Zalando customer numbers surge, expects fast growth to go on

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Sep 23, 2019

German fashion and beauty e-tail giant Zalando has reported what it called “outstanding” customer growth for Q2 with its strongest ever active customer growth for that particular part of the year and its fastest site visit growth since 2013.

Importantly too, profitable growth continued with gross merchandise value (GMV) up 23.7% to €2 billion and adjusted EBIT of €102 million. Revenues rose 20.1% to €1.6 billion. GMV growth is predicted to continue in the 20% to 25% range with actual revenue growth being at the lower end of that range.

So, plenty of good news there but what does it mean in terms of customer numbers and site visits? Well, the number of active customers grew by 3.7 million (15.2%) year-on-year to 28.3 million across Zalando’s 17 European markets. Site visits surged by 34.3% to 986.4 million at the same time, and the important point here is that 84% of this came through mobile devices, leading to a record number of orders (36.1 million).

And the company is investing to ensure it meets its ongoing growth prediction. It’s building a new warehouse in the Netherlands to better serve customers across its Western European markets and get ready for future growth. It has also boosted same-day and next-day delivery in Germany. And it recently announced a boost to its Premium offer too.

All of that has led it to raise its profitability outlook to the upper half of the adjusted EBIT range of €175 million to €225 million. It had predicted that same range previously but had simply said that EBIT would come between those two figures rather than towards the top end.