Dear all, welcome to the full year 2024 results of Maisons du Monde. François-Melchior de Polignac, CEO, and Denis Lamoureux, CFO, will be your speakers today. I'll hand over to François-Melchior de Polignac. Sir, please go ahead.
Thank you and good morning all. Yes, I'll be your speaker today. We'll be Denis, our CFO, and myself. We are happy to have you today for the discussion about our full year results. If we move to the first page of this presentation, you will see a page which is important to us, which is a reminder of what Maisons du Monde stands for. As you can see, we are a love brand. It's important to remind everybody of this love brand status, which is absolutely still completely the case. This is why we have updated our also customer surveys to comfort the situation that you know of. It's also about remembering you about the fact that we are a very well-balanced model, which is all you see in the middle of this page.
You know, and this has not changed, it's been enhanced further, that we are a genuine omnichannel model with about 50% of our sales, which is purely brick and mortar, while 50% more or less of our sales are also digitalized, which makes us quite unique in this respect in our sector. You also see the remaining this balance between geographies and also this balance between categories. What probably is even more important at this stage and with the results that we're going to share with you today is the fact that we also maintain our best-in-class gross margin level, and we'll go back to that later on. Of course, as you know, we are a well-recognized player and in fact leader in the sustainability agenda in our sector, which is an important, of course, recognition for parts of our fans and customers.
Now, having covered this background, let's move on to the next page, where you can see what you already know, of course, as well as we do, that we have been going for now a couple of years through macro headwinds that impact the furniture market, as you see and as you know, with the specific case probably in France of the real estate situation and the construction of new apartments and housing, which has been extremely low for now about two years. This translates into, of course, a down cycle in the market, in our market. What is probably important to notice and to underline is the fact that our positioning as an inspirational player in this market makes us more sensitive to adverse market conditions. Of course, we'll have a greater potential for growth when the rebound will come. We don't know when it will come.
I can assure you that we do not count on it this year, unfortunately. Yes, we know that when it will come, we will be in a better position than other players of this market now. Moving to the next page, this for me is the most important page of what we want to share with you today. In fact, the key elements are what you find on the top left and the bottom right, because basically it is a commitment we shared with you exactly a year ago, which was to embark on an in-depth full transformation of Maisons du Monde and its model, which is what we have been doing. Of course, we'll come back to that in a second. Yet, at the same time, not doing that at the expense of the free cash flow generation.
Indeed, remember, we committed to EUR 100 million and more of free cash flow accumulated over 2024-2026, with every single year being positive, including, of course, 2024, the difficult year of the launch of this full-fledged transformation. Now, if we speak quickly about what we have been transforming, as you can see, we're talking here about the way we sell, the distribution model. We have been reinventing and investing in the distribution model. We commented the fact that we have been refreshing 63 stores last year. We also highlight the fact that we are putting a specific focus on commercial centers. Why is that? That's because those stores have both, of course, a commercial impact, but also they are used as showcase for our brands because they're located in places that see millions of passers-by and customers every year.
They play a very special role in our strategy, both commercial and of brand awareness and recognition. We have also accelerated with the partnerships. Remember that we have chosen a model of affiliation, at least for our close countries of continental Europe, France, and to come are Spain and Italy. All this work, including what we have been doing on all other fronts, of course, has also helped us improve our NPS Net Promoter Score by 4 points this year, which is a great satisfaction in a year of full transformation. Of course, a key part of the equation is what we do with the offer. I will come back to that later on, but we had decided to reduce our assortment to optimize it.
It's very important for me to remind you each time that it is not with the sole objective of cost-cutting optimization of the cash. It does allow us to do that, but the origin of this optimization is customer feedback saying, "We love your brand. We love your product," but the offer is a bit confusing and even more so at store level. This optimization of the ranges brings a few benefits both for customers and for simplification of the model, but also allows us to make some space for additional or new categories that also our customers were requesting from us. I will come back to that in a moment. Remember that we were talking a lot about the customer, the three C's that we started to speak about a year and a half ago. The first of the three C's is, of course, the customer.
That is a key part of us reconnecting with our customer. A loyalty program has been a key base for that in France last year, and we will expand on this experience in this year and in the coming years, of course. We have also started other initiatives to reconnect with our customers, as I will comment further. The last point on the left, which stands with no figure at all, but is very important to me, is that we are really transforming the company in depth, which is also why we're talking about the three-year journey.
One example I like to share, because it's the most obvious one, is that we are not asking our store managers and teams any longer to be back to the customer and facing the merchandising of the products, but rather to do the opposite and to engage in the relation with our customers, which is what we need to do now because it's what our customers are waiting for and is what you need to do when the time is a bit more under stress. It's just an example, but it's just to give you a hint of the fact that we are really transforming in depth the company and the way people work and the cash of the company, which, of course, does not happen overnight, but we are really in this process.
With local decision that comes as a natural consequence of what I was just describing, for the first time now, store managers in Maisons du Monde are allowed to have their say in the assortment that is shared with them at their store level, allowing us to be much more in contact with the local needs of customers. Now, this in-depth transformation, of which I could speak, of course, for much more, but that gives you just a few hints and probably remember most of them, did not result in positive sales in 2024. Clearly, we did not expect sales to be positive, but clearly we know that the headwinds have been quite strong. What is new is because we commented the sales a month ago, is what's rather on the right side.
You see that the gross margin ratio has been in the range of our best-in-class margin levels, despite promotional efforts, despite some price reductions. This is clearly a satisfaction and a resilience of the model. We have, of course, as you know, been working very intensely on all the lines of the cost and cash. You see that this results in a free cash flow generation of EUR 15 million, of which we will speak again with Denis in a few minutes. Basically, the key message here is in-depth, genuine transformation underway, and yet, as promised, a positive free cash flow generation. As we move on to the next page, you see here our ongoing pragmatic, unless I would say, approach to the store network.
What you see is that the number of stores, the net number of stores, has reduced by about 3%, that we have opened a few stores, that we have increased the share of stores in affiliation, and also increased, of course, the share of stores that have been refreshed or revamped. You see a well-balanced and pragmatic approach to the store network to improve it progressively. As we move to the next page, just a couple of pictures to show you what it means at store level to have an optimized and simplified offer. It allows us to showcase much better the assortment, is what you see on the left side. I will not comment too much, but we also are now rolling out an AI-based tool to optimize the dispatch at store level.
What you see on the right side is just a couple of examples that allow you to understand what is the extension of ranges that we are now able to make thanks to the optimization of the assortment. Household linen, you can see, or on the right side, you see something that illustrates two items, two parts of the offer improvement. New category, which is the bathroom items. It was an explicit request by our customers two years ago to say bathroom is a room that Maisons du Monde is not working with, and we would love to see Maisons du Monde inspiration in the bathroom, which, of course, is important to customers. You see our own products here. You see one of the best lines of tableware, which is transformed into the bathroomware, which is already meeting with great success, and also the towels.
You see another part of the selection, which is Fer à Cheval , a brand that matches well Maisons du Monde inspiration, and that is in the bathroom extended category. As you remember, we have opened the possibility for us to partnership with a few well-recognized brands that match our inspirational promise. Next page. It is all about the connection with customers. We have been going back to customers in what they were expecting from us. I.e., part of our customers say, "We love the website, but the inspirational access to Maisons du Monde should also be on paper." You know that Maisons du Monde catalog used to be a real institution and something that people waited for eagerly for weeks before it came.
We are back with this tradition of making a big event, of having the inspiration of Maisons du Monde available to you in your own hands. We started that, as you remember, last year, and we've been also distributing such catalog together with a few magazines. We will enhance this this year because it met with great success on the part of the customers. I spoke about the loyalty program, which is also a key to relation. Of course, you also know that we started to shift from a nearly 100% SEA marketing allocation to a more balanced allocation so that we are able to speak again about Maisons du Monde outside of the web, which is what you see on the right part of the page.
This is the beginning of a mixed shift that we are going to further work on and extend to other countries in this year and the following year. As we move on, of course, as you know, and as you can see with the figures, we have been working intensively at each and every single line of cost and cash optimization. I will not, of course, go through all of them because topics that are quite, I would say, self-evident. Just to give you a couple of examples that are very material. In the payroll, we have been launching the annualization of the work hours for store staff, which is a market best practice in France, but that we had not implemented before in Maisons du Monde.
It allows store managers to have the better part of their teams for the peak weeks of the year, namely, for instance, Christmas, while they have less work hours with their teams for lesser weeks of the year, namely, for instance, February. This is both a financial and a customer advantage, I would say, that we introduced last year. To speak a little bit about the head office, we know we have been reducing the head office. You might know that we are in the middle of a collective plan to further reduce the head office. This, in turn, has allowed us to reduce our rental costs by reducing square meters both in Paris and in Nantes where our head offices are located.
If we move on to the next page, this page is something we shared with you a year ago, which was a way to share some of the key action plans that we wanted to launch. The key message here is the following. Every single action plan has been really launched for good in 2024. You see that some of them already met their targets. Some of them could be late on their target, but showing progress compared to the history. There is only one. Clearly, we have not been able to reach the objective, nor to progress, which is the store conversion rate.
My view is that this is probably very much linked to some liquidation of all the inventories that we made in 2023, which allowed us to have a very dense approach, a sales approach to low-value products throughout the year, notably at the end of the year. At the same time, I can guarantee you that I very much trust that the change that we are operating now at store level is going to bring this KPI back on track in the coming months or year. We are indeed, at the moment, changing the way we work and structure our staff at store level in France as a pilot, something which is quite promising and will be rolled out further. Now, I will leave the floor to Denis, who will speak more about the financials.
Thank you, François-Melchior. Hello, everybody. We will go through some elements and key financial topics with Maisons du Monde for 2024. We will start with this slide where you can see that this is the one we shared a month ago regarding the sales. You can see that we have lost EUR 126 million of sales. Most of it is coming from like-for-like, so meaning wholesale, and some of that is coming from the store that we have closed last year. You can also see on the right that we continue to invest in the store. We have one opening, we have two relocations, and basically, I remind you that it is what we call the BAL in Maisons du Monde, so Barentin, Aulnoy, and Pau Lons, where we have the new concept started almost one year ago now.
We have also what we plan with Inspire Everyday, meaning the increase of stores under affiliation. You can see both transfer, but also openings of that store. At the end, the stores are 338, which is, as mentioned by François-Melchior, a little reduction of 3%. Again, on that topic, we are working case by case, store by store, to see what is the best option for the store, either to be relocated, either to be closed, or to be transferred from a very cash flow basis. If we look at the next slide, basically, it is the allocation of the turnover. I will not go into all the points. What is very important to have in mind? Yes, we have a decoration is declining faster than furniture.
The fact is you have to remember that in 2023, we have declined the inventory by EUR 33 million, which is quite huge, with a basis of EUR 200 million, and most of it were on decoration. We suffer a little bit from that topic. That is the reason why also we did not push too much on inventory in 2024. You can see that in the press release. The inventory remained almost flat in value in order to be able to start 2025 correctly, as well as you have to have in mind that, as mentioned by François-Melchior, the inventory is quite better than the one in 2023, quite fresh, I would say, on that topic. We have, in that case, a better economics behind.
What is also important to mention is that the business model remained balanced because the dynamics, even if it is not positive dynamics, but the dynamics are almost the same on all either channel or territory. What we can see still is that Italy and Spain, our two and third markets, are growing a little bit, which is very interesting. You have to have in mind that these countries were the ones in 2023 that have, I would say, benefited from Inspire Everyday action, and France has only started in 2024. That is something that could be noted. If we go on the next slide, on the EBIT one, if you look at the EBIT, of course, the EBIT is quite low because it is 0.1% of sales, so EUR 1.2 million, so almost at least a little bit positive.
If we see the variation compared to 2023, what we can see, we have, of course, the volume effect linked to the sales decline, but we have improvement of the gross margin, which is very important in terms of a balanced business model and business model of Maisons du Monde. We can see this growing part of the margin ratio. We can see also the impact of the saving in the EBIT, as well as the impact on depreciation and amortization, all of it linked to EUR 1.2 million of EBIT. Of course, our guidance is on free cash flow. If we go on the free cash flow slide, you can see the EUR 15 million generated in 2024, while we generated EUR 27 million in 2023. Where does it come from? Most of it is coming, of course, from the working capital improvements.
As you can see that in 2023, we have a working capital increase of EUR 24 million, while we have a decline of EUR 18 million in 2024, generating EUR 41 million or EUR 42 million of variation compared to 2023. Of course, we are hit by the decline of the EBITDA. We also have reduced a little bit the CapEx, but if you look at the CapEx, we were at 2.9% in 2023. We are at 2.3% in 2024. I remind you that still, with that amount of CapEx, we were able to revamp 63 stores, which is quite significant in only one year. Basically, we are confident to be able, with this envelope of around EUR 25 million of CapEx, to both invest on the IT side and also on the store side. That is, of course, a good achievement.
If we go on the next slide, and it will be the last one from the financial part of it, again, this one is very important. What we can see is the following. We are declining debts, both declining and low debts. Now we are at EUR 85 million of debt, of bank debt, while we were at EUR 105 million in 2022. This is a good achievement in that situation. Obviously, the leverage ratio, because of the decline of the EBITDA, is quite higher and goes at 3.8. Sorry, 3.8. The good thing is that, as mentioned, we have renegotiated with, anticipated that topic with our banks, and they have unanimously accepted to review our bank documentation, both for December 2024 and also June 2025. We thank you for that because it helps to accelerate on Inspire Everyday plan, which is clearly our target.
What we can see also is that we have no big reimbursement plan in the coming years. We have EUR 25 million, which is our term loan. This one was exactly the same in 2024. We have the capacity to continue to generate cash and to be able to finance ourselves while reducing the debt, which is quite important in that situation. Let me finish with two big elements on that liquidity topic. We have EUR 200 million of liquidity with the current bank documentation. This documentation is validated until April 2028. That gives us time to achieve the plan, which is, I remind you, a plan over four years. Thank you very much. I hand over to François-Melchior.
Thank you, Denis. I hope this clarified any question you might have. Of course, you remember that you can put your question on this question line here. You probably hope that the key message in all parts here is that we have launched this in-depth transformation plan, Inspire Everyday, and we are on those action plans. Yet, at the same time, as indicated a year ago, we are not sacrificing the free cash flow. Instead, we are progressively completing now the first EUR 15 million or EUR 100 million and more free cash flow over a period of three years.
If I move on to the 2025-2026 perspective, the first page that you see is investing for gradual return to growth, which will be part of the answer to the first question I just saw on the chat here, which is we are really guiding our actions on the basis of transformation and free cash flow. Of course, it does mean to make some efforts on the top line, but it is not the first obsession that we are with. We are seeing current trading, which is rather in line with the end of the year, and we are targeting a gradual return to growth within this 2025 year. Looking at what we are doing this year and next year, you will see no big surprise probably for you because we are really now pushing further our agenda of the Inspire Everyday three-year transformation plan.
By definition, it starts all with the customer. I will probably repeat myself a little bit, but this is because we see the benefit of that. We see the magnitude of the change that we can bring, and we see the impact of what we do with our customers. Deeper connection with customers, through customer events. We see that the relation and the emotional bond with our customers, including at store level, is something extremely powerful. We have experienced that when we launched the loyalty program, and we know that classes with professional decorators, events, dinners, invitations to discover the new collection at store level are having a big impact and want to go on with this.
I mentioned also that we want to make sure that the brand is quite seen beyond the SEA on the website, which is what we are doing, and we have further to extend this approach also to other European countries while we started that mainly in France last year. There are new categories that will further increase their assortment and offer over the next seasons, although you can now see in the store, if you are kind enough to go there, that there are some new categories. We shared with you a couple of pictures, and those categories are now quite visible at store level, but there is still room for increase of such ranges. We will go on with the pragmatic management of a store network.
We expect an acceleration, of course, of the franchise and affiliate partners to increase progressively the number of stores, although we are not making any guidance or commitments on that. On the contrary, we are committing to revamping an additional few dozens of stores to reach this, let's say, symbolic level of at least 100 stores revamped by the end of this year, with a specific focus on the stores in shopping malls. I mentioned that it's a dedicated new concept for such stores and that they are both quite important to us commercially, but also in terms of showcasing the brand where so many millions of customers are going every year. We have been seeing the benefit of refreshing, revamping, reinspiring further our store layout.
We will do the same with the website. We will be, over the coming months and probably more than a year, revamping, refreshing, and enhancing the customer experience progressively at website level as well to better showcase our brand. Of course, that's on the next page. By definition, this needs to be fueled by further efforts on the cost and cash front. We, in fact, will increase our saving plan. We have been successful and quite online with our target of cost reductions. We now see that we can leverage further the simplification of the business that we've been bringing for the last year and a half, which will allow us, in particular, to simplify our logistics architecture and will allow us to reduce significantly the cost of rents at logistics level. That will bring, sorry, a big share of additional savings for the years to come.
Of course, we will keep on with the pressure at all other lines of the P&L to make sure that we get every possible saving and cash optimization while still, as Denis was mentioning, reinvesting in the business. You saw here our target to remain below 2.5%, but that means at a sufficient level to go on refreshing store network, website, and basically investing in customer experience, which is why overall we are now considering that we are on track to deliver on our objective of generating this cumulative free cash flow over EUR 100 million during the 2024-2026 period, with the first step of this EUR 15 million generated in this very intense first year of the full-fledged transformation plan, Inspire Everyday.
With that, we have covered the key messages we wanted to share with you, and we are now looking at the chat to see your written questions. Thank you. I'll comment on the current trading. Just an additional word. Do we see any step-up in promotional activity from competitors? Step-up would be too much, but clearly, the market has changed compared to a few years ago. It has become much more promotional than it was, and I suspect it will remain so for the midterm. We see no further questions, but we'd leave you, of course, some time to add your questions to the chat.
We have some questions on the cost and on the cost saving of EUR 45 million. Yes, we have realized EUR 45 million of saving in 2024. These are gross savings after inflation. Let me remind you that we had basically 3% of inflation between the expenses and the rents because, of course, we have a lot of rents, both stores but also warehouses. At that moment, it creates almost EUR 20 million of increase. We have a negative effect on the delivery mix linked to more furniture than decoration. Decoration is most of the time taken directly by the customer in the store, so no additional delivery costs, while furniture are delivered to the customer. It has a huge effect. On top of that, we have also reinvested almost EUR 5 million linked to renovation. These 63 stores cannot be done without some additional costs.
Also in payment means because we have to improve the customer experience. We know that when we put more payment means, there might be some additional costs. For example, if you look at PayPal as well as Alma or that kind of stuff, the commission rate is higher than the one we have negotiated with the standard credit cards. At the end, that is why we have only this EUR 10 million visible in the P&L. If we look, and for being clear, we had the example given by François-Melchior on the head office where we released one floor, but we have also released one warehouse in the south. All these kinds of things are helping us to be able to reinvest on the customer experience. If we go on the gross margin, we have a question on the gross margin.
Very difficult to forecast the gross margin for 2025, and the guidance we are giving is only limited to cash. I can give you some flavor on that. Is that basically, as you can see, in 2024, we have, even with the price decrease over 3,000 products, even with the additional promotional activity, we have succeeded to maintain our best-in-class gross margin ratio. In 2025, what we can see is that we are hedged from a dollar point of view. That should not have any impact and even positive impact compared to 2024 in view of the duration of the hedging in Maisons du Monde. We have secured the ratio, the sea cost with one-year contract as always. The entry margin should remain good thanks to the reduction of the assortment as well as our supplier base.
Should be aligned. We do not see any reason to have a big swing in this gross margin ratio in 2025. We have two questions on gross margin.
No, it's the same question.
Okay.
We have not been seeing any new question in the last minutes. Can you give any more color on the affiliation model in terms of impact on group P&L?
Basically, on this topic, I would say that the affiliation model does not impact Maisons du Monde P&L because we are considering the sales of the affiliate as our sales. The COGS remain our COGS. After, there is a commission paid to the affiliate, and this commission will go into SG&A. There might be a very slight impact, if I'm very technical, on the IFRS 16, but it will be, I would say, at that moment, still quite low impact. If I may add something to the P&L question, it's also a key leverage for us to become more asset-light because, on the other hand, of course, our affiliate partners, when revamping or opening stores, are the ones bringing the CapEx to the store.
We are not seeing any additional questions. I'm speaking slowly to give it a last chance, but it seems that we are done with all the questions. Thank you for attending, and we look forward to the next opportunity to discuss Maisons du Monde Inspire Everyday plan with you. Thank you.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thanks for participating. You may now disconnect.