Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Westwing Group SE Q3 2025 earnings call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen only mode. The floor will be open for questions following the presentation. It is only possible to state questions orally in the conference call, so please dial in if you wish to raise a question. The combination to state a question and to enter the queue is nine and star on your telephone keypad. Please keep in mind that we can only accept questions from participants who provide their full names and their company information in the registration process now. Dear ladies and gentlemen, let me turn the floor over to your host, Andreas Hoerning.
Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us for our earnings call on the third quarter of 2025. My name is Andreas Hoerning, I'm the CEO of Westwing. I'm hosting the call together with Sebastian Westrich, our CFO. Looking at today's agenda, I will begin by providing key updates on our business for the third quarter of 2025, after which Sebastian will share the details of Westwing's financial performance. After our investment highlight summary, we will be happy to take your questions. Let's take a look at the current state of Westwing. In Q3 we delivered growth and continued to improve profitability significantly. Our GMV increased by 5.4% year- over- year despite changes in product assortment. We improved our adjusted EBITDA by 73% reaching EUR 6 million at an adjusted EBITDA margin of 6.1%. This marks an increase of 2.5 percentage points year- over- year.
Free cash flow was positive at EUR 10 million in Q3 and we ended the third quarter with a net cash position of EUR 58 million. For the full year 2025, we expect free cash flow to be double-digit positive. Strategically, we are well on track with the implementation of our three-step value creation plan. Our own product brand, the Westwing Collection, grew 19% year- over- year which resulted in an all-time high group GMV share of 66%. As part of our geographic expansion, we achieved our full-year objective of launching 10 new countries and we continued our store expansion with the opening of seven new stores this year. The operational progress is fully in line with our targets. We confirm our financial guidance for 2025 and are currently expecting the adjusted EBITDA at the upper end of this guidance.
We also confirm our ambition for 2026, which is the return to a high single to double-digit growth at further improved profitability. As always, let's have a look at our three-step value creation plan, which we started executing in 2022. In terms of levers, we successfully completed the first two phases, the turnaround and strategy update phase, and the building of a scalable platform p hase. 2025 marks a transition year for us where we are focusing on the key growth levers of the third phase to be able to scale with operating leverage from 2026 onwards.
As in the last earnings call, let me now briefly guide you through our progress across the key levers of the third phase of our plan, beginning with the latest developments of the Westwing Collection, then moving on to how we strengthen our market share in existing geographies, pushing the premium positioning of our brand and finally the progress we've made in terms of international expansion. Starting with the Westwing Collection, the Westwing Collection is our gorgeous, sustainable private label product brand and we continue to be very pleased with its performance. It again delivered strong growth of 19% year- over- year resulting in an all-time high group GMV share of 66%. This represented a total GMV of EUR 75 million in Q3.
The strong development supports our top line as well as profitability since the products are very desirable and they allow us to achieve a higher contribution margin compared to third-party products. As we build Europe's premium one-stop destination for home and living, we're creating a unique product assortment for design lovers consisting of our own brand Westwing Collection and the best third-party design brands. We still have significant room for improvement on both sides as outlined in our last earnings call. Besides improvements in product assortment, we see offline store expansion as a lever for share gains in existing markets. In 2025 we opened a total of seven offline stores. In Q3 alone we successfully opened three standalone stores located in Munich, Berlin, and Cologne as well as two store-in-stores, one in Duesseldorf and one in Copenhagen.
Before I share an update on our geographic expansion, let me show you some impressions of our newly opened stores. In Munich we opened a so-called [warm-up] store. It is more than just a pop up, it's a preview of our first permanent Munich store coming next year in the heart of the city. Munich is especially meaningful to us as it's where our journey began and where many of our central teams are based, enabling us to learn and refine the customer experience even faster. Next to Munich, we're also very proud to now have a permanent standalone store in Berlin. It is located on the iconic Kurfürstendamm, bringing Westwing to life in the heart of Berlin's western city center. On top, we opened our standalone store in Cologne, one of Germany's busiest shopping cities. Next to our standalone stores.
We also opened two store-in-stores. One is located at Breuninger Duesseldorf on the prestigious Königsallee. Following the successful pilot of our store-in-store concept in Stuttgart in 2024, we are proud to continue our partnership with Breuninger, arguably Germany's leading fashion and lifestyle department store chain. The other one is our very first store-in-store in Scandinavia at the iconic Illums Bolighus flagship store in Copenhagen. This opening marks a new milestone in our Nordics expansion following the successful launch of Westwing in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland earlier this year. By partnering with Illums Bolighus, a destination known for timeless elegance and Danish design culture, we are strengthening our presence in the Nordics and connecting with a design-savvy audience in a uniquely meaningful way. Overall, offline stores help us to further strengthen brand presence, positioning, and top line.
Providing a holistic shopping experience across the multi-touch customer journey supports Westwing's market share gains in home and living. Many customers combine online and offline experiences in their journey, especially for large furniture purchases, the latter mostly for the touch and feel and simply because basket sizes and furniture are often very large and require many touch points for conversion. On the next slide you can see impressions of the official opening of our Berlin store where we welcomed over 250 friends of the brand, key opinion leaders, press, and content creators from the worlds of fashion, art, design, and lifestyle. The event generated strong positive press coverage and a high volume of social content, amplifying our brand visibility. Let's move on from gaining market share in existing geographies and increasing our premium brand positioning to entering new markets.
At the beginning of the year we announced our plan to open 5-10 new countries in 2025. We are happy to announce that we successfully opened 10 new countries this year, reaching our full year objectives as outlined in our last earnings call. Geographic expansion allows us to offer our existing global product assortment to customers in the corresponding market segment. For design lovers in other countries, this means selling more of the same products. All continental European countries follow the same logic with low marginal costs of selling them. Translations supported by AI onboarding of last mile delivery providers, local influencer marketing and performance marketing with attractive returns within a few months. Therefore, in the mid- term we aim to be present in approximately all European countries.
We do not plan to open any additional countries until year end as our focus is now fully on the most important season of the year in home and living. To provide for a glimpse into our 2025 country expansion, let me share some impressions of our Nordics launch event at the end of August. We celebrated our Nordics launch with 200 guests, including brand partners and leading voices across fashion, design, art, and lifestyle. From a styled steamboat experience to sculptural installations at the Westwing Villa, the event showcased our passion for timeless design and cultural connection. It generated extensive positive media coverage and inspired highly shareable social content across the region, achieving exceptional reach both online and offline. This milestone marks the start of our journey in Scandinavia, bringing beautiful living to even more homes.
Back to results, I now hand over to Sebastian for details on our financial performance.
Thank you Andreas and good morning everyone. I'm Sebastian Westrich, the CFO of Westwing. Let me start with details on our top line. Our GMV increased by 5.4% year- over- year while revenue was at + 3.4% year- over- year. Despite the negative impact of the changes to our product assortment, I want to highlight here again what Andreas mentioned earlier in this call. Our Westwing Collection business continued to grow by 19% year- over- year. Now let me also briefly comment on Q3 top line development on segment level. The DACH segment saw a revenue decline of 2.1% while the International segment's revenue increased by 10.8%. There are two major reasons for this difference in top line development. Firstly, we began introducing a largely global and more premium product assortment and related restructuring of our local business functions in the International segment as early as Q2 2024.
The assortment offered in the DACH segment remained unchanged until late 2024 and as a result last year's baseline for DACH is stronger than that of the International segment. Secondly, the International segment benefited from additional revenue generated by our geographic expansion with 10 new countries launched in the first nine months of 2025. Regarding top line outlook for Q4, remain cautious as the performance depends largely on the month of November, including the upcoming Black Friday sales events. Now let me continue with an overview of our profitability development. In Q3 we improved our adjusted EBITDA by EUR 3 million to EUR 6 million which represents an increase of 73% year-over-year. In order to show profitability development before DNA, we also included the EBIT development on an adjustment basis on the right side of the slide.
It is also clearly positive at EUR 3 million and showed an even greater increase of EUR 4 million year-over-year. Excluding adjustments, Q3 showed a negative EBIT of EUR -4 million. The adjustment mainly includes the negative impact of a higher fair value of employee stock option programs due to the significant share price increase in Q3. The impact amounted to EUR -6 million, which was non cash effective. It is important to highlight that we are actively reducing the number of outstanding stock options to reduce both dilution risk for our shareholders as well as negative P & L impact from potential further share price increases. Let us now take a look at our P & L margins. In the first nine months of 2025 we realized an adjusted EBITDA margin of 7%.
This is a significant improvement of 2.6 percentage points compared to the previous year's period in the absence of any scale effects. Let us now focus on the P&L development in the third quarter of 2025 which you can see here.
On the right-hand side.
I am pleased to report that we improved our P&L structure in Q3 in almost all areas, leading to a strong improvement in adjusted EBITDA margin by 2.5 percentage points year-over-year to 6.1%. Our gross margin improved by 2.2 percentage points year-over-year, mainly due to strong Westwing Collection share gains. The fulfillment ratio improved slightly by 0.1 percentage points year by year. The fulfillment ratio includes negative effects from expansion as we accept lower logistics line haul utilization from our central warehouse to the new countries in the beginning. This ensures short delivery times also for our customers in the new markets but comes at higher cost per order. With increasing scale, this negative effect will decrease. Overall, this led to an increase in contribution margin of 2.3 percentage points to 33.9%, a really strong result for our third quarter.
Our marketing ratio increased slightly by 0.3 percentage points year-over-year to -13.4%. The main reason for the increase is our investment into expansion. Our G&A ratio, which includes other result, improved by 2.3 percentage points to -17.9%, reflecting the positive effects from our 2024 complexity reduction measures. This led to an adjusted EBIT margin of 2.6% in Q3, up 4.3 percentage points year-over-year. G&A decreased by 1.8 percentage points year-over-year, primarily driven by the full depreciation of legacy technology assets. Overall, as mentioned before, our Q3 adjusted EBITDA margin improved by 2.5 percentage points year-over-year to 6.1%. The adjustments made in Q3 were minor except for the higher fair value of our stock option programs following the significant share price increase which I mentioned before.
An overview of these adjustments as well as the unadjusted consolidated income statements can be found in the appendix to this presentation and in our Q3 financial report. Let's move on to profitability on segment level in Q3, which is displayed on the right hand side of this slide. We saw a strong improvement in adjusted EBITDA margin in both segments. In the DACH segment, adjusted EBITDA margin improved by 3.6 percentage points year-over-year to 6%. In the International segment, we were able to improve our adjusted EBITDA margin by 1.2 percentage points year-over-year to 6.4%. The improvement in profitability reflects the successful implementation of our three step value creation plan across both segments. Let's also briefly look at our earnings per share development. What you can see on this slide.
Is the last 12 months data since
Q1 2024 the dark green bars showing unadjusted earnings per share. The light green bars showing earnings per share on an adjusted basis. Adjustment includes changes in fair value of the aforementioned employee stock option programs as well as restructuring expenses. We're happy to be able to show that the very positive development continued also in Q3. 2025 the dent in the unadjusted earnings per share in Q3 stems again from the steep increase in Westwing share price in Q3. Let us now move from profitability to our balance sheet and take a look at our net working capital. By the end of Q3 net working capital stood at EUR -1 million which is EUR 4 million higher compared to Q3 2024 but EUR 7 million lower versus the previous quarter.
Compared to the previous year we still had higher inventory, mostly driven by the newly introduced Westwing Collection items that we already mentioned in previous calls. Compared to the previous quarter, we managed to reduce inventory levels slightly despite the typical seasonal eventual build up towards the high season, and we improved trade tables as well as contract liabilities. We expect net working capital to improve further in Q4 due to typical seasonal effects and the respective positive impact on cash flow. On the next slide you can see CapEx and CapEx ratio for the first nine months as well as for the third quarter of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024.
Capex remained broadly stable year-over-year.
In 2025 both for the first nine months and in Q3 specifically. However, when comparing 2025, 2024 we see a shift between investments into property, plant and equipment and intangible assets. While in 2025 we invested more into store openings. We were able to reduce CapEx for internally developed tech assets as we move to a SaaS- based tech platform. Let us now take a look at our net cash position. We are pleased to report a strong net cash position of EUR 58 million at the end of September, which is EUR 8 million more compared to the end of June. Overall free cash flow was at EUR 10 million in Q3. Taking lease payments of EUR 3 million into account, we had a positive free cash flow after lease payments of EUR 8 million in Q3.
Our balance sheet remains strong with no debt other than the IFRS 16 lease obligations and IFRS 2 liabilities from cash settled stock option programs. We remain confident to enable double-digit free cash flow for the full year 2025 driven by both profitability and net working capital. Given our seasonality, Q4 is expected to be the strongest quarter. On the next slide, I comment on the financial guidance for 2025 which we published at the end of March. Our performance in the third quarter and the first nine months of 2025 in terms of both revenue and profitability is fully in line with our guidance. In terms of top line, we had as expected headwinds from our changes in the product assortment.
These negative effects are expected to ease further towards the end of 2025, but as mentioned earlier, top line in Q4 depends largely on a successful November and the Black Friday sales event. In terms of profitability, we expect a typical seasonal peak in the upcoming fourth quarter. To summarize, we are well on track to deliver on our 2025 guidance in terms of revenue and profitability and also in terms of a clearly positive double-digit free cash flow, given the strong performance in the first nine months. With an adjusted EBITDA margin of 7% so far, we currently expect to end the year at the upper end of the adjusted EBITDA guidance. This brings me to our midterm outlook which was shared for the first time in our full year 2024 earnings call.
I want to highlight again that our.
Ambition is to return to significant growth in 2026 while continuously improving profitability. Significant growth means a high single to double-digit growth rate driven by our expansion in initiatives and the anticipated easing of negative impacts from the product assortment changes. In terms of profitability, we expect scale effects as we grow as well as positive effects from our improved product assortment. We remain focused on executing our three-step value creation plan with the clear goal of driving sustained improvements in profitability and cash flow. Combined with our return to meaningful growth, this will enable us to unlock the full value potential of Westwing. I'm handing over to Andreas now to conclude our presentation with our investment highlights.
Thank you, Sebastian. Let me briefly recap the investment highlights. First, we have a unique, relevant customer value proposition through the specific assortment and the way we serve our customers. Second, the market potential is huge, especially in our existing geographies but also beyond. Third, we're developing the super brand in design with high loyalty and true potential to grow further. Fourth, we have high and increasing margins as well as operating leverage while we scale. Fifth, we have a great balance sheet with a strong cash position and no debt, strong net working capital and low Capex. All of this will lead us in the mid- term to 10% + adjusted EBITDA with a continued strong cash conversion. Sebastian and I are now happy to take your questions.
Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen. We will now move on to your questions. Once again, questions can only be placed via telephone keypad. If you would like to ask a question, please press nine followed by the star key on your telephone. If you wish to cancel your question, please press three followed by the star key. You can now press nine and star to state your question. We already have one person who wants to ask a question. This would be Volker Bosse from Baader Bank. Mr. Bosse, please go ahead.
Yep.
Hello, good morning, Volker Bosse from Baader Bank speaking. First of all, of course, great results and congratulations, especially that you are able to specify your guidance to the upper end in these challenging times. Very an outstanding achievement.
Perfect.
I would have three questions if I may, starting with your still decline in orders and number of active customers year-over-year. How do you see the momentum evolving? Do you see an improving momentum, means is the worst triggered by the transformation process behind you, so to say? I mean, your outlook on the forward looking these two KPIs please would be the first question. Second question is on your country expansion. Yeah, great to hear that you achieved also here the upper end of your given guidance range, so to say, 5-10 . So 10 new countries. Can you already share initial developments in the new countries? I think Portugal is most advanced as it was the first country which you opened. How do you see the acquisition of new customers and incremental sales is progressing here or in other countries?
Perhaps you have first thoughts already forth on that. The third question would be on the new physical stores which you opened. Do you see here an increased online activity, be it in click rates or be it in sales in the catchment areas of the stores? Do you have this granularity of data on hand to share if basically the stores do what they are supposed to do, meaning drive sales and brand attention? Thanks.
Thank you, Volker, for your questions and also thank you for the congress. We're also pleased about the development of the, so the first question is related to decline in orders and number of customers. Your question was how this will be evolving, whether the worst is already over. Generally spoken, the decline in orders and number of customers is expected to ease in the same way as the negative GMV effect from the change in product assortment is also expected to ease. We did this in a phased approach. First, we changed the product assortment quite heavily, especially in Italy and Spain, where we also closed offices and warehouses and went from a very local assortment to a global assortment.
We saw a pretty steep decline in number of customers simply because the offering that we had there beforehand to customers was different to the one that we have today. The churn in customers was quite significant. This has already eased in those countries quite significantly. We're actually happy with the development now. The subsequent development was that we also changed the product assortment in our larger markets, Germany and also CEE, by the way, so DACH and CEE a bit later. This effect we are seeing this year. This is also why we were so cautious with our guidance on top line this year. At the moment we are fully in line with that. It stems from exactly your point. The number of orders and number of customers. It is the same reason.
You can also see that in the increase in average order value that we are reporting. Because there you can see that with the shift from a more impulse buying and smaller buying products to more Westwing Collection and more furniture, we see a strong growth in average order value and the decline of the number of orders and number of customers. As it eased in Italy and Spain, it is also easing in Germany or in DACH and in CE. So we can expect that the worst is over, as you say, and into next year.
We actually expect a much, much lower.
Effect of that, if even any. I hope that answers your question, number one. Number two was on country expansion. You were asking about the development here. As you rightly said, Portugal was the first one. When we look now at the countries that we opened this year, the 10 new countries, we compare the development of those to the one that we saw in Portugal in the first months and quarters, and we're actually very pleased with development. It's in line with what we saw in Portugal. We see new customer growth there. Everything that we report from there is obviously incremental. That's the beauty of opening new countries, and our kind of the first results in terms of absolute numbers that we won't share now. Next year I think we will give a bit more indication because it's very early still.
When you look at the absolute numbers, we're actually really happy with what we see in Sweden and Denmark, in Norway and in Croatia also, despite Norway and Croatia actually being relatively small markets. We see really nice developments there. We'll give more updates throughout next year when the numbers become more meaningful, because at the moment, though we're happy, the relation to our overall GMV is of course still very small. That was your second question on country expansion and the third one was on the physical locations on our stores. Here you asked whether we see, besides the top line that we make in the stores, whether we also see an increased online activity in the catchment areas. That's exactly the case. We don't share any numbers on the online catchment area uplift.
Also, for the reason that we do not have an [A/B] test in place, what we do is we compare catchment areas with stores against the catchment areas without stores, and there we can see an effect of the stores. Of course, it is not 100% proof of this effect. For instance, when we had Hamburg and Stuttgart as the only stores in Germany, those two catchment areas were the best performed in the whole of Germany. The reason behind this is obviously what you also pointed towards is that we have sales in the stores themselves and then we also have the effect that is what we call also a marketing effect. When people walk past our stores, it is like a billboard that is out there.
Or even when they walk into the store and they have a look at products, they do not necessarily decide straight away to convert to a buyer. That often happens only after their visit to the store. We have found that, for instance, when customers decide to buy a sofa, there are roughly 30 touch points involved between the very first one and the purchase in the end. These are many, many online touch points and increasingly also offline touch points. This explains why we see this catchment area uplift in the cities where we have the store. It is absolutely positive. I can confirm what you said, Volker. Does that answer your three questions?
Yep. Thank you very much. I would have a follow up, more general remark on your page 23. You give an indication on 2026 already. Very much appreciated. Thank you very much. On market you have a stable or the flat arrow, so to say, or how to say, I mean, question is for, do you see any. Do you see no market tailwind, but also no market headwind for next year? What is your general assumption? Behind your 2026 guidance in regards to what is the market providing.
Thanks, Volker. One question on market development, how we see that in 2026? I'm handing over to Sebastian.
Hi Volker, thanks for your question. On our view on the overall market development, we expect overall no tailwind from overall consumer sentiment and market growth. Of course there will be regional differences. There are some areas within Europe, for example, where I think the overall conditions are more promising compared to what we see, for example, in the DACH segment where when you look at consumer sentiment indicators there is no real improvement. That is why we remain cautious. Our outlook or ambition for 2026, as we already mentioned in earlier calls, is based on our strength in executing our three step value creation plan with the share gains in existing markets and the expansion to new countries. So far we feel very confident to achieve those targets based on the financial and operational progress that we achieved so far in 2025.
Yep, well understood. Thank you very much. All the best for the important fourth quarter.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. Next question comes from José Antonio Pérez Parada from NuWays AG. May we have your question please?
Thank you very much. Guys, congratulations again on the strong quarter. I would like to ask for, I have a couple of questions if that's okay. I will just London. The first of them is if has anything changed regarding the capital allocation over the quarter or if there's anything it's important to know for the near future. The second question will be that we already understand or we see that there will be no further geographic expansions in the rest of 2025. Could you give us any notion on the direction of the geographic expansion in 2026, maybe towards any region? That's another one. The third one is that you told us earlier that fulfillment ratio included some negative effects from expansion. I would like to ask you again if you could please guide me through the underlying dynamic.
Again, Sebastian clearly mentioned something about the centralized distribution center in Poland, but I would like to grab the logic again. That would be.
Thank you, guys.
Thank you, José Antonio , for your questions. I'm going to hand over to Sebastian for the questions on the change to capital, on the capital allocation and on the fulfillment ratio. Before I do that, I'll just briefly comment on your question on expansion. You were wondering what the expansion in 2026 might look like? We're not going to share any specifics, but our general ambition is to be present in nearly all countries in Europe and this also includes Great Britain. Of course, Great Britain is a bit more complex because it's not in the E.U. and it also requires a bit more complex logistics setup. We will likely expand also geographically in 2026 and we'll share more details on that when the time is right to do it.
That clearly answers my question. Thank you so much, Andreas.
Thank you, José Antonio.
I hand over to Sebastian for capital allocation and fulfillment.
Okay, yeah, thanks a lot for your question. Let me start with a fulfillment question related to our expansion countries. Linehaul means the trucks that we send from our central logistics center in Poland, for example, to Portugal, and for new markets we decided to already send those trucks even though they might not be fully utilized. That means of course that the cost per item that we ship is higher. This allows us to ensure better shipping times for our customers. We accept the higher costs for better customer experience as we scale those new countries, Portugal, Nordics, et cetera. Of course, also then the utilization of those trucks improves, so the cost should go down. This is the effect that we briefly mentioned earlier.
That is also the effect that we are seeing in Portugal because there we already have significant volumes. We also combine this with Spain. In Portugal we actually see very low logistics costs and the same will happen to, for instance, the Nordics region because there we are also able to combine certain shipments.
Okay guys, thank you very much. Yeah, it's more than clear. It's crystal clear.
Okay, then, on your question on the capital allocation strategy and if anything changed over the quarter, no, our capital allocation priorities remain disciplined and focused on long term value creation, of course. In line with this approach, we have demonstrated our commitment to shareholder value already in the past when we performed some share buybacks and we may consider further measures going forward. This, of course, is subject to market conditions and also regulatory requirements. Overall, no change to our capital allocation strategy.
Thank you very much, Sebastian. That will be all on my side. Again, congratulations on the strong quarter and lots of success for the closing of the year and the upcoming holiday season.
Thank you so much, José.
Thank you very much. At the moment there seem to be no further questions. Once again, this is your chance to press nine followed by the star key to state your question. We are going to give you a couple of seconds in case there are further questions. There we go. Once again, José Antonio, please state your question.
Thank you very much.
Just taking advantage of the final question. You already answered some of the question to Volker, but we understand the underlying dynamic of the customer and orders. However, if I could have a little bit more color on the underlying dynamic of customer number and number of orders, given that they decreased, for example, our expectation of number of customers was lower and the expectation of orders was a little bit lower as well. How does it look like going forward or what can we expect?
Thank you for your question. Let me better understand. You would like to have an outlook on the development of this in the future. In more specifics, is this what you would like to have?
Yes, that would be perfect. I understand, I fully understand the dynamic behind it that we expect. We are expecting less customers, less orders due to the less impulse buy from smaller ticket items. How does it in general look like going forward or what can we expect?
What we absolutely see for the future is that we will return to active customer growth and also to the growth of the number of orders. This is absolutely the plan, not just from the expansion countries where we obviously see every customer that we gain there is a new customer.
Right.
Also for the existing markets, we have a clear commitment to share gains in existing markets. This in the end we cannot do without active customer growth. We believe that a better assortment, better marketing, and last but not least, also our physical presence, for instance in Germany, will drive this. Actually, we see the beginning of this. The stores enable us to convince customers that we previously were not able to convince, maybe because they required an offline step in their journey to actually then purchase with us.
As we came from two offline stores at the beginning of this year and are now at nine, you can imagine that the full year effect can only be seen next year and actually in the years to come because a store has a certain trajectory over the first three, four years of its existence. It needs to establish itself, if you like, in a city. This is actually one important reason why we believe that also in the existing geographies, we will be increasing the number of active customers. It's a matter of time.
We believe that next year, so we're not going to give a guidance on this, but we believe that next year will look a lot more positive than this year due to the easing of the effect that you also mentioned beforehand and the growing effects from our expansion measure plot stores. No specific, we don't have a specific forecast here, but you can expect that this significantly improves and absolutely our commitment is to going back to increasing number of active customers and orders.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, it's super helpful.
Okay, thanks for the question.
Thank you very much. Once again, Andreas and Sebastian are more than happy to answer your questions. If there is a question, please press nine followed by the star key. We're going to give you another second to think of another question that you would like to state here in the conference call. I guess that is not the case. For some final words, I would like to hand over back to the management.
Thank you. As we have not received any additional questions, we are ending today's earnings call. Thank you for joining and goodbye.