Thank you very much, Mariella. Dear shareholders, 17 years ago, we launched Zalando from a small flat. The vision was simple. We wanted to revolutionize the fashion retail industry to meet the needs of our customers and partners better than anyone else. We have shaped online retail and turned crises into opportunities. A startup has become one of Europe's most successful digital groups with help of outstanding colleagues from over 140 countries.
Along the way, we have not merely witnessed major upheavals, we have actively shaped them, from the early days of e-commerce, through the rise of the smartphone, to navigating the pandemic. Today, we're driving the next great revolution and shaping the industry in the age of artificial intelligence with our innovations. The past year has shown that we're making great strides in this regard. Our strategy is working. We have achieved our financial targets.
A key milestone was the integration of ABOUT YOU. It strengthens our foundation for everything that lies ahead. At the same time, we want to address openly today what concerns us and you as well, no doubt, the performance of our share price. Although we have significantly improved our performance and laid a strong foundation, the current share price does not reflect Zalando's true value and enormous potential. We understand your dissatisfaction, as we fully share it.
We ourselves expect more and set significantly higher standards for ourselves. David and I will show you today how we are creating sustainable value through AI and our progress in the B2C and B2B businesses. We see enormous opportunities for you, our investors, as well as for our customers and partners. We are therefore looking forward to discussing our next steps in detail and in direct dialogue with you today.
We're also embarking on this journey with renewed strength in our team. Anna Dimitrova is joining us as Chief Financial Officer. With her international experiences, she will play a decisive role in driving our vision forward. Let's get started. Behind Zalando lies a unique AI-powered data and infrastructure platform that we have built up over 17 years. It gives us a massive strategic advantage.
We utilize Europe's richest fashion-specific data, drawn from billions of interactions, and the leading logistics network for fashion to connect 62 million customers with 7,000 brands across 29 markets. Here, AI acts like a growth turbocharger in a high-performance engine. In the B2C sector, the heart of our business is our portfolio of apps comprising Zalando, About You, and Lounge by Zalando. In the B2B sector, this engine becomes the operating system for our partners.
We open up our infrastructure from software to logistics and thus connect brands directly with their customers. The best part is we get better every day, every second. The more people use our apps and the more closely brands work with us, the faster we grow. A greater scale of interaction mean more data, and more data then means our solutions become ever more precise, better, and more unique. In short, we provide the technology to enable an entire industry to grow. How do we do this?
Firstly, our brand network. An unrivaled network of more than 7,000 brands provides deep insights into detailed data on product ranges, content products, and supply chains. Secondly, our logistics infrastructure. With 14 locations, we have the leading logistics network for fashion across Europe. We ensure that customers in 29 markets receive their parcels exactly as they expect, namely fast, reliable, convenient.
With our local focus, we are close to the people. Thirdly, our tech platform. We have built a strong team of around 3,000 tech specialists and developed a powerful and scalable platform. Fourthly, our payment platform, the foundation of trust. We process a transaction volume of more than EUR 34 billion annually through it. This unique combination of expertise gives us a lasting competitive edge.
Dear shareholders, the fact that our technology platform operates highly efficiently is clearly evident in our balance sheet. Let us turn to the financial figures for 2025, as always, compared with the same period last year. At group level, we're seeing double-digit growth. Revenue grows by almost 17% to EUR 12.3 billion. Our operating profit stands at EUR 591 million. Both sides of our business are delivering strong results.
In the B2C segment, Zalando and ABOUT YOU continue to grow together. GMV rose to EUR 17.6 billion with an operating profit of EUR 536 million. This demonstrates that our offering is a magnet for customers across Europe. Our B2B segment is also delivering. Thanks to ZEOS and Scale, we've increased revenue to EUR 1.1 billion, an increase of almost 15%.
Particularly impressive, we've more than doubled our operating profit. This proves just how profitable our operating system is for partners. This success is the result of a strong team effort, after all. A huge thank you goes to our more than 16,000 Zalando employees. Every day, they give their best for our partners and customers on our platform. These figures also show that our business model works. We expect even stronger momentum for the current year.
The management board and supervisory boards propose that the retained earnings of the Zalando Group for the 2025 financial year be carried forward in full. We will continue to invest strategically in Europe, in our growth, while simultaneously returning surplus capital to you opportunistically in the form of share buybacks. Our aim is to increase the value of the company for you, our shareholders, in the long term.
Let's take a look at the stock market performance. We are aware that the performance of Zalando's share price has not been satisfactory. Although we've clearly improved our performance and built a strong foundation, the current share price does not reflect Zalando's true value and enormous potential. Of course, we cannot influence either the global economy nor geopolitics, but we understand your dissatisfaction because we fully share it.
We ourselves expect more and set significantly higher standards for ourselves. In doing so, we are following a clear plan. We're successfully implementing our strategy and can already see from our figures that it is working. We are rigorously improving our processes and making our organization as efficient and lean as possible. AI has now become a major value driver at Zalando, helping us both boost efficiency and accelerate our growth.
We're realizing synergies with ABOUT YOU much faster than planned, and we're also in a position to continue investing in the major growth opportunities in the European fashion market while simultaneously returning capital to our shareholders, as we announced in March with a share buyback program, which we just concluded yesterday, of up to EUR 300 million. We're convinced that if we continue to pursue our strategy so consistently, the market will ultimately recognize Zalando's full potential in the share price.
We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere thanks to you, our shareholders, for your continued loyalty. We will continue to work hard and do everything in our power to repay this trust. Furthermore, we're investing not only in our financial growth but also in the future viability of our business model. For us, this means we're taking responsibility for a more sustainable future.
We know that sustainability is not an option but a prerequisite for our long-term success. That is why it is an integral part of our corporate strategy. We want to help shape a more sustainable industry. We're starting with ourselves. It's our goal to further reduce our own carbon footprint. At the same time, we're using our scale to set standards that others can follow. Our goals are clearly defined.
By 2040, we aim to be climate neutral in our own operations and across our private labels. By 2050, we aim to extend the standard to our entire supply chain, from manufacturer to front door. For us, sustainability is not an obstacle. Quite on the contrary, it is the very foundation of our business in 10, 20 or 30 years' time. Only those who take responsibility today will remain competitive in the long term.
In 2025, we achieved key milestones. In our own operations, we reduced emissions by 81% since 2017. For our private labels, we reduced CO2 emissions by 37% since 2018. That's good progress, but no reason to rest on our laurels. The entire industry needs to do more. We're optimizing our processes, sharing our knowledge and driving change forward. While sustainability secures our future, our technology accelerates this journey. Our most important tool is AI. Whether we're reducing returns through size advice or optimizing our logistics, AI makes us both more profitable and more sustainable.
AI is no experiment for us. We've been using it for almost 2 decades, and every day I'm inspired anew by how we're not only making Zalando better, but shaping the future of the entire online retail sector. Let's get back to facts. How exactly are we using this headstart? The following video shows you how we do it. You've just seen how we are already using an AI today.
What sounded like science fiction not long ago is now part of our everyday life. AI is transforming our platform at a pace that is completely redefining efficiency and productivity across all areas. These 3 concrete examples show that this is no longer a pipe dream. Let me talk about the first example, the digital customer experience. Within 1 year, we have increased the proportion of AI-generated product content from almost 0 to 90%. Creating a campaign now takes just a few days instead of 6 weeks as before. At the same time, we're producing 70% more content.
Second example, the physical customer experience. We're optimizing complex supply chains in our logistics using AI models, the result, the accuracy of our delivery promises has increased by 22 percentage points in real time. Third example, our team. Our approximately 3,000 tech specialists are increasingly using AI in their programming. Given Zalando's size and complexity, trust, reliability and compliance are paramount.
Despite this challenging environment, we have already managed to accelerate the average number of code changes by over 20%. The benefits we're already seeing from using AI are enormous. Time frames that used to span years are now down to quarters to weeks. Many talk about data, we have data in a depth that is unique in Europe for fashion. We know our 62 million customers.
We know their style, their favorite cuts, their preferred delivery options. We are already the number 1 technology platform for fashion and lifestyle in Europe. What makes our position truly unique is our treasure trove of data, millions of daily interactions and hundreds of orders per minute. We're already working on the next generation of online shopping, agentic commerce. What does that mean? Up until now, you've been searching for a product via websites.
With agentic commerce, AI agent takes over the search and product selection right through to purchase. Zalando is already the preferred fashion platform recommended by AI systems. We are one of two European launch partners for Google for agentic commerce. We're also increasingly turning our Zalando Assistant into your personal lifestyle companion. The response has been huge.
10 million people are already using it in the first quarter of 2026, which is a sharp increase compared to 6 million users in the whole of 2025. Why does this work so well? Through this dialogue-based approach to shopping, we make the shopping experience even more natural. The Assistant doesn't just suggest individual items, it helps put together complete outfits quickly and intuitively.
With new lifestyle AI, the Assistant becomes smarter. It gets to know your style, it offers personalized advice. Let's briefly summarize. When we look to the future of AI, three things matter. We have the most precise fashion and lifestyle data in Europe. Secondly, on this basis, we're training an AI that not only makes Zalando better but also strengthens our partners, whether in direct sales or via our B2B solutions such as ZEOS, Tradebyte and Scale.
We are pioneers in agentic commerce and have enormous opportunities to grow even further in the future with AI. Let's take a closer look at how we're growing in the B2C business. Our goal is pretty clear. We want to be an integral part of our customers' everyday lives. Every morning, everyone asks themselves the same question: What shall I wear today?
Our suite of apps, namely the brand-focused Zalando app, the trend-focused ABOUT YOU app, and the deal-focused Lounge by Zalando app, helps us address different customer needs, and it delivers the right inspiration and answers every day. The key point here is that although our apps take different approaches, they use the same database and infrastructure, as well as our e-commerce expertise in logistics and payment processing. We measure our progress using three key metrics. Reach. Frequency of use. Third, penetration.
Now, let's take a brief closer look at these points and start with reach. We're making great progress here, and that is no coincidence. It's the result of 3 apps that are perfectly coordinated. Each app brings us additional customers, and this means we are reaching more people in Europe than ever before. A look at our potential shows there is still plenty of room for growth in new customer acquisition, particularly in Eastern and Southern Europe.
An important growth driver is our loyalty program, Zalando Plus. In the first quarter of 2026, 18.5 million members across 17 markets placed their trust in us, and these figures speak for themselves. Plus members order more frequently than anyone else. Just 18 months after launch, they were already responsible for almost 50% of our gross merchandise volume in the fourth quarter of 2025.
This momentum is indeed remarkable. Let's move on to usage frequency. Second point, for us, this means more than just orders. It's about engagement. Every click is an opportunity to better understand our users. Our new Discovery Feed has been used by over 25 million people since its launch in January. It's like an intelligent navigation system through the world of fashion.
These interactions also boost our advertising business. retail media revenue at Zalando and ABOUT YOU grew by 42% in 2025 and now account for 1.8% of our GMV. Brands such as Jordan are already successfully using this feed as a platform. The third point is something that makes us particularly proud. I'm talking about penetration.
This means we want our customers to spend an ever-increasing proportion of their fashion and lifestyle budget with us. On average, this amounts to over EUR 300 a year. What's even more exciting is this, people no longer come to us just for a T-shirt. They come to us for many other products that they need and want in numerous areas of life. Last year, we grew by 30% in areas such as beauty, designer fashion, and sport.
Why? Because we understand what customers want and need. Take sports, for example. It's not just about products, it's also about emotions. Take a look. The video shows that we are creating a platform on which we grow together with our brand partners. The partner business already accounts for 32% of our GMV. We've now discussed three things: reach, frequency, and penetration.
Behind this lies a simple truth. Our B2C business is stronger today than ever before. We use our data and our scale to create something that is unique for both customers and brands alike. David will now show you how we are further expanding our data and infrastructure platform for business customers in the B2B focus.
In the B2B sector, Zalando is continuing to expand its operating system for fashion and lifestyle e-commerce. Our module B2B operating system takes the pressure off retailers. We handle the complexity behind the scenes by utilizing our data and infrastructure platform so that retailers can focus fully on their brands and physical logistics, groundbreaking software, or complementary services. We provide the complete package of components retailers need to succeed in e-commerce.
To this end, we offer three key building blocks. ZEOS is our infrastructure for smart logistics, for seamless deliveries and returns across Europe, across all sales channels, whether you want to sell on Zalando or outside of Zalando. Scale offers powerful software for online shops and marketplaces, specifically developed to meet the high demands of direct sales for major brands. Tradebyte serves as a central link for retailers.
With just one single integration, it connects brands to over 90 marketplaces around the globe. Whether a single module or a complete package, our partners benefit directly from the infrastructure and innovative strength that has made Zalando big. By reducing the complexity of cross-border commerce, we open up new digital growth opportunities for brands and retailers. How do we use our capabilities to further accelerate the growth of a B2B business, which is worth EUR 1 billion?
Let's speak about reach. Over 1,200 partners are already using our offering, and we're continuously bringing further top global brands on board. Secondly, usage frequency. Of the EUR 11 billion GMV we process today, 35% already comes from channels outside Zalando. Thirdly, margin. We're increasing our margins through cross-selling and upselling.
The more of our logistics and software modules a partner uses, the higher our share per transaction rises, up to 40% when used to full capacity. In short, we are building the platform on which the future of retail takes place, regardless of the sector, regardless of the location. What does this success now look like in practice?
One example is our partnership with the British retailer, NEXT. NEXT uses our logistics network to supply the whole of continental Europe. By pooling all stock into a single inventory pool, whether for next.com, Zalando, or other marketplaces, we have achieved impressive results with NEXT. NEXT's international online revenue rose by 33%. At the same time, logistics costs fell by 6.5%. That is the measurable added value we offer.
It is precisely this potential that we will unlock for more and more partners in the coming years. Our B2B business has long been a genuine software success story. As announced in March, SCAYLE will become the global e-commerce platform for Levi's, not just in Europe, but also in North America. The fact that the global market leader in denim has chosen us is an absolute milestone.
It is also a groundbreaking reference project in the U.S. market, the world's largest software market. Following these insights into our business areas, we now turn to the current AGM 2026 financial figures and our outlook. We have clearly defined our goals for 2026. We're accelerating our performance and investing consistently in growth.
Despite a rapidly changing geopolitical and economic environment, we expect an increase in gross merchandise volume and a revenue growth of between 12% and 17% compared to 2025. We expect an adjusted earnings before interest and taxes of between EUR 660 million and EUR 740 million. As already mentioned, we will also outline how we intend to deploy our capital in the future. In doing so, we're focusing on three priorities.
First, the balance of the balance sheet strength. We maintain a liquidity reserve of approximately 10% of our revenue to ensure we remain capable of acting and resilient to crisis at all times. Secondly, growth. We invest primarily in our own business and selectively in acquisitions, provided the return is right. Thirdly, capital return. We use share buybacks opportunistically to return surplus capital to you, our shareholders, in a value-enhancing manner.
We're convinced that our business will continue to perform strongly in the future. On 12th March, we launched a share buyback program worth up to EUR 300 million, which was launched yesterday. This will see us repurchase around 5% of the share capital. It is an investment in our own future and a clear commitment to you.
Our focus is clearly on long-term value creation and on increasing the company's value for you, our shareholders, in a long-term and sustainable manner. The momentum with which we started into 2026 confirms that we're on the right track. This is demonstrated by our figures for the first quarter of 2026, as always, compared with the same period last year. GMV grows by 21.7% to EUR 4.3 billion. Revenue stood at EUR 3 billion, an increase of 23.8%.
Operating profit rose to EUR 65 million, an increase of 38.7%. This corresponds to a margin of 2.2%. Our first quarter results show in black and white that the strategy is working. We are working with great passion to make our platform even better for our customers and partners every day. The current geopolitical situation has not yet affected our business. However, we continue to monitor the situation closely so that we can react quickly if necessary should any relevant changes occur.
Last year, I spoke here about the European dream, and today this dream is more important than ever. The state of the world reminds us of this every day. In Zalando living this dream, we bring together people from over 140 nations. We serve 62 million customers across 29 markets in Europe. We are a European success story. To ensure this remains the case, Europe needs the courage to change.
We must invest in our home and shape a strong technologically leading Europe. Only together can we remain a global force. If we were to summarize everything we have discussed today, three things stand out that defines Zalando today, but also in the future. First, we deliver. Our strategy is working. The figures for 2025 are on track, and we have our sights firmly set on our goals for 2026 and beyond.
We're scaling up. The second point, our data and infrastructure platform is the driving force behind both B2C and B2B. AI acts as an accelerator for our future growth. Third, we are investing. Our capital allocation strategy ensures that we deploy our resources where they create the greatest value for you. Dear shareholders, our position has never been stronger.
We combine the power of our technology platform with our mix of proprietary apps and strong B2B services to serve over 15% of Europe's EUR 500 billion fashion market. The AI revolution is in full swing, and we're not just part of it, we are leading it. Thank you for your trust and for joining us on this journey