Good morning. Welcome to Zalando's Annual Press Conference and Business Update. My name is Simon Thiel, and I'm heading Corporate Affairs. I wanted to say thank you for joining us today. We will be presenting our full year results 2025, and sharing our plans for the future, and we're delighted to have so many of you joining our broadcast today.
Good morning also from my side. My name is Patrick Kofler, and I'm heading the Investor Relations department. We have gathered the press, investors, and analysts for today's event. It's a pleasure to have you all here.
We will start our conference with a pre-recorded presentation by our Co-CEOs, Robert Gentz and David Schröder. They will walk you through our progress as we're successfully executing our strategy. At 9:45 A.M. CET, following the presentation, we will open the virtual floor to a live Q&A session for our journalists with our Co-CEOs, Robert and David, and our new CFO, Anna Dimitrova.
For our investors and analysts, at 9:45 A.M. CET, our CFO, Anna Dimitrova, will walk you through the financial development of the last year and will discuss our outlook in more detail in a pre-recorded financial deep dive presentation. After a short break, I'll be hosting a live Q&A session at 10:45 A.M. CET together with Robert, David, and Anna. The Q&A system will open within the next few moments, and you can begin submitting your questions. If you'd like to ask a question, please click the Ask button on the right-hand side of your screen. When you click on it, you can ask your question in writing. As said, the question section is open in the next seconds. You also have the possibility to ask questions during the live Q&A via video.
A recording of the Co-CEO speech and the financial deep dive will be available later on the Investor Relations section of our website.
We now turn our attention to the Zalando Live Studios, where we create inspiring content for our customers. David and Robert, the stage is yours.
A big hello from Berlin, and thank you for joining us today.
Good morning, and welcome everyone.
We are very excited to share our 2025 achievements and walk you through our future ambitions and plans.
The last year has been a big one for Zalando. Crucially, we delivered on our strategy and our financial targets. We took massive strides to shape the future of our industry, from expanding into new European markets to making the customer experience even better now with AI. We also fundamentally strengthened our business and long-term growth potential by successfully completing the strategic acquisition of ABOUT YOU. Finally, we were thrilled to have Anna Dimitrova as our new Chief Financial Officer. With over two decades of international experience and a proven track record of driving real transformation, her strategic mindset is exactly what we need to help execute our vision. As we look ahead, we're incredibly energized about the opportunities that this year brings for Zalando, for our customers, and for all our valued partners.
Robert and I will now walk you through our strategic and financial achievements in 2025. We'll discuss the strong progress of both our B2C and B2B businesses and how we are successfully leveraging AI to further enlarge our opportunity and accelerate our progress. Last but not least, we will share our perspective on the tremendous value creation opportunity ahead of us. Robert, let's get started.
For 17 years, we've built the European technology platform for fashion and lifestyle, connecting over 60 million customers with more than 7,000 global and local brands, and this platform is our absolute superpower. For our customers, we've created apps where discovering and buying from their favorite brands feel personal, inspiring, and trustworthy. Because we have that deep connection with customers, we've become essential to brands, and they partner with us not just to sell their products, but to tell their stories and use our tech to grow their entire business, both on Zalando and beyond. The European fashion market is a EUR 500 billion opportunity, yet only 30% of purchases are made online today.
With roughly 70% of shoppers still conducting most of their shopping in physical stores, and with digital shopping now growing at a 6% CAGR a year, the potential for us is huge. We are the clear number one in Europe, the fashion and lifestyle center of the entire world. As the European technology platform for fashion and lifestyle, we're perfectly positioned to lead the shift and serve customers and partners in the best possible way. By simplifying a highly complex market and driving real innovation, we're unlocking new value and growth for everyone. Our business across B2C and B2B is powered by a shared data and infrastructure engine, supercharged by AI. For B2C, this engine powers our multiple consumer apps designed to inspire lifestyle shopping and keep customers deeply engaged.
For B2B, the same engine serves as our operating system, enabling the e-commerce success of our partners by sharing our sophisticated infrastructure from software to logistics and connecting brands directly with customers. This engine gets better every day, every second as more and more people use our apps and more and more brands get deeply involved with our ecosystem. More scale means more data, and more data means our solutions just keep getting better, and that makes us unique and so excited about our future. I will discuss several real-world examples of how we leverage our huge data pool in the next section.
Over the past 17 years, we've built four unique platform capabilities that power both our B2C and our B2B businesses. First, our brand network. We've created an unparalleled brand network of more than 7,000 global and European brands, with deep insights into their product development pipelines and supply chains. This provides us with unique and detailed data around assortment, content, and products. Second, our logistics infrastructure. We've built Europe's leading fashion fulfillment network with 14 locations serving 29 European markets, enabling a fast, reliable, convenient, and highly localized experience for customers while ensuring a high level of efficiency. Third, our tech platform. We have attracted and grown an incredible team of around 3,000 tech specialists, allowing us to build a proprietary, highly scalable tech stack which fuels our growth, drives our efficiency, and accelerates our innovation. Fourth, our payment platform.
We've built a powerful in-house payments platform processing more than EUR 34 billion in transactions volume for customers and partners annually. Thereof more than 60% leveraging our buy now, pay later solutions. No one else has that set of capabilities. They form the core of our data and infrastructure platform, creating a lasting competitive advantage. Since the launch of our updated strategy in March 20, 2024, we've used this powerful engine to successfully execute on our strategy. On our B2C journey, we focused on deepening customer engagement and inspiration. We've upgraded our loyalty program and launched an AI powered discovery feed. We've successfully acquired ABOUT YOU, so that more than 60 million customers now discover and shop with us across three distinct apps. In B2B, we have significantly scaled our operating system by adding 12 new markets and 8 new channels.
We've built advanced fulfillment features and are forming deep enterprise partnerships with leaders in retail, like Next. The addition of the digital commerce platform SCAYLE further expands our ZEOS offering, enabling us to support our enterprise partners, not just with their marketplace business, but also with their own D2C business. Now let's turn to our financials. Fueled by our strategy and the acquisition of ABOUT YOU, we significantly accelerated our financial performance in 2025. At the group level, we delivered strong double-digit growth with revenue up nearly 17% and adjusted EBIT climbing to EUR 591 million. In our B2C segment, Zalando and ABOUT YOU continue to grow, reaching over EUR 17.5 billion in GMV and over EUR 540 million in adjusted EBIT. In B2B, we strongly benefited from ZEOS Fulfillment and the inclusion of SCAYLE.
We recorded revenues of over EUR 1 billion, a 13.6% increase on the previous year, and more than doubled our adjusted EBIT. Overall, the strong set of results demonstrates the strength of our business model and marks another important step forward towards delivering our midterm financial targets with further acceleration expected this year. As part of our strategy, we also aim to enable a more sustainable fashion and lifestyle industry at scale and have set ourselves a clear ambition. We want to get to net zero in our own operations and private labels by 2040 and across our entire value chain by 2050. In 2025, we reached important near term milestones. We've reduced the absolute emissions of our own operations by 81%. We've also reduced the emission intensity from private labels by 37%.
While this is good progress, more needs to be achieved by us and the industry. That's why we will stay focused on developing and scaling solutions that not only support businesses across the industry, but also drive positive change. After highlighting our achievements in 2025, it is now time to look ahead and talk about a topic that is on everyone's mind at the moment, AI. I cannot describe how incredibly excited I am personally about how AI allows us to shape the future of Zalando and the future of the entire industry. For us at Zalando, AI is more than a tool, it's a powerful catalyst for innovation, driving growth and efficiency. We've already proven that we successfully apply it for more than a decade.
before we get into the details, let's now look at a short video to highlight some of the many exciting things we're doing in tech and AI.
Ice on my neck. Ice on my neck. Ice on my neck. Ice on my neck. Ice on my neck. Ice on my neck. Ice on my neck. Ice on my neck. Ice on my neck. Yeah, icy. Cold on my wrist cost EUR 30. I'm rich, yeah I'm bout boom. I got enough to prove. Ice on my neck, yeah, icy. Cold on my wrist cost EUR 30. I'm rich, yeah I'm bout boom. I got enough to prove. Ice, ice on my neck.
Since Zalando was founded in 2008, we've always had one clear principle: what you cannot measure does not exist. It was tough, and it was debated, but it always made sure we ground our business decisions in facts and in data. Data, and then machine learning and AI, have been at the core of how we create solutions and value from day one. We are proud of all the great products and services our teams have built by applying AI to solve problems for our customers and partners. You can find some of the great examples represented on this slide, but rest assured, there are many more. Years of investment into data, machine learning, and AI, and the talent to build and improve the models, have allowed us to build a strong foundation.
That's why, with the rise of GenAI and AI agents, we are even more excited about building on this great foundation to further enlarge our opportunity and to accelerate our progress. Our success on this journey will be fueled by our scale of distribution with customers and partners and our unique and deep data foundation. Many companies out there state that they have data, but I can tell you that we are one of the very few ones, especially if you look here in Europe, that actually have unique and deep data at scale. Most importantly, we've built a data flywheel so that our data advantage grows and gets more valuable over time. Over the life of the company, we've collected an unparalleled amount of data, including customer behavior, assortment, size and fit, rich product content, and supply chain data.
That is unique data only Zalando has, and scale clearly matters. With more than 60 million customers and more than 7,000 brands and a strong bench of in-house AI talent, we can turn successful pilots into platform-wide services and continuously improve models and applications as we learn from millions of daily interactions. Every time we enrich a customer experience or a partner service with AI, we generate more signals that grow our data pool and enable us to improve our models further. Let me highlight two specific examples. First, in size and fit. We help customers to find the right size the very first time. With real body measurements of over 1 million customers, we can provide better size advice than anyone else in the industry. Every single week, more than 20,000 customers scan and submit their body measurements to us.
Second, let's take a look at logistics. For every customer order, we use live supply chain data and a virtual model of our network to optimize for fast, reliable delivery at affordable fulfillment cost. Every single year, we generate fulfillment data from almost 300 million customer orders, allowing us to optimize delivery down to postal code level across 29 markets in Europe. These two examples demonstrate AI deepens our competitive advantages as we are embedding it across Zalando's end-to-end value chain, driving both efficiency and growth across our B2C and B2B business. Now back to Robert to dive deeper into some of our most exciting AI applications and use cases, starting with a focus on efficiency.
The rates of change that we see across our business that are possible through AI are just incredible. Ideas that seemed impossible a few years ago all of a sudden become not only imaginable, but a reality. We see this all across our business now, how it changes the game with what can be done through efficiency and productivity. Here are some interesting examples across our supply chain to illustrate what we see here. First, let's start in digital experience. As of today, 90% of our product marketing content, which you see in our apps, is purely made by AI, like the promotion material, the teasers, the product campaigns. One year ago, this was close to zero. All of it was still shot with cameras and photoshopped, et cetera. This now allows us to move much quicker with campaigns.
A process that used to take us six weeks from idea to life is now done in days. On top, we could increase the campaign content by 70% without increasing our overall content investments. You can really see how this now moves to a real-time and personal campaign world in the future. Some of you might already see your weekly edits in your feed on Zalando, where we leverage generative AI to recommend to you products that we hope you might love every week. That's pretty impressive. Second, moving on to the physical experience. It's an incredibly complex problem to precisely forecast the delivery time of an order for the customer, as an order needs to be consolidated across like different logistics centers and is dependent on carriers, on traffic, et cetera. It really is what customers appreciate.
In just one year, through the advancement of the AI models, we have been able to improve the precision of our real-time delivery promises by 22 percentage points. 22 percentage points is huge. Thirdly, of course, our team of around 3,000 tech specialists, engineers, and scientists are using AI coding tools. Even in our complex environment, we already see increases of over 20% more code changes. Increasingly improving AI tools mean we are moving faster than ever. The impact is staggering. There are places in our business where roadmaps that once took years are shrinking into quarters and quarters into weeks. These examples show how AI is changing the efficiency and productivity game across everything that we do. These gains are very exciting for us, and we know that in some cases our advantage is temporary.
Our commitment is we will always be the fastest, and we will always be the first. The other big focus of ours is how we invest in AI for growth. We're moving very fast, so let me ground this in reality. There are three concrete examples of how we are using our massive data advantage. Let's start with the basics, searching for fashion and lifestyle items. We developed our own foundational models over the last years that just focus on understanding and matching the right products to the customers and understanding context, product characteristics, garment details, and learning through our feedback loops with customers. Why did we do this? Because fashion is incredibly fragmented, and combine that with the fact that personal taste is intensely subjective and context dependent and matchmaking becomes a highly complex challenge. What one person finds adorable, another finds horrible.
The advancements we made through our models over the last years show truly impressive results. For example, 13% more items are being added to bags and wish lists as a result of the increasing precision in matchmaking. They progress by the day, driven by our own unique data set and focus on fashion and lifestyle. Another exciting example is the size and fit challenge in fashion, the holy grail of fashion e-commerce. We're benefiting from the unique data sets we've grown and keep on growing every day. A knowledge graph of billions of items ordered over the last 10 years and size validated by our customers across a large part of the European population. On top of that, we have 1 million people who entered body measurements in their size profile, and 20,000 more people follow every single week.
Based on these amazing data sets, we created our own AI models to recommend or visualize the right sizes for customers. Already now, these solutions reduced size-related returns by more than 8% as they help customers to pick the right sizes in advance. These models are getting better every day. As the last example, let's talk about our AI-driven Zalando assistant. What started as a conversational helper in the Zalando app is now turning into a true companion as we add more and more capabilities into it. We recently launched shopability, allowing customers to add to their bag, find items that complement the items in their bag, and go to the checkout from within the assistant. We're currently testing new personalization and longer memory, so customers will experience an assistant that is more capable of learning their preference and making great recommendations.
We now already have 6 million people who are engaging with it, 4 times more than last year. Why are we so excited? Because it creates a completely new conversational way to shop with Zalando. With the customer's permission, the assistant will soon be able to tap into their purchase history, into their size profile, and unique style preferences. It will evolve into a true personal lifestyle companion capable of shopping on their behalf within the Zalando app. In addition, we've partnered with one of the most ambitious AI labs in Europe, Kyutai, under the leadership of Peter Sarlin. Together with Kyutai, we're thrilled to work on the frontier of where fashion and lifestyle meets AI to make a lifestyle agent a reality. A lot of exciting things are happening.
AI is not only exciting inside of our platform, there are also a lot of new opportunities that arise beyond that, we are very keen on driving. Particularly the agentic commerce channel. The emerging opportunity for customers to purchase directly through AI chatbot. While it's not yet a reality in Europe today, it will become a reality soon, and there are some estimates that this might become 15% of the entire e-commerce market by 2030. It's an exciting opportunity for us as we believe it will help to convert more of the 70% offline sales into online as it unlocks a new set of customer groups. We will be the best at this channel and are pioneering and co-shaping the agentic commerce for Europe.
Zalando is one of the only two European companies that are part of the initial launch partners for Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, which will basically set the standard for agentic commerce here in Europe. Being the pioneer ensures that we are the one that are first to learn and scale, and this is the best position to be in, and we're truly excited about what's here to come. Let me summarize a few key takeaways for you. First, AI is our catalyst to build the most leading end-to-end experience in fashion and lifestyle. We use AI across the entire fashion and lifestyle journey from discovery to purchase to create a highly efficient and personalized experience. We're eliminating all problems like sizing and discovery by using and building smart AI agents in commerce.
Our massive scale in B2C with both consumers and brands gives us a constantly growing data pool. Crucially, 70% of our traffic is organic, which is the engine that fuels our AI data and allows us to deliver cutting-edge solutions back to customers and brands. Our decades of built-up trust and high satisfaction rates ensure that customers trust us with their data and with the AI solutions that we're rapidly building and scaling. Second, agentic commerce is the massive, exciting opportunity of the future. It is expected to hit 15% of online retail by 2030, and we're uniquely positioned to dominate this channel in Europe, already being the number one referred fashion platform through chatbots today. Our work on the lifestyle assistant ensures we're ready for a world where our agents interact with others.
We will shape European agentic commerce, and that will attract new customer groups for our platform. Thirdly, there are also great agentic opportunities in B2B. We've said it many times, as it's so true, Europe is beautifully complex, and as a consequence, the European fashion sector is highly inefficient, and we harness that with our B2B offerings. For brands directly participating in agentic commerce offerings, we provide with ZEOS the multi-channel solution that unlocks superior unit economics for them, giving a 25% cost advantage on average. For chatbot AIs seeking agentic commerce, our B2B offerings enable a technical and logistical consolidation, and this reduces coordination efforts, gains speeds, and increases customer satisfaction. We're positioned like the spider in the web in B2B for the agentic commerce channel.
Looking at all these developments, we're truly excited about the future as we're unlocking the power of AI on our platform and beyond. Okay, let's move on and focus on our multi-app approach in B2C. Our North Star across Zalando B2C is to play a big role in people's everyday life, so ideally, creating a touchpoint every day. As we all ask ourselves each morning, "What do I wear?" Our consumer apps have inspirations and answers for you. By now, we have a team of three large consumer apps, Zalando Lounge, and ABOUT YOU. They enable us to play a broad scope of categories and experiences in fashion and lifestyle. They have different value propositions for customers, yet work together as a team.
The big Zalando being brand led, ABOUT YOU and Lounge as the smaller but faster-growing teammates being trend and deal led. Together, this team of apps covers more than 60 million active customers across Europe, and each one engages its user base in a unique manner through content, gamification, or daily deals. While our apps have slightly different value propositions, all of our apps use the same foundational backbone, the same data and infrastructure, and the e-commerce capabilities across logistics and payment. What we strategically care about across our team of apps in B2C is pretty simple. We try to reach as many customers as possible, so our platform distribution. We care that they come as often as possible, our frequency, and that they spend the highest share possible of their lifestyle spending through our platform, our depth.
Our team of apps drives jointly to increase our platform's overall distribution, frequency, and depth. Looking into our distribution, we actually see that each of our apps has a significant share of unique customers. Increasingly in our new customer acquisition, there's even less overlap between them. Each one of our apps has an important role to increase our overall reach as a platform. When we look at our overall potential in Europe, there's still massive room to grow. One way we consider here is the population penetration. What's the share of a country's population who are an active customer of our platform? In our core markets like the Nordics, Benelux, and DACH market, we've already achieved a population penetration of more than 20%.
Especially the more recent expansion in Central and Eastern Europe and the Southwest Europe still offer a lot of room for catch-up and scaling. With our team of B2C apps, we see that we can more efficiently now leverage the app which sees the most efficient path to further increase our distribution. A central engine to drive the active customer base at our core app, Zalando, continues to be the loyalty program, Plus. Throughout 2025, we've pushed the cross-country rollout and take-up of the program. As a result, we now have more than 16.8 million members of our loyalty program, and they have accounted for nearly half of Zalando's GMV in Q4. I think that's a pretty impressive figure only 18 months after launch. Plus effectively drives order frequency of customers through its mechanics.
We've seen a steady incremental uplift in average order frequency from Plus members every single quarter compared to its control group. We're very excited about the compounding effect that the loyalty program will have on our customer base going forward as we continue to grow it and optimize the mechanics. Moving on to talk about frequency. When we talk about frequency of usage of our platform, we don't only mean the frequency of orders, we as well mean the frequency of usage, of engagement. Every single touchpoint with one of our apps is very valuable to us. It's an opportunity to engage, to learn about preferences, and as well an opportunity to market products and services. That's why next to our customer metrics, we increasingly started to drive the usage metrics of our platform.
In our core app, Zalando, the feed and its underlying content platform is the major building block to increase the frequency of usage. We've seen strong user adoption as evidenced by growth in critical engagement areas. We launched at scale. Since the full launch in January, more than 25 million unique users have interacted with the feed. This is driving frequency of use. We now engage and entertain an audience of more than 9 million users on a weekly basis. We're seeing early signs of this positioning Zalando as a destination for discovery, with 5 million users engaging with the feed daily. This has led to a significant increase in engagement frequency already. We're further elevating our content programming strategy to bring our world of inspiration, entertainment to life.
With strong brand partner adoption and the scale we've unlocked through generative AI, we are excited to scale this to our entire user base in 2026. As we talk about how to drive up the frequency, it's as well a good moment to report on the advertising monetization of our platform. Our retail media business, combining Zalando and ABOUT YOU, grew much faster in 2025. The growth rate has jumped from 12% in 2024 to an impressive 42% in 2025, mainly driven by Zalando Marketing Services. Our retail media revenues are now 1.8% of GMV. This acceleration comes from a smart strategic move. We shifted from just focusing on transactions to building a deeper, more engaging ecosystem. The key growth drivers were our self-service platform investments, more efficient campaign management and data access, and using AI to optimize ad performance.
This hard work is paying off with a higher growth rate in 2025. Looking ahead, our new feed and content platform is a massive opportunity. It lets us introduce innovative, audience-based, full-funnel advertising formats for brands. The feed is perfect for targeting the right customer and using rich content like video to tell a compelling brand story. The best part, the entire experience is seamlessly shoppable on Zalando, covering the full journey from brand building awareness to making the purchase. This potential is truly exciting and unique in the market, as shown by our early success here with Jordan. With our team of consumer apps, we cover over 300 EUR GMV now per customer in yearly spend.
The biggest growth rates, and this is quite strategically important to us, we see in the lifestyle categories, so beyond fashion, like sports, family, beauty, or designer. Here we saw last year 13% growth of the group's GMV on a like-for-like basis. This is important to us as we continuously move beyond being only the fashion destination and find our way into all the other segments of consumer spending. Particularly sports is a very exciting opportunity for us as it's a new way to engage consumers and move the perception of platform beyond fashion. To see what this looks like in action, here is a glimpse into how we're energizing the sports experience on our platform. Our 17 years of strong brand partnerships, combined with technological advancements, have been a very crucial driver of our shared success.
We start in 2019, strategically shifting our model from that of a retailer to retail enabler, aiming to accelerate our platform strategy. This involves offering partner technology, content services, and infrastructure to help them grow their brands. We have achieved in 2025 a 32% share of partner business of our overall B2C GMV. Our ambition is to increase the platform share of our B2C business to 40% and beyond by 2028. We're committed to this ambition because we see that brands achieve superior dynamics when they fully utilize our comprehensive suite of platform services. Furthermore, these strong brand relationships can be leveraged beyond our B2C platform, extending to collaborations outside our own apps through our B2B offerings. Over to David.
Let's now turn to B2B. Our B2B operating system is designed with a single purpose in mind, to allow merchants to focus on building their brand and digital business while we handle the complexity of their back end by leveraging our data and infrastructure engine. From physical logistics and mission-critical software to value-added services, we provide all the key components a merchant needs to run a successful online business. ZEOS provides the infrastructure for smart logistics, enabling a seamless and highly localized delivery and return experience across Europe, regardless of whether merchants are selling on Zalando, their brand dot com or other channels. SCAYLE offers a high-performance shop and marketplace software built to handle the rigorous demands of enterprise scale direct-to-consumer retail. Tradebyte serves as the integration and trading engine, connecting brands to more than 90 marketplaces around the world through one single integration.
Merchants can start with a single product or adopt the fully integrated stack, always benefiting from the proven data and infrastructure engine, the best-in-class experiences, as well as the constant innovation of Zalando. How do we leverage our B2B strategy to further accelerate the growth of our EUR 1 billion B2B business? First, we want to serve as many merchants as possible. We already serve more than 1,200 merchants with our B2B services and aim to leverage our brand network to bring more global brands into our ecosystem. Second, we unlock digital business growth for these merchants, both on and off the Zalando platform. We currently already enable around EUR 11 billion in GMV. There are 35% outside of the Zalando platform.
Third, we expand our take rate by cross- and upselling our B2B services across logistics, software and services, with the potential to reach a total take rate of up to 40% once a merchant leverages our full operating system. We are building our operating system to serve merchants across a vast range of verticals and markets, creating a multi-billion EUR growth opportunity for Zalando. Our current focus is clear. We aim to become the preferred partner for enterprise-level fashion and lifestyle brands and retailers across Europe. However, the modularity of our operating system and the flexibility of our software stack allow us to capture exciting growth opportunities that extend beyond these segments. First, we are moving beyond Europe. Our technology is no longer bound by European borders, as evidenced by the new global partnership between SCAYLE and Levi's, which I will talk more about in a minute.
Second, we are expanding into general merchandise. Partners like Netto demonstrate that our high-performance software is just as capable for general merchandise retail as it is for fashion. Finally, we are opening up our stack for the small and medium-sized business segment. Through integrations with platforms like Shopify, we are making Zalando's enterprise-grade backbone accessible to the next generation of entrepreneurs. To see the tremendous real-world business impact of our operating system, let's take a look at our landmark partnership with Next, one of the UK's leading omnichannel retailers. As a strategic partner with GBP 7 billion in revenue, Next is utilizing our continental European infrastructure to drive their international expansion. By consolidating Next continental European inventory in our shared logistics backbone and serving customer orders across next.com, Zalando and other marketplaces from one single inventory pool, we've unlocked massive growth and efficiency in their international business.
The results speak for themselves. Next has achieved a 33% increase in international online sales, while simultaneously seeing a 6.5% reduction in fulfillment costs. We are looking forward to bringing these exciting benefits to more merchants in the coming years. B2B is not just a logistics story, it is also a software play, and that is why we are incredibly proud to announce an extended strategic partnership with Levi's today, representing a defining milestone in our journey toward becoming a global B2B solution provider. Levi's has selected SCAYLE to power their global direct-to-consumer business across Europe and North America, making them our first enterprise partner for the North American market. Levi's is an iconic global brand, founded and headquartered in the US. Their decision to trust our software for their global direct-to-consumer business is the ultimate validation of our tech stack's borderless capability.
For us, this opens up an exciting new growth opportunity for our B2B software business, as the U.S. is undoubtedly the largest software market in the world. That's enough from us now. Let's hear it directly from Levi's.
Over the past several years, we've been rewiring Levi's to operate as a best-in-class direct-to-consumer first retailer. That starts with having a deep understanding of exactly how and where our fans want to engage with us. This partnership with SCAYLE and with Zalando will help us deliver for our fans and centers around three core areas. First, we need a trusted partner that combines best-in-class technology with a deep understanding of fashion and its unique nuances in fit, style and storytelling. This technology is best suited to help us showcase and elevate a denim lifestyle offering to our global fans. Second, in this environment, speed and innovation are critical to our success. With SCAYLE, we can build a modern e-com infrastructure that integrates advanced AI to deliver a seamless and differentiated fan experience across our global footprint.
Lastly, this partnership builds on our long-standing partnership with Zalando, which has been going very well. By combining our iconic brand heritage with SCAYLE's cutting-edge e-commerce technology, we're entering a collaboration where we believe we can create a differentiated brand experience that only Levi's can deliver.
Following these detailed insights into our B2C and B2B businesses, let's now move on to our financial outlook. Our financial performance in 2026 and beyond will be fueled by our scalable engine, a shared data and infrastructure platform. This platform, with data at its core foundation, supports both our B2C and B2B operations. Crucially, AI is the catalyst that supercharges this powerful engine, and you can clearly see this reflected in our financial guidance. We also want to highlight that while the world around us remains volatile, Zalando's engine has never been more finely tuned. We aren't just navigating the change, we are all in to win. In 2026, we will focus on accelerating our financial performance and investing in future growth opportunities in line with our midterm guidance. For the 2026 fiscal year, we expect GMV and revenue growth of 12%-17% year-over-year.
We expect to achieve this growth through a combination of three factors. First, the full year inclusion of ABOUT YOU. Second, through sustained growth of our active customer base and an increased share of wallet in B2C. Third, through further scaling of our B2B logistics and software businesses. Furthermore, we aim to significantly increase adjusted EBIT to a level between EUR 660 million and EUR 740 million. This includes EUR 40 million worth of synergies in 2026 from the ABOUT YOU transaction and further efficiencies across our OpEx lines. CapEx is expected in the range of EUR 240 million to EUR 300 million. Net working capital will remain in negative territory. Now, let me talk about our midterm targets for 2028, which we first shared with you back in 2024.
We are on track and fully committed to deliver against these targets. Following our acquisition of ABOUT YOU, we are hereby reiterating and translating our targets into a midterm guidance for the combined group to match our reporting. The expected CAGR 2023-2028 for both GMV and revenue based on the reported figures is projected to be in the range of 8%-13%. We continue to target an adjusted EBIT margin in the range of 6%-8% in 2028, and we will deliver strong free cash flow throughout the period. Since our strategy update in 2024, we've consistently delivered every single year. In 2026, we are taking another big step towards our midterm targets. We have a clear plan, and we are delivering on that plan. That's why today is exactly the right time to announce this capital allocation framework.
This framework has three building blocks. First, we will maintain a strong balance sheet with robust liquidity equivalent to 10% of our last twelve month revenues to ensure operational flexibility, guarantee resilience, and cover for seasonality. Second, we will continue to prioritize organic investment to deliver on our strategic ambitions. This may be complemented with selective M&A if our strict ROI hurdles are met. Third, we will return excess cash through share buybacks on an opportunistic basis and only when it maximizes value to shareholders. To put this framework into action, we announced a share buyback program of up to EUR 300 million today. Looking ahead, we remain laser-focused on long-term value creation, and that's why I hand it back to Robert now to talk about the huge opportunity ahead.
Let me add a couple of points about the long-term opportunity. We're absolutely confident to cover a larger than 15% share of the EUR 500 billion fashion market of Europe. The digital transition to a higher online share is in full swing again, and we are perfectly positioned with our interplay of B2C and B2B. In B2C, we capture with our own team of B2C apps, and in B2B, we enable brands on all other channels that might emerge. We're more confident than ever before to reach our long-term target of 10%-13%. Why? Because, one, now we see that the 6%-8% margin target in 2028 is well within reach. We're controlling our costs very disciplined, and the platform transition is progressing very well.
Second, AI is not only a catalyst for unique growth opportunities, but as well for great efficiency gains. As a company with unique data, long-standing experience in AI, and around 3,000 tech specialists, we will always have a lead against others in our industry in terms of productivity and efficiency. We're closer than ever before to reach our long-term target of 10%-13% margin. Let's close this presentation with the key takeaways of today. Firstly, we accelerate our strategy execution. We delivered on our 2025 financial commitments, and we are on track with our 2028 targets yielding significant cash generation.
Secondly, we build a unique data and infrastructure engine powering our B2C and B2B business and continue to develop our AI capabilities to unlock even more value for customers, for partners, and for our business.
Last but not least, we remain laser-focused on long-term value creation and continue to invest into the immense opportunities ahead of us based on our capital allocation framework.
Good morning, everyone. Great to meet you all today. I'm Anna Dimitrova, and I'm thrilled to have joined as CFO of Zalando at the start of this year. I have spent the last two decades in the telecom sector, where my focus was navigating teams through periods of major strategic and operational transformation. Throughout my career as a CFO, I have prioritized an open and transparent dialogue with the financial community, and I'm truly looking forward to building that same relationship with all of you. Okay, let's get started. We'll begin with a look back at 2025 before turning our attention to 2026 and beyond. Our performance in 2025 was strong. We successfully executed on our strategy, and we delivered growth and profitability at the high end of the 2025 guidance. Our focus on execution continues to deliver strong results.
This shows our ability to capture market share, even in a market environment characterized by geopolitical instability and economic volatility. On top of that, we have made exceptional progress in capturing synergies from the ABOUT YOU acquisition, which we successfully closed in July 2025. We exceeded our 2025 synergy targets and delivered EUR 10 million, which on a full year basis equals 20% of our EUR 100 million run rate. We now expect to realize the full EUR 100 million in synergies in 2028, a year early. On the back of this strong performance, we are announcing today the implementation of a capital allocation framework. We ended the year with strong cash position, which gives us choices in terms of shareholder value creation. At the same time, we're investing in our operations to drive future growth and margin expansion.
Specifically, we are focused on capturing the 70% of the market that still shops offline through technologies like agent e-commerce. Simultaneously, we remain committed to a disciplined investment profile. As a result, we are now reducing our CapEx to revenue ratio from circa 3% of revenues to approximately 2% through 2028. We can do this by investing where it matters, and we will invest proportionally less in our logistics footprint and more in technology and AI. We will use some of the cash we have generated to buy back shares and are announcing a share buyback program of up to EUR 300 million, and we will be canceling all of the shares required to reduce the shares outstanding. This shows our commitment to returning excess capital and in our belief that our shares are currently trading below their intrinsic value.
In summary, the business is growing, profits are increasing, and our capital allocation is laser-focused on long-term value creation. The strong performance of 2025 provides a solid basis for this. Overall, GMV, revenue, and adjusted EBIT all improved significantly in 2025, and in doing so, we are reaching another milestone towards our midterm outlook. The reported increases are driven by solid underlying growth in Zalando and the inclusion of ABOUT YOU from mid-July onwards. On a pro forma basis, as of July 11, assuming ABOUT YOU had been part of the Group in the prior year period, we saw healthy growth of 6.8% in GMV and 6.9% in revenue. This shows accelerated growth from Zalando on a standalone basis compared to the year 2024, with 4.6% growth in GMV and 4.2% in revenues.
I will provide more detail on the performance of ABOUT YOU in a later slide. In summary, this growth reflects our strategy of combining organic growth with selective strategic M&A, and we were successful in turning the overall growth into higher profits. Adjusted EBIT grew 15.6%, reaching EUR 591 million for the year. The Zalando standalone adjusted EBIT margin improved year-on-year from 4.8% to 5.3%. For the first time, ABOUT YOU was break even for the reported period after including the EUR 10 million in initial synergy capture. Now, let's shift our attention to B2C. We are outpacing the growth rate of the European e-commerce fashion segment, and this performance was supported by growth in both the retail and the partner businesses at Zalando and ABOUT YOU.
Putting the market lens on, in 2025, the Group grew in all our markets, and we expanded our footprint further by launching Zalando in Portugal and Greece. Putting the categories lens on, the growth was fueled by lounge and our lifestyle categories, sports, kids and family, and beauty. All of these grew above group average and above the online fashion market growth. Putting the customer lens on, we increased the number of Zalando Plus customers in Q4 by 25% to over 16 million across 17 markets. This is a very positive development because Zalando Plus customers order more and spend more every single quarter compared to non-Plus customers. Let me turn to our partner business, and I'm pleased to see the partner business growing faster than the retail business. This highlights the continuous strong commitment of partners to our platform.
While there was strong growth in absolute terms, on a relative basis, the share of partner business was 32.1% due to the lower share of ABOUT YOU partner business. The Zalando partner business actually increased to 34.5%, with strong progress of 1.7 percentage points in the last quarter, and this is a good tailwind for our ambition in 2026. Going forward, ABOUT YOU partner share will expand as well. We also saw strong growth in high-margin retail media business. Retail media revenue as percentage of B2C GMV rose to 1.8%, a 0.4 percentage point increase. In short, our B2C engine is expanding in size and diversifying its revenue mix, thanks to the strong growth of the non-retail business.
In terms of customer traction, we aren't just reaching more people, we are becoming a more central part of their daily shopping habits and increasing our share of wallet. First of all, we increased our scale significantly through the acquisition of ABOUT YOU. In 2025, 62 million people across Europe ordered at least one Zalando or ABOUT YOU package. This is 15% of the European population. At Zalando, we attracted more customers to our brand-led approach, and at ABOUT YOU, we attracted more customers by being trend-led. Approximately 6 million customers currently use both Zalando and ABOUT YOU. The high share of unique customers on both platforms supports our multi-app approach. We are going to leverage the multi-app approach to drive growth and to cover an even larger share of the European market.
Beyond growth in absolute numbers, we also increased our share of wallet with our customers. The average order per active customer remained roughly stable at 4.8. Because the size of the basket increased, customers increased their spending with us. The average basket size increased by 3% to EUR 62.8, driven by a higher value per item, which is the result of a higher quality orders, but also a reduction in cancellations and lower return rates. This led to GMV per active customer of around EUR 303, which is 2.3% higher than last year. The success of our strategy is evident. One, our customers are spending more. Two, with ABOUT YOU, we can tap into different customer segments and drive growth. Three, customers that utilize both platforms demonstrate even greater growth and higher spending power.
I will give you some more insights into our customer base with a cohort analysis. Overall, our customer base has become larger, more loyal, and is characterized by not just higher spending, but also higher profitability. We can see the strength of our customer base in three KPIs. First, we have been very successful in acquiring new customers. This resulted in a year-on-year increase in spend of our new customer cohort. In fact, our new customer cohort generated significantly more GMV in 2025 versus 2024. Second, our focus on profitable growth continues to be reflected in the spending dynamics of our older customer cohorts. Third, as you can see, our focus on driving customer lifetime value shown in profit contribution per customer is paying off nicely with particular focus on younger cohorts. Thanks to this, we have further increased the profit contribution per customer over time.
This is true for Zalando and ABOUT YOU cohorts. The improvement on all of these KPIs is the result of various initiatives, like implementing cross-selling activities and active return management across markets to improve order economics, and our focus on driving productivity in logistics. The overall top-line growth, stronger partner engagement, and improved customer metrics also translated into solid B2C profit growth. Starting with gross profit. Gross profit increased by 13.6% to EUR 4.8 billion, with 42.3% gross margin. This is a 1.2 percentage points decrease compared to 2024, despite the strong growth in absolute terms. There are three key drivers impacting the gross profit margin. First, the retail margin declined by 1.2 percentage points. This margin development was driven by the strong performance of Lounge by Zalando, which operates on a structurally lower gross profit margin profile.
Additionally, we deliberately decided to increase the offer for more price conscious and value-seeking customers as a way to better create returns than in ROI-based marketing. Retail gross margin was also slightly impacted by the revenue deferrals associated with the expansion of our loyalty program. Secondly, we were able to offset some of the retail margin decline by strong growth in our higher-margin partner and retail media businesses. Thirdly, the margin was impacted by the acquisition of ABOUT YOU, which currently has a lower margin profile than the Zalando B2C business. This adversely impacted the group gross margin by 0.5 percentage points. The strong growth in gross margin in Euro terms has also supported strong growth in adjusted EBIT. Adjusted EBIT grew by 9.6%, reaching EUR 536 million for the year.
This corresponds to an adjusted EBIT margin of 4.8%. The Zalando B2C standalone margin improved year-over-year to 5.3%. We were able to offset much of the lower gross margin impact by reducing operating expenses from increased marketing efficiencies and operating leverage in admin expenses. As ABOUT YOU is new to the group and the transaction significantly impacts our reported financials, let me give you a bit more detail on the ABOUT YOU performance. Overall, we are very pleased with the ABOUT YOU performance during the first half year of consolidation. We heard your request for more transparency after our Q3 results. Here is some detail on the GMV performance of ABOUT YOU since the acquisition. ABOUT YOU significantly accelerated growth and grew double digit the last two quarters.
At the same time, Zalando standalone GMV growth accelerated in 2025, while growing at mid-single digit percentage levels, growth was higher than the year before, and at a six times bigger GMV base compared to ABOUT YOU. We will continue to report the development through H1 2026, at which point we will have fully lapped the prior year comparison. I wanted to provide more clarity today, as you can see that both ABOUT YOU and Zalando B2C are accelerating in line with our expectations. As we integrate ABOUT YOU into the group, the focus is on scaling their growth engine while rapidly capturing synergies. The team achieved adjusted EBIT breakeven in the second half of 2025 when including initial synergies of EUR 10 million. This strong performance post-closing is a great testament to the cultural and operational fit between our two organizations.
We expect the total synergy capture to accelerate significantly in 2026 to deliver around EUR 40 million synergies. The main driver for this acceleration is the early and higher realization of commercial synergies, including, for example, improved trade terms, exchanging article photos and videos for overlapping assortment, and procurement collaborations in transportation, marketing, and media buying. We have also laid the ground for synergies in logistics and payment, which will be more back-end loaded. This gives us very clear and accelerated trajectory towards our target of EUR 100 million in annual group adjusted EBIT one year earlier than planned, by 2028. The speed of this integration gives us high confidence that ABOUT YOU will be adding to the group profits starting in 2026 in absolute terms. Another key driver of revenue and profit growth is our B2B business.
In B2B, in 2025, we saw a sustained double-digit revenue growth. On a pro forma basis, as of 11th of July, assuming ABOUT YOU had been part of the group in the prior year period, the segment also delivered strong double-digit growth of 11.7%. Similar growth rate as Zalando B2B standalone. This performance was primarily fueled by ZEOS Fulfillment, which includes our Zalando Fulfillment Solutions and our multi-channel fulfillment offering. Last year, we served over 70 merchants across 18 different channels, and we have shipped 5 times more items than we did in 2024. Soon, we will be also adding Marks & Spencer as another large enterprise customer to our B2B platform. The platform is ready to scale and bring on more and more of these large merchants over time without requiring incremental investment.
Furthermore, SCAYLE, which has very attractive software gross margins, has provided a strategic boost to our revenue profile and achieved double-digit revenue growth in 2025, driven by increased subscriptions and country go live fees from existing customers. Today, our B2B segment is mostly driven by logistics-as-a-service business. ZEOS accounts for more than 90% of our revenue. At the same time, our software division is growing very fast. This division includes both Tradebyte and SCAYLE. The software share of our B2B revenue grew from 5% in 2024 to 7% in 2025, including SCAYLE. This B2B revenue growth translated effectively into higher profits and significant margin expansion, making a greater contribution to the group profits than before. Thanks to the double-digit revenue growth, our B2B gross profit margin expanded by 3.4 percentage points, rising from 11.6% to 15%.
This translates into a strong increase in adjusted EBIT, which more than doubled to reach nearly EUR 54 million, and also doubling the adjusted EBIT margin to 4.9%. The significant margin expansion was driven by two key factors. One, the increased efficiency and scale we are achieving within ZEOS Fulfillment. Two, the contribution of high-margin software revenues from SCAYLE. As we scale our B2B operations, we're intentionally building a mix of high-volume logistic services and high-margin software solutions. The faster growth in software will support further margin expansion in B2B over time. Thanks to the strong growth in both B2C and B2B, we are able to deliver a solid overall growth in the group adjusted EBIT. Starting at the bottom, we kept our adjusted EBIT margin stable compared to last year, in line with our guidance.
We delivered this by becoming more efficient so that OpEx savings could offset the slight decline in gross margins in 2025. In 2025, we delivered a group gross margin of 39.9%. Although this shows a decline of 0.8 percentage points year-on-year, the overall gross margin continues to hover around our 40% midterm target. The gross margin was impacted by three main factors. A 0.5 percentage points impact from Zalando B2C, a 0.2 percentage point impact from the inclusion of ABOUT YOU B2C business at group level, and an 0.1 percentage points dilution due to the continued scaling of ZEOS Fulfillment given its structurally lower gross margin. We were able to offset the margin development by driving operating expenses, especially in marketing and admin down. Let me now turn to our balance sheet and cash flow development.
Our business generally operates with negative working capital. At the end of Q4 2025, we had a total net working capital position of negative EUR 676 million. Strong Cyber Week trading and the inclusion of ABOUT YOU fueled a robust cash inflow at year-end. As we move into Q1 2026, we expect a corresponding normalization of cash levels as we process high volume partner payouts from peak season. Our total inventories rose to EUR 2.1 billion, a 36% increase year-over-year, mainly as a result of the integration of ABOUT YOU into our reporting. Zalando B2C inventory grew 12% year-over-year, primarily driven by our lifestyle expansion into higher retail share categories like sports, kids and family, alongside growth in lounge. We have seen stronger than expected partner business growth in Q4.
As a consequence, we are in the process of clearing some extra inventory in H1, which will have an impact on our retail gross margin in H1 respectively. While inventories and payables are currently at elevated levels, we expect net working capital to normalize as payables are settled and we proactively reduce inventory levels. As a result of our strong cash balance at the beginning of the year and the strong operating cash flow generated throughout the year, we were able to fund our organic and inorganic growth from our own cash flows. We started with an exceptionally strong position of EUR 2.6 billion in late 2024. Our operations were the primary engine of liquidity, generating an operating cash flow of EUR 1.1 billion. This was driven by solid operating income and the cash inflows from working capital management.
To conclude, we have successfully funded a major acquisition and paid down our convertible bond, all while maintaining a solid cash position that remains among the strongest in the industry. This makes us very well capitalized as we enter 2026, and we are poised to deliver another year of solid growth. This is reflected in our 2026 guidance. We are building strength as a group, which will result in continued growth in GMV, revenues, and profit. You heard from Robert and David the targets we are committed to. Let me focus on our adjusted EBIT line. We are targeting a further increase in adjusted EBIT, reaching a range of EUR 660 million-EUR 740 million. The overall growth in adjusted EBIT implies a margin expansion from 4.8%-5.1%.
Overall, this development will be driven by a combination of growth across our businesses, an increased focus on efficiency improvements, the accelerated realization of synergies ahead of the initial plan, and overall operating leverage of the large group. For transparency, we expect both Zalando and ABOUT YOU to improve underlying standalone profitability. To support the growth, we project capital expenditure between EUR 240 million and EUR 300 million. This reflects our updated warehouse consolidation and automation plan alongside an accelerated investment in technology and AI. The amount projected is also in line with our capital allocation framework of CapEx in the range of 2%. Net working capital will be negative. Therefore, it will continue to be a source of funding for our growth in 2026 and beyond. Overall, we are on track to deliver our 2026 numbers, and I'm fully committed to delivering on these targets.
Let's now move to our midterm guidance. This year is about getting smarter and building strength. Next year is about unlocking value. 2028 will be the year of full scale growth. Our midterm targets are clear. One, top line growth, two, margin expansion, and three, strong cash generation. To better reflect the acquisition of ABOUT YOU and provide a clearer view of our growth trajectory on both a quarterly and yearly basis, we are reiterating and translating our midterm guidance to reflect the combined group approach. It is important to know that our original plan and commitment remain unchanged, and we are updating these targets to be more transparent with you.
For both GMV and group revenues, we guide to a five-year CAGR from 2023 to 2028 of 8%-13% on a reported basis, which is the translation of a 5%-10% CAGR and the contribution from ABOUT YOU. For the adjusted EBIT margin, our guidance for 2028 remains 6%-8% of revenues. We stick to this range in spite of the contribution of ABOUT YOU that was dilutive to our EBIT margin on acquisition, as previously reported. We will deliver this with CapEx of around 2% of revenues, down from our previous 3% target. These factors will result in strong free cash flow generation throughout the guidance period, which will give us the flexibility to continue returning capital to our shareholders. We have a clear path to deliver on our targets. Let me be transparent about what you can expect.
In 2025, underlying margins improved solidly, driven by efficiencies, leverage in OpEx, and faster synergy capture. Though ABOUT YOU's inclusion masks this at the group level, the positive trend is clear. We will build on this in 2026 with improved underlying profitability from lower OpEx and accelerated synergy realization. While the inclusion of ABOUT YOU will dilute group margins for another year, we expect reported margins to expand significantly next year and the year after to deliver on our 6%-8% midterm corridor in 2028. Over the coming years, we are maintaining our group-wide gross margin target of around 40%. First of all, we expect to grow gross margins in both B2C and B2B over the period.
In B2C, we are focused on enhancing the retail gross margin by continuously addressing inventory management, COGS improvement, and our efforts to increase full price sell through, being aware of the current market environment and shifts in our business mix with ABOUT YOU and Lounge. At the same time, the B2C margins will benefit from the faster-growing partner and retail media business. The partner business is expected to grow to 40%-50% of GMV and the retail media business to 3%-4% of GMV over the period. As these businesses have a higher gross margin, their increasing share in the mix will support structurally higher B2C gross margins. Within B2B, we expect a moderate gross margin increase coming from efficiency gains in ZEOS fulfillment and a bigger revenue share from our high gross margin software businesses, SCAYLE and Tradebyte.
Therefore, the adjusted EBIT margin expansion will be driven by efficiencies and leverage across our 3 OpEx lines. One, fulfillment. We are targeting substantial cost improvements to increase capacity utilizations, further automatization, improved order economics, and a deeper integration of AI to drive efficiencies. Two, marketing. We expect to drive operating leverage in marketing with expenses trending downwards as a percentage of revenue in the medium term. Three, administration. As the group grows, we will continue to capture economies of scale and drive administrative efficiencies. The transition to platform and further AI efficiencies are key drivers of lower overhead expenses going forward. We have undertaken the first initiatives with regards to OpEx savings. With the announced reshaping of our logistics footprint and the warehouse consolidation, we are able to drive incremental cost savings of EUR mid-double-digit million from 2028 onwards.
Finally, the continued synergy capture from the ABOUT YOU transaction will consistently contribute to increasing our profitability. These synergies will contribute significantly each year, aiming for the full potential of EUR 100 million annually by 2028, one year earlier than we announced at the time of the deal. To conclude, we have a clear plan to reach our medium-term target margin corridor of 6%-8%. As we become more efficient, we can deliver on our targets with structurally lower CapEx as percentage of revenues. Overall, we will continue to invest in our platform at 2% of revenues, around the same level as we have seen over the last few years. This is a prudent assumption going forward as well. At the same time, the mix of CapEx spending will change, and we will be spending more on technology and less on our logistics network.
Our 2025 capital expenditure was split with approximately 40% dedicated to logistics network and 60% allocated to technology investments, supporting growth initiatives and essential capabilities like size and fit, AI and data science, as well as personalization, recommendation, search, and browse. On the logistics side, the reassessment of our logistics capacity network optimization is complete. We are now focusing on the completion of fulfillment centers in Paris and Frankfurt, the closure of 4 sites, maintenance, and upgrades to the existing sites. As a result of more disciplined CapEx for the logistics network, we have increased our ability to invest more in technology and AI, which you heard from Robert and David earlier. In conclusion, we keep investing into our data and infrastructure platform and integrate AI to support long-term profitable growth and efficiencies while keeping CapEx spend around 2% of revenues.
This leads me to our capital allocation framework focused on long-term value creation. Robert and David also elaborated on it earlier today. Let me just briefly recap. There are three building blocks in how we intend to allocate our cash in future. First, we want to maintain a strong balance sheet with robust liquidity equivalent to 10% of our last twelve months' revenue to ensure operational flexibility, guarantee resilience, and cover for seasonality. Second, we will continue to prioritize organic investments to deliver on our strategic ambition. This may be complemented with selective M&A if our strict ROI hurdles are met. Third, we will return excess cash to share buybacks on an opportunistic basis and only when it maximizes value to shareholders. Consequently, we decided to buy back shares for up to EUR 300 million commencing shortly after our publication.
This underscores our commitment to returning excess capital and our confidence in the intrinsic value of our shares. Here are the three takeaways of today. One, we delivered at the high end of our 2025 guidance. Two, we will achieve our midterm adjusted EBIT margin target of 6%-8%. We are unlocking further growth, driving efficiency across our various cost line, and realizing our EUR 100 million new synergies from ABOUT YOU in 2028. Three, we announced our capital allocation framework and decided for a buyback of up to EUR 300 million. With that, I conclude the presentation, and I look forward to answering your questions in the Q&A session shortly.