PANDY - Pandora A/S (PNDZF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-02-07 16:09:07 ET
Pandora A/S (PNDZF)
Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call
February 07, 2024 05:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Bilal Aziz - Investor Relations
Alexander Lacik - Chief Executive Officer
Anders Boyer - Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Grace Smalley - Morgan Stanley
Thomas Chauvet - Citi
Lars Topholm - Carnegie
Antoine Belge - BNP
Anne-Laure Bismuth - HSBC
Michael Rasmussen - Danske Bank
Kristian Godiksen - SEB
Piral Dadhania - RBC
Presentation
Bilal Aziz
Good morning, everyone and welcome to the Conference Call for Pandora's Full Year 2023 Results. I'm Bilal Aziz from the Investor Relations team and I'm joined here by its CEO, Alexander Lacik; CFO, Anders Boyer and the IR team.
As usual, there will be a Q&A session at the end of the call today. We do have a hard stop at 12:15 CET so if you could limit yourself to two questions at a time that would be great.
Please play notice to the disclaimer on slide 2 and turn to slide 3. I will now turn to Alexander.
Alexander Lacik
Thank you, Bilal and welcome, everyone. As I'm sure most of you are aware following a strong Q4, we already pre-announced our results on Jan 7 where we gave some selective details. Here I'm going to focus on the big picture of what we achieved through the year and dive into some of the drivers a bit more.
First, we had a solid 2023 with organic growth of 8% and like-for-like growth of 6%. We also ended the year on a good note with organic growth of 12% and like-for-like of 9%. You won't need reminding that the external environment remained challenging throughout the entire year.
The reason we were able to deliver ahead of our previous guidance was simply that our investments into Phoenix, our strategy are paying off. You can perhaps see that most clearly through the strengthening of our brand. We are clearly attracting more consumers and the very strong growth you see in for instance Timeless is a testament to the ongoing transformation into becoming a full jewelry brand.
Also in this inflationary environment, we've continued to demonstrate a rock solid P&L structure. You'll see our gross margins reached another record high in Q4 and ended full year 2023 above last year's. This clearly underpinned solid EBIT margins at 25% in line with our guidance whilst we scaled up investments into the business through the year.
Finally, our asset-light model helped convert this into cash as we delivered very strong cash conversion for the full year. Therefore, once again, we have announced today sizable cash returns to our shareholders of DKK5.5 billion. So in conclusion, 2023 was a good example of where Phoenix is taking us; solid growth, sustainably high margins, very strong cash flow which comes back to our shareholders....
Pandora A/S (PNDZF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript