Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Ceconomy Q2 half-year results webcast and conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you will need to press star one and one on your telephone keypad. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Fabienne Caron, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q2 results presentation. By my side today are our CEO, Dr. Kai-Ulrich Deissner, and our CFO, Remko Rijnders. Before we dive into the detail of our performance, I want to remind you that we will be discussing certain forward-looking statements. Please refer to the disclaimer for more information. You can also find the presentation slide on our website for your reference. This call is being recorded and will be accessible on the website later today. Now, I'm delighted to hand over the call to Kai, who will walk us through the highlight of the first quarter. Kai, the stage is yours.
Thank you, Fabienne, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining Remko Rijnders and me today. Now, in the formal course of business, we're pleased to present to you some pretty strong results and good progress for the second quarter and the first half of the fiscal year. Before we go there, we need to pause for a second. To be sure, these have been some weeks with significant change for all of us. Let me emphasize from the very beginning here, this company is on a steady path, well grounded in a consistent strategy and execution. Our results, which you will see in a second, can prove this. Actually, in many ways, the changes of the past few weeks reflect this steady progress, and they do make us proud at Ceconomy.
As you know, Karsten Wildberger, our previous CEO, has taken on the ministerial position for digitization and state modernization in the new German government. To be sure, this step is a loss for us, but we're also very happy for Karsten and for ourselves. We're proud of us because, in a way, Karsten's appointment is seen as a sign of respect and recognition for our journey as a company here as well. It's an important statement for the achievement of the whole team here at Ceconomy and MediaMarktSaturn. Now, you will have read the supervisory board has initiated a structured search process for the long-term successor. In the meantime, they appointed me as CEO for the next phase and Remko Rijnders as the CFO during this time.
If I may speak for my dear colleague who's sitting right in front of me here now, we're both honored by this decision, and we do stand for continuity and diligent execution. If you allow me to put it like this, we will not drop the ball. Going into business, it's commonplace, but it's very true of Q2. Retail is a dynamic sector. Our results for this quarter underline once again that we are really equipped to deal with these developments. First and foremost, we cater to the needs of our customers. We're innovative, and this makes us ready for the future. Three milestones that I particularly want to highlight in this quarter. First, we are creating great personalized offerings for our customers by leveraging the potential of our first-party data. In the past quarter, we achieved a major milestone in personalizing our app.
In March, we introduced what we call For You Pages. On those, we recommend to our customers their new favorite products, all based on their search history and preference. I'll say a bit more in a second. Second, we're also driving what we call space as a service offering. Think of it like special boutiques or smaller event spaces in our stores. You can try things out or see eye-catching features right when you walk in. To be sure, this isn't just great for shoppers, but also beneficial for our partners and for our business because as part of our corporate strategy, our business is way more than just selling products. We're here also selling our reach, our customer contacts, and our space. If you want it in a sentence, we're selling, selling. This helps us strategically to rely less on the usual cycles of the retail sector.
Instead, we diversify our revenue streams. In this case, our retail space itself becomes the product. In Germany, we successfully rolled out our experience zones. That is part of space as a service, as well as our so-called entrance statements. I will also go into more detail later. Thirdly, as you all know, and as we have discussed here many times, our marketplace is an important tool when it comes to enhancing our product offering and growing our online business. We are steadily adding more countries to it. In the second quarter, we successfully launched our marketplace in Belgium. This is the sixth country that is now on board. Following these highlights, as already mentioned, our development in Q2 continued to be strong despite, admittedly, the volatile market conditions around us. First and foremost, we further strengthened our profitability.
We look at the most important numbers now, but Remko will give you a more detailed overview later in the financial section. First, sales grew 1.3% with a like-for-like growth underneath that of 0.8%, all of that in a soft environment. Overall, on reported numbers, sales accounted for EUR 5.2 billion. Secondly, and importantly, our adjusted EBIT grew again with plus EUR 4 million to now EUR 10 million in the quarter. This then makes Q2 the ninth quarter of profitable growth for us. The basis for all of this, our NPS, our net promoter score, reached a great all-time high at 61 points. This is a four-point increase since previous year. Finally, we gained market share again, and it was mainly driven by our strong online business performance. Next step to an overview of our different business areas.
Our robust results, which you've just seen, were particularly driven by our growth businesses, and this shows our investment in becoming an omnichannel service platform is truly paying off. With strengthening our omnichannel business, we're also strengthening our online revenues. While bricks and mortar sales remained broadly flat year-over-year, online sales surged by 7.4%. Our online share was at 24.9%. That's an improvement of 200 basis points compared to last year. Additionally, our growth businesses performed strongly. Service and solutions income increased significantly. GMV of our marketplace rose by around 90%, and retail media also grew strongly. All of this underlines that the emphasis that we put on our growth businesses is just the right way to go. Different cut now. Looking at our countries, especially Türkiye, Hungary, and Spain showed a good sales performance.
In Germany, we only saw a soft development driven by a still volatile market. In Spain, Netherlands, Hungary, Austria, and Switzerland, profitability improved. Throughout our group altogether, our profitability does also improve. As I've already mentioned, EBIT grew by EUR 4 million, with our EBIT margin now increasing by 10 basis points. Our reported EPS was at EUR 0.23 in the first half of the year. Our free cash flow at EUR -171 million. We will give you more details later on. Let's turn to slide seven, the key chart we share each and every quarter to track progress on our key pledges. I will not go through in detail, but you can see in Q2, we again made great and clear progress across all relevant KPIs. What sticks out is our loyalty members grew significantly compared to the first quarter.
For some focus today, let's zoom in on retail core, and then we'll talk about our growth businesses afterwards. So retail core. We're continuously working on enhancing our retail core and actually the shopping experience in our stores. I already mentioned this at the beginning when I talked about space as a service. That means practically, besides store modernizations and lighthouse, we're adding dedicated areas to bring excitement to our stores for both customers and partners. Two examples are the entrance statement and the experience zones. Now, what's an entrance statement? An entrance statement can be found right when you enter the store. Promotes products or services or brands highly visibly, for example, on large screens or 3D walls. This creates great advertising space for our brands and partners and is perfect for showcasing new products and services. It also opens new revenue streams for us.
We introduced this entrance statement in over 50% of our stores in Germany already. Second example, our experience zones. This is where we temporarily offer areas in our stores for product or service demonstration. We have both a standardized setup as well as a custom premium solution for partners that wish to do just a little bit more. This is not just our established partners whose product we sell online or in our stores, but also, for example, for marketplace sellers who only trade online, but they now have access to the many customers in our stores. In retail core, we're convinced, and we do also know from research, when customers walk through our doors today, they look for a shopping experience like with space as a service, and they're looking for something that is not standard, but that is just for them with their individual needs and wishes.
Let me show you on the next slide how we're working on this particular aspect. In our Q1 call, we already introduced to you what we call personalized service. Now, with personalized service, we're putting our customer in the center. There's a deeply shared mindset at the bottom of this. In our words, my customer, my responsibility. If this attitude really works, customers experience a great new level of service with shorter waiting times, individual advice, and a dedicated contact person in the store with a telephone number that you can call and contact afterwards. As an example, in over 360 stores in Germany, you can now make appointments via app to get this sort of tailored support. More fundamentally, with our personalized service, we're improving our service quality, and this is paying off. We already see rough mid-single-digit increase in both conversion rate and attachment rate.
Obviously, we're now planning the expansion of this service into more stores in Germany and more countries. The amount of great service quality is also possible because we're using our data for our customers' good. In Q2, particularly, this fueled our online sales growth. As I said in the beginning, we implemented a new For You page that displays tailor-made assortment to each and every customer. It contains product recommendations from personal favorite categories, recently viewed products, as well as recommendations based on the search items. We also improved this experience with price and availability alerts. This was retail core, but let us now have a closer look at the growth areas, in this case, private label. Over the last quarter, we've seen some strong growth here because we've strategically chosen categories where we can present attractive great alternatives to established brands. This is bearing fruit.
Our private label sales grew by 15% in Q2, and our sales share was up by 40 basis points year on year. We are now on track to achieve this 5% private label share goal, which is one of our midterm targets, which we promised at the capital markets day. We are enhancing this offering with some exciting brand collaborations. First, we are expanding our great Koenig Grills collaboration with the German star chef Tim Raue. We are just this month launching grills in the month of May, so perfect for this weather. Secondly, we have got a real genuine music superstar joining forces with us on private label. Robbie Williams is partnering with Peaq Audio Collection to launch an exclusive audio collection in July. Talking headphones, speakers, soundbar, so convincing products to kick things off. This is not just a quick celebrity endorsement.
We've secured a full three-year partnership, and we're confident it will transform how customers see these audio offerings. These examples then show we're continuously refining our product selection and design to offer really the best options to our customers. All of these growth businesses contributed substantially to our gross profit and the growth of gross profit. In the second quarter, we increased both gross profit and margin based on this strong performance. Underneath that, retail core margin remained stable, but this underlines our ability to maintain consistency in our operations while focusing on growth. Each of our growth businesses, service and solutions, marketplace, private label, retail media has played a great role in strengthening our financial position. They account for a constantly growing amount of our gross profit. Especially service and solutions stood out as a key contributor.
Once again, it shows we're on the right path with our growth businesses, and they do strengthen us as a company overall. Let me close with a topic that is deeply ingrained in our strategy too, sustainable service and product offerings, where we make great progress again in the past month. We substantially increased the share of products that are more sustainable. In Q2, we already reached the year-end target for this fiscal year of 7,300 Better Way products, and that's ahead of schedule, and we even exceeded our target. This means we're offering more and more eco-friendlier options for our customers. Let's also talk about trade-in. Yes, we did see a dip in numbers during Q2, mainly because the market for mobile phones was a bit softer overall. There's some good news underneath.
Where we got slightly fewer devices, they were worth a lot more. The total value actually jumped significantly last quarter. This is good for our sustainability efforts and our bottom line. It shows our trade-in program is attracting better quality devices over time, providing more value to our business. Trade-in thus remains absolutely central to our strategy. We are constantly building this area up. You can also see this in action with our current international campaign, which most of you probably heard while you were waiting for this call, the campaign that features Jürgen Klopp, and which is now live across 11 countries where we operate. Finally, we are actively promoting refurbished products. Over 170 stores in Germany are now offering refurbished items in our marketplace. This omnichannel initiative is further strengthening our presence there. Our commitment is also clear in the numbers.
We grew by over 200% in refurbished year-over-year. Now, let me hand over to Remko Rijnders for the financial sections, but allow me to introduce Remko briefly. Seventeen years of MediaMarkt and Saturn. He brings with him extensive knowledge of our company and really valuable leadership experience. Since 2020, Remko has led MediaMarkt Benelux as CEO, and since 2023, he's been COO for a number of countries that includes Benelux, Iberia, Türkiye, and Poland. Remko, it's so cool to have you here. The stage is all yours now.
Thank you very much, Kai, and also for the warm introduction, of course. Good morning to all of you. Yeah, I'm honored to guide you today through the financials, so let me start on slide 14. First, let's look at the headline numbers. We grew our sales in Q2 by 1.3%.
That is adjusted for currency and portfolio changes in pre-IS29. The like-for-like, as Kai already mentioned, grew by 0.8%, including a negative calendar impact due to the leap year of -1%. This is a good performance in a softer market environment, which we are extremely proud of. Our growth was mainly driven by online this quarter. This resulted in a strong increase of our online market share in all our three regions. Our adjusted EBIT on group level reached EUR 10 million in the quarter, thus double the number of last year. This is the ninth consecutive quarter of EBIT growth. For the first half of the year, we recorded EUR 36 million uplift, which I think is a great performance. It's important to keep in mind that relative to our financial year, Q2, so January to March for us, doesn't contribute very significantly to our annual EBIT.
Yet, the year-on-year improvement does play an important role. Now let's have a look at slide 15, profitability, per segment. We start with DACH. We recorded a 3.7% decline in like-for-like, driven by all countries except Hungary. Consumer demand was rather soft in the region over the quarter, as Kai already mentioned in his introduction. Still, profitability improved with a EUR 1 million increase in adjusted EBIT. This achievement was made possible by an improved gross margin and effective cost control, allowing us to counter the decline in sales due to the soft market. In Western and South Europe, our sales were roughly stable with a 0.1% decline in like-for-like. We gained market share in all countries except the Netherlands. Netherlands is positive in market share over the first half of the year.
Consumer demand in the region was, as for DACH, soft, but Spain continued to stand out with a positive like-for-like. On profitability, we increased our adjusted EBIT by EUR 10 million and our margin by 60 basis points. A great performance in my view, as Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands were the main drivers of this profitability increase. Moving now to East Europe, sales was once again driven by Türkiye. As anticipated, the market continues to slow down in line with inflation and in line with our expectation. In Poland, a new CEO has been appointed, and we remain determined to turn around the business. There we have a clear plan in place with unique selling points in the market, like a focus on service and solutions with the widest portfolio in the market, but also unique delivery options, to name one, for example, our Uber delivery in 90 minutes.
Still, a recovery will take time. As a whole, profitability is normalizing as expected in Türkiye, while Poland remains challenging. We recorded a EUR 9 million adjusted EBIT in the region or a 1.1% adjusted EBIT margin. Finally, let me highlight our other segment, which primarily represents holding costs and our private label business. We have seen a positive quarter with EUR 10 million adjusted EBIT. Also here, a EUR 2 million improvement year on year. Now let's look at the half-year numbers on slide 16. After another EBIT improvement in both Q1 and Q2, we closed the first half year with EUR 289 million in adjusted EBIT. A strong EUR 36 million increase year on year, which is great. Let's go now to slide 17 and talk about service and solutions. Our biggest growth area. You can see that we grew our sales overproportionately with a plus of 7%.
This was driven by a 70 basis point increase in service attached. All service categories increased in Q2, but the strongest growth came from warranties and our consumer financing. Kai already mentioned the online sales that we see on slide 18. Our first-party online sales also grew overproportionately with +7.4% in Q2 and now reached a total of EUR 3.3 billion in the first half. In Q2, we grew strongly in Türkiye, Switzerland, Belgium, and Hungary. On the back of this, our online sales share increased to nearly 25% in the quarter. Again, a great performance. Let me come back to the EBIT development on slide 19. Our gross margin increased by 50 basis points in Q2 to 18.4%, which is a great performance.
This improvement was driven by our growth areas while we stabilized our product margin and we did not chase unprofitable sales in a quarter. Now, circa 35% of our gross profit comes out of our growth business, which is according to our strategy, as Kai already explained. Our OpEx ratio increased 20 basis points this quarter to 18.6%, given the soft top-line development. Still, note that on the absolute level, our OpEx was broadly flat as we have mitigated the OpEx increase with strict cost management. In the first half year, our OpEx ratio improved by 30 basis points to 16%. Turning to the full-year overview on slide 20, from adjusted EBIT to net profit. Walking down from the adjusted EBIT of EUR 10 million, we recorded the EUR 4 million non-recurring items.
The EUR 35 million decline year on year is mainly due to a lower profit share of Fnac Darty, as well as the cost we had to book for a fire damage in our repair center in the Netherlands. We anticipate these costs will be offset next quarter as the insurance process finalizes. Consequently, our reported EBIT reached EUR 14 million, which is a EUR 30 million decline year-over-year. Our financial result came in at EUR -47 million, a EUR -21 million below last year. This decline is mainly driven due to the dividend for Metro Properties and Metro AG booked in the prior year. On this point, let me tell you that we sold our remaining 1% stake in Metro AG on the 4th of April. This should result in a EUR 19 million cash inflow in Q3.
Now, regarding tax, we paid little tax of 20% tax rate on an underlying basis, which means ex Fnac Darty, IS29, and the impairment in Poland. Our tax rate was an impressive 16%. This is a tax rate you should use for the year. Please note that the year-on-year comparison is distorted by the fact that last year in Q2, we activated more deferred tax assets than in this quarter. All in all, for Q2, our reported net result was EUR -38 million and our earnings per share EUR -0.08. Keep in mind that Q2 does not contribute very significantly to our annual result. Slide 21 summarizes our financial performance in the first half of the year in the same logic. Overall, first half, we reported EUR 110 million net result and we reported earnings per share of EUR 0.23. Now, let me conclude with free cash flow on slide 22.
Our free cash flow was influenced by a soft demand in the second quarter, resulted in a EUR -171 million for the first half. Looking at the underlining dynamics of the first half, the primary factor impacting our performance was, unsurprisingly, working capital. Indeed, soft demand and negative calendar impact in Q2 led to higher stock levels. We activated addressing this by adjusting our inventory levels to align with the current environment, and we expect big improvements in the next quarter. You can also see the underlying positive development in tax with EUR 54 million year-on-year improvement. Other operating cash flow developed well due to lower adjustment from our profit share in Fnac Darty. Finally, on cash investment, the higher CapEx mainly reflects a shift in product timeline rather than new spending. Overall, we are optimistic about achieving a positive free cash flow generation for the full year and reaffirm our outlook.
With these comments, I will hand now back to Kai.
Thank you, Remko, for walking us through these details. In closing, let's turn to our outlook on slide 24. We confirm our positive outlook for the year. Despite the volatile market conditions expected this year, we do remain confident in our ability to drive further growth. We do take confidence from those Q2 results, which you've just seen. Our performance is not just dictated by the market. We do set the pace. We break away and we define the future. In summary, we still expect moderate increase in currency and portfolio adjusted total sales, with all regions contributing to this growth. Moderate, to be precise, means 3%-5% growth. We secondly anticipate a clear increase in adjusted EBIT. That's primarily driven by DACH, Western, and Southern Europe.
Here, we continue to feel comfortable with the current consensus. To follow on this growth trajectory, two things are key to us. Continue to execute our strategy to excite our customers and to provide them with great experiences. Let me also give you an overview of categories that we're particularly looking forward to in the next quarters. First, AI continues to be on the rise, especially in our IT category, where we're strong thanks to AI-enabled products like laptops. Secondly, with the imminent release of the Nintendo Switch 2 in June, pre-order numbers are exceptionally strong. We anticipate renewed growth in the gaming category as a result, which, as you know, was soft last year. In general, gaming is a category with great potential for us.
We have a unique selling proposition here through not only our diverse offerings, but also our gaming-focused specific store concept, which we call Experion. Finally, we're listing new emerging categories. From our perspective, smart glasses are actually an exciting mass-market-ready category. Right now, we do see a high potential for mainstream adoption. Let me summarize those results for you. We posted a robust performance in a volatile environment. We gained market share. All of that because our sizable growth businesses keep expanding, and they do strengthen our profitability. Fourth, we progress in leveraging data to improve the customer experience and create unique personalized offerings and experiences. Fifth, our focus remains on cost, liquidity, and profitability. We do confirm our growth outlook for this financial year. From both Remko's and my perspective, these results underline once again we're moving forward. We are becoming an omnichannel service platform.
We are using innovation for our greater good, for leveraging our potential, and for shaping the future of retail, but always putting the customer first. Now, thank you for your attention this morning, and Remko and I are looking forward to your questions.
Thank you. To ask a question, you will need to press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Thank you. We will now go to our first question. One moment, please. Your first question comes from the line of Andreas Riemann from ODDO BHF. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning. Two questions. First one, would it be possible to speak about the trading in the DACH region? Was March better than February? Would you even be willing to comment on April? Is there a recovery? This would be the first topic, so to say. Second one, retail media. Here, you are doing very well. To help us better assess the potential size of that business, can you shed more light maybe on the penetration of retail media by country? What do you think? How big can this business become going forward, given that your midterm target is already achieved? These would be my two topics, so to say. Thanks.
Thank you, Andreas, for those questions. This is Kai speaking. I'll answer both. I ask your understanding that we do not disclose monthly figures or current trading, certainly not on a country level. What I can say about DACH and specifically about Germany is, yes, it is true. In Q1, we did see a market slowdown.
We attribute this primarily to sentiment, a sentiment of uncertainty with consumers. We faced headwinds. We faced headwinds in the region, but also in Germany. What for us is the biggest focus is that despite these headwinds, we did increase profitability. As I tried to emphasize for the past 35 minutes, it is this resilience of our business model that is most relevant for us. If you summarize that quarter, it is in line with our expectations. You asked about April. I am going to avoid that question, but I am going to try to give you a perspective on that. In current trading, whether in DACH or in any of the other countries or segments that we have, there is absolutely nothing in current trading, which explicitly includes April, that lets us doubt the guidance that I have just repeated and confirmed.
That is of a moderate sales increase, 3%-5%, and a clear increase in EBIT. On your second question on retail media, you're right, and we're proud of the fact that we reached our target for retail media already early at the end of the last financial year. We've said, and I will repeat, that the more ambitious target that we've given ourselves now is a three-digit million EUR income number. We won't be more specific at this time, but as you can see, our initial target was some EUR 40 million. We've already more or less doubled that as an ambition going forward. That hopefully gives you an indication.
Okay, thanks.
You're welcome.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Clément Genelot from Bryan Garnier & Co. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning. Two questions on my side, if I may. The first one is for Karsten Wildberger. As a former head of Poland, what is your view on the Polish market and the group's relevancy to stabilize the business there? My second question is more on the rollout competition online on Temu, AliExpress, and Shein. Do you see the assortment overlap that you have with them? Do you see them already turning more aggressive and usable in your market? Thank you.
Yeah, good morning, Clément, and thank you for the question. This is Remko Rijnders. On the Polish market, the overall Polish market is a growing market. Let me say, first of all, that we are currently not satisfied with our financial performance as a business. Nevertheless, we have a very clear plan in place. As already mentioned, we hired the new CEO in Poland.
For the next period, we will focus on three topics in the market that make us unique for the customers, and that's extremely important in a highly competitive environment. One is on service and solutions, where we have the highest portfolio, the widest portfolio, also with trade-in, but also already mentioned warranties, and of course, in an omnichannel setup. The other one is logistics, where we have a customer offering that no competitor can match with 90-minute delivery, but also cutoff times. Order before 10, deliver the next day for free, which will take the competitors quite a long while to follow due to their volumes and their current setup. We have it live on digital. Kai already mentioned, Belgium is the sixth country. We will also go live in Poland with Marketplace. Then we have the whole setup for digital.
We are doing a lot of improvements on the customer journey digital to make our content rich, to make sure that we drive organic traffic to our sites. We are quite convinced that we will improve the result in the upcoming period. Nevertheless, it will take time to show that performance and a lot of efforts from the team. Thank you very much. Thank you, Clément.
This is Kai. I'll take your second question on Temu, AliExpress, and Shein. Two or three answers to this. The first is a very clear no. We do not see that what they are offering has a significant overlap with our assortment. Their rise is also not eating into our business. Very clearly, this is what we are currently observing. If you take it one step further, do they offer in products that we are offering?
Do they offer there in those products aggressive prices that would put us in danger? The answer is also no. There is no overlap in the assortment. They are also not undercutting prices significantly in our existing assortment. Overall, we are quite confident that in their current approach, this will not harm our business. Having said that, we always have a lot of respect for any sort of competitor who is out there who is generating significant interest from customers. From a customer perspective, I have to say we can learn from them. They are attracting customers not just by very aggressive prices, but also by very innovative ways of interacting with their customers. I take a lot of inspiration from that.
We will see how our own customer experience, I emphasize personalized service, I emphasize the experience zones, how we can also add elements of what these are doing to our business. In the pure numbers, I cannot see any impact from their business at the moment. Their thought leadership, let's get inspired by them.
Okay, thank you.
You're welcome.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Volker Bosse from Baader Bank. Please go ahead.
Yep, good morning. Volker Bosse, Baader Bank. Thanks for taking my question. I would also have two questions. I also want to come back on the DACH region with - 3.7%, a bit disappointing. You explained already the reasons. However, could you give a bit more details? What drove the decline? Was it footfall, so frequencies, and also by categories? Which categories suffered most?
Which product categories suffer from the lower consumer appetite here? The second question, to be honest, I was a bit disappointed about the reported EPS. You explained the measures and the ingredients which led to the lower reported EPS. However, could you give us a bit of sense what to expect in the third and the fourth quarter in order to avoid further, let's say, surprises? What is to expect here in that regard to non-recurring items as far as you can tell us already today? Thanks.
Okay, Volker, good to speak to you again. It's Kai speaking on DACH and what happened. I would reiterate what I think I said to the first question here. We attribute this mainly to sentiment, sentiment in the wake of global economic upheaval, I would say, following the U.S. election, the trade war, and all of that uncertainty.
Now, if you break it down into drivers, the main driver that we see in our sales comes from footfall. From footfall in the stores, simply people walking into the stores, fewer people walking into the stores while conversion rate and all these things are more or less stable. The same is true for online. Obviously, it's not footfall there, but it's traffic. These are the two big drivers or the one major driver. Now, in terms of categories, there is no single category that stands out. I would emphasize again that what we managed, and this has a lot to do with categories. That's why I'm pushing a bit back on that question, is we managed, despite this footfall, through good cost discipline and also smart management of our assortments to produce a positive like-for-like on the profitability line.
I'll give you one word about the future here. I attribute this very much to uncertainty. This is also the sentiment in the industry. It remains to be seen whether the sentiment, in particular in this country here in Germany, changes with the new government now going forward. There are obviously some signs that point in that direction. We can't be sure. It remains a volatile environment. I think it's important to note that it's sentiment and not fundamentals that drove this. That's what I can say on that. For EPS, we don't guide on this in any specific way. What I can say perhaps is two things. If you look at the usual cyclical swing of EPS through the year, you see, I'll say this a little figuratively, you see a bathtub.
You see a high value in Q1, slightly lower in Q2 and Q3, and again, a high one in Q4. This is what I would encourage you to look at. You also asked about non-recurring items. Look, it is the nature of non-recurring items that some of them are unplannable. I would point to the impairment that we had to do in Poland and strategically in terms of planned non-recurring items, so restructuring, let's say. Think of it as a low double-digit million EUR figure for this year.
Okay, thank you very much and all the best. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one and one on your telephone keypad. That is star one and one on your telephone keypad if you wish to ask a question. Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I will hand back to Kai-Ulrich Deissner, CEO, for his closing comments.
Yeah, Kai-Ulrich Deissner will first say thank you very much, but will first say that, look, this is an exciting business. If you still have a question, by all means, press the button on the phone, and we're here to answer your questions. I'll pause for another 30 seconds to give you a chance to think about it again before I close this call this morning. All right. Look, thank you for your time and for your questions and interest this morning. I hope you've seen our strategy and our ambitions are constant. We firmly believe that we're on the right path, and we will continue working towards our clear goals, which you all know and which you discussed in so many individual conversations.
If you do want to engage with us again through our official channels, we're very happy to continue the conversations. You can also mark August 12th in your calendars already, where we will present our Q3 results. Until then, Remko and I wish you all the best. Thank you for your interest, and see you very, very soon.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.
Speakers, please stand by.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q2 results presentation. By my side today are our CEO, Dr. Kai-Ulrich Deissner, and our CFO, Remko Rijnders. Before we dive into the detail of our performance, I want to remind you that we will be discussing certain forward-looking statements. Please refer to the disclaimer for more information. You can also find the presentation slide on our website for your reference.
This call is being recorded and will be accessible on the website later today. Now, I'm delighted to hand over the call to Kai, who will walk us through the highlight of the first quarter. Kai, the stage is yours.
Thank you, Fabienne, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining Remko Rijnders and me today. Now, in the formal course of business, we're pleased to present to you some pretty strong results and good progress for the second quarter and the first half of the fiscal year. Before we go there, we need to pause for a second. To be sure, these have been some weeks with significant change for all of us. Let me emphasize from the very beginning here, this company is on a steady path, well grounded in a consistent strategy and execution.
Our results, which you will see in a second, can prove this. Actually, in many ways, the changes of the past few weeks reflect this steady progress, and they do make us proud at Ceconomy. As you know, Karsten Wildberger, our previous CEO, has taken on the ministerial position for digitization and state modernization in the new German government. To be sure, this step is a loss for us, but we're also very happy for Karsten and for ourselves. We're proud of us because, in a way, Karsten's appointment is seen as a sign of respect and recognition for our journey as a company here as well. It's an important statement for the achievement of the whole team here at Ceconomy and MediaMarktSaturn. You will have read the supervisory board has initiated a structured search process for the long-term successor.
In the meantime, they appointed me as CEO for the next phase and Remko Rijnders as the CFO during this time. If I may speak for my dear colleague who's sitting right in front of me here now, we're both honored by this decision, and we do stand for continuity and diligent execution. If you allow me to put it like this, we will not drop the ball. Going into business, it's commonplace, but it's very true of Q2. Retail is a dynamic sector. Our results for this quarter underline once again that we are really equipped to deal with these developments. First and foremost, we cater to the needs of our customers. We're innovative, and this makes us ready for the future. Three milestones that I particularly want to highlight in this quarter.
First, we are creating great personalized offerings for our customers by leveraging the potential of our first-party data. In the past quarter, we achieved a major milestone in personalizing our app. In March, we introduced what we call For You Pages. On those, we recommend to our customers their new favorite products, all based on their search history and preference. I'll say a bit more in a second. Second, we're also driving what we call space as a service offering. Think of it like special boutiques or smaller event spaces in our stores. We can try things out or see eye-catching features right when you walk in. To be sure, this isn't just great for shoppers, but also beneficial for our partners and for our business. Because as part of our corporate strategy, our business is way more than just selling products.
We're here also selling our reach, our customer contacts, and our space. If you want it in a sentence, we're selling, selling. This helps us strategically to rely less on the usual cycles of the retail sector. Instead, we diversify our revenue streams. In this case, our retail space itself becomes the product. In Germany, we successfully rolled out our experience zones. That is part of space as a service, as well as our so-called entrance statements. I will also go into more detail later. Thirdly, as you all know, and as we've discussed here many times, our marketplace is an important tool when it comes to enhancing our product offering and growing our online business. We're steadily adding more countries to it. Now, in the second quarter, we successfully launched our marketplace in Belgium. This is the sixth country that is now on board.
Following these highlights, as already mentioned, our development in Q2 continued to be strong despite, admittedly, the volatile market conditions around us. First and foremost, we further strengthened our profitability. We will look at the most important numbers now, but Remko will give you a more detailed overview later in the financial section. First, sales grew 1.3% with a like-for-like growth underneath that of 0.8%, all of that in a soft environment. Overall, on reported numbers, sales accounted for EUR 5.2 billion. Secondly, and importantly, our adjusted EBIT grew again with plus EUR 4 million to now EUR 10 million in the quarter. This then makes Q2 the ninth quarter of profitable growth for us. The basis for all of this, our NPS, our net promoter score, reached a great all-time high at 61 points. This is a four-point increase since previous year.
Finally, we gained market share again, and it was mainly driven by our strong online business performance. Next step to an overview of our different business areas. Our robust results, which you have just seen, were particularly driven by our growth businesses, and this shows our investment in becoming an omnichannel service platform is truly paying off. With strengthening our omnichannel business, we are also strengthening our online revenues. While bricks and mortar sales remained broadly flat year-over-year, online sales surged by 7.4%. Our online share was at 24.9%. That is an improvement of 200 basis points compared to last year. Additionally, our growth businesses performed strongly. Service and solutions income increased significantly. GMV of our marketplace rose by around 90%, and retail media also grew strongly. All of this underlines that the emphasis that we put on our growth businesses is just the right way to go.
Different cut now. Looking at our countries, especially Türkiye, Hungary, and Spain showed a good sales performance. In Germany, we only saw a soft development driven by a still volatile market. In Spain, Netherlands, Hungary, Austria, and Switzerland, profitability improved. Throughout our group altogether, our profitability does also improve. As I've already mentioned, EBIT grew by EUR 4 million, with our EBIT margin now increasing by 10 basis points. Our reported EPS was at EUR 0.23 in the first half of the year. Our free cash flow at EUR -171 million. We'll give you more details later on. Let's turn to slide seven, the key chart we share each and every quarter to track progress on our key pledges. I will not go through in detail, but you can see in Q2, we again made great and clear progress across all relevant KPIs.
What sticks out is our loyalty members grew significantly compared to the first quarter. For some focus today, let's zoom in on retail core, and then we'll talk about our growth businesses afterwards. Retail core. We're continuously working on enhancing our retail core and actually the shopping experience in our stores. I already mentioned this at the beginning when I talked about space as a service. That means practically, besides store modernizations and lighthouse, we're adding dedicated areas to bring excitement to our stores for both customers and partners. Two examples are the entrance statement and the experience zones. Now, what's an entrance statement? An entrance statement can be found right when you enter the store, promotes products or services or brands highly visibly, for example, on large screens or 3D walls. This creates great advertising space for our brands and partners and is perfect for showcasing new products and services.
It also opens new revenue streams for us. We introduced this sntrance statement in over 50% of our stores in Germany already. Second example, our experience zones. This is where we temporarily offer areas in our stores for product or service demonstration. We have both a standardized setup as well as a custom premium solution for partners that wish to do just a little bit more. This is not just our established partners whose product we sell online or in our stores, but also, for example, for marketplace sellers who only trade online, but they now have access to the many customers in our stores.
In retail core, we're convinced, and we do also know from research, when customers walk through our doors today, they look for a shopping experience like with space as a service, and they're looking for something that is not standard, but that is just for them with their individual needs and wishes. Let me show you on the next slide how we're working on this particular aspect. In our Q1 call, we already introduced to you what we call personalized service. Now, with personalized service, we're putting our customer in the center. There's a deeply shared mindset at the bottom of this. In our words, my customer, my responsibility. If this attitude really works, customers experience a great new level of service with shorter waiting times, individual advice, and a dedicated contact person in the store with a telephone number that you can call and contact afterwards.
As an example, in over 360 stores in Germany, you can now make appointments via app to get this sort of tailored support. More fundamentally, with our personalized service, we're improving our service quality, and this is paying off. We already see a rough mid-single-digit increase in both conversion rate and attachment rate. Obviously, we're now planning the expansion of this service into more stores in Germany and more countries. The amount of great service quality is also possible because we're using our data for our customers' good. In Q2, particularly, this fueled our online sales growth. As I said in the beginning, we implemented a new For You page that displays tailor-made assortment to each and every customer. It contains product recommendations from personal favorite categories, recently viewed products, as well as recommendations based on the search items. We also improved this experience with price and availability alerts.
This was retail core, but let us now have a closer look at the growth areas, in this case, private label. Over the last quarter, we've seen some strong growth here because we've strategically chosen categories where we can present attractive great alternatives to established brands. This is bearing fruit. Our private label sales grew by 15% in Q2, and our sales share was up by 40 basis points year on year. We're now on track to achieve this 5% private label share goal, which is one of our midterm targets which we promised at the capital markets day. We're enhancing this offering with some exciting brand collaborations. First, we're expanding our great Koenig Grills collaboration with the German star chef Tim Raue. We're just this month launching grills in the month of May, perfect for this weather.
Secondly, we've got a real genuine music superstar joining forces with us on private label. Robbie Williams is partnering with Peaq to launch an exclusive audio collection in July, talking headphones, speakers, soundbar. Convincing products to kick things off. This isn't just a quick celebrity endorsement. We've secured a full three-year partnership, and we're confident it will transform how customers see these audio offerings. These examples then show we're continuously refining our product selection and design to offer really the best options to our customers. All of these growth businesses contributed substantially to our gross profit and the growth of gross profit. In the second quarter, we increased both gross profit and margin based on this strong performance. Underneath that, retail core margin remained stable, but this underlines our ability to maintain consistency in our operations while focusing on growth.
Each of our growth businesses, service and solutions, marketplace, private label, retail media has played a great role in strengthening our financial position. They account for a constantly growing amount of our gross profit. Especially service and solutions stood out as a key contributor. Once again, it shows we're on the right path with our growth businesses, and they do strengthen us as a company overall. Let me close with a topic that is deeply ingrained in our strategy too, sustainable service and product offerings, where we make great progress again in the past month. We substantially increased the share of products that are more sustainable. In Q2, we already reached the year-end target for this fiscal year of 7,300 Better Way products, and that's ahead of schedule, and we even exceeded our target. This means we're offering more and more eco-friendlier options for our customers.
Let's also talk about trade-in. Yes, we did see a dip in numbers during Q2, mainly because the market for mobile phones was a bit softer overall. There is some good news underneath. While we got slightly fewer devices, they were worth a lot more. The total value actually jumped significantly last quarter. This is good for our sustainability efforts and our bottom line. It shows our trade-in program is attracting better quality devices over time, providing more value to our business. Trade-in thus remains absolutely central to our strategy. We're constantly building this area up. You can also see this in action with our current international campaign, which most of you probably heard while you were waiting for this call, the campaign that features Jürgen Klopp, and which is now live across 11 countries where we operate. Finally, we're actively promoting refurbished products.
Over 170 stores in Germany are now offering refurbished items in our marketplace. This omnichannel initiative is further strengthening our presence there. Our commitment is also clear in the numbers. We grew by over 200% in refurbished year-over-year. Now, let me hand over to Remko Rijnders for the financial sections, but allow me to introduce Remko briefly. Seventeen years of MediaMarkt and Saturn. He brings with him extensive knowledge of our company and really valuable leadership experience. Since 2020, Remko has led MediaMarkt Benelux as CEO, and since 2023, he's been COO for a number of countries that includes Benelux, Iberia, Türkiye, and Poland. Remko, it's so cool to have you here. The stage is all yours now.
Thank you very much, Kai, and also for the warm introduction, of course. Good morning to all of you.
Yeah, I'm honored to guide you today through the financials. Let me start on slide 14. First, let's look at the headline numbers. We grew our sales in Q2 by 1.3%. That is adjusted for currency and portfolio changes in pre-IS29. The like-for-like, as Kai already mentioned, grew by 0.8%, including a negative calendar impact due to the leap year of - 1%. This is a good performance in a softer market environment, which we are extremely proud of. Our growth was mainly driven by online this quarter. This resulted in a strong increase of our online market share in all our three regions. Our adjusted EBIT on group level reached EUR 10 million in the quarter, thus double the number of last year. This is the ninth consecutive quarter of EBIT growth.
For the first half of the year, we recorded EUR 36 million uplift, which I think is a great performance. It's important to keep in mind that relative to our financial year, Q2, so January to March for us, doesn't contribute very significantly to our annual EBIT. Yet, the year-on-year improvement does play an important role. Now let's have a look at slide 15, profitability per segment. We start with DACH. We recorded a 3.7% decline in like-for-like, driven by all countries except Hungary. Consumer demand was rather soft in the region over the quarter, as Kai already mentioned in his introduction. Still, profitability improved with a EUR 1 million increase in adjusted EBIT. This achievement was made possible by an improved gross margin and effective cost control, allowing us to counter the decline in sales due to the soft market.
In Western and South Europe, our sales were roughly stable with a 0.1% decline in like-for-like. We gained market share in all countries except the Netherlands. Netherlands is positive in market share over the first half of the year. Consumer demand in the region was, as for DACH, soft, but Spain continued to stand out with a positive like-for-like. On profitability, we increased our adjusted EBIT by EUR 10 million and our margin by 60 basis points. A great performance in my view, as Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands were the main drivers of this profitability increase. Moving now to East Europe, sales were once again driven by Türkiye. As anticipated, the market continues to slow down in line with inflation and in line with our expectation. In Poland, a new CEO has been appointed, and we remain determined to turn around the business.
There we have a clear plan in place with unique selling points in the market, like a focus on service and solutions with the widest portfolio in the market, but also unique delivery options. To name one, for example, our Uber delivery in 90 minutes. Still, a recovery will take time. As a whole, profitability is normalizing, as expected in Türkiye, while Poland remains challenging. We recorded a EUR 9 million adjusted EBIT in the region or a 1.1% adjusted EBIT margin. Finally, let me highlight our other segment, which primarily represents holding costs and our private label business. We have seen a positive quarter with EUR 10 million adjusted EBIT. Also here, a EUR 2 million improvement year on year. Now let's look at the half-year numbers on slide 16. After another EBIT improvement in both Q1 and Q2, we closed the first half year with EUR 289 million in adjusted EBIT.
A strong 36 million increase year on year, which is great. Let's go now to slide 17 and talk about service and solutions. Our biggest growth area. You can see that we grew our sales overproportionately with a plus of 7%. This was driven by a 70 basis point increase in service attached. All service categories increased in Q2, but the strongest growth came from warranties and our consumer financing. Kai already mentioned the online sales that we see on slide 18. Our first-party online sales also grew overproportionately with plus 7.4% in Q2 and now reached a total of EUR 3.3 billion in the first half. In Q2, we grew strongly in Türkiye, Switzerland, Belgium, and Hungary. On the back of this, our online sales share increased to nearly 25% in the quarter. Again, a great performance.
Let me come back to the EBIT development on slide 19. Our gross margin increased by 50 basis points in Q2 to 18.4%, which is a great performance. This improvement was driven by our growth areas while we stabilized our product margin and we did not chase unprofitable sales in a quarter. Now, circa 35% of our gross profit comes out of our growth business, which is according to our strategy, as Kai already explained. Our OpEx ratio increased 20 basis points this quarter to 18.6%, given the soft top-line development. Still note that on the absolute level, our OpEx was broadly flat as we have mitigated the OpEx increase with strict cost management. In the first half year, our OpEx ratio improved by 30 basis points to 16%. Turning to the full-year overview on slide 20, from adjusted EBIT to net profit.
Walking down from the adjusted EBIT of EUR 10 million, we recorded the EUR 4 million non-recurring items. The EUR 35 million decline year on year is mainly due to a lower profit share of Fnac Darty, as well as the cost we had to book for a fire damage in our repair center in the Netherlands. We anticipate these costs will be offset next quarter as the insurance process finalizes. Consequently, our reported EBIT reached EUR 14 million, which is a EUR 30 million decline year-over-year. Our financial result came in at EUR -47 million, a EUR -21 million below last year. This decline is mainly driven due to the dividend from Mater Properties and Metro AG booked in the prior year. On this point, let me tell you that we sold our remaining 1% stake in Metro AG on the 4th of April.
This should result in a EUR 19 million cash inflow in Q3. Now, regarding tax, we paid little tax of 20% tax rate on an underlying basis, which means ex-Fnac Darty IS29 and the impairment in Poland. Our tax rate was an impressive 16%. This is a tax rate you should use for the year. Please note that the year-on-year comparison is distorted by the fact that last year in Q2, we activated more deferred tax assets than in this quarter. All in all, for Q2, our reported net result was EUR -38 million and our earnings per share EUR -0.08. Keep in mind that Q2 does not contribute very significantly to our annual result. Slide 21 summarizes our financial performance in the first half of the year in the same logic. Overall, first half, we reported EUR 110 million net result and we reported earnings per share of EUR 0.23.
Now, let me conclude with free cash flow on slide 22. Our free cash flow was influenced by a soft demand in the second quarter, resulted in a EUR -171 million for the first half. Looking at the underlining dynamics of the first half, the primary factor impacting our performance was, unsurprisingly, working capital. Indeed, soft demand and negative calendar impact in Q2 led to higher stock levels. We activated addressing this by adjusting our inventory levels to align with the current environment, and we expect big improvements in the next quarter. You can also see the underlying positive development in tax with EUR 54 million year-on-year improvement. Other operating cash flow developed well due to lower adjustment from our profit share in Fnac Darty. Finally, on cash investment, the higher CapEx mainly reflects a shift in product timeline rather than new spending.
Overall, we are optimistic about achieving a positive free cash flow generation for the full year and reaffirm our outlook. With these comments, I will hand now back to Kai.
Thank you, Remko, for walking us through these details. In closing, then let's turn to our outlook on slide 24. We confirm our positive outlook for the year. Despite the volatile market conditions expected this year, we do remain confident in our ability to drive further growth. We do take confidence from those Q2 results, which you've just seen. Our performance is not just dictated by the market. We do set the pace. We break away and we define the future. In summary, we still expect moderate increase in currency and portfolio adjusted total sales, with all regions contributing to this growth. Moderate, to be precise, means 3%-5% growth.
We secondly anticipate a clear increase in adjusted EBIT. That's primarily driven by DACH, Western, and Southern Europe. Here, we continue to feel comfortable with the current consensus. To follow on this growth trajectory, two things are key to us. Continue to execute our strategy to excite our customers and to provide them with great experiences. Let me also give you an overview of categories that we're particularly looking forward to in the next quarters. First, AI continues to be on the rise, especially in our IT category, where we're strong thanks to AI-enabled products like laptops. Secondly, with the imminent release of the Nintendo Switch 2 in June, pre-order numbers are exceptionally strong. We anticipate renewed growth in the gaming category as a result, which, as you know, was soft last year. In general, gaming is a category with great potential for us.
We have a unique selling proposition here through not only our diverse offerings, but also our gaming-focused specific store concept, which we call Experion. Finally, we're listing new emerging categories. From our perspective, smart glasses are actually an exciting mass-market-ready category. Right now, we do see a high potential for mainstream adoption. Let me summarize those results for you. We posted a robust performance in a volatile environment. We gained market share. All of that because our sizable growth businesses keep expanding, and they do strengthen our profitability. Fourth, we progress in leveraging data to improve the customer experience and create unique personalized offerings and experiences. Fifth, our focus remains on cost, liquidity, and profitability. We do confirm our growth outlook for this financial year. From both Remko's and my perspective, these results underline once again we're moving forward. We are becoming an omnichannel service platform.
We are using innovation for our greater good, for leveraging our potential, and for shaping the future of retail, but always putting the customer first. Now, thank you for your attention this morning, and Remko and I are looking forward to your questions.
Thank you. To ask a question, you will need to press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Thank you. We will now go to our first question. One moment, please. Your first question comes from the line of Andreas Riemann from ODDO BHF. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning. Two questions. First one, would it be possible to speak about the trading in the DACH region? Was March better than February?
Would you even be willing to comment on April? Is there a recovery? This would be the first topic, so to say. Second one, retail media. Here, you are doing very well. To help us better assess the potential size of that business, can you shed more light maybe on the penetration of retail media by country? What do you think? How big can this business become going forward, given that your midterm target is already achieved? These would be my two topics, so to say. Thanks.
Thank you, Andreas, for those questions. This is Kai speaking. I'll answer both. I ask your understanding that we don't disclose monthly figures or current trading, certainly not on a country level. What I can say about DACH and specifically about Germany is, yes, it's true. In Q1, we did see a market slowdown.
We attribute this primarily to sentiment, a sentiment of uncertainty with consumers. We faced headwinds. We faced headwinds in the region, but also in Germany. What for us is the biggest focus is that despite these headwinds, we did increase profitability. As I tried to emphasize for the past 35 minutes, it is this resilience of our business model that is most relevant for us. If you summarize that quarter, it is in line with our expectations. You asked about April. I am going to avoid that question, but I am going to try to give you a perspective on that. In current trading, whether in DACH or in any of the other countries or segments that we have, there is absolutely nothing in current trading, which explicitly includes April, that lets us doubt the guidance that I have just repeated and confirmed.
That is of a moderate sales increase, 35%, and a clear increase in EBIT. On your second question on retail media, you're right, and we're proud of the fact that we reached our target for retail media already early at the end of the last financial year. We've said, and I will repeat, that the more ambitious target that we've given ourselves now is a three-digit million EUR income number. We won't be more specific at this time, but as you can see, our initial target was some EUR 40 million, so we've already more or less doubled that as an ambition going forward. That hopefully gives you an indication.
Okay, thanks.
You're welcome.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Clément Genelot from Bryan Garnier & Co. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning. Two questions on my side, if I may.
The first one is for Karsten Wildberger. As a former head of Poland, what is your view on the Polish market and the group's relevancy to stabilize the business there? My second question is more on the rollout competition online on Temu, AliExpress, and Shein. How do you decide the assortment overlap that you have with them? Do you see them already turning more aggressive and your role in your market? Thank you.
Yeah, good morning, Clément, and thank you for the question. This is Remko Rijnders. On the Polish market, the overall Polish market is a growing market. Let me say, first of all, that we are currently not satisfied with our financial performance as a business. Nevertheless, we have a very clear plan in place. As already mentioned, we hired the new CEO in Poland.
For the next period, we will focus on three topics in the market that make us unique for the customers. That is extremely important in a highly competitive environment. One is on service and solutions, where we have the highest portfolio, the widest portfolio, also with trade-in, but also already mentioned warranties and, of course, in an omnichannel setup. The other one is logistics, where we have a customer offering that no competitor can match with 90-minute delivery, but also cut-off times. Order before 10, deliver the next day for free, which will take the competitors quite a long while to follow due to their volumes and their current setup. We have it live on digital. Kai already mentioned, Belgium is the sixth country. We will also go live in Poland with Marketplace. We have the whole setup for digital.
We are also doing a lot of improvements on the customer journey digital to make our content rich, to make sure that we drive organic traffic to our sites. We are quite convinced that we will improve the result in the upcoming period. Nevertheless, it will take time to show that performance and a lot of efforts from the team. Thank you very much. Thank you, Clément.
This is Kai. I'll take your second question on Temu, AliExpress, and Shein. Two or three answers to this. The first is a very clear no. We do not see that what they are offering has a significant overlap with our assortment. Their rise is also not eating into our business. Very clearly, this is what we are currently observing. If you take it one step further, do they offer in products that we are offering?
Do they offer there in those products aggressive prices that would put us in danger? The answer is also no. There is no overlap in the assortment. They are also not undercutting prices significantly in our existing assortment. Overall, we are quite confident that in their current approach, this will not harm our business. Having said that, we always have a lot of respect for any sort of competitor who is out there who is generating significant interest from customers. From a customer perspective, I have to say we can learn from them. They are attracting customers not just by very aggressive prices, but also by very innovative ways of interacting with their customers. I take a lot of inspiration from that. We will see how our own customer experience—I emphasize personalized service, I emphasize the experience—how we can also add elements of what these are doing to our business.
But in the pure numbers, I cannot see any impact from their business at the moment. Their thought leadership, let's get inspired by them.
Okay, thank you.
You're welcome.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Volker Bosse from Baader Bank. Please go ahead.
Yep, good morning. Volker Bosse, Baader Bank. Thanks for taking my question. I would also have two questions. I also want to come back on the DACH region with - 3.7%, a bit disappointing. You explained already the reasons. However, could you give a bit more details? What drove the decline? Was it footfall, so frequencies, and also by categories? Which categories suffered most? So which product categories suffer from the lower consumer appetite here? And the second question, I mean, to be honest, I was a bit disappointed about the reported EPS.
You explained the measures in the ingredients which led to the lower reported EPS. However, could you give us a bit of sense what to expect in the third and the fourth quarter in order to avoid further, let's say, surprises? Yeah, what is to expect here in that regard to non-recurring items as far as you can tell us already today? Thanks.
Okay, Volker, good to speak to you again. It's Kai speaking on DACH and what happened in Q1. I would reiterate what I think I said to the first question here. We attribute this mainly to sentiment, sentiment in the wake of global economic upheaval, I would say, following the U.S. election, the trade war, and all of that uncertainty. Now, if you break it down into drivers, the main driver that we see in our sales comes from footfall.
From footfall in the stores, simply people walking into the stores, fewer people walking into the stores while conversion rate and all these things are more or less stable. The same is true for online. Obviously, it is not footfall there, but it is traffic. These are the two big drivers or the one major driver. Now, in terms of categories, there is no single category that stands out. I would emphasize again that what we managed, and this has a lot to do with categories. That is why I am pushing a bit back on that question, is we managed, despite this footfall, through good cost discipline and also smart management of our assortments to produce a positive like-for-like on the profitability line. I will give you one word about the future here. I attribute this very much to uncertainty. This is also the sentiment in the industry.
It remains to be seen whether the sentiment, in particular in this country here in Germany, changes with the new government now going forward. There are obviously some signs that point in that direction. We cannot be sure. It remains a volatile environment. I think it is important to note that it is sentiment and not fundamentals that drive this. That is what I can say on that. For EPS, we do not guide on this in any specific way. What I can say perhaps is two things. If you look at the usual cyclical swing of EPS through the year, you see—I will say this a little figuratively—you see a bathtub, yeah? You see a high value in Q1, slightly lower in Q2 and Q3, and again, a high one in Q4. This is what I would encourage you to look at. You also asked about non-recurring items.
Look, it's the nature of non-recurring items that some of them are unplannable. I would point to the impairment that we had to do in Poland and strategically in terms of planned non-recurring items, so restructuring, let's say. Think of it as a low double-digit million EUR figure for this year.
Okay, thank you very much and all the best. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one and one on your telephone keypad. That is star one and one on your telephone keypad if you wish to ask a question. Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I will hand back to Kai-Ulrich Deissner, CEO, for his closing comments.
Yeah, Kai-Ulrich Deissner will first say thank you very much, but will first say that, look, this is an exciting business. If you still have a question, by all means, press the button on the phone, and we're here to answer your questions. I'll pause for another 30 seconds to give you a chance to think about it again before I close this call this morning. All right. Thank you for your time and for your questions and interest this morning. I hope you've seen our strategy and our ambitions are constant. We firmly believe that we're on the right path, and we will continue working towards our clear goals, which you all know and which you discussed in so many individual conversations.
If you do want to engage with us again through our official channels, we're very happy to continue the conversations. You can also mark August 12th in your calendars already, where we will present our Q3 results. Until then, Remko and I wish you all the best. Thank you for your interest, and see you very, very soon. Thank you very much.