Good morning, everyone. Nice to see all at the Esprinet Q3 2024 Results Conference call. Please note that this webinar is being recorded, and after the call, the podcast, together with the presentation, will be posted on the Esprinet website in the investor section. During the speech, your lines will be on listen-only mode, but at the end, there will be a Q&A session. Please note again that this presentation contains forward-looking statements, so I would like to draw your attention to the regulation note on page two regarding the information contained within this document. I'm Giulia Perfetti, Investor Relations and Sustainability Manager of Esprinet. With me is Alessandro Cattani, CEO of Esprinet, and I will now turn the call over to Alessandro to present and comment with you the Q3 2024 results. Alessandro, over to you.
Thanks, Giulia, and welcome everybody for this presentation. We are out of the Q3 and well into Q4, by far the most important quarter for the season and for our company, and generally speaking, for the market. So, a couple of highlights on the first nine months. Q3 was a strong quarter in terms of market demand, as well as our performance in the market. The ICT market recovery, which was forecasted by the analysts, is indeed happening. We saw a change in the speed of growth, not only of Italy, which was already performing pretty well in the first two quarters, but Spain as well turned into positive territory after a very challenging first quarter and, let's say, sluggish second one. We have accelerated sharply our growth and consolidated our leadership in the southern region.
This is particularly true if we look at our gross sales, which were up 8%. Net sales after IFRS 15 and revenue recognition application was up 11%. What is particularly interesting is our really, really good performance in Solutions and Services, where we grew 24%. We are getting market share at really a great speed, and we are very pleased at what we're seeing. I think we are paving the way for very strong, very strong years moving forward in terms also of profitability. The screen segment has been very, very good as well in terms of revenue performance. The real reason here is that last year we lost share, but this year we have been able to grow again, benefiting more than our competitors of the recovery and the demand of PC, which is up and running.
And what is nice to see is that the retail channel eventually showed good resilience after very challenging quarters, things sort of stabilizing. We had very good operating cost control, and that led to a good profit performance, notwithstanding the pressure on sales and especially on margins that we had on the consumer electronics segment. The quarter would have been really great if it were not for the consumer electronics segment, where we had a really challenging quarter, not only in terms of sales, but of gross profit margins as well. There was a lot of pressure compared to last year, but generally speaking, in TVs, in white goods, in accessories, and mobility. Cash conversion cycle is down eight days against Q3 2023 and flat sequentially. We are into the last quarter.
We are seeing very good momentum, and I'll comment later on, and in the market and us within the market. So we think we should be able to close the year with a good performance in terms of cash conversion cycle. Net Financial Position is negative by EUR 344 million. We are up sequentially against June as well as against 2023. There's a higher level of average invested working capital because we are growing in terms of revenues, and sequentially, the cash conversion cycle is flat on average, but on a quarterly basis, pure quarter basis numbers, as always, worsened in Q3, adding up into the last quarter of the year. We normally pile up inventory for the Black Friday and Christmas season.
We have also to point out that we are consolidating for the first time in the IFRS 16, the lease of the new warehouse that we built in Tortona, in Italy. That accounts alone by roughly EUR 39 million of higher IFRS 16 lease. Okay, that's for the highlights. If we move forward to the following slide, we can see the sales evolution more in detail. We basically outperformed the market everywhere. In Italy and Spain, the market in Q3 grew 2% and 4%. That's a great piece of information. You can see it on the right side. I draw your attention to the dynamic. Italy was down, the market was down 3% in Q1 and then up 1.2% and then 2.5%. Spain, - 12%, -3.8%, + 3.9%. And forecasts for Q4 by analysts are pretty positive. Portugal keeps on performing pretty well as a market.
It's a small market compared to the others. We are talking about roughly EUR 1.5 billion against EUR 9 billion of Italy as a total market, and you see more or less the same dynamic all across the regions. Italy is recovering in the Solutions space. Spain as well, even though it's still negative, mostly affected by the lack of government spending. In Spain, the government budget, especially the one related to the central government, has not been yet approved. So they are working still on temporary budgets, and therefore the expenses there are, if not frozen, definitely constrained. Portugal is doing fine. All in all, you can see a market that is moving up, and forecasts for the rest of the year, as well as the next years, are pretty bullish, and that is part also of our guidance.
Supported by the performance we have seen in October, we made a very good October. We're seeing a really good traction in November, lots of orders, and already up year-on-year in terms of sales. It must be noted that the last year, Q4 for us, was really a tough quarter. We were down a double digit. We are recovering market share. We expect a much easier compare year-on-year in Q4, at least in terms of revenues. If we go by product category and we compare us against the market, you can see that we have outperformed the market in terms of Screens, +4% against +1% in the quarter. We were flat during the year against the market that so far in the first nine months was down 1%. What is noteworthy is the performance in Solutions.
We were up 24%, 24% against the market, up 5%. And if we look at the Solutions and Services since the beginning of the year, the market has been up 1%, and we were up 16%. So really, really a great performance. As you can see on Devices, during the year, we have been able to outperform the market, but Q3 was really challenging. The market was flattish, and we were down 2%. That is mostly in consumer electronics. We won market share in printing, but the market has been challenging, and there's been almost a 1% reduction in gross profit margins year-on-year in Q3 in Devices. So that is what really put a strain on our overall performance.
If we look at the end by customer type, we see that on retailers, we are still underperforming, while we, and that is matched by the tremendous performance on Solutions and Services. But on IT resellers, we are really outgrowing the market. We have put a lot of focus over there, and we are reaping the rewards of this activity. So in all, first message, market recovering and accelerating, and we have a very good outlook in front of us. We have outperformed the market more or less on all areas, geographies, products, customer type. And what we're seeing in the market in Q4 is a market that is much more vibrant than what we expected. We are recovering market share, excellent October, very good November. Only question mark is all of these orders will turn into real deliveries. The jury is still out.
We need to see if, especially the retailers that sell out, they account for quite a chunk of our Q4 sale. If they're sold out during Black Friday, it will be good. Early indicators point to that direction. But that is the main, if not the only concern that we have. There's still a lot of pressure on margins, but in October, margins were really good after quite some months of pressure. So we are pretty confident of what we are seeing so far. And that's for the sales evolution. Now, if we move to the challenges and opportunities, well, I already spoke at length on what happened in the market. The macroeconomic backdrop is still quite challenging. There's still a lot of geopolitical tensions, inflationary pressures that put a drag on consumer spending. But all in all, it looks like things are getting better.
The big question mark will be, as for everybody, what in the next quarters or years will be the European performance as influenced by the new U.S. government and their policies. AI-related spending in both software as well as infrastructure keeps being a long-term driver of growth, together with the cybersecurity. The PC market recovery is well underway. There are several positive signals that point to stronger performance in the next quarters. Mostly, the PC refresh is driving this kind of activity. It should be a nice short-term growth driver. We're witnessing wave after wave of latest generation AI PCs powered by the new AI PC processors, and that should drive up also the average sales price of PCs as well as volumes. We see infrastructure, hardware, and software in the Solutions area that should be a good driver of growth in the next years.
We have headwinds in Spain as well as in Italy for different reasons in the government spending. There are short-term constraints. In Spain, the budget has not been approved yet. And so a bunch of projects are ready to go but still frozen, waiting for the budget approval by the central government. Some local regional budgets have been approved, but not by all regions. Spain is a federal spending system. Italy is more centralized. In Italy, we have witnessed some scandals in the public administration purchase performance. And so it might be that some of the tenders will be temporarily reviewed. For us, it's a massive, massive opportunity. We were not involved with the vast majority of these customers. And so this is paving the way for new opportunities of growth for us.
So this is good, and we'll see if this will turn out into further growth drivers in the quarters ahead. Okay, now, for the profitability, the real point here is all about gross profit. It was our worry after a subpar performance of gross profit margins in Q2. And in Q3, we witnessed the same situation, and mostly driven by the performance of the Devices. There has been some pressure, mostly driven by the customer mix in PCs and smartphones as well, especially in PCs. We are recovering sales and market share there. And so we've sold more to retailers proportionally. And that put a drag on the gross profit margin but helped on volumes. Cost, in absolute terms, has been really good, but percentage-wise, it showed a sharp decrease. So we offset it partially, but not entirely, the drop in gross profit margins.
And so you see in Q3, the EBITDA margin moving down from 139 - 125, while the gross profit margin was down from 580 - 525. We have recovered most of the decrease by means of better cost control. On cash conversion cycle, we'll come back later on. And I already gave a few hints around the Net Financial Position. If we move to the following slide and look at the four pillars, we now split, as you know, the volume business, which we run under the Esprinet brand, from the value-added business, the Solutions and Services, which we run under the V-Valley brand. And as you can see in Q3, the overall growth, as reported, the sales in V-Valley was up 31%, and Esprinet was up 6%.
EBITDA adjusted was up 14% in the V-Valley business, while the Esprinet business was impaired by almost EUR 1.5 million of lower EBITDA driven by Devices. Here we had, as I said, a sharp drop in gross profit margins. So we are working around this. There are better forecasts for the last quarter, but that has been an area of attention. If we look at our performance, we see that since the beginning of the year, the value-added business has performed around 3.6% in EBITDA margin against 3.67% last year. And the reduction we witnessed is all linked to a lower performance of the Esprinet business, not so much in Screens, which have performed from a margin perspective flattish against last year, 0.61% in the first nine months of 2023 and 2024.
But we add, mostly because of the poor performance of Devices in Q3, we add this drag on our numbers in the Devices. We see things improving. We have taken actions. Some of the things that happened were probably linked to seasonality, and we have already seen a very good October. Let's see if things will progress properly during the rest of Q4. Okay, that's for the four pillars. A comment on the P&L. We already discussed the gross profit margin. On SG&A, we have been able to control our costs really in a great way. year-on-year, we are flat. Even if we have consolidated in these first nine months, we have consolidated Sifar Group in Italy and Lidera Network in Spain, while last year we added their cost only for basically a month, and in Q3 alone, we were up really just 1%.
So very, very strong cost control. We have been able to absorb the inflation that weighed on us, especially because of the collective bargaining agreements signed retroactively, both in Italy as well as in Spain, which are a heavy load on our numbers as most of our G&As are basically wages. And so we have been good at managing that area. We have had more depreciation, mostly linked to the investments that we made in some automation for our Italian warehouses. And then we also have the leases linked to the new warehouse, which went in Italy, which went into operation in August, end of August. This same impact can be seen in IFRS 16, where we add these higher expenses linked to this lease.
We have had very good exchange gains and slightly more expenses, financial expenses, mostly linked to higher interest rates still and a higher level of working capital utilization in absolute terms. Income taxes. We had a special charge in Q2, which has been reversed in Q3. So all in all, during the year, our tax rate should be the usual one around between 25%-27%. So it's mostly an exchange between the quarters. And that's basically for the P&L. If we look at the balance sheet, well, as usual, we will focus in a second on our operating net working capital. I only draw your attention, I mentioned it before, on the right-of-use assets, which moved sequentially from EUR 99.4 million - EUR 138.6 million, so EUR 39 million more of right-of-use assets.
That's the net present value of the leases linked to this new warehouse, which we opened up in Tortona and which will be used for certain projects linked to both the service area as well as the solar business as well as the consumer electronic business. We will close other warehouses which we were using and paying as one-off rents. And we are consolidating most of these activities into a new warehouse fully operated by us. The rest of the movements are all linked essentially to working capital. And I would go to the following slide and look at the dynamics of our working capital metrics. This, as always, is the four-quarter average. And as you can see, we are flat on 22 days against 30 days of last year, 21 days of 2022 year. And down again against 2019, pre-pandemic era when the numbers were around 26 days.
During the pandemic, we had eight days and 13 days, mostly linked to a very good performance in warehouse, in inventory days. The aim of the company is to run. I remember the ambition to run around an average of 18 days, 19 days, which means the company should be, excluding IFRS 16 impacts, cash neutral, if not cash positive. We look at the performance in the following slide of what happened just in Q3. You can see compared to Q3 2023, we are flat in terms of inventory days. We have reduced by four days our DSOs, and we reduced a little bit payment terms from vendors as well. We loaded up in preparation of the last quarter. We had a lot of discussions with our vendors. Vendors are offering us longer payment terms in exchange of higher levels of inventory because they want to offer the market more flexibility.
We accepted these deals, and we are in for these kinds of deals. We should perform pretty well in Q4. Those are the expectations. And that's basically for what happened with our working capital. Now, we can move to the following slide. And you can see that because of these activities linked also to the opening of the new warehouse and the impact that we had on our overall profitability in Q3, the return on capital employed stands around 6.5%. We forecast an acceleration in the future. That's what we're aiming at. And it's all linked to this working capital performance on one side and on the new projects that we're seeing in the value-added distribution business on one side and improvements in the performance also in the Screens area moving forward. I close with final remarks.
And so the recap is, first and foremost, the ICT distribution market is back to growth. And we are outgrowing the market, especially in the high margin segment of Solutions and Services. So we see a lot of opportunities moving forward. Some of our competitors are less focused. Some of others are struggling a little bit. So there's a lot of opportunities. We have seen it in that tremendous growth of 24% in Q3 against the market that was up 5%. There's a lot of opportunities in our historical traditional PC and smartphone market. We are outgrowing the market after having lost the share significantly last year. Cost control has been in place for all of the year, and that is giving a good and solid foundation to our profitability. We are negotiating with vendors this balance between inventory days and payment terms.
We are using factoring whenever it makes sense. If I look at what we're seeing in the market now and what is forecasted by the analysts, analysts foresee a good Q4 in terms of overall demand. We have witnessed a very, very solid October. We're seeing lots of orders in November. As I said before, we see an easier compare against Q4 last year, which was particularly weak in terms of sales, very good in terms of gross profit margin. But if all these orders will turn into deliveries, and part of it is linked to the sellout data of retailers, we should hit quite easily our forecast of an EBITDA adjusted between EUR 66 million and EUR 71 million. We'll see in the next weeks how the situation will move forward. Looking forward, the ICT market is returning to growth. Analysts are seeing the market outgrowing the GDP.
Even if the Eurozone macroeconomic scenarios are still a bit uncertain, the tech sector is a powerful engine for business growth. Infrastructure, so Solutions, is essential in the digital transformation, and its growth is likely to continue, especially once the constraints on government spending in Spain, and to a lesser extent, the turbulence in what's happening in Rome will subside. Growth in the infrastructure should accelerate, and for us, it's an enormous opportunity. We have seen the replacement cycle. We are entering the fifth year after pandemic and after the spike in especially PCs and printer sales, and so it's time to change the Devices, and we have seen the replacement cycle beginning. We are also expecting a more balanced approach between outdoor and indoor spending.
Last year, consumers have been heavily weighted on entertainment and less on purchases of household equipment, PCs, and generally speaking, anything that was not an experience: restaurants, travel, hotels, and we're seeing a more balanced approach, so even the retail spending should add a little bit of momentum to the overall scenario of the next couple of years. There's a lot of product innovation linked above all to artificial intelligence, but we're seeing areas that are moving. You've probably seen Meta announcing prototypes of these glasses, so there's a lot of things that are happening behind the scenes around new ways of interacting with a machine. We have historically seen that anytime a new user interface has been invented, first the keyboard and then the mouse and then the touchscreen, that drove the introduction of new product categories that grew the market.
And so we think we are probably on the verge of a new quantum leap in this area as well. And lastly, there's a lot of opportunities in the market for services because companies need to invest in technology, need to have cost efficiency enablers. They have to leverage new technologies such as artificial intelligence, and they need a lot of help from external entities that either transfer or manage technology, train, finance, maintain these new technologies. And we, as an outsourcer of these services, we have just scratched the surface with very few millions, highly profitable services. So that's an area where there might be huge opportunities moving forward. And then the adjacencies. We're really growing fast on our solar business. More news probably next year when we will fully report the information about this business that starts to be, to a certain extent, material.
But especially moving forward, we believe could be a really good contributor to our expansion. So that's for what happened. We see a good quarter coming in and especially good years moving forward. And that's all. And I turn it over to Giulia for the Q&A session. Thanks.
Thank you, Alessandro. Yes, we can start with the Q&A session. You have to book your speech and unmute your microphone. First is Mr. Nargi. Mr. Nargi, please go ahead.
Hello, everyone. And thanks for taking my questions. I have three questions. The first one is on the net sales path. You mentioned before that the trend in October and also looking at the orders collected in the first part of November seems pretty good. Assuming also that in Q4 2023, the performance was not good. So you are going to face an easier comparison base in Q4.
Might we expect a continuation of the growth, at least in line with the growth you had in Q3? We saw an 11% year-on-year growth. So the first question is on net sales. The second one is on gross profit. You mentioned about some pressure on gross profit, particularly in the device segment, which had a negative impact on EBITDA in the quarter. So focusing on Q4, might we expect a slight improvement in this figure? And what could be a reasonable level of gross margin do you expect by the end of the year? And the last one is on the net working capital and net debt evolution. We saw a significant increase in Q3, mainly due to seasonal working capital dynamics and partially due to the impact of IFRS 16 for the new warehouse. So typically in Q4, there is a trend reversal.
What might we expect for this quarter? Thank you.
Thank you. It all boils down to our guidance. We modeled our guidance around what we see in the market. To achieve those numbers, EUR 66 million-EUR 71 million, we need to keep performing with double-digit top-line growth, as well as having margins which we conservatively are forecasting slightly lower than last year. If you do this math, keeping as they have been for nine months, costs more or less flattish, you end up having, depending on how much above 10% and how much less than previous year gross profit margin, you put in the equation, you end up closer to EUR 66 million or closer to EUR 71 million.
That's the math that we have been doing, which is basically supported in terms of sales by what we are seeing in terms of forecast by analysts in the market, what we have seen in our performance in October, what we're seeing in terms of order taking and sales so far in November. And in terms of margins, the actions that we have put in place on one side and the performance that we have seen in October and the targets that we're seeing negotiating with the vendors for the end of the year. So that's how we build our forecast. Costs more or less flattish and continues strong performance in terms of top line. The real indicator is how much or how less gross profit margins you put into the equation. And that's partially a function of the customer as well as product mix that we will have.
But so far in the calculations that we have made, numbers point to this range. Then, as always, we make most of our profit in Q4. And this is history. We have a very seasonal business. We have tried hard to de-seasonalize the business, but there's a disproportionate amount of volumes that are performed during the last part of the year. And it's very hard to design a company with a cost structure that is fit for the first three quarters only. If we design a company like that, we would lose an enormous amount of opportunities. And basically, we would piss off our customers and suppliers in Q4. So we, as many other companies, had to adjust. As per the working capital, well, we do expect, as always, a sharp decrease in the inventory levels. It always happens like this since years.
And a reduction of the DSOs as well. There's a higher level of retail sales in Q4. And normally, retail sales are cashed in earlier via factoring. As per payment terms, vendors are very positive with us. They're giving us support because we are introducing flexibilities into a more and more unpredictable behavior of customers and to a lesser extent, supply chains. So we should close the year in our expectations with a good number. Now, I always remind anyhow that we typically suggest our investors not to look at a specific end quarter number, but rather look at the moving average, which is more representative of the performance of our activities within the market. Okay. See if there's other questions.
Mr. Berti, a question comes for you. So I give you the floor. Please go ahead.
Remember to unmute the microphone.
Okay. Sorry. Thank you for taking my questions.
Couple. First one, I would appreciate if you can give us some indication, qualitative indication of what you expect in terms of growth for the next years. I mean, if the trend of replacement should show its full potential, which is the growth that you expect. And then if you can add a little bit more color on digital green, I mean, the performance of Zeliatech.
Yeah. Okay. So on next year's performance, let's say that the analysts are in this moment talking about mid-single-digit growth, more or less. Our ambition is to stay at least in line with the market, if not outgrowing the market. We have not a budget yet. I can only give this indication as qualitative, very qualitative indications. It's not only a matter of our top-line performance, which, of course, to a certain extent, is linked to the market.
Then there's this ambition of being at least in line with the market, if possible, to outgrow it. For instance, if I think of Portugal, it's a small portion. We walked away from very unprofitable businesses, extremely cash-demanding. We are rebuilding the activity there. We are seeing very good momentum in a more solid environment. Our ambition there is to recover part of the market share that we had and that we deliberately left on the table, but in a more profitable way. That comes back to the point that it's not so much in our calculations volumes by volume's sake. It's a matter of finding the right balance between additional volumes, gross profit margins, and working capital performance. We are having discussions with our suppliers.
And I say we are eager to be into either high-margin low-volume business. Sorry, and that's value-add distribution, generally speaking, or high-volume low-margin businesses. The big difference is if we are involved in high-volume low-margin businesses, that's Esprinet business. You need to give us a compelling reason to work on that area. And the compelling reason is very good working capital, either by letting us have very low inventory days or very long payment terms. Give us this, and we will gladly perform in that area because it will create a return on capital employed in good quantity and in good percentage. Sorry. In the value-added business, we are more focused on profitability, and we are ready to sort of trade off a little bit more longer payment terms to customers that are involved in projects in exchange of good profitability. So that's how we think.
But generally speaking, market mid-single-digit growth, and I hope we will be able to look after this market the proper way. Zeliatech is doing great. We have not yet reported the figures, but I can tell you we are way north of EUR 100 million of revenues and growing fast, so we will probably report separately. We are discussing internally if in full-year numbers, we will move from reporting the four pillars of Screens and Devices grouped under Esprinet, Solutions and Services grouped under V-Valley, if not creating the solar business, and we are debating whether to split separately the infrastructure Devices to build a physical data center under Zeliatech. It could be. We are really working on that. Up to now, I can only give these indications, but we have great expectations for next year. This could be a real added value contributor moving forward.
There are no more questions?
No questions.
No.
Okay. Good.
Okay, so we can end the call. Thanks for participating, and see you next time.
Thanks, everybody. See you next call.