Good afternoon, everybody. We are down to the last presentation, the 11th presentation of our German Select Conference, and the slot goes, last but not least, to HORNBACH Holding, which will be presented by Antje Kelbert, Head of IR. As always, we'll have a 30-minute slot, 20 minutes, roughly, presentation, 10 minutes Q&A. If you have questions, like in the presentations before, please use the chat box to enter them, and we will address them during the following Q&A after the presentation. In case you did like this format, please feel free to join us on April 23rd for our Austrian Select Conference. We will share the link to that shortly in the chat box as well. That's all I have, and I will now hand it over to you, Antje, to share your insights on HORNBACH Holding.
Well, thank you very much for your kind introduction, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure to welcome you today here and to present HORNBACH Holding to you. HORNBACH is a company characterized by resilient business model, sustainable growth prospects, and a continuous innovation. As said, my name is Antje Kelbert, and I'm Head of Investor Relations. Here's some disclaimer remarks, but now jumping directly, what are we doing and who are we? HORNBACH is one of European's leading brand when it comes to home improvement and the DIY sector. Many of you, I'm probably sure, are already familiar with HORNBACH, whether through your own projects you've made or also our marketing and advertising activities. In the capital market, we are active and operating as HORNBACH Holding and are listed in the SDAX. We are dividend payers and a very consistent one.
Since our IPO in 1987, so nearly 40 years, we've never suspended or reduced our dividend, and this is a strong statement and a very well track record. Our largest subsidiary and operating subsidiary is HORNBACH Baumarkt AG, and HORNBACH Baumarkt AG is what you know from all our 176 stores throughout European countries. We have in nine European countries, different locations, and we are also complemented those with our online presence and our web shops. Our offering is complemented by HORNBACH Baustoff Union. This is a smaller part of the group, roughly 5% of our group sales, and this caters for new construction industry, mainly for professional customers. It's a merchant's business, trader's business. Over the recent years, we have continuously increased our market share. You see here a small snapshot on our map.
This clearly underlines that we were able to strengthen our business and our competitive position in all the countries where we are operating. In the past fiscal year, that, by the way, we have a broken fiscal year, ended February 2026, we generated consolidated sales of EUR 6.4 billion, and approximately half of this revenue was generated outside of Germany. You can really consider us as a European player. Adjusted EBIT amounted to roughly EUR 265 million, and international operations contributed 2/3 of this result. What differentiates HORNBACH from other DIY retailers? Our strong focus is definitively the project. All projects related to your home, to garden, balcony, your living, we are ambitious to be the best partner when it comes to project realization, and we want to support our customers to support in these projects.
We consistently align our offering around the needs of a customer with focus on projects. This includes both customer types. On the one hand, the retail customers that we cater as well as the professional clients, and you see it on the graph on the right-hand side, roughly 20% of our clients come from the professional side. Our customers focus on project execution, as already said, and this means to have the right products in the right quantity and to meet also their budget. This is how we are structured to cater for all those needs. This means we have comprehensive services, we have efficient purchasing processes, and we can also include expert advice.
Our stores offer a deep and broad assortment, and as we have the real big boxes we are providing, we have the availability of really big volumes of products available at once without pre-ordering in advance. We operate an industry-leading online platform, so we also enable the customer to design its journey like he wants, online, offline. A key differentiator is definitively when it comes to our everyday low price policy, which we are very strict on. This helps the customer to be sure that he has chosen the partner that always has the best price.
We are price leaders in all our regions where we are operating, and we also deliberately refrain from promotional discountings, and instead, we have every day the low price at the moment a customer want to realize a project with us. Our projects and our whole processes are designed to ensure a very seamless, fast, and convenient shopping event for our customer so that they are able to quickly return to their project and their project execution. An example for this is we have drive-in facilities where you can directly take your car, go into this drive-in facility, buy heavy, bulky things, put it in the trunk of the car, and off you go. This is what our customers really like because it's very efficient. Our offering is further complemented by dedicated professional services, tool rental, financing solutions, and also repair services.
I've already mentioned our online offering, and you see here an overview of our key topics on that. Our online offering is part of the whole business. We call it Interconnected Retail. This is a deeply integration of our online channels in the whole business. It's really a seamless customer journey and the customer can seamlessly move also during one purchasing event from online to offline. We support click and collect. We have direct deliveries, whatever is helping the customer to design his shopping experience with us. He can, for instance, start in a physical store, or even he plans everything online at home on his sofa. We have configurators, so he can prepare his shopping basket.
When he sees, okay, this is a really big amount and perhaps a professional should have a look, then he could go to the store around, and could say, "Okay, let's discuss, is this the right product, the right glue, the right tile?" in order to optimize that. He can purchase everything, take it from the store or get it delivered at home. If he has ordered some tiles, which he does not need, then he can also for sure bring it back to the store. It's always a shift between online and offline, and we enable that this is a seamless way of shopping.
In total, we have 4.3 million customer accounts, and a customer account is very important because when he has a customer account with us and a price is reduced, then he automatically, up to 30 days after his purchase, get a refund on his customer account, which he can use for the next purchase with us. In total, we have more than 350 million visits, clicks on our website, on our webshop. A lot of different surveys underline that our customers are very happy with our online offerings. We have a very good ranking and rating, which is underlining a very high customer satisfaction. When it comes to efficiency, we have this chart on the left-hand side, and this is showing the sales per square meter. The first message is, you see, compared to our other German competitors, HORNBACH is operating the largest store.
The average store square meters, we are key. Also the sales per square meter is something which we are really proud because it shows that we are efficiently running our business. You see, we have also in the last year, we have even increased once again to EUR 2.9 thousand per sq m, which is a plus of 1.9% compared to the previous year. This is a very efficient thing to run this big boxes, and it underlines that we know what we are doing, and we are having the right focus. What is helping here is that we have very good locations that people can easily come to us. We have good parking slots. We have also the online offering and all together with our good assortment, the availability, and also the advice our experienced customer store staff can give to our customers.
This all is showing that we are ahead of the industry. On the right-hand side, you see a long-term graph that shows the development and the growth of HORNBACH compared to German GDP and also to our German competitors. Also here, we feel very comfortable with our positioning, and it underlines that we are doing the right things. Here we show that we are very successful in expanding our business. This is what we did in the last fiscal year. We had some new openings in Romania, in Austria, and also in Germany. We added around 70,000 square meters of new retail space for our customers and for their dreams and their projects to come true.
With this expansion, we are welcoming also 400 new colleagues because, as already said, these stores are really big, and this also means that adding a new store means also adding a small enterprise from the people we are onboarding for such an opening. These latest successful openings are part of HORNBACH impressive overall track record of organic growth. Not going too deep into detail, but this is the growth path over the company history, where we started to increase the footprint in Germany and then followed the extensive European expansion over a couple of years. The last country we are now going to expand to is Serbia, where we will see also new store openings, probably by the end of 2027. How do we proceed? First of all, we identify markets and countries with significant potential for DIY business.
People must be very open to do things by themselves. We secure attractive locations. As said, location is key when it comes to retail so that the customer can also come to you. As a next step, we build a clear network of state-of-the-art DIY stores to broaden our footprint in the respective country. This strategy has not only made us successful in the past. We are strong believers that this will also function in the future, and we will conduct the same strategy when it comes to getting into the Serbian market. We see that the Serbian market is offering an attractive growth potential for us, and this is also because of the general competitive situation we see there because these big-box players are probably not there, and we see a good potential to secure market share in that area.
As said, earliest by the end of 2027, we will see the first store opening, and in total, we will see a potential for roughly six stores in that large catchment areas in Serbian urban centers. We have already secured the first locations, and we will now continuously roll out and proceed to enter the market. We will not only enter the market by our big boxes, but also will establish an online shop for sure, as we have in each and every of our countries, and also roll out our Interconnected Retail strategy. What is the general growth tendency where we are established? I think probably it's very clear.
One of ones is the focus on your own home, especially in times where it is uncertain, where there are a lot of wars, geopolitical uncertainty, macro uncertainty, people tend to focus on that area of their life that they definitively can influence by themselves For instance, their house, their garden. This is the area where they can do something with their hands, and they can also, like a kind of a therapy, come out of this multiple crisis mode by, for instance, going to the garden and doing something outside. This is very important for our customers. The next thing is when it comes to energy refurbishment, please keep in mind that we have a really old housing stock throughout Europe and throughout all the countries where we are operating. They not need a general refurbishment, but in particular energy refurbishment projects.
We are also well-positioned to participate from this trend. Last but not least, you have also an aging society. Aging society means you have to adapt your living area because you want to stay there even if you turn older, and you need, for instance, a walk-in shower and you have to restructure your bathroom. This is also something where we can support our customers to do so to get barrier-free renovations. The last thing is also tradespeople. There's a scarcity of tradesperson in Europe in general and in Germany. We try to enable our customers to do things on their own. We have tutorials on our website.
We have good advice in the stores to enable our customers to do things by themselves and also to save cost, because also people have restrained budgets, and doing it on their own is not as expensive as doing it from a professional customer. As already mentioned, we have a lot of selling space, and roughly 62% of this selling space is in our own hands, which this graph is showing. This is very helpful because it gives us a lot of flexibility to change things. For instance, to add the already mentioned drive-in facility for construction material, for large, heavy, and bulky things, where we can just erect that directly attached to the market, and it gives us a high flexibility to expand and to adapt our own sites.
At the same time, it's also kind of a finance reserve we have in the different countries, and it's also true for all of the countries where we operate. Partly, we have rented sites, and partly we have own sites in our own hands. Let us now look at the latest figures. We have not disclosed the full set of numbers yet, but we had also already given some information on our trading statement in March. We come to this here. There you see that we were able to successfully conclude the fiscal year 2025, 2026 within our guided ranges. This is something we are really proud because we were able to show a good growth, a good development, despite a really challenging environment. You probably know it's not so easy, and we're really happy with the numbers we were able to disclose to the market already.
The rest of the numbers we'll disclose on the 19th of May with our annual conference, and there we give more details, including a guidance for next fiscal year. Just to guide you here, I already mentioned the development of net sale for the full year, +3.8%. What is also important to see is the like-for-like sales growth. This means if you only consider the stores that already have been in our group 12 months before, we achieved a growth of 2.4% here. If you consider the industry, they did not were able to show such a good development. The gross margin, as already indicated, remained on a strong level, and the adjusted EBIT was a little bit below last year. Not all of the cost increases got fully compensated, but the good gross profit was able to compensate a lot of cost increase.
All in all, we were really happy with a successful conclusion of the fiscal year. Also, looking a little bit ahead, as said, we have no official guidance currently. We will have that in a month of time. Looking ahead, we will stick to our core USPs, as said, the price leadership, and we want to be a reliable project partner for our customers. We want to further expand our strong market positions. We want to further increase the market share in the different countries, and we will also for sure look on efficiency, look on cost management, and the world around us will not get easier, so we also have to be efficient. We have to look where we can use AI and digitization to compensate cost management and better manage our inventories. You always know we have already issued ESG reporting.
We will do that also with our annual report in May again. All those targets are also incorporated in our compensation of the Board. It's really a very important thing to look on ESG criteria at HORNBACH. Last but not least, we will maintain a strong balance sheet. We will stick to our attractive dividend policy, never reduced or skip the dividend. Also going forward, we will stick to our dividend policy to be at least at the level of the previous year. All further details will then be disclosed with the invitation for the AGM. I think I'm pretty much in line with our timing and now open to your questions.
Very good. Thank you so much, Antje. We do have a few questions already lined up. Let me start out with the first question, which is regarding the EBIT margin and the EBIT margin development. We've seen EBIT margin peak in the COVID time and era. Since then, it's been hovering around 4.5%, give or take. Do you see any initiatives or any growth that might drive that margin higher? We see top-line growth, but there really hasn't been much leverage on the margin. Is this a business that will stay around 4.5%?
I think the COVID years have been really outstanding. You know, these were really outstanding years for our business development. It was kind of skyrocketing and also reflected in the EBIT, because our net sales rose tremendously, and we normally would need more people to handle that. During the pandemic, it was not able to onboard them, so there was a little bit of mismatch of development of this. Later in time, we had more pressure, especially during the times of inflation, when also the demand for wage increases for sure was there, and we have experienced a lot of increases in wage. Also last year, we have seen some further wage increases, but also, as said, onboarded new colleagues, which also increased our staff and our personnel costs. Personnel costs by far are the biggest block of costs we are confronted with.
For sure, as said, we want to be as efficient with our people as possible, especially in the stores where we can help our store staff to lift some work from them. For instance, the disposition of articles and so on, where we could use in future more AI, where we could better and more optimal guide our inventories and to free them from logistic tasks to focus purely on our customers. I think this is something where we really have some initiatives, and also in our offices and in the administration, we want to be more efficient. I think there are some things we can do, but in general, people are important to HORNBACH because, as you know, you come to a DIY store and no one is there. I think this is key for generating our revenue.
Thank you. Regarding your low-price strategy, which is of course a unique differentiator and I guess also helps getting people into your stores, how do you view that strategy in an environment of rising prices and higher inflation? Because on the one hand, competitors are, of course, increasing their prices, and you might leave some money on the table, especially in that inflationary environment, how do you view that, or do you have any experience with that?
Yeah, we have. We had times after the COVID pandemic where, due to this energy price rise we have seen during the time of the start of the war in Ukraine, and this scarcity of gas and all those discussions, we had also seen a high inflation. Also during that time, we have experienced the pressure that is causing to the price leader. If you take into consideration how we are doing the pricing, it's not a cost-plus pricing, it's that we really scan the market. We look where is the price scheme, and we try to position us on the low end of this price scheme. For sure, if the general price level is going up, also our price level is going up. We are not in the driving seats of driving the general prices according to our everyday low price policy.
For sure, this is a logical consequence. Yes, it gives some burden, but we also benefit in normal times very much. We consider that really as an asset because people come to us. Not losing top line is also a very important thing because that directly helps us to increase our gross profit.
Thank you. I'm sure this is a question that is asked more frequently regarding your real estate portfolio. Is this something that you will keep going forward, or is it something where you could imagine sale and leaseback and maybe monetize that more efficiently?
Mm-hmm. Yeah, sure. As already presented, we have currently 62% of our selling space in our own hands. The strategy is to have roughly 50%, so we are a little bit over that. We could imagine to do something like that. It's, I think, part of the general toolbox our CFO could consider to use, and also in former times, this has been used already from the company. It's something if it makes sense and if there's an opportunity, we would do it. Just also from the idea, why we are renting the one location and we are buying the other, I think to keep into mind is important, in retail, to have the right location that very much fits into your existing portfolio is important. A certain location to have it, this is the key decision.
If this area is up for rent or for sale, this is the next thing we are deciding. First of all, we want to make use out of this area, and we want to make use by operating a large DIY store, and this is important. What you could do, and this freedom, as I said, it's kind of a finance reserve. We could imagine to do that, but this is part of the general financing functions we could use.
Thank you. You talked about online sales, store sales, and the combination of the two. Can you give us a little bit more feeling as to what the split is? The question actually read, "What is the average transaction value of a customer who engages digitally before or during a store visit versus one who doesn't?
Yeah. We have not the concrete number, who's really doing some research in advance or not. We only know that nearly each and every customer is already starting the buying process by using online offerings, by doing some research, by looking up availabilities in our app and things like that, also looking at the tutorial. It's an important thing, and nowadays you say if you are not online, then you're not offline. The connect is really strong, and we are not really breaking that out because, as I said, Interconnected Retail is the whole bundle of our offering and the whole customer journey. To give you a broad number, we have roughly 13% of our sales is generated from the online world, so from our e-commerce, and this has also, compared to last year, increased by 7%. We are happy to do so.
We have also not a target to reach 15%-20% or so because this would not go along, this freedom we want to give to our customer to design its customer journey as best as it pleases him.
Makes sense. I do have one more question which was asked regarding the competitive environment, and you've already touched on that because you're focusing more on the high-end customer in the retail and the professional sector. The question is wondering if the discounters like Lidl and Aldi, with their brands like PARKSIDE, for example, are cutting into your territory, or if you were to say this is a completely different market segment that they're catering to, and we don't feel it, and we don't worry about it.
Yeah, you always have to have a close look at the market and the market development, and you should also never underestimate your competitor. I think this is also, in trading, a very important thing. However, as we are more focused on the whole project, and the project is always a combination of different things, of material, of tools and so on, we see ourself well-positioned to participate from the overall growth trend. Yes, for sure, they have different offerings as well, and we have to keep an eye on that, for sure.
Great. Thank you so much. We're out of questions. I do have two or three housekeeping issues that I quickly want to raise before we part. First of all, thank you everybody for attending this presentation or potentially some more during our conference today. We will have recordings of the individual presentations available on ResearchHub a little later today. In case you missed one, feel free to look it up on ResearchHub. We will send out, and already have, questionnaires for you to give some feedback to the presenting companies. We'd very much appreciate it if you'd take a second and fill it out. It's very quickly done, six questions, and that will be very helpful for the companies to evaluate their performance. Last but not least, if you enjoyed what you saw today, feel free to join us for the Austrian Select on the 23rd of April.
I posted the link in the chat box just a little while ago. With all this in mind, thanks again from my side. Thanks to you, Antje.
It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
A final comment. There you go. Anything else?
Yeah, I'll invite you to do your own gardening projects currently because it's spring season. I think our colleagues have a lot of good ideas how you could bring some flowers, some spring to your own life and garden. I hope to see you soon in one of our stores.
Great final remarks. Thank you so much, Antje. Thank you, everybody else. Have a great afternoon and a great evening, and see you soon. Bye.
Thank you. Bye-bye.