Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Maisons du Monde Q4 and FY 2025 sales presentation. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question- and- answer session. If you wish to ask a question via the webcast, please use the Q&A box available on the webcast link anytime during the conference. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, François-Melchior de Polignac, Chief Executive Officer of Maisons du Monde, and Denis Lamoureux, Chief Financial Officer of Maisons du Monde. Sir, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for Maisons du Monde's fourth quarter and full year 2025 sales results. So let me start directly with the top line on the right side of this slide. In the fourth quarter, sales reached EUR 278 million, down 5.9% on reported basis and 5.4% on a like-for-like basis. This brings the full year to -5.4% and -4.7% on the like-for-like basis. And in terms of the second semester, which reflects our autumn-winter collection, we are nearly stable at -1.3% reported or -0.7% like for like.
Indeed, as you can see, this indicates a very strong difference of dynamics between the -8.9% of H1 in like-for-like, compared to this -0.7% in H2. Of course, Denis will go into more detail on the figures in a minute, but so much for the figures at this stage. Moving now to the left part of the slide. Now we keep on the same slide. Go back to the same slide. Yeah, thank you. On the first, on the left side, sorry. You see first the positive elements that we would like to highlight. First, as you can see, traffic continued to increase with now 6 consecutive months of growth. The brand awareness was further strengthened, and I will come back to that later on. It's a key point for us, of course.
Customer satisfaction continues to improve, as reflected in a growing NPS, and retail activity proved resilience with growth in Southern Europe. So those elements clearly reflect the transformation journey that we have been executing over the past years, and of course, our continued focus, which we'll come back to in a minute. However, on the other hand, of course, Q4 remains negative, and we cannot be satisfied with this level of performance. And indeed, we did face two key challenges or ongoing challenges, I would say, because they have been here for a while now. First, let me address the weak macroeconomic environment that we do see remain fragile, particularly in France, and that continues to be quite challenging for retailers. To give you some reference points on that, we do follow Retail Int. pane l, a key benchmark for tracking French retail trends.
It's a very large panel of a diversity of non-food retail businesses, which has reported a traffic decline of close to 3% in the, let's say, home segment, both for the full year and for Q4. In parallel, according to IPEA, the French furniture market, excluding kitchen equipment, will probably have declined by around 3% in 2025. I'm saying probably here, because the official figures are still about to be issued, probably sometime in a couple of weeks or next week. Indeed, we do see, and we do further anticipate weak consumption dynamics, particularly in France, our key core domestic market.
This has been the case for quite a long time now, and we see no clear improvement signal, which is why, as you saw, we decided to withhold our EUR 100 million cumulative free cash flow guidance in the press release that you saw. The second challenge is our online activity on the performance. That said, performance improved markedly over the year. You might remember the sales, we are down around 15% online in H1, and now it's -5 % in H2. The weakness is mainly concentrated in our Northern European countries, where we invested less than in our core markets. Excluding those countries, online sales were indeed close to flat in H2, highlighting a greater resilience of our core markets.
But again, this, by definition, is not satisfactory, remains a challenge, so we do see here a key improvement to be organized and to be got in conversion rate, which is why we changed the organization in January, and that will be appointed a new head of e-commerce at Comex level to accelerate our transformation. If we move on to the store network slide. So this remains, of course, a key pillar of our transformation, and it was our most resilient channel throughout the year, with like-for-like retail sales down 2% in Q4 and 1% for the full year 2025. The resilience is not to be driven by our affiliation model, which continues to prove its relevance. It's an efficient and resilient way to operate, notably smaller stores, which combines, as you know, strong local execution with disciplined economics.
At the same time, we continue investment in our physical network, which is delivering tangible results. We have now about 70 resilient stores that show more resilient performance than the rest of the network, while also significantly enhancing the customer experience. If we move to the next page, indeed, you will see some illustrations of the latest reopening. This is a ZAC store, so in commercial activity outside from the main city centers or shopping malls, where we have been improving further and inputting all the learnings from our recent and not so recent remodeling.
Basically, it does continue to elaborate on all the learnings from what we have been doing, and you can see in particular, a self-service area with high stock density for decoration items and small furniture, which is in fact very much inspired by the success of such equipment and merchandising in our shopping mall stores. But of course, because this is ZAC stores, a furniture destination zone designed like a showroom and offering a fully immersive experience. We also here had the launch of a takeaway offer for selected pieces of furniture, which improves responsiveness and customer satisfaction. You have a central advisory hub for both private customers and professionals, where we are also testing an interior design tool developed by our subsidiary, Rhinov, to further empower our sales staff. And then a new signature approach to better highlight the value and differentiation of our unique products.
So basically, as you can see, we keep on investing and improving our stores, which are, again, a key component, both our customer experience and brand recognition. Indeed, speaking about experience and recognition, if we move to the next slide. This one. Lovely. We do see here a couple of key events of Q4. So on the left, you can see we mentioned Black Friday. As you probably know, Black Friday has become, is becoming an even more major commercial moment, where visibility and differentiation are really essential. We do see a growing importance of this month of November in our sales and, of course, on Black Friday in particular. Thus, we made a deliberate choice to stand out, and as a result, we delivered our historic sales week, the best, in fact, in the last past three years.
If you look at Christmas, on the other hand, this had been for us an opportunity to strongly reaffirm a key part of our DNA, which is the opening to the world as Maison, plural, du Monde, of course, with warm, emotional collections, offering our customers an opportunity to celebrate Christmas by traveling through our products across a variety of inspiring places, ranging from Paris to London, Canada, or Mexico. You can also see in the middle, an illustration of the change in the marketing mix that we initiated a year and a half ago. Moving away, I would say, from the nearly 100% SEA-only investments to a more balanced online and offline approach.
You will have recognized the underground in Paris for some of you, and maybe even for some of you, Léna Situations, who's one of those influential creators and influencers in France with around 5 million followers on Instagram. These initiatives significantly increased our visibility, especially among younger audiences. And as I mentioned before, the results achieved are more than encouraging, as we see increase in traffic, both in-store and online, customer satisfaction improving, and globally, brand awareness also showing some progress. With that, I will leave Denis go into more granularity on the figures themselves.
Thank you, François-Melchior, and hello, everybody. As you will see that we are in the same kind of value dynamics that we have seen in the last quarter. Of course, the figures are a little bit disappointing for this Q4, namely that the Q3 was positive with the same size of around +5%, which is important, and I will elaborate a little bit also on the H2. So the value dynamics we have on retail France and international, as you see in the figures, retail like-for-like international is grow, is flat. France is declining. Retail France, like-for-like, is declining by around -4%.
Other is like opening and closing figures, and non-like-for-like is mainly the loyalty program, because you know that we have launched a loyalty program, and there is an IFRS way of booking as a decrease of sales, and it has been booked at the end of the year. Of course, the main disappointing channel is e-commerce and web, web and digital. As mentioned by François-Melchior, decision has been taken in order to put much more emphasis on that channel.
If we look on the H2, H2 is because, again, we later in October, we have a collection effect because this year we have decided to accelerate the delivery of the winter collection, and it is why we have so much inventory at the end of June, and it was part of the success of the Q3 2025. As a result, we have a negative effect, mainly on October, while at that moment, the collection were delivered. And also, as we have you, I guess you have seen with others, December was not the best month for the consumption, namely in France. If we take a broader view on the H2, because H2 show a stabilization of the sales, but again, with strong dynamics, namely international.
If we look at the retail on the H2, we are growing by +1% compared to last year. And it is even more on international, where we are at +6.6%. France is -2.4% on retail like-for-like, and digital is -4.6%. At the end, we are at -0.7% on the H2, which is a stabilization after a long, long period of semester, of negative semesters, which is very important to have in mind. And globally, on a full year basis, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland show a positive like-for-like in retail, which is quite important because we are putting more emphasis in these countries, namely Spain and Italy.
Of course, France will remain our biggest market with almost 50%, with more than 50% of the business, but clearly very encouraging and showing that the strategy on local actions are profitable. On the last point, as mentioned by François-Melchior, traffic is positive every month, both on web and on retail, which is also very important in terms of brand desirability. If we go on the next slide, and you basically, it's some figures that shows exactly what I just mentioned, is the. I will not elaborate so much on the category side, but by channel, for sure, you have the decline of the online and the resilience of retail. So for sure, the share of digital is decreasing.
And by geography, you are seeing the various effect on showing share of international bigger than before. Thank you very much, and hand over to François-Melchior.
Thank you, Denis. So a few words on our 2026 key priorities. First, we'll accelerate what is already working. Over the past two years, we have rebuilt strong foundations, and in many areas, our actions are now delivering tangible results. So in 2026, of course, the objective is to go faster and extract more value from those proven initiatives. So first, brand and marketing, I already mentioned it, but it's clear that our brand awareness has been increasing, and we believe that the change in marketing mix we've been operating is a relevant one. So we're going to push further in this direction to improve our visibility, both online and offline. We'll have many stories to tell, that will be for our products, with a broader offer, more frequent newness and impactful collaboration designed to reinforce desirability and relevance. Second, the store network.
Over the past months, we have learned a lot about our network, and we are excited to push this further in 2026. Our ambition is to have stores that increasingly reflect and honor the Maisons du Monde brand, delivering, of course, stronger experiences and more consistent performance across formats and locations. Of course, cash and cost discipline, so we will continue to reduce our cost basis. It's true that a significant amount of work has already been achieved over the past two years, but we remain fully committed to maintaining the discipline and to go further in 2026, while of course, supporting growth initiatives. At the same time, we are clear-eyed, as I mentioned, about the fact that our online performance has not yet met our expectations.
While some progress, as we mentioned, has been made in H2 compared to H1, the sales remain disappointing relative to the potential of the channel. In 2026, our ambition is therefore to reset and rebuild our online model with a clear objective, to deliver a best-in-class digital experience, fully aligned with the Maisons du Monde brand. This means notably simplifying the customer journey, significantly improving the mobile experience, and reinforcing the perception of quality, design, and value across all our digital touch points. As I mentioned, to support this ambition, we have adapted our organization, strengthened our leadership, and already ensured the beginning of those changes. Together, these priorities reflect a balanced approach, accelerating proven levers while decisively addressing our key area of underperformance at the moment, and put Maisons du Monde on a sustainable path back to growth.
Now, let me finish on the next slide, just to give you a hint of the Spring/Summer 2026 collection that you can now find in our stores. The season is built around three key themes that you can see, the Indoor Garden, Dolce Vita, and Exotic Touch. And of course, our ambition is to surprise and inspire our customers throughout the season by bringing fresh, creative touches on a regular basis. What's important here for you to keep in mind is that the variety of the styles that we offer is really our DNA, and is the reason why we are consistently recognized as a leader in inspiration within our sector by consumers.
As part of this, approach, we will also launch two special collaborations during the quarter, which illustrate both our creative ambitions, and one of them, as you can see, is targeting the growing pet environment that we have been developing over the last year. Then just to tell you that the very first, media reception has been very good on those, new launches. We had a record number of journalists with, with us and with the teams to share those new products and those new expressions of our inspiring products, and we are quite happy with that. So we expect to have a positive output commercially with the Spring/Summer 2026 collection.
So that's in a nutshell what we wanted to share upfront, and of course, we are now happy to take questions, and I believe there are already some questions, so we will immediately open the Q&A sessions. So, I will leave to Denis, the first financial question, but I will, I will move on to the, the other one. So the financial question that Denis will tackle in a second is: With the cost reduction of EUR 120 million by 2026, how much total revenue will you need to have in 2026 to have a small positive net financial result? But I will address first the second question I can see already, which is: What is the trend of sales in January? Is there any impact of the weather conditions, snow in France?
So for January, to put it short, we expect to be slightly negative, and the slight negative indeed does include a circa EUR 1 million effect from the snow events. We had notably three days that were very, very harmful for the French business. We did have a number of stores that had to close, and we did have a number of stores with traffic down by more than 40%. So very slight negative in January, including positive global retail sales and a circa EUR 1 million impact due to the weather conditions in France. I see a third question, and then we'll let Denis go back to the first one. You were targeting 30% affiliated stores. We are far from that at this moment. Can you please explain the reason?
Yeah, clearly what we do not have issues with is number of candidates and eagerness of candidates, to be honest. And I can share with you, I think it's Florent was the question. I was, not many weeks ago, together with all our affiliated partners of France, and they were quite happy the progress we are making and quite happy with the concept. And yet clearly, the business environment in non-food retail in France is quite difficult at the moment. So it does reduce also sometimes the possibility of our partners to further expand their investment and, and CapEx. So no problem on the topic itself, no issue of potential candidates, but certainly a difficult momentum in terms of retail, non-food, enthusiasm in France at the moment.
So basically, on the question, with a cost reduction of EUR 120 million by 2026, how much total revenue will you need in 2026 to have a small positive net result financially? Of course, we will come back, in more, in the last, the next publication with the final results of 2025. But you can imagine that even with this, cost reduction, you have to take inflation because we are speaking of gross cost reduction, we will probably need a slight increase of sales to be in a position to deliver a positive, net result. If we go on the other financial question, can you please elaborate more on the agreement to amend the financial documentation regarding covenant ratio for 2025? And do you need some refinancing?
As obviously, we have mentioned that the group is holding discussion with its financial partners to secure the financing of the business plan. In that context, we continue to benefit from the support of our banking partner, who have unanimously agreed to amend the financial documentation regarding our covenant ratio for December 2025. On that topic, obviously, you can imagine that in view of the top line, the EBITDA is not sufficient enough to be able to pass the ratio. So, we have a covenant waiver on that topic, and we will communicate in due course on the outcome of these discussions.
Thank you, Denis. [Foreign language] , could we have more colors on your strategy to bring digital back to growth? Our flat year-on-year online sales possible, or at least in H2, [Foreign language].
Yes, clearly ambition is to deliver more than that. And in fact, there are two key parts of what we want to do to bring the online back to where it should be. There is a backbone in-depth project to strengthen our model, which is kind of a long term, and there are many things that we are actually working on in very short term, which include, for instance, increasing the payment methods that we have, and they're not all of them rolled out in every country. So that's a part of it. We also see that we can improve the quality of some of the pictures and visualization of products and the detail of products that we can make, and so we're working also on the improvement of this part.
We are also consistently, constantly, sorry, reducing the number of days for deliveries, and we know that we can further improve, not only in the major cities. So you can see 3, 2, 2 dimensions. One is the in-depth, long-term backbone of the online experience with some investments, and that will take place by 2026, 2027. But yet at the same time, we do have some great opportunities to improve sales on a shorter term. And just to also bring some more color on that one, we know that our products and prices are working because retail is playing with exactly this, and we know that the online could be better because the marketplace remains positive and dynamic. So we really know that there is in between something that we can improve, which is really in our hands.
There's a question of current trading, but I already answered it. There is a comment that the value of the company is very low, which is wrong, and this is going to improve moving forward. We certainly believe and hope so. Absolutely, and we work a lot to make this happen.
There is a question of flavor regarding level of inventories.
Well, basically on the inventory side, we achieved to be at the budget. Of course, we will see it in the sales meeting, but it was part of the challenge we had on H2, and it's something that we target and that we met. So we were back at the level of inventory of the budget, meaning a little bit lower than the inventory we hold in December 2024.
There is a question on discount and promotion during the Q4 or H2 versus last year. So a couple of topics on that one. First, we do continue to observe a general trend in our markets towards more promotions. So that's been a you know, a trend that we've been observing for a few years now, probably in fact, ever since the inflation crisis happened in 2022, which generally speaking, led to price increases, which consumer did not want to accept, so in the end, it reflected, generally speaking, I'm not talking specifically about Maisons du Monde, but certainly about the sector and certainly about Europe here. So that has been going on for a while, and we did see a further-...
Increase in promotional investments on the sector in, well, basically in 2025, in every quarter compared to the previous year, certainly. November, as you may imagine, with what I said about Black Friday, has been very heavy on promotional investments. Huge investment on the marketplace. We also invested in promotion in November, more than last year, certainly, with a different approach to last year, because we did have more healthy inventories at the end of the year than last year. So it changed a bit our approach, with less huge discounts on specific products that we would have need, needed to get rid of, but rather a more, a more limited discounts on the broader spectrum of products. And so, yes, this is a general trend.
The pleasing bit that we had about the Christmas collection I mentioned before, is that for this specific collection, we managed on the country to increase sales while reducing promotion, but this was kind of an exception in an overall more promotional intense environment.
Okay, so Black Friday, what was the difference of sales on Black Friday? Frankly speaking, it's difficult to put a specific number on that one, because, in fact, Black Friday has become, as you may have seen, a Black November to some extent. So we had a record week on the core Black Friday, and we had a positive output globally on the Black Friday campaign, but it would be tricky and potentially misleading to put an exact increase of sales on the specific day of Black Friday.
We are not seeing any other questions here on the screen, so I guess I will just go through them again to check if we forgot something, but I believe we addressed all the question. In some cases, it might be twice the same question, but I don't see any question that we did not address. So in that case, let us thank you for your attention today, and we are happy to speak to you again soon. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. Bye-bye.
This concludes today's conference call. Thanks for participating. You may now disconnect.