Rasmus. Welcome to Matas Group Q2 2026-2027 financial presentation. Today's call is being recorded. All participants will be in a listen-only mode throughout the presentation, and afterwards there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question, please press 5 star on your telephone keypad. I'll now hand it over to the speakers. Please begin. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our Q2 investor call. I am Mette Uglebjerg, the Group CEO of Matas Group, and joining me today is Per Madsen, our CFO. But let's get started here. We start, as normally, with our disclaimer regarding our forward-looking statements. So please take a couple of seconds to look at that. Good. So today, I'm going to start by sharing my perspectives of the quarter, our performance, and the key actions we are taking to strengthen Matas Group. And then Per will go in and double-click on some of our results and give a little bit more colour to that. And then in the end, of course, we're going to open up for questions. So let me start with the overall message for the quarter. It has been a quarter with fundamental changes. We are building a stronger, we are building an integrated, and we are building a more customer-focused group. And this is a long-term business transformation, and we have identified areas where we believe and where we should and where we can improve our performance. Across our business, and we are also taking actions to address those. At the same time, we are also addressing the integration of Kicks and have launched a new Nordic operating model. That is, of course, super important steps for us in order to, to make better use of our scale and then harvest the synergies, but also move closer to our markets. And that also had some impacts on Q2. I'm also super pleased to announce that the new Nordic Executive Leadership Team is now complete. It's a good mix of team members who have a long record and know Matas and also know the industry, but also we brought in some new team members who have international background, a lot of background from integrating and working across markets. Our transformation, of course, starts with our customers. We want to become more relevant, we want to be more accessible, we also want to be more rewarding. And we are strengthening our commercial capabilities in all these areas to deliver on our ambition here. here. Our focus is super clear. To deliver commercial competitiveness in terms of assortment, pricing, and promotion, and execute with a very, very strong execution in our stores and in our e-com business. And that is, of course, the foundation for everything we do and foundation for profitable growth. However, I also want to be very clear, we are not satisfied with the Q2 performance. Competitive market conditions, particularly in Sweden, Lower campaign pressure following an IT implementation delay impacted the quarter as well. But let me take you through some of the highlights for the quarter and the actions we are taking. The group delivered currency-neutral growth of 1.5% in Q2. Growth was primarily driven online, but— and also our in-house brands was a great contribution. Online revenue increased by 4.2% and Matas online currency-neutral, with Matas online growing 5.6%. In-house brands grew 6.6%, almost 7%, demonstrating the strength of this important area for us and the important proposition it has for our customers. We are particularly very pleased with the reaction we see, consumer reaction we see in our Kicks market, where we have grown our estate here and we grew by 19% in the period. Matas grew 1.9%, including subsidiaries Grain and Fjeldsalg, while Kicks grew 0.9% currency-neutral. Performance in Kicks continued to be challenged, particularly in Sweden, but I also want to mention that we see some improvements. In Sweden, we have turned negative. performance into +2% performance growth for the quarter in Sweden. So we are, of course, pleased to see that. Profitability was also weaker. With EBITDA margin before special items at 11.6% compared to 12.4% in the same quarter last year, the decline was mainly driven by lower gross margin, price initiatives, and product mix. The total cost also shows improvement from cost initiatives and more efficient operation. offsetting the lower GM. But we are not satisfied with the performance, and improving performance is also a very clear priority for us. During the quarter, we continued preparing for our new Nordic operating model, that we launched on October 1st. We are also strengthening the cooperation with our brand partners, developing joint plans, delivering more relevant assortment, more relevant assortment, but also making sure that that it is the right assortment for our customers and with an underlying profitable growth. In parallel, we are changing how we plan and execute campaigns to become even more agile, even more targeted and responsive to the consumer's needs. And we've done a couple of things here. We have, of course, all— everything we're doing here is to improve agility and speed to market. And these initiatives are, of course, designed to make us even faster and more relevant for customers. And we also saw a delay in the system, the muscles in the campaign muscle or the campaign engine, and that has a negative impact and that has reduced our campaign pressure in the period. So during the period, we saw 70 to 80%, 90% campaign activity versus a normal quarter. And that's, of course, impacted our performance. We're also maintaining our full-year guidance of 2 to 6% on revenue, EBITDA margin 14 to 14.5%, and given the Q2 performance, we are pointing in the lower end of the guidance. Our share buyback program of up to €100 million, we are following that. And by the end of Q2, we were at €23 million. And then I'm very happy to share that on March 12th, we will give you a strategy refresh, and I'm looking forward to tell more about our plans and our financial ambitions. But let me give you a little bit more color on our financial performance behind these areas. So group revenue was €2 billion in Q2. Matas, including subsidiaries Green and Kiks— not Kiks, Green and Firtel— contributed €1.3 billion. Delivering 1.9% revenue growth. Kiks contributed a little bit more than €700 million, currency-neutral growth of 0.9%. At group level, that is a growth of 1.5% and 2.5% in the first half of this financial year. Gross margin was 46.4% and 42% in Kiks. Reflecting some of the pricing initiatives, but also the unfavorable product mix we actually see. We see that customers are getting more price sensitive. And they are more focused on campaign and activities we are doing. The EBITDA before special items was at 11.6%, primarily reflecting the lower gross margin, but also partly offsetted by lower costs. The key message here is that we continue to see growth opportunities, particularly online and in-house brands, and we are dedicated to focus on improving that. And restore margin momentum. So let's move on to our strategic priorities. Our 6 strategic priorities are centered around one ambition, and that is to win the Nordics. First and foremost, we want to offer more for our customers through one shop. stopping. That is, we want to have a much stronger portfolio of brands and products. And during the quarter, our in-house brands grew by almost 7%, as I mentioned. And it's really, really great to see how in-house brands is traveling across across the organisation as a best practice. And we saw the Mette Strieber, the core product, was in February the number one product in Finland. Measured in volume. But we also had some very good launches, good launches from Kyrell in Kiks, but also Estura in Matas, just to mention some examples. We also had Jisoo. So So a lot of new things are coming into our portfolio, which is super important and is driving a lot of sales. An important part of the commercial agenda is also to strengthen the collaboration with our brand partners, and we are developing joint plans focusing on our assortment, relevance, and of course, identifying joint opportunities in each market. Secondly, we want to become closer to our customers. So what does that actually mean? So we saw that our membership now has 5.5 million active Nordic members. And that is a really important foundation for us because that is providing us with first data insight, but it's also giving us a really good way to communicate with our customers. We had planned a reconsent in the period, and that is— you saw a drop in our number of KIX members. But I also want to say that we are on a good track to get back members, and we actually had a record high, all-time high level of onboarding new KIX members in the period. So really, really good. And yeah, we can talk more about that later. Our online business also continues to grow, with group revenue up by 4.2% currency neutral, and we will continue to continuously invest in our online business. And but what is really important here, that is the online and the omni-experience. continue to develop that, and that is actually part of our secret sauce between our physical network and our online universe. We also want to make sure that we want to become more relevant for customers in even more occasions. And we added— part of that is also adding and expanding our network. We added 6 more stores in the period, so we now have 502 stores, 2 in Denmark and the rest in Norway and Sweden. Stores remain still a super important part of our offer to the customers, so we continue to invest in that. Finally, yeah, then we rolled out the electronic shelf labels. I mentioned that before, but that is actually giving us agility and speed, giving the opportunity to react even faster. Finally, stronger for you. That is where we're actually integrating and share our capabilities across the group even better. Our automatic logistics center, we talked about that. We continue to see good improvement there. We'll continue to improve on efficiencies, and we are very satisfied with that development. And then we also added the new Nordic operating model that I launched and talked about last quarter. But also consolidated IT platform, which is an important part of that. So although delays in the implementation of the campaign system impacted us in Q2. The long-term objective is clear, and that is about a more customer-focused group. More integrated and much more efficient. So let me just talk a little bit more about the Nordic operating model. So the new Nordic operating model, we went live on October 1st. We talked about it last time. But moving from a banner-led to a market-led model, this is a super important milestone for us and laying the foundation for the long-term transformation. We made progress in the back end from an integration perspective. Now the focus is primarily on the front end of the integration, and we continue that focus and making us more efficient with more customer-facing initiatives. And with a full-blown integration of Matas and Kicks. The purpose is, of course, to focus local execution and accountability, at the same time also taking out scale across the markets and leverage some of the synergies we see. So Denmark will be and is being led by a Danish country organization, same for Sweden and Finland, and we now also have a country organization in place in Norway. The organization is leaner, fewer layers, fewer overlapping roles, and all that is to secure speed and agility, but also to move us closer to the market with a stronger mandate for our country lead, but also making sure that we take out the synergy and so we are able to deliver profitable growth in each market. With a more lean model, we expect that our run rate savings is approximately $45 to $50 million in full year effect, and it's all about And that is not the purpose here, but of course we take all the cost savings we can have, but that is not the purpose here. The purpose is to become even more customer-focused. commercially stronger and fully integrated as a group. We know that the implementation of a new organization doesn't solve anything itself. But the months ahead and the years ahead, of course, is going to demonstrate the strength of what we put on the table here. Right now, our focus is on this peak season. It's the most important quarter for us, so we have all hands on deck, and it's great to experience the the energy in the organization. Everybody is focused on delivering a strong quarter, where we are strengthening our campaign activities and improving our competitiveness across all our channels. So, and then the last slide I just want to mention with you, we have the last team member on board, and that is Michael Stenderup, who will join the group at the start of the new year. He will join as Chief Marketing and Customer Officer, and then our new executive leadership team is completed. So Michael and Helene will join in the new year, and Michael, he and Helene, so responsible for the Swedish and Finnish market, and Michael being responsible for the customer agenda across the group. customer relevance, commercial execution, but also the brand development. So, together with the rest of the executive leadership team, all play a super important role to drive that transformation. Building a more integrated, more customer-focused group. And as we move forward, our priority is super clear: strengthen execution across the entire organization, improving our performance and delivering better experience to our customers. So we have important work ahead of us. But we are taking the necessary steps to build a stronger but also more competitive Matas Group. So our immediate focus is to drive a successful peak season and at the same time continue our business transformation. And with that, let me hand it over to you, Per, to double-click on our numbers. Thank you, Mette. setting up the new operating model. So the numbers is pretty much the same as we presented last time. So what we're looking at this year is around €100 million in special items. Yeah, good morning to all. I will take you through some more details on the financial numbers, but let me just start with what we presented earlier in last quarter is really around our to complete setting up the new Nordic operating model, and we are still looking at savings in the area around €15 million for this year and €45 to €50 million for the coming year. But, you know, all this around our new operating model and some of the ambitions for the years to come, as Mette already alluded to, we'll present more to you on March 12th. In the coming year. So let me just dive into the quarter. So really looking at a quarter where we grew the business 1.5% currency neutral, driven by our online growth in Matas by 5.6% and Kiks 1.8%. With stores being down slightly with 0.6% from a currency-neutral perspective. Somewhat supported also of new openings of stores. And we basically opened 6 new stores. And this is all part of the strategy of making sure that we are relevant for our customers and we have the convenience by having our omnichannel available. Looking at a number of transactions that went down, 3.7%. But with the pressure and now consumers really going after promotions, that also means that the basket size is coming up. They're pulling more of their purchases, which you'll basically see when you look at the average basket size, which was up 4.8%. Going to our gross margin. So a slight decline in our gross margin compared to last year, also reflecting the product mix that we talked about earlier. And the pressure from an overall pricing perspective in the market. You'll both see on the Matas side where it went down 1.3%. Kicks, pretty much in line from an overall gross profit perspective, but the margin coming down as well, almost 1%. Moving to our cost, which is actually a little bit of the good story of this quarter, is that, you know, some of the initiatives we put in place, as we talked about last year, and also in Q1, is really about how do we take out group synergies from our indirect cost base. And as you'll see, increase in staff costs, that has both to do with following the impact of our growing e-com business, salary inflation, but it's also to do with a little bit of insourcing of certain areas which has a better economic situation for us. And as you'll see, our other external costs coming down significantly. So overall, our cost base is growing less than our top line. And this is the direction that we've been looking for also in terms of creating the synergies. from a group perspective, utilizing the scale from a Nordic perspective. So just to summarize, EBITDA for the quarter is down compared to last year, which you also see in, in the EBITDA percentage coming down to 11.6% compared to 12.4% last year. Really driven by the gross margin, whereas we've been able to partly offset that with some of the synergies on our cost base. And, you know, overall, the business this quarter was driven by, again, our online business and particularly by Matas. Turning into our balance sheet, and I know we end up talking about inventory every quarter, and this quarter is similar to every quarter we've had in Q2. We are scaling up to the high season. We need to be ready for Black Month. We need to be ready for the Christmas quarter. Having said that, you can see on the left side that the long-term or the percentage of our long-term revenue in Matas is coming down. We are increasing the focus on our inventories and managing that. And if we compare to last year, it's slightly down compared to last year. Having said that, a lot of Christmas gifts a lot of Christmas packages was delivered in 2nd quarter, which of course we're all utilizing in the 3rd quarter. in line with all previous years. Turning to our free cash flow, this quarter was an outflow of €60 million compared to an outflow last year of €160 million. And some of the key variables there is really a higher cash flow this year from our operations, less impact on working capital, so slightly less negative on the working capital this quarter compared to last year. And then, as already mentioned, this quarter, we invested heavily because we implemented all the electronic shelf labellings across Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. And of course, that impacts our cash flow for the quarter. Last but not least, the execution, as we just talked about, of our operating model also took place in this quarter, and thereby the special items of close to €60 million. And turning into our gearing, and this is, of course, a reflection of both our operating or net working capital and the impact of a quarter where we end up slightly below our own expectations, as Mette said, not pleased with the results of this quarter. But as, as the gearing is also impacted by our EBITDA, we're looking to close this quarter with 3.5 times in terms of gearing. Uh, We still have the target and still our focus to be inside the long-term range, and that is 2 to 3 times EBITDA. Share buyback, as already mentioned, is going according to plan. And that brings me to, to the full year and the guidance for the year. We retain our guidance. We keep our guidance for the full year. So revenue between 2 to 6. And an EBITDA margin between 14% and 14.5%. And I think with that, I think we'll open for questions. If you wish to ask a question, please press 5-star on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, you may press, press 5-star again. We'll have a brief pause while questions are being registered. The first question is from the line of Sebastian Grave from Nordea. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted. Yeah, thank you for— hi, Mette and Per. Thank you for taking my questions. I think the first one for you, Mette. You alluded to you know, Matas being in this transformation and that it will take time, but that you are clear-eyed about the performance gaps needed to be closed. Could you help maybe expand a bit on these gaps, please? You say you need to be more consumer-focused. But are you referring to sort of more fundamental issues in the organization that should take a longer fix? Or how should we think of this work ahead? So, so, hi, Sebastian, and thank you for your question. I think what is super important for us, and we need to be more customer-focused, and by that I mean that we need to be where the customers are. And with the environment that has changed, I'm not going to talk a lot about geopolitical changes, but of course that impacts our markets. And that also impacts how the consumer responds and behaves. We see that in particular in our Kicks markets, where our starting point was a high-end beauty player. And we want to become— broaden that out. So we are delivering even more products for even more customers with a broader appeal. And much more price points. To be fair to say, we haven't been moving fast enough on that. So that is actually what we are speeding up now. And that is— it all starts with the customers. And for me, that is one of the biggest things that we need to succeed with. And that is to increase our relevance for the customers. We see our customers, they're happy to come and visit our stores, but we really need to make sure that we get in more customers. And that we increase the frequencies by adding new products and price points to new occasions. So that is on the journey we are on, and that is a super important journey. Part of that is also why we moved the organization to from a banner to a country-led model, making sure we are super close to the markets, every single market. There are some synergies we can take out across. Some of the products travels across. But there are also local differences, and we need to make sure that we deliver on both. And that is the foundation for what we are doing. So that is some of the business or the biggest business transformation we are doing. And then as an organization, we have been 2 organizations, to be fair. Now we are integrating that as one group. So we have historically done some backend integrations. Now we are integrating more in the frontend, and that is super important for us, and that is the necessary steps we have taken. With the launch of the new operating model, but also the focus that we are driving in the organization. So I hope that answers your question, Sebastian. so much better that you retain the guidance? Hi, Sebastian. I think there's 2 levels of our guidance. One is, of course, our revenues. And if we look at our revenues coming out of the first half with 2.5% growth, we feel comfortable also looking at some of the comparable numbers we saw from last year, especially in the Kicks market, where we were very very predictable last year and we are not that predictable this year. So, and I'm not going to share what that means. So I think we're fairly comfortable on the top line. On the bottom line, as I also think I mentioned in last quarter, some of the synergies that we're getting from joining or getting closer together with Kicks, especially on indirect cost. No, that was great. Thank you, Mette. Great answer. If I may move on to the next question, it's on the guidance. Maybe it's a CFO question. So if you look at the guidance implied for second half, it looks like it entails quite significant improvements here, especially in the Christmas quarter and especially on the margin line. So I guess with 2 subsequent quarters of rather slow momentum and negative margin progression, sorry. What gives you the confidence that Q3 here, the Christmas quarter, will be You saw it in this quarter. We'll see more of that coming into the next quarter. And then in addition to that, some of the synergies that we mentioned last year, that carrying into this year is also looking to come in place in the second half of this year. So if we combine all these things and comparables to last year, we feel comfortable that we'll still be able to be inside our range. Although in the lower end, as we also said, on the financial guidance. Okay. No, that's fair. And I'm just double-checking on the expected currency effect from a stronger NOK. So it gave you some slight tailwind here in the quarter. Do you expect more tailwind in the second half? And if so, can you explain on how much? I'm not going to predict on the FX rates on Norway. What we're looking at is really making sure that, that, that we manage the business from a currency-neutral perspective. And that's also what we're reporting. Yes, we had some, some, some support in this quarter. Last year, it was the opposite. And of course, we're trying to manage that on a quarter-by-quarter basis with the latest development in on the world scene. You know, who is to say what the NOK is going to move next? But we're managing the currency effects on a quarter quarter-by-quarter basis. Ja, okay, det er fair. Og så to korte spørsmål, hvis jeg må. You refer to lower campaign activity in the quarter being sort of the main reason for the slow momentum. But I guess, lower campaign activity in itself should suggest less discounting and a stronger gross margin, yet you see your gross margin down year-on-year. So can you just help me understand how does that work? You can say, go ahead. No, I think what you need to look at, Sebastian, is that even though the campaign pressure was a little down, a lot more of our customers is actually buying on campaign. And that is the product mix we're looking at. You also look at the mix from a channel perspective. We have significantly higher sales on our e-commerce business compared to the stores, and that also is part of the You know, where do we get the momentum from our revenues? That's really online, and there's slightly more campaigning online compared to in the stores. So that is also impacting the gross margin. And having said that, from a Kicks perspective, there is a very high competitive pressure. And as we As we adjust our assortment being 75%, actually in this quarter, 74% of the high-end business of our revenues, that means that if we need to be relevant we need to adjust prices. And that is also a reflection of what you see in this quarter. But in general, I just want to add to what you said, Per. We are a very campaign-intense business. So of course, if you're doing some things on the campaign engine there. Of course, that impacts. So just for some of you who might be worried about that, so we have postponed that. And so right now for the quarter, the peak we are in, we are all hands on deck and fully focused on that with no effect on the campaigns. Okay. No, thank you, Madame Per. Very clear. Mainly the last question, if I may, Per. You touched briefly on it, the stores, which you also allude to being an important part of the growth. muscle moving forward. Yet we see negative currency-neutral growth in the quarter. I think it was the same last quarter. So why— what makes you still, you know, so confident in the store network as a driver to drive shareholder value going forward? I can take that. I think that our secret sauce, part of that is the balance between our physical network and our online. That is really how we connect and how customers seamlessly travel between those 2 channels. So it is— we see that and we know that in areas, we can see that in our numbers, if we're closing down our stores, our online goes down. So there's a huge dependency between those 2. So we continue to grow our numbers in numbers of stores, but of course, in a period with lower activity, lower campaign activities, we also been impacted on our customers. But, but customers and how you count customers is getting a little bit more tricky when customers are traveling behind the different channels. So they might go in the stores. look for products, might buy it online, and they might go back in the stores again and pick it up. So how customers are traveling between the channels makes it a little bit more You need at least to look at more KPIs to look how things are evaluated— conversions, average basket, etc., just to mention a couple of examples. No, thank you so much, Berit, Mette, and Per. Thank you for taking my questions. And let me just remind you that if you wish to ask a question, please press 5-star on your telephone keypad. It does not appear like we have any further questions from the telephone, so I'll hand it back to the speakers. Okay, but thank you for joining in and thank you for your questions here. First and foremost, before we end, I just want to say we are not satisfied with the performance we see. We, we do what we can to strengthen our business. Focus on the customer is the most important thing. Second, we are taking concrete actions. to deliver on those, those gaps. But we're also taking concrete actions for us in our long-term transformation. And then we may remain confident in our quarter here, in our— both in our long-term— in our long-term business. But we also remain confident in the quarter that we have started. And with that, I just want to say thank you for joining and hopefully put a note in your calendar on March 12th for the strategy refresh and then have a wonderful day.