2019.
This is because, as you may see looking at the number of 2018 and 2017, that we keep spending a significant amount of money in our retail network. But the segment of CapEx that is growing more significantly is the so called corporate CapEx, which include several projects. One very important in the expansion and automation of our logistic hub in Italy. We anticipated that to the market is a project that is worth in 3 year about EUR 15,000,000 €5,000,000 and about EUR 8,000,000 €9,000,000 of this amount has been posted and spent in 20 Then there are several really several information technology projects and a new omnichannel project, the project to develop our own online platform in Korea first and then we will see that start in 2018 and it is included in this number for a couple of million, but in 2019, the amount we are spending will be much more important. So now let's go now to Page 13, where we report net working capital, still good in the region of 7%, slightly better than last year.
Very strong credit control, very good inventory management. Something to highlight that inventory is growing, is growing significantly as compared to last year. But you may see that a great part of this increase is offset by an increase of payable and this is because the increase in inventory is totally in great part associated with the anticipation of the production cycle related to the fall winter, the upcoming fall winter 2019. So we are ahead as compared to last year, which is very good for our business. Page 14 now, net financial position.
As we anticipated before EUR 450,000,000 with net cash of almost EUR 550,000,000 and the financial debt that, as you know, as you may remember, is not the financial debt with banks, but with our partners in our joint ventures in Japan, in Korea, in Turkey. Cash generation for the year has been very strong EUR 145,000,000 after the distribution of dividends for EUR 70,000,000 and after an important 2 important buyback programs for EUR 148,000,000 Something important to highlight is that the Board held today is proposing we propose to our shareholder meeting a distribution of dividends on the earnings of 2018 for EUR 100,000,000, 30 percent payout and EUR 0.40 dividend per share. Page 15, we report the balance sheet. I don't have any comment, but of course, if you have questions, we will answer your question later. Page 16, cash flow statement.
The cash flow statement is the summary of all positive events of the year. Business wise, strong EBITDA, very good working capital, but also the tax benefit I mentioned before is particularly visible in the line change in current and non current assets, where we report EUR 48,000,000 positive as compared to the EUR 22 1,000,000 negative last year with a total amount of EUR 70,000,000, all of them, the vast majority of them, associated with the tax benefit of the Patent Box we said before for both companies. At the end, the free cash flow of EUR 362,000,000, 50 percent higher than last year. And again, the dividends, as we said before, at the end, change in net financial position of EUR 145,000,000. Normally, with this slide, we end the presentation, but this year, for the first time, we have one last slide, which is the impact, the estimated impact of the IFRS 16 revision we are talking about in accounting principle.
You all know very well that will take effect in January, January 1, 2019, but we believe that may be helpful for you, for the market to understand how much would have been the impact of the new accounting principle on our results. The big impact, as you know, as expected, is on our net financial position. That is EUR 500,000,000 which practically totally resets our positive net cash position and with the positive impact on our operating margin for about EUR 10,000,000. The impact of our net result is slightly negative, but it's not material. We are talking about possibly a couple of €1,000,000 Okay.
We are done with the presentation. Thank you for your attention, and we are ready now for your questions.
Excuse me. This is the Coruscalo conference operator. We will now begin the question and answer session. The first question is from Alain Bloor Bismuth with HSBC. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, good evening. Annoure Bissnes from HSBC. First of all, congratulations for your great results. So I have three questions.
So retail was up 26 percent at constant FX in full year 2018 with comps up 18%, implying 8% contribution from New Space in full year. I know that you do not comment on the quarterly comps performance, but it implies comps up 11% in Q4 and 7% contribution from new stores. I'm wondering, do you still plan a low double digit contribution from new space in 2019, as you mentioned in the past? My second question is about the performance at the beginning of the year. So the comp basis is particularly challenging in H1.
And I'm wondering if you can give us what are the initiatives, especially the Genius Capsule collection that you are planning to launch that you have already launched or planning to launch in Q1? And some colors about the current trading and especially during the Chinese New Year? And my third question is about the number of store openings that you plan for full year 2019. Thank you very much.
Okay. Hi, Alor. About the space contribution, you know that there is some mechanics. I mean, our sales contribution was in 2018 more or less 10%, 11%. But the difference between our retail growth of 26% and our comp is 8%, because as you know, our comp is related only to our regular stores.
Outlet stores performed pretty well, but less well than our regular stores. And this is the reason of this small difference. For the future, for 2019, our own plan is still in the region of 10%, maybe 8%, 9%, 10%. Of course, it is now a little bit premature. But honestly, the way we plan new openings is more or less in the region of the number I told you, so 9% to 10%.
Good evening, Anne Laurence. Your question regarding the Q1, as you are all aware, we have a very high base of comparison with the great result we had in Q1 2019. We have also an impact of shorter Chinese New Year this year because it has been anticipated by 11 days. So you have an impact which is shorter than last year. It's like if we had to move, let's say, the Christmas time for Europe 10 days ahead.
And on top, we have a much warmer winter. This notwithstanding, we are very happy about the results that we have had in these first 7 weeks of the year, especially the result in China Mainland. As you know, our Chinese market is at 98% local clientele, and we have been growing at double digit growth in China. We have had also good growth in Europe, but to a lesser extent, with France still suffering from the impact of the Yellow West, where we had, unfortunately, since the beginning of the year, every single weekend, lower traffic in our Parisian store, especially in the store we have in Faubour that is being so close to the Palaisse that the street is closed. So there we are suffering, but we hope that this is going an issue that is going to be solved in the next few months.
Same for the UK, where we are with the Brexit that is in the air, there is also a little bit less traffic of tourists. This being said, we are very happy about the 1st few weeks of the year. Regarding the number of openings that we have in 20 19, maybe to give it some flair, I think we are still in the same area of 15 openings of the U. S, 15 renovation and 15 shop in the shop for wholesale. But maybe to give you some flare of what we intend to do during the year.
First of all, we had signed an agreement with 1 of the main distributor we have in the U. S. With Bloomingdale's to move the store we have in New York on the 59th Avenue from wholesale into concession. This is the first time this is happening for Montclair in the U. S, and this will be followed by 4 openings we have with them on the ground floor in New Jersey with Whitwell Field, also in Los Angeles, in Southcott Plaza and also in Washington and Salt Lake City.
I think this is the first good move for Montclair to go ground floor and to move from wholesale into concession. 2nd point is that we already opened 2 stores in February this year. One is a flagship store that we opened in Singapore. It is the one of the largest store we have in Asia together with the store we have in Ginsa in Japan and the one of Canton Road. And we opened a second store in Sydney, in Westfield.
This is the 2nd store we have in Australia after the opening. We had 1 year a little bit more than 1 year ago in Scharstone in Melbourne. Melbourne, where we extended already the store because it's working extremely well. And the good news is that for the 1st months of February, the store of Sydney is working as well as the one we have in Melbourne. Then also in terms of store relocation and expansion, it's also something that we're working very, very strongly on this because these are also projects that are bringing a lot to the brand.
We are going to open a flagship store in Germany, our 1st flagship store in Germany with a store that will be opening in September this year in Munich. This is a relocation or an extension of our store. We are going to quadruple the size of the store. And we have also been able to manage finally an expansion with our 2 main department store in Japan with Isetan both for men and women and also in Ginza with Matsuiya where we're going to double the space. Maybe a last point, Anur, on the as you know, we said when we had the Capital Market Day a very clear direction regarding opening in airports.
We had 4 airports at the end of 2016. We closed 2018 with 13 doors, half of them being in wholesale, the other half being in retail. And for this year, we are planning between 8 to 10 openings. 2 of them will be in retail. The rest will be in wholesale.
So we find this also we have the first results of 2013 of the new openings are really good, and we can't very much answer on the additional growth that this store will be bringing.
Thank you.
The next question is from Elena Mariani with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Hi, good evening, gentlemen, and congratulations on these great set of results. I also have three questions, please. The first one for you, Roberto. I was wondering where you are right now on all the KPIs that you're monitoring in the retail network. I know that you track units per transaction, store traffic, the average ticket size and so on.
Where are you versus your targets? And how much space do you think you have to further improve the store productivity, which has already reached an incredible level? That's question number 1. Question number 2 for Luciano. It's about the inventory.
Could you clarify a little bit what you've just said before about the growth in your inventory position? You said that it was about the anticipation of the production cycle. And what does it mean exactly? And why this year is looking so different versus the previous year where instead your inventory control was very tight and you seem to be happy about the previous strategy. So what has changed and what does it mean ahead of the upcoming months?
And the third question perhaps for Mr. Ruffini. I was very curious to hear what you think about the competitive environment given that you've been so successful, the high end outerwear category is growing very nicely. It feels like this has attracted new entrants into the end products in the outward category. So how do you feel you can maintain your differentiated positioning versus the others?
And what is the key to success in your view for the coming years? Thank you.
Good evening, Helena. Thank you for your question. It's Robert. I'm going to comment on the retail KPIs. You are rightly saying that something that we are monitoring on we have the results on a daily basis.
We look at them very deeply on a monthly basis and it's something that is discussed with the retail managers and so the President of the region, where also it's part of their management objective of the year. So they are really driven towards performance and also increasing, let's say, the satisfaction of our clients. Maybe first, before we go to really retail KPIs, I think there is one thing that we are monitoring that is a little bit overall is what we call the repeat purchase. Repeat purchase is something where I think before we really started doing clientele, we were quite weak. We were below 30% on repeat purchase during the same year for clients of Montclair.
This has been increasing now and the impact on the turnover was at 37% of the total turnover driven in 2016 was driven by repeat purchase and we have been able to go above 40%. So we gained in just the 3 years more than 10 points between 2015 to 2018. I think this is a sign of all the efforts and energy that has been put into the store to loyalize the clients and make them come back. And clearly also what we have been doing in terms of action with the launch of Genius, That is also a fantastic opportunity to do clienteling, to drive our client, to do preview with them, has been also a strong factor of increased loyalty of our consumer. Regarding what is more related to retake APIs, as you know, we are obsessed by our sales density.
So something also that we are monitoring. And here, we have been able to further grow this sales density in 2018. And also in the month of December, where I was personally I had some doubts that we could be doing even better and in December was another record month in terms of sales density. Regarding unit per transaction, in 2014, we were at more or less 1. So people were entering Moncler to buy the outerwear.
We still push them very much and we do whatever possible to keep the let's say, the outerwear as being the iconic element of Moncler. But as you know, we have been able to grow the other category a lot in the course of the past 3 years. They quadrupled. If you remember the turnover we had in 2014, we had €690,000,000 We are at 1.420 now and the weight of the non auto ware grew from 12 to 24. So this grew where we multiply the non auto ware by 4 has been helping to drive the unit per transaction is now at 1 above 1.3 with the aim.
Our aim is to be close to 1.4 next year. And I think there are further possibility the more this category will become visible in the store, the more we will sell. So clearly, we see an uplift in terms of unit per transaction. The good news is that we have been able to drive and to grow the unit per transaction while increasing the average selling price and the average transaction price, which is also something that we consider as being very, very positive.
And if I may add one thing. Can you remind us of where you were in terms of sales density and where were you at the end of 2018?
At the end of 2018, we are at €36,000 per square meter, a little bit more than €36,000. And 2 years ago, we were at €33,000. And we always say that our objective was be above €30,000 per square meter. We have been able in the course of the last 3 years to increase by 20%.
And you see additional room to grow from this level?
Never say never. I think it's a very challenging figure already to replicate. All the efforts that we are doing are there to maintain this very high level of sales density. We all hope to be again surprised and to be able to maintain or even to further increase it.
Hi, Elena. This is Luciano. And thank you for your question. That allows me to clarify a very important point. No change at all in our inventory strategy.
No change at all in our inventory results. You know, Elena, that our inventory management has been very, very efficient over the past few years. And the efficiency in managing inventory translates in a KPI, which is the sell through that you know very well. Our sell through last year for the current or for the previous fall winter season was over 70% as much as it is now over 70% this year. So we are very, very cautious in planning our inventory.
And again, I mean, this story, you know very well. We prefer to run the risk to miss some sales rather than ending up with a big leftover. Having said that, what I said before is that this year, better than last year because last year, we started the production cycle for following 2018 later. This year, we started earlier in December, in November actually for the raw material purchases, but also we started some production already in December, which again, this is very healthy for our business. So the additional inventory you see in our balance sheet, of course, in part is driven by the additional business for the current full winter 2018 seasons, spring 2019, but also in part is associated with the upcoming fallwinter2019 season.
Last year, it was very, very small immaterial amount. This year is much higher because of what I said. And this is the reason why you see also a high amount in the variables because all these raw materials inventory, which is fresh, which is new, which is good, just to clarify that, and was still at that time to be paid. So it was still in our accounts payable. So again, important to clarify, we are still we maintain still the same prudent strategy in managing our inventory.
Thank you. This is very clear.
Elena, talking about the competition. Honestly, if you're talking if you think about the specialist, we don't have much. For sure, the few we have, they're growing very fast, but I think they take a totally different street than our strategy. And the rest, if you think about the luxury market, everyone have outerwear in the collection, more or less as before. For sure, I respect everyone.
I really don't feel big competition. I think the big competitor is ourself. We have to make the best strategy, the best product, the best quality and I'm very confident of that. Talking about the future, we feel that, as you know, we changed the business almost 1 year ago. Changed the strategy.
We changed the way to work. And honestly, after 1 year, I'm very satisfied. I feel a strong energy in the company. I feel strong energy in my store. I feel a strong energy for my customer.
And I really feel it's like a new company. I really feel is we are like a start up and everything new, everything everybody is very I feel is very happy. Again, I really feel every day in the office and when I travel in all our store a lot of energy. Honestly, I don't want to be pretentious, but I feel again that as a product and as a brand perception, we really have in that something very, very strong. Genius help us a lot to demonstrate to the market we are really able to make different product, different ideas, different really have the possibility to talk with different generation.
We really attract a lot of young kids that we're always looking for because I think energy came from the young market. And we have to work for sure in quality. Quality is really our one of the first point we always have in mind for sure in the product. I think we can have better and better product. My quality for us is quality 3 60 degrees.
I think quality, we're looking for quality every day, everywhere in the company, in the people, in the stores. And I think quality is really what we have in front of us every day. In distribution, again, I feel we have very good distribution, both in retail and wholesale. Working in the last 10 years in retail, as you know, we try to do we try to find always the best location. We have some old stores, but we relocated.
We started, as you know, 3 years ago, 2 years and a half ago to relocate stores. We tried to keep the location or try to find even better location. And we really feel that we have now a very strong chain, right number of doors, especially in Asia where we have 30, 33 doors in China, I think is a very good number. So we don't have to grow much more. I think we have the best place, the best location.
It's not it's sometimes best to relocate in some department stores and some mall in the best in better location. We find also I think a new language in the digital world that is something, as you know, especially not only for sale in e commerce, not for talking with the customer, I think today is very important. We have to fine tune. We have to do much more. But I think this type of communication to talk with the customer every month, every day, to have new editorial project, to have new ideas, to really stimulate the customer in this way, to attract them every month into the stores, I think is really a new way to work.
It's for sure a new way to work in the luxury market. I feel Gini was something strong for our company. Thank you.
Great. Thank you very much.
The next question is from Luca Fokker with Bernstein. Please go ahead.
Yes, good afternoon. Talking about Genius, I wonder Roberto, if you could possibly go through the impact on the revenue drivers, especially the performance, the retail performance KPIs that you're looking at and the impact of Genius in particular. I'm toying with the idea that we're actually looking at a relatively subdued effect of what this idea could generate considering the weather. I have the idea that it could have been much stronger and that you're producing fantastic results even with weather, which is slightly at first or quite at first for your product. So interested to know what could be impact of Genius on traffic and how this has been benefiting the average bucket size or the frequency and the overall traffic flows?
And the second question, I was wondering whether you could potentially elaborate a bit more about the demand dynamics by nationality looking at Chinese consumers and American consumers in particular, but also the European consumers trying to move away from the geography, which is sometimes difficult for us to reconcile. And thirdly, I thought the preamble today was very appropriate and very well deserved. What you achieved as a team with Montclair and what Mr. Ruffini has achieved is outstanding. Is there a more clear method or is there a remorogenic method that could potentially be applied elsewhere?
Good evening, Luca. Thank you for raising the question. I think you almost know the answer because I think we had the opportunity when I was visiting you in Paris to have an in-depth discussion in Ingenious. But thank you for giving me the opportunity to re explain what is the objective behind Genius, what we are trying to achieve. First of all, we always mention that this is a fantastic communication opportunity to become, and as Remo Ruffini was saying, it's the 1st digitally native project that we have.
So clearly, we can talk about the impact on turnover and so on, but there are some figures I would like to share with you, and this is mainly driven by each pause that has been done regarding Genius. The number of impression we had in 2018, with impression I mean the number of post visualization, increased by +43 percent last year. The number of reach by reach, I mean unique visitors to the Montclair web site increased by +59 percent last year. I think this would not have been possible if we had a traditional way of communicating with our consumer. I think this is an energy that is coming every single month through different drop.
We had already 1 first drop this Q1, which was 1952 at the beginning of the month of January. And just yesterday, we had the launch of the new collection of Simon Rocha, which is also driving additional traffic in the stores and also on our website and on the website also of retailers because we are leveraging also both channels, retailers, our wholesale channel with the best stores and also our stores. We had a fantastic presentation this year. Again, I would say, after the presentation last year of the Paris Solerci Intiela, the new collection that we presented with 2 new stylists, Richard Quinn and Alex, had a tremendous success when we did our show last week in Milano. We had almost 5,000 people attending the show.
I think it has been the show with the largest attendance in Milano on the Milano Fashion Week. We did the opening on the 1st day. And it was also a fantastic idea and initiative that Mr. Ruffini had to say why don't we open why it would be fantastic for Moncler to be the 1st brand to open a show to public. As you know, usually when you have a show, it's really meant for professional people from the luxury industry or from the fashion industry.
And we opened it on Sunday. And on Sunday, we had more than 10,000 people coming to see the show that we had close to the Milano railway station. And the fantastic thing about this was that I think 80% of the people that were coming, they were proud to show their Moncler jackets. Some of them had even vintage jackets from the 80s or the 90s and came to attend the show being very proud. Now this being said in terms of traffic, and as you know, we say it's a communication project.
This being said, we are not against doing some business. And we said and we maintained that our objective is to be at with a figure that is close to it's a high single digit growth, not far from 10%. Each time we have a drop, we increase the traffic in the stores in the few days following the launch of each collection. And as you can imagine, this has been something that was compared to the way we were doing things before because now it's a launch at the very same date throughout the world with support on digital. This has been additional traffic that we have been generating to the store.
So we can say that overall, this business has been generating between 5% to 8% additional traffic on a worldwide basis in 2018. Starting from June, now we have in 2019 the full year effect because we started from very beginning of January, while last year it was starting from June. In terms of average ticket, the average ticket is slightly higher for the collection of Genius. This always depends on the collection. Of course, Saint Simon Rocha, for example, was more expensive.
When we had Palme Angel, it was slightly below, but on average, it's slightly above the average price of the main collection of Moncler. Unit per transaction is very similar. We are at the same range of the main collection. The other things that is positive for us on this Genius project that we have seen that the clients coming to buy and see the collection of Genius, 50% of them are also interesting to buy into the main collection. And we had also on new clients that discover Moncler for the first time through Genius, already some repeat purchase that will be in the range of 20% to 25% that are going to come back to buy either a Genius collection or the main collection.
So I think on top of generating a lot of energy in the store, fantastic tools to communicate, higher leverage on the social media. It has always been also been a generator of traffic and business for us. FEMI. Luca, your question was related to the full year 2018 or it was more related to the current trend?
Well, if you could comment on both, that would be great.
Okay. Well, in 2018, the two regions with the highest growth have been Japan and APAC, especially Mainland China. You know that we have a limited number of stores in China. We have 31 stores. So there is still a strong demand and people eager to find Moncler.
So these two nationality has been growing over proportionally, but not so much above and slightly above the average of the rest of the nationality. What has been interesting in 2018 compared to the previous year is that we have been able to grow our business mainly with locals or more with locals. The weight of locals increased in 2019 compared to the growth that we had, which was also double digit on the tourists, inside region and outside region. So I think this is also probably one good sign of all the initiatives we have been doing in terms of clienteling, where we are able to grow the business also with our locals with a strong impact on Italian on the Italian, on the Korean, on the Japanese and the mainland Chinese, but also with the Americans that have been growing in the U. S.
Market and in Canada. This trend at the beginning of this year continues. So we see a trend, which is more a growth with locals compared to tourists. If you have been looking at the result of Global Blue, there is a slight decrease of traffic of tourists in Europe. This being said, we have been positive with Chinese tourism.
But we have seen Chinese tourism that has been more moving in their neighboring country, especially Singapore, also supported for us by the adoption of the flagship store of Marina Bay and also to Australia and to a lesser extent to Hong Kong and to Taiwan.
Hi, Luca. I don't think we have a formula. I think a couple of years ago, we felt that the world was changing in our industries. We feel that we felt that it was quite boring when we walk on the luxury street around the world. And actually, we said we have to do something, we have change something, we have to attract new customer, we have to talk with new generation, young generation, we have to talk with old generation.
And we're starting how we can change our business model. And as you know the story, we 1 years ago, we changed everything, more or less everything. We changed the culture in the company. And we say we have to give different ideas, different way to work and give more energy to our customer. We started the project and everything in 1 year is changed basically.
And I think today we can attract new customer, we can talk with new customer, we do new generation, we can have a project every month, we can have editorial project every month, so that are able to talk with the customer every day. I think this is think this is the key that why the brand have I think today very strong energy. Having said that, I think we are quite a good team. We did incredible good job in some area of the company. Supply chain did incredible job and surprised also myself.
We delivered every project in the same day at the same hour in every of our stores in all our partner retailers, wholesalers. The marketing area did quite a good job. I think we are able to organize all the project around the world. We have still a lot of things to do. We have a lot of fine tuning to do.
We feel we are in the right street for the luxury market.
Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.
The next question is from Janet Kloppenburg with JJK Research. Please go ahead.
Good evening, everyone, and congratulations on a great quarter and a great year. I just had a couple of follow on questions. I was wondering if you could talk about the size of the new store openings for 2019, given the success of Genius and the newer categories and the flagship stores, I'm wondering if the square footage per store is moving higher. And my second question is on the gross margin opportunity as we look out into 'nineteen 'twenty. If we could see further expansion there, what should we expect?
And lastly, I just wondered about the Genius program on two fronts. One, how some if you could talk a little bit about the performance of the high fashion designer products versus the more commercial fragment granola lines? And also if the flow of the product will be relatively similar in 2019 versus 2018? Thank you.
Good evening, Janice. Thank you for your question. Regarding the size of the store, the average size of the store currently is at 160, which is higher than what we had 4 years ago. We were at 110. So the new openings have been driving the size further up the size of the store.
Each time we do relocation, and we are talking about 15 relocation, we try whenever it's possible not only to go and enter the look and feel of the store and the material and the design, but always to take the opportunity either to relocate in a better location or to expand. This is what is driving us. So on that side, you can expect some slight higher for the relocation and some of the new openings of a larger store. We have Singapore that is a larger store. We have Munich that is also a flagship that is going to be a larger store.
At the same time, this will be in the way slightly mitigated by the push we had at airport level. We are planning between 8 to 10 openings in airports. And we know that, for example, for airports, it's difficult to reach an average size of 160. So we're expecting a slight growth of the average size of the store, but not to the extent of a double digit, probably something that is going to drive us to 165 to 170 square meter for 2019 on average.
Yes. This is Luciano. About your question on gross margin, I mean honestly, I mean as I said before, you know that our gross margin in 2018 was particularly strong. And I'm not talking about only the gross margin we report, but also the gross margin for each individual channel, which was even a little bit better than last year when it was already very good. So opportunity to further increase the gross margin may come only by the increase of the retail business.
But if you consider that we reported a 70 7.4% gross margin and our retail margin is more or less 80%, 81%. I mean, even if our retail business should be 100% of our business, the maximum we can have is the reason of 80%. So honestly, I don't think that we can expect material significant expansion on our gross margin also because, again, in 2018, inventory management, everything was particularly good.
Okay. Great.
And coming back is Roberto regarding the collection launch in 2019. Of course, we will have more collection launch that we had in 2018, but just by the fact that we have started with this monthly drop only in June last year. We did the presentation in February and we did the first launch in June. This year, we are benefiting from having had the show in September of the spring summer collection. So we have started already at the beginning of 1st week of January with the launch of 19 52.
We have now the second one with Russia. There will be 3 other launch March, April May before going into I don't want to call it routine because each time it's very exciting for us and we are far from having this as a routine. But there will be 12 launch of collection this year compared to the 7 launch we had in 2019. Grenob is one of the key pillars on which we are really counting because it's representing really the DNA of the brand. We further continue to develop also the renovation and relocation of our resort store in the mountains.
And I'm happy also that we'll have now the opportunity to open an additional one in Valdezaire. We continue to work also with ski schools, equipping new ski schools that are addressed in Montclair because I think that for all these new people coming to the ski and there are a lot of new agents that are coming to Europe or to Japan and are initiate to ski, it's nice to see that the reference for them, which is the school teacher is dressed in Montclair. It's something that we are going to continue. Regarding the Genius launch, the objective like for last year is also to have us, at a given point in time, all these collections under the same roof in what we call the Art of Genius. Last year, we had one in New York in Seoul and one in Aoyama in Japan.
We're working and there were also a certain number of shop in the shop that presented the full collection in October. We have decided this year because we have new collection arriving and the new designer coming a little bit later to have the same approach with shop in the shop well, let's say, with a pop up store, but that will start on the 7th November and touching a little bit more the peak season. And we are planning to have 2 new households in here that still needs to be confirmed, but the intent is to have 1 in Europe this time and to have again something in Japan because it's something that has been working extremely well in 20 18.
The
next question is from Omar Saad with Evercore.
Great year, another great year. Congratulations.
Omar, sorry, Omar, we don't really hear you well. Can you just talk a little bit closer to the mic?
Absolutely, absolutely. Sorry about that. Congratulations on another great year. It's great to see. I wanted to ask, it looked like in the Q4, the Asia revenue line slowed down a bit.
I mean, it's still very strong and a great year, but you saw this huge acceleration in Italy and Europe as well in the Q4. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what the underlying dynamic is going on. Is that tourism shifts or Chinese tourist shifts going on? And then in a related question, have you seen big changes in Chinese tourist consumption patterns since some of the luxury VAT tax changes went into effect last summer? And then I guess my last question would be around the supply, maybe a little bit of an update on the supply chain, how you're evolving and especially with a year of genius under your belt, adjusting the supply chain for those types of collections, presumably more in the future.
How are you thinking about the supply chain the way it's set now? Thank you.
Good evening, Omar. It's Roberto, and thank you for your congratulation. Regarding some of the assumption you had in your question, I don't have exactly the same reading. The Italian market grew. In fact, it accelerated in the last quarter because we grew at 26% in the last quarter.
So we don't see you have not seen any slowdown. If any, it was an acceleration on the Italian market, especially with the local clients. Regarding China, but also the other country, what we always said is that what is driving the performance for us at the end of the year is the sales density. And it's the first time that we overpassed the €80,000 per square meter in December in our retail network. And I think we will all be dreaming to grow 20%, 25%, but I think that when you're at €80,000 per square meter on average, you are number 1 in the industry.
Or if not number 1, it's number 2. But we're really and we are ready to take the challenge for December. So we know that our opportunity to further grow our sales density is to work on the 1st 3 quarters of the year. So the base of comparison of December is very, very high. So I don't read that as a deceleration, but more as the fact that as we are best performing, there is a kind of saturation effect in our store.
And I honestly, I was not expecting to have a double digit growth in December in our sales density. I think this is all the good work that we have been doing to create the desire for the brand. I think creating the excitement, creating the emotion of the brand is what is driving this company. And I'm also very, very happy about the performance of our people in the store that are there every day and have been really outperforming, in my opinion, in the last months of the year.
Understood. So I
mean go ahead Luciano.
Are you okay with the question to Roberto?
Sure. Yes, sure.
Okay. So Omar, about supply chain, I mean, you made a point. Supply chain, of course, is very important, extremely critical for everyone, but specifically to implement and to make this kind of project, business project happen. As we said before, we are very happy about how the supply chain responded to this project. That was really a change in our culture, in our methodology to implement production.
But I mean, it we made it. It was very successful. We have really, as our Chairman did, to thank our people because they themselves, I think, made it happen and made the difference. Having said that, we keep investing in our supply chain. But the most important investments are not financial investments and this would be much easier honestly, not only because we have cash, we have money, but the most important investment in our supply chain, which is much more difficult, difficulties are the investment in the culture.
And as you know, a few years ago, we have invested a small amount of money, but a big effort in our own factory in Romania, that factory that was still is a manufacturing factory. Now it is really a technological hub where we develop a technology that is then spread over the regions where we make production in 3rd party factories. And this is something very important and it's a long journey. I mean, we have some never ending story, but we keep investing in culture, in developing new people, new methodologies, new technologies. Also another important piece of this mechanism is the size of our production capacity that to respond to our growing volumes is something that we have to look after permanently.
And this is something that is not easy. Again, it's not easy, but it's something that we are totally, totally under control. So again, to give you a simple answer, very difficult, but we are totally aware about the difficulties. And I mean, all our supply chain team and not only also the strategic team is looking after this point.
Thank you.
I think we have time sorry, I just interrupted. I think we have time for one follow-up question
The next question is from Susie Tibaldi with UBS. Please go ahead. Hi, good evening. Thank you for taking my question. I have 3, please.
I wanted to ask with Genius now, clearly, you have you're attracting more and more younger consumers. So I was wondering how your consumer base is changing? What's if you can give an indication of the for example, the percentage of sales to millennials? Secondly, on the wholesale, clearly, Q4 was very strong. I guess some of that was driven by the online e tailers.
And I was wondering if that's really something that you're seeing growing really fast, if you can give some color around that. And then lastly, still related to the e commerce, I was wondering if you can give an update on your progress, both with Tmall and also with the pilot in South Korea. Thank you.
Good evening, Susie. Thank you for your question. I'll start with the first one with the question related to Genius. In the choice we made of the different stylists, we wanted to touch not only millennials, but to touch all segments of the database and every single designer is coming with his own universe that is talking to different people and this diversity that we like in the indigenous project. This being said, some of the studies that we have been choosing are driving younger generation.
And if I make a comparison because it's too early to have an impact on the global database, But if we just look at the, let's say, the demographics of the Genius Consumers, we have a higher penetration on the millennials, which is to the extent of 40% to 44%. This is really changing from each time there is a launch, depend 1952 is younger. Simon Rocha is now that we are launching now is slightly older. But the demographic has shifted to a little bit more younger generation. And we have with the new stylist, especially with Alex, again, somebody that will drive additional millennials to our stores when it will be launched later on this year.
Regarding the wholesale, the performance of the last quarter was very good. There was a strong demand also from the U. S. Market to have some anticipation regarding the springsummer collection because of the very high level of sales through that we have with the fallwinter. The performance is driven partly by the very good performance of the retailers, but also by the further expansion that we have with the shop in the shop and also by the expansion, the opening that we have at the airport with the airports because as you know, the business model in airports is not defined by brand, is defined by the choice of the airport to have either an operator or to work directly with brand.
The reality is of this market is that 2 third of the airports they are driving, they are working with operators. So this is also further driving the growth of the wholesale. The growth that we have seen at this 13% has been an exceptional growth, very, very strong growth. And it has been driven by the very performance we had also in terms of sales through in 2019. And we have, of course, retailers that are growing at a pace that is above 30%.
So clearly, this is helping. We take advantage and we continue our selection of doors and reduction of number of doors that we have in wholesale. This does not mean that we are not opening new ones. I think we are now also in thanks to Genius in more edgy distributors since now more than 1 year. But in total last year, we closed more than 100 doors.
We are now below 1400. We were at 1500 the year before. So the plus 13% has been done despite the closure of more than 100 doors in 2018. I give maybe the answer and Luciano, feel feel free also to comment on the approach on the e commerce. The project internally, the code name of the project is 1.
The project for Korea, it's advancing very well. I think this is another initiative that is driving a lot of energy in the company. This is being helped and driven today by our Head of Omnichannel because we changed also our structure to be more focused on this omnicanality. And also thanks to the arrival and the person that joined the company, Chief Digital Officer 4 months ago, that is also helping us to drive the development of the e commerce for Korea. The launch is foreseen at the beginning of the 2nd semester of this year in 2 phases with a full implementation of omnichannel before the end of the year.
Regarding China, we are, of course, assessing the different possibility of further developing our presence online in China. We have strengthened the collaboration that we have with WeChat and with the mini website in order to drive, let's say, the development of our online business in China. TIMOL is also part of the assessment, but we really want to focus on something that is going to help us and we plan to launch the omni channel with our website before the end of this year. We you're probably aware, but we launched what we call light omnichannel with return in store, with exchange in store, with click from store, which we believe a lot in Europe in June this year. We have had the full rollout of the 75 stores we have in Europe in 2018, and now we're working for the launch.
And the pilot is now in the U. S, and we plan after that to launch in Japan, Korea with our own website and China also before the end of this year.
Great. Thank you very much. Ms. Florenta, I give you back the floor for your final remarks. Thank
you. Very briefly, first of all, thank you very much for your participation and for all your interesting questions. I'm sure some of them has some leftover questions. So we are at your disposal anytime. Please call us.
Myself and the IR team will be available. We thank you, and good night to all of you.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining. The conference is now over and you may disconnect your telephones.