Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Boozt Audiocast and Teleconference Q1 2022. For the first part of this call, all participants will be in listen-only mode, and afterwards, there will be a question and answer session. Today, I'm pleased to welcome CEO Hermann Haraldsson and CFO Sandra Gadd. Dear speakers, please go ahead.
Thank you, and welcome to our Q1 2022 conference call on this beautiful sunny morning here in Malmö, Sweden. If we move on to the first slide, the key highlights. Just to start with, I will say that we are very encouraged to see that the execution of our Nordic department store strategy continues the very positive momentum. Our categories are getting stronger for each season, and we believe that we are well on the way to create the preferred destination for customers of Nordic fashion lifestyle. The underlying business drivers are all showing improvement, with the cohorts from 2021 increasing the true frequency compared to the 2020 cohort.
Our return rates have stabilized at a low level, and this is thanks to a diversification of categories, and not least our unique fair use concept to limit fraud and abusive return behavior. Last but not least, the average order value has continued to increase, supported by more items per basket. Growth in the quarter was 25.2%, despite a quite challenging market in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, increasing inflation and, as a consequence of that, a sharp drop in consumer sentiment. The year got off to a quite solid start in January, but we saw the aforementioned effects had quite a meaningful impact in February. During March, however, we saw a gradual improvement and customers engaging more.
Our inventory position is quite healthy, and this provides us with a good opportunity to be more opportunistic in terms of campaign buys. This is backed by a strong balance sheet with ample cash, along with a very good and sufficient capacity at our warehouse. We predict that there will be more campaign stock available this year than in 2021, and therefore, we are ready to support the growth in both Boozt and Booztlet with further inventory to secure market share gains within a very attractive stock composition. Backed by a strong performance in the first quarter, we reiterate our outlook for 2022. With that said, we also acknowledge a more challenging external environment. This introduces a higher degree of risk and uncertainties than normal.
Therefore, with the current market conditions, we see a high likelihood of achieving the bottom end of our outlook for 2022 in terms of net revenue growth as well as Adjusted EBIT. But going to the next slide, the most important ones, the customer satisfaction KPIs. If you look at the customer satisfaction highlights, you can see that during the quarter we have maintained our five-star rating on Trustpilot, and we've managed to deliver an NPS rate at a stable, very high level. We have improved the delivery speed to customers during the quarter as our efforts to expand our fulfillment capacity have been successful and they have provided us enough capacity and throughput to handle the high growth.
We've also secured what we believe to be the strongest selection for the Nordic consumers for 2022, with some attractive price points. This is, we believe, a good foundation for customer satisfaction in the time to come. If we go to the next slide, order development, we can see that we have increased the number of orders by 10% in the first quarter for Boozt.com. In combination with the increase in average order value gross amount and a strong development of our additional revenue streams, be it Boozt Media Partnership and BooztPay, we've managed to secure a significant net revenue growth. The average order value continues to develop strongly in the first quarter and is up to now SEK 838 per basket.
We are actually quite confident that our continued execution of the department store strategy will support a sustainable high average order value. High average order value is what we consider to be the single most important thing to continue to deliver best-in-class profitability and even more so in volatile market conditions. Moving on to the next slide, the cohort development. We continue to grow our base of active customers on Boozt.com. In the first quarter, we had 17% more active customers compared to last year and 56% more than the first quarter in 2020. At the same time, our number of orders per active customers was slightly up compared to last year, but still slightly down compared to 2020.
This is kind of as expected, as people spent overall less on fashion apparel during the pandemic, but many more bought online. The true frequency developed positively compared to previous year. We are quite encouraged to see that the cohorts from the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 continue to behave in line with what we've seen from previous years. This also tells us that the changed buying habits during 24 months of corona, meaning a higher online penetration, is quite likely to stick. With that said, I will now hand it over to Sandra for some perspective on the financial performance.
Thank you. If we look at the group results, net revenue increased with 25.2% for the group in the first quarter, with an FX tailwind of around 3 percentage points. Considering the market development for fashion and apparel in the Nordics, both online and offline, we can conclude that we gained significant market share with these high growth rates in the first quarter. Return rates for the group remained on the same low level as last year. As we continuously develop our unique fair use algorithm, we are well in control of unnecessary returns and continue to be front runners on advanced fraud management, which is an increasing problem in the industry. The diversification of sales is a clear benefit from our department store strategy.
Not only do we offer a convenient and relevant shopping experience for our existing and new customers, but we also hedge our own financial risk for specific categories in a market environment that is a bit hesitant due to the overall economic development in our region. Our categories continued to develop well during the quarter. Growth was especially good in Norway and Finland, while market sentiment in Denmark was relatively depressed, which impacted our growth negatively. The gross margin was 39.3% in the first quarter, which is one percentage point lower than last year. The lower gross margin relates to planned and intentional price investments in the first part of the quarter to ensure capacity for the incoming spring and summer collection in our BFC. The variance in gross margin is also partly an effect from a different inventory mix than last year.
The Adjusted EBIT margin was 0.6% in the first quarter, a decrease of 5.4 percentage points compared to last year. Q1 2021 was an extraordinary quarter, the first Q1 in our history where we made a profit. Seasonality in our industry is usually demonstrated by high profits in Q4 and Q2, while profits, if any exist in Q1 and Q3, are significantly lower. That we can make a profit of 0.6% in the first quarter under the existing market conditions shows the strength of our business model. As I will get to in short, when we look at the development of our cost ratios, our profitability was negatively impacted by both intentional and unintentional developments in our cost structure.
If we move to the next page, we can see that the revenue growth for Boozt.com was 21.4% in the first quarter, positively impacted by currencies. Our home, beauty, and sports category contributed especially well to the growth development. Return rates decreased compared to last year. Average order value increased 2.9% to SEK 838 from SEK 815 last year. All historic cohorts, including the ones from the COVID years, continued to develop well and with the same patterns as historically, while customer satisfaction remains at very high levels. The Adjusted EBIT margin decreased from 5.7%- 1.4% in the quarter due to lower gross margin, planned investment in personnel to accommodate future growth and market share gains, as well as temporary higher costs in our fulfillment operations. Moving on to the next slide.
Booztlet grew 42.8% in the quarter, mainly driven by growth in Norway and Finland. Growth in the Nordics was 40.7%, while growth rates in the rest of Europe was 53.5%. We are especially happy to see that the average order value continues to increase as it has been for quite some time. In the first quarter, the average order value was 15% higher than last year with SEK 820. The Adjusted EBIT margin decreased to a - 2.4% from last year's + 7.6%. The decrease is mainly related to an intentional price investment which impacted the gross margin negatively. Coming into the first quarter, we wanted to make sure that we had enough space in our fulfillment operations.
At the same time, as we believe that this time of economic uncertainty is the time where we will be able to gain market share in the off-price segments, why it makes sense to do investment in growth for Booztlet. Therefore, we decided to favor our balance sheet and long-term goal for Booztlet to become the off-price destination in the Nordics despite the trade-off on the profitability. These actions also serve to mitigate the temporary slowdown in sales we saw when the war in Ukraine broke out and uncertainties regarding this season were the highest. Booztlet is set out to generate strong profits both this year as well as in the future, even though the development in the market may lead to higher price investments due to slower development of overall demand.
Moving on to the next page, we see the development of the cost ratios in the first quarter. The fulfillment cost ratio was 12.6%, an increase of 1.5 percentage points compared to last year, and 0.5 percentage points higher than the fourth quarter of 2021. Our fulfillment costs were negatively impacted by significantly higher sick leave because of the pandemic, both in January and February, while in March, sick leave was back to normal levels. The negative impact from high sick leave being in low season and a few temporary inefficiencies in our fulfillment operations was around 1 percentage point compared to last year. In addition, the increase in fuel prices and a different country mix impacted distribution costs negatively in the quarter with around 0.5 percentage points.
The marketing cost ratio increased slightly to 11% from last year's 10.6% with the continued high spend to attract new customers along with building Boozt and Booztlet as household names in the Nordics and gain market share. The admin and other cost ratio increased to 12.2% from 10.1% last year. The increased cost base was impacted by the planned investments into strengthening the organizational structure and capacity during 2021 to support present and future market share gains. We will grow into these investments within the short term. The depreciation cost ratio increased to 3.8%, that is to be compared to 3.3% last year. The development was expected as we made heavy investments to increase our automated fulfillment capacity in 2021 to support further growth.
Looking at our cost ratios overall, we are confident that our business model has a lean setup that enables us to run a cost-efficient model that sets us apart from competition. As we continue to invest in growth, there will continue to be temporary fluctuations in cost ratios, especially in the fulfillment costs, where investments and changes in the setup don't come in perfect alignment with the growth. External factors such as increased fuel charges do have an impact on our operations. However, given our high average order value, both on Boozt.com but also on Booztlet, we are much more resilient than businesses with weaker unit economics.
We believe that this is a time that we now operate in, is the time where business models that are able to generate profitable growth will show their strength, and we believe that we will be one of those winners. Moving on to the next page, we see that the net working capital of 7.7% of the net revenue over the last 12 months was on par with last year when the same ratio was 7.8%. Our inventory position has grown in line with the business, and the delivery of the SS22 season has proceeded as we expected. CapEx totaled SEK 360.1 million in the quarter and was driven by the acquisition of the remaining shares from the minority owner of Rosemunde of SEK 164 million.
As of now, we own 100% of this company. During the first quarter, we also finalized the combined fifth and sixth expansion phase of the AutoStore and invested further into the seventh expansion phase. These investments totaled SEK 175 million. The free cash flow from the first quarter was SEK -502 million. That is to be compared to SEK -236 million last year, mainly impacted by the heavy investing activities. Coming into the second quarter, we have a super strong balance sheet with a fresh and relevant inventory position and a cash position of SEK 1.1 billion that will enable us to be opportunistic, invest in available campaign stock, as well as further investing in CapEx as we set out coming into this year.
As we do expect this year to continue to be challenging from a market perspective, we believe that our balance sheet and the strong competitive mindset of our organization gives us the opportunity to turn these challenges into opportunities while thinking long term and acting fast. Before I hand back to Hermann, I would like to highlight that from this quarter, we have a dedicated section in our quarterly report where you can follow our ESG development on a continuous basis. As we believe that ESG, KPIs and development are as important as financial and operational KPIs, this is an important step to increase transparency on our development in this area. The setup of the KPIs and the information that we provide in this section will develop over time, and we're happy to be able to start this journey as of now.
Okay. Thank you, Sandra, and let's move on to the next page. Before we head into the outlook for 2022, I just would like to put a few words on the long-term perspective of our business. We've always been focused on long-term value creation by investing our free cash flow and balance sheet. The situation we're seeing now with high volatility in the markets and no visibility will not change our priorities. We act fast to changes in the market, but we stay very true to our business model and our strategy. Focus for the long term as well as the immediate future will be on gaining market share and to further increase the scale benefits of a business.
We've seen very clear advantages from this increase in size and scale in the Nordics in recent years. Actually, we believe that the current situation provides opportunities as one of the largest players and the largest department store in the Nordic region. Personally, I believe that the Boozt organization is stronger than ever before, and I believe that we've made the right investments into securing a very strong foundation, and especially so during the last 12 months as we saw a need to expand our capabilities. A key focus of ours has been to build a stronger and a more localized set up both for our category and country teams to become even more focused on getting all the growth opportunities and providing the best possible shopping experience for customers.
Most of this strong organization is already in place, and it will be fully finalized and operational during this year. Going forward, we will continue to invest as needed to further develop our core business, but also be opportunistic in terms of creating additional revenue streams to gain increased control of the e-commerce ecosystem. Recently, as you might know, we acquired a third stake in LiveShopper. This will provide us with a platform to create tailored content and inspiration for our global customer base while we are using and leveraging our good relationships with brands to build a strong platform for live shopping. We see that in other parts of the world that live shopping is gaining momentum, and we see a clear opportunity to be a part of this growing trend in Europe.
In moving on to our final slide, the outlook. Coming into 2022 and on the back of two exceptional years, not least in terms of growth, we set ourselves ambitious targets to continue to take significant market share and targeted a net revenue growth in the level of 20%-25%. In terms of profitability, we set out to deliver Adjusted EBIT in the level of SEK 365 million-SEK 420 million , which indicates growth between 6%-20% and a margin between 5%-6%, depending on growth opportunities and promotional activities in the market that we operate in.
We see that the start of the year has been more challenging than we initially expected with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a steep increase in inflation, and consequently a significant drop in consumer sentiment. On the back of our strong execution and rapid response to the change in the market, we managed to deliver significant growth in the first quarter. Performance was strongest in January prior to the impact of the events that I just mentioned. February was quite tough, but we saw a recovery in March. The outlook for 2022 remains unchanged, although the challenging external environment introduces a greater degree of risk than normal.
Considering the market conditions in Q1, there is currently a high likelihood of achieving the bottom end of the guidance in terms of revenue growth as well as Adjusted EBIT if we don't see a gradual improvement for the remainder of the year. With this, I will conclude the presentation, and I would like to hand over to the operator to get the Q&A session going. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now ready to take your questions. If you wish to ask a question, please press the one on your telephone keypad. Our first question comes from Niklas Ekman, Carnegie. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Yes, a couple of questions from my end. Firstly, can you tell us a little bit more about the development here during the quarter? I think you indicated around the Q4 results that sales growth started at similar levels as Q4, so around 35%+, and then they fell sharply and then now you say they gradually recovered. Can you give any indication where the growth rate was towards the end of the quarter and kind of going into Q2?
No. It's as we said, you know, January started well, February was quite weak, and March was a rebound. We don't like to give monthly revenue numbers because, you know, there's so much seasonality. We stick to kind of saying that what we said is that the growth was 25% and in Q2, it's still early days and what we've seen so far has made us kind of stick to our guidance, but with the uncertainties that we see. We don't really want to leverage further on a month-by-month basis with this.
Can you say if the run rate is in line with the full year guidance?
Again, we don't wanna, you know, we think it's far too early to speculate on ups and downs. The only thing that we're focused on is basically to make sure that every day has a higher revenue than the previous year, and that's our main focus. Basically we close the books at the end of the quarter. This is what I can tell you. We can't tell you. We don't wanna tell if the growth is above or below the run rate.
Oh, fair enough. Just have to try.
Yeah. I know.
Question on campaign buys. You mentioned now that you see an opportunity for higher campaign buys than in 2021. Can you elaborate on this then? What kind of levels are we talking about? If you look at the different years here, 2020, 2021, and now 2022, what kind of magnitude are we talking about if you compare those three years?
We don't know yet, because that depends what will end up in the market. What we see is that our inventory position, that is 25% up compared to last year, which is in line with our growth, that enables us. Usually, we try to be a little more stocked than our revenue growth. We have room there. We have physical room in our warehouse. Looking at the other players in the market, we see that they have much higher inventory levels, indicating that their buying might not be as high. We believe that we're in a good position. We know that there are delayed goods, that at some point will come to Europe.
We just think that there's a lot of opportunities, and we are ready with our cash position, with our inventory position, where we are in the markets. Given what we wanna do with Booztlet, we think that this is a great opportunity. What is available and how much that will be, we don't know yet.
Okay. Can I ask about markdowns? It sounds like markdowns did not increase materially here. You talk about planned campaigns in the beginning of the quarter, so before the slowdown. You haven't seen any increased markdowns as a result of the slowdown in the latter half of the quarter. Is that right? Is that kind of what you're assuming going forward as well, you don't see a tangible risk of increased markdowns going forward?
I would say like this, like coming into the year, we planned to do like heavy growth in January and to make sure that we had room enough and that of course impacts the markdowns we wanna give. Looking further ahead, things, you know, it was quite tough in February. It was. Maybe we continued a little longer than we would have if it wouldn't have happened. But apart from that we're, you know, we're-
This was some planned ones.
Yep.
It's difficult to see, you know. Of course, you know, if the market has excess stock, there might be some pressure. Again, I think we're quite good in the headwind, so we can deal with that.
Okay. Thanks. Final question now from my end. Personnel costs almost double YoY. Are there a lot of one-offs in this, or is this kind of the run rate you're looking at going forward?
Well, it's, you know, our cost of course is partly with the warehouse, where we have staffed up, taking some consultants in. Of course, we're also increasing our staff in Boozt because we kinda want to grow and to continue to grow, and we've been running behind for almost two years. We need to make sure that we have the right competencies in place to continue our strong growth.
There are some one-offs as well.
Yeah.
That we don't adjust.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you for taking my questions.
Welcome.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Daniel Ovin, Nordea. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning, Hermann and Sandra, and thank you for taking my questions. I wanted to start with asking about the other revenues that you highlighted now in the report. You mentioned here media partnership, et cetera, and it seems to have been growing quite fast versus last year. So I wonder, can you just remind us what is the margin on these revenues, and also what level of sales do you think this type of revenues could end up this year and next year?
Yeah. The margin obviously is close to 100% because you don't have a lot of costs in dealing with that. Of course, what we're selling is data, so it's a theoretical margin because of course it's delivering all this data that has some inherent cost, but it's a part of kind of a business model. We offer our brands that they can use our data to market their brand. It's a marketing partnership.
We don't disclose how big this can be, but some of our peers have disclosed historically how large this can be, and that could be an Amazon or a Zalando who I think have a target of how big that should be. We don't disclose it. Of course it's you know with us gathering more and more data as we grow, this is quite unique that we can offer this to our brands.
Okay. Then another question here on the adjusted admin cost that was up quite significantly than I think it was the highest I could see going many quarters back. You mentioned here, talked also about personnel costs being up, et cetera. Really, can you highlight a bit more what's in this group? Because I guess that the automation and warehouse probably in the fulfillment cost. Perhaps can you highlight a little bit more what is exactly in that cost line, and also what should we expect here going forward?
Well, the admin cost, the significant part of that is the cost of personnel. The other cost is, you know, normal stuff you have to run a business. In that part you know, it's growing in line with what it should be. There is nothing extraordinary in that. It is the personnel, it is the investment in personnel that we made and we hired a lot of people last year, and of course that impacted cost in a lower quarter as this one. As I said during the presentation as well, we will grow into this, and this was according to our plan.
All right. Perfect. Thank you. Just one final question also on the marketing cost. I know you've been talking about having it around 10% for the full year, and now I see it's a bit higher here in Q1. Is that according to plan and it's a smaller quarter in sales, or is there anything else behind that, perhaps cost per click, et cetera, has been edging up here? Perhaps you can share some more color around that.
There's no secret that cost per click is going up. I think all players see that. Our target is to be around 10%, but we are very much driven by the cost of lifetime value and the cost of acquisition cost. That's why, you know, it will fluctuate around 10%. Also in market conditions where the consumer might be a bit more hesitant, you should expect it to be maybe slightly elevated. You know, we still get the return on marketing investment as we want. That's why, you know, it is fluctuating.
Again, we are protected by a very high basket size compared to all our peers, which makes us more resilient towards an increase in click prices.
All right. Perfect. That's all my questions. Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
Our next question comes from Michael Benedict, Berenberg Bank. Please go ahead.
Morning, all. Thanks very much for taking my questions. Just two or three from me. First one is on CapEx, and apologies if I've missed this, in the statement, but any color on where CapEx is likely to land in FY 2022, first of all, please?
CapEx, well, sorry about this. It's difficult here. You're asking if where CapEx will land in 2022 total?
Yeah. Yes. Yes, that's right.
It's around SEK 500 million-SEK 600 million.
Great. Thank you very much. Then I guess given the uncertain outlook for consumer sentiment, how are you going about planning your inventory buy for the upcoming season? Are you pulling back on that and looking to order more within season or are you going to stay aggressive?
Well, for us, when we look at our inventory, we always make sure that we don't end up with an iceberg behind us. It's really relevant to make sure that we are fresh. That makes our life easier because in that way we can be opportunistic when we can. That's the way we plan to continue to be. Coming into the AW season, we are well in control of the stock. The rejection rates, you know, orders we order but don't get, that has increased. We have included that in our projections on what we will receive in the warehouse. We have enough space in our warehouse to be opportunistic. We will continue. You know, growth is our main priority, but we will always do it with profitability.
We will continue to be very tough on our inventory position, making sure we have a clean and fresh inventory and buy as much as we can and need. Also to make sure, this is where the department store strategy is really working for us because we can hedge different categories. We see what's happening and if there's a slowdown in one, we can push the other. I think we stand in a very interesting time right now.
That's great. That's both my questions. Thank you very much.
You're welcome, Michael.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press zero one on the telephone keypad. Our next question comes from Niklas Stoeckmann. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, good morning. Two questions from me, please. First of all, on the return rates, which you said are down YoY, if you only look at the fashion sales, has that return rate changed compared to last year, given that assume that the product mix has changed a bit, while the sort of department store strategy is selling more of a low return beauty products and so on is offsetting this?
If you look at, you know, the most kind of interesting return rates from a negative point, of course, is the women's category and it's at the same level as last year and lower than pre-pandemic, and that's probably 100% due to our fair use policy. So we've managed to avoid a lot of unnecessary returns, and the fair use policy plays an important part of that. So we don't see kind of returns inflation in the numbers.
Okay, perfect. The second question is, I think you said that reaching the guidance as it stands now requires things to pick up. Do you mean then pick up from Q1, the sort of Q1 as a whole development or pick up from where you sort of exited March?
What we mean is that, you know, Denmark came out with the lowest consumer sentiment in 40 years last week and I don't think that the Swedish consumers are much more happy. We're just hoping that the doom and gloom that we've seen is kind of turns. If people kind of stop shopping, of course that ultimately will influence us. Again, as we said in the guidance, you know, we are assuming that things don't get worse and hoping of course that things might get better. That's kind of the best way I can quantify it.
Okay. Maybe one more then. Have you seen any shifts in sort of how consumers shop in terms of trading down to cheaper price points at all?
Not really. Of course, outlet is growing, and this is kind of that was always our assumption that when the next economic crisis would hit, that would benefit an outlet. I think that we see that is happening. Actually we don't really see that people are trading down. Obviously we are mainly focusing on the mid to premium higher priced. You know, if you look at our garments, it's higher priced. It's not throw away easy, fast fashion. We haven't really seen this trading down yet.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you. We have no further questions. Your speakers are back to you.
Okay. Thank you. As there are no further questions, I just want to say thank you and wish you all a good day. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for attending. You may now disconnect.