Good morning, everyone. I am Christoph Barchewitz, and I'm joined today by my co-CEO, Patrick Schmidt, and our CFO, Matthew Price. Firstly, I would like to talk about the worsening conflict and tragedy in Ukraine. GFG is deeply saddened by the war, and we stand alongside all those whose lives have been affected. Our focus continues to be on our Ukrainian colleagues who we are in regular communication with, and we continue to support as best we can. We are maintaining salaries and offering additional financial and employment support. This also includes an increased pledge of EUR 5 million for both our team in the country and the broader humanitarian response. While business as usual in our CIS region is not an option, given the ongoing humanitarian crisis and the significant uncertainties and operational challenges there, we have pared back our operations across the region.
Matthew and I will take us through the results, and then I will provide you with more details on our CIS business and operations at the end of this presentation. Taking a look at the Q1 performance, we achieved net merchandise value of EUR 543 million, up 23% year-on-year. We have a large active customer base of 16.8 million, and our customers made over 10 million orders with an average order frequency of 2.9 x. Our further increased marketplace participation and strong retail margin meant gross margin improved by 1 percentage point to a strong 45%. Our adjusted EBITDA margin improved 0.6 percentage points on the prior year. Q1 NMV growth of 23% was driven by a 5% increase in orders and a 17% increase in average order value.
CIS saw high inflation from exchange rates, so if we excluded CIS, AOV still increased by 14%. It is worth spending some time explaining the drivers for the average order value. There are two elements, each of which contribute to the growth rate. Firstly, region and country mix effects with ANZ and CIS, which have larger baskets and higher selling prices, growing significantly faster. Secondly, we are seeing inflation, particularly in CIS. Looking at our key customer metrics for Q1, there is a positive improvement across them all. Our active customer base remains stable at 16.8 million, reflecting strong growth in ANZ, as well as our deliberate pullback in marketing investment across LatAm to execute our investment plan. We continue to retain our large cohort of customers recruited during the pandemic.
As a rolling 12-month KPI metric, the normal level of first-year attrition in this large cohort holds back growth in our overall active customer metric. Our active customers CAGR since Q1 2019 was 13%. Order frequency grew 8% year-on-year to 2.9 x. Higher average order value and greater order frequency across the group drove NMV per active customer up by 23%. Now turning to our regional performance on slide six. Starting with our LatAm business, the team has stabilized the performance there. As a result of prioritizing efficiency in marketing decisions, NMV and active customers declined 6%, while we improved NMV per active customer by 10%. CIS delivered NMV growth of 50%, with high demand throughout the quarter, which has slowed over the last couple of weeks.
Southeast Asia demand has still not recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Across some of our largest markets, including Indonesia and Philippines, COVID restrictions remain on group gatherings and limits on a full return to work. Against this backdrop, the region delivered NMV growth of 5% and active customers grew by 6%. ANZ NMV grew strongly up 28%, driven in part by robust active customer growth of 18%. NMV per active customer grew 19%, supported by category expansion and the return of going out categories. We have delivered 70% constant currency growth over the last two years, and the longer-term growth dynamics of our business remain strong. I will now hand over to Matthew to take you through the financials.
Thank you, Christoph, and good morning, everyone. In Q1, we delivered revenue growth and a higher gross margin, generating an improved adjusted EBITDA margin. Revenue grew 18% on a constant currency basis to EUR 349 million in the quarter. Again, we see revenue growing slightly slower than NMV as marketplace growth continued to outpace our retail growth. We improved our gross profits to EUR 157 million, representing a 45% margin and a 1 percentage point improvement on last year. The growth of marketplace share delivered most of this expansion. Our group retail margin remained stable despite some ongoing discounting in ANZ, with a higher margin reported in CIS due to the way the exchange rate volatility is reflected in inventory accounting.
Adjusted EBITDA improved by 0.6 percentage points because of the improved gross margin, partially offset by cost investment in LatAm and investments in ANZ to optimize the fulfillment operations after a sustained period of strong growth. In the quarter, we excluded from adjusted EBITDA EUR 1.7 million of share-based compensation, a EUR 0.5 million non-cash hyperinflation adjustment, along with EUR 2 million of other costs, mainly relating to supporting our Ukrainian colleagues and business. Let's take a look at our regional performance on slide nine. We entered 2022 expecting the demand scenario in the early parts of the year to be very similar to Q4 last year, with some ongoing discounting like we saw in Q4. LatAm performance remained under pressure from the macroeconomic environment, and the targeted reduction in marketing investments led to the decline in Q1 revenue.
As we explained at our results in March, we strongly believe in the opportunity in LatAm. We will continue to prioritize investing in the customer proposition instead of focusing on near-term growth. The region's gross margin was broadly stable. CIS delivered revenue growth of 43%. The gross margin increased by 1.8 percentage points to 49%, which largely reflected inflation and the accounting impact of currency devaluation. A sharp drop in the exchange rate tends to flatter the gross margin, while the costs arising from the devaluation come through the financing costs lower down in the P&L. These were a few million EUR in Q1. In SEA, despite 5% NMV growth, revenue declined marginally, with the NMV growth coming from the marketplace.
Increased marketplace share contributed significantly to the gross margin improvement of 1.3 percentage points to 37%, alongside an increase in platform services revenue in the region. In ANZ, the growth in going out categories were a key driver of performance, and the region delivered strong revenue growth of 25% in the quarter. Gross margin reduced to a still strong 47%, reflecting discounting in the market. Now looking at our cash performance on slide 10. The group's liquidity position remains very strong. We invested EUR 48 million in working capital, reflecting our usual seasonality trend. We have EUR 350 million of inventory available, EUR 67 million more than this time last year on an FX neutral basis, ready to trade the upcoming season with fresh, new and relevant product.
We spent EUR 19 million of CapEx, broadly equally split between fulfillment centers and capitalized technology. We closed the quarter with EUR 552 million of pro forma cash, which includes EUR 9 million of restricted cash and EUR 230 million invested in high quality short duration investment funds. Moving to slide 10. Now, going into our outlook for the year. The elevated level of uncertainty in CIS remains, and the impacts of future customer demand, supply of imported products, and potential operational, financial, or legal constraints mean we are currently unable to provide guidance for 2022. Based on what we know today, we would expect to be able to provide guidance of our Q2 results in August.
For our other three regions, we expect the demand environment seen in H2 of last year to continue for the rest of H1 2022 and to progressively improve into the second half. In LatAm, we continue to execute our investment plan. In ANZ, we're investing in H1 to optimize our fulfillment operations after a sustained period of strong growth. Before I pass back to Christoph to update you on our CIS business, you will have seen this morning we launched an offer to buy back up to EUR 100 million at nominal value of our convertible bonds. This reflects the strength of our liquidity position and the board's confidence in delivering our long-term strategy within the funding available. It's our opinion that this offer is of benefit to our investors.
Thank you, Matthew. Our number one priority is our people in Ukraine, and as mentioned earlier, we continue to focus on supporting them as best we can. Lamoda is a local fashion and lifestyle e-commerce retailer with centralized operations across Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine, and employs approximately 9,000 people across the region. They make up a significant part of GFG, and we will continue to do everything we can to provide job continuity and support to our people in each country where we operate. We have pared back our operations across the region and pivoted our focus from growth towards financial self-sufficiency. A variety of factors have contributed to a significant reduction of our imports, marketing activity and investments, and well, as well as the suspension of the development of Lamoda's second fulfillment center in Russia.
In April, we repaid local financial indebtedness of around EUR 20 million, leaving Lamoda debt-free. In the normal course of business, GFG guarantees certain trade liabilities for Lamoda and the other regions. Currently, GFG guarantees around EUR 40 million of such, Lamoda trade liabilities, which we will continue to manage carefully through the seasonality. GFG does not expect to make additional financial investments into or take distributions from Lamoda while this situation endures. Clearly, the operational realities of our CIS business have changed in fundamental ways, and we are working diligently to evaluate a range of further options while ensuring the safety and well-being of our employees. We will now open the call to your questions. If you'd like to submit a written question, please click on the speech bubble at the bottom of the screen and type it in. Thank you.
Thank you, Christoph. If you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Again, press star one to ask the question. We'll pause for just a moment to allow everyone an opportunity to signal for questions. We will take our first questions from Michael Benedict from Berenberg. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Morning, all. Thanks very much for taking my questions. I have three, if that's okay. The first one is just on your comment around evaluating a range of options in CIS. I wonder if there's any color you can give on the range of possible options there. And are you able to get money out of the country if that region is sold? The second one is the comment around optimizing fulfillment operations in Australia and New Zealand. Could you just give a bit of color around what's happening out there and how long the cost drag is expected to last? And then the third one, you mentioned the CIS distribution center is no longer happening. Are we able to get a bit of color on FY 2022 CapEx, given that, or indeed the saving on from that DC being pushed on?
Thank you, Michael. I'll take the first one, and then I'll let Matthew answer the second and the third. What we said about evaluating a range of options, I think it's premature really to get into a lot more detail. It's a very new reality in that region at many levels. I think what we are doing is very carefully considering all of the implications, starting obviously, like we stated, with our people, but then also the broader financial, legal, et cetera, viability of the business.
You know, we'll update the market when we know more about that, but we don't wanna get ahead of ourselves of you know, setting a certain direction which then we may need to change on anyway given that the situation is very fluid. I know that may be not quite the answer you're looking for, but I think it's really early. What we can say is that we are very diligently looking at a broad set of options and we are not ruling anything particularly out of those choices that are available. But even that set of choices is clearly subject to change in the next, you know, weeks and months ahead. I'll leave it at that, Matthew.
Thanks. Yeah, on the ANZ fulfillment operations, this isn't major CapEx or anything, Michael. What we've got there is the business has grown so strongly for a sustained period of time and has expanded its assortment as well, you know, the really good strong rollout of beauty, other products we've talked about. It will be another few months, and it's about changing in racking, bits of automation, bits of software, et cetera, to make sure that the customer service remains absolutely excellent as that business continues to scale. It's a bit of a drag on the EBITDA in H1, but I'm not expecting any huge amounts of CapEx et cetera on there. In terms of CapEx, obviously, the CIS distribution center, that was our major capital project for this year.
We were expecting it to be somewhere in the sort of EUR 35 million-EUR 40 million range, and you've seen the original guidance. Early part of the year before March, we had spent 4 or 5 million of that in the year. Really there is a commercial discussion conversation still ongoing with our partners et cetera on it. You know, the project is suspended for a variety of reasons and good reasons. I think we need to just keep working through those conversations to get to the right outcome for everyone there. But I'm not expecting any further major spend this year from what I'm seeing at the moment. Was that okay, Michael?
Yeah, that's brilliant. Just to confirm on that last one, Matthew, I mean, I think we had EUR 60-odd million of CapEx prior to today. All else equal, that should be sort of EUR 13 million lower. Would that be a fair-
Yeah.
Okay.
It might be a little bit higher than that, but I mean, we'll do full guidance later, but yeah, it's gonna be significantly down on last year, certainly.
Really helpful. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one. We will take our next questions from Miriam Josiah from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone. Two questions from me. Firstly, just on CIS. Could you just give a bit of color on current trading? You mentioned there the reduction in imports and you've pared back marketing, so could you talk about the impact that's having and then just generally what the inventory situation looks like there at the moment? I guess you were pretty comfortable at the full year results. Just wondering if you could give an update on that. Secondly on SEA, could you just talk a bit about how you're positioned in terms of the inventory mix and assortment in that region? Should we expect any additional discounting in the coming quarters given the new COVID restrictions? Then also, are you seeing any further disruptions on the supply chain side given the restrictions as well?
Finally, if you could just comment on what you're seeing in terms of discounting across the other regions as well, and then also the competitive environment. Thank you.
Thank you. I'll start with that, with the question on the CIS current trading and then hand it over to Patrick. So on CIS current trading, clearly we had high demand in the first quarter. I think you'll recall that we said at the March results that we had a very strong start also January and February, and that obviously continued in March. We've seen a slowdown since in terms of demand. Not surprising to us. This is not driven by a lack of inventory or supply at this point. For the current season, we received most of what we expected in terms of the retail model.
There is a bit of a pullback around the marketplace side, given that, you know, some brands have decided to stop those sales, which obviously they control. We're not concerned about a lack of available product for the spring-summer season. For the fall-winter season, that's a broader question that we're obviously working through with our brand partners, you know, both local, which are likely gonna increase in importance, but also international. That's a bit early still to say at this point. We're working towards a range of options in terms of what or scenarios, what the demand will look like later in the year. For now, Q2, we certainly have the inventory and the product available.
Mariam, I'm coming to your second question regarding the inventory in SEA specifically. We're really happy with our inventory in SEA. We obviously have a very high marketplace share there. I'm mentioning this because obviously this is a situation with local lockdowns here and there, broadly SEA going into the direction where Europe and the U.S. already is, where we need to remain very agile, and we remain agile through having a higher and higher marketplace share. At the same time, our retail inventory is good, it's fresh. We don't actually see too much disruption in SEA. We think that that is because we are closer to the source, and we're not just relying on China.
The supply chain disruptions are there, but they're relatively minor. We don't see much additional discounting in Q2 and in current trading. It is a region obviously which is certainly discount driven to some degree, but it's not at a level which is elevated because of the current macroeconomic environment. In regards to your last question, I think that was broadly about discounting in the competitive environment. It's pretty much business as usual. We talked about CIS, we talked about SEA. ANZ has a little bit higher discounting than what we have seen in the past.
We're controlling it, as Christoph said in LatAm, given that we really wanna focus there on profitability and not necessarily on growth, given the profitability we had in LatAm during the last couple of quarters.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. We will take our next questions from our participant, from Mr. Volker Bosse from Baader Bank. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hello. Volker Bosse, Baader Bank. Thanks for taking my question. Sorry to come back on CIS. So, some suppliers as adidas, PUMA decided to stop doing business in Russia. Are you still able to sell these products? Or in other words, are you still able to supply products from these brands, or how is that organized currently? A second question would be on the potential decision on your side to leave CIS. What does it mean financial-wise? I mean, on sales earnings, it's clear, but you said EUR 40 million you have as liabilities on fire, so to say. Is that the maximum or what kind of assets do you have in CIS which need to be written down? Or a bit of color. Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks, Volker. I'll take the first one on the brands and then leave the second one to Matthew. In terms of the brands, it's a very diverse picture in terms of how different brands are approaching that market. I don't really wanna comment on any individual brands and really leave it to them to talk about their CIS business. Obviously everyone can look at our site and find what is available there currently and not, so that's an open source. Broadly the way it works is that on the retail business, whenever we have bought stock for the local market, it sits in our fulfillment center, it's on our balance sheet, and we also decide whether we sell it or not.
The brands have generally also not asked us to change that approach in any way. It's not like there's any degree of disagreement with brands about whether we should continue to sell that or not in the market. We are selling the stock that is on the balance sheet. We have also worked with a few brands who had, you know, additional inventory that they've offered to us that in some cases we have taken where that made sense for us. On the marketplace side where the inventory also sits in the fulfillment center about the brands to control pricing and availability on the platform, that is really a brand by brand decision. A few brands have decided to pause those sales on our platform.
most brands have continued to sell on the marketplace. Then going forward for kind of resupply on the wholesale side, for our retail business model, that's then a brand by brand conversation about whether they are planning to supply the market for the fall/winter season or not. I think many brands have not yet fully decided on that, and that's a very live conversation with our brand partners over the next you know several weeks, few months, as we're heading towards that later part of the year. At this point, we can see that for the current season, like I said, we are very well stocked both on marketplace and on retail.
We don't think that that is a constraint in the near term. More medium term, it's a bigger question mark. Matthew?
Thanks. Hi, Volker. I mean, in terms of numbers under a range of options for CIS, I mean, obviously the commercials and the accounting, et cetera, would vary very widely. I'm not gonna try and give you scenarios for that. All of this is, you know, still quite early stage, and we're working through what the choices could be. Just a couple of numbers then. The EUR 40 million that Christoph quoted, that is what we currently guarantee on the imports for purchases from international brands under PCGs and various bank guarantees for which the group is supporting. That number will and does vary with the seasonality of our working capital.
As Christoph indicated, you know, we are paring down the operations there to achieve financial self-sufficiency inside the country and the region. It'll be more muted than normal, but it does vary. In terms of other potential write-downs, should that arise, our accounts at the end of last year showed that we had EUR 140 million of non-current assets in the region. That probably gives you an indication of what, you know, a non-cash impairment or write-down number could be up to. Thanks.
Yeah. Thank you very much. All the best. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. It appears there are no further questions at this time from our audio participants. I'd like to turn the conference back to Christoph for any questions from the web. Please go ahead, Zoe.
Thank you. We've had one set of questions come from a private investor on the webcast. The first is, could you provide some color on the cadence of CapEx through the year? The quarterly number would appear modestly elevated. The second is, would you expect working capital investment in line with prior years on a full year basis? The last one is, what drove the decision to repay the CIS debt?
Thanks, Zoe. I'll take that. The Q1 CapEx, the number I was quoting was in the cash flow there. That's the cash CapEx rather than the balance sheet additions. You may have noticed that in last year in our Q4, the cash CapEx was really quite low compared to the balance sheet additions. Really, what's happened in Q1 is the cash payment catching up with the timing of the balance sheet addition in there. There's nothing unusual in there, just normal cash cycle. I mean, that happened because the major fulfillment center project was on site, and therefore we were booking before we were due to pay, booking the works in before we were due to pay the supplier.
In terms of working capital for the balance of the year, nothing unusual really happening with our working capital other than, you know, obviously CIS. Our retail business in Q1 was growing a little bit less quickly than our marketplace business, as Christoph commented on. Our retail NMV growth was about 18%-19%. I'd expect that our working capital on a full year basis would grow really in line with the scale of that retail business. A little bit slower than total NMV growth, but it won't be a huge number. What drove the decision to repay the CIS debt? I think there's really a couple of things there.
The first and primary decision is because we said we want to make that business financially self-sufficient, and that we don't want to be putting any further money into the market, nor taking any money or profits out of it. Therefore, dealing with the debt was a logical process of that. In addition, some of the debt is with banks who, you know, are no longer, you know, facing sanctions under EU, et cetera. We obviously chose to sever relationships and deal with that. I hope that makes sense.
Our next question call comes from Paul at HSBC. Question is, can you talk around the strategy to focus on profitability in LatAm and the competitive environment in this market? When will this be expected to progress?
Hi, Volker. I can give some color to that. I was actually just in Brazil about two weeks ago, and this was certainly one of the key topics.
The strategy in LatAm is pretty simple. We wanna make sure that we put our best foot forward, both in terms of products, brand assortment, exclusive assortment, like for example, Forever 21, which we are distributing exclusively in Brazil, but also in terms of customer experience where we talked, I think during the last couple of calls, about the innovations we've made on Milk Run, for example, you know, marketplace fulfillment, better returns, et cetera. While we're improving both the merchandising and also the customer experience with reduced marketing a little bit, because we believe that we're gonna get a better payback on those marketing dollars once we have made all these improvements.
That's why we, while we're not happy with a shrinking business in Q1, we have made that decision of reducing marketing, which has contributed to this result. We believe it's the right decision given that we have actually a lot more a better proposition sort of in the pipeline. That's why we will increase marketing again in Q2 a little bit and even more so in H2 when we see that that proposition is working well and customers like it. We believe that that is probably in line with spend of customers in this category in fashion, lifestyle and beauty actually going up again. Right now, this is certainly true for Q1, the spend and the demand was simply not very strong.
Also the comp in 2021 was pretty strong, so that didn't help either. To answer your question, it's a temporary focus on customer experience, not a pivot towards profitability versus growth. We still believe that with you know probably the lowest e-commerce penetration in LatAm of all of our markets, that we can grow in this market considerably. We will do that in H2.
We have no further questions on the webcast. I'll pass it to you, Christoph, for a closing remark.
Thank you very much. Thank you all for joining today. If you have any further questions, please reach out to the investor relations team directly as you usually do. Thank you.