Revenues at Zalando, one of Europe’s largest online fashion retailing platforms, rose 26.5 percent over the third quarter and totaled 3.02 billion euros.
The German company’s gross merchandise value, or GMV, also rose 21.6 percent to 4.21 billion euros in the three months to September. Zalando sees GMV, which measures how much inventory the platform has moved, as a key indicator; it is usually higher than company revenue.
For the nine months to date, Zalando was able to record growth of 11.4 percent and revenues of 11.82 billion euros.
“The third quarter demonstrates how we are relentlessly executing our strategy to embrace the immense opportunities in front of us and to capture profitable growth,” the company’s co-chief executive David Schröder said in a statement.
Zalando has actually only been growing in mid to higher-single digits most of the year and the unusually-high third-quarter numbers for revenue and GMV come mostly as a result of Zalando’s acquisition of another large German retailing platform, About You, over the summer.
On a pro-forma basis, if one assumed About You had been part of the company during the third quarter last year, then revenues only rose by 7.5 percent and GMV by 6.7 percent, Zalando explained in a press release announcing the results Thursday.
Other key performance indicators were also positive, again thanks to the purchase of About You.
Zalando recorded 61.4 million active customers, an increase of 21.9 percent, in the third quarter and also saw orders rise 18.4 percent to total 68.5 million euros.
The average basket size — that is, what each customer spends when they made a purchase — rose slightly, going from 61 euros per basket to 61.80 euros. However, the number of average orders per customer fell from 4.9 per shopper to 4.8.
Zalando’s adjusted earnings before interest and taxes, or adjusted EBIT, also improved to hit 96 million euros in the third quarter. Previously, investors have been worried about Zalando’s EBIT because of the costs involved with this kind of retailing and the EBIT margin in the quarter — how actual earnings compare to revenues — remains low, sitting at just 1.6 percent.
Earlier in the year, the online retailer had already adjusted guidance, mostly due to an uncertain economic climate and the impact of that on consumers. This quarter, Zalando confirmed that forecast. The Berlin-based company still expects mid-single-digit growth for the entire group in the second half of the year.
About You will boost comparative numbers, and group revenues are predicted to rise between 14 and 17 percent over 2025. But Zalando actually expects pro-forma revenue and GMV to only grow somewhere between 4 and 7 percent for the full year. Adjusted EBIT should come in somewhere between 550 and 600 million euros. Zalando had previously expected between 4 percent and 9 percent growth for its operations alone, without the addition of About You.
