Thank you very much indeed. Good evening and thank you all for joining us.

I took some notes because I didn't want to forget any significant comment to the 2025 results, I might come across a bit less natural than I would love to. Let me tell you, during 2025 we devoted our efforts to strengthen the business by pursuing a thorough revision of our operating model, which led to a significant reduction of the cost base, the benefits of which have already emerged during the financial year just ended.

In a market environment which is still impacted by material contraction in consumption, which led to a sales decline of 5.3% versus the same period last year on a comparable basis, the initiatives we have undertaken already delivered tangible results. Net losses were halved compared to 2024, standing at €16 million compared to €30 million last year, and the bank debt significantly reduced by circa €10 million to €92 million.

We accelerated a number of initiatives aimed at strengthening current and future margins. We reduced and or discontinued non-profitable distribution channels.

We revised significantly the operating model. We reduced the cost structure, which was enhanced by reaching more efficiency, sustainability, which was increasing our capability to absorb the business uncertainties.

To support our current and future commercial and financial targets, we're bringing back to the center of our commercial and marketing strategy the group's R&D and technological DNA, which have always been the core part of our brand's heritage and values. We are already leveraging on patented products such as our Fast in product line, which significantly contributed to our 2025 turnover.

In addition, and more importantly, new patented products were developed during the year, leveraging on our expertise and technological innovation capabilities. Geox is now preparing to launch a revolutionary solution initially targeted at our own retail network.

We have also chosen to entrust the style development for the future, in particular for the women's collection starting with Spring/Summer 2027, to a globally renowned design studio, which is an international reference in footwear design. We strongly believe that this collaboration has brought renewed creativity and stylistic viability to the Geox brand portfolio, and we're confident that it will further enhance our market positioning and overall appeal.

I'll be happy to answer to any question later on, but let me now turn the floor to Andrea Maldi, who will walk you through the financial performance in details. Thank you very much indeed.

Thank you, Francesco. Thank you, everybody, for joining Geox fiscal 2025 year-end results.

I will try to deep dive you into the financial performance of the company during 2025, and I would start from the main key financial drive, commenting on the sales. Net sales amounted to €608.7 million at year end, which sign a decline of -8.3% versus last year.

If we exclude the effect of China and US platform that has been winding down in 2025, decline in sales with the right comparison amount to -5.3%. As results of this decline in sales, the EBITDA adjusted amount to €24.8 million, which is pretty much in line to the same EBITDA adjusted that we have in 2024.

Slightly decline. We were sitting in 2024 at €26.2 million.

This means that the result has been achieved through a solid and strong cost control and efficiency within the organization. As a result of the two action, the EBIT adjusted amount to €9 million, which is pretty much in line with the 2024.

We have been able to reduce the loss at the year end, moving from €30.3 million in 2024 to €16.2 million in 2025. From a financial point of view, the bank debt amount reached the value of 19 €92.6 million negative, showing a significant improvement of €10 million, more than €10 million compared to the same period of 2024.

Net working capital reached the value of €135.7 million, 22.3% of the net sales. Same period last year, €104 million or 15.7% at December '24.

Given the main financial KPIs, if we move to the page 7 of the presentation, which is available for the participants, we try to deep dive a bit more on sales. As you can see, we have tracked the sales from 2023 to 2025.

We are now reaching the value of 16 €608.7 million, which include a margin value which is stable at 51% compared to the same period of last year. From an EBIT perspective, the EBIT adjusted, net of non-recurring items, amount at €9 million, which is clearly a strong achievement because we have been able to maintain the same EBIT of last year despite the decline in sales of overall €55 million.

Moving to page 8, we can see how we have been able to reduce almost half in the losses from €33 million to €16.2 million negative. We can see that the fiscal year result is impacted by a sales decline of approximately €55.1 million compared to previous year, leading to a gross margin reduction of €27 million.

The reduction of €27 million is being completely offset by decrease in the cost base structure for the same amount, €27.4 million, thanks to a series of action that the management has been able to commit and deploy: reorganization, cost reduction, renegotiation, reorganization and restructuring of the personnel cost. If we move to the non-recurring item, we can see that we have a slight decrease from €13 million in 2024 to €12 million in 2025.

This is the amount that we have invested as non-recurring item, special items, to reorganize and restructure our business operating model. At the same time, we got a benefit from the financial expenses structure, where we have been able to benefit of about €11.7 million, mainly coming from two main factors: the reduction of the debt, thanks also to the capital increase that we have performed in 2025, and at the same time a reduction of the financial interest; and mainly, for €10 million of this €11.7 million, almost €10 million, 9.something, €9.8 million, mainly to the exchange rate in between euro and ruble that have positively impacted the 2025.

If we look at the sales and we try to have a drill-down by channel in page 9, we can see that the wholesale is declining compared to last year for about €17.9 million. The negative performance mainly in Italy, France, Iberia region, and Russia.

This is due to a softer sell-in for Spring/Summer season 2025, and for Winter '25 campaign across the key geographies. The retail is down 3.3% year-on-year, and it's clearly impacted by performance issue, which led the DOS brick-and-mortar like-for-like performance negative down to 1.8% compared to 2024.

The franchising in deal business model like-for-like performance again deteriorating by 2.5% versus 2024. At the same time, we got an hit by the negative perimeter in terms of sales, which amount to €3.7 million due to network reorganization or rationalization.

Clearly the perimeter effect, despite the decline in sale, is bringing the positive effect on the overall contribution, because clearly we are continuing rationalizing, cleaning our network where we see shops or franchising direct customer which are not performing from a contribution point of view. If we look at the digital channel, clearly we have a weaker performance on the wholesale and marketplace.

On the marketplace side, I would like to remind that we have taken strong decision, like we did for USA and China, to reduce and close platform which are not performing. While, if we look at our own website, we are pretty satisfied with the performance.

We have been able to register a like-for-like increase of 5% or of 4.6% compared to the year 2024. If we look at the net sales by region, clearly we can see that all the region are decreasing compared to the year 2024.

Italy is down 4.5%. Wholesale and retail deliver a negative performance, only partially offset by web performance growing mid-single digit, 5.4% just in Italy.

Europe overall, including our core market, is mainly down for the performance driven by the negative wholesale results. At the same time, just to mention the DACH area, that confirms negative trend mainly across all channels.

France continue to be a country pretty much resilient and positive performance in retail and web. This is clearly reflecting the position of a solid market leadership, while we are suffering a little bit in the wholesale channel.

The rest of the world is clearly impacted by our reorganization, because we need to consider that we have winded down the operation in US and China, which led to a sales loss of 16 sales decline of €16.7 million, as we already mentioned during this call. On the other side, we have a positive performance in the Middle Eastern region, while Russia, which is clearly an important market for us, is continuing clearly decline slightly and underperforming compared to the previous year, mainly due to the wholesale side of the business and due to a conflict and war which is currently happening between Ukraine and Russia.

Just to mention that the performance of the directly operated shops in Russia is still solid. We are still perceived like a strong brand, well-positioned on the retail side.

I would like just to move you directly into page 12, where we can see the evolution of our network. From a DOS perspective, we are slightly declining the network.

We have five net closure of DOS, mostly related to the Hong Kong subsidiary, which has been rationalized and reorganized. While we are decreasing more significantly into the franchising and deal store, mainly in European countries, following again the networking rationalization.

On the franchising and deal, clearly we can expand a bit more later during the Q&A section, but this is clearly an action where we are trying to reorganize our network through more financial partner with a higher financial stability, higher financial strength, that are clearly on the other side cleaning our business from credit risk. I think that given all the description of the business, just a mention on page 16, as already did, to the net financial position.

We move, as we said, from the €103 million negative of last year to €92 million €92 million, which has been achieved to cost reorganization, capital increase, and decrease of the indirect cost spending and rationalization of the Far East purchasing. I think if we consider where we are now and the way we close 2025, forward-looking into 2026, we can say that the fiscal year 2026 sales are expecting, as we already communicated during the approval of the budget, to decline in the low single-digit area compared to the fiscal year 2025.

The EBIT margin estimates are instead still unchanged in the range of 2% 3% 2% to 3%, as already stated in our business plan and also during our session of budget approval, mainly thanks to the cost initiative that are able to compensate the decline in sales expectation. The bank debt is expected again to improve and to move into the range of the €80 million to €85 million by year-end 2026.

As we already commented in our previous communication to the market, the management team is strongly committed and working on a refresh of our previous business plan. The idea is to be ready at the end of the spring 2026, most likely into the range of June, with a refresh on the new business plan and explanation of the trend of sales for the year '27, '28, and '29.

I would like now to thank you again for participating, and would like to open the session of Q&A for the management team.

Yes, good evening. Thank you for taking my three questions.

The first one is on the evolution of the gross margin. Do you expect it to stabilize at the 2025 level?

My second question is on current trade. Can you give an update on the performance in January and February with some details on what's happening for each channels?

The third one is on the control of cost. If sales deteriorate much more than expecting, what kind of cost actions could be taken further to mitigate the impact on cash flow?

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Oriana, for for your question. I will try to to give you the fair answer, the best that I'm able to give you so far.

I think that we can start from the first one, which is the gross margin in 2026. As you might recover in our budget session, we have forecasted an improvement of our margin for about 110 basis points, out of which 80 mainly due to the channel mix.

I think that given the way so far the current business the current trade is is now performing into the first months of the year, I I suggest, I would say to the market that we are committed and we will be able to maintain a margin flat compared to 2025. If we this is leading me to comment a bit on the current trading side.

I think that it's fair to say that if we look at our D2C, direct-to-consumer market, and in particular to our regular brick-and-mortar business, as of week 10, the like-for-like performance is down in the range of the 5% to 6%. While the outlet, again brick-and-mortar physical in the same week, we are referring to week 10 as a as a current trading point for this comment, is down significantly in the range of 16.6%.

On the other side, the good news is coming again from the digital side, where the the the DOS digital like-for-like performance compared to last year is up, significantly up, double-digit, close to 10%, a bit more than 10%. If we look at the wholesale, we need to be to comment looking at also the calendarization of our performance.

We are down in the range of 18% compared to last year, which is corresponding mainly to the execution of the decline of the order of the Spring/Summer campaign 2026, for which we are now billing out the product. That's it.

That's that's the way we have we we started It's true, it's fair to say that we started the year lower, a bit lower than expected. I think that when we look at the direct-to-consumer business, both physical but both sorry, both physical and digital, but mainly physical, one of the item that is clearly impacting our current trading is the decline on traffic.

The decline on traffic is mainly due to economic condition. Overall, overall economic condition and clearly what is now happening overall in the world with the new new conflict is not for sure helping the the recovery of the economy and the stability, and is not supporting the the normal consumption for the overall market.

On the other side, I think that we will be able in the next future to recover a bit of the traffic, especially because we are starting from last week, but mainly we will focus on the next few weeks, we will start with a new communication campaign that I think that we'll be able to address a little bit the the and recover a part of the traffic and the attention of our customer to our new product, especially on the Spring/Summer side, where we have significant innovation on the shops in terms of product with two two line, the most sophisticated Blue Touch and the current overall hero heritage product that we have developed nicely for 2026 Spring/Summer. The third question is on the cost control.

I think that we have proved we have a track of success in in cost control over the last two year, mainly in 2025, where we have accelerated significantly. As you the good results in terms of for profitability achieve in 2025 came from a cost rationalization and cost control.

We have adopted a rigid discipline to look to look at our cost base because we we realized that we were not able to follow from the market side the sales expectation that we have a decline in our previous business in our actual business plan. On the same side, we still feel that we have a room a significant quite a good room to improve the the base cost in 2026.

First thing that I would like to say is that the strong investment in the personal cost and staff reorganization, that has been very painful from from a from a group point of view, will clearly pay off in terms of financial benefit mainly in 2026. It's already included in our budget section.

If we look our budget-based cost, we will be able to again reduce the overall cost structure for about €16 million. The management is already working on plan to further take action on indirect cost if the current trading will continue in that direction.

Overall, I think that we will make our best effort to eventually mitigate a further deterioration of our top-line expectations. Top-line sales expectation.

Understood. Thank you very much.

Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, if there are no further questions, we invite you to contact us if there is any further need for information.

This is Francesco speaking. Let me just reiterate one concept.

We managed to navigate 2025 quite successfully as far as cost control are concerned. A good portion of the costs that were put under control were related to the performance of the business, and they're going to be somewhat influencing the 2026 results as well.

There were some costs that we stopped during the year, such as, for example, communication cost, because we revised entirely, as I suggested in my initial speech, we had to revise our strategy, and therefore there was little point to keep investing a significant amount of money into communication while we were revising not only just our communication strategy, but generally speaking, our future development strategy. That has had, clearly, an impact on our sales during the last quarter of last year and probably the first few weeks of the current fiscal year.

We truly believe that the strategy that we have adopted, which is, as I indicated, reviving the technological content, is already paying off, because if we look at the areas where it should be more effective, such as men's sales, the first few weeks of this year were actually very good indeed. Where we're not being particularly successful was on the women collection.

Women collection has not been appreciated into the market, and that is why we have made a decision to coordinate far better our new offer. Unfortunately, a company in this business is like a large boat.

You need to wield the rudder in order to make changes. The new collection developed with the new stylist will hit the retail business only during the second quarter of next year, 2027.

We're going to have some indications of how much it is appreciated by the market during the next sales campaign in late spring this year. Between June and July, we should actually see how that is appreciated by our wholesale clients.

In general, however, we still have room, as Andrea indicated, to keep our cost base under control. Some of it is a natural consequence, if there is a contraction of the business, of the contraction of the business.

Some of it is linked to further initiatives which we are implementing. A component of it is clearly related to the initiatives that we have already implemented, such as the restructuring cost on our organization, which led to a reduction of approximately one-third of the labor cost in terms of heads.

We have reduced by approximately 200 million on a 600 million base last year. The benefit of that is going to be more evident during 2026, of course.

We believe that 2026 is a year of transition, during which some of the benefits of the new commercial strategy will not probably fully materialize, because the new collection will kick in only the following Spring/Summer season, because some of the actions, even in terms of communication, will trigger their effects over the medium term rather than just as an immediate reaction to a commercial. We need to reshape a bit the market recognition of our brand, and that will not take just a few weeks or months; it will take a bit longer.

But 2026, we still believe that we can confirm basically the results that we anticipated in our 2006 to 2026 budget, and hope that with the business plan we're going to give more clarity to the market for what we expect going forward.

Thank you. Thank you, Francesco, and thank you overall to everyone that participate in the call.

I think we can now close the call if there are no further comments.