Chairman / MD Message


Mr. Harsh Bahadur

(Chairman)

Overview

We have consistently believed that value creation and sustainable business practices are complementary goals. We are on the right course, in the right direction and the Company would continue with its tireless efforts to improve returns for its shareholders, delivering quality products, and taking customer centricity to the next level. We are also proud to be a company with the highest level of corporate governance and transparency.

Differentiated value proposition

We are an electronic retailer of fashion jewellery, gemstones, lifestyle products and accessories in US, UK, and Germany, with access to approx. 124 million households through our TV home shopping networks and digital platforms. The group has reported a track record of consistent growth in digital retailing of jewellery, gemstones, and lifestyle products over the years. We take pride in being a value player by offering compelling values to customers enabled by our direct sourcing and an asset-light business model. Our focus on expanding our channel footprint along with widening the product portfolio has broad-based market share gains across US and UK over the years and we are confident of continuing this momentum.

What helps sustain margins

A fully integrated supply chain is our moat, and we manufacture the majority of our jewellery products which allows bulk sourcing and better price negotiations. Recently, we also ventured into manufacturing apparels. Apart from China, India, Thailand and Indonesia, we have a strong sourcing arrangement from several countries. This strong supply chain mechanism allows a strong value proposition to the customers and sustains gross margins above 60%. Our vertically integrated supply chain has worked favourably for us till date. Even during the recent period when the freight prices went up sharply along with air freight capacity constraints, we were able to tide over these challenges with relatively reduced impact. Besides costs, our vertical model also help reduces delivery time and better control over the quality of products.

Expanding non-jewellery categories

We understand the potential of being an omni-channel retailer with cross-category selling potential. With the intent of deepening our customer engagement, we continue to introduce new non-jewellery products regularly. TJC Beauty, our dedicated beauty channel, expanded its reach in UK by launching on SKY - UK’s largest pay-tv broadcaster. Non-Jewellery products provide synergistic adjacency to its fashion jewellery portfolio at similar price points, allowing us to target a larger wallet share of customers. This also helps us improve retention and repeat purchase by customers.

Brand: Deep Discounting Focused Retailing

Our key focus of the year has also been to consolidate our branded products to enhance customer trust and loyalty. Today, our in-house brands contribute 25-30% of group revenue. Further, during the year, we acquired global online brand rights of ‘Rachel Galley’, a UK based jewellery designer brand. It is a multiple award-winning brand which focusses on the principle of ‘exceptional jewellery at affordable prices. Also, we launched ‘TAMSY’, a new female fashion apparel brand targeting customers above 40 years of age. We believe that wider brands presence across multiple sales channels allows higher recall therefore better customer retention and repeat sales opportunities.

Innovation facilitating business efficiencies

At Vaibhav Global Limited, we constantly nurture a culture of innovation across products as well as processes. In product innovation, we have created multiple programmes such as ‘Innov8’ for employees and family members, ‘Draw a Design’ for college students, ‘SPARK’ for entrepreneurs, ‘Idea Labs’ for customers, ‘Catapult’ for outside Innovators. We are proud to share the fact that revenue from our innovation products contributes ~5% to our global revenue. Similarly, on the processes front, we encourage our employees to share their process ideas. During the year, we received more than 2,000 innovative process ideas, out of them 246 ideas have already been implemented. Process innovation is expected to provide operational synergies and cost optimisation across the organization.

Committed to sustainability

We have consistently believed that value creation and sustainable business practices are complementary goals. Renewable energy is a key focus area in VGL’s strategy for mitigating climate change risks. As the world races towards Net Zero, we have set a target to become carbon neutral in Scope 1 & 2 emissions by 2031. We remain committed to using responsibly sourced material. Our solar power capacity of 3.23 MW is addressing 100% of our energy requirements in Jaipur. Our two office buildings in the US are also using 100% renewable energy. During the year, we developed 2nd Miyawaki forest in Jaipur and planted ~13,000 saplings there. We compost all our biodegradable waste and safely dispose off our plastic and e-waste in our India units. Efforts are already underway to follow the same at other group units too. Under our flagship one-for-one meals initiative ‘Your Purchase Feeds…’, we served 13 million meals to school children in India, US and UK during FY22. With this, we have served 63 million meals till date.

Moving forward

Our differentiated value proposition through the deep discounting model presents an opportunity to grow faster organically (US and UK) and through our foray into the new territory of Germany. We are on the right course, in the right direction and the Company would continue with its tireless efforts to improve returns for its shareholders, delivering quality products, and taking customer centricity to the next level. We are also proud to be a company with highest level of corporate governance and transparency.

As we look ahead, on behalf of the Board of Directors, I take this opportunity to express my sincere appreciation to our Customers, Partners, Employees and Shareholders for your support and trust. I seek your continued support to grow and progress our Company to greater heights.

With My Best Wishes,

Harsh Bahadur

Chairman

Mr. Sunil Agrawal

(Managing Director)

VGL AT GLANCE

The year depicted a significant landmark as Vaibhav Global Limited accomplished milestone of completing 25 years of being a publicly listed company in India. We take this opportunity to thank our shareholders who shared this journey with us and contributed to our success. All these years, our deep discount value positioning worked well in various kinds of economic cycles.

We continue to gain market share in our addressable markets of US & UK and our endeavour is to sustain this market leading growth in future also. Our business continues to be driven by value proposition at an expanding range of innovative products and deep customer engagement. The underlying long term business prospects are promising, and our long-term ambition is to sustain growth whilst building operating leverage.

FY22: A year of Investments

It is pertinent to note that FY22 was a ‘year of investments’ for us whence we created future growth levers. During the year, we ventured into new geography of Germany, thereby expanded our addressable electronic retail market. We made significant investment on digital front through various initiatives. We are expanding our sales points across channels- Cable TV, Over the Air (OTA), websites, mobile apps, OTT, social-media, and third-party marketplaces.

On Region-wise performance

Today, we have a strong base of half a million unique customers with healthy repeat purchase across our addressable markets. Our primary markets of US and UK started the year on a strong note. However, post first quarter, as vaccination in both US & UK reached pivotal levels, economy started to open up. Consequently, consumer went out en-masse in a phenomenon called revenge outing & revenge buying. Global macro headwinds in the form of geo-political tensions and inflation also impacted consumer sentiments in second half of the year.

Owing to our robust business model, we delivered stable performance. In full year FY22, in constant currency terms, Shop LC (US) grew by 4.8% YoY, and 28.1% over FY20. While UK was flat YoY, against FY20 it grew by a strong 32.3%.

In US, which is our largest market, we finished upgrading our tech infrastructure on Salesforce Commerce Cloud for the website and mobile applications. This would enable elevated customer experience in coming periods. Besides this, we also invested on acquiring more OTA homes. We also purchased land in Texas to build new integrated headquarters of Shop LC (US) which is expected to bring operational synergies and cost savings.

In UK, digital investments on technology infrastructure & customer experience were made similar to US. In addition to those, Shop TJC (UK) upgraded its Freeview channel position to 22 from erstwhile number 50. This investment is expected to provide long-term growth opportunities and increased market share. During the year, TJC UK’s dedicated beauty channel (‘TJC Beauty') widened its reach by launching itself on ‘SKY’- UK’s largest pay-tv broadcaster. We see good potential in this segment and will continue to expand its reach going forward.

German operations are faring well, and its performance has been as per our plans. We are already present on prominent TV networks, digital platforms like Website, marketplaces, OTT and social media. Today, we have coverage in approx. 27mn households in Germany and are continuously expanding our presence there. We expect to breakeven in Germany by H2 of FY 2023-24.

There are multiple levers for future growth available to us and we continue to remain alert and agile to capitalize on upcoming opportunities. We are adopting pragmatic approach to continue to gain further market share.

On Operational Efficiencies

We are proud to be the fastest growing e-retailer driving efficiency in our business model and having a well-established cost-effective supply chain. Several key steps were adopted to achieve operational efficiencies in our business operations during the year. The call centre in India became operational. This has helped us in achieving excellent CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) scores of 95% for both US and UK. Presently, ~50-60% volume of US & UK is being catered by Indian call centre. We acquired one apparel manufacturing unit thereby expanding our lifestyle products category. The acquisition is likely to give flexibility in terms of procurement, better control over quality and cost arbitrage. Further, commissioning of GEEK+ robots at our warehouses in US and UK have been completed which is expected to improve the picking productivity by almost 3 times vis-à-vis conventional manual picking, while reducing error rates. We also acquired majority stake in a packaging company in Sri City. This investment is already enabling us to cut our packaging box costs in US and UK.

On Key Focus Areas in FY2023

Our business model revolves around customer centricity with a wide range of product, engaging content and deep value proposition supported by a vertically integrated supply chain. In FY23, our key focus area will be to further strengthen our omni-channel presence enabling cross-selling potential and resultant improved customer lifetime value. We also intend to increase our TV reach by increasing the number of households we broadcast to. We will continue to invest in strengthening our ‘Digital’ capabilities’. We will work on further improving shopping experience of customers by improving various customer touch points, while maintaining overall profitability.

The recent challenges related to inflationary trends and recession fears might affect consumer sentiments in the short-term. However, with focused strategic pillars in place which are 'broadening our omni-channel reach’, 'expanding customer base through compelling content and promotions’, ‘increase retention by improving customer experience’ and ‘increase repeat purchase through varied product offering’, we expect continued and sustainable growth in the medium and long term.

Towards the end, I would like to say, that we are confident to continue our growth trajectory with healthy margins, as our current investments will help build on significant opportunities in the medium and long-term.

Best Regards,

Sunil Agrawal

Managing Director