H2 20/21

Jun 16, 2021

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SASA's online investors presentation for the year ended 31st March 2021. The past year was the most difficult one for the world and SASA was no exception. Our business operations and financial performance were severely affected by the COVID pandemic. The group's annual turnover declined by 47% to RMB 3,040,000,000, dollars Loss for the year amounted to 3.50 1,000,000. As a result of the group's stringent inventory management and cost control measures, our inventory decreased by nearly 2.40 1,000,000, while our cash on hand stood at 5.30 1,000,000 as at the year end date, adequate to meet our current operating needs. The performance of our core market Hong Kong SAR was weak throughout the year. This is mainly due to a substantial decline of visitors from Mainland China to almost 0 as a result of global stringent border controls, while local consumption was also affected by social distancing measures. In Macau SAR, the consumption subsidy scheme launched by the government last May boosted local consumption. The reopening of the border with Mainland China in late September last year led to the continuous growth of Mainland Chinese visitors. Facilitating the gradual recovery of the group sales in the second half. In Hong Kong and Macau SAR as a whole, thanks to the Mainland China border reopening in Macau SAR and the load base effect in the Q4, sales decline narrowed from around 71% in the first half to 38% in the second half. On a full year basis, our sales declined by 58%. In the face of the challenging operating environment, the group responded with measures including short term cost reduction plans, stringent inventory control and long term cost structure optimization with a focus on rationalizing the store network. In Hong Kong SAR, the group had a net decrease of 12 stores last year, of which 80% were located in tourist At the same time, we continue to negotiate for rental concessions from landlords in order to reduce rental expenses. The group has further streamlined its operations and stepped up digitization and automation to bring down costs and improve efficiency, while minimizing unnecessary and non productive expenses. Office expenses have been reduced by about a third compared to that of the previous year, driving higher cost efficiency of the group in the long term. During the year, sales were dominated by local consumption. SASSA introduced products that address the needs and preferences of local customers, such as protective and personal care products. We also launched promotions and improved in store product display to drive consumption and bolster customer loyalty. With strenuous efforts on developing our online business, the turnover of this business segment increased by approximately 80% in the second half, leading to a profit turnaround for the whole year. In the new financial year to date, this business segment has continued to outperform with a growth rate of more than 100%. The group has actively promoted the OGO business model by the integration of its physical retail stores and online platforms at the operating level. With an aim to reduce its reliance on brick and mortar stores, thereby lowering its fixed overheads and overall operating costs and arriving at a more flexible cost structure. Such approach would help to lower the breakeven point of our retail business in Hong Kong and Macau SARs. In the Mainland China market, the pandemic has been under control since May last year. Driven by the post pandemic consumption, the group registered positive sales growth starting from the Q3. We also strategically expanded our store network in key regions as planned. The number of stores increased by 13 during the year, while the annual turnover increased by nearly 16%. In Malaysia, the group stores were forced to close temporarily for nearly 100 days due to the pandemic, resulting in a decrease of almost 35% in turnover. Nevertheless, the group carried out effective cost reduction measures, which successfully lowered store and office expenses by about 30%. Wage subsidy from the government also helped to mitigate losses. However, the worsened pandemic situation in recent months in the country has led to weakened sales performance again. Over the years, SASA's business focus was placed on Hong Kong and Macau SARs as well as the physical retail segment. In the future, we will expedite this market development beyond Hong Kong and Macau SARs physical stores, especially Mainland China physical store market and online, which both possess promising growth potentials. Our long term vision is to grow business beyond the brick and mortar operations in Hong Kong Macau SAR from approximately 35% in this financial year to about 50% in order to achieve a more diversified and sustainable business. We will speed up the expansion of online operations with a focus on O2O integration with brick and mortar stores to realize complementary advantages. Adhering to our customer centric service philosophy, we have launched the click and collect service this year to offer customers with greater flexibility. Our shopping website in Hong Kong SAR has been revamped to improve online shopping experience and has successfully driven sales growth higher. This new website also enables SASA's frontline staff to provide personalized services to customers online and will be used for centralizing and consolidating both online and offline customer bases in Hong Kong and Macau SARs in the future, with the aim of raising customer loyalty and repurchase rate. Retail stores play a pivotal role in improving customer experience in SASA's O2O operating model. Where rental and store area allow, we plan to set up customer experience zones in designated physical stores in Hong Kong and Macau SARs for customers to try out beauty and health products, creating a unique shopping experience. We are also eyeing on the enormous market potential in Mainland China, taking advantage of a weaker rental market to negotiate for more reasonable rent after the pandemic. We will accelerate store opening in Mainland China. We will focus our resources on expanding in core city clusters, especially in the Greater Bay Area and improve store management and operating efficiency. In Macau SAR, sales has been picking up continuously over the past few months. The business outlook is expected to improve further, thanks to the gradual increase of Mainland tourist arrivals. As for the Hong Kong SAR, the performance of this market still depends on the timing of the reopening of the border with Mainland China. Nevertheless, the consumption vouchers that are about to be launched by the government is expected to boost the consumer market. Hopefully, the worst of the winter has passed. Guided by our vision towards sustainable development and the corresponding business improvement plan in combination with our prudent cost control measures that would optimize overall cost structure, SASSA is poised to return to profitability. SASSA will fight alongside Hong Kong and overcome adversities together until the pandemic fully subsides. We will donate Hong Kong $1,000,000 worth of SASA cash vouchers as prices in lucky draws to encourage COVID vaccination among Hong Kong residents to help us reach effective herd immunity soonest. We believe the faster vaccination penetration increases, the sooner our city can hopefully further ease anti pandemic measures and reopen our border, leading to a faster normalization and recovery in the economy. Now I will pass the floor to Guy, who will explain SASA's financial and operation performance for the year. Thank you. Hi. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to SASA International Holdings Limited's annual results presentation for the year ended 31st March 2021. Our agenda today covers our financial performance, business review and outlook. First of all, our financial performance. Our turnover was €3,043,000,000 a reduction of 46.8 percent. Gross profit was €1,51,800,000 a reduction of 49.5%. Gross profit margin was 34.6%, a reduction of 1.8 percentage points. Loss for the year was €351,400,000 as compared to €515,900,000 last year. Basic loss per share was CAD0.1103 as opposed to CAD0.167 last year. In terms of geographical sales mix, Hong Kong Macau SAR sales mix has decreased from 82.9% of group turnover last year to 65.7% this year, mainly due to cross border restrictions, which effectively put a stop to tourist flow into Hong Kong and for a limited period Macau as well. The rise of online shopping is manifesting itself in our online sales mix, which has increased from 6% of group turnover last year to 16.5% this year. Mainland China sales mix has increased from 4.3% last year to 9.5% this year, thanks to the speed at which COVID-nineteen has been brought under control, our new store opening efforts and improved product offerings. Malaysia has also risen from 6.8% last year to 8.3% this year by virtue of a slower decline in sales. This slide shows the onlineoffline sales breakdown for both Hong Kong Macau SARs and also Mainland China Markets. The penetration of online sales is clearly increasing in Hong Kong account where physical stores have traditionally dominated sales. We are starting to see online sales making headway increasing from 0.6% of Hong Kong account turnover last year to 4.6% this year. Online sales has been our main thrust into the Mainland China market for years and therefore has made up over 50% of our sales in the market. For the Mainland China market as a whole, growth of sales online has been higher than physical stores and the same holds for us too. In the year of this report, our sales at physical stores increased by 15.9%, but our online sales has increased by 45.4%. As a result, our online sales mix has increased from 56.2% to 57.3%. Physical stores have traditionally been our main business in Hong Kong Macao. But as the pandemic halted tourist flow, the flexibility and scalability of online shopping has become more prominent and the high fixed costs of physical stores brought up to France. In Hong Kong in particular, where rental costs are among the highest in the world, We have reduced our footprint in tourist areas by about 20% to 45 stores, and we'll continue to reduce store count in tourist locations. This serves to reduce both short term costs and improve long term cost structure and will increase our profitability and competitiveness in the long run. In the mainland, where we are underrepresented physically, we have increased the number of stores by about 30% to 57 stores and we increased the pace of store opening to increase market penetration. In Malaysia, we will consolidate our position until the pandemic is brought under control. This is the group profitability analysis. Before accounting for store impairment charges, Hong Kong Macao operations incurred a loss of $296,500,000 for the year as we were affected by the pandemic for the entire 12 months of the financial year. This compares to $148,200,000 of loss in the previous year. Losses peaked in the first half of the year at $192,500,000 when the pandemic started to take hold, but started to decline in the second half, during which losses narrowed to €104,000,000 Thanks to cost reduction efforts paying off and Macau turning in a profit in the second half. Our online sales has made a profit of $8,800,000 while our mainland market and Malaysia market made losses of $12,700,000 and $1,200,000 respectively. The improvements in our online business is quite market, turning into turning a first half loss into a profit for the year. I will go into more details for each business further on. Group loss of the year after store impairments and including discontinued activities decreased from RMB515 1,000,000 last year to RMB351.4 million this year. Our group's financial position remains at a net cash with 0 borrowings. Our cash on hand stood at DKK526 1,000,000 as at 31st March, a reduction of DKK 115 1,000,000 from last year. Our reduction of inventory by DKK 239,000,000 has helped us finance this difficult period. Accounts payable has increased by DKK 71,000,000, playing a small part in financing us. Please note that currently, we have no borrowings at all. Then we move on to business review. In Hong Kong Macao SARs, we have contrasting performance due to pandemic management. The combined sales of Hong Kong Macao SARs declined by 70.8% in the first half and this decline narrowed to 38% in the second half due to low base from the Q4 the previous year and Macao's recovery in the second half. In Hong Kong SAR alone, it had a year long weak performance being dictated by close border and persistence of social distancing measures. For Macau SAR, it benefit from government consumption vouchers and the resumption of individual visits scheme for mainland Chinese visitors in late September. As a result, sales declined substantially narrowed in the second half and Macau was able to provide positive profit contribution to the group. The worst of the pandemic is likely over. The vaccination program is underway and our cost control measures are now starting to see results. Efforts by Hong Kong and Macau SAR Skibboost local consumption is also underway. In Macau SAR, the recovery of SASA transaction volume of PRC tourists is faster than arrivals in Macau as a whole. This slide shows that the return of mainland tourists to Macau is picking up steam. And on top of that, the recovery of our sales to mainland tourists is faster than their arrival. In the Q3, mainland visitors to Macau declined by 73.2%, while salsa corresponding sales volume declined by 72.5%. By 4th quarter, mainland visitors to Macau decline narrowed to 31.8%, while salsa's corresponding sales volume declined by 0.8%. In Hong Kong and Macau SARs, our gross profit margin started recovering in the 2nd quarter. In the Q1, our gross profit percentage was seriously affected by discounting to drive inventory clearance amidst of the pandemic. In the Q2, our gross profit margin bottomed out and started recovering after inventory reached a reasonable level. Gross profit margin started to rise steadily and got to 35.6% in the 4th quarter. Our house brand mix weakened, but was not the main cause of the gross profit margin decline for the year. We made all our efforts to reduce our cost in Hong Kong and Macao SARs, including rental costs, which has reduced by $379,300,000 or 49 percent when including the effects of store impairment reversals. A further point to note is the continuous growth of our online business will reduce reliance on physical stores, facilitating the drive towards the lower breakeven points. We will go into more details on the next slide. We have reduced staff costs by 40.3 percent or 280 3,700,000. This includes frontline and back office staff costs, but excludes government subsidies. Losses narrowed in the second half year on year as well as the first half despite less government subsidies. This carries on from the last slide. The rental cost of the year has reduced by $238,400,000 or 30.7 percent if we exclude the effects of store impairment reversals. This includes the $120,000,000 savings on store closures and $51,600,000 of rental reduction upon contract renewals. We have also obtained $45,700,000 of rental concessions from landlords. The bottom shows the monthly rental cost that we are contracted for. It has gone down from $69,400,000 in March 2019 to $61,200,000 in March 2020 $48,400,000 in March 2021. We currently expect this will further reduce to $36,400,000 in March 2022 based on 85 stores. For our online business, we are seeing significant improvements. Growth started to pick up in the 2nd quarter, reaching 101.6% in the 4th quarter. Of course, do bear in mind that logistics disruption at the start of the pandemic created a low base in the Q4 the year before. For the year as a whole, we recorded solid sales growth of 45.4% over last year and 27.9% against the year before. The growth of online sales is such that our online sales mix increased to 16.5% of group turnover from 6% the year before. Our second half was profitable and was able to turn the whole year into profits at €1,200,000 and €8,800,000 before and after non recurrent reversal of provisions. If we look at online business by segments, there are 3 segments to look at. The first one is O2O sales and has grown by almost 14 times, resulting in its sales rising from 1.8% to 18.4% of total online sales. This started in October 2019 with the mainland market using WeChat and then extended to Hong Kong SAI in May 2020. It has the advantage of higher margin than other online channels, higher gross profit percentage due to personal interaction as well as savings on platform fees. The second channels would be 3rd party platforms where sales are up by 48% and sales growth has been accelerated in the second half by 11 and 12 festivities. We also launched at Lazada near to the year end to further target Southeast Asia markets. Our own channel sales in Mainland China reduced by 47.1% due to the closure of our home websites, which have poor cost efficiency. Customers have been redirected to our WeChat Mini program. Our largest market being Mainland China grew at 42.7% 84.1% in Q3 and Q4 respectively, taking up 74.7% of our full year's online sales. In the Mainland China market, our sales declined by 10% in the first half because of the pandemic, but consumption bounced back strongly in the second half after the pandemic was brought under control, boosted also by new stores and improving product competitiveness. Our sales increased by 46.4% against last year and by 12.4% when compared to the year before. Same store sales also increased by 13.6% in the second half. We opened 17 new stores during the year, seven located in Southern China, another 5 located in Western China, mainly in Chongqing and Chengdu. New stores are opened in key clusters for operating efficiency and cost effective Product procurement team has been restructured successfully and product competitiveness has been enhanced and has boosted consumer spending in our stores. Again, in the mainland, sales growth in the second half was supported by improvements in product offerings and boosted by recovery in spending and new store openings following the control of COVID-nineteen, with healthy rise to both top line and same store sales performance. The new product mix in new stores have both exerted some immediate pressure on gross profit margin, resulted in short term decline in store level profits and only a marginal reduction in recurrent loss to 23,800,000. However, good inventory management has lowered our stock provision requirement needs and resulted in an overall reduction in losses to 11,000,000 this year from 34,300,000 last year. In Malaysia, our effective cost management measures has allowed us to mitigate losses, where sales declined by 34.9% as stores were closed on and off for nearly 100 days cumulatively under several movement control orders. We undertook aggressive cost reduction exercises during the year involving rental concessions, manpower adjustments and postponing shop renovations. As a result, store and office expenses reduced by around 30% year on year. We launched online home delivery service in March 2020 and collaborated with 7 online platforms to drive online sales and to serve customers. Now we move on to outlook and future plans. Our long term goal is to increase the sales mix outside of Hong Kong Macao to over 50% of group turnover. We recognize that the role of physical stores are changing. It is important that it complements the online operations, provide additional in store services to enhance customer experience and to appeal and uniqueness of physical stores and attract traffic and length of time spent in stores. The role of online touch points is to attract new customers who have shifted to online shopping, to provide online convenience to existing physical store customers and to provide seamless online to offline experience to all our customers. We aim to tap huge potential in the mainland markets, where its post pandemic economic recovery stands out in the world. We will expand our physical store network and capture more online business opportunities. In HomeClip and Macau SARs, we will realize more online and offline synergies to address overconcentration of sales in physical stores. This will support further closure of excessive physical stores, especially in tourist locations and allow us to reduce high fixed rental costs to lower breakeven points. We will increase basket size by click and collect and increase sales through online and offline promotions. We will allow customers to try out beauty treatments and health care products on the spot in our unique in store experience, where we're going to have a few stores to allow us to provide this experience. And hopefully, this will allow us to lengthen customer stays in the stores. We will also try and deploy more Internet of Things to further add customer experience and put through changes in commission system and training to help synchronize O2O operations. Online business is on a fast growth trajectory and 3rd party platforms will remain one of the core focus. As they will increase market penetration and broaden customer We will continue to seek new platforms to explore cooperation. Centralized customer database would benefit the collaboration of online and offline businesses. And when the Hong Kong China border reopens, we aim to have physical stores helping us to engage more Mainland visitors. This will improve customer loyalty and repurchase rates. Mainland China is our main growth driver, both online and offline for the group in the future. We will speed up new store openings as rental are more reasonable after the pandemic and we will focus on expanding in core regions and city clusters, especially the Greater Bay Area. We will continuously enhance store management and operating efficiency. We will also enhance our product portfolio by introducing more trendy new products to cater to consumer demand and deepen our collaboration with local suppliers and enlist cooperation with new ones. For Malaysia, we remain cautious amidst the pandemic. We will focus on optimizing existing store network, improving the efficiency and closely monitoring market trends to adjust product mix. We will have promotion collaboration with other parties to attract customers and stimulate sales. We will further expand our online platforms and engage new social media platforms to recruit young customers and enhance delivery services to facilitate customers who shop from home. The appendix here shows the post year end date performance. Hong Kong Macau retail sales has grown quite a bit compared to last year by over 50%. This, of course, is a good thing, but of course, everybody knows we had the low base last year. If we compare to the year before, then Hong Kong Macao sales would have declined by 68.3%. Mainland China, if we exclude the CRM impact, the growth rate is 40.1% and same store growth at 13.9%. If we compare to the last the financial year before last, we would still have a growth rate of 6.5%. Malaysia has a top line growth of 3.5% compared to last year, but of course due to low base, if we compare to the year before, it would have declined by 43.4%. Our online business has grown by 131.2%. And if we compare gains the year before, we would have grown by 50.9%. And the group overall has grown by 55.1% compared to last year and 59.2% compared to and minus 59.2% compared to year before. We have as at year end date 100 stores. And we added 2 stores in the last financial year and we renewed 24 last year. No doubt we have more discussions in these areas after this. This concludes our presentation. We'll be happy to turn over to a Q and A session. Thank you.