Mytheresa hails enduring change in shopper habits as Q4 and full year boom

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Sep 14, 2021

Mytheresa has reported another strong quarter and year and even outperformed its own expectations. Q4 saw “exceptional net sales growth” and the full year was ahead of both 2020 and 2019.

The Germany-based business said that in the final quarter (the three months to the end of June) net sales rose 36.1% to €162.4 million year-on-year (YoY). Meanwhile, full-year net sales were up 36.2% YoY to €612.1 million.

But perhaps more importantly, net sales growth was 60.5% for the quarter and 61.5% for the year compared to the last pre-pandemic period, underlining just how strongly the business has been growing as online has become a much more important part of luxury retail.

It also said that it saw continued strong profitability with adjusted EBITDA for the year of €54.9 million, compared to €35.4 million a year earlier while the adjusted EBITDA margin rose to 9% from 7.9%.

The luxury multi-brand digital platform said it was able to successfully continue to deliver strong growth driven by a “fundamental change of consumer behaviour, and a superior business model based on a sharp luxury customer focus and strong brand partnerships”.

In Q4, that helped it to strong net sales growth across all geographies with “outstanding” growth in the US (+133.3% YoY) “as consumer demand jumped”.

The quarter had seen it working hard to reach luxury shoppers with High-impact Top Customers events in Beijing and Paris, plus exclusive capsule collections and pre-launches in collaboration with Alexander McQueen, Loro Piana, Jacquemus, Missoni, Brunello Cucinelli, Roger Vivier, Valentino, Christian Louboutin and more. It also launched its first beauty pop-pp in collaboration with Estée Lauder Companies featuring La Mer, Frédéric Malle and By Killian.

So what happens now? Well, the company is upbeat about the year to June 2022. It’s forecasting GMV in the range of €750 million to €770 million, representing 22% to 25% growth. It expects active customers to grow by a similar amount, leading to net sales of €680 million to €700 million. And gross profit should be €345 million to €355 million, up 21% to 24%, with the adjusted EBITDA margin at the upper half of the long-term range of 7% to 9%.

CEO Michael Kliger said of the last 12 months: “Despite a year of continued uncertainty and unprecedented changes, we again achieved strong new customer growth and delivered excellent results. We view this as a strong affirmation of our unique and superior value proposition to customers and brand partners at a global level.

“Mytheresa’s focus on curation, content and service drove exceptional top-line results beating our expectations, at stable gross profit margin and most importantly with extremely high customer satisfaction. The shift of consumer demand to online in luxury has been significantly accelerated by the pandemic. We clearly believe this trend will continue in the post-pandemic world, probably reverting to the strong market growth rates we had seen before the pandemic started.”