Group, especially welcome for all of you following online. Those of you in the room, we are at our Copenhagen hub. We have a big and wonderful store downstairs, but this is where we meet when we meet with our new colleagues from KICKS and when we do special events such as this. A big day for us. Today we are announcing the results of our first year together with KICKS. We are announcing a new strategy, and it is all presented by my colleagues, a quite new team brought together to execute on the strategy we're going to tell you about today. So we've been looking forward to this. We want to thank you right away for spending time with us. We have a strategy.
We call it Win the Nordics. We have already this morning announced new financial ambitions, and today is very much going to be about giving you an insight into why we believe this is possible, what we set out to achieve, and how we're going to do it. We have put together an agenda. I will start out doing the broad outline of where we want to go. Then I'll hand over to Carola Lundell from KICKS, to Lise Ryevad from Matas. Then we'll take a short break, trying to keep questions limited to what you have just heard and not open the floor for everything that you have on your mind. Then a short break, and then we will turn to group functions to hear from the Nordic functions and from finance to put it all together.
Then we will have a nice long time for Q&A until you have no more questions. For those of you in the room who are interested, there will be an opportunity to visit the store and get a little guided tour of a Matas after the event. But thank you so much for coming. This is the team that you will meet, and I will introduce each and every one of them as we go along. Sorry about that. I'm told that purpose statements, you know, the question, why are you here, is not really of interest to investors. It's marketing, but this one should actually interest you because it tells you everything you need to know about this case.
We call it For Beautiful Lives, our purpose, and the two elements of that is that beauty is a massive need. It's an evergreen need. It is something that consumers care wildly about. And what we want to say today is we believe that consumers care more about beauty than they have ever done before across all age groups. The other component is to understand what kind of business Matas Group is. It is about building a relationship to customers for life. It's not just about one transaction; it is about building a relationship that we can nurture and develop throughout the phases of people's lives. We have a new ambition. We have an ambition to take the joint company, Matas and KICKS, and put Matas and KICKS on a long-term, profitable growth journey.
We think it's possible because we see a big and attractive market, more than DKK 70 billion market overall, growing faster than GDP, for reasons I will come back to. We enter this market with a vision to strengthen the leadership position that we already have, to strengthen that across markets, across channels, across categories. We have a very strong starting point, and I will get back to that, both in terms of our track record, but even more in terms of having refined and built a business model that we believe can be scaled across the Nordic. Today, we will be announcing six strategic priorities, six levers, if you will, to help us achieve those goals and targets that we have set up.
As mentioned, we have a great team behind it, but our ambition is to reach above DKK 10 billion in the financial year 2027, 2028, and to raise our margin from where we are now to between 15 and 16. And again, I will get back to why we have chosen those exact numbers. Let's start out by just looking back, and if you see this slide, this is the performance since 2017. This looks like a wonderfully stable, growing market. But if you look behind these numbers and what has actually happened is new competitors coming in, strong new competitors coming in, a rapid, rapid digital transformation of the total way the consumer spends her money and her time. Covid, which turned out to be a boom for Matas.
A massive recovery after COVID of consumers being very, very excited and then suddenly being hit by an inflation crisis. So this looks stable, but it has been anything but stable. And the reason Matas has navigated this change is that we have pursued two strategies, getting us to the point where we are now, and both those two strategies are what we're going to build on as we move into the next phase. So many of you in the room were present when we announced the strategy back in May of 2018, that we wanted to take Matas, by back then a conventional, a good company, but a conventional retail chain, and take that company digital as fast as possible.
We had a very successful ride, and if to pick out just one number from this, we saw online revenues grow from 4% of total revenue to 26% of revenues. Then we met COVID, we met all the changes to consumption and to the markets, and all that. That turned out to be a benefit for Matas because we were ready digital. We could keep our stores open. And of course, the drawback of getting lucky, if you will, is that luck never lasts. So we decided in August of 2021 to set in motion a new growth strategy. And the idea of that strategy is to expand assortment, to offer much more choice, many more brands, many more categories online to our existing customers, and get growth no matter what happens in the market, but get growth by expanding assortment.
Of course, that strategy finished out with the acquisition and the announcement of the acquisition of KICKS just before the summer of last year and the closing in September of last year. That sets us up to what we're going to talk about today, the next strategy, which we call Win the Nordics. It gives us what I would call a pole position to start from, and as all of you know, starting from the pole position is great, but there is also the burden of starting from the pole position. Let's dig into that. These numbers we will be familiar with, it's almost DKK 8 billion company, pro forma EBITDA margin just above 14%, and the number one company in the Nordics looking at beauty and wellbeing within our segment.
Just one number to highlight, a 70,000 SKU base. That is, for our business, quite a lot, and it's quite important that we already have that SKU base once we dig into the strategy. This is the secret, which is no longer a secret then, but this is the business model. This is the assets that we have built and the operations that we have built that makes what we do quite hard to copy and what makes what we do valuable to consumers, our business model. And again, at the core of that business model is a lifelong relationship with every single member that we can get. We have more than 5 million put together, between KICKS and Matas and across the Nordics, but that is at the core of everything we do.
So sometimes when we are called a retail company or something like that, I kind of, shift a little bit. We, we are a relationship company. We, we live off and for the relationships with our customers, and everything we build around that. So our national retail banners, our assortment, our supplier relations, which go back more than 70 years, the tech we invest in, retail media, which we're gonna talk about today, our supply chain, the way we provide value for consumers, just beyond, beyond the product, not just the product, and of course, our omni-channel setup. Sounds easy, looks easy on a slide, very hard to do, very hard to copy.
But this is our business model, and this is the business model that KICKS has been pursuing as well, and therefore, it is quite easy to join up and to roll out this model in the Nordics. Being a market leader, being a modern company, you have to take responsibility, and you don't only have to take responsibility, we also want to take responsibility. It is something our customers expect of us, it is something our colleagues expect of us, and it's something we want to do. And we have set out three areas where we want to move the needle. One is sustainable retail, that we believe that we can make a difference for sustainability in the way retail is run.
The second one is making sure that everyone is on board, and we have an environment, no matter if you're a colleague or a customer, you feel welcome. You can never do that for everyone, but you can try to get there as much as you can. We are also a company that can make it different for health, whether it's mental health of our colleagues and customers, or whether it's the physical health with the products that we have and the way we source those products. Let's just look back to what's happened since closing, since we got the keys to KICKS and met our colleagues in Stockholm for the first time.
I've been fortunate to spend most of last year living in Stockholm, or rather traveling out of Stockholm, to Finland and Norway, and of course, spending a lot of time in Sweden to find out that what did we get ourselves into? Here are the conclusions from those nine months. KICKS is a good business. KICKS is fundamentally a good business. No surprises to what we thought we bought back then. We had a very thorough due diligence, so we would be very surprised if there were any surprises. First financial year, according to plan, that's not a given, as you know, when you buy something that you actually deliver on the first year. But that happened even with a sales upgrade after Q3.
The synergies that we expected and that we announced to you are confirmed. We believe those synergies and improvement opportunities are there. It is also clear that it is a very dynamic market. It is a competitive market. We have different kinds of competitors in the Nordic markets than we do in Denmark, different one for each market, and I know my colleagues will get back to that. And they are ramping up, maybe in response, maybe because they were doing it anyway, and we will be ramping up as well, as you know, from today.... And then, I have to say that's the most important part of everything, we have met some great people. We have gotten great new colleagues. We work together in Nordic teams already. We have a good cultural match.
Someone told me that, "Don't take for granted that Danes, and Swedes, and Norwegians, and Finns are the same. Don't take that for granted." And we don't, and there are differences, but what really unites us is that we have a retail culture. It is a culture of ruthless execution, if you will. Something has to happen now and fast, and we're driven by results. And we are also both in the beauty and well-being business, and enjoying being the, in that business, in that business for all the different reasons you can find. So a good match, a good business, a good start, lots to do, and it is hard work for us to do integration, hard work work for our colleagues. And this is the first time that we acquire something of this size, and scale, and complexity, and it just...
We don't have the playbook. But we're building the playbook, and we're building it together. A good start to the relationship and to what we want to do. What we want to do is to win the Nordics. So that is the rationale behind joining forces, KICKS and Matas. It is to not only take the position that we have today of being number one overall, if you look at beauty and well-being, we want to take that position even further. We think there is a lot of room to grow for our companies. We're not done at all. There are lots of pockets of growth, and very long term, and there is no time limit or deadline to this.
Very long term, what we aspire to be is the company that is number one in all the Nordic markets, in both channels, online and offline, and in all those core categories that we choose to play in. That is the long-term vision. It's not gonna happen tomorrow, but that's the direction of travel. So let's look into the market. It is, as I said, an attractive market. It's a dynamic market. It is a market expected to grow above and beyond GDP. Of course, we can't predict that that's gonna happen, but we're seeing some things, and some trends, and some tendencies, and we have a history of seeing our sector grow even though macro goes up and down.
Sometimes it's called the lipstick effect, that even in hard times, people spend money on beauty and well-being, and they might not spend money on that much else, but for sure, they want to feel great about themselves. And that drives a certain kind of dynamic and a certain kind of resilience, as in our sector. So limited exposure to business cycles, it is a business that sees structural demand trends. And if we can point to one thing, I think the emergence and importance of social media and the fact that our customers, colleagues, live a great part of their lives online, as well as in the physical world, that has created a whole new level of experience, and expectations, and discovery of beauty, for better or for worse, you could say.
But for sure, it has stimulated interest in our category, from early on to late in life. So across all life stages, we see an increasing appetite, to shop for beauty. As we look at the market, it's quite unconsolidated. We're the biggest one. We have 11% market share. That's not like a massive position, and that's why even though we say we're a market leader, we don't want to think too much as a market leader. We do want to think as a company that has opportunity to grow, and change, and make things happen.
It is also an industry that has always been characterized by high margins at every step of the value chain because it's about brands, it is about experience, it's about theater, it's about hopes and dreams, and not just about the function of the product. So this is not a business that's looking like it's getting commoditized. This is a business where the experience and the brands matter, and newness matters a lot. So how do we think we can outgrow the market, and why do we think we can outgrow the market? First of all, we are top of mind in Denmark, we are top of mind in Sweden, we are top of mind in Norway, but with closer peers, and we're just getting started in Finland and thinking like a challenger in Finland.
We are not fully penetrated in all markets, and we think that there is room to go, grow geographically within these markets, and building our top-of-mind position even stronger. You might think that opportunity is biggest in the markets where we are small, but that is not actually the case. We see a lot of opportunity in Denmark as well with our expansion, our assortment expansion strategy. Second, we see opportunities in channels, and our growth strategy is predominantly a digital growth strategy. We think digital and the digital sea change is not done. We think there's lots left to do. We think we can add new stuff to the market and new experiences to the market, so absolutely online being a key driver of our strategy.
But we also think there is room for more stores, not like a wild and crazy expansion plan. We think there are room for more stores to different degrees in different markets gradually... case by case, only great locations, only great cases. It's not like a, "Let's just go out there and build stores," but it is a belief that stores will be part of the future. And then finally, we think that there is room for growth in categories. There are some categories where we are very strong, makeup and fragrance, where we will defend and extend, but there are also areas where KICKS could be even stronger. Skincare, for example, where Matas is very strong, and for both of us, haircare, which is an area that historically has not been within, you know, the KICKS or Matas experience.
So, part of our case is to improve margins. KICKS does not have the level of profitability that Matas has historically had, and we see opportunities to improve margins in our total group. We don't run it as separate business units with each their P&L; we run it as a total group. You already know that we see DKK 100 million of synergies fully in by 2025, 2026. We will today, and we have also talked about profitability initiatives, the integration of Skincity, the supply chain transformation that KICKS is undergoing, and the construction of the warehouse and our automated logistics center in Matas. On top of that, we have even more initiatives to shore up the margin and build out the margin.
And then on top of that, when we see growth, we will get more operating leverage on our Nordic platform. And I say this to make absolutely clear to you that margin improvement is a key priority for us as a group, and to tell you that we want to reinvest a good part of that margin improvement into growth and into competitiveness. Because we think if we only focus on growing with the market and improving margins, I think there's a good chance that we will lose position. We have a set of strategic initiatives. The basic idea, the basic idea of what we want to do is to those 5 million members and all those customers who are not yet members, we want to tell them and give them the experience, then they can get everything they need with us.
They don't have to shop anywhere else for their beauty and well-being needs. We can actually now, because of online, where we have unlimited space, we can actually provide that total offer that the consumer wants, and we can make it very personal, and we're gonna talk about that today. We can make it super targeted to the individual customer, so she doesn't get confused, or he doesn't get confused, more likely, by the enormity of the assortment, but we can actually pinpoint it to the individual, individual consumer. So we have three areas where we make moves over the coming years.
More for You, that is a bigger assortment, but it is also a more distinct assortment, something that you can only find or find first with us, using our strong relationship with suppliers to secure exclusives, but also building our quite good portfolio of in-house brands, something that we will return to later. Second move is to move closer to the consumer, and we do that in a number of different ways. With digital, we still have a lot to do in moving closer to the consumer, building a stronger bond with the consumer, using all the digital opportunities out there, and Brian will cover some of this. We also believe in stores. As I said before, we think there are good cases in physical retail.
We are quite disciplined about those cases, both how we invest and where we invest and when we invest, and what requirements it takes. But overall, what we have seen over the last 5, 6 years is a comeback of stores. Consumers like stores, and they particularly like beauty stores because it's an experience that you can't really copy online. The final one is, of course, that we want to use the joint strength that we have now to be stronger for consumers. That is to add value to consumers by having tough and interesting conversation with our suppliers, by sharing and integrating so that we share the resources we have in the company, and of course, invest to have a platform where we can deliver fast and efficiently, and an IT platform that we can share across the group.
On top of this, but not required to reach our ambitions, we are always on the lookout and curious to see if there are potential M&A opportunities that could accelerate, but it is not part of our financial guidance. It is something that we keep an eye out for, but it is not an M&A strategy as such. This is a organic growth strategy with opportunity to do more if interesting assets come up. So, this all sounds very nice, and I'm sure you wonder what could go wrong, and so do we. We think there are three particular issues, and Per will cover this in more detail. Of course, the market might not grow as we expect. This will delay our journey towards the ambition.
We do think that there is underlying growth and that it looks good for the coming year, but things might happen, of course, in the macro environment that will slow down consumer spending in our category as well. Second, we calculate and we assume that there will be intense competition. That is part of our base case. But sometimes industries, they get exposed to very disruptive competitors that have a completely different mindset and just want to gain share without looking at the bottom line at all. And we should, at all times, be prepared to meet those kinds of competitors as well, but this, of course, is a risk. And there's cyber and IT, Per will cover that as well. So, what have we done?
We have set up a Nordic organization, and this is the class photo of the team and the people you will meet today. It's a quite simple organization. We have Lise heading up Matas in Denmark, and making sure that Matas in Denmark continues on the journey we have been on for years and adds even more to that. We have Carola leading up the KICKS business with local management in Sweden and Finland and Norway as well. So that's the market-facing part, and that's to stay close to consumers, stay close to the market, be fast, and react locally, because consumers are not alike across the different markets. And then there are four areas where we believe that being a group makes more sense, and that is for commercial, and you will hear from Alice.
It is digital and loyalty, you will hear from Brian. It is our operations, where David will take you through, and then group finance, where Per will cover the financials, less than the organization. But this is the setup, and this is the way we operate as of April 1st. Here's the agenda, again, for your consultation. We will move on to my good colleague, Carola Lundell, whom I met in the due diligence process. So we had very good access to management in the due diligence process, and when I found out that Carola has a, a long experience in media and retail, I thought, "That's great, because that's similar to my own experience.
That can't be better." But it was also very, very clear to me that Carola has the clarity of mind and the leadership and the followership needed to take KICKS to the next level. And frankly, I think the best proof point is that Carola has been able to pull together a team of the strongest talent in KICKS, and has created an environment where our KICKS colleagues have not gone to LinkedIn to update their resumes, but actually chosen to stay with the company and be a part of this journey and be part of Carola's leadership. So welcome to Carola Lundell, who will give you a deeper look into KICKS.
Thank you, and I can take the clicker, making sure it works. So hi, everyone. Very nice to meet you all here today in the room and online as well. I'm Carola Lundell, EVP of KICKS since 1st of September. I joined KICKS late 2020 as CMO, meaning I was responsible for marketing, our e-com P&L, CRM, sustainability, and PR across Sweden, Norway, and Finland. And what I'll do today is I'll give you a closer look at the KICKS business, and we'll kick it off with a film introducing KICKS.
And I want you to be mine. So if you wanna dance, let's have a show, 'cause I want you to be mine. Just as I thought that it was time to say goodbye, I see you in the corner of my eye, smiling like you never say goodbye. Can barely hold your gaze, and I'm not shy. Words escape me as you pass on by. So graciously, I told him of the glitter in his eyes, and he said, "It's your reflection, darling." Then he said, "It's your reflection, babe." I see the good in you. Do you see it, too? I see the good in you. Do you see it, too? What's your name? Can I call you mine? All I want's a moment of your time, 'cause I see the good in you. Do you see it, too? Simple, but I can't organize my thoughts.
You make them fly. Feeling like I've never seen the sky. Feeling like I've never seen the sky. Your color's glowing like, like crystal light. Hope that you can read what's on my mind, yeah. Simple, but I told him of the glitter in his eyes, and he said, "It's your reflection, darling." Then he said, "It's your reflection, babe." I see the good in you. Do you see it, too? I see the good in you. Do you see it, too?
Yes, so I hope that that gave you a flavor of the KICKS universe that we will now take a closer look at. KICKS has a turnover of approximately DKK 3 billion. Our largest market is Sweden, constituting 60% of the business with 128 stores, followed by Norway, approximately 30% of the business and 71 stores, and then we have Finland, 10% of the business and 29 stores. We have 3.8 million members in our KICKS Club. We have an e-com share of business of approximately 30%, and that is including Skincity, which I'll come back to in a sec. We have approximately 1,700 employees and nine in-house brands.
Now, looking at Skincity, Skincity was integrated into KICKS in January 2023, and for those of you who don't know Skincity, it is an online pure play within professional skincare, so typically the more advanced skincare that you will find in salons. Skincity has been around for more than 10 years, and the offer is very much built around professional skin therapists curating the assortment, but also performing skin analysis and giving advice to customers on how to use these products. The Skincity business boomed during COVID, mainly driven by two things. First, being an online pure play, very favorable when no one wanted to visit stores, and second, not much point in wearing a lot of makeup or fragrance when you were sitting at home, but people were spending a lot of time pampering their skin with advanced skin routines.
So business boomed, but ever since, Skincity has been struggling both with a negative top line and a negative development on bottom line. So we integrated Skincity into KICKS during last year. We've moved Skincity into the same tech platform, systems, infrastructure, processes. We merged the org. We moved the warehouse. All this to create cost synergies, but we kept the consumer offering separate, still meeting the customers with a Skincity offer and brand only at Skincity.com. But we've now, in 2024, taken the next step to integrate also the Skincity offering into KICKS, making it the professional category within KICKS.
You'll see throughout the day why that makes sense, because we want to build the KICKS position and the KICKS destination and set ourselves up for growth going forward, and we are ready to sacrifice some top-line growth on Skincity in order to build KICKS long term. 'Cause if we take a closer look at what KICKS sells, KICKS heritage is very much within makeup and fragrance, with makeup being more than 40% of our business. And if we look at those 3.8 members that we have in our club, we know that they go to KICKS to buy either of those categories. Then we manage to also cross-sell skincare to those customers, but they don't come to KICKS for skincare. With Skincity, we have a fair share of skincare.
We want to grow that, and I'll get back to that later, but more importantly, we want to use that to also make KICKS a destination for skincare. Now, unlike Matas, you see that we are a pure player within beauty. We do not do well-being and other adjacent categories yet, but we also want to move into those categories over time. But really, our position as is, super strong in makeup, and fragrance, and a lot of potential across the other board. We have nine in-house brands in our KICKS portfolio, and we use them obviously to drive uniqueness and profitability. The majority of these are KICKS brands, but we also have two Skincity legacy brands, MAKETHEMAKE and Skincity Skincare, that we've now launched with KICKS.
This constitutes 7% of KICKS revenues, so huge potential to grow this going forward with our joint portfolio of in-house brands that Alice will take you through later. So what is it that makes KICKS unique? Well, what defines KICKS is that we offer customers beauty beyond the actual products, meaning we have the member club, we have the locations, we have the assortment, we have the expertise, but we really use that in order to help and guide our customers to find the right products and solutions for them, to give them the latest trends, the hottest news. Customers knows that if they go to KICKS, this is what they will get. So in our stores and online, you will meet our beauty experts. Those are people knowing about skincare. They will know about makeup. They will know about fragrance. You'll meet them online.
You'll meet them on social media. You will meet them in our own community, KICKS Beauty Talks, that we launched a couple of years ago, tapping into that high engagement around beauty that Greg has mentioned. So this is really our own social platform that we've built, now gathering more than 200,000 members, where they discuss beauty, they share routines, they give each, each other tips, but most importantly, they create very valuable content that we can use for KICKS across the board to increase conversion. We've also introduced various tools in order to guide the consumer online when there is no access to, to those experts, and the latest example of that is our Gen AI BeautyBot... that helps consumers who are searching, but they don't really know what product they're searching for.
They know what occasion, what type of problem, or what their dream is, and the bot will help them find that. Beauty Beyond Products is what we offer consumers. It's not something that we talk to consumers about, but we do talk to them about being More of You, and this is our brand platform. During the last couple of years, we've been working actively with reigniting the KICKS brand, making sure that we stay relevant for consumers in this very dynamic market, and More of You is really a dynamic platform. It is also an exclusive platform where we are only here to provide consumers with the tools, the products, the knowledge for them to express themselves. Because this is about self-expression, it's about joy, and it's about joy without rules. So we don't set the rules, you set the rules, and you do you.
That is the essence of our brand platform. So do we have a strong brand? Yes, we do. KICKS is the number one top-of-mind brand if you ask Swedish consumers between 16 and 65, if they know where to shop beauty, one-third of consumers will spontaneously just mention KICKS, top of mind. We're also in a similar but more challenged position in Norway, and we don't have the same top-of-mind position in Finland yet. If we look at the associations that consumers give to KICKS, we can see that they appreciate the wide assortment, obviously, a valid reason to shop, but also that the expertise, the service, and the guidance is there. They appreciate the club. They appreciate the offers that they get from KICKS, but we can also see where there is room to improve.
So fast deliveries, for example, we know that that's an area that's very important for online consumers specifically, and where we can improve going forward. We also ask these consumers, since everyone knows KICKS, why does not everyone shop with KICKS? The most common reason for not shopping with KICKS, and this goes across our three markets, is the perception of KICKS being expensive. Now, that's partly due to us being very much of a high-end premium player. We don't do much mass in our assortment, and it's also a consequence of our pricing strategy. But huge potential in providing even more value for money and increase, and improve the price perception for KICKS.
Another key measurement for us is the NPS, and for those of you who are not familiar with NPS, that is the Net Promoter Score, very commonly used to measure customers' loyalty/satisfaction with a brand. It ranges from -100 to +100. So obviously here you wanna be on plus to begin with, but then the higher it gets, the better you are performing. And important is, of course, to follow that development over time, making sure you improve and get better in the mindsets of the consumers. And our consolidated figure, cross-markets and channels in May, is 68, compared to 64 last year, so proof that we are on the right track. And speaking about customers and loyalty, we've mentioned the very impressive figure of 5 million members together, KICKS and Matas.
We have 3.8 million members in the KICKS Club, and we have actively been working with recruiting members, as you can see, during the last couple of years. Why is that? Because it's super important for us to get access to that valuable first-party data so that we know who our consumers are, what they shop, when they shop, why they shop, et cetera. We have 80% of our revenues coming from members, meaning that for 80% of all our revenues, we know exactly that, and we can use it to develop our offer and to improve the consumer experience. Female dominance, not surprising, but when I joined KICKS, it was 92% female. Now it's 86%, and that's another sign of the rising interest of beauty within the male target group as well.
Every other Swedish woman is a member in this club between 16 and 64. Important to point out here is if we look at the target group of 16 - 25, it's actually over 60%, and I think that that's also a great example of making sure that we are relevant also for the younger consumer and making sure that, as Gregers mentioned, we build lifelong relations, right? We want them to come in early, and then we want to nurture and grow with our customers for life. Great penetration in Sweden, our biggest market, and potential to further grow, definitely, but more so in Finland and Norway, where we have less than 30% of the female population being members in KICKS Club. Do members appreciate this? Do they want to be part of a club? Yes, they do.
We know it works, and we recently also got awarded Best Loyalty Club cross industries and categories in Sweden by consumers. So when consumers themselves rate loyalty clubs, KICKS came out the strongest. Our stores, a very important part of our business, and where we can actually manifest both the brand, but also the customer promise in terms of Beauty Beyond Products. Our stores are very much built around that service concept, giving advisory to consumers by our beauty experts, but also actually providing treatment, treatments in all stores that you can either book online or just drop in and get your full routine done. And for those who actually do that, we obviously see a higher conversion rate and much more products in the basket. But the biggest key to our success, I would say, is that we are an omni player.
We have our vast store network, and we have a healthy e-com business. And really by looking at the consumer, regardless of where they shop, because that's how they behave, they move seamlessly between the channels, and so must we as a brand and as a retailer. So one example of this is when we launched Click & Collect, that immediately rose to a very popular form of delivery in our e-com. Click & Collect is now almost 20% of all orders. Now, that means consumer goes in online, picks their basket and says, "Ah, great! All these products are available in this store or that store," a store of your choice. If it is, you can check it out, pay for it. You will get a text. It will be ready for you in less than four hours.
So 20% actually prefer to pick up their order like that. It's perceived very fast by the consumer. It's super sustainable because we're not sending stuff here. They actually go and pick it up in the store, and it is picked by the store, so it's also super cost-efficient. Now, this is only made possible when you have a vast store network combined with the e-com. I've been talking about the club, the data. Brian will get back to all the, the great things we will do with that. But another example of how this actually helps the consumer experience is our digital sales assistant. So all store staff can access a member account when they go into the store, and if they're like, "Hey, I bought a mascara a year ago.
I don't remember what name it was, but I loved it, and I would like to get a new one." We'll know which mascara you bought a year ago, regardless of where you bought it. We'll also know, if that has been discontinued, what is the match to actually make you happy with your new mascara. 'Cause we have our rec engine built into that, so we can give entire routines to consumers based on their previous behavior and purchase data. And when we use that in stores, our conversion is three times the conversion of an average store visitor. So we're really working on getting the penetration of those DiSA calls up.
And the great thing here is that we also see that we have a lot of similar solutions in Matas, sometimes better solutions, that we can then use to further improve some of these, solutions. So how has KICKS been doing the last couple of years? We have been on a solid growth journey since 2019, with the exception of 2020, when COVID hit. We grew e-com during that period, like everyone else, but we didn't fully compensate for the fact that we had to have store closed and restrictions in certain markets. But once, the worst part of the pandemic was over, we went back to growth, and we've kept on deliberately growing all channels and all markets ever since. In 2023, we also, acquired an integrated Skincity, meaning we added additional revenue online on top.
Despite the evolution that you see here, where e-com has grown its share, we've been able to keep the margin stable throughout, even though e-com has typically a slightly lower margin than stores. So healthy, healthy growth during these years. So this is where we're at today. How do we plan to develop KICKS going forward? We want to continue to grow KICKS, and we want to improve margins. And based on that, we've set four strategic priorities, very much in line with our group strategy, and one operational excellence initiative that spans over a vast area of things in order to also improve the margins. And that will mostly come from sourcing synergies and supply chain synergies, but we'll get back to that later. But we've heard Gregers touch upon the assortment expansion. Lise will go into that.
Alice will go into that later as well. That will be a key growth driver for KICKS going forward. The second pillar is Win Locally, and that means tapping into and getting more market share, basically, in Finland and Norway, but also Sweden. Accelerate e-com growth. We have had a healthy, strong e-com growth in KICKS, but we think there's more to be done, and we do believe that going forward, the big growth will take place online. Last but not least, we will also develop our store network to make sure that we drive like-for-like growth, but also identify new, exciting spots for profitable growth. Diving into the assortment, so, you know, we're big in makeup, we're big in fragrance. If you look at the market, we're a heavy player in fragrance in KICKS. So we have almost a 30% market share.
We wanna keep and nurture that, obviously, but we're very much looking into what more categories can we grow on behalf of KICKS. Makeup, our biggest category, is a rather big category. There's more to be done here, because what we also need to do, except going across category, is deepen within categories. We're high-end, we're premium. We don't do the more accessible price points. That's an opportunity in order to become more relevant at more occasions for the consumer. It's also an opportunity to make sure that we are super relevant for all, all age groups and target groups, so a work to be done also within makeup.
But what you could really take out from this is skincare, because skincare is the biggest category within beauty, as you see, and we only have a 7% market share, including Skincity, and this is not a go-to destination for KICKS today. So we've already taken measures to improve that. We launched Beauty Pharmacy a couple of weeks ago in Sweden, online and in our three flagships. Beauty Pharmacy is dermatological skincare, and that is the fastest growing subcategory within skincare. It is also where some of the most demanded and Googled brands reside, so having this in the KICKS offer is a huge milestone for us going forward, and we obviously want to roll that out also in Finland and Norway.
I've already talked about Skincity and moving Skincity into the KICKS offer as Pro Skin by Skincity , and this also went live two weeks ago in all KICKS e-com, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. By doing this, we do want the Skincity consumer to feel at home. It's very much a shop-in-shop Skincity branded experience. But more importantly, we want to reach out to those 3.8 million members and also introduce this professional skincare offer to them. Now, this is not the end of our skincare journey. It is the beginning of KICKS winning skin and growing in the most important category. Hair, we've barely gotten started, so a lot of potential there, not least to drive frequency, because hair is a frequency category.
Beyond hair, we also want to go into well-being and other adjacent categories where Matas has found success during the last couple of years. But it's not only about the assortment, it's also about how we price the assortment. I mentioned expensive as being a barrier. This is also something that we're working with and addressing, and we will be launching a pricing program with everyday low prices, very much like the Fast Lav Pris, which you have in Matas today, where we will always be able to provide nice prices to consumers. Now, this will help us, especially online, to both drive traffic, sales, and price perception. I said Sweden is our biggest market. We have approximately 13% of the Swedish market. In Norway, we have 10%. We are the market leader in Norway, but it is a highly competitive market.
We haven't been around for as long time as we have in Sweden, so we have a 10% share here, and there is definitely more to be done to gain share in Norway. The same goes for Finland, where we are player around number three. That is really still an emerging market for KICKS, but it's a fast-growing market, and it has been the fastest-growing markets for KICKS during the last three years. Now, how do we capture local demand better? It's very much about making sure that we are relevant in each and every market, and that we localize the offer. We need to adopt and localize the assortment. We need to make sure that the commercial calendar is relevant for each and every market, not necessarily doing the one size fits all.
And it's very much about activation in the market, the media, the partnerships we choose, and it's also about investing in the latter, which we're doing. Because our competition, competition is investing heavily in awareness-building activities and visibility across our three markets, and we've also been wrapping up our investments, and we will continue to do that. But one milestone is taking place already in September, and that is the opening of our first flagship in Finland, in the best location in Helsinki, on Alexandersgatan, and this will manifest the entire KICKS offer and brand to the Finnish consumer. It will manifest the KICKS position on the Finnish market, and it will also be a gateway to getting certain assortment into the Finnish market. So, huge milestone that we're all very excited about. E-com, the growth, the majority of the growth will take place online.
We want to take a larger share of that growth, so we want to grow faster, and we want to fuel that by most importantly, using the club and the members that we have. In our club, approximately every tenth customers shops from both online and in store, and it's mostly store customers choosing to do their online shopping somewhere else. Now, that's very much about the offer that we have, because if you're shopping your makeup in KICKS and you wanna buy hair online, there's no really reason to go to KICKS today. But we'll change that over time, and by doing so, we'll be able to increase the spend per member as multi-channel members spend 3x the single channel members. We have 3-4 times frequency a year, 4 times in Sweden, three in Finland, and Norway.
Matas has twice that amount of shopping times per year, so also a huge opportunity to be relevant at more occasions for the consumer. Going back to assortment, going back to price points, obviously, but making sure that we give consumers to come more often to KICKS, also by incentivizing them and by effectively working with cross-sell online, we'll achieve this. If we look at the average spend on an e-com customer and a store customer, the e-com customer spends more. They put more things in the basket, more items at a higher value. So making sure that all the assortment is there, that we can effectively cross-sell, is key to unlocking this value. And last but not least, 25% of our members have not made a purchase within the last 12 months.
Making sure we give them a reason to do that, to come back more often, will in itself help us drive revenue here as well. But there are some prerequisites that we need to get in place, and Brian will get back to that later, how we will evolve and develop our digital offer. Last but not least, our stores, you know, the 128 in Sweden, the 71 in Norway, and the 29 in Finland. If you compare that to Matas, Matas has more stores in one market than KICKS has in three markets. So there is definitely opportunity to expand the store network. Now, this is something that will be done on a case-by-case basis, making sure it's a strong location, limited cannibalization, and really the opportunity to drive profitable growth.
So it's not gonna be us opening stores to the right and left. But having said that, there is an opportunity for us to have more stores. But the biggest opportunity is in making sure that we can create like-for-like growth in the stores that we have. Now, we already have a track record of that. The growth you've seen, that's on a net negative basis of stores, so we have not been driving growth by opening more stores in KICKS. And making the like-for-like growth increase is obviously a high priority for us, and we believe we can do that, again, by giving consumers a reason to come more often to KICKS, by updating the experience, but mostly the offer in the stores, and drive traffic and hence frequency. And that would be the key for the like-for-like growth.
We're also going through the concept of KICKS stores, making sure that we can fit a larger assortment going forward. That was our four growth initiatives. I won't go into the operational excellence. You'll hear more about how we will also improve margin, but it is really the combination of this that will make us succeed going forward. KICKS has a solid foundation to build on. There is potential to continue to grow and to grow profitably. And now, together with Matas, we also have the scale, we have the muscles, and most importantly, we have this successful track record of assortment expansion, which is, which will really be key for KICKS' success going forward. So I feel very, very confident that over time, KICKS will become that one go-to destination for everything beauty, and over time, also well-being in Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, Carola. Really great. I hope you got the impression that I've gotten over the last nine months of a really sound and good business, but also a business with opportunity and a business that has a very nice fit with Matas. And that brings us to Matas, because we are absolutely not done with Denmark. We're not done with Matas. There is lots to do, and when we created the new organization, the person who came to my mind immediately was Lise. Lise joined Matas shortly after I joined, was brought in from Copenhagen Airport, where you were responsible for creating that shopping experience. And if you remember 10, 15 years and remember what it is now, just a massive change.
Before that, Lise has worked in the beauty business and with consumer businesses for her entire life. Lise took on the role 5 years ago, 6 years ago, as head of our commercial function, and the renewal of Matas and all the stuff that you have seen happening over the last few years, there are a lot of Lise's fingerprints on that. Now, Lise is tasked with running Matas and making sure that Matas keeps growing, keeps developing, keeps renewing, keeps staying relevant. Lise, please tell us how.
Thank you, Gregers. So my name is Lise Ryevad, and I've been with Matas for the past six years. Before coming to Matas, I spent, among other places, eight years with L'Oréal, our, one of our very biggest suppliers. And in a period of that time, I was responsible for Matas as L'Oréal's biggest customer. And in that period, I got to know Matas from the outside. I got to know the weaknesses, and I got to know the strength. And this is what I use now in my new role as Executive Vice President for Matas in Denmark. You all know Matas very well, so I do not have a long presentation about Matas today. But in brief, Matas is, the absolute leading company within beauty and well-being or beauty and health in the Danish market.
We are now an almost DKK 5 billion large company, DKK 4.8 billion in the last 12 months. 31% of our turnover comes from e-commerce. We have 1.9 million relevant and loyal consumers in our club. 70% of all Danish female consumers are member of our clubs above 18 years. 2,300 competent employees and 11 strong in-house brands. So Matas is a sound business. Matas is a healthy business. Matas is a very, very strong business. Matas has been growing, as you all know, over the past five years. I'm here today and spend the next 15 minutes to explain to you how we will continue and sustain that high growth pace for Matas, also in the coming 3-5 years, and still securing an attractive margin to all of us.
Now, I will be going through these five different strategic initiatives. I'll focus on the four of them, but operational excellence is not forgotten, even though I won't focus on that today. It is a big part of what we're doing every day. But today, I will focus on pushing further the assortment expansion strategy. I will give you a view on fueling e-com, how we are going to fuel e-com and the omni-channel experience. How we are going to grow as well our physical stores. We have 264 physical stores, all of them, by the way, profitable. How we're going to grow traffic and grow those stores and drive business from those stores. And finally, elevate the brand and secure a better reach within social media. So to begin with, I'd like to dig into assortment expansion.
Three years ago, I was here on exact same space, more or less. It was Corona, so it was in front of a screen at the Capital Markets Day 2021, and I presented the strategy assortment expansion. Since then, we have developed this strategy, and we have driven a lot of growth out of this strategy. I think the figures that I show right here really convinces everybody that assortment expansion is not just nicely written on paper or in my voice, but it's also delivering results and growth for Matas. During the past two years, we have delivered DKK 415 million in incremental revenue to Matas from assortment, new assortment. Products, brands that were not in the Matas assortment two, three years ago. This is 50% of the total growth that Matas delivered within those two years, coming from new assortment.
Now, how did we do that, and how do we do that? Because right now, we have entered new categories such as professional haircare, dermatological skincare, parent and child, so actually categories that were not existing in the Matas website three years ago. How did we do it? And this is a pure recipe. It's easy. It's easy. One, you've done it, once we have done it, once you have tried it several times, now we know the recipe. This example is professional haircare. Professional haircare did not exist in the Matas website three years ago. There was no such product, neither online or offline. Today, among our consumers, we are perceived the number one website for professional haircare. So the consumers, if they should choose one place to look for professional haircare, they would say Matas. Now, how did we do that?
And the recipe is written here, quite looks very simple on paper, and a lot of people has been involved. It's about really bringing the right brands to the table and getting them online from the very beginning.... they're getting the right competencies in, the right hairdressers that can do a lot of content, that can make pictures, small videos, that can advise our consumers. Get them in so that we will become the absolute best universe and the absolute best destination for this, category. Once you become this strong, and you manage to triple our turnover in only three years in this category, not only can the consumers start focusing on Matas when buying professional haircare, also our suppliers, suddenly we have become one of their main partners in this category. This is the recipe, and this is what we have been doing also with dermatological skincare.
This is what we are doing in parents, child, in sports and nutrition, in sexual wellness, and we have not finished. There's still huge potential in the five categories I just mentioned to move on and to continue the growth. That was it on assortment expansion, a very important growth driver in the coming three to five years for Matas. Another growth driver is our e-com and omni-channel pillar. As you all know, we have grown rapidly in e-commerce over the past years, and I believe that one of the reasons that we have done so is that we have not only, we have not only focused on driving sales, hardcore e-com. We've been focusing on building the good links from Matas.dk to the stores and from the stores to Matas.dk.
We have been building an omni-channel muscle that is second to none, and like this, we have prioritized a smooth customer journey. The customers, they just find the way of shopping with Matas, you can shop online, you can shop offline, you can get delivery wherever you want. This is what they really do like. This has become a real competitive advantage for Matas, and this, I have to say, is one of the competitive advantage that is hard to copy. Actually, almost impossible to copy. And since we joined up with KICKS and the KICKS team, we can see that KICKS has some omni-channel tools today that we do not have in Matas. So we can see we can find synergies in the way we can work together.
Carola just mentioned and presented the Beauty Bot, the KICKS Beauty Bot. She mentioned the KICKS community. These are two omni-channel tools that we do not have in Matas, that we are now looking into implementing in the Matas universe. Then I'd like to introduce a magic tool. This is a true magic tool. This is, it's not the Swiss Army knife; it's a Matas Army Knife. This is a tool that exists in every single store. It exists in the hand of all of our employees. The employee with this tool in their hand can serve the customer anywhere in the store, so they don't have to go to the cash till. She can sign up all the customers to Matas Club Matas or to Club Matas Plus. She can take payment right here, not at the cash till.
She can help the customer enter the customer profile, and she can watch and look at the historic purchases that the customer has done, or she can look at the rebates or campaigns that should be specific or personal to the customer. So she can, in a one-to-one, a quite close relation, she can serve the customer in a very personal way. We are working right now to implement even more tools into this device, and over the past three to five years, we have trained every employee in being confident in using this tool. And we have to say, this has been a major advantage of giving a strong, strong consumer experience when going to our physical stores and changing the consumer experience in the physical stores.
Now I'd just finish off by having you leaning back and imagining you are one of our beloved customers and bring you on a 5five out of five-star experience. So Trustpilot, this experience that I will bring you through, is what typically gives us five stars. So it's 1:00 P.M. in the afternoon, and as a customer, I enter a Matas store. I need a skincare product. Unfortunately, this skincare product is not on the shelf, or it's not listed in that specific store. The employee takes the handheld device, enters the customer's profile, helps the customer to get the product and buy the product, of course, looks up and gives the rebates, the personal rebates that the customer has. The employee takes the payment and leaves the customer run out the door.
During the same evening, that customer will receive the products at home, at the doorstep. This is a true omni-channel customer experience, and this is one of those that gives us five stars. If you are interested, you should have a look at Trustpilot. We have a lot of happy consumers that are handing out a lot of stars for Matas because of this specific customer experience and the omni-channel model that we have. The third pillar is our physical stores. 70% of our turnover comes from our physical stores, 264 stores across the entire country. We have a full program for how we want to grow like for like in stores. And some of them I've mentioned on this slide. We have three opportunities here. One opportunity is we want to build new stores.
We want to figure out where are the white spots, where we can actually build new stores, and we do see white spots. We opened four new physical stores last year in Christianshavn, in different places, Frederikshavn, where we were not before, we were not placed with a store. That's one way of growing. The second way is relocation. Our store network goes many years back, and some of the stores we figure out probably are not placed in the right location compared to traffic in that specific city, or there's just a better location, and once that location gets free, we will move our stores. That's what we call relocation.
And the third opportunity is to refresh and upgrade our existing stores by implementing flexible elements that can show more flexible products, more young products, that also can give a younger look and feel to our stores. And this way of changing and refreshing our stores is a new way of thinking. We opened two new stores like this last week in the Copenhagen area, and these are our laboratory stores, where we are testing and learning, how can we actually work with the full store network? We want to refresh them, but we do not want to spend money to rebuild the full store because that's a lot of CapEx. But how can we work with elements to upgrade?
And we do believe that within the coming 6-9 month, we'll find that solution, and then we'll roll that out to other stores. The physical stores, I mention it again, it's 70% of our turnover. It's 2,000 employees, competent employees, that are passionate about Matas, and we have set ourselves the goal that we want to grow traffic, we want to grow revenue like for like in these 264 stores. The final pillar is our brand, and looking six years back, when we introduced the renewing Matas strategy, we had some problems with the brand. This was exactly what our dear consumers, they said. They loved Matas in the inner of the heart. They really did love Matas, but they begged Matas to renew ourselves. They wanted us to communicate in a more modern way.
They wanted us to give them better inspiration, more relevant advice. They wanted us to show them trends from outside. So since then, a lot of things has happened to the brand. We have grown our NPS from 62 to 73, and this year, actually, Matas came out as brand number three among all brands in Denmark, all, retail brands, and all product brands. Of course, we are very proud of this. We jumped three rankings. We are above LEGO, which is, by the way, a very strong brand, so we are very strong. But we do still have one segment where we do not feel that we are strong enough and where we do not feel that we are close enough to them, and that's our young consumers, the Gen Z.
We have seen, funny enough, these consumers, when we communicate on emails, they don't open it because they are on TikTok. So over the past 12 months, we have managed to grow our followers on SoMe up to 1 million, and this is a path that we will follow from now on very strongly. Our consumers, they spend a lot of time on social media, several hours a day, and we want to be best-in-class, reaching them via social media. So to sum up, we have five strategic pillars: push further assortment expansion, secure high growth level, pursue the level of growth that we have seen over the past years, e-com and the omni experience, keep focusing, bring growth via our physical stores as well, and elevate the brand and become stronger within social media, especially within Gen Z. Thank you!
... Thank you, Lise. I hope you get the impression that we are definitely not done with Matas. There is still lots to do, but also that you get the impression that between Carola's presentation of KICKS and Matas, there is a strong fit, but there is also tons of stuff to learn from one another. What we do now is we take a few questions, and the price will be a coffee break. A few questions addressed to KICKS and Matas, so we don't open up for everything, but to anything you have heard so far from me, from Lise or from Carola, we're happy to take a few questions before the break. Question?
Yeah. Yeah, so, thank you for a great... Yeah, thank you a lot, and, thank you for a great presentation so far. I guess first question is for you, Gregers. So, the long-term guidance implies a revenue CAGR above 6%, and looking to a guidance for the next year, it's around 5% at midpoint. So it sounds like you're seeing sort of an accelerated growth throughout the strategy period. So maybe you could just expand a bit on this dynamic.
Not so much acceleration, but as Carola mentioned, for KICKS, we have decided to integrate Skincity into the KICKS experience. We've decided that there might be some revenues that we will be sacrificing in this first year against the Skincity base. So that's why we're slightly lower on the guidance for next year. But otherwise, there's no indication on sort of the speed or any hockey stick effect, or anything other that you can imagine.
Thank you. Thank you. A couple of questions from my side. So I think on the beauty treatments in the stores, it seems like it's a very embedded part of the KICKS strategy. What are your view? And I think it's also we obviously saw Douglas coming out with an IPO that's also very a very big part of their strategy as well. So any thoughts on whether that could be an example for Matas?
Carola, maybe you'll remark just a moment on beauty treats and how you see that work, why it actually makes sense to have in the stores, and then we can get back to Matas.
We've been doing beauty treats in our stores for a very long time. But we've renewed the concept, making it Treats by KICKS and packaging it, and also ramping up the type of services that we offered a couple of years ago. And for us, it's a way to drive differentiation, but it's also a way to actually cross-sell and upsell consumers, where we see that we get a higher ROI from customers doing the treatments. That you obviously need to sort of put against SKUs that you could be selling in that area. With KICKS, having a limited assortment, and very deliberately so on the high-end premium side, makes a lot of sense to offer those treatments alongside that assortment.
And in Matas, we have a treatment concept as well. In some stores, you can remark on that, and then I can take... If we will roll out the KICKS into Matas, I will—I won't let you answer that, but, you can say what you're doing right now.
Well, we do have, but that's few stores, but we do have, like, 20 stores where we are offering these kind of formats, and we can give these treatments. It's not part of the, you could say, the overall Matas concept. And I'd say, lately we did this Købmagergade store. So we introduced treatments in this store because we had the size, and we knew that this was going to be a special store where we wanted to unfold the full Matas palette and the full Matas feeling and look and feel, so the consumers should have the full experience. But most of our stores are much smaller than downstairs and therefore, we would not put it into our stores as they are right now.
I think it's a good question in the sense that all those mini cases, if you will, of what Matas is doing and KICKS is doing, we'll look at those and see if we can transfer, if it makes sense. This particular one, probably not. With the size of stores that we have and something that we're now already for the big stores, we have something that's working, so probably not this one. Yeah.
Maybe just a follow-up on—
Yeah
... on store contribution. So you expect to open stores in both of the banners. Maybe could you elaborate a bit on this, the magnitude of store openings and maybe also on some of the thresholds for opening stores? Is there some kind of payback period for raw margins-
Yes
... some of the financial stuff?
So, I had a feeling that I would get the question, how many stores are you going to open? Because five years ago, five years ago, I got the question all the time: How many stores are you going to close? And that goes to show that, you know, the world is so dynamic, and what might be right at one point in time will not be right later on. So we are moving with the pace of the consumer. We're not on a massive store expansion journey, but we do see that there are areas, and we do see that we have concepts that are fit for a long-term, profitable business to put out a store in a certain area. And Lise mentioned, you know, relocations, expansions is also a very good case for us.
In some of the KICKS markets, we have two small stores for our ambitions, so relocating or expanding is an opportunity. That was a long way of not answering your question.
Yeah.
But what I can say is we have a very short payback view on stores, and we have a principle of not signing up for very long lease commitments, so that if we make a mistake, we can get out quite quickly again. Yeah, so that's it.
But I can't get you to sort of say something about four-wall margins then?
No.
Yes, thank you. One question on slide 15. So why is it that the Swedish market is set to outgrow the Danish market in terms of beauty?
Yes, that's a very good question, and, for, for that, forecast, we have used, Euromonitor, so that's one view on the market. Euromonitor, as with any other forecasting, they rarely get it exactly right. But we have compared those, forecasts to, other industry specialists, and they all say the same overall thing, namely, that the beauty market is set to grow faster than GDP. There is more interest. And then there will be nuances from market to market, and, and specifically why, Sweden is set to grow faster, I, I can't pinpoint exactly why.
Okay.
Maybe you have a... No. Good.
Coming back to slide 15, can you say a little about how you define the markets? Because if you compare 15 with the one you had for the Nordics, then your market is half the market which you had on slide 15. So what's not included, and-
So, on slide 15, it's beauty and well-being. It encompasses both the mass beauty component and the higher-end beauty, and it includes the part of well-being that's not pharmacy exclusive. So that's the definition of that market, meaning that in that definition of the market, the DKK 70 billion, we have parts of the market where we don't play today. That's parts of the market where the supermarkets or Normal have their strongholds. We're obviously a concept that's more relevant for the higher end of the market. But it still goes to show the size of the consumer need.
It still goes to show that there is an opportunity for us to play with price levels and price brackets in the stores to recruit new kinds of consumers, and it goes to show that consumers might grow up in the lower end of the market, but they will grow in eventually into the KICKS and Matas store environment and brand environment.
What's your addressable market on the 72, then?
We can have long arguments about that, but because for Matas, it's quite different from KICKS. KICKS is positioned more high end today, but obviously, as Carola mentioned, there is an opportunity for KICKS to broaden their position in the market. We have learned some lessons in Matas. How long does it take for consumers to change their mind about when a brand is relevant? It's not next day. It takes time, but as Lise also showed you, it's not a ten-year cycle to educate consumers that they can now get something different with Matas or KICKS than what they're used to.
So no number on that one?
No, no number on that one, no. But I'm sure you can find industry data that will help you sort of size it. Yeah.
About the customer journey you had in store with same-day delivery, is that a Copenhagen and Aarhus issue, or is it all Denmark? And secondly, if you copy it to KICKS, is it then possible to do it with the large markets that you are addressing, with limited number of stores?
Me first, yeah?
Yeah, you go first.
Yeah. It is for the time being, it is not 100% the country that we are covering. I think it is, and Brian, you have to correct me, it's one third of the customers of the market that is covered with this service. And of course, we are keen, as we were probably some of the first that entered into such a short delivery time. We are keen to be the first as well to cover the full market. So we are looking into every day our possibilities by how to do this and how to grow our services to be relevant and contribute to a quick delivery. Because our consumers, right away, we see the NPS score, we see the customer satisfaction going right up when we give that kind of service.
But it needs to be as well in some kind of profitable way. We can't just, you know... Yeah.
It's about the larger Copenhagen area?
The larger Copenhagen, isn't it Aarhus as well?
Mm-hmm.
Yes, it's Aarhus.
10:00 A.M., and-
10 o'clock cut off for Aarhus, and then it's the Copenhagen area.
We're in long markets, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. We serve everyone from our new automated warehouse in Rosersberg, so same-day delivery in the north of Norway will only happen if you go and pick it up in our store in Tromsø. And then it needs to be picked in the store
That could work for Stockholm, yes.
But also, Paul, of course, there is an option to supply from bigger stores in local areas. If we have flagship stores, they might be used for that purpose in the future.
For Carola, on KICKS. So you're saying there's a perception that KICKS is too expensive, and it sounds to me like you wanna do something about that. So does that mean you're sort of trying to reposition the brand? Is that the way to think about it? And also, I mean, in terms, I guess, some of the brand equity in KICKS is that it is expensive. So I mean, yeah, could you maybe-
Exactly
... expand a bit on that?
So we don't wanna lose our premium position. We have an exclusive assortment that you cannot find elsewhere. It's super important for us to keep that, but we can see that during the last couple of years, consumers-
has also changed their shopping behavior. They tend to niche players. It has become more difficult to be a niche player, and you really win by getting a lot of traffic and addressing a lot of different needs, and you have no problem shopping for an expensive good together with a low priced item. So it's not about changing the position, it's really about expanding the position. And if you look at, it's slightly different in our various markets. In Norway, we are really high-end because our stores are so small. We only carry the premium assortment in stores, whereas in Sweden and Finland, we have a broader offer, and it works. So we know that potential, there is flexibility in the brand. We're not gonna reposition the brand, we're just gonna expand it.
Thank you. And then, and then there's a lot of talk about the different markets, both like beauty markets being different in nature, in different countries in the Nordics, and also the competitive environment being different.
Yes.
So maybe you could maybe put some more color to the competitive environment across the Nordics.
Yes.
So I know the market share positioning, but also, I mean, could you mention some key players-
Absolutely
... that you're seeing?
The common thing about Sweden, Norway, and Finland is that those three markets are highly competitive markets. If you would look at market shares, you'll see that there are a couple of players in each market that have approximately the same share. So it's fragmented markets. There are few competitors running across those three markets, but there are some, Lyko being one, who's present both in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and also Denmark. We have, which is not really a competitor, but we obviously have Normal present in all markets. But then it's very much a different competitor set in each market. So in Finland, it's very much the old department stores, the Stockmann, and the Emotion, and the Stockmanns of the world.
If you go to Norway, BliVakker is the dominant online player, and then you have more legacy players like Fredrik & Louisa and VITA, local players in those markets. Looking at Sweden, we're also up against Åhléns, the department store. But then also online pharmacies in Sweden are quite aggressively moving into the beauty segment as well. We don't really see that type of presence in Norway and Finland yet from online pharmacies. So we really need to have slightly different competitive strategies for each market, but that's also what makes it fun.
Very good.
Very good. We'll take one last question, and then we'll move to break, and there will be opportunities for questions as well later.
All right. Thank you. That's just on KICKS as well. Just wanted to make sure, are you moving into mass, or are you evaluating it? So it's a part of the strategy, or is it-
We're evaluating-
Yeah
... you will see we have some mass. You'll probably see some more mass, but we're not going after a mass position.
Okay.
So it will be an addition to the offer.
We agree on that-
Yes
... by the way.
Yeah, exactly.
In case you wondered.
Yeah, good point.
Well, we've seen premium players go to mass-
Yes
... and that's not a recipe for success.
No.
We think it's still the distinction, and the premium experience that stands out. Having said that, there is a big difference between premium premium and mass mass. There is a lot of space in between where KICKS has a license to play. Okay. Thank you very much for first round of questions. We ask you to be back, also online, at 3:00 P.M., but now we have coffee and, drinks, non-alcoholic drinks, served outside. Okay, back at 3:00 P.M. See you then.
You want it all, don't you?
I deserve it all.
... All right, welcome back. Hope you enjoyed a brief break. And now we turn to the next part of our program. You've heard from Matas and KICKS, and they, of course, exchange ideas and work together and best practices. But the next couple of people you're gonna hear from, they are born Nordic, if you will, in the new organization. They are here to supply both KICKS and Matas, to supply all four markets with either goods and products or digital solutions or operations. And the first one I would like to introduce is Alice. And I hope that you online joining us as well can see Alice here as well.
So Alice came to Matas in May of 2019, after a long career in doing only beauty. And Matas, and Alice got the not very easy task of trying to turn around our mass beauty business. One third of the Matas business in decline when Alice came on board, and in a very short while, you managed to add your skills and innovation and drive and turn that business around to growth. So we thought, let's put Alice to another difficult task, namely that of building our own brands portfolio. And lo and behold, you came in, and you drove our own brands portfolio to growth very, very rapidly.
So when we set up the Nordic organization and looked for someone to drive and to take over from Lise on building a Nordic sourcing commercial organization, turning towards the suppliers, asking for their support, we could think of no one better than you. So, over to you, Alice.
Thank you. Thank you. So here. Thank you. Going further. I am very excited to have taking on a Nordic position, being responsible for Matas Group Commercial. I have a long experience and extensive experience from the supplier side, and when I was sitting on the other side of the table, there were two retailers who stood out, and that was Matas and KICKS. So being in charge of the commercial strategy for both of them is an incredible opportunity. Matas Group is the one phone call partner we have for both local brands and global brands. We have a super footprint in the market, and we have a strong value proposition to attract brands. And we have a unique position to offer now to our partners Nordic scale and one-stop destination. Oh, that was the wrong one.
We have three key priorities to support growth and margin expansion in the commercial strategy. One, expand and source the most relevant assortment to broaden and deepen with relevant and inspiring assortment in the relevant categories to build and to bring fast new brands and new hot and social trends to the market. We negotiate and ensure best terms with the suppliers. We are now the gateway to the Nordics, and that makes us and then it's possible to attract new brands which were previously not interested in Matas and KICKS, and to push for exclusivities and pre-launches to a new extent, and at the same time negotiate best terms. Three, expand and improve portfolio of our in-house brands. We want to consolidate, and we want to focus on fewer brands, making big bets on the power brands and bring them to life in a new Nordic scale.
In-house brands deliver profitability, differentiation, and loyalty. We are already on a very successful journey on assortment expansion, as already mentioned by Lise in Matas. We have broadened and deepened within the relevant categories in order to make sure that we are the preferred choice for our consumers. We have launched more than 1,100 brands within the last three years, equally split between beauty and well-being. Last year, more than 50% of our growth came from these initiatives. One of the first new category destination was pro haircare, as also mentioned by Lise. Within less than two years, we became the number one go-to destination for customers seeking for products and inspiration. We've also successfully grown health with a double-digit growth and going into new trends within these categories.
We will continue to broaden and deepen within relevant categories, and we will double down on what we have already launched to ensure to maximize this as well. And we will go into new categories like Gen Z, accessory, niche fragrance, and much more, and we will leverage this into KICKS. So why have we been so successful with our assortment expansion journey? We have a proven play, playbook to build and to launch both new brands and new categories, and with speed. We work with four steps: We define, we build, we drive awareness, and we evaluate. And to take an example, our baby category, which we have just launched, we are extremely consumer-centric and data-driven in the way we define our category strategy. Within the baby category, we were finding out where are the moms, what do they want, what are the needs, which communities are they in?
Then we define the category strategy. Once that is done, we build. An example, within the baby category, we launched 50 high-quality and curated baby brands, handled by our extremely efficient sourcing team. We make sure to set the right price and promo at day one, and then we build the destination with a high quality of guidance and service and making sure we have inspirational content at the same time. Once launched, we go into a hyper care period in order to make sure that we build sustainable growth. And at the same time, we evaluate. We have automated systems to make sure that we look into, should we increase the distribution? Should we keep it as it is? Should we move to drop shipment, or should we eventually kill the brands again? So do we have more potential?
Despite being a strong number one in the market, we do see a lot of potential and ahead, significant head growth, growth. We want to become number one in core categories going forward. We are already there in fragrance and in makeup, and we want to move on with makeup, focusing on Gen Z, and to be fast and first movers on new brands and on TikTok trends. We also want to win skin, as mentioned, both within, with Carola's presentation and Lise's. We want to continue maximizing, beauty pharmacy brands, pro skin, and deepen within our existing categories. We want to build hair and take share, and we want to continue well-being with new trends coming within well-being as well. And as Carola mentioned, we do see potential to take market share in well-being in KICKS as well, going forward.
Being the gateway to the Nordics is a key enabler to differentiate offerings and to improve profitability. We have a decade-long relationship with more than 600 suppliers in Matas and KICKS to ensure best terms, to give access to new brands and exclusivities. And by joining forces, we unlock new opportunities to grow profitable in new areas and new categories with ensuring scale and synergies. We have three major impacts here. First, the renegotiation of contracts. We have a significant part of suppliers which are overlapping in Matas and KICKS, which calls for a renegotiation of contracts. We do also have suppliers only present in one of the banners, who wants to be present in both banners going forward, also calls for a renegotiation. Then we have an ease of doing business.
We are the entry point to 4 countries now, and then we have a faster return on investment to brands. We have an unrivaled first-party data for more than 5 million club members. And we have a unique Nordic position, with scaling both online and offline, which enable us to build brands in a new way together with our partners. And we have actually already now signed with brands which were not interested in us in the past for autumn launches. Our in-house brands played a huge role in recruiting, differentiating, drive traffic, profitability, and loyalty. And in our group set up, we now have 19 brands, all of different sizes and different positionings, and we are in almost all categories: beauty and health and sport and healthcare, accessories, and you name it. But one brand stands out, and that's Striberne.
This is by far the biggest brand, and it's also the number one brand within personal care in Denmark, and it is a loved, iconic brand in Denmark. We have Nilens Jord, which is the biggest makeup brand in Denmark, and we have BeautyAct, which is the biggest in-house brand in KICKS, already now launched online in Matas. Hence, the strategy is to consolidate and to build strong Nordic in-house brands, fewer, bigger and better. To make sure that we have a strong and clear positioning within the brands and a broad consumer coverage, being able to roll out with a new scale in four countries.
And at the same time, we need to launch within the brands with launches that are fast followers of proven successes, and lately illustrated by our Curly launch, which is the biggest launch ever in-house brands, building incremental growth in haircare and already being a consumer darling and winning the Danish Beauty Award. So to sum up, our three growth pillars supports our ambition to grow profitable with scale and speed brands in cooperation with our partners, and to deliver an great experience and choice for our customers. We are very proud of what we have done to date, but we have just begun, and we are super excited about the journey ahead to keep growing. Yes.
I think what you should be left with from Alice's presentation, and one thing that we discussed many times, is the importance of brands and relationships to the global brands. This is a business that lives off and thrives off and is driven by having the right brands, and therefore, Alice's position and Alice's team, and the fact that she can offer to global brands access to the Nordics with one phone call, that is a major step for the industry, that there is that ease of doing business and that fast access. Now, I would like to hand over to my great colleague, Brian.
We actually met, I think, 12 years ago, maybe even longer ago, on a bus trip in to Silicon Valley to visit Google on a study trip. We ended up sitting next to one another, driving from San Francisco to Palo Alto, and I remember thinking, "I want to work with this guy. He's really clever about e-com." Brian has been doing e-com as one of the first people in Denmark and has been doing nothing but digital, and the digital transformation that Matas has gone through over the last couple of years is in very large part due to Brian's leadership. You can find, these days, you can find many people who are good at e-com. I think what makes Brian stand out is that he understands that it is a company-wide change.
It is not just about the people in his department, it is about getting the entire company on board on a digital journey. So very proud to introduce Brian to you to talk about what we can do together on digital.
Thank you, Gregers. I still remember the bus trip, a lot of good conversations. So I'm happy to be here, and today I will share how we will create the strongest digital personal experience across the Nordics in beauty and wellbeing. And actually, 25 years ago, I wrote my master's at university in how to deliver a personalized e-experience in fashion, and at that time, it was just a vision. It was a dream, but technology was not ready. But now in these years, a lot of new technology are at the market, so we can do really great and amazing things. But first, a short look back on what has happened in the Danish banner in the growth Matas journey that Gregers showed earlier on, and I was also presenting at the last Capital Market Day.
We had a very strong growth at the Danish business. Six years ago, we were just about DKK 100 million, now we are up to just over DKK 1 billion, so we have adjusted 10 times our digital business at Matas. At the same time, we just have not just won the beauty category and health category in Denmark, we are also going from being the 20 most used webshop across all categories in Denmark to get up to be the second most used e-com player, just after Zalando. Zalando is playing in significantly bigger category than we are. So every third transaction that are done on the Danish e-commerce are done at Matas Digital. A key reason for that is the NPS score.
As Carola clarified, NPS can go up to 100 as the best, and we had, in the last year, improved from around 58 to 74, driven by a lot of initiatives. The key it is to be really commercial relevant. This model was also shared at the last Capital Market Day, and we have a very proven model to drive our digital growth. And that is to have the broadest assortment, having the best advice and inspiration, and that's one of the really cool thing working in beauty. It is, it's a lot about inspiration, a lot about guidance, giving the right advice, building brands. It's a lot about fast delivery as well. A significant part of our parcels is delivered at the same day, the rest of them for the next day.
A lot of, about 50% are picked up in store, so we have very fast delivery. We have some very attractive loyalty benefits. We both have a free program, but we also have a paid grow program, so it gives some additional benefits on top. We are very good at using our first-party data. We have very strong partnerships with the big marketing platforms, all the big players we are working with, so we really can be targeting, be really relevant, and then we have very strong partnership with our brand partners, so we can work with them. And in the end, I will share more about our retail media offering. So this proven model will also be very important going forward.
It will be very important for scaling, the KICKS business, so that's our way of thinking. But to improve our position, we believe going forward that being really strong at personalization is also very important. So I will share how we will build a shared Nordic platform to be better at personalization, how we will improve the app, and also how we will be the preferred choice in retail media across the Nordic. So if we start on our digital platform, we have a very strong foundation that we have consent for our +5 million members to collect data on all their touch points.
So, we have more than 500 million annual page views at our digital touchpoints, and from each touchpoint there, each page view, we learn something about this member, and we can use that to build a profile. We also has more than 30 million transactions with multiple items on each, and this makes us a very strong foundation for doing personalization. On top of that foundation, we are just at the moment integrating stronger systems for profiling customers in real time, for using all these signals to connect them across channels, and also a new content management system to be better at utilizing our content to be really relevant across touchpoints.
We are working with how can we be personalized in guiding a personalization, so that we provide different guidance for Gen Z to maybe a more grown-up member? How can we use it in our retail media to sell the right spot to the right consumer? How to do the merchandising, how to do relevant upselling and cross-selling across the relevant touchpoint, and also to implement frictionless shopping. What we're doing now, it is, we are for sure. We are coming from two different platforms. So KICKS had their investment, Matas had their investment. We are now consolidating that to one optimized e-commerce back end that can be used both for our app, for our e-commerce, but also for the cool tools in stores that both Carola and Lise shared with you.
And then on top of that, we will have a banner-specific branding, so that consumer feel the look and feel of the brand they're dealing with. But in the bottom here, we also have what we call an omni-order management system. And what is that? It is that we have a very strong competitive advantages in that we have 500 stores, we have two fulfillment centers, we have drop ship agreements. But to really capture benefit on that, we need a really flexible system that have a shared view of inventory. So we are now building our own platform, so that we have a single view of stock across all touchpoints. And that makes it possible for us to do fast delivery, to do cheap delivery, and to do a lot of innovation.
So when we have the next idea, how can we fulfill from store? How can we combine this new partner? We have our own stack that we control, so we can build these things. And then I will move on to talk about our app. Our app is really a touchpoint that is a lot about loyalty, but going forward, we will focus a lot about also the shopping and the in-store functionality, and how we could use it for inspiration. So it's a tool that will combine all our cool features, and going forward, it will be the most used digital tool across all the offers we have today.
And going a bit more into detail, at the Danish business, we have just around 30% of our business, digital business, is coming from app today, and that has grown from 20% two years ago. And we have almost 1 million people who have downloaded the app, and they have a significantly higher conversion in the app because we always know who they are, and we can create a more engaging experience in an app environment than you can on a mobile website. So we have a lot of features about the, the members, how to shop, how you can use your benefits, in the store. You can scan a product in store.
We just implemented a functionality that if you're near a store and we have the consent to use your geolocation, we can show you relevant things in the store before you go into it. But we also have a lot of inspiration, videos, games, other kind of competition to aid engagement. And going forward, we really are moving in to build what we call a personalized feed on the front page. I'm sure all of you use social media, LinkedIn and other kinds, maybe Instagram. And you know, the reason that these medias have been successful, it is that they're personalized for each of you, and if you look for them in an hour from now, you will have a different experience. As soon as you start scrolling, it will adapt and learn.
We are going to implement similar functionality into our app, so it's way more relevant based on all the data we have about you as a consumer. We are also going to what we call deep linking. So today, the traffic to our app is direct traffic, so a consumer who choose to open the app. But going forward, if you have the app installed, we will redirect the email traffic and the paid traffic directly into the app, so we will have a significantly higher use than we meet for the next Capital Market Day, I'm sure.
And then, we have currently we only have a Matas app at the Danish business, but we're also preparing to implementing an app in KICKS, and it will especially be relevant when the frequency go up, go up and the KICKS consumers get access to more assortment. So my final section will be about our retail media, and I guess most of you refers to our leaflet. So for decades, we have been very successful about selling inventory, our leaflet to our brand partners. We still do that and are still very successful. If you go into the store, you will see posters and displays with brand image, with brand presented. That also retail media, where we take money for these placement.
But in the digital revolution, there has been a lot of new opportunities to have placement at our website, to have placement at our app, to have placement in our emails, and also that we can sell placement at external media, at Facebook, at Instagram, at Google, based on the data we have. So a lot of new media is coming. We also have very strong insight services, so we can tell a brand how many of our members could be relevant, how many is inactive, how many should be reactivated. And we could also, after a campaign, measure the results, and therefore we have a very powerful insights. And then we also have a creative service.
So if you, as a brand, don't have strong creatives yourself, we can sell them to you, and we can also use our experience from our own business, what works and what do not works. So these three things build a very strong retail media business. And if you look at the complete digital industry, the retail media industry is really growing. So due to Boston Consulting Group, each year, there's about 25% growth in revenue in the retail media industry. And in a couple of years, about 25% of the massive advertising spend in digital will be in retail media. And the reason for that, it is that we have, as a retail company, we have such a strong data foundation, and therefore we can provide stronger, return on investment than in a lot of other opportunities.
Also, a lot of the possibilities to track in the external networks are being closing down for a lot of different reasons. With our first-party data, we have a stronger foundation to track return. So we have a clear vision about being the preferred partner for all our strong brand partners in the Nordics. We have four building blocks. We have our data, we have our analytic capabilities, we have some strong internal medias, and we also have partnerships with external medias. That gives us opportunity to build brands across the complete user journey. So we can create awareness, we can work with creating desire and how to create consideration, how to make the first conversion, and also to create loyalty. So we can complete the user journey.
And going forward, we are looking into how can we improve our retail media offering? So one thing that we'll just launch soon, it is what we call sponsored search. So it is, at a lot of searches, there may be 100 different brands. We have a commercial sorting based on sales and some personalization, but now we can also offer that the brand partners can bid on being higher on the list page, and they can bid against others. And that's an opportunity for a brand partner to get more presence at our site, and it also a opportunity to create income for us as a group. Then we will look into, can we build more digital in-store solutions? We have screens in some of our stores.
We have opportunities to put more screens into, and in the future, these screens can also be personalized, and this gives a lot of opportunity to deliver new formats from retail media. Then we also look into using our data. How can we personalize these retail media offerings? So if you're a niche brand, you are not willing to invest for a full day on the front page of Matas or for email to all our members, but, but we can really use this data to make a segmented offers and find the members that are relevant for you. And all in all, we should be the go-to partner for creating cross-Nordic launches. So if you are a brand that would like go into the Nordic, we have a media setup that could support, that you could get awareness for your brands.
If you're assisting brands, we can help you growing your existing, existing portfolio. To sum up, I have talked about how will we create a shared platform so we could use across the Nordic to really be the number one in personalized experience. I've talked about the app, how that would be the most preferred, digital item across our channels, to combine channels, and then about our retail media offerings and what they are coming to there, and how we will be the preferred partner in that. Yes.
Thank you, Brian.
Thank you.
I think what stands out from, from always working with Brian and talking to Brian is that all of those things that seem really easy from a consumer point of view, please show me the next product that I might find relevant, what it takes to deliver that experience. So I think what Brian's presentation made clear is that this is a deep competence, and it's really hard to copy. So we have something here that we can leverage across the Nordics. So thank you very much for that, Brian. And now it's time for David, one of our new colleagues. David comes from the KICKS side.
Actually, David is a lucky punch in the sense that when before we even started dreaming about KICKS, we knew that we would go on a tech transformation journey, and we had started looking for that person to drive that tech transformation journey. When we did the due diligence, when we met the management team, we also met David, and David is one of those rare people who used to be a really strong consultant and make the change into a real job, helping companies and working with companies to actually deliver on what's on those slides, to actually deliver and practice the changes and the transformations. David has run a lot of those transformations, both in tech and logistics, and we're very happy that David took on the job as a EVP for our Group Operations.
David, over to you.
Yes. Thank you, Gregers. So by now you've heard a lot about our high ambitions and our most important priorities going forward. What I'll do now is I'll walk you through some of the key enablers to succeed, and I will talk about supply chain, I will talk about IT, and I will also talk about AI and analytics, and what we're doing over the coming years. And yes, we do have a lot of exciting things in front of us. Operations and group operations, it's all about building a shared platform for growth, but it's also about building a shared platform for competitiveness. And if we zoom in on our strategic priorities within operations, in supply chain, it's all about future-proofing and automating, and I'll walk you through that. In IT, it's all about unifying and modernizing.
And finally, in AI and analytics, it's all about leveraging all the emerging technologies that we see out there. But let's start with supply chain, and a lot of exciting things going on here. We recently opened a completely new warehouse in Rosersberg, which is just outside of Stockholm. It will service the KICKS markets, so Sweden, Norway, Finland, and it's an omni warehouse, so both e-commerce and stores. We are also soon opening a new logistics center outside of Copenhagen in Lynge. And I will now zoom in on both of these very exciting projects, starting with the KICKS logistics center in Rosersberg.
So as I said, it's a highly automated warehouse, meaning it will take less than 10 minutes from the time a customer online places an order until it goes through the automation, and it's ready for pickup by a last mile transporter. Highly automated also means that 90% of all orders will actually have very limited human interaction as it goes through the warehouse, which is also great as we wanna scale going forward. It's a large warehouse. It's roughly four times the size of the previous KICKS e-commerce warehouse. It is a major transformation of our supply chain. We used to have 5 different supply chains for KICKS and Skincity, and now we have one. So this has been a major change to the entire organization.
It's been a huge team effort to get this to work. We've been spending a few months now on getting things to work, stabilizing, and so on. But as of right now, we are actually in normal operations, which is great. I also wanna mention that we, from the very beginning, set very high sustainability ambitions for this warehouse, and it will be certified BREEAM-SE Excellent, which few warehouses can pride themselves with reaching. So really super exciting. And another great thing is that as we now just have been through this big journey on the KICKS side, and we're planning a similar go live in Matas, we will be bringing a lot of great insights, a lot of lessons learned that we will use in Lynge.
So the Matas new warehouse is roughly the same size, a bit bigger than the KICKS warehouse. It is only for e-commerce. It will actually use a high-tech solution. It's a different solution to the one that we have in Rosersberg. It will be an AutoStore, which is really suited for e-commerce. In Rosersberg, we're using a shuttle solution, which is great for omni. Also here, and we're really proud about having high sustainability ambitions here as well. It's a different type of standard, but we'll also be certified at a very high level. And as of right now, things are looking really good. We are on time, on budget, on scope, and we are planning to, as mentioned before, to go live early next year.
What are the benefits with having these two highly automated warehouses? Well, there are a lot of benefits. From a customer perspective, I mean, it's all about... And we've talked about this before, it's all about being faster. And this was a question that came up before, right? How can we be fast in KICKS in the three markets? Well, we see the Rosersberg warehouse being one component, but then with a pick-in-store solution and possibly getting last miles going out from some of the bigger stores, that will actually make us really fast locally also. With a highly automated solution, we expect error rates to go down, and we also expect a reduced risk of stock out, which is great for our customers. More from an internal perspective, I mean, it's now scalable.
We are taking into consideration a big growth journey ahead of us, both in Rosersberg and in Lynge. We will have a reduced cost for our supply chain, which is great. We will have a better inventory management. And last but not least, we expect to reduce environmental impact as well, as we are able to reduce packaging material, use solar energy, reduce air that is transported, since we'll be able to cut the packages and so on, to a great size. So really a lot of great benefits for our customers and for us as a company. All right, that was supply chain, and now I'll move on to IT. The starting point here is that we have two completely separate IT structures, right?
And the great thing is that we have actually, as you've heard already, we've come a long way in terms of having really strong omni platforms, both in KICKS and Matas. So as we now... And as I mentioned, the mission is to, to unify and modernize. As we now embark on that journey, we actually have a lot of great solutions to pick and choose from. And as of right now, we've made most of the choices on what we think makes sense. And I think Lise showed us the mPOS, so the mobile POS before, and I think this is a, is a great example. I remember, I think, probably seven years ago or so, on the KICKS side, when I was CIO, we started looking at a mobile POS, POS as well.
And it was something that we really believed in, and we put a lot of effort, but after a year or two, we just felt that we can't make this work. On the Matas side, we didn't give up, and today, we actually have a really great solution that we now can bring to the KICKS side, and just one example of these advantages that we get by now joining forces. We are in, I would say, in the ramp-up phase of the merger, integration, transformation around IT. We expect to be through in the financial year 2026, 2027. This is, as I mentioned, it's an exciting, it's, it's a big journey that we have to get this together.
But we will get to one shared platform also in IT, and that will bring a lot of advantages to the group, to make the group stronger. We will actually have then, I mean, one POS solution, we'll have one e-commerce solution for the group. So every investment that we put in to the actual platform can be leveraged across. So either we can reduce the total CapEx, OpEx in IT, or we can get just a bigger bang for the buck that we put in. As part of this, we also want to unify the way we're working across the group by having shared processes and systems, and that will also drive efficiencies across the group. We talked about cybersecurity before.
This is an area where we, by joining forces, we can get a better shared protection also, which will be important going forward. And as we're now setting this platform up for the future, we're of course looking into enabling more scalability long term, in this strategy as well. So a lot of exciting things happening in IT. And let me take us to the last area, AI and analytics. And this is actually an area where we have already come a very, I would say, very far already in KICKS and Matas. It's something that we've been investing in, and this is an area where we wanna step up going forward. When we look at AI and analytics, we look at it from, I would say, two main areas.
One is, how can we leverage these technologies for the customer journey and improving that? And I would say that's maybe the more fun part, where we have spent most of our time so far. And I'll, you've heard some of the examples. I'll take you through one example in a short while. But what we also wanna do, which is then the other side, what we here call backend, it's all about how can we operate, how can we steer and govern the company in a smarter way by leveraging data and smartness across? So this is something we wanna enable for the group, get our data together, so that we can use it in a smart way as possible. And let me just finish off by zooming in on, I think, a great example.
You've heard about it already, the KICKS Beauty Bot. I would recommend that you go to KICKS.se to check this out. It's actually a great tool if you are like me, not that great with our products, and you need some help. Because if you look at typical search engines, they are all about you—you pretty much need to know what you want to find the right results. Whereas this KICKS Beauty Bot is more about solving a problem. So, for example, if you are going hiking in the Alps, you can ask the Beauty Bot, "What type of skincare should I bring?" If...
Or if you're gonna buy a present to someone, you can just ask, "Okay, what should I buy this 18-year-old guy that wants to feel successful?" And it will actually give you some examples of things that you can buy. And what we see with this is that it's actually also great for business, right? Key KPIs are going up, so add to cart, clearly going up. Items purchased, also clearly going up. So this type of smart systems that we have actually built ourselves, leveraging ChatGPT, can actually be used in a really smart way. And this is, like we mentioned before, something that we now wanna look at across the group. Great. So just briefly to summarize, supply chain, it's all about future-proofing and automating. Easy. IT, unifying and modernizing.
Finally, AI and analytics, all about leveraging the technologies that are coming out there. Great. Thank you.
Thank you, David. Listening to you, I think it's a great example of how retail is very, very different now from what it was just 15 years ago, when it was a store around the corner and people driving out with goods from the central warehouse. This is retail now. It's highly, highly intelligent, highly data-driven, highly tech-driven. Super happy to have you on board to drive these 2, 3 big transformations for us. Now, it's time for my good colleague, Per. Per's been with Matas for two years as Group CFO. We had a great job interview, and we decided that we wanted to work together, and Per should join this wonderful Danish company called Matas, located in Allerød. Stable business.
You know, you had a life of doing all kinds of things, working with private equity, being overworked by those kinds of owners. And so we made the deal, and after we had a conversation, and then we said, "Oh, it's quite nice. It's 10 minutes from where you live. You can drive to the HQ and back." And then you started, and I said, "I have to tell you something. We have an idea to maybe go beyond Denmark. We have a conversation with KICKS." And your job for the last two years has actually been driving and helping with the entire acquisition process, and since then, with the integration, which is not 10 minutes away from home.
Thank you very much for joining and for still being here, and show us the money.
Thank you, Gregers. Well, I guess, you know, I've been looking very much forward to being here today and to present this to you. And I guess you've been waiting for this also in terms of some financial numbers. And just one thing I wanna highlight is, I've not been in Matas for two years. I've been here for four years. At least it feels like it in terms of hours. But let me, over the next 15, 20 minutes, take you through the financials, the investment story, the equity story of what you will be looking at, and the strategy we will be rolling out. I'll also cover our capital allocation principles.
So let me dive into this by starting with our-
... with our midterm financial guidance. As Craig has already said, you know, our aim is to deliver above DKK 10 million, or DKK 10 billion, sorry, in 2027-28. And at the same time, you know, expand our EBITDA margin to 15%-16%. So what are some of the key assumptions behind these numbers? It's really what you've seen already today. It's the plans that Carola and Lise presented for the KICKS business and for the Matas business. It's all about some of the expansion things that Alice talked about in terms of assortment, and as well as Brian alluded to the whole development within digital. So and how do we then get the expansion of our EBITDA? That is really through some of the many of the things that David was talking about before.
In terms of the other elements, CapEx, our gearing, and our dividend policies, it's unchanged, compared to what you've seen in the past. The next thing, of course, is, you know, and I think a lot of questions on that has been around in terms of our synergies, and we are still on track to deliver the DKK 140 million, as we've talked about already from when we announced the acquisition of KICKS, and I'll come back to more details on that. But let's just look at the journey we're on. We've already talked about this, quite some times today in terms of the renewing Matas strategy, followed by growing Matas, which has been very successful, supported by different movements in the market, of course.
What we're looking at right now is within the Nordics. I just put in, as you'll see on the screen, the DKK 6.7 million was basically what we just reported this morning in our financial accounts. What that entails is a pro forma business of DKK 7.8 million. So when we report next year, you will see a bigger jump than what we're talking about today. But that's just accounting-wise, but, you know, from an underlying business performance, we are still looking at the 4-7, as we announced this morning. The starting point is then the DKK 7.8 million, and we're looking to grow that to DKK 10 billion. And let me take you through some of the key elements of what's going to take us there.
It's basically going to be a combination of two things: the market growth, as we talked about, the 3.6% that, that we have factored in, and then combined with, with gaining market share. And the key element here, of course, in addition to, to, the market growth themselves, is, you know, how do we then capture, market share in the market over the next years? And this, and I think we've already talked about earlier today, we're looking at around 6.3% if we need to hit above DKK 10 billion by, by 2027, 2028. But let me give you a, a, some examples on, on, so what does it mean by gaining market share, and how are we going to do that?
What I brought to you today is just examples on how we look at that from a KICKS perspective. Some of these, of course, will also apply on the Matas banner, but this is just to show you some of the key facts in terms of what we've been looking at. On the right side, you will see, on your left side, you will see the spend per member in Denmark is roughly DKK 1,850. If we look at the spend per member in KICKS across the three countries, it's DKK 650. So what are our plans basically to drive that going forward? We already touched upon that, you know, from Carola's perspective and her plans today in terms of the assortment expansion.
When we look at the different number of SKUs that we currently carry, you know, we have around 50,000 in Denmark, 30,000 in Sweden. That is just 60% difference in terms of if we would have the same number of SKUs. We will not have that in the short term, as Carola also alluded to. It's a plan that will evolve over time, but just tells you that there is, there's a room in terms of number of SKUs in the business. The second point is the spend, basically per store. Currently, there is 30% difference in terms of how much a store sells for in Matas compared to KICKS. If we look at the average size of the stores, excluding the flagship stores in Sweden, it's the same size.
And how do we then work with that? Part of that will also be number of SKUs in store. Of course, taking into account the different treatment that KICKS has as Carola already alluded to earlier, but still room for improvements also in terms of number of SKUs. Then, as already talked about, don't wanna touch more on that, but the number of stores, the store expansion and the opportunities in the market to increase the number of stores, of course, is also going to be a key driver. And last but not least, all the elements that Brian just touched upon on how we're going to drive the digital agenda and how we're going to drive the loyalty club.
Not at least, you know, potentially with, with also using some of the features from, from the app, that we have in, in Matas, currently not in KICKS. So this is just an example on, you know, spend per member in KICKS. That does not mean that, you know, this is not going to continue as, as Lise already presented for the Matas banner, but it's just an example on how we can drive the spend per member in the KICKS market. And you can do the math yourself.
Moving into the EBITDA, which is the other key element, of course, we would be looking at how do we grow the business from today of roughly DKK 1.1 billion, and if we hit the mid of our guidance in 2027-2028, we'll add DKK 400 million of incremental EBITDA. What drives that? Of course, we'll have the market growth, but if we would only have the market growth, we would not get to where we need to. And that, in addition, will then be the margin improvement initiatives that we have planned. Most of these you've already heard about. There's the automation of our logistics centers, and that would improve our margins as we move into automation compared to the setup we have today.
There's the synergies, the DKK 140 million, which we've discussed a couple of times, and then, of course, as we become bigger, we will get some operational leverage. What does that give us? That gives us a pocket or a, an amount that we can invest in the market to ensure that we get to the DKK 10 billion. A little bit part of this will also be, you know, moving as, as, as Gregers said in the beginning, a big chunk of the growth will be on the e-com side, and that will, of course, also impact from a, from a mix perspective. However, as we start getting more and more automated, that impact will be less. This will bring us to the 15%-16% EBITDA margin in 2027-2028. Maybe just, before we move on, just cover the synergies.
I know that's been a question. So it basically consists of two things: the DKK 40 million of standalone synergies coming out of KICKS, which was basically linked to two items, the integration of Skincity and the launch of our automatic logistic center. Those two items have basically been executed. Part of the synergies is in the base, and the rest will be in the year 2025, 2024-2025, as we move forward. In terms of the group synergies, the DKK 100 million we talked about and we announced when we acquired KICKS is on track. The reorganization we did as of April 1, of course, has been executed, and that will go into 2025, 2024-2025 from a run rate perspective.
And the two other elements is basically linked into our supplier negotiations and scaling and sharing best practices, and we are still on track by 2025, 2026 to have all DKK 100 million into our, into our performance. And with that, I will move into our capital allocation. And this is. There's no change to this as I said earlier. Basically, what we're looking at is our free cash flow. We will apply that to and use around 3%-4% of our revenues we'll use in CapEx on an ongoing basis. This does not include, of course, costs like MLC or logistics, and so that's after that. And then we'll use that funds after investments in de-gearing within the range of 2-3 times.
And last but not least, free funds will then go into dividends or share buyback. So that's the, that's the, that's the prioritization of our free cash flow. Free cash flow next year, 2024, 2025, is going to be limited. We're going to finalize the investments we have on the Matas Logistics Center. And as we presented this morning, roughly DKK 650 million next year goes into CapEx, of which DKK 325 million is linked to the finalization of, of the logistics center. However, after 2024, 2025, there will be significant cash flow, and we'll, we'll evaluate that as we move along in terms of how do we deploy that the best way possible. This plan does not come without risks. And Gregers was talking a little bit about it in, in the early stage.
So, when we look at this, of course, we have based our plans on a growth in the market, and there could be macro developments in terms of the market. There could be changes in terms of consumer spending, there could be changes in regulations, there could be all kinds of things. I think, you know, we have, as a business, shown historically that in downturns and in times with economic crisis, that Matas Group has actually performed very well. We have not had the same impact, you know, the lipstick effect, and we also believe that, you know, going forward, we'll be able to manage that in the same kind of way. But of course, there is an overall macroeconomic element to it. Then there's industry development and competition.
I think the biggest thing here is probably an entrance of a big competitor of some kind. We think with our structure, with our setup, from an omni-channel perspective, that we have the winning model. We also believe we are very strong in this structure and the setup we have, which is not easy to replicate, copy, and which is basically the reason why we believe that we'll be able to sustain this in a good manner and manage that risk as well. Having said that, you never know what happens from a competitive perspective. Just want to highlight that. Last but not least, and this is about cybersecurity.
You know, we, we all read about companies being attacked, and I, I think we have a very strong setup, both in terms of protection, but also the way that we structure our IT, which will allow us to be as protected as you can be... Having said that, you know, you never know what you don't know. But I think we have a very strong setup also from this perspective. And this will then bring me, trying to summarize and conclude also a little bit for the day before I will, hand over to, to Gregers. What we're basically looking at is that we, the Matas Group, we are the market, market leader in the Nordics. We have an ambition to be number one in each of the markets, in each of the channels, in each of the categories, core categories.
We are operating in a very attractive market, a big market, where there's still room to grow and still room to capture market share. We have a very solid platform from where we can grow, as David also was talking about, in terms of our new automation and so forth. We have a business model, which is very strong in terms of our omni-channel setup. From 2025, 2026, we have a very significant cash flow going forward, which we can apply and use in the market to continuously grow, and capture market share. And last but not least, I think you met all my colleagues today. I think you would agree, we have a very strong management team, a very seasoned management team that will be able to deliver this plan.
This is, this is the summary of basically all the stuff that you've seen today, and with that, we will be able to deliver above DKK 10 billion by 2027, 2028. We will deliver a 15%-16% EBITDA, so we'll deliver profitable growth over the next four years. CapEx, we have the funds to continue to do the investments. We believe that's going to be around the 3%-4% on an annual basis. We will evaluate every year if there's big opportunities out there, and of course, we'll evaluate and look at those. We have a sound gearing at 2-3 times. We'll continue at that level. And last but not least, any excess funds, of course, will go back to the, to the shareholders, if we cannot deploy them in, in the business and create even bigger returns.
When you look at all these elements, and you look at the earnings per share, you will see a double-digit earnings per share growth over the period. With that, I will hand over to Gregers for a summary, and before we open for Q&As.
Thank you, Per, for adding everything up. This finalizes, summarizes the presentation from our team. I hope that we have given you deep insight into what kind of business we are, but even more, that you leave in maybe an hour's time or when we're done with question, that you leave having seen that we believe in the plan, that we have concrete evidence to support what we're doing. We're not doing something new. We're doing what we have been doing for years. Now, we're doing it together and in four markets. And that is why I personally am quite hopeful about what we are about to enter into. So, what we're going to do next is Q&A.
You can ask questions of anyone, direct them to me, and I'll make sure that they end up in the right place, or if it's something very sensitive, I will give you a long and nonsensical answer. Please ask anything, anything you want and need. Let's go to Q&A, and Matthias has the microphone.
Hello, Klaus Kehl from Nykredit. You have talked quite a lot about that you have launched new categories, and you have expanded your assortment, and I can see it also on your top line. But you haven't really talked about what kind of impact it has on your earnings or margins or anything. So could you elaborate a bit on that? And then my second question, and perhaps it's a bit related, but when I try to add it all up, and I look at your financial targets, then I'm not quite sure why your margins doesn't end up above 15%-16%, 3 or 4 years down the road. So, yeah, could you yeah, also expand on a little bit on that?
Yes. So a very good question on what is the effect of assortment expansion on margins. And if you remember, Alice's presentation, she had the playbook, where we start out by identifying and sourcing and then introducing the assortment and then building awareness. That is an investment. It is a margin investment because you don't really have the negotiation power towards the suppliers to get the best deals. You have to introduce the products to consumers, and often you have to introduce with campaigns to lure consumers into the beautiful environments that we're creating, and you have to overspend on marketing as a ratio of sales for that category. So in the beginning, as you enter new categories, they are margin dilutive.
But quite soon, as they scale, they rocket, I would say, towards the levels that we are used to, because the categories we enter are categories where we feel that we can add value as a retailer. It's beyond just the product, and we are, of course, careful to select brands and categories that fit our logistics systems and that fits our margin requirements as well. So you do see some margin dilution from entering new assortment, but you also see the ramp up as these new assortment areas scale. And this is quite similar to what we have seen historically, that in the beginning, the online business was margin dilutive. As it scales, we've seen the online business become almost as profitable as the store business. So that's the one question. On the margins, yes.
I think what you are asking about is what is the size of the red box? Because there are a lot of initiatives supporting margin improvement synergies, standalone improvements, operating leverage. So this, to us, is the reserve we need to drive growth, but also to make sure that if we find ourselves in more competitive situations, that we can respond to that. So we need a margin reserve. If there is someone who comes at us at big speed, we don't wanna be tied up in a situation that we—where we can't respond because we've made promises. I think that is a very sound management decision to always be able to respond if there is competition, if prices change, if the consumers change, some of those scenarios that Per went through, you have to be able to have the flexibility to execute on that.
As always, running a business is not a straight line, so, we will adapt all the time. We would look at how much growth opportunity is out there. If one year we can grow faster than expected by doing more, then we want the freedom to do that. So that's the background for the margin guidance.
Yes, thank you. So Win in the Nordics, what is sort of the ambition internationally? I know you also have tested Germany. Is that done and completed now?
Not at all, but after joining forces with KICKS, we think there is a DKK 1 billion opportunity in growing in the Nordics. Running wholesale in Germany could still be a good business, but it's a much, much smaller business. We will continue to wholesale our products in Germany. We will run it profitably, break even. It's not an area where we want to invest a lot more, but keeping the chips on the table is a good idea for a company like us, and we have quite strong relations to the German retailers, and actually won the Retail Award for being best brand partner to the retailers that we're working with in Germany.
What I would say for win the Nordics is that we have learned a lot about introducing our own products with another retailer, and if you think about it, that's really what we're doing with KICKS. We're taking brands that the Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish consumer may not know, that we know and love, but they might not know and love it until we do the right thing. And that experience, I think, is worth more than what we're making in Germany, frankly.
Then at the last Capital Markets Day, you had some slides around the capacity utilization in terms of SKUs and number of orders. Where are we today with MLC and Rosersberg? What is the max capacity? Where are you today, also in terms of the number of orders?
So with the setup we are building now, we have the capacity to grow to the ambitions that we have set, so you shouldn't anticipate another big logistics investment to get to the DKK 10 billion. Who knows what the future brings, and that's why we've made sure that it's scalable, what we're doing. As to the question of efficiencies, we have not started running down the learning curve yet. We've just opened Rosersberg. MLC is not even open yet. So that run will be for the next time we meet.
Last time you gave some numbers on the slides.
On the impact of MLC?
No, the number of daily online orders compared to the capacity.
Ah.
And then also on the same in terms of SKUs.
Yes. So we haven't brought updated numbers, this time, so.
I think you can say that what we currently have of scale in terms of both Rosersberg and what we're building for MLC is based upon the level of e-com we have today, plus our expectations for the coming years, so there should be plenty of capacity to manage the orders that we're looking into in this Win in the Nordics.
Thank you. First question, on the synergies part, so you reiterate that, but are there any synergies built, you know, cost synergies built beyond the 25, 26, as your margin target is for 27, 28? And then also maybe if you comment a bit on the revenue synergies.
Yes
... That'd be the first question.
So at this point, we don't see synergies beyond what we have communicated. So the synergy plan is on track. I think what we are learning, and I think what every other company is learning, that it's a trade-off. If you take out synergies, you do lose some momentum on growth and being in the market, and this plan is about winning in the market. And I think that's much more valuable. Over time, will we identify new savings potentials, new efficiencies? I think we should consider that part of the running business, part of what we called operational excellence in Carola's and Lise's presentations. And what you heard from both Alice and from David and from Brian is about sharing. So is there more ways we can share the platform?
So that's for sure. And the other question?
That was the revenue synergies as well.
Yeah, revenue. I think what we showed you today, a lot of that is revenue synergies, so the fact that we have a 70,000 SKU base that we can now share to drive the assortment expansion without making a single phone call to a supplier, I think that is an obvious revenue synergy. I think what Brian showed you on retail media might not be a revenue synergy, but it's you know, driving that retail media business across the Nordics on one platform, one concept, being ahead of the market in the offerings we can make to suppliers, I think is another one. And the whole way of running the club, prepare a slide on what do we do to increase spend per member in KICKS? Those are examples of revenue synergies, I guess. Yeah.
Then secondly, you say you wanted to consolidate the Nordic beauty market, and M&A is obviously an obvious lever here. So what is your view on M&A? And I'm thinking both in terms of obviously consolidation of the retail within health and beauty, but maybe also on potential brands you want to increase the share of revenue from own brands as well.
Yeah. So historically, we have made acquisitions that accelerate our strategy. That is our thinking as well, that if we find appropriate targets, appropriately priced targets as well, that fit well into what we're doing, that's not a distraction from what we're doing, then it's part of the toolbox. But this is not an M&A strategy as such. And our targets, just to reiterate, are based on organic growth and the initiatives you've heard today.
Okay. Let me rephrase the question.
... maybe then. So, is there anything that would make it not likely for you to do any M&A? Would you be willing to do it if obviously, the right asset comes along at the right price?
I think that's too big of a question to answer broadly. I think M&A is always specific. It's always case by case. This is our strategy. The Nordics is our strategy. It's an organic strategy. If we see opportunity to accelerate with a good buy and a good fit, then we will look at it, and we might walk away from it if we don't think it's a sound business, or if it doesn't fit, or if it's a distraction, or if we can't afford it, or whatever. That's the thinking.
Maybe just one thing-
Yes
... one question left. On the margin bridge, maybe could you comment maybe a bit on what are the levers to and then the high end of the range, and what are the levers to and then the low end of the range?
I don't think that would be helpful because it would probably not be exact enough for you to actually use it.
And I also think, you know, when you look at the different ones, you know, the automation of our logistics and that, that's also a journey that will come over time. There will be more and more experience with the systems, the setup, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a little bit difficult. This is why this is illustrative also, that we will capture synergies or value or margins out of that. How much and how fast, you know, we'll take the learnings as we move on. So that's... You can say that would be the difference out of the end. If everything would be super, super successful, probably in the higher end compared to being successful, still being good at inside the range, but, you know, we cannot put specifics on them.
I think the only one we said is the synergies. We believe we are on track for the DKK 140 million.
What you can't do, you can't take a precision measuring band and say, "Oh, this is 140," so your predecessor always said, "That's what the analyst used to do," is
Wow
... because you forget to size it. So the blocks are very indicative and same size. Yeah.
Thank you. So, my first question was on sort of the revenue growth curve towards 2027, 2028. Now, how about sort of the margin curve towards 2027, 2028?
Yeah. So I think, you, you get two data points, right?
Yeah. Yeah, I think, you know, what we said is when we look at the next year's guidance, we're looking at 14.5-15.5. So that's the first point. And then from there on, until 2027, we really will be within 15-16.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So there's no-
There's-
... you can't imply whether-
There's not-
... is it like this or is it like this, or what's it like?
No.
I think a lot of that has to do, again, with business flexibility, that if we see opportunities to grow faster, we might take some of those opportunities. So, you have the start and the end, but the journey, we can't be specific about that.
Yeah, okay, but it's fair. It's fair.
And then back to, circling back to the cost synergies. So from David's presentation, at least as I heard, the ramp-up phase in IT transformation and the integration is done by 2026, 2027. So to me, that sounds like cost synergies beyond 2025, 2026, or was I hearing it wrong here, or?
IT synergies, IT is not part of our synergy scope. So the IT transformation is basically about investing to have one platform where we get a higher return on investment. And whether that will allow us to spend the same in IT and just get a higher return, or whether that will allow us to spend less on IT to get the return we used to get, that's more of a theoretical discussion, I think.
Okay. But it sounds like upside potential or-
I think—we think there is, and David, you can comment. There is, of course, upside to having one platform that you can leverage across markets.
Yeah.
But please add some flavor.
Yeah, and I think we always wanna add more, right? In terms of IT, we wanna have more systems, more tools, and so on. So, I think, yeah, it's up to us to choose. Do we wanna get the savings or do we wanna get higher leverage? And that we don't know yet.
Yeah, thank you. Thank you, David. And then, just my last question, sort of on the SKUs or the SKUs, sorry. So it seems like from your last Capital Markets Day, it was a lot about the 100,000 SKU number you wanted to add to the business, and now you have added, I guess, was it 20,000 SKUs since then? And you've been driving, I guess, more revenue from those SKUs than you expected. So what are sort of the learning been from this transformation and working with, so broadening the assortment?
I think the learning obviously is that we can drive a lot of the revenue with fewer SKUs than maybe we thought. But if you look back, what we said at the last Capital Markets Day is really we built capacity to 150,000 SKUs, but it's not a goal to go to 150,000. Not a goal. We're looking at revenue, at SKU efficiency, and can we do more revenues with fewer SKUs? That is obviously business optimal. So we're not guiding on how many SKUs we have the room to expand further, but we can reach the targets that we have here with the capacity that we have here and with the organization that we have now. Will there be more opportunities to enter more space and more categories? Maybe. We'll see about that.
But for now, our priority is getting bigger in categories where we have already entered, for Matas, whereas for KICKS, it's, as Carola mentioned, taking share in some of the core categories where we could be stronger.
Do you see any signs of cannibalization from launching BeautyAct on Matas's website?
No. There's always a bit of cannibalization when you launch a new brand, and that's healthy because it teaches you as a retailer which brands are not sustainable in the long run, so that's part of the jungle law of retail. You bring in something else; if consumers, you know, shift, then something else might be crowded out. But specifically for BeautyAct, no. You can comment. Yeah.
No, but we are in the early stages with BeautyAct launching online, but right now we see incremental business.
You would do the same with the other brands? You would do the same with the other brands than in-house brands.
If they are all incremental sales-
Yeah
... or if they crowd out something else, I think there's no one answer to that.
Yeah.
It's all about how are the brands positioned. Let me give you an example, Nilens Jord. We thought that we had identified the closest peer to Nilens Jord, and that when that brand started to make investments in building out their assortment, we thought it might hurt Nilens Jord. Not at all. Not at all. It, if anything, it created more attention, more awareness, more growth to Nilens Jord. So it's one of these things you can look at the data, you can articulate all kinds of hypothesis, but seeing is believing. We have been surprised to the degree where new assortment is incremental revenue and actually incremental customers who are looking for that brand with us, but haven't found it until now.
Just a follow-up question here. Could you maybe comment a bit on what to expect on, on a per banner? Just to be at, you know, you, you said on the conference call as well, you know, there's a lot of moving parts. Obviously, very interesting to hear. Now you have the opportunity to present all those moving parts.
Mm-hmm.
But, you know, how to view the growth journey for those two brands? And then maybe also if you could comment on the disclosure part. Is it correctly understood that you will—that we will have a like-for-like per banner and also a channel per banner going forward?
In terms of disclosure, yes. Once we start reporting every quarter, we will report the, the, the growth per banner. So which will give you the information that, you know, how is one banner performing compared to the other banner as, as part of our regular, you know, quarterly, quarterly numbers. We'll not go into the different markets in each of the banners, but we'll, we'll focus on the banners.
And that is also like-for-like and per channel?
That will be like-for-like and per channel, yes.
Perfect. Okay. And the growth outlook for, for each of the banners?
Yes, that's a great question. We guide on the totality.
Yeah.
But you also guide on EBITDA margin, and then, as you probably know, Per especially, you know, I prefer looking at EBIT. So maybe could you comment a bit on also all these investments on how to think about the depreciation amortizations in this period then at least?
I think, you know, if there's a couple of elements that goes into that, of course. One thing is the whole leasing obligations, as you know, and then that is already always determines a little bit on, on the interest rates in the market, and then you define on how much you capitalize and how much is interest. So that will be a moving part. I think when you look at the last quarter of this year, I will give that as a guidance. You'll see a number in terms of depreciations, and I think that would be a good proxy for what you would expect for the coming years.
Okay, perfect. Then just lastly on, this is more of a commercial question, and I was just wondering, the brands that were not interested in going to neither Matas or KICKS, where were they present, for the Nordic consumer?
Some of them have not been present yet. I cannot go into specific brands, but what's interesting now is that they have the gateway to Nordics. So if you have not been present yet in Nordic, you know, scale was really important and the ease of doing business, and that was some of the reason for signing them now.
Perfect.
Kind of being a preferred partner now.
Frankly, if you're a global brand, the Nordics is-
Still small
... difficult-
Yeah
... and small.
Yeah.
We're trying to make it interesting and slightly bigger and easier.
All right. Thank you very much for your attention. Thanks for joining. You are more than welcome to take a drink on the way out. If you want to have a tour of the store, those of you who are in the room, please just go to John. And for all of those of you who have joined us online and are still hanging on, thank you so much for listening in to our Capital Markets Day. We're here to win the Nordics, and we're happy to get started. For us, work starts tomorrow, so that we can deliver on those ambitions. Thank you so much for joining. Take care.