Hello everybody, and welcome to CDON Group's earnings call for the first quarter of 2024. This is the second time we are recording this live from our office in Stockholm, and this is also the second time I have our CFO Carl Andersson next to me. Great to be back, and I'll be back shortly to dive into the financial performance. Yes, to summarize our quarter, this was really a tough quarter for our company. We have been up with three different challenges who have put a lot of pressure on the organization and on the business performance. The first challenge has been changes that Google have done to their algorithm affecting our organic traffic to the site. The second part has been the closing down of our Malmö office, which we announced mid-February. And lastly, we have our long-term migration of our platform, which of course consumed a lot of focus and resources internally. These three challenges combined made us do a lower sales than we anticipated. All in all, we made an EBITDA of -SEK 2.2 million, and this is the first time in a year where we don't have a positive EBITDA. We're not happy with this, and we're really looking forward to change this throughout the year, and this does not change our view on the business. We still firmly believe that we have a really good potential in this company in the long and mid-term. Looking into a little bit more details about these Google updates, I have been in the e-commerce business for roughly 20 years, and I've seen a couple of changes that Google have done. What's also interesting to know is that the Nordic region is a little bit specific when it comes to Google. Pretty much all the customer journeys start on Google, and this is not what's applicable on all other countries, but this is very specific for the Nordic region. So when Google does changes like this, a lot of businesses online get affected. This time, the rumor says that Google have made these changes due to the enormous amount of AI-generated content that are flooding the internet and Google. As you can see here in the graph, aggregators such as us as a marketplace or price comparison sites such as Prisjakt and PriceRunner have really had a negative effect from these changes from last year. This is also confirmed by the CEO of Prisjakt, who announced in February that they are doing layoffs, and a quotation down to the right, as he says, is that many of the price comparison sites in Europe have been affected by this. Aggregating services have been impacted in terms of visibility in the search results. Brands and retailers were given priority, and this very much aligns with our view on this as well. Also, Amazon has been negatively affected. Here you see their global sites that they have, and we only have one green spot, which is actually Sweden. We are still looking into what the reason is behind this, and we haven't really come into a clear conclusion. However, we believe that it has something to do with their recency of their launch of Amazon.se. But what we though can see is that Amazon is globally affected by these Google changes. If we're looking and take the graphs up until two days ago, we can see a little bit maybe that we are some signals that we are at the low ebb. The last couple of days and weeks, we see some positive signs, especially on the Fyndiq site. We have throughout the year implemented a lot of technical fixes on both Fyndiq, but also some on CDON. We are more ahead when it comes to Fyndiq due to the velocity that we can implement changes on Fyndiq. We see some positive signs now, but it's a little bit too early to say that we have a turning point. The status of the closing down of Malmö office, we announced it mid-February. The handover is pretty much done now, and we are now very focused on recruiting the 25 new people to the organization from Stockholm, and we are really happy to see that we have a good talent pool applying for all these roles now. In addition to that, we can also see that our customer service work with outsourcing it are progressing very, very good. On CDON, we are already now at the same customer service satisfaction numbers as when we were in-house. When it comes to Fyndiq, we even have improved that by 5%. So on that matter, we are well ahead of plan. When it comes to costs derived from closing down the Malmö office, we cannot really contribute any cost to the first quarter, but it will instead come in the second quarter. The big long-term migration project that we have been talking about for almost about a year now is the migration of the CDON into the Fyndiq platform. This is according to plan, and this is very important for us, and we are very confident that we will reach our deadline in September. Here you can see we reached -SEK 2.2 million. The first quarter is a seasonal, weaker quarter, but we were hoping for a better result than this, and we're not happy with that. With this said, we still believe that our main strategies are still intact. We are focusing on massively increasing the supply and greatly improving the customer satisfaction. When it comes to the supply growth, we have it a little bit on a halt, and this we do every now and then when we do big pushes as we did in Q4. We need to take on some bottlenecks such as onboarding and increasing the sales for the onboarded merchants, but also make sure to purge bad merchants and bad supply. We are around the corner. We are able to push another increase of supply into both CDON and Fyndiq. When it comes to the overall customer experience, the second strategy, we are doing great progress. To the left, you have the customer review score, which we send out a couple of days after you have received the package. We have increased that from 3.8 to 4.3 in only a year for CDON, and this is really, really positive news. On top of that, we can see that we have increased the product reviews also by 11%, and this is due to the purging of bad merchants and bad products. This, in my book, is really important because when it all comes down, it's about happy customers that then come back and do another purchase, and we are on a good journey when it comes to this area. With that said, we will now jump into the financial performance, and I will hand over to Carl. Thank you very much, Fredrik. Nice to be back, and let's dive into the reported numbers. Still, Fyndiq is only part of the 2024 figures as the acquisition was closed on April 12, 2023. So when comparing 2023 and 2024, it's like comparing the CDON segment in 2023 with the group in 2024. Despite this, we report 3% lower GMV in the quarter, 5% higher net sales due to the addition of Fyndiq and the higher net sales and margins of that business and some mixed effects, significantly higher gross profit and gross profit after marketing thanks to the addition of Fyndiq. And all in all, this leads to a negative EBITDA of -SEK 2.2 million in the quarter compared to minus sorry, compared to +SEK 0.6 million in 2023. It was by all means a tough first quarter. Customer sentiment is not back. We see early signals that it is turning and that it will get back, but it's yet to materialize in positive customer behavior. CDON segment is down 27% versus last year, in particularly poor performance in our home and garden segment, for sure influenced partly by the very late arrival of spring in Sweden this year. We've seen less negative development in our sport and outdoor and health and beauty segment, which really highlights the importance of diversification in our business. Fyndiq segment, less negative, but we still report -3% year-over-year. This was even despite a very strong start to the year where we saw double-digit growth on Fyndiq segment, but supply-related issues related to Chinese New Year's did affect us severely in the remainder of the quarter. With a higher exposure to Chinese merchants and products, the effects were larger this year despite our best efforts and mitigation actions. We have been able to maintain strong gross profit margins in the quarter. CDON segment around 63% in this quarter, up from 57% last year. There is a bit of a temporary effect to this, but we're still above 60%, which is a great improvement and shows the steadiness of our margin. Fyndiq maintains its high margin around 97%, and all in all, this has led to a gross profit of SEK 70 million versus SEK 78 million when adding up the segments in 2023. Our take rates are stable or even slightly higher. We're now reaping the benefits of all the hard work we did last year with commission increases and adherence to our category and selling fees. This has established a somewhat new normal of around 14% for CDON and 30% for Fyndiq segment. We believe this level to be sustainable and should be able to carry this forward during the year. Our gross profit after marketing development must be seen in the light of the GMV development. On the CDON segment, GPAM declined by 16% despite the GMV development of -27%. So we have been able to expand our margins in the quarter, moving from 7.5% to almost 9% GPAM, gross profit after marketing over GMV. In the case of Fyndiq, we grew our gross profit after marketing by 15% despite the 3% decline in the quarter. This has also led to an increase in absolute gross profit and gross profit after marketing, which we're very happy about. We have seen some headwinds in our traffic acquisition, organic as well as paid, and looking at our profit on paid marketing spend, we've seen a slight increase in the quarter. We have made changes to our performance and campaign setup on CDON, driving a small increase. In the case of Fyndiq, we've added a lot of supply to our Nordic regions, which has led to slightly higher costs. It is stable, and we expect this level to maintain going forward as well. All in all, the challenges in our operations, the Google algorithm updates, the closure of the Malmö office, and the continued platform migration have led to a negative EBITDA in the quarter of SEK 2 million. We are not happy about this, and this is the first time in five quarters we report a negative EBITDA, but we believe we have a good understanding of what has caused this and that we are doing the right things about this. As said, the mid and long-term outlook is still very positive, and we are fighting away every day to address and turn this around. We strongly believe that we will be more profitable in 2024 versus 2023. We have a slightly lower OpEx cost base in the quarter, and this is despite us continuing and carrying the costs of the platform migration as well as the closure of the Malmö office. We've seen rather limited costs related to the Malmö office closure, so we have not adjusted our OpEx or EBITDA in this quarter. We're talking impact in the range of SEK 1 million in Q1 alone. We still believe there will be costs associated with the closure and that it will stay in the range that we have previously communicated. We remain confident that we will continue to reduce OpEx during the year, even though the main effect and the main OpEx reduction will happen once the migration is completed towards the end of the year. We're confident that going into 2025, we will have a lower run rate, SEK 40 million lower than at the point of the transaction as we have previously committed to several times. Lastly, a few words on cash. Our operating cash flow before changes in working capital is slightly negative this quarter. It is a seasonal weak and somewhat eventful quarter, but there is also a timing effect related to the payment of supply debt. Easter was at the break of Q1 this year, and we released a merchant payment of roughly SEK 20 million before the end of the quarter that, according to previous payment routines, would have happened afterwards. That was in the rounds of SEK 20 million, so that would have put us in a positive operating cash flow position if we were to have continued with that. We remain cautious about our cash position and monitor it closely, but we have a positive outlook on it, and we feel safe in the current cash position. With that, welcome back on stage. Time to round this up. Yes, and to summarize this, this was really a tough quarter for the company, both for the organization but also for the business performance, yielding a negative EBITDA, which we're not happy with. However, we strongly believe that we are on the right path, and this company has a truly high potential in the mid and long term. With that said, we are ending the first part of this call and open up for the Q&A. If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key six on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Nicklas Fhärm from SEB Equities. Please go ahead. Thanks, operator, and good afternoon, everybody. I have a couple of questions. The first one I would like to start off is, if you look at the purging of merchants over the past year now, I would say or assume, could you give us an update on where you think that sort of internal measure will actually analyze, according to you, as we stand right now in April, please? I would say overall, so we are pretty much through. We have released the worst or the bad merchants and the bad products. We can become even more granular when doing this, but we have some bits of the puzzles left to be able to do this. But overall, we would say that we are through getting rid of the majority of the bad merchants and bad products. Right, and if possible, would you care to give us some feeling for the actual impact in the 27% negative GMV development reported in Q1 from purging merchants, just to get a sense for the magnitude, please? I think that's quite hard to distinguish. I mean, as we said, it's a quarter impacted by a bit of seasonality and weather to that. As said, home and garden segment was a disappointment. But all in all, I think it's very hard to distinguish that, Nicklas, unfortunately. All right, all right. Before we leave sort of Q1 and perhaps look forward, can you give us, if there are any examples of any product categories or anything that actually surprised you on the positive side in Q1 that perhaps could give us some idea of where we are in the cycle in terms of the overall consumer and consumption online, please? We continue to face tough market conditions, in particular in our sort of higher price point categories, electronics, really. I think the comparison in home and garden is a bit skewed due to the late spring. We've not really sold AC units and too much outdoor furniture this year around as of yet. We are happy about some of our smaller categories, sport and outdoor and health and beauty, as said, naturally with a bit of a lower price point. On the same side, I think the stronger performance on Fyndiq is also relatively wide. So I think that somehow confirms that consumer sentiment has not really bottomed out and turned positive just yet. Right, right. Thank you. So final question, and then perhaps I could pop back into the call later on. If you look at the actual changes to algos that Google has implemented, obviously impacting you and other marketplaces and price comparison sites alike, how should we think about this looking ahead? Is this something that recently would also impact Q2, Q3, and Q4 even, or is there any or several reasons for why we should not expect this change or these changes to actually impact current trading and onwards? Purely asking from an organic search perspective, please. Yeah, it's a fair question, and that's maybe our top question as well. I can see, though, from being in this business for many years that when Google do changes like this, you as a company have to adapt to the new changes. As I referred to before, the last big change that I saw had an enormous impact like this was when they said, "Okay, now we're going to switch to mobile first." But what they did at that time was that they gave a really long-time heads up. They said that even one to two years before, and they said, "You should adapt your site in this and that way." This time, it came as a surprise, and it came also as a surprise that the effect would be so hard for aggregators, so to say, as we are on price comparison sites. A lot of experts are saying that this has been made in a rush, and the effects have been a bit bigger than they anticipated. But as far as we see it, we need to adapt to this, and we need to do this really fast. So this is what we're doing. No matter if we believe this is for the long term or short term, we need to here and now adapt to everything to make sure that Google likes our sites. So that's our main. And as long as our visitors like our sites, Google likes our sites, and that's our main theme. So we put a lot of focus in this area as we speak. Thanks. I guess, is that then I mean, obviously, your ambition is to make sure that the impact is not as significant in current trading as it was in Q1, but would you also care to give us any sort of guidance on if you actually think you would be somewhat, at least, successful in making these changes going forward? Yeah, in one of the slides, we gave you an update on the visibility index up until mid-April, and you could see already there that it was continuously negative. So definitely, the first half of April has been very negatively in this area. We believe that we see some positive signs, especially on Fyndiq, that we are hitting some kind of bottom, but it's a little bit too early to say. So definitely that we will see an effect in the second quarter as well. If this will pan out in the third and fourth quarter, we truly hope and not believe that, but it's really hard to say. This is the biggest change they've done in seven years. Most appreciated. Thank you for taking all these questions. As I said, maybe I can have the opportunity to come back later on in the call. Thank you. Sure. Thank you, Nicklas. The next question comes from Yiheng You from Jefferies. Please go ahead. Hi, thank you for taking my question. So just following up on kind of what Nicklas asked. So there has also been a drop in the growth in the e-commerce market in March as well. So do you think this, coupled with the challenges from Google, are impacting your GMV growth expectations in the year? Or are you still expecting, or hopefully expecting, GMV to continue growing or to grow in the year? I mean, I think it's still fair to say that our ambition is high. We want to get back to profitable growth for this company. At the same time, we have been questioning somewhat the statistics out there, talking about a strong recovery in the e-commerce market in the first quarter. As we can see, and it's becoming clearer in peer performance, Q1 has been challenging. Macro is tough. We're seeing early signs of recovery, but it has not materialized or converted to positive growth. By all means, we are cautious about the development in 2024. We have high ambitions, but we must remain realistic. Yeah, before, when we got this question, we have talked about that the first half of this year is going to still be tough. We still believe that this is a consensus in the industry and that the second half will be more positive. And we can see now that that was true, what we thought, by the end of last year. Okay, thank you for that. Just a couple more questions. You mentioned that you are seeing a little bit of improvement from the Google impact. What could you detail some of the steps that you're taking in curbing the impact from Google? Sorry, what indicators we have? No, so what are the steps that you're taking in curbing this impact? I mean, it is a combination of technical SEO fixes, improvements to our navigation structure and the crawlability of our site. We're also exploring the use of free listings, a new concept that Google is using. So it was a recent feature that was released, which has increased our organic clicks, but still very early days in terms of being able to say if we see a trend in that. But we are exploring quite some avenues in terms of improving our organic performance. Okay, great. Just a final one, a quick one. So you didn't expect to explicitly mention this in the press release, but is your long-term guidance to achieve double-digit market share still intact as well? Yeah, I mean, that's still our long-term ambition. We still believe that we can achieve that. We don't think that we, as customers, are wired differently than our peers in Europe. We think that the customers, when they see truly a marketplace that has this wide assortment with great prices and a great customer experience, that we easily should be able to come up to the double-digit market share. So we strongly believe this is a little bit dip, a bump in the road short term, but we still are very confident in the long term that the marketplace value proposition is here to stay and can really grow in the Nordic region. Great, thank you so much. That was all I had. Thank you. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Edward Riley from Cannon Wealth Management. Please go ahead. Hey, guys, thanks for taking my question. Just on previous Google algorithm changes that you guys have faced in the past, how long is it typically taken to return to state of normalization? Yeah, it's a very good question. Usually, when they do changes, it becomes a little bit too drastic, too fast, and we can see signs that this happened this time as well. When it came to the mobile-first changes they did six, seven years, that change was here to stay. So you had to fully adapt to their recommendations. This time, it's a little bit hard to say, is this really a long-term change that they are doing, or is it more short-term they are trying out some differences in their algorithm? Either way, we are very focused now to do everything and mitigate everything we can. Usually, these types of changes take from weeks to months when you see the effect. We have already implemented some of the fixes in January, February. We also have some fixes that we are working on now and have released the recent weeks. We are doing step-by-step progress here, but we have an effect delay, I would say, of weeks and months on that. Okay, great. And then you spoke to purging of the bad merchants. It's nice to hear that you guys are finally through with that. But could you speak to maybe your efforts in bringing in more aggregators and new merchants in the quarter? And when should we really expect to see the significant benefits from bringing these merchants to the platform? Yeah, that's a good question. Last call, I was talking about the delay we have. We were talking about when you have onboarded a merchant, you see usually the effect about two to three months later. We see that still is correct. However, we have seen some challenges now from an onboarding perspective. What we're doing now is really to push the throttle, onboarding new merchants into a platform, which we also are migrating into another platform. So our, I would say, both technical knowledge and also velocity in being able to do technical changes are quite restricted. So this is why we see now when we did this big push in Q4 that we have to stop a little bit, make the onboarding process much easier, make sure that these merchants get good sales, and then also purge, which always happens. You get wrong merchants with wrong intentions or bad intentions or just have the bad products. And that is something that we are purging as we speak as well. We see that we are quite close to being able to address this and come through this and really push the throttle again in increasing both merchants and supply. So we have, I would say, a very good cooperation with our aggregators, and we are doing progress in actually also connecting with additional aggregators in the future. So we have a really good backlog with new aggregators that are waiting. Okay, great. And then last one for me, just maybe if you could give a little bit more insight into the cash flow for the quarter? I know there was that some timing of the payables affected it. But could you maybe give us a sense of the cadence of that line item and how it might look throughout the rest of the year? I mean, that is a good question. I mean, fundamentally, that's more of a it's a one-off character, right? I mean, if we continue to pay at this schedule, it should not really affect drastically in any other quarter. But the effect was taken in Q1 due to Easter with the break, and we wanted to pay ahead of due date. Previously, we typically paid or maybe slid a day. That has happened after a quarter break. We continue to monitor our cash position. We remain confident that we are in no need of additional cash at this point in time and that we should be generating cash over coming quarters. We'll continue with that and feel comfortable with it. Okay, and then just some housekeeping. Did you say the impact was SEK 20 million? Roughly SEK 20 million order of magnitude, yes. Okay, okay, thank you. That's it for me. Thank you. The next question comes from Adam from ADW Capital. Please go ahead. Hey, guys, can you hear me? Yes. Hello, Adam. Okay. Yeah, most of my questions have largely been asked. I think you guys went over the effect of pruning in the quarter, I guess. I guess the vast majority of my question is there have been a lot of moving parts. I think at the November Analyst Day, you put a little line up that said, "Well, we're annualizing at SEK 10 million." I think Carl had this thing that was in the September quarter. You were sort of annualizing run rate, SEK 10 million of sort of one-time duplicative costs, and that the SEK 40 million was really going to become SEK 50 million. You've had additional costs associated with changes. I mean, obviously, getting out of leases, maybe consultants or costs associated with the platform migration, severance and relocation as you're changing. When you say to some guy, "Hey, do you want to move from Malmö to Stockholm?" you have to, obviously, if he says no, you've got to pay him some money and then hire a consultant. I mean, can you, I mean, try and give people a sense of sort of how many sort of the quantum of double costs that you're incurring that sort of because I know you guys do EBITDA, but you don't really give an adjusted EBITDA. But when you're doing a merger of this scale, especially with severance and cost and tech, I mean, it would be normal to expect a company to sort of provide what we would call an adjusted EBITDA bridge. I mean, most companies that do large-scale mergers like this, they sort of provide an adjusted EBITDA bridge that shows consulting, restructuring, severance, this, that, and the other. I mean, can you at least try and attempt to quantify sort of how much one-time or duplicative costs that are sort of running through the P&L right now, or at least speak to it? I mean, as we said before, if we talk isolated about the closure of the Malmö office, the additional cost that we're bearing is quite limited in the quarter, to be honest. We have staff still on payroll who have left the company, but we've been very restrictive in terms of adding consultants back into to cover for those tasks. We are in the middle of recruiting up to 25 individuals. There is a cost associated with that to maintain speed. And then we have, I mean, a few costs with training of our customer service that is added. But all in all, this adds up really to the SEK 1 million in this quarter. We will see more coming. We still haven't gotten the full cost of, say, the recruitment and so on. But in general, we're very restrictive about this. On the migration side of things, yes, we've had to cover and add a little bit of additional manpower to make sure that we maintain velocity and migrate according to our timeline before Q4. But also, that is very low. And we're talking about one or two individuals that we've added to one or two consultants that we've added to our cost base. So that's really why we're not showing an adjusted EBITDA as of this time with the effects of Malmö closing only. As rightly as you say, Adam, yes, we are running at a high cost base at the moment, but this is still with duplicate costs of our two platforms and also external consultants who are helping us with the migration in the data department, in the tech department, who we will be able to release once the migration is completed. That all in all will take us to the -SEK 40 million run rate versus the April run rate that we had at the point of transaction. Got it. So basically, it's fair just to unpack what you said. There's probably $1 million of one-time costs associated with Malmö in the quarter. And then you're saying there are a couple of additional consultants associated with the tech migration. And I don't know what that costs, but I mean, that could be another couple million dollars, a couple of million kronas annualized, I would think. And so maybe it's fair to assume that maybe there's like SEK 1.5 million or SEK 2 million in the quarter. I mean, certainly more than SEK 1 million. Is that right? Yeah, SEK 1 million, not dollar. SEK, yeah, SEK, SEK, yeah, yeah, not dollars. Correct. I mean, it's around those numbers. But we were always talking about adjusting, especially for the Malmö closure costs. And they're so low, they're in that range, and then adding on top a little bit like that. But we've still been very restrictive in terms of adding costs because we don't want to bloat the P&L with a large OpEx cost base. Right. But I guess what I would say is that if you have a couple million dollars, a couple million kronas in a quarter, and people are annualizing these things, it makes a big difference in terms of what people expect for the annual projection, right? If there's a couple million, I mean, obviously, it's the seasonally weakest quarter, but people tend to annualize the last quarter, even though that's not really academically honest. So I mean, if you have a couple million kronas in the quarter, people might expect to think that's annualized at a much higher number. But I guess the only other thing I would ask is, obviously, you've seen sort of the GM, the visibility sort of bottoming, so to speak, in terms of the trends there. Can you talk about sort of what you've seen with traffic once you've recalibrated? I think Fredrik has mentioned that after some of these algorithm changes, the companies actually emerge stronger because they've sort of tightened up the search algorithm, and they're getting better conversion and this and that. I mean, can you talk a little bit about what you expect after you sort of tighten it up? And I mean, any more color in terms of when you think you'll sort of expect to see the benefits of sort of the new sort of changes that you've made to adapt? Sure. I can address some aspects of that. One thing that's, I would say, kind of good when Google changes comes is that you really get forced to focus your resources concerning the organic traffic. And that is usually something that you then get a very recurring effect from the coming months and even years. The second part I would also like to address is that we have our own-built platform. We are not dependent on a third-party consultant or a third-party bureau who have 100 other clients. We have in-house kick-ass developers who now know every bit and piece of this platform and can implement these changes fairly quickly and also can adjust depending on the effect that we see that we get from the changes. So I would say we have the ability to run really fast and adapt really fast to these changes. It's too early to say how positive these effects are, but we have really good conditions to get on top of it. Okay, great. That's it for me. Thank you. Thank you, Adam. There are no more phone questions at this time. I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions and closing comments. Yes. We have one written question from Jacob concerning if we would say that the synergies with the merger with Fyndiq and strategy to increase marketing efficiency for CDON, as well as an increase of merchants, have been a tougher task than first anticipated. I would say yes and no. I would say yes. Everything is a little bit tougher than we maybe thought. Otherwise, we maybe wouldn't have jumped into this with such a good energy. But we still have this long-term belief in that this is the right thing to do for both of the segments and also that we have this long-term potential as a marketplace in the Nordics. I would say a lot of things have gone according to plan. One thing is actually the migration of the whole platform, which has been the big thing, to migrate two of the biggest marketplaces in Nordics into one platform. That's a very big challenge. And we are progressing very, very good on that aspect. I would say when it comes to marketing efficiency, we are doing good progress there as well. So I would say that's according to plan as well. What's not according to plan, I would say, is the GMV, definitely on CDON. We have tough macroeconomics, and now we have this Google change also on top of that. But we're not happy. We would have anticipated a quicker turnaround of the GMV growth for CDON, to be honest. So it's a little bit ups and downs. All in all, this will pan out in a really good way. And that's our strong belief. Will it be this week, next month? Very hard to say. But in the long and mid-term, definitely. All right. That was the last question. And with that said, thank you, everybody, for your attention. And see you in three months again. Bye-bye.