Good afternoon. My name is Julianne, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Farfetch fourth quarter 2018 results conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then the number 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. Thank you. I'd like to turn the call over to Alice Ryder, VP of Investor Relations. Ms. Ryder, you may begin your conference.
Thank you, Julianne. Hello, and welcome to Farfetch's first quarter 2019 conference call. Joining me today to discuss our results are José Neves, our Founder, Co-Chair, and Chief Executive Officer, and Elliot Jordan, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, we would like to remind you that our discussions today will include forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements, and forward-looking statements made today speak only to our expectations as of today. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise them. For a discussion of some of the risk factors that could cause actual results to differ, please see the risk factors section of our annual report on Form 20-F, which was filed with the SEC on March 1st, 2019. In addition, we will refer to certain financial measures not reported in accordance with IFRS on this call.
You can find reconciliations of these non-IFRS financial measures to the IFRS financial measures in our earnings press release and the slide presentation, both of which are available on our website at farfetchinvestors.com. Now I'd like to turn the call over to José.
Thank you, Alice. It's great to be with all of you today. Thank you for joining us for our first quarter 2019 call. I am pleased to report that we had an excellent Q1, where we continued to successfully execute on our plan. We met important strategic milestones, which I will share with you today. We not only surpassed our expectations in terms of our growth and performed well across other financial KPIs, but we also made great progress operationally and are even tracking ahead of schedule on some of our key initiatives. In Q1, platform GMV grew 44% to $450 million. Adjusted for FX, this GMV growth was approximately 50%. A pace of growth, which is about 2.5 times the projected 20% compounded annual growth rate of the online personal luxury goods market through 2025.
The pace of market share captured by Farfetch continues to be strong, demonstrating that our overall offer to consumers is extremely compelling. Our continued strong top-line growth in Q1 increased our GMV over the last 12-month period to $1.5 billion, which we believe makes Farfetch one of the largest, if not the largest, single destination for in-season luxury fashion in the world, both in value of transactions and traffic. I am very pleased with our ability to execute on our growth plans for 2019, while also making progress on strategic initiatives to drive growth in 2020 and beyond. Today, I wanted to take the opportunity to review our progress against a number of strategic opportunities that we have undertaken in the past 18 months.
We have, in fact, successfully executed against the corporate development strategy, including Store of the Future at Chanel, Middle East joint venture with the Chalhoub Group, JD.com partnership, including the Toplife acquisition, entering the resale market with Stadium Goods, and Farfetch Platform Services, or FPS expansions, with the CuriosityChina acquisition and enterprise deal with Harrods. One of the main themes that I want to cover today is how we are successfully executing on these fronts. With respect to China, our most strategic market, we remain more enthusiastic than ever. There is a great opportunity ahead of us to create the premier luxury gateway to China. According to Bain, China will represent about 46% of the luxury market by 2025, up from 33% in 2018, representing approximately $80 billion of incremental spend over the next six years.
Bain also estimates that half of those purchases will be made domestically in mainland China. As we scan the landscape, we believe the investments we have made over the past four years in our localized tech stack, logistics, and operations, which were more recently bolstered by the acquisitions of CuriosityChina and Toplife, will accelerate our China strategy and offer brands a one-stop integrated solution. All of these position Farfetch to be the partner of choice to help luxury brands develop and implement a digital strategy to crack China. To this end, the China team has hit the ground running following the announcement of our Toplife acquisition. Working closely with JD on the Farfetch Toplife integration. In fact, we're currently tracking ahead of our initial second half 2019 go live date, and are targeting a launch at the end of H1 2019.
The incredible execution to date demonstrates the benefits from the technical investments we've made in our API-based technology platform, our data center in China, as well as the stellar local management and talent we've built on the ground. By going live at the end of Q2, we will be able to leverage traffic from JD's anniversary festival celebration. While we don't expect we've have 100% of our catalog live by then, it will give us more time to familiarize ourselves with the ecosystem and test and iterate on our merchandising strategy to start driving results from this initiative in the back half of the year. Another key benefit of being on the JD platform will come from the opportunity to grow brand awareness of Farfetch among Chinese consumers, who will see the Farfetch direct entry button in the level 1 position on the JD.com app homepage.
Clearly, our partnership with JD.com and our strategic investment in China are working. We now have unrivaled technical and logistics capabilities that are very difficult to replicate and are delivering an excellent customer experience to our Chinese customers. At this point, I'd like to outline the current progress of some of our other major strategic initiatives. It has been one year since we launched in the Middle East in partnership with Chalhoub. It's a good time to pause and evaluate the results with that JV. We are pleased to share that the Middle East is our fastest-growing region. This is on the back of incredible execution from our teams with the backing of Chalhoub. In just three months after signing with Chalhoub, Farfetch launched its Arabic websites covering the entire Gulf region.
Farfetch, in this time, also opened a Dubai office, staffed it with a full team from outstanding management to marketing, private client, and customer service teams. In the last 12 months, we've signed two regional department stores to the network and launched a number of Dubai Mall tenants on the Farfetch platform. Turning to Store of the Future and our augmented retail strategy, in Q1 2018, we were very proud to announce our exclusive partnership with Chanel, who also became shareholders in Farfetch. 15 months later, we're very happy to confirm that the augmented retail pilot is now live in Chanel's new flagship boutique at 19 Rue Cambon, Paris.
Currently, the pilot consists of a client's boutique app and a fashion advisor app, plus a number of connected devices such as digital fitting room mirrors, NFC, and RFID product sensors, which are designed to augment the client and fashion advisor relationship. It is already delivering a new retail experience to a small number of select Chanel clients. We are delighted that both Chanel and Farfetch are very happy with the progress of this pilot so far. We have many years ahead in this exciting partnership, and we will continue to expand and develop the current technology and its user base over the long term. Turning to our strategy of entering not just new categories, but new business models in luxury, we're delighted to update you on Stadium Goods.
We have already started to combine operations and benefit from synergies. The operational integration of the full Stadium Goods catalog is tracking ahead of schedule and is expected to be completed in the near future. Browns will also bring Stadium Goods' physical presence to Europe for the first time in an initiative that we dubbed Sneakerbeast, with many exclusive products and collaborations that Stadium Goods and Browns are bringing to London and via Farfetch to European as well as global sneakerheads. We're also excited about 1PO, First- Party Owned brand, as a new business model. Stadium Goods have seen high demand for their own branded streetwear, which has been a small, limited production. Based on this strong traction, we will be investing behind the Stadium Goods brand and launch it as a streetwear brand in its own right.
This not only creates an exclusive app offering for Farfetch, it is also a very high-margin, profitable line of business for us, albeit obviously starting from a small base. Our continued investments in Farfetch Platform Solutions, which includes the previously named Black & White white label business, CuriosityChina, Store of the Future, and other B2B products, is paying off. With Harrods on track, as well as a very interesting pipeline of other enterprise deals being discussed, expanding our B2B platform business for 2020 and beyond. I'd now like to provide an update on our progress along our four strategic pillars. On our last call, I mentioned that we were seeing attractive LTV over CAC metrics with payback of less than 6 months. Based on these indicators, we continued to lean into our customer engagement efforts in Q1.
This included our decision to invest in demand generation activities aimed at introducing Farfetch to the first-time customers, as well as maintaining engagement with existing customers. As a result, active consumers, including Stadium Goods, increased 64% in Q1 to drive a 44% platform GMV increase, or approximately 50% adjusted for FX, which exceeded our guidance of 40% growth for the period. We are also pleased to report that we were able to deliver this top-line outperformance while also maintaining adjusted EBITDA margin in line with our guidance. Our GMV outperformance was driven by strong results across our regions, including U.S. and China, our two largest markets, as well as the Middle East, a key market which I mentioned earlier. Our platform continues to develop as one of the world's only truly global luxury commerce platforms. We have recently launched several localized sites in countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden.
Our newest site was launched in Denmark in Q1, bringing our total to 22 localized sites available in 15 different languages. This strategy has demonstrated strong return on investment through better economics in terms of demand generation and retention of customers. Farfetch is committed to providing all customers around the entire world who love fashion with an unrivaled customer experience in their language, currency, and in the case of 53 countries, local supply with premium delivery services such as same-day delivery in 19 global cities. With respect to our strategic pillar on supply, during Q1, we continued to strengthen our customer proposition by bringing additional supply from the best boutiques and brands in the industry. We have expanded our relationships for both breadth and depth of supply, and have in the past year, launched more than 100 brands on the marketplace.
The top 10 brands by Farfetch Marketplace GMV have increased their supply 160% year-on-year in terms of stock value. This clearly demonstrates the success of these industry-leading brands with their Farfetch e-concessions, and the fact that they now see Farfetch as one of the most strategic direct-to-consumer channels globally. We continue to develop our department store strategy and have signed On Pedder and Joyce of The Lane Crawford Joyce Group in Greater China. They are, as you know, a premier department store, brand management, and distribution group with operations throughout Asia. This follows department store signings such as Harvey Nichols, Rubaiyat, and Trianon. Turning now to our technology and innovation initiatives, I am happy to share that the Farfetch Platform Solutions and technology teams are off to a great start in building out Harrods' new e-commerce site, and remain on track for our go-live target in 2020.
As our first multibillion-dollar department store client, it's no surprise that there are certain additional features and capabilities to be developed in order to support their operations, as well as specific support for the beauty and fragrance categories. That process is well underway with our teams. One of the benefits of our tech stack is our ability to make these investments at the API level on the Farfetch platform, then leverage them to enhance the experience for all our tenants, including our own marketplace, Browns, and B2B clients. These same services will also benefit 3.1 Phillip Lim, a fashion label now powered by FPS following our launch of their new website during the quarter. As previously mentioned, we have also taken a massive step forward on the Store of the Future solution that we're developing through our ongoing innovation partnership with Chanel.
An area which has enormous potential and where we've seen great development is Fulfillment by Farfetch or FBF. Farfetch offers a leading luxury logistics solution with 4 3PL warehouses in key regions including Italy, U.K., U.S., and China. We have active plans to continue to expand this network this year. Next destination, L.A. Brands or boutiques can use FBF to handle all their fulfillment closer to the customer. We are using our proprietary data insights to predict where the product should be sitting, given 90% of orders cross a customs border. All of this without losing global visibility and availability of inventory. This increases speed of delivery, which is a key component of customer experience, allows for a better level of consolidation of orders, and significantly reduces fulfillment costs. Fulfillment by Farfetch paves the way for significant cost savings and improvements of service for both consumers and sellers.
Also, as our sellers grow their inventory to meet the rapid growth of the Farfetch platform, Fulfillment by Farfetch is in place to decrease the friction for sellers who would otherwise need to increase their fulfillment investments. We are very excited by all of these developments and by the prospects of leveraging them to create a high-margin, recurring revenue business with increasing impact on the Farfetch group in 2020 and beyond. We've also achieved major milestones towards our fourth strategic initiative, building our brand. In March, we launched Farfetch Communities, which showcases bespoke editorial content to inspire and help customers find the things they love. We named the initiative Communities in celebration of our global Farfetch community of fashion-loving creators, curators, and consumers.
It's designed to be an ever-changing gallery, which features their influential tastes, collections, and fashion viewpoints to have Farfetch become part of the discussion that helps customers discover what they want to buy. Communities is an innovative approach to building our brand using a storytelling mechanic, which is really relevant to consumers and the way they use media today. It also enables us to highlight the vast Farfetch community, which is made of fashion influencers, our brands, and boutiques, who are all incredible storytellers, and also want access to our amazing luxury audience. We're very pleased with the initial customer response to Communities and by the strong positive response from our brand partners, who are increasingly recognizing the media benefits of participating on the Farfetch platform to display their products and brands to Farfetch's high-intent luxury shoppers.
The appeal of Farfetch as a media platform for brands continues to fuel strong year-on-year growth on our early-stage Media Solutions business. The vision for Farfetch Communities is to create a perpetual fresh stream of content that we'll be able to incorporate in our digital marketing campaigns. Farfetch Communities will enable us to add content engagement data to the product performance data to help us make predictions about demand generation investments, which is really critical for making our flywheel spin faster. We expect this to become a competitive advantage as we have more products which generate more content, driving higher velocity of our data loop and better demand generation decisions versus other digital marketeers. Over the course of Q1, we also continued with the rollout of Access, our loyalty program.
I am pleased to report that it has now been completed ahead of plan, and is now available to 100% of our eligible customers. While the full implementation is relatively recent, early indications of customer response are consistent with the increased engagement and frequency of shop that we observed from our initial test group. We are very excited about Access and are focusing on further leveraging the program to increase retention and spend per customer to ultimately reduce demand generation costs over the long term. Before I turn the call over to Elliot, I would like to mention one other initiative which we are committed to as we strive to drive long-term benefits to our people, places, and products.
As a company at the cross-section of an industry more than 150 years old and its rapid modernization into the digital era, I strongly believe Farfetch has a responsibility to be a force of positive change in the luxury fashion industry. I am very proud to say that we've made a big push on this front recently. Just last month, we launched Positively Farfetch. Positively Farfetch is a 360-degree strategy to embed sustainability in everything we do to the extent we can. Our sustainability mission is to become the global platform for good in luxury fashion by empowering everyone we work with to think, act, and choose positively. As an example of this, we have begun piloting Second Life, which allows customers to trade in their pre-owned designer bags in exchange for Farfetch credit.
We've also launched a partnership with Kiva to enable our Farfetchers to support entrepreneurs in need across more than 80 countries with otherwise unattainable funding. Finally, we launched Dream Assembly for Good, our technology accelerator, which dedicated its entire second startup cohort to sustainability in partnership with Stella McCartney and Burberry. I'll now turn to Elliot for his Q1 update.
Thank you, José, and good evening, everyone. I am delighted to present to you the first quarter of 2019 financial results for Farfetch. We have had a strong start to 2019, continuing to execute on the plans we outlined when we last spoke, growing the business above our expectations, investing in near-term customer acquisition and longer-term platform development, and delivering profitability in line with guidance. We have also made significant progress integrating the new businesses that now form part of the Farfetch group. Q1 GMV has grown 43% year-on-year to $419 million, which was driven by strong momentum in platform GMV, up 44% year-on-year to $415 million, ahead of our stated guidance of 40% year-on-year. We estimate that on a constant currency basis, platform GMV grew 50% year-on-year. I am particularly pleased by this performance, as this growth sits on top of the 67% growth rate achieved in Q1 2018.
We now have a range of complementary marketplaces and platform solutions that combine to drive this platform GMV. When looking at the non-financial metrics we provide, I think it is more useful to split out the AOV for the Farfetch marketplace and Stadium Goods, as they operate at two different price points, and a blended AOV would be meaningless. I think it is also helpful to provide you with total active customers across the group, where we serve them directly on our platform through Farfetch, Stadium Goods, brownsfashion.com, and associated apps. Orders on the Farfetch marketplace no longer provides a meaningful view of the business performance, so won't be provided moving forwards.
Of those metrics in Q1, the Farfetch AOV was $601, which declined by 7% over the same period from last year, which is primarily due to the expected currency translation impact from non-U.S. dollar baskets on the overall AOV. By comparison, the AOV for Stadium Goods across Q1 was $300. We now serve 1.7 million active customers, which is an increase of 64% year-on-year in active customers compared to March 2018, including the underlying growth across the Farfetch marketplace and including those active on Stadium Goods. As you know, these customers are truly global, with demand split roughly a third across each of EMEA, APAC, and the Americas. We are proud to enable our sellers to trade internationally.
90% of our Q1 orders crossed the customs border, and our bespoke order management system streamlines this trade, delivering a multi-language, multi-currency duties paid customer proposition with optimized global logistics solutions. Focusing on trade with China, a hot topic right now, I wanted to highlight that 90% of our shipments into mainland China come from fashion boutiques and luxury brands from within Europe. We currently have no exports from mainland China, but a growing luxury fashion supply within China to serve local customers from local suppliers. Dissecting platform GMV, our third-party business, where we provide an an end-to-end technology solution and act as a selling agent for retailers, continues to represent the bulk of our GMV. With strong growth from more than 1,000 boutique brand and department store partners selling via the Farfetch marketplace.
Growth in the GMV being delivered by our 18 white label customers utilizing our modular Farfetch Platform Solutions suite of products, and the addition of GMV from the sneaker resellers operating via Stadium Goods. Our first-party GMV, where we purchase stock at wholesale and sell across our platform, grew over 76% year-on-year, again, driven by an increase in our Browns first-party business and the inclusion of Stadium Goods first-party sales for the first time. Browns revenue has grown to become almost 10 times its size from four years ago, as it has leveraged both the Farfetch marketplace and our white label solutions to power its e-commerce presence, ensuring we're offering customers the best selection of merchandise across different channels. As a result, our first-party business represents about 9% of our overall platform GMV.
Looking at revenues, Q1 group revenue grew 39% year-on-year to $174 million, with growth in group adjusted revenue, which excludes fulfillment revenue of 42% year-on-year to $146 million. Platform services revenue, which is derived from our platform GMV and excludes our in-store revenue, grew 43% year-on-year to $142 million as a result of the strong platform GMV growth, a slightly higher mix of first-party GMV year-on-year, 100% of which drops through to revenue, and a slightly lower third-party take rate of 30% versus the 31.8% take rate from Q1 last year.
The take rate decline year-on-year was driven from the increasing mix of sellers that operate on a lower overall take rate, including sellers on Stadium Goods, which as some of you have already noted, is closer to 20%. Q1 platform order contribution of $50 million was 34.9% of platform revenue, similar to that delivered in Q4 2018, as we continue to focus on delivering the right balance of absolute profitability to fund our business growth, whilst also reinvesting in growing the customer base at attractive economics. Q1 demand generation costs of $31 million is 22% of adjusted platform revenue as compared to 20% in Q1 2018. As we mentioned on the last call, we are seeing some strong LTV over CAC metrics at a cohort-by-cohort level, and are seeing payback on CAC spend within six months.
Based on this, we have continued to invest in new customer acquisition and up-weighted our paid media spend to support customer retention by focusing on second and third order activation to drive the lifetime values. As a result, we've seen an increased share in orders from existing customers across the quarter, improved our retention metrics, and witnessed a 4% increase in average order frequency by customers on the Farfetch marketplace versus Q1 2018. This level of investment continues to set ourselves up well for our future growth and stronger order economics in future periods. About half the reduction in order contribution margin year-on-year comes from the increase in investment in demand generation, and the remainder from a reduction in gross profit margins as a result of our platform cost of sales growing faster than our platform fulfillment revenue and our platform services revenue.
The latter, a function of the reduced take rate. As expected, we've continued to leverage our G&A expense, which at $62 million for Q1 2019, is 42% of adjusted revenue versus 50% in Q1 2018. G&A grew 20% year-on-year against the 42% adjusted revenue growth. This reflects our ability to drive scale across the platform by benefiting from previous investment in our platform services, account management, customer service, and corporate teams to deliver strong GMV growth from the existing resources. We continue to make investments in technology with the Q1 P&L charge of technology spend growing in line with revenues year-on-year to $20 million. In addition, we incurred $19 million of capitalized product development costs.
These reflect our investment into growing our product and engineering teams that are delivering the platform developments critical to our success, including the integration of Farfetch onto JD.com's platform, building a new Harrods website, initiatives to enhance our database, digital marketing, demand generation capabilities, and products to further enhance our customer engagement activities. Adjusted EBITDA loss for Q1 of $30 million or -20.7% of adjusted revenues is in line with our expectations and reflects the reinvestment of efficiencies into growing the business. Of note, below adjusted EBITDA is our Q1 share-based payment charge of $39 million and Q1 depreciation and amortization charge of $14 million. The share-based payment reflects two things.
The quarterly charge of $18 million in relation to our stock-based compensation plans, including employee incentive awards following the Stadium Goods acquisition and the 2019 annual key contributor grants as part of the Farfetch compensation plan, and $21 million of fair value remeasurement in relation to cash-settled awards and provisions for associated employment-related taxes. The step up in depreciation and amortization quarter-over-quarter to $14 million reflects the increase in capitalized development costs in relation to the long-term infrastructure and assets we are developing. $2 million of amortization of acquired intangible assets, as well as a $4 million impact following the adoption of IFRS 16 on lease accounting. The resulting loss after tax was $109.3 million and loss per share of $0.36. Coming back to the impact within the quarter as a result of the required implementation of IFRS 16.
As I mentioned on the last call, this non-cash accounting change alters the treatment and presentation of our operating leases across the balance sheet, the P&L, and the cash flow statement from January 1st, 2019. It's important to note that our 2018 comparative information has not been restated. We now recognize the initial present value of the unavoidable future lease payments as right of use assets and future lease liabilities on our balance sheet. You will see that as of March 31st, 2019, we have reported right-of-use assets of $94 million and associated lease liabilities of $95 million. These amounts will now be depreciated over the remaining life of the leases. On the P&L, our operating loss and reported EPS are not materially impacted.
The result of this accounting change is that adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margins in 2019 will be more favorable than in 2018, all else being equal. This is because we no longer record operating lease charges within our G&A expense above adjusted EBITDA, but have instead replaced these costs with a depreciation charge of broadly equal value, which sits below adjusted EBITDA. As I've said, we have not restated the comparative figures. If we did restate the full year 2018 P&L, $13.5 million of rent would move below adjusted EBITDA, making underlying adjusted EBITDA loss $82.4 million, and adjusted EBITDA margin negative 16.3%. For Q1 2018, adjusted EBITDA margin would've been negative 20.3% after $3 million of rent moves below adjusted EBITDA.
There's no impact to cash, but cash flows associated with lease payments now form part of cash flows from financing activities instead of being contained within cash flows from operating activities. Once you've digested all of these changes, you will see that they do not materially impact our economics, our financial position, or the cash flows of our business, but has given my team something interesting to do over the last few months. In terms of liquidity, we ended the quarter with $795 million in cash and cash equivalents, following the $150 million cash component of the Stadium Goods acquisition, which was completed in Q1. In terms of capital expenditure, as we think about our future business plans, we've decided to develop our own fit for purpose Farfetch campus to house the bulk of our engineers and operation staff in our spiritual home of Porto in the north of Portugal.
In conjunction with these plans, on April 8th, we acquired 70,000 sq m of land at a greenfield site just north of the city for a total cost of $17 million. This new facility will be transformational for our Porto-based teams, bringing them together under one roof and allowing for future growth. We believe these plans will deliver significant P&L benefits and positive net cash flow over the next 10 to 20 years and beyond. As part of Positively Farfetch initiatives, we will be constructing the new facilities in accordance with LEED standards, making our new home one of the most sustainable office developments in Europe. We expect an additional $5 million will be spent on preparing the site over the rest of 2019 before construction, which we expect to cost $70 million, is completed in stages across 2020 to 2022.
Looking ahead to Q2, we are making good progress on the developments needed to add the full Stadium Goods catalog to the Farfetch marketplace. As José said, to launch Farfetch on JD later in the quarter. Whilst these developments won't have a material impact in Q2, the underlying momentum of the business is strong and with a good response from customers in relation to the new spring/summer collections on offer. As such, we now expect Q2 platform GMV growth of 40%-42% year-on-year. We expect currency will continue to depress Farfetch AOV for the quarter ahead. At the adjusted EBITDA level, incorporating the effect of the P&L from Stadium Goods, our strong G&A leverage, investment into technology, and continuing to drive near-term customer investment, we're expecting an adjusted EBITDA loss in Q2 of negative 19%-21% of adjusted revenues.
Whilst it is too early to be reflected on the platform GMV position across H2, the higher-than-expected growth rates across the first half should be reflected in the full year outlook for growth, which is now 41% year-on-year. Our full year EBITDA margin guidance of negative 16% to 17% after the adjustments, of course, for IFRS 16 remains in place. José?
Obrigado, Elliot. Wrapping up, the online luxury industry remains a fast growth opportunity. With the recent numbers from Bain pointing to a 20% average yearly growth through 2025. Farfetch has now established itself as one of the largest, if not the largest, single destination in the in-season luxury market. With over $1.5 billion in the last 12 months platform GMV and over $1.9 billion estimated in full year 2019. In spite of that scale, keeps capturing market share from competitors at incredible pace. Our platform GMV growth of 44%, which adjusted for FX, was approximately 50%, is comfortably above our previous expectations and demonstrates the strength of our business and consumer offering. In the last 18 months, Farfetch has executed several strategic partnerships and acquisitions.
Be it in markets such as China and the Middle East, entering new categories such as with Stadium Goods, innovation with Chanel, or expanding supply. For example, by adding department stores. I would like to congratulate all Farfetchers for what has been an impressive execution on these strategic initiatives. All of them either on track or going faster than anticipated, with a number of them poised to fuel our growth in 2020 and beyond. We demonstrated our ability to studiously evaluate where to invest and then deliver on our plans post-investment, all while staying focused on the core marketplace business, which is reinforced by these new initiatives in a virtuous flywheel.
We are very pleased with our progress across our strategic initiatives. Whenever we see opportunities to execute on our long-term mission, either in promising markets or in strategic categories that remain untapped by Farfetch, we will continue to explore opportunities with potential partners, while we remain focused on executing on previous such moves, as well as on our core business. We are building on our incredible foundation to go after the lion's share of the online portion of an industry that we believe over the next decade will grow to be worth more than $500 billion. Over the next 10 years, online penetration of this $500 billion industry is expected to grow from 10%-25%. This means we have the opportunity to go after an incremental $100 billion of sales in the online luxury market.
We accelerated our opportunities with the strategic actions we took over the past 18 months, we're now executing towards realizing them for 2020 and beyond. Thank you. With that, I would now like to open the call for questions.
If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by the one on your telephone keypad. Your first question comes from Ike Boruchow from Wells Fargo. Your line is open.
Hey, good afternoon, everyone. Congrats. Great start to the year. I guess, two questions. One first for José. I'd love to hear more about the relationships with your top brands. It seems like more of the luxury brands are talking more openly about joining the digital world, especially in the marketplace model. You've talked about expanding your depth of supply. Just curious about your brand relationships today. Then Elliot, I'd just love to get your perspective on contribution margins, knowing that you're reinvesting into customer growth today. Where would you like to see contribution margins over the next year or two, and how do you balance that against, at some point scaling this business and the profitability? Thank you.
Thank you, Ike. In terms of the brand relationships, we're extremely pleased. We added over 100 brands to the marketplace, now counting with over 400 brands directly using our marketplace to reach consumers globally. Specifically the top brands, the super brands, as sometimes I call it in this industry, they are obviously focused on direct-to-consumer channels such as Farfetch, and doubling down, in fact. We're very pleased to report more than 160% growth in the supply in value from these top 10 brands. Definitely strength in health in these relationships and what for me is more important is the strategic angle with which we see brands approaching the Farfetch marketplace.
For example, just with the launch of Communities, we've had some of the largest brands in the industry really reach out to us, very excited about a new way of leveraging storytelling and wanting to be part of it. We will have some of these super brands in the next few weeks, joining the Farfetch Communities effort. This shows that they're seeing Farfetch as a direct-to-consumer channel, obviously an amplifier of their storytelling in terms of the global fashion consumer from China and Japan all the way to the Middle East and the U.S. That is, from a strategic perspective, very, very powerful. We will continue to do everything we can to align our strategies with our brand partners.
Hi, Ike. Just on the contribution margins. I think it's probably best to look through the headline contribution margin and look at the underlying economics that are in behind. We're still seeing fantastically strong economics, unparalleled economics really, with $600 AOV, 30% take rate. The LTV over the six-month period is paying back as we have been seeing. The Q3 2018 cohort absolutely paying back within the six-month period since then. The Q4 2018 cohort over three months is looking to be in the same place. First and foremost, the customer cohorts are super strong. As we've talked about in the past, the key here really is to focus on retention and frequency of shop to help continue to boost that LTV. Historically, we've seen 3 times LTV over CAC on a 2-year basis.
As we disclosed at the IPO, we're seeing those trends continue since then. For me, focusing on those economics is the key place to look at. Whilst we've got significant growth opportunities ahead of us, as José's just talked about, very strategic supply partners that are being brought on board, I think it's right for us to continue to invest upfront on acquiring those customers, investing in locking in those customers in terms of retention. Then, of course, bringing on the strategic brands. Right now, this mid-30%, so we were just over 30% in Q4. Sorry, 35%, just over 35% in Q4, 35% here in Q1.
I think this mid-30s is a good place to be in the short term. Over the longer term, I'm very confident we will be on the right path to getting back to the 60% long-term order contribution margin target we talked about over the last few quarters. Of course, that then ultimately drives the profitability of the business from then on. Right now, investing, not too worried about the margin. Obviously, getting the right balance between cash being delivered from our revenues so we can invest in the business and continue to deploy that into technology. Then longer term, the margins will rise and deliver the profitability.
Your next question comes from Louise Singlehurst from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Hi, good afternoon, José, Elliot. Thank you for taking my questions. Elliot, firstly, just on the AOV, thank you for the color on that so far. I wondered if you could just give us a little bit more help in understanding the impact of FX. Obviously, if there's any underlying promotional activity, obviously in Q1, the FX, and obviously you've hinted at the Stadium Goods dilution in there as well. Then just more structurally with the messaging around customer engagement. Should we structurally be thinking of a lower AOV going forward, i.e. much more constant customer engagement and more frequent orders going through the system? It's much more about building that community that you often have been talking about during the call today. Secondly, I wondered if you could just talk about the revenue, the GMV guidance for this year.
Obviously, approximately 40%, you've nudged it up to 41%, it's there or thereabouts in the same magnitude. Is it just more granular than we think in terms of the forecasting? Is there an FX assumption in there as well in terms of the movement there? Finally, just on the Chanel progress there. Can you just talk about the rollout for Chanel? If you're able to use some of those initiatives with Chanel further abroad in terms of other brands going forward? Presumably, there's a period of time where they're exclusive. If you could talk about that would be very helpful. Thank you.
Sure. Hi, Louise. Just in terms of AOV, the 7% reduction year-over-year was pretty much all down to the translation effect of currency. I look across the basket of currencies that we have in terms of customers being able to shop in their local currency. Sterling was down 6% or 7% versus the U.S. dollar. EUR was 8% down Q1 versus this Q1. AUD was down 9%. BRL was down 14%. RUB was down 14%. Across the board, the U.S. dollar has gotten so much stronger. That's really just kind of flowing through to the reported number in terms of AOV. That's the main driver. There is a little bit of mix impact. Not from Stadium Goods, actually, though. That's why I split out AOV on the Farfetch marketplace from Stadium Goods.
The $601 doesn't include what's sold by Stadium Goods directly. That's in the $300 AOV number that I just talked about. Of course, if there's categories that are at a lower price point, children's wear is a good example. Good, strong growth in children's wear. That is bringing down the AOV from a mix effect, but there's more items per basket starting to compensate for that. Overall, the AOV is mostly currency. In terms of customer engagement, I think if customers are buying slightly smaller baskets but buying more often, I think that's a good thing. We've seen over Q1 versus last Q1, very strong growth in our organic direct traffic. I think that's being boosted by Farfetch Communities.
I think there's customers coming now to be inspired by Farfetch, and if they come back seven times and then buy, I'm very happy with that rather than going somewhere else. That's good to see. In terms of revenue guidance. What I've done is taken the 44% growth across Q1 versus the 40% that I previously guided, and the now 42% growth across Q2 versus the 40% previously guided, and let that flow through to the full year number. The full year number naturally moves up from 40%-41%. For the second half, I'm leaving at 40% for the time being. I think it's too early to talk about Q3 and Q4. I prefer to talk about that when we speak again next quarter.
I suppose just coming back full circle to currency, that depressed AOV drives the depressed GMV, which then drives the constant currency number of 50% that we just talked about. I'm seeing currency, the U.S. dollar is continuing to be strong, really across Q2. At least some of the currencies I've just talked about flow through into Q3 with the U.S. dollar being stronger. Something like the Aussie dollar, based on today's spot rate, could be the rest of the year where we're seeing currency headwinds there because of the stronger dollar, the U.S. dollar. It's a bit of a mixed bag, but that's where we land, unfortunately. On Chanel, José?
Yes. Thanks, Louise, for your question around Chanel. This is a long-term play for Chanel and for Farfetch. It's also an exclusive relationship for the time being. We've launched a pilot. Chanel is very happy with this, so are we. Obviously, as you would expect, following this, there will be a gradual rollout to other countries and then our global geographies over the years.
Absolutely. Both exclusivity, the technology we're developing, which we're developing as everything we do, as a true platform, multi-tenant with the ability to be customized and adapted to different maisons and their needs. It has always been the intention to put it at the service of this entire industry. Not just brands, but also department stores, boutiques, large-scale retailers. We've had, in fact, lots of inbound interest and people asking about it. Long-term play, I think we believe there is absolutely going to be a convergence of physical retail and digital retail. This, in the long term, expands the Farfetch TAM to the full $500 billion that this industry is going to move in the next 10 years.
We're extremely excited that we're now servicing real customers in real shops, and not just shops, but the Chanel boutique in their spiritual home in Rue Cambon with real fashion assistants. It's extremely exciting and very proud of the team.
Louise, I should clarify that Q2 guidance, of course, is 40%-42%, which is what's flowing through to the full-year number.
Your next question comes from John Blackledge from Cowen. Your line is open.
Great. Thanks. A couple questions. Could you discuss the GMV growth across kind of the main geos, the Americas, EMEA, and APAC, any further color on China, the growth there, and perhaps kind of your expectations for consumer spending in the second quarter and the rest of the year? Just on the take rate, Elliot, maybe how do you see that trending over the rest of the year and then over time? I think you said kind of a 30% take rate over the long term. Just given the mix of Stadium Goods, should we expect that to be a bit lower as we go along here? Thank you.
Hi, John. Just a bit of color on the sort of demand by region. It's been pretty solid across all the three major regions that we provide information on, so EMEA, APAC, and the Americas. What's interesting is that Europe, Middle East, and Africa is the biggest of those three being pushed along by Middle East, which is fantastic to see that partnership that we started with Chalhoub Group last year really starting to drive a lot of the growth in that region. Within the Americas, North America, the U.S. has been particularly strong over the quarter. Inside Asia, I'll let José talk maybe a little bit more about China more broadly, but Mainland China is very much driving the Asia Pacific segment. Very pleased with growth across all of our markets.
That's the beauty of Farfetch, is that we are operating in a number of different markets and seeing good growth across those markets. I'll let José come back to China more broadly. On take rate, I've talked, I suppose, in the past about a range of 29%-32%, relatively volatile within that range in the short term. You've seen last quarter it was closer to 32%. This quarter, it's 30%. I'm expecting short term that 29%-32% range to be the guardrails. As you say, settling down at 30% over the longer term as we start to bring on some of the higher-margin businesses within Farfetch Platform Solutions that drive really good take rate.
Of course, offset some of the larger brands with a strategic take rate that's maybe slightly lower than that range, but still very confident on 29%-32% short term and 30% long term.
Your next question comes from Eric Sheridan from UBS. Your line is open.
Thanks so much for taking the question. Two, if I can. On macro, as you went region by region, is there any areas where you saw your consumer sort of outperforming or underperforming versus expectations? We tend to get that question a lot from investors for further granularity on a region-by-region basis. Turning to Access, what should we expect the output from the investment in Access to be? Is it greater retention, higher order velocity? How are you thinking about what the return on Access will be in terms of what it will do for your consumer behavior as you look out over the long term? Thanks, everyone.
Hi, Eric. On macro, I think obviously lots of conversations going on publicly in the market and media about U.S., China tariffs and all of that. I think, from a trade perspective, 90% of our sales in China are coming from Europe. There are other markets that are also not affected by this, like Middle East supply going to China, Australian supply going China. The U.S. is really a tiny fraction of our supply into China, and from China to the U.S. is zero, literally. We have domestic supply in China, but it's just for the domestic market in Mainland China. From a pure trading perspective. Immaterial exposure, I would say. I personally believe that it's a very resilient market that we're in. There are two secular trends. One is the migration of offline to online.
In China, very low penetration of luxury online at the moment. The other secular trend is millennials and Generation Z as a huge new cohort in luxury, and particularly in China. Obviously, these customers are digital first. I think those tailwinds are far stronger in our industry and in our business model than any macro wind. I remain very confident on China. On Access, what we've seen in the pilot, we've A/B tested it in Q2, Q3 last year in some markets. What we've seen, and that is consistent with what we're seeing now, that we've rolled out to 100% of our customers, is that the engagement of customers goes up. The times they return to the site or the app and the frequency of shop goes up as well as the basket.
Very strong results, which make us very confident that we should continue to invest in the program and in the benefits that we pass to the Access customers. We will see in the medium to long term, a strong return on investment on those investments we're making today.
Your next question comes from the line of Jason Helfstein from Oppenheimer. Your line is open.
Since one on the fulfillment side, maybe talk about long-term strategy around, I guess that 90-minute and how close ultimately do you want to help inventory move to the customer, obviously how that plays into the relationship with the bigger retailers. Secondly, can you talk about Stadium Goods, as far as the resale business versus working with brands like Nike and adidas who may not necessarily be on your platform today but can open up a much bigger market at the price points, even at the more expensive items that they sell. If that ultimately leads to a new vertical for you, right? The $175 sneaker and bringing those customers on your platform. Thanks.
I think on Fulfillment by Farfetch, we're very excited about our capabilities of kitting third-party logistics. To be clear, we are not building warehouses, and we're not hiring fulfillment staff. We are partnering with great 3PL businesses. For example, in China is on top of the JD Luxury logistics. We essentially kit those 3PL warehouses with our software, with our operations. That is extremely scalable, and that's why we now have more warehouses scattered around the world than any of our competitors. That will continue to be the case, and we'll continue to roll out, depending on the demand that we have in each city. What's great about Fulfillment by Farfetch is that it enables an increasing level of service to customers, faster delivery.
Farfetch, sometimes people don't realize, but we have a unique model that already offers same-day delivery in 19 global cities. This is something that you don't see often in e-commerce in general, and I think it's quite unique in the online luxury space. With Fulfillment by Farfetch, we can do extra services such as consolidation of orders from different merchants. Obviously, save costs, because with 90% of the orders crossing a border, if our data scientists can predict when the orders are going to be, we can ask our European suppliers, for example, to have the product already closer to the customer, be it in China or L.A. or New York, or wherever we may open in the future.
Advantages all around for our consumers, for fulfillment costs on the Farfetch side, but also removes friction from the growth of supply as our sellers, as you can see, were growing over 40%, 44% in terms of GMV, 50% at constant rates. This fast growth could create some pressure in terms of fulfillment for our sellers, that is then completely removed by Fulfillment by Farfetch, where they can use our warehouses to expand their fulfillment capabilities. I think it's going to be really important for future growth. On Stadium Goods, absolutely, we are very excited. Just to be clear, we have over 700 boutiques, and many of them, they are tier 0, tier 1 boutiques for Nike and adidas drops. When these sneaker companies, they have the collaborations, et cetera, many of our boutiques, including Browns, are part of that network of premium drops.
We do have access to the firsthand new products flowing into our customers. That's what gave us confidence that this was an incredible category. Obviously, some of these products, they completely run out of stock in minutes, as you know, and they're then resold at a multiple to the original RRP. In that space, Stadium Goods is the luxury company in the sneaker resale category and a very, very cool brand for sneakerheads. That's what we're excited about, is serving the sneakerhead community with the drops, and when they are not fast enough with their clicks, then coming back to them with the Stadium Goods offering.
Your next question comes from the line of Douglas Anmuth from J.P. Morgan. Your line is open.
Hi, this is Cory Carpenter on for Doug. Two questions, if we may. Just following up on the resale market. In addition to Stadium Goods, you recently announced the Second Life pilot. On the platform business, it seems like this has been a good inroad for relationships with clients. Could you talk about how you think about the platform opportunity longer term? Is the ultimate goal to move these partners onto the marketplace? Or is this a business in and of itself that we could see scale meaningfully? Thank you.
Hi, Doug. On the resale category. Yes, sneakers are a category where we're going to invest aggressively post-acquisition with Stadium Goods. We think it's the most premium brand in the space. It has huge international potential. In China in particular, but in other territories such as Europe, hence the collaboration with Browns in London, where we're going to launch first time with the physical presence of Stadium Goods in Europe and Japan and other countries. More broadly, in terms of resale, we have had vintage, which is essentially resale, in our portfolio for a number of years, quite successfully. What we've done is expanded our model, which was until now essentially vetting the best, most luxurious vintage boutiques from all around the world and invite them as sellers on our marketplace, expand this to our customers. This was really a sustainability angle.
We had many customers in our studies, in our research around sustainability. One of the main concerns is the life cycle of products and the circular economy. We thought it was really interesting to start experimenting with providing our customers with an ability to trade in their products to Farfetch and obviously help that circular economy in terms of our sustainability credentials. It's something that we are monitoring. We're not making any predictions or statements in terms of its potential, but we're certainly monitoring, and let's see what consumer reception we get on this.
Your next question comes from the line of Lloyd Walmsley from Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.
Thanks for taking the question. This is Kunal for Lloyd. Question on China and trying to understand our frame of time and how that is changing with the acquisition of Toplife. Wanted to understand, one, where you are in terms of revenue, and one of the things you pointed out earlier in this call is that China is the second-largest market behind the U.S. That's probably with the WeChat integration that you have. How does that change with the JD Toplife acquisition, and what is the competitive landscape right now, especially in terms of the brands having a direct presence within China?
Yes. Thank you for touching on that topic. China remains an absolutely strategic priority for all the brands in the industry. It is the fastest-growing luxury goods market, accounting, I believe, for something like 85% of the growth in the industry last year. As such, brands know that they need to crack China, and they need to crack China digitally. As we all know, the Chinese consumer has actually leapfrogged and, for example, in terms of digital payments and mobile payments, is well ahead of the West. The question here is how can we help brands crack China? This is what we've been investing very intensively in the past four years. We currently have a data center completely connected in an active architecture to all our infrastructure globally.
We have a local engineering team, local data science team, product management team, 300 people, in fact, in three offices in Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong with unrivaled logistics capabilities able to do both cross-border in record lead times consistently and also domestic delivery. We've acquired CuriosityChina, which is powering the WeChat channel for 80 luxury brands. Of course, the marketplace and now the new Toplife channel. This is a 360-degree gateway to China. The beauty of it is that it's a turnkey solution. Once you have one integration with Farfetch, you're live in China. That's the case for the 3,000 brands we have on the marketplace. They're now able to tap the Chinese customer directly through Farfetch, and very shortly through our exclusive luxury channel on JD, which is very exciting.
Your next question comes from the line of Stephen Ju from Credit Suisse. Your line is open.
Great. Thank you. José, can you give us some more color on your Middle Eastern operations, the behavior of the consumers there, where the AOVs and order velocities and the rate of returns and all that stuff may lie, and adjustments you may have to have made in order to take down friction in the region? Digging a little bit deeper into the China opportunity, do you anticipate any sort of logistics-related investments that you might have to make in the region, or will JD be handling most, if not all of that for you? Thanks.
In terms of the Middle East customer, we're very excited. It's a young customer, but with actually a higher AOV compared with the average. Very sophisticated as we all know. It is, however, and this is for me, a huge opportunity, a market where online penetration of luxury is very low. Customers love shopping in malls. As we all know, the Dubai Mall is the largest, most luxurious mall in the world. There's a strong mall culture. There hasn't been a strong focus from our main competitors in localizing in a complete and thorough way for these markets. This is not just the U.A.E. We're talking about Saudi Arabia, obviously all the other countries in the Gulf as well. What we've done through the partnership with Chalhoub was obviously first hire an amazing team. It's all about people.
The team we have on the ground is absolutely stellar. Then start a heavy program of localization with, obviously, Arabic language, and a number of features on both the website and the app, which make this an incredible experience for the local customer. We also have a local private client, which is our VIP team. As we all know, there are high spenders in the territory, so it's important to have this incredible level of attention to detail for these customers. We think we're only scratching the surface, but we're seeing already very strong results. Your question around logistics in China, we are not planning any CapEx. We do this in partnership with logistics companies. Obviously, JD being a shareholder and a partner in the territory. We're leveraging their incredible logistics capabilities in the territory.
We've also developed our tax tech to enable integrated customs clearance in record time. We now have a very consistent cross-border delivery service in China. What is, I think, very unique, a fulfillment by Farfetch warehouse in Shanghai, where brands can consign with us, and we'll take care of the rest, which for brands is an incredible advantage. Obviously we're going to continue to double down on our customer experience in China along those lines.
We have time for one more question. The final question will come from Ella Ji, from China Renaissance. Your line is open.
Great. Thank you so much for taking my questions. I have two. First is also about China opportunities. You mentioned you will participate in JD's June 18 anniversary sales event, which is great. Should we expect that you will launch on JD on all its 300 million users, or is it going to be a gradual step-by-step launch to its users? How should we think about the user behavior in China? For example, their average order size, their order frequency, things like that, could you just give us some more color? Second question is relating to your active customer, which had a great net add this quarter. Could you just provide more color? What are the main drivers? Who are the new consumers that sign up to your platforms? What are the main reasons that you think that leads to this much higher acceleration of user growth?
Thank you very much.
Hi. Thank you. The JD channel, essentially is a level 1 button. Farfetch will have a level 1 button. Plus, obviously, all the JD app users, if they are searching for a particular brand that we have, we will be available to the entire population of users, all the 300 million users. The level 1 button, we have requested and agreed with JD, to be shown to customers that the data science engines that JD has, have high propensity to buy luxury. We want to elevate the channel, obviously very mindful of the positioning of our brands in the industry. We thought this would be the most powerful solution. Absolutely available to all 300 million users, with the button visible to the ones that we know are likely to be luxury shoppers.
Our Chinese consumers are very sophisticated, actually, the AOV is higher in China. The age is younger, which is really interesting. Last time I checked, I believe around 29 years old on average. We're squarely on the millennial and even Generation Z cohort of customers. This is incredibly powerful because this is exactly the customers the brands must capture. I'm very happy that we're being seen by our brand partners as a great media channel and obviously sales channel, to penetrate the new Chinese luxury customer.
Hi, Ella. Just in terms of active customer numbers. The numbers now, the 1.7 million versus the 1.4 million last quarter, now includes Stadium Goods, obviously. That explains part of the sort of step-up. If we were to strip that out, actually we've seen very strong new customer growth, as I was saying earlier on, with the economics in a really strong place. We've leaned in to continue to grow that customer number. Actually, what has helped drive the boost within Farfetch is less dropouts from previous cohorts. We've been able to retain customers in greater numbers than we have previous quarters. That's helped drive the net new customer up. You can kind of back solve it. I gave you the little nugget that we had an average order frequency increase of 4% Q1 this year over Q1 last year.
You can sort of see that active customer numbers on an underlying basis grown to a very strong place. Very pleased, as I say, cohort by cohort on the payback and the LTV that we were expecting over the customers that we added. Yeah, good place.
There are no further questions at this time. I turn the call back over to the presenters.
Great. Thank you so much for joining us today. We look forward to speaking to you next quarter.
This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.