Hello, welcome to Groupe SEB 2023 First Quarter Sales and Financial Data Call. My name is Jess, and I'll be your coordinator for today's event. For the duration of the call, your lines will be on listen only. However, there will be the opportunity to ask questions. This can be done by pressing star one on your telephone keypad to register your question at any time. If at any point you require assistance, please press star zero and you'll be connected to an operator. I will now hand over to your host, Stanislas de Gramont, Chief Executive Officer, and Nathalie Lomon, Senior Executive Vice President and CFO, to begin today's call. Thank you.
Thank you very much for this introduction. Without further ado, we'll get going. We'll cover today, it's a quarterly sales review, we will cover, of course, Q1 sales highlights. We will look at our sales performance analysis. We'll have a glimpse on the overall net financial debts, we will conclude with the outlook for 2023. Starting for the sales highlight of the first quarter, our sales total performance declined by 3.7% like-for-like, 4.9% reported. That graph highlights the very high level that we maintained for first quarter.
We are close or very or slightly below the level we had in 2021, so it's a very strong first quarter, and that -3.7% has to be taken in in the context of that very strong historical number. As you know, that strong historical number will not be so prominent in the next three quarters of the year. It's a soft start of the year. It's a soft start of the year as we anticipated. We've been saying since December, January, February, that our first quarter sales would be soft. In fact, it is in line with group expectations.
We've been used, and as usual, we have a gap between the performance of our consumer business, which is down 6.6%, but it's worth highlighting the professional business, which is up 29% like-for-like, and 34% total. That is a very strong performance, better than our expectations. Our consumer business has been penalized this quarter by the following elements. The fifth and last consecutive quarter with a high comparable base that should disappear from Q2 onwards. We still have some tough key markets performance in France, Germany and the U.S. The U.S. is mainly a question of phasing, and we have a soft performance in China as expected. I'll come back to that.
Professional, has a very strong start, great momentum in all geographies, a very strong, sound core business trends driven by both machine sales and services. We have new contracts, in the PCM business, which is, very exciting and pulling the growth. Nathalie, you wanna take us through the key numbers?
Yes. Thank you very much, Stanislas. In the first quarter of 2023, Groupe SEB has reported sales for EUR 1,822 million. As you can see on this chart, it's quite a contrasted performance as Stanislas has already highlighted as well, with the consumer declining 6.6% like-for-like facing high comps, and we'll get into more details in a few minutes regarding the performance of the consumer segment. Whereas the professional segment has delivered EUR 209 million and 29.1% growth like-for-like, an outstanding performance. If we move to the usual bridge of sales comparing the first quarter of 2022 to 2023, you see here the organic growth of -EUR 72 million, accounting for -3.7%.
A negative effect in currencies for EUR 27 million, a positive impact coming from scope. This is reflecting the first quarter of sales that we record in 2023 regarding Zummo. I want to highlight that we will consolidate La San Marco, a business we have acquired in February this year, as of June 2023. Moving to the currency impact, the -EUR 27 million that I have just highlighted. You can see on this chart all this currency impact is broken down on sales with a strong positive contribution from the Russian ruble and the US dollar. On the far extreme of the chart, a negative contributions mainly coming from emerging countries with fluctuating currencies, in Colombia, in Turkey, in Egypt, and also a negative impact coming from the Chinese yuan.
Thanks, Nathalie. We've tried to look at the sales performance in the context of the previous two quarters of sales, Q4 and Q3 last year. This chart works this way. You have the first column is Q1 2022, the second one Q1 2023. We have the variation from 2022- 2023 in reported and in like-for-like. We've reminded you of the Q4 like-for-like numbers and the Q3 like-for-like numbers. The lines are classical geographical split. What's interesting, if you go to the bottom of the chart, we had Q3 at minus 8% like-for-like last year, Q4 minus 5.6%, and we post Q1 2023 at minus 3.7%.
We see that there is a clear recovery of sales performance year on year, in parts mainly due to the comps numbers. You see that that recovery is a factor of the consumer slowing down its decline, 8.8% negative in Q3, 7.3% negative in Q4, 6.6% negative in Q1. But also the acceleration of the professional business that we were expecting. We've been saying since since the second half of 2021 that professional will be recovering and we're expecting this business to come back to speed with a strong growth and a profit generation. Now, by regions, you will have the opportunity to look at the details.
Two potential hiccups in this trend of quarter-on-quarter performance. In Americas, we're expecting it because it's a high comps number in the first half of the year, driven by 2021 and 2022. And in China, it is a very specific moment, mainly due to the fact that China last year, Q1, had a very robust 11% growth performance. Now, a bit more flesh around this performance, starting with the professional business. It's a very strong business. We have a double-digit growth across all regions. Yes, China is driving the pack, but in Germany, in the U.S., and in U.K., we also have some very strong performances.
We have a 50/50 mix in machine sales growth between large deals and core business. You will remember that during the COVID lockdowns, we did work on expanding our customer base, and we reap the benefit of that now. Deals have come back, but core business, smaller outlets, smaller customers are still there, and that's, I think, driving the business. We see also a strong recurring revenues from service and maintenance. The growth is in line with the overall professional business, and that's great news. Last, we see that we have a solid new product momentum. We had a great customer reception at the INTERNORGA fair in Hamburg in March, which is probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest, fair for professional material coffee machines in particular.
We have a very strong pull from customers for our new products. Finally, you will remember that we've acquired La San Marco in the first part of this year. That will bring great complementary products to our PCM offering. Moving on to the consumer business, starting with EMEA. In EMEA, we have a contrasted performance between Western Europe, which is at -9.6% like-for-like, and other EMEA countries, which are back to growth at +6.7%. In Western Europe, we were expecting that we have soft markets in Western Europe during Q1.
We still have a strong comparison base for 2022 Q1 as an extension of Q1 2021, which was absolutely exceptional in France and Germany in particular. We see some continued reduction in inventory level with some retail partners. We had high inventories in trade in the first half of last year. Those inventories in trade went back to a kind of historical normal level in the second half of last year. Now we see some retailers going further down in their inventory level and of course that impacts our ability to convert stronger sell-out into sell-in. Last, we see that there's a good momentum for several bestsellers. We have oil sprayers which are growing fast.
We have Ingenio cookware and that includes an LP, a loyalty program in France that is working very well. We see that we have some good drive and some good momentum in Western Europe on some key product lines. Other EMEA countries are positive overall. We have in Central and Eastern Europe, high inflation in the region. Despite that, we put good performance with share gains in several countries. We see the market recovering in Ukraine, that is leveraging Groupe's strong historical leadership positions and still gaining share. We have a strong local demand in Turkey and Egypt, despite a highly volatile currency environments. Moving on to Americas. It's not disappointing. We're expecting it. A low minus 22% like-for-like performance in North America.
Again, something that we're expecting. We are in a context, in a market that is pretty soft. We are gaining share and expanding our leadership position in cookware. Cookware is the bulk of our businesses in North America. We are gaining share in Tefal and in All-Clad. Here, again, we are impacted by some retailers focused on inventory levels and cash management. That is something that is in the papers. Mexico, as [KIFs] was seeing very strong performance. We are developing positively across all categories. We have successful new launches in fans and blenders. We have reinforced our leadership in cookware. Finally, in South America, Brazil and Colombia, we are growing.
Colombia both through cookware and kitchen electrics and in Brazil particular, we have a good back of season fan performance. If I move on to Asia. In Asia, we had a soft start to the year in China as expected. We have a very high comparable base. Last year, Q1, we were up 11% like-for-like versus Q1 2021. The timing of the Chinese New Year was mid-February last year and is the last week of January this year. Which means the inventory build has been in parts on Q4 on December 2022. That's, that makes the comparison base more difficult. We see that we're continuously gaining shares in both cookware and kitchen electrics in both online and offline.
I remind you that we are now, of course, number one in cookware, both on and offline. Combining on and offline on kitchen electrics, we are now the market leader in China, ahead of Joyoung and ahead of Midea. That's a credit to our innovation and activation strategy. We have a very powerful house in China, both in terms of product development and expansion and in terms of activation on the traditional trade, on the traditional online platforms, but also on the new platforms like Douyin. We see strong performance. There's a lot of talks in China on the economy reopening. We don't see yet that supporting demand for cookware and HDA products.
A lot of people look at that, we see that hospitality, catering, and travels are the sectors that are benefiting more. We're confident that we end up benefiting from that. We were in China a few weeks ago, we see that we see this business back to growth in revenue for the remaining three quarters of the year. I think it's something that we are very comfortable with. The rest of Asia had a challenging performance. We have, in particular in Japan and South Korea, which are our biggest markets outside of China, some challenging situation.
We see that currencies, the Japanese yen in particular at JPY 147, makes it very difficult to maintain or to keep our business with a steady level of performance. We've had some crisis in Japan and Korea in the past. We know that it may take some time, but we are confident that past these historical numbers of Q1 last year, we should start to see a sequential improvement in this region as well. Voila, for sales. Nathalie, you wanna take us through the profit outlook?
Sure, Stanislas.
In the first quarter, the group has delivered of 65 million EUR. That is 3.6% of margin. Before getting into some comments on this number, I just want to remind you that because of the seasonality of the activity of the group, the first quarter operating profit is not representative of the full year performance. As we said, because we're delivering lower sales in the first quarter, for sure there's an impact directly in the operating results.
We still have quite high costs in the first quarter because they're made of products that have been manufactured or sourced in 2022 at higher cost compared to what we currently see in the beginning of the year. This has a negative impact that we estimate to be close to EUR 50 million in our profitability in the first quarter. Second, as we're delivering lower revenue, this is creating a negative operating leverage on our OpEx. With more details on raw mat, freight cost and FX, and I will start with the raw mats and the freight costs. We see them decreasing in the first quarter.
As we said, when we delivered the 2022 performance and 2023 outlook in February, that negative impact of cost decrease will materialize in the second quarter in our margin. In the first quarter, we have a very limited impact coming from FX on the operating profit. Moving forward, we expect to see more negative impact coming from FX that will offset the positive impact we expect on lower production costs on raw mat and freight. Moving forward, this means that we expect that the offer margin will improve quarter on quarter from Q2 and for the rest of the year. If we move to the net debt of the group, we're closing the quarter with a net debt at EUR 1.864 billion.
It's a decrease of EUR 109 million when compared to end of last year. This is coming from a strong cash flow generation, which is above EUR 200 million for this quarter, mainly fueled by a further reduction in inventory. You may recall that we have started to decrease our inventory with an action plan that has been triggered at the end of the second quarter last year. Since then, we're sequentially reducing our level of inventory, so we're still on that way. Another explanation for the gap between the evolution of in the net debt between the free cash flow and the and the reduction of the net debt is coming, of course, from the acquisition of La San Marco.
We're closing the quarter with a still, very, healthy and well-balanced, financing structure, and that is worth noting as well. Over to you, Stanislas.
Merci, Nathalie. Right. We are confirming our full year outlook. We see a pro-progressive recovery in consumer sales, starting in March. We see that confirmed in through April. We confirm strong growth in professional sales and of course, the very strong, outstanding, stellar first quarter, can only encourage us in this direction. All the more so as in professional, that business is not coming from a particular huge deal. Of course, we have big deals, but not only, we have also a sound ground growth of our business. We still see that we will increase the full year group performance offer margin. We have as expected, a low margin in the first quarter.
The bulk of it is due to this cost embark from 2022 Q4, that will disappear from Q2 onwards. We confirm our outlook and now we are ready and happy to take your questions.
If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Please ensure your line is unmuted locally as you'll be advised when to ask your question. The first question comes from the line of Charles-Louis Scotti from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Hello. Good afternoon. I have four questions, please. The first one on top line, stripping out the easier comparison basis. What makes you more a beat on the consumer demand for the balance of the year? If you could share with us any, you know, evidences or early signs of improvement, this will be very helpful because it seems that the macroeconomic data are somewhat worsening in recent weeks. Second question on the cost base. If we look at the freight cost, it has kept falling year to date, and it's approximately 85% below the average level of 2021. If I remember well, it had a EUR 244 million headwinds on your cost base.
How much do you think you can recoup from those headwinds? It seems that it's a little bit, you know, your guidance is probably a little bit conservative when you say that the FX will completely offset the expected margin tailwinds coming from the falling input cost base. If you could elaborate a little bit on that, it would be helpful. Two other questions on the professional business. Have the Q1 sales been boosted by any one of contract or is it fair to assume that the business will keep growing at the same pace for the balance of the year, i.e., in the low mid-twenties for the full year on average?
Finally, if I'm not mistaken, you are a supplier of Tim Hortons in Canada. I'm just curious to hear if you are also a partner of Tim Hortons on their huge expansion plan in China or if your contract with Luckin Coffee is exclusive there. You can remind us also the breakdown of PCM business by region, it would be very helpful as well. Thank you.
Thank you. That reminds me of those Canadian viewers of mine. Thank you, Charles Louis, for these questions. I'll take one, three, and four, and then Nathalie will look at the cost base. We are, when we look at the prospects of top line recovery in the consumer business, of course, the comparison base is a key one. Yes, you're right. There is no great news or news flow on the consumer demand or on the economic growth, et cetera. We see that we have some strong product initiatives coming up on Ingenio, on L'OR Espresso . We see that we have very positive commercial agreements with our trade partners, in particular in Western Europe.
There will be a bit more promotional aggressivity in the second half of the year than we had in the second half of last year. That will generate stronger growth. The drivers, we are a bit because of new product initiatives, because of customers agreements and because of some commercial aggressiveness. On the professional, we have, I will not give you a precise number for the full year guidance on professional growth. I repeat that sales growth is balanced between contracts and core business. We, yes, Q1 is probably a bit on the high side. That's because of Q1 last year wasn't at the level of Q3 or Q4.
If you look at the const number, again, that is, that is probably one of the main explanation for this very high 29%. We see again, professional business with a strong growth through the year. On Tim Hortons, we have no, I mean, yes, Tim Hortons is expanding outside of Canada, in particular in China. We do have some collaboration with them outside of Canada, and we don't have an exclusivity for Luckin Coffee in China. Of course, we are mindful and conscious of the relationship with such and such customer, and we try and protect our relationship with our customers in the best interest of the company. Nathalie?
Yes. To your point regarding the freight cost, for sure, we'll benefit of lower freight costs in the course of the year, having in mind that they've been super high in the entire year 2022. As I explained, everything we have sold in the first quarter was sourced or shipped with high freight costs. We will recoup three quarters out of four of lower freight costs in the course of the year. Regarding raw mats, the situation is a bit different. We've seen a significant increase in raw mats and component costs in 2022. That will not be recouped in 2023.
We have, based on the one hand, our hedging policy and on the other hand, discussions that we have with suppliers, some opportunities to see a lower raw mats and component costs in the PNL in 2023. We will not recoup the entire increase in cost that we have faced in 2022.
Okay.
Yes. We answer your question, Charlie?
Yes, perfectly. Just one other question, yes, on the geographical breakdown of the PCM business. Can you share this data with us?
Not really. I mean,
Okay.
We, I can tell you that, we have our three biggest countries are China, the United States, and Germany. Those three countries are driving the growth and driving the pack. We don't, no, we don't communicate by country or by geography. Okay?
Okay, perfect. Thank you very much.
All right. Maria?
The next question comes from the line of Mourad Lahmidi from BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you. Good morning, everyone. Three questions for me. The first one is, last year, you commented on the trends in the market, especially in Western Europe. You pointed to a reversal of the market in April last year. Maybe you can give us an update on where the market is going right now in terms of demand, especially in Western Europe. The second question is around what you indicated during the call that retailers are winding down inventories below their normative level. Is it something that you see across the board, or is it only in Europe?
Can you maybe share with us some sell-out data in March and in the latest weeks? Finally, I was quite surprised by the positive impact from ForEx in the PNL bridge. I thought that ForEx was gonna be a headwind, so maybe you can give us some perspective on the fading of the ForEx incident. For the current year. Thank you.
Thank you, Mourad. I'll take the one on Western Europe and inventories. On Western Europe, we the market is pulled by positive product initiatives like oil-less fryers or Ingenio, which is a premium cookware. On the negative there is some slight trade down, in particular in France and Germany. France, because it's driven by a grande surface alimentaire, food stores. We saw last year a sudden negative impact on demand through March, April. We see that this going through these comps or against these comps, we have a better performance than we had last year.
That confirms the fact that the markets are pretty steady and the shots or the impacts, the negative impacts of last year are behind us. We don't share sell-out data because if we start to share sell-out data and sell-in, then we have to report every week or every month by country, by customer. By the way, sell-out data is often confidential information that retailers share with us, so we don't share sell-out data. We do see, and it's in the 20s in terms of EUR million. We do see a gap between the sell-in and sell-out.
The regions involved are Western Europe and, in particular, some very core specialists that have some challenges on their financing and balance sheet. We'll let you elaborate or find out who that is. We also see in the United States, big online retailers or big offline retailers being cautious on the inventory they build. Again, they publish their results in the last 24 hours. You see that there is a clear intention to reduce inventories on their side. Outside of Western Europe and North America, we don't see that factor. Nathalie, Forex?
Yes. regarding FX, we have, as I said, a very limited impact on the operating result, and I assume that's your question. You're not talking sales, right?
Yes.
Yeah. We said that on the full year basis, we would expect a negative impact. That is still our assumption. You may want to recall that we have a high short position in US dollar and in Chinese yuan. We have a prudent hedging policy. Last year we have benefited when those two currencies have strongly evolved from very positive hedging results as we had booked our hedges in average nine months in advance. That will not be the case in 2023, and that's one, if not the major reason why we expect a negative impact coming from FX moving forward.
Okay, thank you very much.
You're welcome.
I think you probably have a slight underestimation of the FX impact, both in sales and profit from what I see in the consensus and in the numbers that they published.
Yes.
Okay. Right. Thank you, Mourad.
The next question comes from the line of Alessandro Cecchini from Equita. Please go ahead.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for taking my questions. The first one, if you could elaborate a little bit more, on the Forex side, for the year. What could be, I mean, an assumption in term of headwinds, at the half level for the, for the full year? My second question instead is, if you could, of course, not, in a precise way, but, if you could... You are saying that in China now is 70% is online. I was wondering if you could update us about the online business, portion, of the market in Western Europe, and in the U.S.?
Also to better analyze the part of the business that in this moment is under pressure coming from the decision by retailers, physical retailers to reduce inventories. And then, still on this kind of inventories, do you think that it's on specific categories, this kind of willingness to reduce inventories in Europe and U.S. or is broad base? Thank you.
You wanna take the Forex or F.X. first?
Yes.
Great.
When we released our 2023 outlook, that was back in February, we said that there would be headwinds and tailwinds in the offer in 2023. Tailwinds coming from lower costs in terms of sea freight, in terms of raw mat and components, and the headwinds coming from FX. As I just said, the most significant part of the FX headwinds is coming from the change in our hedging results. The sum of the two, the tailwinds and the headwinds, will be.
Close.
close to zero. This is what we have disclosed in February, and this is still the way we see the PNL moving forward in the next three quarters. You should expect that both headwinds and tailwinds will neutralize.
On the, you have several questions on online. First, maybe a set of data. Online is getting close to 40% sales globally for the group. That's and that's something that we see in all regions. With peaks in China, as you say, over 70%, but also the U.K. over 70%. We see the U.S. prominent as well. Online is now an integral part of the of the the trading picture of the group. We have the same challenges on the inventory management with online retailers as with offline retailers. One of the big the biggest online retailer is reducing inventory throughout. Of course, the weight of this retailer on our business impacts our selling.
We don't think there is a category-specific reduction on inventory on the side of our retail partners. We see that they are under pressure to reduce their cash consumption and that applies, I think, to all categories. If anything, they are probably still a bit overstock on the consumer electronics or on TV sets, and that, of course, impacts their ability to purchase other categories as a side effect.
Okay, thank you. On the gap that you expect for the full year to be neutralized, roughly speaking, just to have in mind that of course you don't consider the cost that you spent last year to reduce inventories. Now, I think that inventories for you are at good levels. Basically the starting point now is - EUR 47, - EUR 50, because -EUR 50 is inflation plus three Forex. You expect to recover this kind of a EUR 50 million that you lost in the first quarter. It's right, the?
Yes.
Yes.
Okay.
Yes. That EUR 50 million is coming from the cost for producing in 2022. We have most of our negotiation, our annual negotiations. We're starting the year with new prices being in terms of components or raw materials. We see that the cost of production are reducing, but that will materialize in cost of goods sold when we will sell what we're currently sourcing or manufacturing, so in the second quarter.
Okay. Thank you.
Okay. You're welcome.
Before we move to the next question. As a reminder, please press star one if you'd like to ask a question. The next question comes from the line of Mary Ford from Société Générale. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thank you. I just would like to come back on the promotion that you mentioned for the second half of the year. Could you comment further and tell us if it's a worldwide policy, or have you specifically targeted some markets or some product category? The second question is about your cash flow generation, which is due to the fact that you reduce further your inventories. Did your inventories have been reduced for finished goods or for raw mat? Lastly, my question is also... No, sorry. That's it. It has been already asked.
Okay. I'll take the first one. Nathalie will take the one on cash. On the promotions, we know that we need to recover some slots that we lost last year because of the need to protect our margins, and that is mainly in Western Europe. If you step back, I mean, our industry is an industry where pricing is very transparent between online, offline, China, et cetera. We need to stay in the market, and we'll re-adjust our promotional intensity to the promotional intensity of the market. It's mainly, to answer your question, it's gonna be mainly Western Europe and a bit in the United States. Nathalie.
Okay.
Yes. What we say that, actually when we look our inventory, we have almost one quarter of that, which is road map components and to a lesser extent WIP. Then the rest is made of finished products.
WIP?
Work in progress. The rest is made of finished products. You could consider that the reduction is more focused on the finished products than on the rest.
Okay. I recover my last question is about China. You've got 70% online. I would like to know if you still have room to progress on that side, or if you think that now the business online is pretty mature on a current basis?
No, it's not us who are making progress, it is the market and the consumers. I mean, Douyin, known in Western, in the Western world as TikTok, Douyin has 800 million visitors per week. When they expand their offering of their sales to consumer or more product categories, this is what drives the evolution of the market from offline to online. What is sure is that we have a very strong position in all offline retailers. We are establishing strong positions in all online retailers. We wanna be number one wherever we are. Then we let the market decide, we let consumers decide where they shop from and why they go and shop from Tmall, Jingdong or Pinduoduo or Douyin. It's difficult to answer.
What we know, is that, our business is very interactive between online and offline, when it comes to looking for information, looking for alternative solution, comparisons, et cetera. People are very easily and frequently online to look for our products. If there is a good online selling and distribution and service offer, then they buy online.
We agree there is no anymore any mixed impact on your profitability from online.
No, no. We watch that, we watch that very carefully because the models evolve very fast. I mean, you can move from logistics operated by Tmall, then Tmall asks you to take control of the logistics. Your PNL fluctuates between OPEX, traffic building, margin, price. We watch that in a very careful manner. I mean, our Chinese colleagues look at it every day or every week. We look at it at the group level every month. The mix of activity varies a lot, and we make sure that we keep a good control and a good balance of our PNL in all these clients.
Thank you.
Okay.
The next question that comes from the line of Fraser Donlon from Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, Stanislas and Nathalie.
Hi, Fraser.
Thanks for the presentation. Hi. I had two questions. One was just on kind of people and wages. Maybe you could give a comment on the, let's say, global wage inflation you're seeing within the group based on the markets you're exposed to. Within that, how should we think about, you know, volume of employees? Because I could see there was quite a big drop in China in 2022, which I guess was weighted to the back half of the year. Just any guidance you could give me in terms of how that pulls through in 2023 would be super helpful. The second question was just on the very nice kind of revenues in professional.
What kind of margin are you seeing at that kind of more than EUR 200 million sales in the professional business? Thank you very much.
Thank you, Fraser. Thanks for your questions. Very good questions. On people and wages, we expect salary inflation this year compounded around the world between 4.5% and 5%. That is a reflection of salary inflation in the Western world, but also in China and everywhere. We see this inflation hitting us. You will note that the impact on Q1 numbers is still low because salary increases typically take place in March. We should have more impact of that from Q2 onwards. Employment in China is a reflection of the variability of our production.
We had big drops in production and export in the second half of last year. We've adjusted our workforce to this big drop. We have a remarkable ability in China to let people go and to hire back people in our factories. This is a very well-oiled operation. We are. I think it's a great asset for us to be able to wind down or up our operation in China with that.
Flexibility
... flexibility. On the professional profitability, I think we had a tough 2020, 2021. The business was lagging behind in terms of sales. It's a high fixed cost business. Now we are back into EUR 200 million-plus in a single quarter. I would be very disappointing for anything below 15% operating margin.
Perfect. Thank you very much.
Nathalie looks at me, "No, no, we said 15% is the target." I say, "I would be pretty disappointed if we stay below 15%." Thank you, Fraser. Did I answer your question?
Yes. All clear. Thank you very much.
Very good.
As one last reminder, please press star one if you'd like to ask a question. There are no further questions in the queue, I'll now turn the call back over to your host for some closing remarks.
Okay. Well, thank you. Well, first, thank you very much for your continuous interest in our business. I did like that question session because I think you are on the, on the key topics that we are focusing on. That means there's a good alignment and a good mutual understanding of what we are up to do on our side and the way you see it and the way you see the business evolving. It's, it is still a non-satisfactory performance because every time a sales number is negative, I call that unsatisfactory.
Yet we see that the things are progressively improving and we expect from Q12 months to have a much better progression to share with you. Our next meetings will be for the media results. I think it will be in the back end of July. We have our general assembly on the 17th of May. In the meantime, thank you very much, and wish you all a very good weekend. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Thank you for joining today's call. You may now disconnect your line.