Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Redcare Pharmacy Q1 2026 earnings release analyst and investor conference. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Olaf Heinrich, CEO. Please go ahead, sir.
Yes, thank you very much and good morning to everybody and a very warm welcome from our side. Let's have a look into the agenda of today. First of all, we would like to talk about financial performance, then Rx and regulatory updates, and then guidance. If we start with the financial performance, let's look into the highlights of the Q1 of 2026. Our revenues are 18% year-over-year up to EUR 849 million. We show strength in both segments with 19% for DACH and 16% for international. Our active customer base reached 14.2 million, up 1.1 million year-over-year. Also our average basket size is up 9% year-over-year. Non-Rx revenue up 10% to EUR 533 million. That's important, and we will talk about this later.
Growth in Germany accelerated from 5% in the Q4 of last year to 9% in Q1. Group Rx revenues are up 36%, in Germany 55% to EUR 168 million. Also the eRx NPS further increased from 73 in Q4 of last year to now 76 in Q1 2026. Our adjusted EBITDA margin improved 0.4 percentage points year-over-year, reaching now 1.7%. Here we are fully on track to achieve our full year guidance. If you look into the segments, again, same number but some more details. 19.1% in the DACH segment, driven by 35.5% Rx and 8.1% non-Rx. Whereas in the international segment we have 15.7% growth. Let us have now a more detailed look into the German market. Good news.
Overall, we see a strong rebound in the German non-Rx business. As explained in the March earnings call, we had two main reasons for the low growth in Q4 of last year. First of all, the very strong basis in Q4 of 2024 due to the branding and marketing push and also softer markets. In Q1 of this year, we see a net acceleration from 5% to 9% and an even further acceleration in April to 11%. Very good news. Main reason for the turnaround are adjustments in our marketing mix, plus some improvements in the still soft market environment in March. Having said this, I would like to hand over to Hendrik.
Thank you Olaf, and a very warm welcome as well from my side. As Olaf showed, we had a very good start into 2026. We have been able to compensate or more than compensate the year-over-year decrease in gross margin by scaling and optimizing our business. We have increased in Q1 our adjusted EBITDA by 58% year-over-year. This compares to an implicit guidance if you combine the revenue guidance and the margin guidance of about 50% year-over-year for the full year. At the same time, we have increased our EBITDA margin by 0.4 percentage points year-over-year. Obviously, our full year guidance is at least 5% such points of margin improvement, so this could be perceived as that we would not be on track for our profitability objective.
I will show in the following slides why we are very confident to be able to achieve our guidance on all metrics. Let's start with gross margin. Our gross margin is mostly driven by margin compression in the non-Rx business. This is due to competition in an overall soft market environment. However, the story has changed during Q1. What we saw in the first half of Q1 was that there were still soft market environment and pricing pressure, and in the second half we have seen stronger demand and we were able to increase our prices and hence our margins. I want to underscore that we have not achieved the top line acceleration in DE by reducing prices. We will continue to optimize our pricing, and we do this increasingly with the help of AI.
Please note that until Q4 we will be lapping prior year periods without the Rx bonus scheme in place. This adds to the gross margin dilution due to the increasing share of Rx in our revenue mix. An important call-out on this slide is the headwind from retail media, the -0.5 percentage points that you see here. Our high margin retail media business did not have a good start. The start was soft as we struggled to deliver all scheduled campaigns in time to recognize the revenue. This was despite an actually strong order intake for retail media. We consider this largely a one-off effect that we will catch up upon during the rest of the year. Moving to SD&A. Our selling distribution and administration expenses and percent of revenues have decreased by 2.8 percentage points year-over-year.
We have reduced our marketing expenses significantly, especially for brand and TV. We will continue with our strategy to use the Rx bonus as our best lever to attract and retain Rx customers. We still do TV, but at a lower level. We invest instead in more targeted online campaigns. The operation scaling, the minus 0.8 or 0.8 percentage points improvement that you see on this chart have two drivers. I want to call this out because it's important. 50% of this improvement is the real scaling, that is, lower cost per order. The other half is mostly coming from a mix effect, so a higher share of Rx orders, which have a higher basket value and therefore a lower cost rate.
You see as well an 0.5 percentage points headwind in other mix. About half of this headwind is related to IT. We continue to invest in IT. We want to reduce our tech debt, and we need to enable scaling by automation and AI. We are committed to building a strong business for the long term, and we are not optimizing for short-term profitability. Let's look at the business by segment. In DACH, you can see that we have, whilst we grew top line by 19% year-over-year, we have achieved strong growth of Rx business in Germany and Switzerland, and despite of that, we have an improvement of 0.8 percentage points in our EBITDA margin. Despite the strong growth of a low margin business, we have seen a significant scaling effect increasing 0.8 percentage points.
This shows how our business can scale when we optimize marketing mix and when we leverage our increasingly efficient operations. Next slide, please. In international, we didn't have a good start into 2026, and the international performance is therefore weighing on our Q1 profitability overall. The good news is that this is mostly driven by two one-time effects. First, we tested higher prices in Q1 2025, especially in Belgium, and then in Q2 2025, we reduced these prices again. This will, going forward, not be an ongoing lapping effect. Secondly, the delay in the delivery of advertising campaigns that I mentioned above was especially concentrated in international and this as well reduced our gross profit margin.
Without these two effects, we would actually have been breaking even in international already in Q1, and therefore, we continue to target break even for international for the full year 2026. Let's go back to group level. If we combine the 0.8 percentage points improvement in DACH and the 1.4 deterioration in international, we end up at only 0.4 percentage points improvement on group level. As I said, this is fully on track with seasonality, our plans. If you remove the one-off effects in international, our group margin would actually have been at 2% in Q1. Let's move to cash flow. To better reflect our free cash flow, we have split in this chart our financing cash flow into two pieces, operational financing and, what I call here, for lack of a better word, pure financing.
Both are classified in IFRS as financing, they are of different nature. Operational financing is related to leasing buildings and to customer payments that create as well costs that are categorized under financing costs. The pure financing costs here are completely unrelated from operations, and in this quarter are driven by the redemption of our old convertible bond. What you can see here is that our operational free cash flow, according to this definition, has been only slightly negative in Q1 and shows a significant improvement quarter-over-quarter. With this, I hand it back to Olaf for an update on our Rx business and the regulatory environment.
Thank you very much. Let's start with the key metrics of our Rx business in Germany, which we continue to improve. I mean, first of all, the average basket size went up. If you look into Q1 of last year compared to Q1 of this year, from EUR 113 to EUR 135. That is really driven by higher ASP, but also by more Rx units in the baskets and also more non-Rx units in the baskets. This you can also see in our mixed order rate went up from 36% to 42%. What we are really happy about is the Net Promoter Score, because that's the direct feedback from our customers. We significantly improved from 58 in Q1 of last year to 76 in Q1 of this year.
This shows, I mean, we have really developed a very good value proposition towards our customers and is also recognized by our customers. Our customers are happy customers and therefore returning customers. Overall, very good development. If we go to the next slide, you can see there's still one open topic, I would call it that way, and that is the number of new customers and the development of our active Rx customers, which is still a topic we have to solve. If you look into this one, you can see the development from the introduction of the e-script at the beginning of 2024. We are steadily adding active Rx customers.
The main reason why the number is not growing faster is because we somehow struggle to increase the number of new customers per quarter. The new customers we acquire show a great quality in terms of second order rate, frequency, AOV, but we are simply not adding enough new customers at acceptable costs to be able to further accelerate the growth. The good news is, within the next 12 months, additional redemption options and levers will go live. First of all, the introduction of the digital Health ID based on PoPP will allow a fully digital journey on top of the existing eGK physical card solution. The next, the EU Digital Identity Wallet, will be introduced beginning of 2027, which offers another digital way to redeem scripts.
Then on top, doctors from July 2026 already on can switch for repeat prescriptions from a quarterly to a half-year cycle for stable chronic patients having only one disease. This will make the journey for those patients completely digital. They don't even have to go to the doctor's office. They can order repeat scripts from home via an online pharmacy. Very good development ahead of us, but the main task remains we need to convince more new customers about this product and the solution. Again, those customers who have the experience give us a very high NPS on our product. On the next slide, we would like to talk a little bit about regulatory and to give you an update on that. In Germany, the healthcare sector is under cost pressure and subject to reforms.
First of all, a fundamental healthcare reform, including budget cuts impacting all major stakeholders like doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, but also pharma and patients is underway. To us, most relevant are higher patient co-payments, but also higher pharmacy rebates towards payers. Secondly, the legislative process for the increase of the Fixum, you know, the script-based remuneration, as agreed upon in the coalition agreement, has not yet been started. We need to see how this develops over time. Additionally, a pharmacy reform is underway. This pharmacy reform entails, next to many other elements, a draft regulation on temperature control on the last mile, which is relevant to our online pharmacy business. The current draft wants to extend the sole responsibility of the pharmacist for the quality of the products, including temperature, on the last mile also to the logistics providers.
From our perspective, this makes no sense at all since we have successfully managed this topic in the last 25 years. Good news is also the EU Commission shares our view and has issued a detailed opinion on this, the strongest formal signal possible. The Commission does not see any necessity for such a regulation at all. As a result, Germany will have to adapt the current draft regulation to avoid a potential infringement procedure. Overall, please keep in mind that all of the mentioned reforms are still subject to change in the legislative process. Therefore, from our perspective, it does not make sense, a lot of sense to speculate about potential outcomes. We will give you an update, once we have more insights or final situations. Having said this, I would like to turn over to Hendrik.
Thank you, Olaf. The guidance, there's not a lot to say about guidance. Despite the strong rebound of our non-Rx business, especially in Germany, with accelerating growth in April, we are not increasing our guidance at this point. I want to clarify that we have only called out April revenues for the DE non-Rx business because of the strong focus on this topic after the dip in Q4. The fact that we're not reporting on overall April revenue by no means should be read as, you know, we are selective and are maybe not that happy with other parts of the business. That is not the case. We are doing well in April across the board. We are very satisfied with the progress that we are making in all parts of the business, and we will continue to optimize our marketing mix.
We're working very hard on building the foundations for long-term scaling of this business. With this, I hand it back to the moderator for Q&A.
Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touchtone telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use only handsets while asking a question. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. One moment for the first question, please. The first question comes from Jan Koch from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Hi Olaf, hi Hendrik. Thanks for taking my questions. I would like to address three topics. Firstly, on Q1, could you share some color on the lower non-Rx growth in Austria and Switzerland in the quarter, and when do you expect this to improve again? Secondly, on your guidance, if I annualize your Q1 German Rx sales, you are already at the full year guidance. Do you expect that the sequential growth rates for this business could be negative in some quarters in 2026? Finally, on the regulatory environment, could you confirm that the higher planned pharmacy rebates could cost you about EUR 2 million-EUR 3 million, and that this should be significantly offset by the targeted Fixum increase whenever this comes?
Yeah. Thank you for the question. Starting with the first one, as you said, like, despite the strong rebound of the non-Rx business in Germany, overall, the DACH non-Rx business has been not accelerating, and this is due indeed to Austria. It's not the Swiss business, it's the Austrian business, where we actually had some operational issues after the transition to Pilsen. As you remember, we started to ship from Pilsen in Q1, and we had some supply chain issues that for a short period reduced the assortment that we were able to offer our customers. We have been able to fix this in March, and we are back on track with growth in Austria in April. On your second question, continued momentum in the Rx business in Germany. Yes.
You're right. You know, we're tracking very well. As Olaf said as well, the activation of new customers remains hard, therefore, you know, we're not significantly or we don't increase our guides at this point. We say EUR 670 million or more. You know, we will continue to invest in this. We are the category leader, we develop the market as well. We don't wanna go overboard with respect to the acquisition cost for new customers. Hence, yeah, we don't change our guidance, but we're very happy with the ongoing trajectory of the Rx business. Finally, you are right, the discount or the Apothekenabschlag is or would have roughly an impact of EUR 2 million on a full-year basis for us.
As Olaf said, all this is work in process. We don't know yet when exactly what is going to be go live and hit us. At the same time, we hope that the Fixum will as well be adjusted, and that may happen at the same time as the discount, and may actually end up overall in a positive effect for us. We don't know this, and we have not included this in our forecast. There's neither upside nor downside at this point included in our 2026 assumptions or in our 2027, 2028 assumptions as a result of Fixum or Herstellerabgabe discount.
Maybe to add to this, as you said, Hendrik, and as I said earlier, I mean, look, I mean, for those of you who have followed this for quite a long time, I mean, the Fixum, for example, has been in the coalition agreement, and we have been discussing this now for more than a year. Yes. I mean, you see even the legislative process hasn't started at all. That means, I think we should not really speculate so much about things we read somewhere, neither an increase of Fixum or an increase of the rebates towards payers, because also that is, it is, this is a draft out there. It's a work in progress.
Therefore, I mean, we, as Hendrik said, we don't have this in our forecast at all, and we will only update you on this one once we know for sure what is going to happen.
Got it. Thank you.
The next question comes from Olivier Calvet from UBS. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning, Olaf and Hendrik. Thanks for taking my questions. I have a couple left. First, on the Rx temperature regulation, could you perhaps remind us of the cost per package that this would introduce in theory, regardless of the scope? Maybe that would be helpful. Secondly, just a follow-up on non-Rx. You know, if your Austrian issues are transitory, you know, Germany is growing again in the low teens in April, international growing 16% in the quarter. Just trying to reconcile this with your full-year group non-Rx guidance of 8%-10%. You know, are you essentially, you know, assuming Austria weakness, you know, over the remainder of the year, or are you incorporating anything else in terms of, you know, being conservative on comps or on competitors?
That would be the second question on non-Rx. Just on Swiss Rx, you know, we've seen a very positive development. Not much impact to the bottom line, but just wondering if you expect that team's growth rate that we've seen continue into the rest of the year or rather a normalization of the growth. Finally, sorry, just a fourth one on the retail media contribution delay. Are there any changes to sort of the supplier strategy there? You know, can you just help us understand a bit better how that normally contributes? What's changed in this year? Thanks.
Okay. Maybe I start with the first one, and then Hendrik, you take the next one on the guidance.
Sure.
Yes. Maybe on non-Rx, I can also add a little bit then. Temperature. I mean, thank you very much for the question. What I was trying to point out is that at this point in time, I mean, this still is a work in progress kind of piece. There's a draft out there, where the European Commission clearly said this is not in line with EU law. That means there will be changes to this draft. Therefore, we can, at this point in time, not speculate about any potential outcome out of that. We are pretty convinced that there will be changes to this, and therefore, I can also not give you a number in theory, because that was your question. Let's wait for the process.
Let's see what the next draft of the regulation looks like. We can take it from there. That is, at this point in time, the only answer we can give to you. Guidance.
On the non-Rx piece, you're right. We are trending very well, and April is looking good. At the same time, it's still early in the year. You know, we have seen volatility in this. As I said, despite of this, we are not yet increasing our guidance. It could well be that obviously should this trend prevail, you know, that we would increase our non-Rx guidance. At this point, as we said, we're very happy with the rebound, and we see this sustained. We feel it's too early to change the guidance. On your other question on the MediService specialty Rx business. You know, this is a great business to have. We're very happy with the strong growth.
To some extent, this growth has surprised us a little bit, to be transparent. Sometimes there are new products where we get selected and they boost, especially as these are very highly prized products. You know, they have an immediate impact on the top line. As you called out as well, the impact on the bottom line is not that significant. Whilst we continue this to assume the strengths for the next quarters, you know, there's no significant impact on the group results overall, but obviously it's good for us overall, you know, and we're happy with our Swiss business, with the specialty Rx business and with the non-Rx business in Switzerland as well. On the retail media part.
It is really an execution issue, right? There's not really a strategy or whatever story here. We have seen a tremendous growth of our retail media business, and we have in some areas not been able to scale the process quickly enough to deliver against the demand that we have. The really good news is here, yes, the suppliers and advertisers, they want to work with us, right? Now we need to basically operationalize this, and then we can recognize the revenue. There's no strategy shift here, or any concern about demand, but it's purely an execution issue.
This is as well an area where we invest in IT, with more automation to be able to handle the demand quicker and translate it into recognized revenue. Does that answer your question?
Yeah.
Sorry, maybe on-
Thank you.
Austria, as I said, yeah, we assume we have seen the rebound in April in Austria and there's a transition item and we will be back on track in Austria in Q2. Yeah. That's part of our-
Thanks.
Does that answer?
Yeah.
As a reminder, anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one at this time. The next question comes from Guillaume Galland from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Hi, Olaf. Hi, Hendrik. Thank you for taking my questions. I have two, if that's okay. The first one is on German Rx. Net customer adds accelerated into Q1, around 100K from flat in Q4. Could you provide more color around this acceleration? What have you seen in terms of cash bonus development in the quarter? Should we expect similar trends into Q2, Q3? I guess the second question is more on the regulation side and the CardLink to POP transition. How are you thinking about addressing this? Is it more around there's some changes in the app. Are you developing the tech internally or are you thinking about third party partnerships? Is there any costs or investments around this? Thanks.
Thanks, Guillaume. I understood the first question about trajectory of the DE Rx business, right? As Olaf said, you know, we're happy with the cash bonus. It works. We see a good impact, especially on retention and frequency. We see as well an impact on acquisition, it's not something, you know, that has changed really the trajectory of our new customer acquisition or activation. We are happy with our approach. We are not assuming that we'll change this. It's an agile instrument. We can dial it up, can dial it down. There's this discussion about, you know, co-payment increasing. At this point, we don't see a need to adjust anything neither for that reason nor for competitive pressure. We are making progress.
We are gaining share, so to say, in the online Rx domain. We're happy with our cash bonus strategy. We continue to do this. That is what we extrapolate for the rest of the year, and we apply it to new customers as well as to existing customers. There's no differentiation. Yeah, and for the gematik related question, I hand it over to you.
Yes. The second question, my understanding was on gematik and transition from CardLink to POP. Yeah, as we pointed out earlier, to me, it's a huge opportunity because it will give us an additional redemption way. We will keep the CardLink solution as it is in our app, and we will have the digital Health ID on top. Yeah. That's actually a great improvement. If you look into the details, even on using the physical card, looking into the preliminary specs, it looks like you do not need the SMS any longer. That means it will even be a smoother process for our customers. Improvement. Using the physical card attaching to the phone, and then on top you get the digital Health ID.
Therefore, from my perspective, it is an opportunity going forward. In the app, again, as I said, there won't be any changes, except that the SMS step or process step will not be necessary any longer. In terms of cost, I mean, you know, there will be some cost involved with that, but they are not major costs. I mean, we already have today a very good setup towards gematik, and then we will adjust this based on the specs. But I think that we can handle that easily.
It looks like there are no more questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference back. Oh, I'm sorry. We just got one follow-up question coming in from Jan Koch from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks for taking my follow-up question. On the cold chain, again, when do you expect to have more clarity on potential changes to the cold chain requirements? Could there be a new draft before July?
Yeah. Thank you. It's a good question. You know, based on the European Commission's opinion, there's a standstill period until the middle of July of this year. Yeah. Therefore, that somehow determines the schedule a little bit, but we don't know exactly when there will be a new draft of this regulation. That's what I said earlier. The minute we have something which we think we can communicate about this, then of course, we will give you an update, but we now are waiting for the new draft regulation.
Okay. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, this was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Olaf Heinrich for any closing remarks.
Yes. Thank you very much. Thanks for everybody joining the meeting. Thanks for all of the questions. I hope we answered all of the questions, Hendrik. We are looking forward meeting you the next time, end of July. Thank you very much for joining.