Thank you very much indeed. Good evening.

Thank you all for joining us today. We're going to talk about the first quarter 2026 results.

The first quarter of 2026 recorded a 3% sales decline versus our budget across all sales channels and all geographic areas. This represents a 12.5% sales decline compared to the same period of last year.

On a more comparable basis, however, such a decline was 10.3% when we include the impact of decisions taken to close some less relevant stores and certain non-profitable digital channels. While the performance of the wholesale, brick-and-mortar, and web channels was expected as a consequence of the 2026 spring/summer campaign, and therefore included in our budget, the performance of the retail channel was well below our initial expectations.

Although the trend had begun in the second half of 2025, it dramatically intensified in the first months of the current year. The consequence is a widespread drop in traffic, both for us and for the market, of approximately 8.8%, of which 8.1% in our regular stores and 10.1% in our outlets, that according to our recollection can be observed across the entire sector.

Despite the decrease in sales, the initiatives of rationalization and cost efficiency we implemented during the second half of last year are now generating savings in the operating cost structure of about €10 million in the quarter. These savings contributed to record in the first quarter an adjusted EBIT higher than budgeted and give us confidence that the group will be able to confirm the forecast set out in the budget approved in December, both in terms of operating margin, adjusted EBIT margin equal to approximately 2% to 3%, 2% to 3%, and reduction in bank debt compared to 2025.

We expect indeed the bank debt to settle in the range of approximately €60 million to €70 million by the end of the current year, also supported by the planned optimization of production, inventory management, and working capital cash flow. I also want to emphasize, however, that focusing on industrial processes and cost containment is not the only leverage that management is pursuing, although it is essential in order to enable the group, moreover under unfavorable market conditions, to invest in its future.

On the contrary, we are focusing much of our efforts on our top line. To this extent, we have brought back to the center of our group strategy our R&D capabilities, leveraging on our expertise and technological innovation, which have always defined the brand's heritage and values and its historical success.

We are now about to launch on the market revolutionary solutions which will initially be distributed by our own retail network. Moreover, over the past few months of very intensive work, we developed the spring/summer 2027 collection that will be presented to our international sales force next week.

The style of the collection, which is combined with the technological context of Geox products, has been entrusted to a globally renowned design studio, which is an international benchmark in footwear design, with the goal to bring a renewed creative and stylistic energy to the Geox brand, offering a much shorter time to market of our products. In an increasingly complex global environment, marked by conflicts, instability, uncertainty, we continue to closely monitor recent market developments.

Although these dynamics have had thus far a relatively marginal cost impact on our operations, which we have so far managed to absorb and that are reflected in our first quarter results as well as in our current year forecast, we believe that any further deterioration of the geopolitical landscape is likely to affect the top-line performance as a consequence of traffic deterioration in our reference markets. For this reason, we consider it essential to maintain a prudent approach, combining growth in higher margin products, distribution channels, and markets with the continuous optimization of processes and cost containment.

I thank you very much for your patience. I will now turn the floor over to Andrea Maldi, who will walk through our financial performance in greater detail, and very willing to get your questions at the end of the presentation.

Thank you, Francesco, and good afternoon, everybody. Thank you also because Francesco gave us quite a clear picture also the main financials that have characterized the period of the 3 months 2026.

I will try to deep dive a little bit more on sales and on channel to give you further color on the specific performance of our channel distribution. As we discussed from the very beginning, the sales as of March '26 is set at the level of €165 million, with a decline of €23 million compared to the period of last year, which is a 12.5%.

Already mentioned by Francesco, if we look at a comparable basis taking off the perimeter effect of the reduction of shops and some of the marketplace platform which are not profitable, the decline is going down to 10.3%, 10%. We have different speed of the declining or in improving along the different channels.

If we start from the wholesale physical, the brick-and-mortar physical, clearly the results of 8% negative, which is representing a value of business of €68 million versus the €74 million of the previous year, is mainly driven by registering the initial orders of the campaign spring/summer 2026 that has been done last year and that's already factored in our budget and forecast numbers. No surprise on the wholesale.

We are simply registering what's going on in terms of the invoicing process of the order that we have already captured. At the same time, we need to register the decline of the wholesale web, which is quite significant over the quarter, €11 million out of that €36 million that we have registered in the 2025.

This is mainly driven by different kind of reason. We have the strong impact of the Russia platform, mainly referring to an important customer, which is Wildberries, that has clearly declined significantly due to the different kind of geopolitical situation, the investment.

Just to give you some numbers, if you think that back at the end of 2023, the beginning of 2024, this customer was having orders with Geox for about €10 million per season, we are now forecasting in the entire 2026 just €1 million of sales. There is another important element to mention when you look at the wholesale web platform, that is clearly the cleaning of some of the off-price sales.

When we say cleaning, we mean our approach to a more consistent omnichannel go-to-market strategy, where we have clearly understood that some of our sales in the off-price were clearly affecting the consistency of the price and sales coming from the other distribution channels. At the same time, we still have some other important platform which are growing within this kind of declining platform.

We are clearly working strongly on the offering strategy and segmentation to cover more consistently the kind of platform like Amazon, where we are able to improve our performance strongly in this distribution channel. If we look at the retail, retail has been a bit of hit over the quarter because we have reached a value of €86 million against the €91 million of the previous year, same period.

The main impact, as already presented by Francesco, has been driven by adverse traffic condition, which has affected the entire period in the range of 8% decline compared to last year, which has clearly given us the hit of the €5 million of lower performance, which are clearly a gap compared to the 2025 business, but are representing a gap also with our budget assumption, where we were forecasting a much better traffic. Despite we are confirming our operational excellence in the shops given by the fact that our conversion rate, our capability to transform in sales, has been stronger over the entire network of our shops, not only in Italy, but globally speaking and mainly in the Europe markets.

The overall set of this kind of different speeds in different channel, as we discussed, gave us a hit of €24 million, which has been clearly offset during the quarter by a stronger capability of deliver cost control and action to reduce the impact of the loss of the margin in the range of €10 million. We are also having a better-than-expected payback and payoff of the action that we took back in 2025 in order to prepare and to set the business in 2026.

If we move for a while from the channel view to the geographical footprint, which is discussed and presented in page 8, we can see that Italy, which is clearly a market stand-alone in terms of weight on overall business, €55 million, €53 million against €55 million done in 2025, is down 4.6%. Europe, which is clearly all the rest of the main European market, is down significantly from €86 million to €75 million, 11.7%.

We are mainly impacted by the DACH area, which is clearly confirming a negative trend, and France, which is experiencing a deterioration of the performance overall across all the channels. On the other side, we have to register, when we look at Europe, the positive DOS like-for-like performance in all countries, with the exception in the first 3 months of France.

If we look at the rest of Europe, the decrease is in the region of the €11 million, and clearly it's mainly represented by our operation in countries which are clearly under instability from the geopolitical condition that are globally impacting the business. Worth to mention, clearly, as we discussed before, the decline of Russia, mainly on the wholesale, not in the shops, which are working properly and providing quite a good set of performance, as we said, mainly in the wholesale and the wholesale platform, as we discussed before.

I would like just to bring you a little bit to the page 10 where we discuss the overall brick-and-mortar distribution network evolution. As you can see, we are continuing our review of the distribution of our shops, direct and indirect.

We are in March 2026 at 562 overall managed shops against the 570 at December 2025. If we look back at the first 3 months of 2025, the gap is quite important because we were running on an average of 594.

This is mainly driven by a selective approach in reviewing operation with the aim of improving profitability across the P&L of Geox Group at group level, which is quite paying back because, as you can see, when we discuss of the overall recoverability of cost that we have done in 2025 and in 2026 in the first 3 months, this is also driven by the saving of cost where we've been able to cut investment or cost which were not directly profitable or were in a way deteriorating our target margin that we are pursuing. If we look at the financial review, clearly it's worth to discuss the working capital, which as of March 20 as of March 2026 is setting the value at €140 million, which is not far from December 2025, €135 million, and pretty much a bit lower than March 2025, where we were at the level of €144 million.

As we are deeply impacted on the working capital discussion by our seasonality, which is clearly impacted by the way we manage business. In the first 3 months of the year and in the first 3 months of the second half of the period, we are normally moving from inventory to sales and to receivable the season that we have purchased, and in the other 3 months, we are monetizing the cash of the wholesale plus the retail performance.

Having said that, and considering the fact that the working capital is measured against the 12 months rolling sales, we need to register an increase in terms of percentage from 22.3% to 24.1%, despite inventory quality and inventory stock level is getting better, €160 million against the 205 at the same period of the 3 months of 2025, and the rest of payable and receivable are moving accordingly to our conditions. I think that having taking in consideration what we have discussed with Francesco and myself, and with the deep dive overall of the business, we are looking at 2026 and we are overall in the year, and we are able to confirm the target in terms of EBIT margin adjusted compared to our expectation and our previous communication to the market.

At the same time, we are forecasting a bank debt in the range of the 6- €60 million to €70 million, with an improvement compared to our initial expectation, and which is in a way the proof of concept of the fixing and restructuring and organization that we are doing overall in the business model. Despite we need to register clearly a decline in sales, which is moving and set in the area compared to 2025 in the area of the mid- to high single digit.

I think that just to close, as we already mentioned and as Francesco already explaining some of the strong initiatives that we are carrying over, we are still working deeply on finalizing a review of our business plan, and we will announce in the future when we will be ready, considering also the fact that we need to take into consideration the evolution of the geopolitical situation that is impacting globally the world. Thank you very much, and we can open the Q&A session.

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

The first one is about current trade. Can you give us some details on the trend that you saw in April and start of May?

The second question is on the first quarter's sales performance by category. Is there a significant difference between men's, women's, children's and between the premium and the value segments?

On the positive side, were there any product lines that stood out? The third question is about the potential reaction to the current macroeconomic uncertainty on the capex plan.

Are you considering modifying your investment plan? Could you please remind us your budget for this year in terms of size and type?

Finally, regarding the product strategy, you have announced the decision to hire a new external studio to innovate the style. In the meantime, the macro scenario has deteriorated and can further deteriorate.

Do you think that more structural changes to the product may be necessary in the future, for example rethinking the range, focusing on some segments that are more resilient or something like that? Thank you.

Do we

should we answer these question one question at the time or should we collect all the questions and then—

Okay. Let me take

let me take the last one. This is Francesco.

Let me take the last one and perhaps give you give a glimpse on on the other two questions you asked regarding capex profile and products where we've suffered the most. As far as the strategy is concerned to to get along an external designer, this is a decision that was taken back in November 2025.

The reason for that is actually two or even more manifold. The first one is that we had to put a more focus on our style in as much as our style was, for a good portion of it, the consequence of a very long industrialization process that had features featured in the company, i.e., to take from the design of the collection to the production of the samples to the final production of the collection and the the delivery to both our wholesale customers and our retail customers, it took approximately between 18 and 24 months.

As a consequence of that, our collections were historically not updated in terms of colors, in terms of shapes, in terms of offer compared to the competition. The decision to go along with an external designer was therefore to get to try to get as close as possible in terms of time to market to where our competitors are.

That was a very important decision in the process. Now that carried with it a number of risks which we have mitigated internally because we have accelerated the process, the industrialization process, and we indeed next week, as I anticipated, are going to present to the to our international sales force the new collection for spring/summer 2027.

This has been done in record in a record number of months, in 5 months compared to 24 months approximately of the previous process. Is there any change that is suggested by the current turmoil in the market?

Now, first of all, I believe that very few of us, certainly not me, can speculate on how long this turmoil is going to to rocket our boat our boats. We find rocking of our boats, sorry.

We find that so far we have been able to absorb the cost that were indeed the result of this turmoil. Is it going to make a significant change in our future offer?

Of course not, because the collection has been designed. However, next week we will start the sales campaign and we will see the reaction of our wholesale clients.

Depending upon their orders, we'll have a better feeling of where the market is moving is currently moving. In terms of resilience, well, we know for sure that luxury is normally more resilient than the lower or the lowest part of the market.

We believe we have a balanced offer. The collection that was designed with the idea of providing a good offer to both the wholesale channels as much as the retail.

As a matter of fact, one of the issues that we will be focusing our attention on in the next collections is a more distinct product offer, more focused on wholesale and more some of it more focused on retails, so that we can indeed differentiate our offer more than we have done so far. I would say that on this I'm happy to answer any further questions that might come, and I would switch to the issue of capex.

Now most of our capex—and I'm not going to go into the details in terms of numbers, but I leave that to to Andrea to go into greater details—but we our capex range is is approximately between €15 [million] and €20 million. If we include what I still consider an investment in marketing, we are more in the range of the €35 [million] to €40 million, combining marketing investments and and other, let's call it, hard assets investment.

Among the hard assets, the Geox effort over the last few years has been that of retail, direct retail investments. Now we can anticipate that we are we are reconsidering that as a strategy for the future and we discussing internally indeed how we can switch most of our investment effort to communication and to developing proper tools to participate with greater effort on the digital markets.

Digital is performing better today than than wholesale and retail, and we believe that that is an area where we we will need to put more brainpower and money to make it a market segment where growth is pursued with greater with greater effort. We still have some rationalization to be made in our direct retail.

We still have some flagship shops that are not worth the amount of money we have invested in. We will work on it.

We have constraints, of course, because we have contracts, medium- to long-term contracts, and we need to understand how to unwind without too much of a damage. There are a number of items, a number of subjects where we're focusing our our attention.

Most of the investments are going to go into into into information technology tools that might be instrumental to develop our digital business. As far as marketing is concerned, we have switched significantly our investments from production to communication.

We had invested too much of of a of an amount in production when we had the benefit of

Penelope Cruz's

ambassador. We have in 2025, we have reconsidered that communication strategy.

We are now producing even with taking the advantage of artificial intelligence. We are producing at a far lower cost.

Being the amount of investments we're going to make in communication basically the same if not slightly higher than last year, that translates into the fact that we are going to communicate far more using not only the traditional tools that have been used by Geox in the past, i.e., basically television, we have switched a lot of effort on into other channels pay TV, for example, rather than

rather than

other digital channel, social, and so on.

If

indeed if you have an opportunity to look for Geox on the web, you will see a lot more communication through content creators, influencers. We are gradually switching or swiveling, I should say, from traditional channels to more to more up-to-date channels.

That is, to my expectation, something that we we should see the result in the relatively near future. Last but not least, and then I leave I leave Andrea with the with the proper numbers, we have been on on on segment of our offer between baby, women, and and men, we've been consistently performing well in men.

Men like our technology, they even like our style, which at times I find quite surprising, but never mind. It's a good it's a good it's a good performer.

We're not bad in babies, although we have seen some peaks in certain in certain in part of our offer and more weakness in in other parts of the other offer. We basically not succeeded with all the collabs that we had launched.

That is focused more on certain of them, and some of them have not been successful. Where we have consistently failed is on the women collection.

Women collection has been has had a poor performance over the last few few seasons, and even the current season is not good. Now let me tell you, I hate to take distance from what was done in the past, because I believe that a company is a continuous is an animal that has a continuous life.

Don't forget that in 2026, we are selling the spring/summer collection that was originally designed almost 24 months ago and produced almost 12 months ago, and the fall/winter that was designed approximately 18 months ago and was produced less than 6 months ago. We are in a transit- 2026 is a transition year.

I would love to think that with a new collection we can indeed turn around the perception of our offer. To that extent, the collection that is going to be launched is going to be presented to the sales force next next month next week, sorry, in in the coming 2 or 3 months should actually give you give us confirmation if we have gone in the right direction or not.

Sorry if I took a lot of your time, but I took advantage of this opportunity to introduce some of the subjects where we are brainstorming a lot internally.

Thank you, Francesco, because you waved me from the duty of going through all the questions that have been posed kindly by our analyst. I think that we just need to complete a little bit the question on the current trade.

The current trade so far, Oriana, in April, as of the week 19, is not showing us a particular difference from what we have seen in the first quarter, unfortunately. It means that the traffic is a bit better, but still down in the area of the 8%.

At the same time, when we look at our own DOS, we are registering a little bit better performance in our regular shops. We are down 5%, 8% compared to the overall 8% that we were discussing for the first quarter.

At the same time, we have seen that we are having a different speed when we look at the digital, our own web DOS, our own website, where we are registering a performance which is quite positive, like-for-like 10%, which is mainly driven, as we said, by the good performance of the digital channel with the website, but also the marketplace on a like-for-like basis. Just to give you the color on what we have seen so far on the retail physical and digital.

All the other questions I think that have been properly addressed by our CEO. Just the color on the capex, the range, yes, we were setting our target around €50 million.

We are thinking to cut a little bit of some of the investments that are not directly connected to production and sales, but at the same time, to support the new collection and the investment on new collection, spring/summer 2027, we are increasing a bit the investment that we are going to do in the area of the stamps and sole instruments to develop a new collection which is going to be a game changer

for the

spring/summer 2027. I think that this should address properly we are giving you all the info.

Yes, yes. Thank you.

Very clear.

Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press * and 1 on your telephone.

As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press * and 1 on your telephone.

Thank you for participating in our quarter call and see you for the next meeting for the half year.