I would now like to turn the conference over to Dr. Steffen Greubel, CEO METRO AG. Please go ahead, sir.
Yeah, good morning. Thank you very much for the introduction and to welcome to our Q2 2023/2024 results call. I'm very happy to present you the most recent business developments today together with our new CFO, Eric Riegger, who's sitting here next to me. Eric, it's great to have you on board. I will start with the strategic update, and then Eric is gonna follow, who's gonna present the financial results in detail. And as in the previous calls, there will be, again, a written and a verbal Q&A option. Feel free to post the questions in the tool or asking them later on verbally, your questions. And, as already announced, German-speaking session we will have afterwards. So there is a session for the German-speaking journalist in Deutsch that we can do, later on. So let's directly go into the content and look at the overall summary.
The Q2 very much, you could describe in four key levers. Number one, we are able to drive inflation-adjusted sales growth. So at the end, a proxy for volume growth. Inflation is coming down. Even in our selling price, we're looking partially at deflationary environments. So we see that volume is moving up. Then, we are fully on track with the implementation of our sCore strategy. All the strategic KPIs are moving exactly in the right direction. And we see in terms of results, number three, good results in Q2, sales growth, and also EBITDA is very much in line with expectation. Of course, the second quarter is almost due to seasonality a rather weak quarter that we also see in bottom-line figures, which is still also impacted by some post-transactional effects. Overall, we are confirming our guidance and our ambitions very much.
So let's go a little bit into detail and start with inflation. I was just mentioning, you see in Eurozone inflation coming down. We see in March 2024, in the overall Eurozone, inflation sitting roughly at 2.5%. Germany, even 2.2%. So it's very much coming down to levels that were, that were at the, I would say, same level than back in 2021. Also, the food inflation is decreasing overall in the market and is sitting around 3%. We are following our sCore strategy. We are also investing in prices to sharpen our wholesale value proposition. So our selling prices are also moving accordingly. Even in some of the markets, especially the ones where we have a bigger transformational need, we see even deflationary tendencies.
Overall, if we are adjusting our sales, as I said, by inflation, by our own inflation, by our own selling price adjustments, we see in Q2 a significant volume growth that apparently, you see it in the chart, is sitting around the 3%-4%, and is kind of, stabilizing in the full financial year so far. So that's a very good development. We are very happy because, in some of the regions, the economic development is, rather producing head than tailwind. So we can conclude that also on the volume side, we are winning market shares. Let's move on. Let's look at some of the output figures. What you see on the left-hand side of the chart, the Q2, is a 4% sales growth when you would, adjust for currency.
When you would adjust on top of that for portfolio, we would look at 7%, 7.2%, sales growth overall, which is very much in line with our expectation and is basically very consistent to what we have also seen in the first quarter. So, at the end, in a fair comparison, the company is growing by 7%. You see on the right-hand side, what I already mentioned, there's seasonality. Q2, because of seasonality, Jan, February, and March, is usually a weaker, less productive quarter. That's basically dependent on sales. So we see also the, the EBITDA sort of structurally lower in Q2. And as I already mentioned, the, EUR 73 million that we are reaching is also impacted by some, post-transactional efforts that you would see under the category of Others, mainly, related to, income from the, from the China from the China transaction that is no more there.
So that's mainly the topic. When we look at the pure operational performance and when we adjust for that kind of rather non-operational effects, we are very much in line with our expectation and are also moving forward on the bottom-line figures. Our strategic visual, you all know, it's the symbol for our multi-channel strategy combining stores, FSD delivery business, and digital. When we look at the decomposition of the growth, and here you see the 7% that I just mentioned, after portfolio and currency effects, you see a very healthy composition of the growth. We are growing in all the channels and in all activities. So that's number one. Number two, we are growing in the stores in still the heart of the business, so to say. We are growing in the important FSD area with 18%. So that's a very good growth, actually.
We are even growing faster in METRO Markets, which is our online channel with 45%. And even in DISH, which is the digitization of our customers, so to say, tools for gastronomy, we have 8,000 new subscribers. And every month, I'm looking at new records we are breaking in terms of new subscribers towards our DISH and reservation tools that we are promoting to our customers. So it's a healthy growth composition that is very much in line with the rolling out of our multi-channel sCore strategy. So let's look a little bit in detail. And as always, we are picking out some of the, I would say, effects or cornerstones of the strategy. And this time, it's sales force and it's some of our infrastructure transformation. Sales force, to remind everyone, our overall target is compared to baseline to double the sales force. And we are hitting this target.
We have hired net 470 additional salespeople that are visiting our customers each and every single day. You could ask yourself the question, why in this time where we have cost pressure and where the economic headwind in some of the areas and some of the activities is blowing, why is METRO hiring salespeople? And that's exactly because we are moving from a pull-to-a-push model. Multi-channel, you have to sell. Digital, you have to sell. Our customers, they are not buying from METRO. They are buying from sales rep. They are buying because there's an individual relation, and we are embracing that, and we are investing in that. And that's a very, very important cornerstone of our strategy. And we are investing, and we keep on investing, in building up sales force because that's, at the end, the enabler for our growth plans, especially in a multi-channel environment.
Another enabler is apparently our infrastructure. What we see when we are looking at our multi-channel transformation is that we are using the existing stores and we're repurposing them to multi-channel fulfillment centers. Not to skimp on everything, we are just building up the infrastructure accordingly. Take Magdeburg. It's a former store, roughly 15,000 sq m, two floors. We closed one floor. We moved a lot of the not relevant for our customer, not relevant articles, or not core articles, rather C articles, to online or listed them even out, pushed everything in the first floor, made the entire appearance of the store way more efficient, more pallets, more one-touch pallets, more productive environment, more value for our customers. And we were increasing our FSD capacity out of store to 1,000 sq m.
Now we're geared up for the future in a very, I would say, capital-light way, to just give you one example. So that's how we are transforming our stores into multi-channel fulfillment center. Another example is France where we have opened our first depot. France is characterized by smaller stores. So here, we also moved the operations out of 10 stores towards one single depot that is serving now Île-de-France, the highest density area of France, to give better service and higher growth rates to our customers. And there are other examples from Serbia, but also from Kazakhstan where we are also investing accordingly to our sales and as planned in our infrastructure. Boringly consistent, consistently boring. I guess that's the headline when we look at the strategic KPIs.
We are always reporting on them, and we're always giving you an update also on a longer term. FSD sales share is hitting record high of 24% last, moving from 22% over the last of the first half of the year. When we look back to baseline, so when we started sCore, this indicator developed quite significantly. So we are really fulfilling our targets. We are becoming more delivery. And the FSD sales share is higher, but also on a higher baseline. So you can see that absolute volumes and absolute sales are growing exactly in line with expectation. It's the core driver of sales. And we are hitting targets here. To highlight a couple of countries, it's France and Germany. France is delivering significant uplift in sales, but also significant uplift in profit.
Germany is one of our most productive FSD countries and has the highest order value and has also moved very much in line with the target, the sales significantly in FSD. So we are, indeed very happy with those two countries that are contributing massively to the overall FSD sales share that is very much in line with our targets. Same thing for digital sales share. We are now sitting at 13% coming from 9%. You might say that's not a lot, but bear in mind that there is still the denominator of the entire equation is our overall sales. So it's still cash and carry that you cannot digitalize. So, at the end, when we look at the 13%, for me, it's a major shift. It's a major shift.
Almost 50% of our FSD customers, and that's where it's really relevant, are buying already online, are ordering online. We are moving with a lot of activities to achieve our goal until 2030 of 40% digital sales share and in FSD to almost 100% digital ordering. The frontrunners in that regard are Czech Republic and Slovakia. They're already sitting right now at above 30%, which gives you the proof that it's not fantasy to go to 40% within the next six years because right now, there are companies, same circumstances, same IT, same everything that are already overachieving the 30%. So it is possible. We have it in our legs. We're moving forward on that one as well. Same thing Own Brand. Own Brand now, 23%. When I started three years back, I just celebrated my three years working anniversary first of May on Labor Day.
We were looking at 15%. Now, we are looking really at a significant number, 23%. And it's a good dynamic. So you see this important KPI constantly moving up. It's increasing margin. It's increasing loyalty of our customers. And we are pushing a lot. And when we look at frontrunner countries like Spain and Italy, especially Spain, we are looking already at our overall Own Brand share of 37% for Spain. So you see what is possible. Spain is already delivering today our targets that we have for the entire group of 2030. So it gives us also confidence that the targets are reachable. And for the overall company, we are very much in line. Same thing counts for the strategic customer sales share where we are now at 23% coming from 71% compared to last year. Croatia, Bulgaria here, the frontrunners in terms of improvement.
So we're here also moving very much in the right direction, serving the right customer with our store strategy. So that's just the update on the strategic KPIs. When we look at the overall wholesale transformation, which is at the end driving that, I just want to highlight a couple or maybe two things. Number one, and I touched it already, it's store repositioning. We are moving from store to multi-channel fulfillment center. We are moving from a pull model to a push model. We are moving from putting products in shelves and the price to proactive selling. And we are repositioning our stores to productive environment for delivery and for pickup. That means we have delisted a lot of articles again. Last year, we already have delisted a lot of articles. We continue to do that.
The increased or the gained surface, we will repurpose in increasing delivery capacity that I just mentioned. We do that also on a continuous basis. We are also within our stores gaining productivity because we are putting things more on pallets. There's going to be higher turnover. We have higher productivity per sales rep. That's what we mean with multi-channel fulfillment center or store repositioning. We are moving forward with that one. Why are we doing that? Because we want to build up the FSD in a cost and capital-light way, the FSD business out of our existing infrastructure.
And then we want to put digital on top of that because we know, and that's the multi-channel advantage, which nobody than us has in the market, that customers who are using all the three channels are buying up to 10 times more than compared to if you would only use our heritage cash and carry channel. That's the big multi-channel advantage. That's why we are pushing so much in this transformation. At the end, we are delivering volume growth. We have mentioned that the strategy is bearing more and more fruits and is delivering more and more the desired values. We are winning market shares. We are even given, again, that in some of the markets, it's a bit more complicated. Also regulation doesn't help us.
But we are very confident that even the headwind is blowing, we are able to fulfill our targets. We are able to move in the right direction in transformation of the company. We are delivering the results on the strategic KPIs. And we, and that's what you see here on my last page, of course, are confirming our growth ambition. So thank you very much. And let me now hand over to Eric for the financial part.
Thank you, Steffen. And good morning also from my side. I'm happy to present today the financial performance of our second quarter. But before I do this, let me give you a few insights about my first three months here at METRO. For me, it was really important to see our operational business. So therefore, I have visited so far eight countries.
I went to stores, depots, joined our sales force in customer visits to get a deeper understanding of our business. So I was really happy to see we're very motivated people dedicated to METRO. I can see that the sCore strategy is being implemented to grow our business. Furthermore, I also had a focus on the finance strategy, which I will explain on the next page. We worked on a new finance strategy, which is called One Finance. It consists out of the following elements. First, digitalization as a basis to increase efficiency. Second, standardization and automation that enable us to increase the use of shared service centers even more. Third, our people, our talents, and continuous development of their skills in line with sCore. And finally, most important, our new focus, cost leadership.
The goal is to improve cost structures across METRO, but keeping the sales momentum of our sCore strategy. We have started to implement this new finance strategy already in our finance organization. We're working on, expanding it to further business areas. More to come on this in the future. Now, let me continue with Q2 financial performance and start with the high-level KPIs. Generally, Q2 is in line with the plan. Q2 in METRO is seasonally, the quarter with the lowest sales share across the financial year. We continue to grow above inflation and in line with our targets. Given the Q2 seasonality, our free cash flow and EPS are typically low. Let's have a look at the sales. We achieved 7% sales growth, portfolio adjusted, and at constant currency. This was driven by good progress on strategy execution, as explained by Steffen.
We see the strong growth in all our channels. Despite decreasing inflation, our inflation-adjusted growth was 4%. Adjusted EBITDA developed in line with our expectations. The decline to EUR 73 million in Q2 was driven mainly by the expiration of the license fee from China and other post-transaction effects in the prior year. These are the same effects mentioned in Q1 already. Our earnings per share in Q2 are typically low due to seasonality. Overall EPS decreased by EUR 0.24 with the prior year and sits at -EUR 0.53. It's mainly driven by the delta in other financial results, which last year were supported by positive non-cash foreign exchange effects from Russian currency. Negative free cash flow of -EUR 673 million is mainly due to seasonality, but still EUR 163 million better than prior year due to improvement in net working capital.
Our net debt stands at EUR 3.5 billion, and hence, an improvement versus prior year as well. So let's have a look at the details. On the top left, you find the 7% portfolio adjusted growth at constant currency. The portfolio effect in Q2 is around 3 percentage points. Therefore, we reached EUR 6.9 billion sales in the reported view. In Q2, Adjusted EBITDA declined by EUR 26 million. As mentioned, this is mainly driven by the post-transaction effects in Q2 of last year. Looking at the segments, all segments contribute to the sales growth in Q2. To be more specific, Germany with sales of EUR 1.1 billion, increasing by 2% versus prior year in a deflationary environment. HoReCa customers showed the highest growth. Adjusted EBITDA decreased slightly by EUR 3 million. This is driven by the transformation phase and strategic investment in price optimization.
In the segment West, reported sales of EUR 2.8 billion and an increase of 2% versus prior year. Sales were strongly supported by our HoReCa customers, which are our focus customer here. Especially Spain and Italy, as well as our FSD companies such as PRO à PRO France, PRO à PRO Spain, Aviludo in Portugal, contribute to the sales growth. The Adjusted EBITDA for the segment West increased to EUR 69 million. This was driven mostly due to sales development. Additionally, we also see a sustainable trend of productivity increases. In Russia, sales in local currency increased by 13%, which is at the upper end of our expectation. However, we continue to see high volatility in the Russian market due to the war in Ukraine. Adjusted EBITDA at constant currency is almost on last year's level. In the segment East, sales in local currency increased by 4%.
Adjusted for METRO India, sales even increased by 14%. All countries in the segment contributed to the sales growth. Especially Romania, Ukraine, Czech Republic saw significant growth. Strong sales growth in Turkey was also affected by hyperinflation. Therefore, we have negative currency effects, especially related to our Turkish operations, significantly impacting the reported view. Adjusted EBITDA reached EUR 55 million. This is an increase of EUR 9 million versus last year at constant for currency, following the positive sales trajectory. In the segment others, reported sales grew by 27% to EUR 60 million and included METRO Markets sales of EUR 35 million. Especially METRO Markets in France contribute to sales growth. DISH Digital Solutions sales growth is above 30% versus last year with strong DISH POS growth. This sales growth is mainly a result of the investment on rollout of our digital business, as explained by Steffen.
Adjusted EBITDA decreased to minus EUR 56 million, mainly due to the previously mentioned post-transaction effects from last year. Let me further bring you through our P&L. As mentioned, Adjusted EBITDA decreased due to post-transaction effects. The currency effect of EUR 5 million is mostly due to the devaluation of the Turkish lira and the Russian ruble. Including transformation gains of EUR 8 million and EUR 2 million of real estate gains, reported EBITDA is at EUR 84 million. Depreciation is almost stable. The delta within the net financial result is mostly due to last year's positive non-cash currency effects related to the ruble. We land at minus EUR 0.53 earnings per share for the second quarter. As in previous years, this figure typically bottoms out in Q2 due to sales seasonality.
Earnings per share for the first six months is at -EUR 0.17 and is in line with our guidance. Moving on to the cash flow perspective, Q2 business seasonality has an impact also on our net working capital and free cash flow. Still, we see an improvement in net working capital versus previous year. We continue to focus on gaining operational efficiency through the implementation of sCore. The delta in other operating cash flow is due to the combination of several effects, just as technical EBITDA offsets and tax impacts. Investments and divestments are in line with the sCore's execution, are almost stable against previous year. Due to the negative free cash flow and dividends paid, net debt decreased to EUR 3.6 billion but remains below last year. Now we come to our financing section.
As you know, in March, we used the favorable capital market environment to refinance a bond ahead of schedule. EUR 500 million bond for five years with a 4.625% coupon. This was supported by Bank of America, ING, DZ Bank, and Intesa Sanpaolo. The secondary market performance is very good, which proves the attractiveness of our conditions. So now we have two bonds outstanding. One is for March 2025, and the other one is for March 2029, on top of our liquidity position supported by committed credit lines. Our S&P rating just was confirmed remaining at BBB - with a stable outlook. Overall, we continue to be well set up to fund the growth of our sCore strategy. Now let's have a look at the outlook for the full year.
For the current financial year, we reconfirm our guidance of 3%-7% sales growth and Adjusted EBITDA development in the range of -EUR 100 million-EUR 50 million. The development is fully in line with our sCore strategy. Normalization of depreciation, amortization, taxes, and financial result for EPS of around zero. Slightly negative free cash flow due to our investment, but also we currently focus on net working capital optimization to achieve this number. An increase in our net debt under consideration of prolongation of leases in the following months. This includes our presentation for today. Now we are happy to answer your questions.
Ladies and gentlemen, we'll now begin our Q&A session. Please note that you can submit your questions in English either via call or in writing via the webcast link. In the Q&A session, we'll first handle questions via call, followed by questions via webcast. At the end, we'll provide a German slot additionally. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star followed by two. If you are using speaker equipment today, please lift the handset before making your selections. Anyone who has a question may press star followed by one at this time. One moment for the first question, please. Once again, to ask a question, please press star followed by one.
We can also try in German.[Foreign language]
[Foreign language]
I now interpret that as that we did a very clear presentation that left no questions. And then I thank you very much for your attendance. And I take that as a positive feedback. And I thank you very much. And I'm looking forward for our next session in the next quarter. Thank you very much.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you. The conference is now concluded, and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you for joining, and have a pleasant day.