MANILA, Philippines — AllHome Corp., the country’s pioneering one-stop full-line home center, sustained its growth momentum due to the continuous reopening of the Philippine economy from the pandemic and the operational improvements implemented by the company, closing 2021 with double-digit growth in revenue and net income.
The company posted a 15% growth in net revenue to P14.325 billion in 2021 and 46% growth in net income to P1.444 billion.
Leveraging core advantages in a post-pandemic market
AllHome Chairman Manuel Villar Jr. reiterated AllHome’s commitment to weathering challenges to deliver value to its stakeholders.
“AllHome’s performance in 2021 is a full display of our core advantages as we navigated through the many challenges of the pandemic. As this global challenge draws to a close, we view 2022 with optimism. All signs point to an increased pace of economic recovery throughout the country, and this bodes well for AllHome. Already we are seeing footfall to our malls—of which AllHome is a key anchor—return to pre-pandemic levels, indicative of customers returning to physical stores with a vengeance or revenge shopping” Villar said.
AllHome is part of the Villar Group’s AllValue retail ecosystem, where the full-line home center is typically situated alongside sister brands AllDay Supermarket and Coffee Project, which provides customers with a more comprehensive and complete retail experience in a single trip.
Growth through operational efficiencies
The company also recorded a 28% expansion in gross profit to P5.019 billion resulting in a 27% growth in EBITDA to P3.419 billion.
The year 2021 saw AllHome employing a number of initiatives to improve gross profit margins, which increased to 35% of revenue from only 31.6% in 2020. Strategic pricing, conversion of select concessionaire merchandise to outright, and increasing in-house brands sales contribution all served to contribute to the marked improvement.
Notably, “2021 saw the creation of our new generation AllHome stores, which carry a smaller footprint and require less capital expenditure to fit out,” said AllHome Vice Chairman Camille Villar. “Our new stores are more efficient—display capacities are maximized from floor-to-ceiling, so our smaller footprint has no impact on our intended sales output.”
AllHome’s new generation stores carry the same 120,000 SKUs in a smaller footprint of approximately 7,000sqm net selling area, reflected in the chain’s newest stores in Santo Tomas, Batangas and in Worldwide Corporate Center, Mandaluyong.
Building on omnichannel capabilities
To capitalize on changing customer behavior skewed towards increasing adoption of e-commerce as a sales channel, AllHome deployed operational efficiency programs to optimize store formats, allowing for additional store warehousing and dedicated fulfillment and logistics areas for e-commerce fulfillment.
“With the increasing adoption of online shopping across all consumer channels, AllHome will continue to leverage innovative customer-facing measures and automated digital marketing campaigns to strengthen our omni-channel presence and grow our consumer base. Aside from AllHome’s strong performance in a time of pandemic, we are notably gaining ground in the e-commerce space, with 11% of our revenue now coming from online channels,” AllHome President and Chief Executive Officer Benjamin Therese Serrano said.
As of December 2021, e-commerce revenue for AllHome is at 11% of total revenue, a notably high revenue share by industry standards.
Through 2021, AllHome expanded on its omnichannel strategies, building on a customer experience that seamlessly translates in-store journeys to AllHome’s digital platforms. Initiatives included predictive personalization of customer preferences, integrating AllValue’s loyalty program into AllHome’s best-in-class e-commerce platform and automating marketing campaigns to improve experience and conversion—which has already seen a 7% uptick in abandoned carts conversion.
Marching towards recovery
AllHome’s operational performance in 2021 reflects the country’s steady march towards recovery. Marked improvements were observed in the company’s same-store sales growth (SSSG), which rose from 3.5% in 2020 to 8.1% in 2021.
Transaction count for AllHome also rose: 3.891 million compared to 2020’s of 3.6 million, an increase of 8%, year on year.
Through the pandemic, AllHome leveraged its agility in responding to market conditions, employing a balanced mix of soft and hard category offerings that allowed quick responses to changing market conditions and customer preferences, observable in trends such as the widely implemented work-from-home setup through the height of the pandemic, as well as a marked increase in soft renovations to improve living spaces, as Filipinos spent much more time at home through this period.
AllHome also fully utilized a key store network advantage—proximity to residential communities, for both its mall-based and free-standing stores. In its February 2022 industry report, Euromonitor stated that consumers were driven by convenience, and tended to pre-plan experiences, with convenient store locations as a key--if not the most important—consideration.
The company anticipates a brisk 2022 summer for construction activities, as restrictions are continuously downgraded.
AllHome made its debut on the Philippine Stock Exchange via Initial Public Offering on October 10, 2019.