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D-Market Elektronik Hizmetler ve Ticaret A.S. (HEPS)

Q4 2022 Earnings Call· Wed, Mar 22, 2023

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I'm Popee, your Chorus Call operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining the Hepsiburada Conference Call and Live Webcast to present and discuss the Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2022 Financial Results. All participants will be in a listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Ms. Nilhan Onal Gökçetekin, CEO; Mr. Korhan Öz, CFO; and Ms. Helin Celikbilek, Investor Relations Director. Ms. Celikbilek, you may now proceed.

Helin Celikbilek

Analyst

Thanks, operator. Thank you for joining us today for Hepsiburada's fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings call. I'm pleased to be joined on the call today by our CEO, Nilhan Onal Gökçetekin; and our CFO, Korhan Öz. The following discussion, including responses to your questions, reflects management's views as of today's date only. We undertake no obligation to update or revise this information except as required by law. Certain statements made on today's call are forward-looking statements, and actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Please refer to today's earnings release as well as the risk factors described in the safe harbor slide of today's supplemental slide deck, today's press release, the 6-K, our Form 20-F filed with the SEC on May 2, 2022, and other SEC filings for information on factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Also, we will reference certain non-IFRS measures during today's call. Please refer to the appendix of our supplemental slide deck as well as today's press release for a presentation of the most directly comparable IFRS measure and the relevant IFRS to non-IFRS reconciliations. As a reminder, a replay of this call will be available on our Investor Relations website. With that, I will hand it over to our CEO, Nilhan. Nilhan Onal Gökçetekin: Thank you, Helin. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'm delighted to be addressing you today as the new CEO of Hepsiburada. Hepsiburada has always been in my radar as the company that established and contributed greatly to the development of e-commerce industry in Turkey. I particularly appreciate its innovative and entrepreneurial spirit. And I'm really excited to lead this company through the opportunities lying ahead. Before I joined Hepsiburada, I have multiple global and regional leadership positions…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Kilickiran Hanzade with JPMorgan.

Hanzade Kilickiran

Analyst

Thank you very much for your presentation and congratulations on your new post. I just want to make a follow-up about your guidance for 2023 actually for the first quarter of this year. Is it possible to provide some sort of a soft review or guidance on how this new e-commerce regulation in Turkey may impact your revenue and the marketing cost throughout the year? And could this be also one reason of projecting a breakeven EBITDA this year earlier than expected. And you are now opening your platforms for third parties in HepsiJet and HepsiPay. I am trying to understand if this may lead to an increase in your CapEx to come for 2023, is there any sort of soft guidance for your CapEx for this year? And maybe I can ask other questions later after my... Nilhan Onal Gökçetekin : Absolutely. Thank you so much, Hanzade for your warm welcome. So your first question was about the new e-commerce regulation and how this will impact our marketing cost in 2023. First of all, we welcome the new regulation that was large quite prepared end of last year, and we have seen the full details of the regulation. And we know that it's going to be positive for the country to create a more rational competition environment. We expect our marketing investment to reduce in line with improvement we already achieved in 2022 for performance marketing and in line with our customer retention strategy. Even without regulation that we are not subject to today with marketing and promotional spend level because we are smaller than regulated limits, our priority is going to be improved optimization for marketing expense, focusing on retention, enhanced with a strong ROI from our investment will be achieving sustainable profitable growth. So ROI for every…

Hanzade Kilickiran

Analyst

Nilhan and also Korhan, congratulations on the strong results, by the way.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Ladies and gentlemen, there are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the conference over to Ms. Nilhan Onal Gökçetekin for any closing comments. Thank you. Apologies, we have a follow-up question from Kilickiran Hanzade with JPMorgan.

Hanzade Kilickiran

Analyst

I just want to ask a few more actually. I also wonder what are the main changes in the competitive environment since we last met. I think Amazon also increased the prime days in 2022. Have you seen some sort of impact on your general customer acquisition? I mean, numbers suggest no, but I want to understand if peers are offering something different in the market this year? And also, you have highlighted that you want to focus improving the non-electronics category. So which category will be your priority, particularly is it fashion or some other categories? Nilhan Onal Gökçetekin : Thank you so much. So in terms of other competitors -- competitive environment, of course, Turkey is vibrant, fast-growing e-commerce category. We are seeing a lot of merchants trying to improve their online offering post-COVID environment. Actually, this is a great advantage for externalizing our services. So our intention is to grow with that. In terms of specifically Amazon in Turkey, naturally I had some experience with last eight years spent in the company, I believe that Hepsiburada has strong advantages being a local player with high agility and local resources. As you know, we have a strong retail business and developed marketplace business. Amazon operating with retail business and they also announced, which is a public information that they will focus on developing countries over emerging economies. And taking prioritization in this global road map is challenging based on their -- what we understand from the public announcement. So we don't think that they are offering new and different than the market. We believe that we have a very strong position, and we have local engineering forces with high agility that can add up, can understand the local needs. And we believe we will stay quite strong for our customers. In terms of improving non-electronics, non-electronics is quite strategic for us. It's -- as you know, it's higher-margin business and our premium -- Hepsi Premium customers, functional shoppers have strong propensity to come back to us for non-electronic shopping. Home FMCG, especially in basic section per our survey is gaining more and more traction. We are also seeing an acceleration in do it yourself robust platform to be specific. These are all quite strong profitable businesses where we will be intentional.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] At this time, there are no further questions. I will now turn the conference over to Ms. Nilhan Onal Gökçetekin any closing comments. Thank you. Nilhan Onal Gökçetekin : Thank you so much for listening us. My closing remarks are Turkey has huge potential with young mobile population. And the country has still relatively low e-commerce penetration. That's a great opportunity for us. The second important remark I want to do is we are going to deliver sustainable profitability in the company. This is showed in Q4, and we provided you an indication for Q1 2023. Thirdly, we will digitize Turkish e-commerce. We will deliver best-in-class fintech and logistics capabilities to grow online retailers. So not only we will grow over core but we will also act as an enabler for B2B partners. And finally, we will be ruthless in our prioritization. With this, I want to conclude for today. Thanks a lot for your patience and support to us.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference has now concluded, and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you for calling, and have a good afternoon.