Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Annual Report 2020 to 2021. For the first part of this call, all participants will be in listen only mode, and afterwards there will be a question- and- answer session. Today, I am pleased to present Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg. Please begin your meeting.
Thank you, operator, and welcome everyone to the call and webcast covering the financial year 2021 and also a preview of our strategy. With me today, I have Anders Skole-Sørensen, our CFO. Today, I'll make a few comments on the current situation. Anders will be covering our financial results for the year. I will get back to the guidance for the coming financial year. Then we will move on to the strategy preview. We will take questions at the end, so that if you have questions for the strategy preview, you can include those as well. As for the financial year, it has, of course, been an exceptional year in so many regards. Heavily affected by COVID-19, but also a testament to the strength of our renewing Matas strategy. Revenues reached DKK 4.16 billion . Our EBITDA before special items came in at DKK 797 million.
That is a like-for-like growth of 13.5%, something that I don't think that we have ever seen maybe since the beginning of Matas, but of course, driven by the very special circumstances of this year. An EBITDA margin of 19.1%, which is actually a tad better than last year, which is quite important given our massive online transformation in the year. We have seen for the year, if I were to pick out one number, it would be that we crossed the threshold and the milestone of DKK 1 billion in online sales, almost DKK 1.1 billion, constituting 26% of total sales. Even in Q4, we actually reached just above 32% of all sales. Our EBIT margin of 19.1% is supported by a market leap in our online profitability. I will get back to that later in the call.
Of course, notable also a cash generation at an all-time high of DKK 774 million, which is supported by quite intensive work with optimizing our inventories. On the back of that, the board will propose a payout of DKK 150 million, split evenly between a dividend of DKK 2 per share and a share buyback program. As for the new year, and trading from April 1st to May 22nd, we have seen 7% growth. We're happy with that. It has been driven by a store comeback. We are actually seeing stores climbing towards the pre-COVID-19 level, and online sales have actually remained at last year's very, very high level.
As for the 2021, 2022 guidance, I will get back to that in detail, it is all about sustaining the uplift that we have seen in this year, we are kickstarting our new strategy and investing both margin and CapEx in reaching higher long-term growth. As for the strategy review, we will just go through the execution of the renewing Matas strategy. We have reached our financial ambitions way ahead of time. I will give you a preview of the Matas Group strategy, where the key point is that we will position ourselves for better long-term growth. With that, I will hand over to Anders to cover the financial results.
Thank you, Gregers. As we can see here, and Gregers has already mentioned it, a very solid growth of 12.9% top line, 13.5% like for like. If we look at the sales, sort of splitting it a bit into the areas themselves, you could see that health and wellbeing was the star performer for the year, rising almost 19% and still adding around 18% of growth in the fourth quarter. In the fourth quarter alone, our high-end business performed extremely well, growing over 22.5%. For the whole year, it was also a very solid growth of 13.3%. Mass beauty was the lowest performer. For instance, makeup had a hard year during the COVID-19, not very surprising, perhaps. It still grew overall by 9.9% in the year, and actually in the fourth quarter, it made a strong comeback, growing 17.6%.
As to the gross margin, well, in reality, it was really very stable, a marginal drop of 0.3%. If we look just at the fourth quarter, it was at 45.6%, which is shy short of the 45.8% we saw in the fourth quarter of last year. The really impressive here is actually that with an online share of, as Gregers mentioned, over 32% in the fourth quarter versus 19% of last year. That is very impressive because as we've discussed many times over, there is a tendency for gross margin in the online business to be slightly lower. Now, however, and this we will come back to in further detail, that gap has really closed dramatically over the last year. We're not really seeing much of a gap anymore.
The costs I will come back to in more detail, just the headline number, they went up by DKK 100 million. EBITDA before special items, well, the margin was virtually unchanged, as we said, from only rising to 19.1% against 19.0%. In the fourth quarter alone, EBITDA rose by 28% versus last year, and the margin rose from 14.6% to 15.6%. The fourth quarter of last year was negatively affected by the lockdown in March of 2020. As to adjusted net profit, well, the rise is basically just the rise we saw in EBITDA minus the taxes. We have to pay taxes. Free cash flow, I will revert to in more excruciating details later. As the number of transactions you can see, it looks like it's the same number. It's not quite the same number. It actually went up by 0.3% year-on-year.
Given the behavioral changes that was brought on by COVID-19, which basically meant that the customers had fewer but larger baskets, we think that this is quite a satisfactory development. If we look at Q4, we actually saw a rise of 1.6% in the number of transactions. As mentioned, larger baskets, we saw that very much throughout the year with the basket size growing 13% year-on-year and even more in the last quarter, where it grew over 17%. Good. If we look at slightly longer-term trends, well, the revenue growth basically speaks for itself. Strong growth in all quarters, peaking in the fourth quarter with almost a 20% like-for-like growth. We have to, of course, remember here that particularly the fourth quarter last year was negatively affected, as mentioned, by the COVID-19 lockdown.
The gross margin development is stabilizing the way we see it, and that is in spite of the channel shift, as mentioned before. The EBITDA margin also quite stable if you look over the last eight quarters. Actually, very stable, I would say, if you look at the numbers quarter per quarter. With regards to longer-term developments in the EBITDA, you can see that, of course, we have actually been increasing our EBITDA in Danish kroner, i.e., the sums are going up because of the rising sales. Now I'm just returning slightly a bit to the cost development. The total operating costs were up by DKK 93 million over the year, and in Q4 alone, they rose by DKK 39 million. However, as a percentage of sales, costs were marginally down in 2021 and also in the fourth quarter, where costs fell from 32% to 31% of sales.
Throughout the year, the development that has been clear with the rapid increase in online sales, both we've seen a rapid increase in the cost associated with the online sales, of course, because we've seen the volume rising as much as it has. However, we've also seen that the costs in the rest of the business have been actually behaving very well, and we've been able to reduce the underlying cost base elsewhere, particularly, of course, in the physical stores. And the net result has been a marginal trend, as shown in the overall cost ratio. As to the cost split between staff costs and other external costs going forward, we see the trend that has been developing, we see that continuing as the channel shift continues in the business.
I think it's fair to say that going forward, there is probably a likelihood that other external costs will rise relative to staff costs as long as the channel shift is ongoing. We come to the slide that for many of you who've seen this, heard me talk about the development in inventories, it's been a bit of a rough ride over the years, but I'm very happy to say that this year it's a much, much improved picture. Cash flow, of course, has been good, and we'll come back to that overall, but it has been helped very much by the inventories. You can see that inventories dropped by almost DKK 100 million in the year, and that was in spite of the fact that we actually had to increase inventories with regards to COVID-19 related products.
We all know what we're talking about, face masks and hand sanitizers and such. We had to add on to the inventories at our Humlebæk facility. In particular, [inaudible] also had to add a little inventory because of the rising volumes. In the rest of the business, we were able to actually take a lot of inventory out, and overall inventories dropped. The drop of almost DKK 100 million is impressive in itself, but it's even more impressive if we look at this and compare it to the turnover. Actually, at the end of last year, if we looked at our inventories as relative to the last 12 months turnover, we were sitting at a 26%, while when we exited the 2021 financial year, that number had dropped to below 21%.
A huge improvement and basically achieved through a combination of better system support and frankly, more focus plus more intelligent management on all levels or within all levels of the organization. Just to cap off the rest of the cash flow development, we just talked about the inventories, but there was also a positive impact from our trade payables because we had rising volumes, obviously, with the rise in sales. We had another push there of about DKK 125 million. We paid a little more in interest and taxes, not surprising with the rise in the cash flow. CapEx was lower. That should be noted because what we saw was, if you dive into the numbers in more detail, you can see that the CapEx was particularly low with regards to the investments in the store portfolio.
That was somewhat partly mitigated or partly outweighed by an increase in investments in IT and in the online business, but not totally. Acquisitions was much lower than last year because if you remember last year, there was an impact because both of some payments in Kosmolet and also in Firtal's acquisition of Din Frisørshop, and we didn't have this this year. All in all, when you add all of these numbers up, you get that very impressive rise in overall free cash flow by more than DKK 660 million from about DKK 100 million to almost DKK 775 million. With that, I will hand it back to Gregers Wedell-Wedellsborg.
Thank you, Anders. I will comment on the guidance for the coming financial year. We have seen an exceptional uplift from COVID and demand during COVID. Obviously there's a bit of headwind and tailwind in the coming year. We guide for a flat revenue development with a range of -2% to +2%. The background for that is important to understand that we do see some reversal effect, particularly in the second half of the year. Obviously, I'm hoping, and this is the first time you'll hear me say that, I'm hoping that we won't have any sales in protective equipment going forward, the masks and the hand sanitizer and so on. I'm actually hoping for those sales to drop.
We will also expect to see some normalization effect from consumer spending due to the fact that hopefully people will start living normal lives again and go traveling. Of course, in the last financial year, we also saw a significant effect from stimulus packages from the holiday pay that we won't see next year. We also expect an increase in online competition, a moderate increase in online competition. However, throughout the year, we have set in motion a number of business development activities within subscriptions. We've made the acquisition of [inaudible] and the partnership with the pharmacy, and we also want to kickstart our next strategic journey with what we call a margin investment in future growth, and that covers primarily marketing investments, promotion investments to fuel a lot of these new initiatives that we are counting on to deliver future growth.
The EBITDA margin, when you look at the EBITDA margin, it's important to understand that we think the underlying business will be able to sustain the EBITDA margin level that we have seen, and we have made a conscious decision to invest up to one margin point in those future growth initiatives. As for CapEx, we also up CapEx, and CapEx split will be different from prior years. We will spend more on our digital business, and as for CapEx to the stores, it will mainly be maintenance and refreshes, but we won't initiate a big concept upgrade rollout. I should note that we have mentioned many times that we're looking into our future logistics set up that is not included in the CapEx guidance, and neither is potential M&A.
To give ourselves headroom for both those things, the logistics and for M&A and other business development opportunities, the board has decided to lower the floor for the payout ratio to 20%, above 20% of net adjusted profit after tax. Previously, it was above 30%. That's the background for the guidance for the year. We think just leaning back and letting the business run is not the right thing. This is a time where the business has a lot of momentum and where we see more growth opportunities for the business than we have for a very long time. With that, I will go on to the strategy preview and review. Looking at our point of departure for Matas, it's been the renewing Matas strategy that's been the headline and the focus for us and the rest of the crew for these last three years.
Across all five of the strategic tracks that we listed when we announced the strategy in May of 2018, we have seen very significant progress. We have seen our brand become a lot stronger. The Matas brand is historically strong at this point. I'm pleased to say, especially with the young demographic, we have taken a huge leap in brand vitality, and we have seen a massive leap in our matas.dk customer satisfaction over the years. As for online, this is obviously the area where we have made a very speedy and very significant transformation. We are now, according to Dansk Erhverv, the second-most used webshop in Denmark or most frequented webshop in Denmark. Online revenues of 26 at 10x increase in three years, and a whopping 600% growth on just the matas.dk. Some of the online growth, as you know, is acquired through Firtal Group.
As for the stores, we have gradually reduced our footprint, but we have managed to keep all stores profitable except two, that during COVID have not been profitable because they have very special locations in high traffic areas, but they will get back to profitability as things normalize. We've also been very successful in getting new growth. Part of the explanation behind our long-term growth journey has been that we are now a much bigger player in the health and wellbeing space since we started. Of course, the acquisition of Firtal, which has been very successful. They have come in consistently ahead of the management and investment case, very happy with that acquisition.
We also acquired Kosmolet. They have been outperforming the makeup category year by year, ever since we bought them, even in a year like last year, where the makeup category was definitely not the one growing. Underlying in the engine room, and we have seen a quite significant shift of resources from businesses that don't grow to support all the growth businesses. The transformation has been actually both a result of organic development and acquisition, as I just mentioned. Here's just a chart to remind you what we have been going through to get to where we are now. I think the key point that I want to highlight today is that we are now a digital company. If you think with 26% of revenues, how can you say that you're a digital company?
I want to go into detail with that because we are truly a digital company across all areas of the business. Any function in Matas has digital responsibilities. Every role has digital responsibilities. If you look at what we as a company should be good at doing, what our core competencies are, every single one of those we have digitized over the last three years, and we have actually added two new significant competencies over the last three years. For our brick and mortar, it used to be conventional retail stores. Now they are connected with a digital footprint around the stores. Our colleagues in the stores are live streaming to local consumers, chatting with consumers, selling outside of normal opening hours, so on so forth.
Our offering, the range that we offer, our assortment used to be set just to fit the stores and was limited by the shelf space that we have. Now we have an endless aisles assortment strategy and have vastly increased the number of products that we offer to the consumer. Our club has changed dramatically. I think if you go back five, six years, being a member of a club meant carrying a card. Now it is a digital relationship. Obviously, the e-commerce competence that we have acquired, taking us from top three to a leader in the field.
Also maybe less appreciated, I think one of the things that we have found out over the last three years and really gotten good at, also with the acquisition of Kosmolet, is knowing how to build consumer brands that is taking products on the shelves and turning them into brands using all the digital tricks in the book. Now we are a digital company leading the online market. We have seen this transformation from being a brick and mortar retail with around 4% of revenue being digital to being a true omni-channel retailer with lots of synergies between the stores and online, with 26% as of last year. A very significant journey and one of the fastest retail transformations that we've been able to dig up.
We are also, and this of course has been a key question, we are also now a digital company with a profitable business model for our online business and in total, and actually in many ways, a superior profitability compared to digital peers. The growth that we've been driving over the years with a CAGR of 6%, obviously fueled by tailwinds from COVID-19, we've been able to sustain the gross margin, even though as we transform to online, there has been and is a lower gross margin in our online business for a number of reasons that we can get back to. We've actually been able to sustain that gross margin level, even though there's been this massive transformation to online. I think that's really a testament to the strength of our business model.
Here's the killer slide in terms of online profitability, because this has obviously been a question not only for us and for investors in Matas, but also a question for retail overall. As you change from conventional brick and mortar to online, will you just see your profitability erode year-over-year? What we have seen over the last three years is that that is not happening. Actually, we're seeing the reverse effect. We're seeing scale effects, and we're seeing a lot of synergies come through. On the nearly DKK 1.1 billion of sales, we have a gross margin of 40% online, which is lower than our store gross margin. As you can tell, it's been increasing over the years.
Even more importantly, when we take in all the direct costs associated with running an online business, so that would be marketing, freight cost, personnel that is dedicated to online, we've seen the scale effects and the synergies really come through, so that we deliver a 19%, what we call channel contribution from online. That's still a bit lower than what we get from the stores. We show this number because then we don't have to have all these discussions about head office or cost allocations. This is a channel contribution that is super competitive, I think, and against the benchmarks. The reason why we're able to deliver those kinds of channel contribution margins is that we have synergies across a number of areas in the P&L. We do a lot of cross-selling between online and offline, and the customer lifetime value.
Every time we acquire a customer online, they actually spend money in the stores as well. The average revenue per user, if you will, is higher than comparable to pure play onlineers. We obviously have better buying power than online competitors. Absolutely key is the fact that our cost of acquiring customers to our online business is a fraction of what you can do if you are a pure play onlineer. Every time we spend money on marketing online, it gives a return not only in the online channel but also in the offline channel. Every time we spend money on the offline channel, it actually has a payoff in the online channel as well. We get very significant marketing synergies.
Because we have around 30% to 40% when it's been down, but usually around 50% of click and collect, so people will pick up the packages in the stores rather than having them shipped to the home. We're able to fulfill much cheaper than online competitors. Finally, of course, we don't have to build a whole buying department from scratch or a finance department from scratch to serve the online. We do get a lot of synergies on our head offices. What we're saying here is we have a structural advantage to our online competitors that allows us to get a better profitability and higher growth than online competitors. This speaks to the fact that we are now a digital company with some competitive advantages that are not going away, but are here to stay.
Many of you have seen this before. Just want to highlight it again. We have been investing heavily in getting a string of assets in place that will help us fend off competitors, that will help us capture growth, that will help us capture value. We list those KPIs, and we follow those KPIs very closely to see that we become stronger and stronger to build the fences, but also the platforms that fuel future growth. Speaking of future growth, we are a digital company with better long-term growth prospects than what we had when we were only a brick-and-mortar retailer. I will speak to that in a moment, but just reminding you that the health and beauty business, which is our market, is a very attractive market to play in. It is expected to outgrow the general economy.
It is an area that is really resilient to economic cycle. It turned out to be very resilient to pandemic cycles. I hope it's not a cycle, but pandemic events at least. It is a sector with quite large profit pools across the whole value chain. It is a sector that is really driven by consumer preferences for brands, for newness, for experience, for advice. It's not a commodity business. Frankly, every time we see a brand getting commoditized, we delist it and we substitute it for something new and exciting, and that's not going away. At least it would be strange if that's the case, because it's been going on forever in that sector.
Of course, and this is one thing where we've really seen some interesting things the last year, there is massive innovation in the consumer health space, opening up new growth opportunities for us. As we look ahead, we see six factors that we should be observant of. First, we think the digitalization of shopping, the social media change of the media landscape will continue. We are very well positioned to capture that. We think we will look into, at least in our industry, that's the talk of the town, that there is a really pent-up demand to go out and lead the good life once again. There is a lot of pent-up spending capacity as well with the private consumer. There's a good chance that we will see some Roaring Twenties repeat in the coming period.
We think that health demand and health consciousness has shifted permanently and will be elevated for years to come due to what we've just been through. As we gyrate towards the more negative territory, I couldn't bear putting it in red, but of course, we are seeing some COVID-related merchandise. We're seeing some reversal from that, as I said, in connection to the guidance. That is a good thing for the world, and we will cope fine without those sales in Matas. We also expect physical retail consolidation to continue. However, I have to say this year, the COVID year, has been a huge vote of confidence in physical stores because every time there is a reopening, people flock to the stores. Even though everyone has learned to shop online, they go to the stores because they're missing that way of interaction.
As I mentioned, we do expect intensified competition over the years. With those kind of competencies in-house, we see three expansion opportunities for Matas that we haven't talked about in detail before, and this will be part of what we will be chasing over the next years. First of all, if you have the second most visited webshop in Denmark, if you have more than 600,000 customers that are really happy with what you do online, our ability to expand into new categories has never been better. We are no longer limited by shelf space. We have all the space in the world online, so we can enter new categories and serve our customers with categories that they think Matas is a natural supplier of. Second, health. We think there are very significant opportunities in the digital health space. We've seen that in other markets outside of Denmark.
Particularly online, we think there is an opportunity in health, but also in-store, because our stores have obviously played that role the last year. Brands. We acquired Kosmolet. We have had the stripes on the shelves for years and years. We have seen Danish brands, local brands, really grow strong over the years, and we have looked into our capability to build new brands. We think there is growth to be had, both in our own channels but also in third-party channels. Finally, and this may be just opening the door a little bit rather than a big step, of course, the digital competencies that we have now, together with the brand portfolio, might open up some opportunities to sell outside of Denmark that we haven't had before without having to build stores outside of Denmark.
This is an area that we will put on the radar in the future. What is the essence of the new strategy? We will get back to the details, the minute details of that on our Capital Markets Day in August. I want to give you just a brief preview. What we want to do is build a group company, and we want to build it on digital and on the digital competence that we have acquired over these last few years. Our purpose is very simple. We aim to deliver health and beauty for life. I think what you should note here is that health takes a more prominent place in our purpose, and you should note that our business model is about lifetime customer relationships.
That's all that we're about. It's not the transaction, it's the lifelong relationship with the customer. This is a more specific way of saying what we want to do. We want to continue the journey that we've been on for the last three years of adding digital revenues on top of our store revenues, not instead of our store revenues. We think that we are positioned to do that over the coming years. We've set an ambition for the next five years to double our digital revenues from the current level. To do that, we have to go through a number of moves, but we are positioned to do that in a way that we have never been before.
The Matas Group, if you ever look into business models, if you think about Amazon's flywheel, if you want to understand what Matas will become in a few years, this is the slide that you should spend time on and talk to us about. This is our business model and the platforms in our business model that will allow us to outgrow the market, that will allow us to sustain an above-market profitability level. Three platforms with a shared core or shared platform: eCommerce, connected retail, and brands. eCommerce is obvious. We see a lot of growth in eCommerce, as I already mentioned. Connected retail is a new way of thinking about the stores. Store revenue is no longer just about customers coming through the door and picking product from the shelf.
It is also about enabling the stores to sell directly to consumers via digital channels. For example, by having live events online. If we did a physical event some years ago, we might have 18.5 customers coming in to buy. If we host a digital event, we can reach 200 from the physical stores and selling direct online. Finally, our brands platform, which is super significant to understand, that we will become a more vertically integrated company in the coming years. These are not three discrete areas. They share a common core, but they also support one another. Obviously, there is a strong connection between eCommerce and commercial connected retail. As I mentioned, a much lower customer acquisition cost for our eCom and a much higher customer lifetime value because we have two channels and not just one.
Second, the link between eCommerce and brands. Having our own brands online will be of increasing importance as the online space becomes more crowded. It will also allow us to sustain a high margin on our online business. Having the eCommerce competence will allow us to sell brands direct to consumers inside Denmark, but also outside of Denmark eventually. The link between having your own brands or having strong strategic partnerships with brands and connected retail, I think is one area where we have really seen the light over the last three years, that if you want to build a brand in Denmark, if you want to reach the Danish consumer, you can take something that is a bottle, and then you can turn it into a brand with a significant brand premium in just the space of three years.
We've seen a number of cases. We are much more aware of our capabilities to do that. Again, of course, having your own brands will support the margin and the differentiation of our retail offering. This is our business model. I could talk about it for hours, and we will, because we have five years to really make it happen and make it strong. As I mentioned, this is a model that is not unique to us, it's not invented, but we see that this is a model that is able to be very competitive and deliver very good results over the coming years. As for ESG, this is an area that's always been part of our business. It's always been part of the Matas DNA. We have pointed out three areas where we want to make a difference over the coming years. First is sustainability.
We have the big issue that as online goes more online, that as shopping goes more online, probably the climate footprint is going to get worse. We have set the aim of joining the pack that will strive for CO2 neutrality in 2030, and I have to admit, there is no one we ask who can tell us by now what we should do to get there. We've made that commitment, and we'll work towards that goal. Second, I think an area where we can make a significant impact is on plastics and waste reduction. We've set the target of reducing plastics by 100 million pieces, and that sounds maybe, what is 100 million pieces of plastic? What you should see here is a specific goal that drives us to specific behavior.
I think if we can find ways of doing that over the coming years, we can actually significantly impact that area. Health, we want to contribute more to public health than we've done before by providing access to digital health solutions for all, but also by increasing choice of green, clean and healthy ranges. The final one is inclusion, that we actually strive to be the best place to work in retail. As retail becomes more online, jobs are changing, from maybe from being in stores to being in warehouses, and we need to be really aware to make sure that we are a great place to work. These are three headline areas we want to work on with five specific areas, where we make an impact. With that, I just want to recap that this is the journey we're going on.
We think we can increase our digital revenues without just converting store revenues to digital, by expanding assortment, by doing all the things I just mentioned. That also means that we're looking at ourselves in a different way, that whereas our peers some years back would be conventional retailers and now would be other omni-channel retailers, we are now looking at the playbooks of more pure play onliners, and also looking at the playbooks of companies like LVMH, which has a comparable business model to the one I mentioned before, combining online retail with a deeper vertical integration. This is the journey that we're going on in the next five years.
I just want to close off by saying I have a very strong group of colleagues and many more than I could fit on this slide. I just want to highlight just one new hire that we have just made. Michael Shin has just joined us. He is our first international addition to the management team. He comes with a long background from L'Oréal, from Elizabeth Arden, and also from building his own brand with co-founders over the last year. He just joined April 4th and added a new dimension to our leadership team and will be taking charge of the brands component of our strategic journey. With that, I want to close the strategy preview and open up for questions.
First, reiterate the invitation to join us for Capital Markets Day on August 18th. We will host it in Copenhagen, or you can join via webcast. Of course, you are more than welcome to reach out to Henrik Lund or to Anders Skole-Sørensen or me, to set up one-to-ones to discuss this. Yes. With that, I conclude our presentation, and we will open for questions for the financial results. I just have to mention, we won't go into details about the financial ambitions or anything surrounding the strategy. That is a topic for the Capital Markets Day. Over to you, operator, for questions.
Thank you. The first question comes from the line of Magnus Jensen from SEB. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Thank you. Thank you very much for taking my question. I have three at least to start with. Starting with the guidance on EBITDA margin, where you say there's a one percentage point drag, which it sounds like it's talked a little bit about as a one-off. Is this something that you need to sort of fuel the sales short-term, and then you expect that to continue going forward? You should expect that one percentage point to continue to be a drag as we move ahead?
For now, we only guide for one year and, very specific to say that we think there are some growth opportunities out there that we should pursue. Pursuing those means investing in marketing, investing in promoting new services and products. What you should see is that that will have up to 1% margin impact this year, but it will fuel future growth.
Okay, it's correct, to understand that this is a new level of cost. It's not cost that will go away next-
I don't think you can make that conclusion yet. It's just for now, it's a one-year indication that this is something we will do, both to stave off the reversal effects from COVID, but also, and primarily, to fuel our business development initiatives that we have been preparing throughout this year, including the acquisition of [inaudible].
Okay, thank you. Next question regarding the inventory. It's pretty impressive what you've done through the year, clearly. Is this the end of it, Anders? Or is there more to come here?
I think it's fair to say that we've really moved the needle on that one, and I'm not going to stand here and promise that there will be a major movement further on with regards to working capital. I don't think that is reasonable. It doesn't mean that we're going to let the foot off and just let it slide. It does mean, I think we've taken a major step, and I don't think you should not be looking for huge further steps in that direction.
Okay, thank you. My final question goes to CapEx. You guide for DKK 140 million-DKK 160 million this year. Is this sort of a normalized level as we look ahead, if we exclude the logistic program and any M&A?
I think we will, again, here, that we'll have to revert to when we come back on the 18th. Otherwise, we'll start discussing the strategy through the back door. We are guiding for the next year, we will revert to the longer-term trends.
Okay. That's my question for now. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Ole Jensen from Danske Bank. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
I assume that's me, Ole Jensen. A question first on the logistics. Just to be more certain, on page 11 in the report, you say it's expected that you want to do the investments, and on page 14 you say if you want to do it, and in the slides you also say that you already acquired a plot. What is the status? Is that one of those put for the CMD in August?
I think we can say, we have acquired the right to buy a plot. That's not quite the same as acquiring a plot. We have an option on a plot at this point in time, and the decisions have not been made yet. That is the correct way of answering your question.
Okay.
There's different kinds of solution designs. There are a lot of ways you can go with this.
Okay. You have, I know you won't talk about ambitions, but longer term, but you say that you want to double the online sale, and I assume it's the DKK 1.1 billion you want to double. It's just to get more color. Does that include international ambitions, or is that domestic only?
We'll get
Now that you put the double into it.
I think any question or comment related to finances and the composition of what we want to do long term is a topic for the Capital Markets Day. I think it's fair to say that the growth opportunity that we see online is not contingent on us succeeding outside of Denmark. We think we can do a lot in Denmark, where we have the strong brand, and we have the position.
Okay. On the tailwind you had in the last year, you talk about this DKK 75 million to DKK 100 million, which should now look as a headwind from the second half. Can you put some level or number on how much tailwind you believe you had, excluding the PPE?
Yeah, we did do that in the accounts. You can see that we put a number there of between DKK 125 million and DKK 150 million. I don't remember what page that's on.
That's including PPE.
That's including PPE.
Oh, yeah. No, we haven't specified the number without that, as you say now. Sorry. You can say that I think we put in Laere, just hold on. I think we put in the numbers, how much of it was PPE, didn't we?
Yeah, we did.
I think we did.
Yeah, that's DKK 50 million.
What I, Ole, I think it's fair to say this is a judgment call. This is looking at what was the trend levels going into COVID? What can we isolate of effects, looking at the different categories? This is really a judgment call to say what are the effects of those things that we can be quite specific about. Obviously, there is a general level of increased domestic spending. There are some other effects that are COVID-specific, but this we can put a number to.
I'm just wondering, if you say that excluding PPE, that it's DKK 75 million-DKK 100 million, and I take that out of your numbers in 2021, then you, in other words, are saying that your underlying grew 6%-7% from normal operations.
If you recall the trading update from last year, we'd just come out of a Christmas quarter growing 4% like for like, and we indicated to you that we had started the year with all-time high like for like growth, because what we started to see at that point is that online growth did not take away from the stores, but rather supplement the stores and coming in on top of the store revenue. We did see a quarter and a half of seeing that particular model work. Then obviously we've been in the trenches, and we've been in the engine room to try to parcel out what's what in the year that's been going. Again, I have to say that this is a judgment call, and it's just to give you some kind of indication. We talked about before, Ole, travel retail that.
When there's no travel retail sales, that doesn't migrate into domestic sales because a lot of travel retail sales is associated with the fact that you have to go to a sunny beach or you have to give a present when you go out. Obviously there's some windfall for us in that, but it's not as significant as you might imagine.
Okay. I have two more. One is just for the bookkeeping. The acquisition of Apo in April, how will that be reported going forward? As part of health and wellbeing or as wholesale?
We haven't actually, to be honest, Ole, we haven't taken that decision as of yet, but we will inform you just as soon as we report the first time around.
Okay. The last one, that's the external cost in the fourth quarter, where you say it's marketing and it's fulfillment costs, which may be increased. Online sale was down quarter-to-quarter by 7%, and the costs were up 28% quarter-on-quarter. Can you say a little more about how much is marketing and how much is fulfillment? If it's fulfillment, why did it increase that much?
Online increased dramatically in the first quarter.
You're talking about the fourth against the third quarter?
Yeah, correct.
Yeah. Fourth against the third quarter, it was up, when I'm talking about the increase, it's very much, of course, on a year-to-year basis. We're not going to go into details about whether it's fulfillment or the cost at this point.
Okay. That's all for me.
Thank you. Just a reminder that if you would like to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. We have no further questions. I will pass back for any closing comments.
Thank you so much for joining the call. As I mentioned, we invite you to reach out if you want a more in-depth discussion on the numbers or on the strategy preview leading up to the Capital Markets Day. I hope you will join us on the 18th of August, where we can go into more detail on the content of the strategy, ambitions of the strategy, and how we're seeing that we could execute the strategy. Thanks so much for joining, and hopefully see you soon.