Hello, and a warm welcome to Get to Know Business Area Fiskars event. My name is Essi Lipponen, and I'm the Director of Investor Relations here at Fiskars Group. As you all know, Fiskars Group consists of two strong business areas: Business Area Fiskars and Business Area Vita. This spring, we already hosted a similar kind of event for Business Area Vita, and today the focus is on Business Area Fiskars. Here are today's speakers: Jyri Luomakoski, Fiskars Group's President and CEO, Jussi Siitonen, Fiskars Group's CFO, and Dr. Steffen Hahn, the CEO of Business Area Fiskars. Here is the detailed agenda for this afternoon. First, we will hear from Jyri Luomakoski, who will open the event. After that, Jussi Siitonen will talk about Business Area Fiskars from a financial perspective. After that, we will get more deeper into the Business Area Fiskars with Steffen.
After these presentations, we will have a joint Q&A, and we will take questions both online and from the live audience here in Espoo. The webcast ends by 4:00 P.M., and after that, the audience here in Espoo will have a chance to see some exciting new launches by Fiskars on the fourth floor. Without further ado, Jyri, please go ahead.
Thank you, Essi, and from my side also, a warm welcome both to you here in the Fiskars campus premises as well as online. We are excited to have you today here with us. We had an event in May in Copenhagen where we presented our Vita business area with the, at that time, very fresh CEO of the BA, Daniela Lund. This is a logical kind of continuation of those series, and as we have a lot of exciting things to tell and show today, happy to see all of you here as well as online. What is the focus of today? As Essi pointed out, we are split into two business areas: the one we discussed in May, Vita, its home decoration, tabletop, some jewelry at Georg Jensen, many, many brands. That is something that we started to build effectively with the acquisition of Iittala back in 2007.
The last move on that side was the acquisition of Royal Copenhagen in 2023. A bit longer heritage here on the business area Fiskars, effectively two brands, and today we will be concentrating on the brand, i.e., Fiskars. A bit longer heritage, 376 years, and a couple of weeks on top of that, or soon two weeks on top of that. Gerber is also a part; Steffen will address a bit also on our footprint and presence. Gerber, but focus will be more on the Fiskars brand within the Fiskars BA. Geographically, as a group, we are fairly well spread with equal, of course, a big overhang in our position in Europe, and then North America and APAC both being important geographies for us. For BA Fiskars, as we will soon learn, North America is, of course, of bigger relevance than for Vita.
It is not only a European and North American business, so if you go to some of the prime do-it-yourself stores in Australia, you cannot avoid coming across Fiskars products. Now comparing our two businesses here, quickly addressing Vita, which is from a distribution perspective, about half and half, direct-to-consumer, both our about 500 stores and e-com presence, and the other half through distributors, so indirect sales. Geographically, Vita has a fairly big European position, not that big America's position, and then again, Asia-Pacific led by Japan and China are the big geographies. Today's focus, indirect distribution model, dominating clearly the business model for BA Fiskars, there is effectively for Gerber, an own e-com presence, and that is where this 3% comes from. Half of the business is in Americas, not exactly the other half in Europe, so the APAC presence, effectively Australia, New Zealand, accounts for the 4%.
Another distinction also here is that the BA Fiskars is more of sourced products, especially focusing on a North American offering and presence in Europe. Actually, most of our offering is manufactured by ourselves. At Vita, we see here that 60% of what we sell is made in our own factories, both ceramic, so porcelain, and glassware factories. We have undergone a fairly big change in the organizational structure, and personally, I was in the Board from 2016 till not too many weeks ago, and 2020, when the pandemic hit us, we had a matrix that at least I had a difficulty to draw all the dimensions of that matrix, actually. That was simplified over the time, and now since February 1 of this year, we have had a rather simple corporate structure.
We have one group roles, about 1% of our people, group business services, that's basically financials, shared services, and IT, as both businesses are sharing the same ERP backbone, about 3% of our people. Today we talk about Fiskars BA with about 20% of the total headcount or personnel of Fiskars Group being employed at BA Fiskars. Vita has a significantly higher share. From a revenue perspective, it's slightly bigger, but as you can imagine, if you are selling a lot of hand-painted porcelain plates, you need quite many hands to do that, and that's explaining effectively. Not to mention the 500 stores. Every store employs multiple people, and consequently, it's way more personally intensive as a business as the Fiskars BA is. Why did we do the split? That's a question I understand has been a lot of speculation, and it's been on the lips of many people.
Obviously, with full accountability, we think that we can reach better results. My personal philosophy is that while we have a lot of smart people also working out of these premises, the group headquarters, but I can't claim that we know best what the Australian or the American consumer needs. How can we charm those consumers in different places that we would have that knowledge necessarily in some from many perspectives? Remote location, of course, when you are located in Espoo from a very central location, as we would say it in that context. This improves our speed, our agility closer to the market.
Transparency, measurability, even in the times of the AI, I firmly believe that what gets measured gets done, and that's something we are living here with our division or business areas divided into there, soon into there or even legal subgroups under the holding company, Fiskars Corporation. We can allocate our capital smarter, more correct, in a better way that yields the best results for our shareholders. We can set the targets properly. When we get to the independent legal entities, on the lower left-hand corner, this is one of those topics. Operationally, since last winter, we've been in this structure. Till the end of Q1, we expect to have the legal part of the restructuring also done, which means that there is a legal subgroup under Fiskars Corporation that is the Fiskars business, and the other is the Vita business.
Through that, we have the entire balance sheet available, also intend to increase our disclosures towards the financial markets for full transparency, but it's also giving us transparency. There might be currently in a country distributors who sell both Fiskars products. They could be selling some of our nice glassware and the snow shovels and the axes and a few other things. We have trade receivables from that party. Currently, we can't in the structure as we speak separate those, so we don't have a full balance sheet consequently measuring and even then in the end basically rewarding on items that are outside of the income statement, which we have had split for years. This is opening again new avenues to be more relevant, kind of sharper focus to the right things.
With this, also looking at these two businesses, having been now in the operative role basically myself since May, Vita with about 12 brands, or if you count all of them, it's probably 100, but 12 active and relevant brands. How to manage that business and then the big Fiskars brand business, different channels, different routes to market, a bit different arguments how to charm the consumer. This offers us now divided in pair, so the dedication that we can do the right things also within the businesses and not have a fruit salad from that perspective. This is a good segue handing over to Jussi how Fiskars business area has managed to get to a resilient business model and also a very efficient capital structure. Jussi, please.
Thank you, Jyri, and hello everyone. What is the Fiskars BA financial role within our portfolio? Fiskars BA contributes three key strengths to our portfolio: a lean cost structure, an asset-light balance sheet, and, thirdly, a very resilient business model what we have there. Let's start first with this lean cost structure. Presented here, you can find Fiskars BA, Vita BA, and then the overall group P&L structure, rolling 12 months at the end of September. Fiskars BA is dilutive to our gross margin. That is due to the business model what we have in Fiskars BA. Roughly half of net sales what we have there is in the U.S.A., so Fiskars BA operates in the U.S.A. mainly through the big retailers. Typically in U.S. retailers, the gross margins are lower than what they are with the European peers.
Having said that, at the same time, that distribution is very cost-efficient. Once you get a door open for one big retailer, you have a platform available for nationwide distribution in one go. Of course, you need to prove that product is working, product is selling through, but at least the platform exists, and therefore the distribution is very efficient. Another thing on top of this efficient distribution we have in Fiskars BA is also when it comes to our general admin cost. Bearing in mind what Jyri said, that only 20% of our employees are in Fiskars BA. The organization is very flat, very efficient there, and that you can see in the numbers. Even though net sales were down this 3.7% now on rolling 12-month basis, we have been able to maintain stable double-digit profitability.
That shows the resilience what we have in Fiskars BA business. That is about this lean cost structure. An asset-light balance sheet. Jyri said that we have a thorough, very detailed balance sheet by BAs once we get this legal entity split completed, but we already have directionally right numbers available. What you can see here is, first of all, Fiskars BA, that has been built organically, and it follows this kind of CapEx-light approach. CapEx-light approach meaning here that whilst almost half of the net sales is coming from Fiskars BA, Fiskars BA is only 1/3 of our CapEx what we have. That results in, I would say, relatively high capital turnover what we can enjoy in Fiskars BA. High capital turnover combined with stable double-digit profitability results in very robust return of invested capital for Fiskars BA.
That was the second topic there. The third one is this resilient business model. The best way to illustrate the resilient business model is to walk through Q3 EBIT bridge, what we have there. As you most likely, well, it is quite well known that actually Fiskars BA is in the epicenter of these tariff discussions and tariff pressures, what we currently have there. Despite that, the underlying gross margin, the gross margin improvement, what you can see here, based on our own operational efficiency improvement as well as strategic pricing, we have succeeded to improve underlying gross margin more than what we have received negative items there from direct tariffs. Net-net, we were able to improve gross margins in Fiskars BA in Q3. That is only one thing. The second thing is that so-called OPEX fluidity, what Fiskars BA is executing, is yielding results.
All the savings what we have had there in admin cost, in general cost overall, we have invested back in those top-line fundamentals, i.e., marketing, R&D, and the likes. We are in this self-funding model with Fiskars BA, we are able to continue investing back. Of course, the negative fund what we have in tariffs there, we can mitigate, but preferably we would like to invest that also in the growth. Nevertheless, the model currently works so that we can mitigate the negative ones from tariffs. This resilience is truly needed. From April, when the tariffs were imposed, on top of those April tariffs, the steel tariffs which were introduced late August, they are impacting on our result. Of course, this year, when they did not start from January 1, we have some impacts already on our P&L.
We see that next year we will have the full impact. We are not off the hook from the tariffs after 2025. They will continue also in 2026. In the business where 50% of net sales is in the U.S.A., and most of those products we are selling in the U.S.A., they are sourced outside the U.S.A., mainly from Asia. That is what I meant with being the epicenter of these tariff challenges we have. The current actions put in place already, what we witnessed in Q3 and year-to-date September, their strategic pricing efficiency improvement, we continue mitigating the direct impacts of the tariffs. The challenging part is those indirect impacts. What is the sentiment there when it comes to the U.S. consumer? We know that U.S. consumer sentiment is somewhat declining. How will we be able to mitigate that one?
Our focus is very much to maintain competitive position, securing our market share and prioritizing our market share and then the cash flow, because that's something we can control. The own actions we have put in place and are putting in place as we speak is mainly when it comes to our sourcing, refood printing. What is the best place to source sustainably so that we can still avoid those highest tariffs there? That's what we are focusing. How long-term planning can we have? That's challenging at the moment because this tariff environment is very volatile, let's say so. We don't know what will happen tomorrow. All the plans what we have put in place are now targeting to mitigate the direct impacts. That's very much when it comes to financial part of Fiskars BA in Fiskars Group.
Now, Jyri and I, we walk through how we see Fiskars BA from group perspective, what's their role in our portfolio. Bearing in mind from financial perspective, lean cost structure, asset-efficient balance sheet, and resilient business model. I am now handing over to Steffen to talk more about what is Fiskars business as such and giving you a better insight on that one. Steffen, please.
Thank you, Jussi. Welcome also from my side. My name is Steffen Hahn, and I lead the Fiskars business area, which is the brands Fiskars and Gerber. I would like to cover four things with you. The first thing is where we are. The second thing is who we are, what we do, and what hopefully is particularly exciting for you, what we do next. If we start by looking where we are, a bit of an overview, and I start on the right side of the slide. You see our country footprint. Today, we are an international brand. We are present in more than 40 markets from North America over Europe down to Australia and New Zealand. We are an international brand, but still with potential to grow in other markets.
Well-diversified, being present about 50/50 on both sides of the Atlantic, of course, always gives us a nice hedge depending on how the economies go on either side. If you look at the middle part of the slide, this is our retailer landscape. For the Fiskars business area, we have decided that we focus on what we are good at: product design, so engineering, design, and brand building. We trust our partners to be good retailers. We do not do our own retailing. We do not do DTC for the Fiskars business area. We are working a lot with big boxes. That begs the question, how exposed are we? Is there one or two or three retailers that really make the bulk of our sales? Many of you probably know the answer. That is not the case.
Even our biggest customers stand for less than 5% of our net sales. We have a very well-diversified retailer customer base that gives us resilience when things go bad in a certain country or in a certain geography, because we have other partners in other areas that would not be as exposed to that. Lastly, when you look at our product categories, we have a seasonal business, but the business happens to be fragmented into subparts that have different seasonality. We have garden cutting in spring. We have back to school in summer. We have in fall the axe business that is very pronounced there. As we run up now to Christmas, the Gerber business, the cooking business, and our snow tools, depending on how the weather goes.
Each of our subcategories has a different geographical profile, which again makes us relatively resilient with the different seasons on our business. Overall, we are very well-diversified as a business, geographically, customer-wise, category-wise. Yet we have one uniting factor that's a key competence that we believe we can do better than anybody else, and that's cutting. Cutting is something that consumers care about, clean cuts, and they are willing to pay a premium for that because they acknowledge that there are tools that are better than others. We can command a price premium quite a bit when you look at our scissors in the cutting area.
What you will see later is that also, as we think about how do we expand our portfolio to cover more consumer needs, that we're always looking for how do we have a right to win as we enter new categories so that we stay true to our core. Our brand has good penetration. In the high season, and after summer in the U.S., during back to school, we sell 100 scissors per minute, statistically, if you do the math. The amount of stick tools we sell in the Nordic countries, so Scandinavia, Finland, amounts up to that we mathematically sell basically one stick tool to every 10th person in the population every year in the Nordics. When you look at the amount of products we sell in Australia, we should be in about half of all Australian households.
We have a foot in the door, and as we now expand our portfolio, we have fantastic opportunities to sell across and to sell up. We are following that path, which you will see a little later. When you think about the penetration and the foot in the door, we have one business that we're very proud of and that is very attractive for us, axes, where we have major upside. Our market shares, when you look at value, is about 25%, give or take, depending on where we are on the market. On the unit side of things, we're only selling about 10% of all units in the axe space. When you think about the axe category, we are shifting focus and say, how do we convert classic wood shaft axe users into our type of axes?
That is very attractive for us: volume, economies of scale, premiumization. It is very attractive for our retail customers because we create category value in a category that not necessarily is growing on its own. It is beneficial for the consumer because when consumers use our axes, they realize how good of a product it is. It does not necessarily tell itself that on the shelf because the shape is similar to what you are used to, but the functionality is really one of a kind. There is a massive opportunity that I wanted to highlight of how we are using our initial penetration in these countries to now try to more deliberately expand our business and how we can surround consumers with more of our products. We are serving our customers with what we think is a world-class supply chain.
We have warehouses in North America and Canada and in the U.S., in Europe, in Finland and Poland, and we have a warehouse in Australia to serve our customers. That supply chain is fueled by four own manufacturing sites that we have. In the U.S., we have a manufacturing site in Portland on the West Coast, which is the mecca of knife making. Our Gerber business is producing our premium knives there. We produce axes and scissors in Vilnius, not far from here. Then a little further, but still not far in Sorsakoski, we produce our cooking equipment. In Słupsk, in Poland, we are producing a number of our gardening tools, so rakes, spades, the Weeder, a product we are famous for, and some of our pruner. This was the where we are. Now let's look at the who we are.
Some of you have heard this before. I try to give a bit of a different take on who we are because it's very difficult to actually grasp what 376 years of heritage are. Early in my career, I used to live and work in Switzerland, in Geneva, which some of you enthusiasts might know is the cradle of watchmaking. Amongst others, the oldest watchmaker in the world is based in Geneva, Vacheron Constantin. When I lived there, they had a very intriguing campaign. They would depict historical events, and then they would say how old Vacheron Constantin was at that time already to showcase how old they are. When Napoleon was born, Vacheron Constantin was 14 years old. When the U.S. signed the independence declaration, Vacheron Constantin was already 21 years old. When Vacheron Constantin was founded, Fiskars was 106 years old.
Fiskars is 106 years older than the oldest watchmaker in the world. That's pretty mind-boggling, I find, when you think about it. Fiskars was founded in 1649. Franz Mozart was born in 1649, which was the great-grandfather of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In 1649, the Maryland Toleration Act was signed, which allowed all people on what today is the U.S., on today's U.S. territory, so that was more than 130 years later, to worship any kind of religion. Isn't that interesting? In 1649, Fiskars was founded. We believe the Fiskars brand is much bigger than its current sales. My team and I, we are determined to change that. Sales up, that is. We believe that Fiskars is really not only a brand or a very old company. It really is a part of cultural heritage of Finland and of cultural heritage of all.
I feel incredibly privileged to lead this incredible business. In 1649, more than 99% of all companies or businesses that existed in 1649 have gone extinct. There must be something very unique about Fiskars to have survived so long. Survival of the fittest. There must be something very unique in our DNA. I believe that is our ability to adapt. You might know Charles Darwin said it's not the strongest or the most intelligent species that survives, but the most adaptable. I think 376 years speak for themselves. We were able to adapt with changing consumer needs. On the very right side, we were Dyson before Dyson with a hairdryer. Fiskars had a microwave oven 20 years before they broke through in the market space. On the left side of the screen, Fiskars did plates and cups and plastic trailers. Fiskars did excavators.
Fiskars did traffic lights. Fiskars has done a lot of things. We have constantly moved with the consumer, with changing needs, and solved problems they had so that we would stay relevant and we were able to make a profitable business. A few examples. Fiskars invented a number of things that we still have today. We have basically fundamental innovations or inventions that we did and that we then could continuously innovate to make things better. Here are a couple of the examples. They are relevant still today and, as you will later see, also beyond. The plastic handled scissors. Scissors used to be made out of complete steel, fully steel, which was very expensive. Fiskars actually invented these plastic handled scissors, which made them more affordable to consumers. We innovated. We just recently launched our sixth generation.
People are more well-fed today than they were in the 1960s, which makes hands on average thicker. You have a different anatomy as a result, and we adjusted the scissors to go with that so that they are comfortable to use. If you today use on average the scissors from 1967, they would feel pretty tight. The power gear mechanism on the very right, 1996. There is a physical limit of how big of a branch you can cut. Fiskars came up with this gear mechanism so that you basically, up to three times the force that you have naturally, you can apply to a branch so you can cut thicker branches. Those of you who do gardening, you know how it feels when you have this branch. You can't cut that bugger.
That is a thing of the past with our Power Gear mechanism. We built on that. You'll see later on an innovation that we have that is taking that to the next level because there are downsides with the gear as well that we're now solving. We continuously make the products better in innovation steps based on what we originally came up with in 1996. The Ropeless Tree Pruner. Again, if you're using these tools, you get stuck with the rope if you have one. I inherited one from my father with a rope, and it's not particularly convenient. Fiskars solved that problem.
With the rope internalized, Fiskars could also come up with a gear mechanism so you could cut thicker branches, which makes it incredibly productive because you do not have to climb up in the tree with a ladder or even get a landscaper who does it for you, and it is pretty costly. Again, an original invention from 1997 that we have innovated, and you will see later how we are taking this forward. The claw weed puller. Actually, if you have dandelions, it tears out the whole plant, including the roots, so they do not regrow. You do not need to go down. If you do garden work, you have pretty quickly a sore back. We solved it because you lift it up, it is stuck to the tool, and then you can unload it. A number of things.
It's not mind-blowing innovation, but it makes a task of a consumer so much better that they see the benefit and want this tool over everything else that's available in the market. We do this about a broader range. This is a few examples. Now, what's nice about Fiskars is we're not only good at solving functional problems, we also add emotional value, as evidenced in many of the wins we have in the design space, Red Dot as an example. What does that mean, actually design? For us, it means we have ergonomics that are truly based on insights of how our tools are used. We'll showcase that a little later about how much of a difference things can make to the handling, to the balancing, to the weight when you really understand how the tool is used in practical terms and how you design for that.
Ergonomically, to health benefits, you have professional landscapes that use these tools eight, nine hours a day. That makes a huge difference. We also offer aesthetical benefits. Some of our tools are used in what you would call demonstrative consumption situations. Other people see you having it or using it. It's part of your interior. You want it on the event, it's on display, you want it to look nice. You spend a fortune on your interior design. You don't want to have outdoor tools that are just functional. You want them to look nice too. That is a value that people are ready to pay for. We have really, I think, mastered that art. We have, and we are intentionally investing into it. We have a Chief Design Officer. We have more than 10 industrial design engineers.
What you see here, the quote on the chart shows you that we are amongst the top of the companies when it comes to industrial design. The top of the companies means we are amongst the likes of Apple, Pininfarina, Porsche Design, Dyson, which you would not necessarily expect from a company of our size. Really at the top end of design capability as judged by others. When you think about sustainability, which is always a topic, Finland happens to be a relatively sparsely populated country. That luckily makes nature present pretty much everywhere. It is always present. That is very nice because it is a good reminder of our obligation to protect it. For us, care about the environment and making sure that we reduce our impact on the environment is who we are. That is really in our values. It is not just in any report.
We have three main pillars how we cater for that. The first is we make tools to last. Durability, which goes very nicely hand in hand with the quality expectation and perception that consumers have about our tools. The second pillar is circularity. You know we've publicly committed to a target. We want our Fiskars products to be by 2030 made out of 50% circular materials. We have a milestone in 2025, 30% on our path to get there, and we've just surpassed that. We are about 32% of all of our material we use in our products to be circular. In some areas, we have really pushed it to what's technically feasible.
When you look at our cooking equipment, you cannot for process reasons, you cannot go to 100% of circular material, but you can go beyond 90%, and we've done that on stainless steel and on aluminum in our Sorsakoski factory. We are really on the cutting edge of what's technically feasible when it comes to the amount of circular materials. Lastly, repairability. Of course, it's much better for the environment if you don't have to replace a whole product, but only parts of it. That happens to coincide with a very attractive spare parts business financially. Again, ecology and economy go nicely hand in hand on the repairability front. This is what we have on sustainability. If you then look at what does that lead to. We're focused on solving functional problems.
We are focused on adding emotional value, and we are focused on doing so in the least environmentally impacting way. That has earned us a leadership position in garden cutting. Pruners, tree pruners, axes. You have an edger here, spades. We are a leader in garden cutting. Given that we invented the plastic handled scissors and then continuously developed our portfolio there, we also earned a leadership position in scissors, both in adult scissors and in kids' scissors and related crafting tools. In kids, there is now an interesting trend emerging, which is away from screen time, back to crafting. Parents more and more look for activities they can give to their kids that sometimes earns themselves in our free time where they are busy, but they develop their motoric skills. They do not look at an iPad, but they get active.
We have an expanding portfolio to cater for that. The same is true for adults. More and more people look for what they call digital detox. We internally call this grandma hobbies are on the rise again. Crochet is growing more than 200% in the U.S.. There are things that are coming back, and we have a portfolio to capture these consumers in our offer. Now, you could think there's a lot of offers in the scissor space, and that is true. The Fiskars orange handled scissors really is a recognized icon in the marketplace. You see here the CNN style article. We've sold more than a billion pieces, which of course means we have a lot of experience of how to do these things right.
We know without being able to disclose names here, but we know that a lot of people use in their professional purposes our Orange Handled Scissors when they really want to get the best possible result. Tailors and haute couture companies, automotive customization to cut leather and things like that, architects to build models. Our scissors is found in the offices of people that really care about the result globally. We have now talked about product. I want to wrap it up with a part of our portfolio that is cooking. Cooking is about 10% of our business, profitable. Again, you see here our nod to our cutting competence. Knives, scissors, interesting. I have just been to Korea.
In Korea, a lot of food in the kitchen and on the table is cut with a regular scissor instead of what we would cut here in Europe with a knife. Gerber is about a sixth of our business. You saw it earlier on the category mix when I talked about where we are. Within the Gerber brand, more than 80% of sales is in cutting tools or cutting related tools, so knives and multi-tools. If we move from product, the physical product now to the brand, our brand is present and highly regarded. The tongue twister, National Collegiate Athletic Association, so college basketball, they have a custom that when a team wins a major title in the U.S., they would cut the net from the game and keep it as a memory for that title win.
They have an officially appointed scissor for that, Fiskars. In the U.S., we are also on the teacher's list. Every year when school kids, they get a list of equipment they need, Fiskars is on that list. If we go to the other side of the Atlantic, in Finland, in 2025, Taloustutkimus named us as the number two most reputable brand in Finland. We've done a number of changes to our brand management organization, which I'll cover in a second. This is testament to that what we're doing is working. We were eight the year before. We're up from eight to two in Finland. We're winning consumer tests in other areas too. Test Fakta in Sweden, an important market for us. In Germany, in Poland.
Our brand has a reputation for quality and design and is acknowledged by the people in the marketplace. Brand management will have an even more important role in our future. We're very good with product and design, and we want to up it even on our systematic brand management. I talk a bit about the numbers and the quantity, but then also the quality. Before I do that, I want to talk about how we handle cost. When I came in in January, we looked at what are our strategic priorities. You saw we have a relatively diversified portfolio, but of course that always lends the risk that you try to do too many things in too many places. We've defined a narrow set of priorities. What are the priorities we really have to double down on?
Because this is where we have an overproportionate return for our effort and investment. We defined our strategic priorities, and then we looked at our organization. You know, post-COVID, there was a contraction of businesses, not only for us, but for the market in general. Of course, that created a lot of turmoil, organizational changes. We said we need to streamline our organization to be able to perfectly set up to execute what we've now defined as priorities. We implemented this multiple ways. As a result, we have lower cost, but happier people. We measure every month in our town hall if people, our own internal people, it's a global town hall, if they agree with the direction, if they agree with the direction we are taking, and if they know what their contribution is to it. It's on a five-point scale.
Since we started this in January 2024, we have improved it by almost a point on a five-point scale. Our people are clearer. They agree with the direction. They know how to contribute. Our employee engagement score also is up. We aligned our organization. The saving out of that gave us the freedom to do two things in parallel that are usually conflicting. We were able to defend our profitability with everything that is going on right now, and we were still able to invest more, what Jussi alluded to earlier, into our future. When you look at quarter one, 2024 as a base, we are now 50% higher media invest than then.
Since I'm here, we've increased our media investment by 50%, admittedly from a relatively low base, but you all know what happens if we have great products and we tell more people about it. We are very excited once the tide turns to see what that then unleashes when we also have a bit of just a neutral market. We're not even asking for tailwind when we just enter from a negative to a neutral market and hopefully at some point in time also a bit of tailwind. Yeah. What does this do now if we look at our EBIT numbers? If I focus first on the green line, that's our EBIT profitability, so in percent, you see on the screen that we are substantially above pre-COVID times and that we actually depends on how you want to read it.
Yeah, I want to read it that it's slightly up, but we are actually able to defend our profitability in a market that is not exactly helping. You know, we have pressure on the top line. We have pressure on the cost, and yet we were able to protect our profitability, which means that while we were investing in our future, more media, also more R&D, you will see it in a second, we were able to defend our position in the top of our peer group when it comes to profitability in these difficult times. While, as you can see on the orange graph, our sales were under pressure. If I draw a quick interim summary before we move on, we managed to take cost out and still have happier people that are clearer where we go and what they need to contribute.
We were able to defend our profitability on sales decline while investing more in R&D and media. These things are usually conflicting, and I'm pretty proud of my team, what they were able to pull off in the time we've worked together. Let's now look at what's next. To drive towards profitable growth, which is our ultimate aim, we have a very simple model, three pieces essentially. We want to continue focusing on innovation, expand our portfolio. We want to be present in more retailers, so broader distribution, deeper distribution, better quality of distribution. We want to drive awareness with media, with advertising. In other words, we want to serve consumers with more products they can buy from us in more places and let more people know about it. If we double-click on the first part of that, so innovation, over the last 20 months, we were able to more than double our innovation pipeline. We will show you four examples in the following, but we start with a little video.
The new Fiskars Ultra. Sharper. Tougher. Stronger. For more one-strike splits. The new Fiskars Ultra.
Here it is. That is our new top-of-the-line product, the Fiskars Ultra Axe. I used it this weekend. I can still feel it. If you have an old woodshaft axe in your tool shack and you buy this and use this, I guarantee you it will be a revelation. This product is incredible. This is our new top-of-the-line range. As you probably saw in the advertising, we are using this to give people an argument why they should buy this instead of a woodshaft axe. You saw the demo.
It truly is sharper. You can truly drive with a tank actually over it. It flexes back. You cannot separate the head. I have myself had a woodshaft axe, an old one that dried, the wood dried. I was using it and the head flew away and on the other side is where my kid is playing. You appreciate that this head cannot be removed from the shaft once you had such an event. I hope not everybody has that experience and then buys our axe. I hope they buy it before that. This is really one of the products that we have that we think will really make a difference in our axe category and start harvesting the 90% of the market that is still out there for us to capture. You can tell I am convinced this is a great product.
It actually has an innovation which comes to the coating. When you want to split wood, a common problem is that you get stuck in the log if you don't split it. This axe doesn't get stuck. So there's a coating on it. It either glides through or it kind of stops at the top, but it doesn't get stuck, which makes it far more convenient to split logs. The coating makes it more slippery, so it's easier to do these one-strike splits. I was talking about the revelation and that's the technology. There are coatings. Our coating lasts more than five times longer. You can use it for a long time. It doesn't rub off. You have this slippery effect for much longer than you usually have. If we go to the next example, urban gardening. Urban gardening is on the rise.
Rooftop gardening, growing your own herbs. If you're on Instagram, you see all these advertisings for tools that are with lighting and everything. This is really a trend. We are looking for subcategories where we have a right to win where there's inbuilt tailwind. Urban gardening is one of them. We've launched a number of products in this area. From retailers in the U.S., you see here some of the star ratings. Usually, if you're a brand manager, 4.3 is what you're looking for. We're getting 4.9s and 5s by a number of consumers. We really got this one right. As it is on display, I talked earlier about demonstrative consumption. You want these tools to look good because you see them. You don't put them away.
This is where we really can apply our gardening knowledge, but also our design capability to deliver consumers something they want to have. The next example is pet care. Those of you who have a pet know this is a very emotional category. It is also a growing category. One of the key concerns pet owners have is that when, for example, they cut the claws on the nails, is that they hurt the pet. There is an effect that some of you might know is if you want to cut and the tool that you have is not sharp, you basically squeeze the nail. The pet starts trying to pull the paw away if you have a dog. Our tools do not do that. They do a clean cut. You have an actual experience that this product is what you are looking for.
We've launched now, or we're in the process of launching 18 products. They're hitting the stores as we speak. Here, those of you based in Finland, which I understand is pretty much everybody, if you go to the retailers, you will be able to see it in the next days if you haven't seen it already. It is rolling out as we speak. We have very positive feedback from everybody who's used the product about its quality. I want to go last, but certainly not least, what is particularly exciting for us is our entry into power. The world is motorizing. If you think about a car today, the seat is electric, the windows are electric, the hood is electric, the trunk is electric, everything is electric. That is also true in all categories. Everything is motorizing.
We are now going into the space too. There are players already out there. Of course, one of the questions that you have in mind probably is, okay, so why us now? Why now? How do we think we'll win this? I believe that we actually have an advantage that we were able to see what everybody else did because we could spot all the issues. I believe that there is no player in the space today that either has the garden cutting insight we have, as evidenced on our manual business, and/or the focus. There are a lot of players that basically have a product in our space, but they are construction focused. They do not really know how you do gardening because they are mostly about carpenting and building drywalls and construction business.
You have more technology-based companies, people that had a battery, particularly the Asian suppliers, they have a battery or motor, and they are coming more from the tech side, but not from the gardening inside. I think we have product to the competition out there, and we are delivering the top-end cutting performance that you would expect, both in terms of force, but also in terms of duration. You will see this later, those of you who are in the product show. You can basically use the battery without charging for a whole day, which is, when you are a professional landscaper, a pretty compelling argument. The handling. A lot of the tools that we see in the market out there are not really based on the inside of how you handle the tools, particularly when they get long. Weight balance is very important.
We see a number of competitors that basically strapped a pruner to a pole, and you have all the weight at the head. Now imagine when you're reaching out two or three, you just can't hold it. From a physics point of view, it's very impractical. We have a very different approach to that, and we think that is superior, is our belief. There is a question with a battery system. We do not have a battery. We have a power bank. We have a power bank that happens to double as a battery for our power tools. All the other players have a battery that they can only use for these tools. That means probably 350 out of 365 days, these batteries sit somewhere not used. They are not exactly cheap. Ours, you can use daily.
You can charge your phone, you can charge your laptop, you can use it when you are gardening in your gardening tool. You also do not need a bulky charger. One common problem is that you have one battery charged, you forget about the other one, and when you want to use it, basically it is uncharged. All you need for ours is your phone charger and U.S.B-C. You plug it in, you charge the battery. If you happen to have more than one charger, I have five or so, you can charge five batteries at the same time because you can use your standard U.S.B-C charger. Given this is now European standard, we can be fairly certain that this is standing the test of time, which is nice because five years ago, that was not the case.
Us coming now gives us the advantage that we see where everything has landed and to now do what we think is an offer that is really distinctive and relevant in this market space. We'll watch another video. Good. This covered the first part of the three-part model, innovation. Let's now look at POS. I said before that we are looking to expand our retail presence. More doors, broader portfolio in each of the retail outlets, and higher quality. Our fundamental approach is that we want to be where the shoppers are. That means not only offline, but also online, of course, but it also means at different price points. We're looking at, are we offering good, better, and best? The Ultra Axe is an example of how we added a new best.
Now with our A-series and X-series and Ultra, we're offering good, better, best. So different price points and then also different use cases. Some people are just not doing so much pruning than others. We're covering occasional usage products at a cheaper price and then also heavy-duty products that we know will last for a very long time in adverse conditions. We talked about the number of doors that we want to expand and the breadth. What I want to double-click on is the quality of distribution because we know that brand building isn't just an advertising task. It's also primarily actually a POS task. At point of sale, you need to get the perception that this brand is offering good value for money. Delivering the quality for the price and also clarity of why should I trade up if you have multiple things on offer.
We are very much focused on improving the quality of our POS presence. We have something that's called the ambassador fixture. It's basically a shop-in-shop offer for our customers that we have installed in a number of places in Europe. If you go to DIY retailers here in Finland, you would see them most often with very good POS in Finland. We are rolling this out, and we have now basically made a change in the U.S. where we did not have any of those. We have partnered with one retailer where we are now rolling out the shop-in-shop. They have national distribution in the U.S., and we now have more than 200 installed, and we keep counting.
POS quality to bring to life, what I tried to explain here earlier in terms of our points of difference and why you should pick a certain product from Fiskars and why Fiskars in the first place is a key priority when we look at the second bucket of our three-part model, which is POS, online, offline. We have a physical model for brick-and-mortar retailers, but we also have a virtual shop-in-shop if you want to tag along with the retailer websites we're on. I should probably mention here that 100% of the traffic we generate goes to our retail partners. I said earlier we don't do DTC. We are really driving traffic to our retailers, and they noticed that. I'll cover that in a second. It's pretty much now media, the third part of our model.
We have great products, but we have an opportunity to tell even more people about it, which is why you saw we've increased our media investment. We've changed our structure. We've brought in additional capability in the media space, for example. We in-house that. We have now an own media team. We call it the Media Town. We've overhauled our media mix. We know which media channels give us the best return on investment or on advertising spend. We've changed our brand management organization, and we are in the process of also altering our agency network. We have now implemented a number of changes, more to come, but we can also see the results. I earlier talked about our most reputable brand score here, number two in Finland. What's very encouraging is when you look at the middle of the slide, this is sales change versus last year.
In brackets, we indicate in which country this was. This was retailer results on products we supported. You know the macroeconomics. In general, sales are rather down. These are some of the numbers where we supported certain items with our approach. The retailers feed us back that they do not really know what we are doing, but it is working in an environment where they do not see this from anybody else in our peer group. Because everybody, because of the macroeconomic situation, is of course a bit in consolidation mode. I think we generally did our homework, we are able to invest against the trend, as you have seen in the numbers before. That is why I am, by the way, excited about the current situation because it gives us a possibility to shake the tree.
Nothing is worse if everything is settled and stable because then you can't really move. We now have this catalyst of change to show retailers why we're the partner to play more with in the future because we're investing, because we have innovation, because we're doing all the things they are looking for desperately for their own needs. They feed us back across Europe. In the U.S., we're doing the same thing, as you can see here. They say it's really working. They get excited, and they want to give us more space. This is how we then want to get the whole wheel spinning, a virtuous circle. We have more innovation. We get more space in retail. We're telling more consumers that we are there and that they should buy us, which they then do because it works.
We get more innovation. We get more space. The whole thing starts spinning, and we're back to a profitable growth model. That's really our approach that we're currently pursuing. Now, what have we covered? We are a brand of long heritage with a reputation for functional quality, aesthetical value, and design. We think we have industry-leading capability when it comes to innovation, not the least evidenced in our very long survival in the marketplace. We've adjusted our commercial model to serve our consumers. Both the shoppers at point of sale and the in-use, the actual user, which is not always necessarily the same person. We're doing so by creating retailer value, category value. It is not only attractive for us, it is actually also very attractive for our retail partners. We have synergistic goals when it comes to developing the Fiskars business.
While doing that, we were able to do our homework on the cost side and on the cash flow side. We have delivered robust financials in the current environment with proven control of cost and risk. That, I believe, gives us a position that we are very well set up for growth in the future, profitable growth in the future. From more innovation, we will give you a glimpse in a moment, from more distribution, higher quality distribution at POS, and from telling more consumers that we exist and what differentiates us to buy us instead of the alternatives out there. That is what I wanted to cover. Thank you. With that, back to Essi.
Thank you, Steffen. Now it is time to take your questions. Just a reminder to those who are following online, you can still type in your questions in the chat. We already have some here, but maybe if we start from the live audience. Let's just wait that everybody gets settled here. Are there any questions here in the room? Noora. Yes, go ahead, Maria.
Thank you for a very interesting presentation. I'm just curious because I'm not actually sure in which country you are located. In Stockholm, in Sweden. In Sweden, okay. Given that, I mean, U.S. is 50% of your business, where is current, if you think about how you divide your time between the different geographies, I mean, how is that done? Maybe as everybody's very interested about the consumer environment, and I think I'm now reading quite a lot of the transcript of consumer companies, I think people are saying that especially in the U.S., it's very diverse, that, I mean, low-income classes are suffering, and then the higher-income classes, I mean, they probably spend more prudently but still have money to spend. If you could a little bit give a color on the consumer outlook in different geographies as well.
Yeah. On the first part of your question, I literally spent myself 50/50 between the U.S. and Europe. I'm also there very frequently. That covers actually both Gerber on the West Coast and not on the East Coast, but close to Chicago, our Fiskars business. I'm building an organization that represents that too. In the past, we had setups where we tried to manage the U.S. out of Finland or tried to manage Europe out of the U.S. We are now really working on a system, on an organizational setup that is double-legged. We have R&D on both sides. We have brand management on both sides. I internally call my two brand managers on both sides half a CMO each, that need to align on where we are taking the brand. We are not running one or the other side. We are really trying to treat it as a global brand, but we allow for differentiation to be locally relevant. That is really the driving force. When it comes to the environment, I think we all are a bit surprised how well it actually goes in the U.S. versus what we expected after the early days of the tariff regime in April.
We have a lot of leading indicators we look at: consumer sentiment, spending data, interest rates, everything you could possibly look at. We are following the market very closely. We get real-time data, particularly from the U.S., when it comes to sellout numbers. We have our ear on the track. I think we have a very good read of where the business is going. What we, of course, do not know is how the policies change, given that they have not been particularly consistent recently. We take it as a sportsman. It creates an opportunity for us, never waste a good crisis. Every disruption creates an opportunity if you are ready to grab it.
When the tariffs were announced back then, within 48 hours, we basically moved half of our organization of the U.S. from other tasks to a task force to re-footprint our supply chain, which is one of the reasons why we saw these robust financials. By now, we've solved more than 99% of our portfolio that was sourced originally from China. We are getting actually additional distribution from our U.S. customers because they feel our plan really is sound, and they can rely that we can ensure supply also if circumstances would change again. I think we're well set.
You had this 12% growth from the U.S. in Q3s. Was that, I mean, attributable to the successful back-to-school campaign, or do you think that is a sustainable level?
We will not be double-digit growing on a growing basis in the U.S.. There's, of course, always a lot of underlying factors. Inventory. Everybody had a bit of a post-COVID reflex on the first announcement of tariffs. Immediately, all the retailers were like, "We need to be tight on inventory." That's now in the base. We don't expect that to go worse or better. I think we are looking for moderate growth, low to mid double-digit on a continuous base. I wouldn't read too much into a quarterly result. I think we're on a good path in the U.S. to get to our target rather short term.
I mean, given that you had a headwind from the tariffs in the U.S., and I think, I mean, if I look at your numbers, you've been able to increase the prices, I mean, to match at least some of the tariff pressure. But still, I mean, you read the statements from the Walmarts and like saying that, I mean, tariffs will not impact day pricing. I mean, how should I read this?
Yeah. I think we have, as you saw in our innovation pipeline, we are trying to move our footprint to categories that have intrinsic growth, tailwind, even if we do nothing. We expect that to offset some of the headwinds that we have in other areas. Of course, there is a lot of things written about what pricing or pricing is not happening in the U.S.. I cannot comment on that for the reasons. I think we are able to, as you saw in quarter three, manage our gross margin to where we need it to be. We continue to work on that.
Then my final question is, I mean, Jyri, you see us, I mean, building this legal structure, I mean, for both of the divisions. What do you think is the biggest benefit for Fiskars to actually have the legal structure in place to be your own business?
This is actually a passion topic for me because there is this theory about if you centralize things, you have more synergies. The truth is there's also cost of complexity. What I feel and what I believe is that what we are now doing is we're getting actually to the sweet spot. There's still a couple of things we do on a group level that make perfect sense.
At the same time, we are creating the speedboat and the agility and the nimbleness to quicker react to market changes in areas where we do not need to have a long internal alignment process. I think we are just moving closer to the sweet spot between synergy and independence. My team feels that too.
Thank you. We have another question here.
Yeah. Thanks, Joni Solberg from Nordea. Maybe question on the gardening power tool market. What is the size of the market and what kind of shares you are maybe looking in coming years? Is there a risk for cannibalization on your, let's say, manual tools?
I take it in reverse order. There is a risk, but if a prune is EUR 20 and a power prune is EUR 200, we are very happy with cannibalization because one tool for 10 times the revenue, that is pretty attractive. There is no limit of how much we are ready to cannibalize ourselves because it is financially attractive. When it comes to the tool market, there is no official statistics on it. When you look at the big power tool companies together, they are probably eating a cake in the size of $50 billion a year. If and when we have developed our power business to $100 million, it is not noticeable to them. We do not think that anybody will react to our entry because they have bigger fish to fry, all of them. We believe that we have a competence in an area that they cannot match because they are not focused, what I said earlier.
I think for us, we can generate significant growth while everybody else in the market will not feel the need to react to us because for them, it's just not big enough, which is a pretty attractive position actually to be in when you think about it.
Okay. Good. You went through about how you are aiming to increase point of sales and stuff like this on this front. Let's ask like this, how far you are with your investments within the retailers currently in the U.S.? You said 200 and growing. What's the target level?
Our first milestone we're now going for is 500 versus the 200 + we now have. We don't have a target. You can always do pay us better. I consider this to be now the ignition of a new journey we want to keep doing. When you look at other companies in the power place, there are some that have pulled this off for 10-15 years consecutively. This is not a one-trick pony or a temporary thing. We want to now get on a new trajectory that we then fuel. That is really our model and the virtual circle.
Okay. Last question from my side. If the market remains as soft as it has been this year, what needs to be done in 2026?
First of all, our base assumption is that it stays soft. We do not expect it to go worse, but we also do not expect significant improvement. We are focused on what we can control. Of course, there is a bit of shift in dynamic. When people expect the economy to grow, they trade up. When they expect the economy to be difficult, they have a tendency to trade down. We are working with our partners to capture these consumers regardless of where they're going.
Okay. There's a question in the back.
Raleigh from Indre's. Hi. Just one question from me on the financials. As you showed, the Fiskars division is doing quite good margins and returns on capital already. So what's kind of your priority in terms of growth and profitability? Are you basically aiming to maximize growth at this profitability or returns level, or how do you approach that?
We have three targets. We want to sustain cash. We want to defend EBIT, and we want to fuel growth. We believe that in the midterm, the only way for us forward is profitable growth. We are determined to do that. Of course, we want to sustain cash and defend EBIT. That's our current priority.
Calla Loikkanen from Danske Bank. Perhaps continuing a bit on that, I was wondering about the kind of the margin development. It sounded based on the previous answer that you prefer growth or margins at the moment. Is that the correct or incorrect assumption?
We prefer a profitably growing business. In some cases, volume due to the cost structure that you have might trump unit margin. In some other cases, it might be the opposite. We do not have a one-size-fits-all answer. We are really looking at subcategory by category. We are supporting categories individually, also with advertising. It is really a case by case, and the answer will be different depending on the category.
Okay. If you now kind of try to, with new innovations and everything, try to push up volumes and sales over, let's say, the next three years, do you think that the EBIT margin would then, should we expect kind of unchanged margin levels going forward, or how do you view that side?
Yeah. I think we're now getting into guiding territory.
Yeah. We have obviously not guided beyond the end of this year. February 26, we will issue the guidance for 2026. That will kind of move us step by step forward. As Steffen indicated, for example, with power, the unit cost, unit price per solving a consumer's problem, i.e., cutting trees, for example, is way higher. From that perspective, when we do development, we do not do development that's not intended to dilute our business economically. To the contrary.
Okay. Got it. Perhaps just on the final question, the profitability side, would kind of the improvement in profitability or margins come mostly from sales growth, volume growth, or is it like gross margin expansion? What is the main driver for, I mean, I am not talking about next year or this year, but next three to fiv e years.
Yeah. The general direction is that we want to improve our gross margin. We want to have a structure that makes more room for investment into R&D, into media. We want to defend our EBIT margin, which means in general, we are looking to expand our gross margin. When it comes to future categories, we expect every category to at least pull its weight, if not more. Every category going into has to be internally competitive when it comes to the financial structure. We will not go into categories that are dilutive to our gross margin mix, if you want.
Okay. That's very helpful. And then finally, I mean, could there be any new kind of product categories that you could be interested in? Like your strong outdoors, could it be something that's not related to cutting but related to outdoors?
So we could. But when you look at, we have a funnel that obviously goes beyond 2026. We're actually now looking up until 2030 in terms of innovation pipeline. And there's so many areas where we still can reap significant benefits for the business with entries that we're today not covering that we don't see a benefit to get outside of our competence before we've done these things.
Because we're really looking for, do we have a right to win, and are we able to really bring something that's differentiated versus competition to make sure that whatever we launch is successful? We just don't need it at this stage.
We have a question here.
Hey, Mari-Mahka, a private investor. I was wondering about marketing. Could you expand a little on that? Have you found which channels work best for you, and are you putting more money into them? Are you doing marketing on social media or traditional media? Which works best for Fiskars?
Yes, yes, yes, and yes. We have, first of all, one of the main drivers for return on advertising spending is that you don't have what a media person would call media breaks. If you do a print advertising and you have to remember it, and then later in the story, remember you've seen it, that is a killer usually for return on advertising spend. 100% of our spending is online and sends to an online website where you can buy so that there is no break. You don't have attrition in the funnel if you want. We have what I'd call the media tower. It really is like an air control tower. We are looking at all the data in all the countries in one central team. It's a virtual team, so they are in the U.S. and in Europe in different places. They're one team, one virtual team, and they literally, on a daily basis, look at how these assets are performing. We change them in real time.
All the way from the number of sessions we create at the very beginning of the funnel, click-through rate, all the conversion to ROAS. This changes actually over time. We have a true real-time approach to media management where we see the best return. We just started the Ultra Axe a couple of days ago. It is 50% better than the previous one. We see that we quantitatively can prove that this model works. I believe hands down that we have one of the best media management approaches there are in the market because it is a lot of money. We want to make sure that every dollar we spend or every euro we spend is getting us a return.
Tom Milborn from DNB, Carnegie. The other division, we have done a lot of M&As in the past, but what about Fiskars? I mean, could you consider expanding your offering by doing an acquisition within consumer goods and then convert or stretch the Fiskars brand into new products? Thank you.
Historically, on the Fiskars side, there have been just a couple of acquisitions. Obviously, it's pretty much a monobrand business, and the brand is not capitalized on our balance sheet. It's hopefully capitalized in our market cap visible there, contrary to the Vita ones, which are acquired brands. Historically, even the U.S. garden cutting business, we had scissor business, and that was actually the garden cutting competence to the local market was acquired to the group. But that's a couple of decades ago. Since then, there have been a few disposing of. There were pottery things relating to gardening. We had watering, which was acquired, was it 2015 or so, and divested here a couple of years ago, really pruning our portfolio.
Of course, as such, while it's not a high priority for the Fiskars business area, we always keep our eyes open and look at are there places. Given the monobrand structure of the business, it's more technology-driven or market access. Going out and buying a brand, like adding to the house of brands, as we call Vita, another brand is way simpler than integrating into the branded house, as we would call via Fiskars as well. It's a different type of logic in terms of acquisitive growth for that business.
Haven't you converted some of the Vita business, like Hackman, into the Fiskars brand? Some of the kitchen products.
We're still running Hackman, literally as we speak.
Yeah. Hackman came with the Iittala acquisition back in 2007 and the, say, functional part of that portfolio because it included both the Iittala glass and Arabia tableware, all that stuff. It included also things that are somewhat Fiskarized. Hackman brand exists for cutlery, and it exists for some of the pan and pot category. The premium offering is Fiskarized, but it actually comes from the factory as Steffen alluded to, Sorsakoski, which was part of the Iittala group, is part of our group. It is part of BA Fiskars, as we now speak. That split basically took place subsequent to the acquisition of Iittala business soon, two decades ago.
Maybe just to build on what you said, Jyri, you are right. There is a Hackman brand. Maybe it is a little oversimplified to only talk about Fiskars or Gerber. As I said at the very beginning of the presentation, we have clear priorities. Hackman is not an investment priority. We're not looking to expand it. Acquisitions, as Jyri said, if anything, we would be looking for capability or access. We're not looking to buy scale with a different brand that you then would have to rebrand, which would destroy a lot of value. We all know that organic growth is the most value-creating kind of growth, and we have so many opportunities out there that we are focusing there. There is a question of depth capacity, which you also know where we stand. For the near term, we're looking at how do we expand our own offer. For the midterm, we would be looking at are there capabilities that we do not have that are cheaper to buy than make. It is the strategic answer to or the strategic addition to what you talked about.
Oh, Joni, please go ahead.
Yeah, Joni from Nordea. One follow-up question. On the distribution model, you pretty straightforward said that you are going through the distributors. Back in the days, you still had some own direct-to-consumer in Fiskars also. Is it now purely through distributor? Yes. Nothing in, I understand, in the U.S., but also in Europe, you are sticking purely.
We had three places when I started where we still did a tiny direct-to-consumer business. We looked at what does it cost us to run this versus what does it deliver. It was dilutive. We closed it. We said, let's focus on the things we're really good at.
Yeah. When we are talking about Fiskars BA, of course, we have direct-to-consumer business and a Gerber brand in the U.S.
Yes. That's actually a good addition. Yeah. So Fiskars brand, no. Gerber, absolutely, yes, in the U.S.
Okay. Thanks.
Thank you.
Any other questions here from the live audience, or should we take one from the online viewers? Okay. Maybe online, and we can then continue here if there are additional questions. Maybe one for Jussi about tariffs. I know we've discussed a lot about tariffs, but would you say that the worst is behind you when it comes to negative tariff impacts, or can you remind what is the magnitude in 2026? And Steffen, of course, you can also continue.
Yeah, you can continue. We are not off the hook when it comes to tariffs. That was sure. The new one introduced late August, I still tariffs there. They will have an impact next year. We continue mitigating. That's the good thing what we have. Fiskars business area model is so that we have enough firepower to mitigate the direct impacts and still continue driving those innovation and investments Steffen talked about. Yes, we continue having this uphill battle next year also when it comes to tariff.
Yeah. Maybe just to drive a little more specification from the BA perspective, I would say operationally, the worst is behind us if what is currently in place holds. Now, of course, we've watched the Supreme Court hearings, and so maybe that changes. If everything that is in place now holds, then operationally, the worst is behind us. Financially, not. We have had inventories, so we have a little less than half a year impact in 2025, and we have a little more than half a year impact in 2026.
Great. Any questions here, or should I take another one from the online viewers? Okay. Another one from here. Here's one for Jyri, a bit more general. What are your first observations as the CEO, and how do you see the group role going forward?
First of all, first impressions. I spent more than nine years in the Boardroom of this company, and of course, the engine room looks a bit different than the view from the Boardroom. That is very clear. the Boardroom has visibility kind of to the top-level talent. One of those important things is that now, having had the visibility and having everyday visibility to a very broad base talent, Steffen mentioned our industrial designers. Those, of course, the Board has seen the Chief Design Officer. It is not, again, a one-man show or one-person show seeing the breadth of many of these competencies and the passion for the business.
It's not only Steffen who is having the passion for the brand. We have in our Vita brands, we see that, and we have in the deep ranks of our Fiskars brand where we see the passion for the brands. I believe that the combination of strong brands and engaged people, that's the recipe for success. The brands alone are not making any money, but that money-making is facilitated then by engaged people who are driving to the common goals. That's important. Hopefully that answers the first impressions starting 2016, and then the next phase started in May, May when I took over as interim and now a few weeks into the non-interim role in the company. What changed?
I don't have my ID card here, but now I can also go to the R&D lab and kind of that's when you have extra 15 minutes after lunch. You walk up there and chat with the people, "Hey, what cool stuff is now in the making?" There is a lot of cool stuff. That's exciting. That's definitely exciting.
The group role?
The group role, obviously, as we had printed also on some of the slides, the parent company, Fiskars Corporation, is de facto a holding company. It has also some of the shared service functions that are relevant, like us driving a common ERP platform. Multiplying those kind of resources and that talent and managing the cybersecurity environment, etc., wouldn't make any sense that we split that in bits and pieces. The group role is really on the capital allocation.
There is a lot of experience of businesses and of consumer business within the group. I think we have a very clear split in the roles with Steffen and with Daniela, who runs Vita, that we are not dancing kind of in their sandpit or doing anything else there. Capital allocation, when we have a lot of potential opportunities where to allocate capital, then it's a healthy competition. May the best bid win. That's what we are executing. Now when we get all the tools after Q1 with the legal structure complete setup, it's, of course, making our job, at least those decisions based on real data and complete data and hopefully then more informed decisions from that perspective.
Thank you. We have one that maybe Jussi, you can take. Jussi shared some of the financial metrics for both BAs, for example, return on invested capital. Will those also become the financial targets when you launch the new strategy?
When we came out with our Q3 result, we announced that we will have capital markets in the first half next year. Exact time is still to be confirmed. Most likely, you can assume that then we are coming out with financial targets. The BAs are very different from each other. One is somewhat capital-heavy. One is very lean when it comes to balance sheet structure. One should be a fast-growing. One is more of the modest growth type of role there. Not yet indicating what are the financial targets there. We have been very transparent now. When we start splitting the company, first we introduced BA-specific gross margin.
Now we have been talking more about return of invested capital for each of the business. What are the final ones? That is to be confirmed. Of course, internally, we have a long list of metrics that we are now following.
Maybe to build on that, you mentioned capital markets day H126. There were maybe some pencil markings in the calendar for this autumn. Last spring, when I took over as interim CEO, I just said that I do not think it is fair that as an interim CEO, I go out with the team. At the same time, this incorporation, it sounds kind of as a trivial thing that, yes, we have CEOs for the two businesses. What is needed more is that we have the solid data into the rope kind of and have them be accountable for those externally communicated long-term financial targets. That is what drove to the decision that it will not be November 2025. Now when we have this clarity, it is very clear that it is due next year in the first half of the year.
Yes, we have one question here.
Yes, Joni from Nordea. Still one question. This could be a bit early, but it seems that Steffen's capital allocation is pretty clear what you are going to do. On the group level, what are the priorities when you are considering now capital allocation going into 2026 and onwards?
Let's start. Okay. First of all, when it comes to capital allocations, our CapEx is roughly 4%-4.5% of our net sales. We assume that stays flat. We still have a couple of this kind of group-level investment platform type of investments. Both BAs will benefit from. Of course, we need to continue executing those. Otherwise, we have, and we are now establishing clear metrics, clear KPIs, what are the principles there for capital allocations. Businesses, as I said, are quite different from each other. The businesses are directly responsible for the P&L, from top line always down to EBIT. What they can spend money there for marketing, for R&D, it's pretty much there. Our capital control is more on the CapEx side, which is, as I said, not excessive numbers as such, but typically the best return will get the most money.
Good. I can see that we have still at least one question here in the chat. This is for you, Steffen. How do you see the competitive landscape evolving in your core categories? What do you think differentiates Fiskars from the other players?
Yeah, very good. I think in general, I hope I brought this to life a little during the presentation. We have insights in a very specific area, cutting in multiple applications, that we think gives us unparalleled capability. We are now rolling this capability out to other categories that are adjacent, like pet care, like urban gardening, like power. It is a very dynamic landscape with competition. There is a lot of innovation happening, particularly when it comes to modernization of tools, as we talked earlier. There is, of course, due to the macro and economic, a lot of people are thrown off their track. I see this as an opportunity.
We are not in a worse position than anybody else, but I hope we have done our homework earlier and better than some of the others, which we kind of get feedback from retailers, that we are able to do things that others are not or are not yet. We try to shamelessly exploit the situation, gain share of shelf, gain in-store presence, gain quality of presence, and be the partner of choice. We want to be the preferred supplier to our retail partners, which we have a symbiotic relationship with. Exiting out of DTC, by the way, gave proof to that in the markets where we had DTC on the Fiskars brand because they saw, "Okay, we are really committing to this relationship." That alone already gave us goodwill and also some practical wins on the distribution side.
Business is always tough, but I think I see the glass half full, and we are now really trying to use the opportunity to make a difference to our in-store presence, to the consumers, and serve the market, serve our retail partners with value-creating initiatives that set us apart. On the technical side, I hope you saw more than enough evidence today that we really know what we're doing and that we actually do deliver products that are noticeably different versus the other offers out there. I hope the consumers conclude that they are superior.
Good. Thanks. Do we have any more questions here from the live audience? It seems that we do not have any more questions. We are ready to close the webcast. I would like to thank everybody who has been watching online, and we continue here with the product showcases with the live audience. Thank you very much on my behalf.
Thank you for joining.
Thank you.