Hello, and welcome to Fiskars Group's Capital Markets Day. My name is Essi Lipponen, and I'm the Director of Investor Relations. Today is an exciting day. We have just published our new financial targets for 2026 to 2030, so we have a lot to share with you. In addition, this is the first Capital Markets Day with operationally independent business areas, so that means that we will also have the Business Area CEOs on stage today. Let's look at the agenda for this afternoon. First, we will hear from the Group's President and CEO, Jyri Luomakoski, who will present the Group's role and priorities in the new operating model. After that, the Group's CFO, Jussi Siitonen, will continue with the new financial targets and will present them in more detail.
Following the group presentations, we will shift gears to the business areas, starting with Vita and its CEO, Daniel Lalonde. We will have a short break of 10 minutes. When we return from the break, Dr. Steffen Hahn will present Business Area Fiskars and its priorities and growth model. Finally, the Group's CEO Jyri Luomakoski will present the key takeaways, after which it's time for a joint Q&A. I would also like to highlight that in addition to the joint Q&A, we have reserved some time after the Business Area presentations for your questions. We will take questions both from the live audience as well as online via the chat function. The official part and the webcast will end at 4:00 P.M. at latest.
I think now we are ready to get started with the presentations, so please go ahead, Jyri.
Thank you, Essi, warm welcome also from my side to our Capital Markets Day. To frame a bit the situation, we are not here giving a mid-quarter trading update. We are here not revisiting or changing or doing anything with our guidance that was published after Q4 in February and reiterated after our Q1 in late April. Now view and look is forward-looking and into our strategy period 2026 to 2030. Just as a quick reminder, you heard the two BA CEOs will be on stage, Steffen being in charge of the Fiskars part and Daniel having from the slide a bit bigger part and also from the revenues and quite many brands under the umbrella of our Vita BA. This is just a reminder, and you will hear way more about this later on today.
Our footprint, we are quite well spread out. I don't like to call us global player because you see some quite big spots on the map where we are not present with our own people, own teams. Definitely, there are consumers in many geographies in the lighter color using our products. Europe, still slightly above half of our revenues coming from Europe. 28% is the last 12 months from Q1 coming from Americas, dominated by the U.S., and then Asia-Pacific, 20%. The splits are quite different when you get later on today to the BAs. Channel-wise, majority of our products offering reaches the consumer through the indirect channel, i.e. distributors, retailers, wholesalers. These players have many names depending whether on which side of the Atlantic you kind of call them, et cetera.
Shy a third goes direct to consumer through our own stores, our own e-com. Business area split of the revenue is 46% Fiskars and 54% Vita. When you look at the two business areas, you might wonder what they are, as we saw also on the kind of ad hoc showroom as we built it here for you, quite different. Why are these together? We see different financial profiles, different levels of gross margin, different levels of fixed cost in the operations. Jussi will address that later. While the DNA of Vita is in the global iconic desirable brands across the high-end homeware categories and the fine branded jewelry, we have functional innovations in the gardening, outdoor, scissors, and creating and cooking categories in Fiskars.
The channel route to market, we always need to win the consumer's heart, and that's what we do every day. How physically we reach the consumer's hand is quite different because the direct to consumer is a big part of the Vita business, while it has basically no material role in the Fiskars business. The balance between what we make ourselves, what we source, there are differences, so we have a kind of a relevant presence in both BAs with our own manufacturing, but also sourcing using third-party contract manufacturers, et cetera, has a big role. The geographical presence is quite much different. When you get to the seasonality of these businesses, 2/3 of Fiskars profits, EBIT, measured by EBIT, are made in H1.
H2 is kind of low season and very much inverse, even more extreme. More than 100% statistically of our annual profits in Vita is made in H2. H1 we should be kind of turning the heating off, et cetera, because the EBIT doesn't support it. Jointly, together as a company, Fiskars Group 40-60, that's already something that I would call way more bankable and using these type of aspects of financial performance, how it's split into the seasons and into the quarters of the year. There is a very clear glue when we look at design excellence. Some of these are kind of aesthetically design items, beautiful objects that we do. We are many of us who also love the functional designs that we see in Fiskars.
Design is a broad term. It's not only the aesthetics, but it's designed for functionality and creating the fun effect working with some of our tools. All of our brands have a deep heritage. Youngsters, there are two brands that are founded in the 20th century. 1904, Georg Jensen, and then Gerber is in the 1930s, late 1930s. Then dating back, Fiskars, 1649, when the journey started with the Fiskars brand in the village of Fiskars. Second oldest brand, Rörstrand, celebrating now 300 years. These are brands that have a deep heritage, and they are authentic. It's not kind of AI-generated nice design and then have a contract manufacturer doing some stuff and charm the consumer. These are real things.
Consumer centrism and the tool to get to the consumer is brand in both cases, Vita and Fiskars. We share our corporate purpose, our values, and we all are committed to sustainability in our business in whatever we do. 'Cause, running a 377-year-old company, if you don't think about sustainability, how can you then plan to be in the game for the next 377 years? It's a existential topic for us. It's an existential topic for all of us as humankind. We have strengthened our climate ambitions, actually tightened or raised the bar. Safety, we strive for zero harm in our own operations. 2.8 is the index per million workers of hours worked. It has a commercial dimension.
Our distributors, there are many consumers who are aware they require that when they make a choice, they consume, that they make the sustainable choice. It's been a bumpy ride. This is the period visible for the last long-term financial targets, and Jussi will dive deeper into the success rate, which is not great. We had the boom of COVID, the pandemic, home nesting. We had the hangover. Russia attacked Ukraine, commodity prices, consumer confidence having its swings. It's not been, as I said to someone, somewhere lately, it's not been only an uphill battle, but it's been a downhill slide when you look at the profitability curve. That's something that we need to turn. Extremely important. We have been making quite big changes into the operating model, how we operate as a company.
Still, five years ago, we were basically an integrated consumer company. Now we are a group with two operationally independent business areas, which both you could say are each of them are integrated consumer good companies. Fiskars Corporation, that's the stock you can buy at the Nasdaq Helsinki, is the listed entity and provides some group functions. The accountability for business performance lies within the BAs. Why did we do all these changes? It's been also a lot of work, actually, getting the incorporations of the entities done and a lot of hours around IT changes that the invoices go from the right company to the right customer, taxation-related topics. It's really the full business accountability. We want to increase speed, and I think we have a few proof points here.
For Vita, we've seen a rather significant cost-related transformation program launched in February. The speed how that's been executed is so much easier when it's encapsulated with an environment. Similarly, in April last year, Liberation Day, a new tariff regime for the U.S. came into force. The speed how the BA Fiskars teams were able to find new bases, new sources, for example, outside of China, with lower tariff regimes for the U.S. market and qualify those suppliers, get the customers convinced that we have the right stuff and it's as good as the previous one. This is when I talk about speed, what we want to achieve with this structure. Dedication, n ot too many years ago, we had mixed sales teams and a global kind of a matrix around sales, et cetera, d id not prove to be that successful.
Maybe saved some costs, but also saved us from growing the sales. Now we have three consecutive quarters of sales growth, like-for-like growth in BA Vita. There are some things happening as a consequence. You've seen maybe somewhere here in the back some of our new Fiskars products, the cycle, how quickly from innovation to market we've been able to get those and not only market to our showroom, but to the consumers, to our distributors. This is again a proof point that focusing on the right things increases very much the likelihood of delivering on those things. Transparency, measurability, that's why we are here today.
We have today published our long-term financial targets with some of those targets relevant to the BAs. This is not a one-size-fits-all because averaging everything doesn't make any sense as we saw somewhat different type of businesses. Certain commonalities, when you get to the financial profile, definitely not. With independent legal entities, Fiskars Corporation has two subsidiaries under which all of these both BAs basically are. That gives also the structural optionality if we want to make any moves in any direction. What does the group do except arrange capital markets days and serve, so to speak, coffee here? We are the, as I said, listed parent company of the group here.
When we manage performance, then strategy, establishing strategy, and the framework for reporting is certainly following also being a public company, setting the ambition level, pushing for improvements, and challenging prioritization. Portfolio, it's about allocating capital and shaping the portfolio. Where to push on the brakes, where to accelerate, and where can we get the best return for the capital. Liquidity, long-term funding. We had a question at the AGM from the audience. They, "Hey, now you have two different subgroups, why aren't you listing those both to stock exchange?" We all know how costly it is to operate a public company and EUR 500 million, EUR 600 million businesses separately are not really that attractive on the equity or debt capital markets.
When you look at some of these financial profile topics like seasonality, there is a risk mitigating, complementing aspect coming from this business. We as a group have to ensure we are the listed entity, so there is enterprise risk management processes and many requirements. As we know, we get always new ones from the regulators to comply with, and that's not a fun kind of free of charge. Now we have optimized that we pay those costs only once. What are our current priorities? Daniel will talk more about BA Vita's turnaround, which has been openly flagged that there is a need, as you can also read from the numbers. BA Fiskars has shown resilience and margins that are beating most of the peer companies in the categories where Fiskars operates.
Growth is in that market has been a challenge to us, and supporting Fiskars returning to the growth trajectory is an important priority. Group functions here, we need to ensure that we are cost-efficient and cost-effective. When you look at our balance sheet, leverage numbers are off spec, so to speak. Driving cash flow and reducing leverage is in our priority box. This is the number of things, you can always with fingers of one hand still count.
In a brief summary, Fiskars Group is acting as an effective portfolio and capital steward, developing its businesses and setting financial targets with a long-term perspective. The group's BAs who are closest to the markets and to the consumers, drive BA strategy, build brands, manage customer relationships, and the day-to-day operational performance. This combination, we believe, with certain central oversight and empowered businesses, is supporting our profitable growth, robust cash generation, and creation of long-term shareholder value. With that introduction, pleased to call Jussi to the stage. I had the nice overview, but now you have the hard facts available. Jussi, please.
Thank you, Jyri. Hello, everyone here at the Espoo campus and online. In the next 20 minutes, I'll show you how we translate the strategy into new financial framework, the one we are committed to deliver, the one we are measured against. Three topics I will cover. First is that how we are resetting the framework what we have had in the past. Secondly, what are the new targets and ambition level what we have set now for the BAs. Thirdly, how we get there, and I will stay quite high level with those fundamentals behind because then Daniel and Steffen will walk you through more in detail. If you start first, this is not refreshing the old targets. This is rebuilding the new framework because the structure of the company and environment around it has changed.
The three forces behind this change, first of all, is that the last five-year period concluded last year, so we owe you a new one. More importantly, the Group structure has now changed. We have two independent BAs holding P&L accountability, and then Group acts as a portfolio and capital steward on top of these BAs. Thirdly, operating reality is now tougher than what we, and admittedly most of the consumer durables companies, anticipated five years ago when we set the targets last time. The targets and ambition I'm presenting, they set today to reflect the reality, not the aspirations we cannot deliver. Before start even talking about the new framework, let's have a point of departure. I walk through how we performed versus the old target. We had four targets, out of which we delivered one: cash flow conversion.
Two we missed: top-line growth for this whole period of 2021-2025 as an average -1.6%. The last year we were flat. On EBIT target being the mid-teens, we ended up at 6.7%, both well below the targets. The fourth, net debt EBITDA, we managed to keep that at a targeted 2.5 max level until end of last year when it went up to 3.3. Why? Two reasons which are not excuses. Jyri already explained, the whole post-COVID consumer sentiment decline in our core markets, core categories, especially when it comes to Vita categories, were the ones which pushed down both the top-line margins and then also wind up our net working capital, leading to this net debt EBITDA increase there.
Our response, we have put actions in place already to restore profitability and unwind working capital growth. New targets we are now setting, they are reflecting that outcome. That was the first out of those three reasons why we change the target. The second one is the new structure. This chart shows what we have been operating with, it's actually best summary on why we are moving to BA level targets. If I start here first on the middle panel, which is BA Fiskars, as you can see, net sales started declining 2023, since that continued coming down. At the same time, we have succeeded to maintain decent, low double-digit EBIT margin in that business. That shows that Fiskars BA is resilient, asset light, well-run business, what Steffen is now leading.
The left panel, BA Vita, same period, very different pitch, picture. Sales declined sharply in 2023, 2024. At the same time, EBIT margin compressed from above 15% level to 4% level. That leads to this turnaround Daniel is now leading. The right panel is a consolidated group level, flat to declining sales, then margin compressing to mid-single digit. A single group level number would hide and ignore the strength what we have in BA Fiskars and then urgency what we have in BA Vita. Jyri already covered that we have shifted from centralized matrix to operationally independent BAs. The structure is now complete. The financial framework will follow.
The principles guiding the design what we have had here is that when it comes to growth and profitability, the targets are set at BA level, not hidden by a single group KPI. Having said that, when it comes to our official guidance, that will be kept at group level. We do not start guiding BA level numbers. When it comes to cash and leverage, bearing in mind the group role what we have here, to maintain capital allocation, take care of the funding. Those targets will stay at the group level, but with greater BA level transparency, what are the drivers behind, especially when it comes to cash flow. With this model, both the accountability and comparability of the business is clearer versus what it used to be. Ten of the new targets or the new framework showing our ambition also.
Four financial targets externally committed. On top of that, five regularly reported KPIs providing further transparency. Let me present the four targets, one by one. Organic net sales growth only set at the BA level. Comparable EBIT margin set at BA level, and the group is merely a outcome of those BA results. Cash flow now measured at free cash flow EBIT ratio, and then balance sheet target net sales comparable EBITDA remained unchanged. The only change is that now it's measured at the year-end, eliminating the quarterly volatility. I will now walk you through more in detail each of the target. Let's start first with the top line.
The chart here shows where we have been, as I already mentioned, BA, Vita from - 7%, - 6% to + 3% last year, over 4% growth if we take rolling 12 months end of March, and then 5% only in Q1. The growth target set for BA Vita is now in this period to deliver 4% - 6% top line growth annually. The drivers behind is repositioning our iconic brands, enhancing those brand desirability. Distribution expansion, both in channels as well as countries where we are under-indexed. Thirdly, optimizing channel mix, and especially from profitability perspective. On Fiskars BA. As you can see, we have been there at mid-single digit type of negative growth for a certain period of time.
The growth target and ambition for BA Fiskars is in the range of 3%-5% for this period. BA Fiskars is an investment case. We like to invest in acceleration of innovation pipeline because we already have a proof point that it works. We like to scale the core categories where we already have a leadership position in the market. Thirdly, we like to invest in category expansions there, expansion in the new agencies. Two different approach here. This is very much where we benefiting from the existing restructuring what we have as well as ongoing plan, and Fiskars BA is very much an investment case. That's about top line. Moving then to profitability. On profitability, we have three levers for improvement.
First of all, Vita turnaround, Fiskars continuing resilience, what we have in that business, and thirdly, more efficient group functions. Vita, currently they are at a bit above 4%, 4.2% EBIT margin, target being at or above 12% by 2030. The levers what we have behind for that one, the big one is the ongoing restructuring, delivering approximately EUR 28 million savings there. Most of those will be there in 2027, roughly one-third already in this year. As I already mentioned, profitability gains from improved product and channel mix. On BA Fiskars, the target being there at or above 14% by 2030. You can see that we are already now at 13% level, which shows that actually someone might say that is this ambition enough.
It is ambition enough because, as I said already, we will invest in top-line growth in the Fiskars BA, and therefore we consider this EBIT target reflecting right the investment need what we have there to deliver this top line growth. When it comes to group functions, our target is to have this unallocated EBIT to approximate -1% of net sales, I'll get back to that on the next slide. When it comes to group targets, delivering this at or above 12% by 2030, that's pure mathematics. It's a combination of those two BAs target what we have. We haven't layered up on top of that everything. It's very much coming from BAs plans. This slide is actually for all those financial modelers we have in the room or online, showing how different those two BAs are.
What we have here is BA P&L structure for Vita, for Fiskars, and for Group. Three observations. BA Vita has a stronger gross margin. We are a bit north of 53% there, but Vita also spends meaningfully more in marketing and sales, mainly because of the channel structure what we have. BA Fiskars gross margin at lower level, mainly due to the big box distributions what we have, but that is very OpEx efficient distributions what we have there. Also, in BA Fiskars, we have simpler model in place, so it carries less G&A cost. On group level functions, unallocated EBIT being this - EUR 18 million or - 1.6% of net sales, mainly consisting of employee cost and depreciations what we have there, partially offset what we get from the forest.
Target there is to get it down to roughly - 1% of net sales. Those who have been following company for a longer period might remember that we have said that when it comes to unallocated cost, it's typically EUR 1 million - EUR 1.5 million each month. The target is to be at the low end of that range. Key takeaway here is that the levers what we have are different in each BA, and the framework we have put in place reflects that one. That's about top line growth and profitability. Let's move to the cash. We are expecting cash flow to significantly improve with a stable free cash flow EBIT ratio. I'll start explaining the chart first.
What you can see here on the bottom right is our free cash flow, how it's now defined by unlevered free cash flow and lease payment included, which means that the free cash flow, how it's now determined, is roughly EUR 40 million less than what we have reported in the past because those lease payments are now part of free cash flow. The top chart shows the expected cash flow conversion ratio. Free cash flow over rolling 12 months EBIT there is expected to be at or above 75%. The new way to measure it is less volatile. You might remember the previous one was based on the net profit, so it was much more volatile in that sense. Three drivers to improve our cash flow.
On top of EBITDA, bearing in mind the top line growth, EBIT margin improvement, obviously EBITDA is one big driver there. On top of that, trade working capital efficiency is the single biggest lever, single biggest unlock of our cash what we have. CapEx discipline. Keep CapEx now at or below 4% of net sales and cap the group unallocated CapEx to EUR 4 million. With the targeted net sales growth, with the targeted profitability improvement, and with the target free cash flow EBIT ratio, we expect that free cash flow will double from that from current position by 2030. I highlighted the importance of trade working capital here, let's spend a bit more time on that one. Again, it's better to explain this slide first because moving to the content.
What you can see here up is our trade working capital and net working capital as percentage of sales. The top chart shows that we have now up from pre-COVID levels, which were approximately 30% there. We are almost 10 percentage points up from that level. Pretty much unchanged top line. The bottom chart here shows the same in absolute terms. As you can see, where this biggest potential is in inventories. They are roughly EUR 100 million up versus the comparison period throughout. That's mainly in Vita. Once Vita can unlock the cash what we have there, it will have a big impact also at the group level. Meaningful progress will happen in 2027. I'm also managing expectations here.
This is not a short-term actions to get it back on track, it goes to 2027. On CapEx here on the bottom right, as I said, we had, or we have target to keep it now roughly 4% or maximum 4% of net sales. Those peak years there, 2022 to 2024, they're pretty much digital and IT-driven. That cycle is now largely behind us, the current level is a good proxy also for this 2026, 2030 period. Net debt EBITDA. Background here, I said in the beginning of my presentation that we succeeded to keep net debt EBITDA at target level until 2025. What happened in 2025 was not that we saw a big increase in net debt. Actually, net debt increase was quite modest there in 2025.
When we saw almost 20% decline in EBITDA, it took net debt EBITDA up to 3.3x. In the new financial frame what we have built, EBITDA growth does most of the work, and net debt decline is expected to be rather modest for this period. Target what we have is to get back to 2.5x levels within the next two years, and we do prioritize deleveraging of the balance sheet in our capital allocation. I get back to that in these two slides. These were the four official financial targets showing our ambition and then where we are committed to. On top of that, I want to highlight one KPI we will report more in detail from Q2 onwards, and that's return on capital employed.
When I showed you earlier that BA Vita and BA Fiskars have quite different P&L structures, they do have it also when it comes to our capital employed. Let me first explain the group level numbers here. As you can see, almost half of our capital employed is in non or slow-moving assets, be it goodwill, be it trademark, be it other intangibles. When we go to BA level, you can see that over 75% of our capital employed is in BA Vita. Out of that BA Vita numbers, roughly 60% is in slow or non-moving assets. Fiskars built organically throughout hundreds of years is asset light. The capital employed what we have in BA Fiskars is mainly working capital related. Then what remains at the group level is mainly the forest assets what we have.
This puts together the target we have set for growth and profitability. For Vita, bearing in mind that Vita assets are slow or non-moving, for Vita it's important to grow because that's the easiest way to improve asset turn what we have there with non-moving asset base. For Fiskars is already there when it comes to returns. Fiskars is already there, I would say satisfactory level with over 30% return on capital employed. Fiskars is an investment case. We need to invest there for sustainable growth to deliver this targeted 3%-5%. I said even though return on capital employed is not in our four core targets we are committed to, we will report this on quarterly basis because this is the discipline we will apply also in our capital allocation.
That's a good segue when it comes to capital allocation. If I start first with sources, and I have mainly covered them already earlier in my presentation, but the biggest potential we have to unlock to cash is in our working capital. All these cost takeout programs and efficiency improvements are the ones, and disciplined CapEx policy. These are the sources of funds what we have. How we are going to use these funds? First and foremost, to enable and secure organic growth, have enough spending power to R&D, have enough spending power to media there to boost the growth what we have, especially in Fiskars BA. Having said that, we keep also selective M&A in our toolbox, bearing in mind the commitment what we have when it comes to deleveraging of the balance sheet.
When it comes to our dividend policy, it will remain unchanged, i.e. stable, over time increasing. In summary, the financial framework for 2026-2030 is built on a tougher operating reality and BA-level accountability. BA-specific growth based on brand enhancement and resetting the channel in BA Fiskars, BA Vita, innovation at scale in BA Fiskars. EBIT improvement coming from three sources: Vita turnaround, continuing resilience there in Fiskars BA, more efficient group functions. On cash flow and balance sheet, as I said, reaching the targets what we have for top line growth, what we have for profitability improvement and on cash conversion, that indicates that free cash flow nearly doubling during this period by 2030. We get balance sheet back to 2.5x levels in next two years' time.
On capital allocation, organic growth prioritized, followed by disciplined deleveraging. These are the targets and priorities, including also the additional KPIs we start reporting now from Q2 onwards. Having said that, handing it over to you, Daniel.
Thank you, Jussi. Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Alright. Well, good afternoon, everyone. I'm Daniel Lalonde, CEO of Vita. I think I met some of you after a month I started last year in Copenhagen, so I have a year since that time period. What I wanted to present to you today is three things: just a point of departure, where we're at today; how we've begun to lay the foundation for profitable growth; and then talk about some, you know, the path forward, some of the big levers and the choices we've made to grow our business in a very profitable way. Let me start. This is our raison d'être. It's a little our mission of what we do at Vita. We build global, iconic, and desirable brands across high-end homeware, where we're the leader today, and fine branded jewelry through Georg Jensen.
Rooted in craftsmanship, material expertise, and design, what we do at the core of our business, creating products people live with and collect, think about the Moomin mugs and many other examples, and shaping everyday moments and lasting relevance. This is what we do. This is our mission. This is what we do every day when we go to work. We have 12 brands in our portfolio, and we've organized them into what we call three brand houses. The brand houses are captured more from a design aesthetic point of view, and the first house being the House of Danish Design Icons. Here, clearly it's Georg Jensen and Royal Copenhagen, you know, defined by timeless Danish design, refined, sculptural, everlasting, pure, enduring. This is where this business unit is housed in Copenhagen.
We have the House of Nordic Design Living, which is here. With beautiful brands that you know, the five of them in this house. Again, built on Nordic design DNA for everyday life, simple, warm, functional, as all these brands do, and they're headed up by a head of business unit here. Last, the House of British and Irish Design, rooted in British and Irish design heritage, character, craftsmanship, ornamentation, contemporary renewal, et cetera. These are design attributes and DNA and codes that guide the development of these brands within these houses. That's how we've organized ourselves, and it's also how we're organized in the company today. I have three business unit heads, each of these three houses. At a glance, Vita, presented some numbers. I'll go very fast 'cause you probably know these numbers.
If we look at LTM numbers to Q1 this year, EUR 613 million sales. Comp growth, which is an organic growth of 4%, which is good, green shoots. Margin, which we'll talk about later, and we're about 5,000 people in the world. If I dissect our brand by or our company by brand, Georg Jensen is our biggest brand, followed by Royal Copenhagen, Wedgwood, Iittala, Waterford, Moomin Arabia. These are six core brands. These brands represent roughly 88% of our business, so we've got to get them right. By category, I think it's the first time we show, we're mainly centered. I've taken jewelry, which is Jensen, the only brand playing in high-end jewelry.
If you strip that out, you know, our biggest categories are tableware, home decor, drinkware, and serveware, which is the core of our business. We have other categories, but they're very, very small today. By channel, again, as Jyri explained, we're mainly D2C-oriented, about 53%. Interesting to note is e-com, which is also one of our most profitable channels and one of the fastest-growing ones as well. Then by country, I think we've always given sales by region, so we've split it up a little bit more by country. Our number one country in terms of sales is Denmark, followed by Japan, Finland, Sweden, China, USA, Australia, U.K., and again, that's about 85% of our business, these top markets.
That's a little contextual of what is Vita today, and I'll show you not in explicit detail like this of where we're going, but I think you can get a hunch of where we're focusing in the future. Our core brands, the six largest brands in our portfolio today are the following. I won't take you through them all in detail. The key message here I wanted to say is that our six core brands play in all of the homeware, high-end homeware categories. We play in all those four or five categories that I explained earlier. We've also worked a lot in the last six months to sharpen the positioning of each brand. For example, Georg Jensen, which we've defined and positioned as the definitive Danish design house founded on silver with collaboration at its core.
Iittala, Finnish design brand creating crafted statement pieces and everyday design icons, and so on and so forth. We've sharpened the positioning of all of our brands. In terms of presence, we're present in 80 countries worldwide, and we produce roughly 60% of what we sell through nine different manufacturing sites that you can see plotted here. There are two of them of which are in Denmark. From a distribution number, not value, we have about just under 1,000 points of sale in our D2C channels, mainly in concessions, which are operated in department stores, large department stores, where we run the business, the inventory is ours, and the sales associates are ours. Freestanding stores and outlets, about 80 of each, 80 of those stores. In wholesale, roughly, we try to count them every month.
We have roughly 11,000 points of sale in wholesale globally, and that's for all brands, of which about 300 e-tailers. Just wholesale partners that just play on the online space. That's our footprint today. Where do we play? I presented this chart, I think, last year. We play in the high-end homeware category. This is a result of some framing of the market by Bain and Altagamma. Shows that the total luxury and high-end business worldwide is roughly EUR 1.5 trillion. Our category is pretty small within there. We're about a EUR 6 billion industry, high-end homeware. Of that EUR 6 billion, Vita brands, the 12 brands together, we are the market leaders. We have a roughly 15% share of that market.
I put in color as well the branded fine jewelry, which is a bigger sector, of which we're a niche player with Georg Jensen today. How has this homeware business, high-end homeware, evolved over the past years? It was negative growth for many years, from 2000 to about the mid-2015, 2016. From 2019-2025, it grew roughly 3% per year. The last three years have been relatively flat in growth. We have, as we posted, as Jussi showed a little while ago, we posted a growth of roughly 3% last year on like-for-like sales. We clearly gained market share last year, which was very good. We're very happy with that. That we'll continue to do every year. That's a little bit the context, who we are, where we play.
I wanted to share with you now some of the work we've been doing to lay the foundation for this, for the turnaround. Here again, just to sit into the context, you can see our sales trajectory, historical over the years. The light blue here is the like for like sales, and the dark blue is the addition of Georg Jensen. You can see there's been a negative trend in like for like sales since 2023. Our EBIT you've seen before. I think it's important to stress by two things on the EBIT. We've, you know, we've had lower volumes than expected overall, and that we have made conscious effort recently and at the end of last year to produce less.
To produce less because we're very focused also on reducing our inventory, which is quite large, and the number of days of inventory, and I'll show you a picture about that later. We've had some green shoots or some blue ones here that we're showing. Over the past three quarters, we've had like for like growth. Like for like or comparable net sales growth, it's been good growth. The quality of the growth has been through successful launches of line extensions to a lot of our key collections. It's been through a reallocation of assets and resources going to more profitable brands, more profitable channels, rather than averaging everything out. We made some very deliberate choices, and many other activities as well. It's been high quality growth. It's not, you know, selling obsolete, for example.
We're very happy with this, and clearly we have to continue for at least the next four years, and then beyond. We've also announced in February a restructuring, a reorganization, to right-size the business. That's on track. In fact, we're slightly ahead of plan this year, so we have a very new and simplified org structure that's already into effect. Here it consists of three business units, the heads of the each of the houses, and then six global markets. We've moved from five BUs and nine global markets to three and six. We also right-sized and selected several manufacturing and distribution sites. In Denmark, we've consolidated some of our sites for Georg Jensen and Royal Copenhagen, the very high end of them. In the U.S., we're in the process of moving through a 3PL in terms of logistics.
In our crystal factories also, we've reduced some of the cost base as well. We're not sitting idle. There's a lot of movement happening to make this happen. Let me go back. I have a funny cryptic on my slides, but that's okay. We're also a brand led organization. That super clear. We have incredible heritage brands. The brands and the houses, the head of the brand houses are responsible for the future. They have antennas to the future on strategy, the product strategy, image, customer experience. The markets execute the brand plans. It's a very clear matrix with very clear responsibilities. It's made us as Jyri pointed out, made us able to go faster, more agile, and to really hone in on the biggest opportunities.
This is one of our biggest challenges because we have many brands, many markets, many channels, and it's about focusing on the big wins. We also have a plan that we announced in February about a restructuring plan worth roughly EUR 28 million of savings, and the run rate will be there at the end of next year at the full run rate. We're not gonna stop there, obviously, these are people and also non-people costs. One of the prioritizations that we have done recently is to prioritize our brands. Not all brands are equal. They're not all at the same level of their growth. Here we've bucketed our brands into three categories. The global accelerators. Three brands. Iittala has just made it in recently.
These are brands that we feel are ready to scale. Here are the axes just so that you get familiar. On the Y-axis, you have the relative financial performance, and through different criteria on the X-axis is the potential to scale. They have the right product. They have the right brand awareness, likability, distribution. We're ready to scale. These are the three brands where we're investing in to grow, and they've been performing, you know, very well as of late. We have regional leaders, very strong brands, but that operate in a few markets, one market or two or three, and they're very profitable, as you can see. This is great. There's a discipline, an approach of discipline, local execution. Look at Rörstrand, which is celebrating 300 years this year. It's having an incredible year.
It's great, and it's where it should be. We have the brand resets, which are five brands which need to do a few things to revitalize the brand and the desirability and also get to a right level of profit before I scale them. We don't want to scale a brand that's not as profitable as others. There are steps to get there. When they get there, we will scale, but not until they get there. What we are doing with these brands, just a little more color on the brands and the brand reset, I've taken the bigger ones, Waterford and Wedgwood, is we're rationalizing the product offer into much fewer collections and SKUs. I'm talking about like a 50% less.
We wanna really focus the collections on the ones that are strongest, do line extensions, activate them and make them successful. We're also developing a new price architecture to the Waterford line, which is an entry level called Marquis. There's a lot of work being done on the portfolio, on the product portfolio and number of SKUs. Markets, we're focusing on two or three priority markets for these brands. Get it right, get the proof of concept, and then extend. Last, and particularly for the crystal factories that I know you know quite well, is to align supply chain, the capacity and capabilities with demand. Here we're doing two things.
We're optimizing, I would say, the costs at the crystal factories today, and also have very clear strategies to increase volumes into those factories, not only on, you know, Waterford or Marquis, as the entry level to Waterford, but also on brands like Rogaška and brands like the B2B business from Rogaška as well. There's very, very clear plans. It's a very clear strategy. It will not happen this year overnight. You know, it will be something that will probably have a clear multi-year plan, but probably in the next couple of years to reset and then obviously then scale. The last point I wanted to talk about is, you know, inventory has been such a big issue for us. Here we're plotting a chart on the days of inventory with a lot of history from 2020.
You see it has gone up, and we've only seen an inflection recently since Q2 last year. We're very focused to bring our inventory levels down and as a result, the days of inventory. All my leadership team have inventory and DOI as a big part of their bonus this year. We're very focused on it, and it's very material to all of us. What we've done is we've scaled down production to match demand. We've done that in Q1. I think we explained that. We have programs in place to sell some of our obsolete inventory. Again, it's not an average. Some brands are doing very well. Some brands don't have enough inventory, but the ones that do have too much, we're really focusing on that.
You know, obviously we have to look upstream to reduce the complexity of the collections. There's a lot of work going on on that, not only for Wedgwood and Waterford, but for the entire brands in our portfolio. If I project forward, what's our path forward? There's a few trends that we see in our, in our sector that I would call more tailwinds today. The first is, and I go over these quite briefly, is still this concept of cocooning. I think people are spending more time at home than they were three or four years ago, and that is a positive trend for us.
There's the rise of experientiality, which is in and out of home, which our products, you know, are used for these experiences, either in the kitchen, in receiving guests at home, et cetera, et cetera, and in the B2B channels too. What we've seen also is a lot of the luxury houses stepping into the home category. We think that's good. We think that's good because we want to grow two things, right? We wanna grow our market share within the high-end homeware, we'd like to grow the pie. We want to grow the pie and our slice of the pie, this definitely helps grow the pie. Lastly, we see a big trend in gift-giving at the high end, and a lot of our brands are very proactively involved in creating gift-giving moments.
It's more than a third of our business, we estimate, that is all about gift gifting. We have a house, as we're in the high-end homeware category. I won't take you through all the details of the house, but we have five or four pillars to drive profitable growth that apply differently to all our brands in our portfolio and the different houses. The first is about enhancing brand desirability. Without brand desirability, which is mainly driven by product, great desirable product and winning on social media, we need to start there. That's the essence of what we do. We have pillars and initiatives around building and expanding our distribution, about driving profitable channel mix and brandization. Brandization, I mean mainly for the wholesale channel.
When you go to our wholesale points of sale, we don't wanna be displayed by category. We'd like to create shop-in-shop, so you feel you're walking into a wholesale partner, into a Royal Copenhagen environment, into an Iittala environment. That's super important for us in wholesale. Last, we want to unlock high-value revenue streams, and I'll speak about that either on B2B and the gifting part. These are the essential pillars of our house. If I had more time, I would take you through all of the sub-pillars and the enablers, which are super important to us. What I thought I'd do is I just would give you an example today of a, an activation that we do within each of the four pillars. Okay? It is not exhaustive.
It's just a few examples to highlight what our teams are focusing on. On brand desirability. One of the essence there is about creating desirable products for the future and icons. How do we build icons? This is where our focus is at today. We start off, for example, in Georg Jensen with a beautiful piece designed by Bernadotte in 1938, a coffee pitcher. Beautiful. Great, but we're not gonna let it stay there. What we have done over many, many, many years, every year, is we've built line extensions. We go to candlestick holders. We go to cutlery, bowls, tableware, glassware, toaster. I have a beautiful toaster at home and a kettle. Beautiful products. That was just in 2024. Every year we activate it. We bring line extensions, make the franchise stronger.
We advertise it, we bring it into stores, and create this space for Bernadotte. It's really important. Now you can tell a Bernadotte product, which we have some here, just by the shapes and the lines that you see. It's recognizable. Guess what? It's by far the largest collection within homeware at Jensen, and it's the fastest-growing as well. These are some of the approaches that our teams are working on, and we have many icons within our portfolio, within all of the brands. I just gave you two pictures here. This one you know all very well. Celebrating a big anniversary this year, the Aalto vase. Blue Fluted, designed in 1775 as well, is an icon. They need to be enriched, and the story needs to be told. In many markets, they are discovering these icons as well.
Not only important to work on and to build icons within our existing product offer, but we need to create new icons for the future, and this is what the teams are working on. The new Bernadotte for the future, the new Aalto vase for the future. We have across our six core brands, six creative directors. That their main job is to do this. That's on the product side. On the second pillar, which is about distribution, we have a very disciplined approach in the future that leverage the strengths of being a multi-brand portfolio. We are much stronger being 12 brands than one brand, and I'll show you why. The first priority is prioritizing and focusing and selecting the key markets where we wanna win. That means not selecting many others.
At an aggregate level for a group, we need to continue to win in the Nordics. I include Denmark in the Nordics. These are great markets, historical markets. We need to continue to grow there. We think there's a lot of potential for our brands and know in Japan and Korea. These are priority markets, and we're resetting the growth model in the U.S. and China. We've invested a lot in those markets, but we're changing, having an inflection point on the model. An example is in China, we had a very strong approach on D2C. Stores, and Tmall as well. We've changed that a little bit to stress more profitable growth. Perhaps less stores, more distribution on wholesale, and reducing a little bit the investment that we do on Tmall.
There's been a reset in the growth model in those markets, and it's showing some very, very tangible results. We also are gonna strengthen presence in what we call the priority cities. There's 20 of them that we've identified throughout the world, and make sure we make big statements in what we call cathedral doors. Cathedral doors are Selfridges, Isetan, NK, because I'm in Finland, Stockmann, all these doors that receive a lot of traffic. Our consumers, we need to make a big presence there globally. Second is leveraging the portfolio. Here there's two big ideas. The first one is about bringing a new brand to an existing market where we can do that. Korea, for example. Georg Jensen is not present in Korea today. Royal Copenhagen is very strong in Korea today.
We have all the distribution that we need, all the key influencers, et cetera. We can leverage the portfolio and bring Jensen to Korea, and we will. Iittala to Denmark, the same thing. There's many examples of how we're making this happen, and also because of our portfolio and our strength with our key partners, we're able to leverage that into, I'd say, commercial advantages, which is about having better spaces and better conditions, let's say, to transact. Last, there are white spaces out there. We're not gonna tackle them in the short term. There's a lot to do right now, but there's a lot of opportunities still existing.
In the Middle East, which is mainly the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, not a great place right now, but we just had started before the crisis, with Jensen and Royal Copenhagen to an incredible start in that region with the best partner. There are other areas like Southern Europe, Southeast Asia. These are markets where we think there's a lot of potential, but we're not ready yet. These are more mid-term markets for us. Third pillar is about driving profitable channel mix and the brandization. Here there's a different point of focus. We want to really emphasize and choose, you know, two markets or two channels which we think we have most potential and which are the most profit accretive ones that we have. That's wholesale, again, with a strategy of brandization at wholesale, and e-commerce, which are great channels.
E-commerce is our second channel after wholesale. We're also in the process of having a common platform, Shopify. We've already put two brands on, Royal Doulton and Moomin, and we have a plan before the end of the year and beginning of next year to bring all of our brands and markets on the Shopify platform, which will have some great synergies for all our brands. Physical retail is still important. We love physical stores. I love physical stores, but we have a very strong ROI lens on them going forward, i.e., if they can't meet a certain profit target for an overall margin target, then I prefer not to invest in building the retail stores. There will be some, but perhaps less than there has been in the past. Last example is about unlocking high-value revenue streams.
Here's a lot about gifting. We have an annual clock in each country with the key gifting moments. We're activating all of them. Part of it is to reach new consumers, more frequency, and to a little bit de-seasonalize as much as we can our business by having a lot of gift-giving moments at the beginning of the year. We have a lot of examples here. I put one really fresh one. Royal Copenhagen finally did a Mother's Day or mother mug. Launched it 10 days ago. Boom, we sold out. We should have planned a lot more. It was a massive success, so we're trying to get back into stock today. Moomin has had some of the similar examples. These are great examples of gift-giving in the first half of the year with our beautiful brand portfolio. How does this work?
We tried to give a small example to say, "How do you put this strategy into action?" One of the examples we used here, I like to use here, is about Jensen. As you know, we acquired Jensen in 2023, around this period. What we have done since then, and particularly in the last year, on product, a real strong focus on the big four franchises and collections of Jensen Home. I talked about Bernadotte, but we've done the same thing with Cobra, with Bloom and Koppel. A very strong focus on enriching these collections. We've strengthened the priority markets, really high-quality doors, few markets, but we went in full steam in them. We've also changed the equation or redirected the equation in terms of channel mix with a very strong focus on wholesale and e-commerce, and we have closed unprofitable stores.
If a store can't make our profit target, and we have very specific profit targets or return on investment and for an overall margin, we don't want to be there, simply put. We've done that turnaround, and then the brand has created a lot of gifting moments. The wine and bar is one example of a wine and bar set that was launched recently. All of these actions together has led to some pretty incredible results in the past quarters. It's our fastest-growing brand today, which is great. It's also our biggest brand. That's how we put our strategy, our four pillars, into action. As Jussi presented his chart at Group level, you know, our sources, where we're gonna get the investment or the money from to redeploy into areas that we want to grow, SG&A is a big one.
We talked about the savings program of EUR 28 million. It's people and non-people cost. This is a very, very important initiative for us, again, that we're slightly ahead on. The channel and product mix. We're shifting our energy and our attention to higher profit channels and categories. That's, that's a very important part. We also think that's where there's most upside revenue as well. Last, turning around the reset brands that I showed to you before, will give us a source of funding to redeploy into what? Into building brand awareness and desirability, which is our most important pillar, to fund also the journey of the acceleration, the global acceleration brands. At last, to drive growth in the priority markets, but also to fund midterm the white space markets where we think there's a lot of potential.
What does it look like on the top-line growth over the next four years? Again, this is maybe a simple way to look at it, a simplistic way, but from a brand point of view, a lot of the growth will come from our global accelerators. It will come also from the Nordics and Japan, could have added Korea there, and it will come from wholesale. Not exclusively, but those are the big chunks that we have to get right. In summary, we have a very unique portfolio of brands. 12 brands with an incredible story, heritage, codes, DNA, a founder, foundation story, and we are the leader in high-end homeware. We also have a very beautiful niche position in jewelry. We've made some choices in our plans for the future, some important choices to grow through focused collection, priority markets and channels, and brand choices.
Not all brands are at the same level of their path for growth. The turnaround is underway, as mentioned. You know, it's early good signs of sales recovery, three-quarters of like-for-like growth, which is good and expected to continue for the future. All the restructuring efforts that we've made, we expect to see some meaningful results starting from H2 this year. There you go. I hope I didn't pass too much of my time, Essi.
No. Thank you, Daniel. You're okay on time, so no worries. Now we have time for some questions. Just to remind you, we have the joint Q&A in the end, but we can take some questions already now. I would also like to remind people watching online that you can type in your questions in the chat, and we will also answer to those. Are there any questions here in the live audience, at least Maria over there?
Yes. Maria Wikström from SEB. Thank you very much for the presentation, Daniel. We indeed met a year ago, and then you've been one month in the business. I know that you're a fast learner, so I could have asked the questions then, but I think I hold myself at that time. Now I would like to ask you that with your experience on multiple consumer brands, what has surprised you, positively or negatively when you joined Vita?
Well, that's a good question. Well, a lot of things. I think, what surprised me positively is the depth of each of the brands. If I turn them all over, they've just an incredible heritage story, DNA, and that their perception from our consumers are still very positive, which is great. You know, none of the brands I thought I discovered were affected, had a bad impression or bad likability. They were all there. What they need to do is to renovate, innovate, become more modern. I need to bring in new designers to inspire from the past to make products for the future. Some of them needed to be revitalized for sure.
That the essence that I was working with, that we are all working with, were great brands who just need a rejuvenation. That was good. That was really the positive thing. The negative, okay, I have to be a little careful here. We're already complex, right? We have 12 brands, 80+ markets. We play in all channels. The brands are all a level of different level of their growth. We have nine factories, all that for EUR 613 million. Wow. It's easier for one, right? one brand, one channel, and that level of sales. I thought, the complexity. We also had a lot of internal complexity, I thought as well, on how we went to the market, through organizations, through structure, through ways of working, et cetera.
I thought it was already a complex mix that we have, so we have to make choices, but I found a complex working environment, which again, didn't give, like, what we want, just speed, clarity, agility, who's on first, who's responsible here, who's setting the tone, and making this matrix work 'cause I think we're, you know, set up as a matrix is the way to go, 'cause we have so many markets, so many channels and brands that are almost global. We just have to take the benefit of making a beautiful matrix work in a very agile way. That was probably the I don't know if it's negative, but it was we complexified our ways of working in an already complex situation.
Then I had a second question on the profitability and the profitability target as such because I think you were given much tougher job, I mean, compared to Steffen.
Thank you very much for saying that. Yes.
Lift the profitability. My question is that, I mean, would you reach the profitability target by disposing, I mean, some of the brands from the portfolio?
That's a, the, yeah, you know, maybe. I guess I can answer that this way, that all not surprise to you, the P&L of all brands and the EBIT of all brands are very different, very different. Yeah, to a certain extent, if there was some, that didn't impact the overall profit the way it is, perhaps. Today that's not my focus. That's not our focus, or my mandate is to, you know, turn around these brands, accelerate these, and the region leaders maybe add one or two countries. You know, we'll get there through a lot of initiatives, the key ones are the EUR 28 million program that I, we talked about earlier. We're not stopping there. We can't stop there.
That's just now, we'll come up with a lot of other initiatives going forward. We see with my team where those cost savings are as well. That's one thing. The second one is the choices we make. It's super important to make the right choices. We're choosing not to add new categories, for example. That was something we had done in the past. You know, it's very meaningless in terms of top line. It was not margin accretive, and it took a lot of time from my teams, my creative teams, to add new categories when instead better to build on what we have and make the core much stronger. That's a profit, that's a positive on profit. The channels as well, we had a very strong focus in D2C.
Guess what? My customers are there as well. There's a big shift in channel mix as well. Then brands, chosen which ones we fund, which ones we fund less. They were almost all funded equally in the past, not from a euro point of view, but percentage of sales, et cetera. It's about, I think, making also all those choices for what we think is good top line growth, but also more profitable top line growth. I think we get there that way. Thanks for saying what you said at the beginning. Sorry, Steffen.
Do we have other questions? I think yes, at least there in the back.
Sorry, Miika Ihamäki from DNB Carnegie. I'd like to also touch on the same profitability topic for the business. The matter is improving top line and fixed costs as the gross margins are already at a quite high level. Now you expect these significant restructuring savings by 2027, but the growth strategy, as I understand, is presumably also on the spending on the marketing based on your actions to make the brand more desirable, optimize the channel mix and being more selective in the distribution. My question is that how much of these savings will actually improve EBIT versus being reinvested? If the revenue growth is weaker than you expect, is there a limit on how much you are willing to put more ammos on the SG&A side?
Okay. To put more what on the SG&A on the last part?
Just more spend, more ammos on the SG&A.
I think, you know, I think our spend today on, you know, marketing overall, if I take marketing, there's some CapEx, but, you know, a few stores, not much. It's already at a decent level on an aggregate. If I compare it to luxury industry, we're maybe a little lower. If I compare it to more accessible luxury and other high-end industry, we're in the right zone. What we're doing is we're just investing those differently, putting a lot more on the bigger accelerator brands, less on the reset brands. There's some of that. I think the SG&A plan we have in place, strangely enough, because I had the question from my team saying, you know, we're reducing, I don't know, personnel costs by X, so my team has to do much more with fewer people.
My answer is, "No, I've taken a lot of the friction out of the system to simplify things so there's less decision-makers, you know who's responsible for all different items of your business, the decision-makers, et cetera." I think it's healthy anyways on the SG&A journey that we're going on. It is a healthy one that I would have done anyway, because I think it makes us faster and more agile. It's also, it makes the teams focus on what the must-wins, what we need to do rather than doing a whole bunch of things. I would have done that.
Now, if there's a point in time, and I'll have to talk to Jyri and Jussi at one point in time where we're continuing to accelerate, again, one or two brands and we see we can even go faster, clearly we will make that happen. I will ask for more investment, but after we have proof of concept in it. I think we're able to do that over the plan. I feel like some of these brands on the global accelerators are already showing some really, really great signs. Last thing we wanna do is limit their growth. We wanna keep feeding them because they can become much larger. I think it'll be a very dynamic process in the future.
The SG&A we do anyways because I think it's gonna help our company focus and create less friction than we may have had in the past.
Okay, I think we still have time for at least one question. We have one there.
Yes. Thank you. Antti Koskivuori from Danske. wanted to ask you on the market growth on high-end homeware. Do you mention that there was a 15-year period of negative growth, from millennium-
Yeah.
... onwards? Then a little bit of growth, I guess, driven by corona boom, I guess, and now zero growth for the past couple of years. What are the main drivers for that historic and what do you see for the future and how that tallies up with your own growth ambitions in the market?
Yeah. That's a good point. I think a lot of industries and a lot of sectors in the high-end over the past years have experienced tougher growth, the industries. You look at the luxury industry, you look at the beauty industry. I think there's been a lot of deceleration in the past couple of years with a spike, you know, just post-COVID. The growth of the 3% that I was citing was from 2019 to 2025. Okay? It was a bit a wider period. You know, I think part of our challenge, as an industry, here I'm going to say it as an industry, how do we make the pie bigger, is that we need to innovate more and create, you know, incredible products for a younger generation. Millennials, younger people who love to collect.
We think also in the categories, because each category will not grow equally. The ones that we feel has the most potential is the home decor category. Frames, vases, all kinds of objects for decorating throughout the home. We think that has the most legs going further. I think it's been a little bit of the supply. If the demand is supply, more the supply. I think we need to all be much more creative as an industry and put incredible product proposals to our customers and aim for a younger customer. With some of the tailwinds and the trends coming up, we feel, I feel very strongly that the pie will grow. obviously, we need to make ours a little larger. I see what some of the other brands in our industry are doing.
There's some good things happening. Again, the fact that luxury brands are doing tableware now or doing glassware, some of them call us to help them. I can't say who they are. I think it's a good sign because you know, like the luxury shoe industry. I don't know if any of you followed that. When the luxury brands started and high-end brands started to enter also the luxury shoe industry, the whole thing blossomed, and they created a much, much larger category. There's been many examples of that in other industries, and I think that's about what's going to happen to ours.
All right. Thank you very much.
Okay.
Good. Just to remind you that we can take more questions then in the end of the event. Any questions in the chat that are related to other presentations, don't worry, we will take those in the joint Q&A. Now it's time to take a short break, and I think now we have time for 15-minute break, so we will be back at 22:03 Finnish time. Thank you.
[Break]
Hi, and welcome back to Fiskars Group's Capital Markets Day. Now let's continue with the agenda of today and welcome Dr. Steffen Hahn, the CEO of Business Area Fiskars on stage. Go ahead, Steffen.
Thank you, Essi. Good afternoon. Good morning to the West, also online. Good evening to the East. My name is Steffen Hahn, and I'm the CEO of the Fiskars Business Area. In the next 20 - 30 minutes, I'll talk you through the plans we put in place to drive our business back to profitable growth ahead of inflation. I will cover three areas. I'll first give you an overview of our business structure, then I talk you through our growth model, and then about how we plan to scale our plans to drive sales, profit, and cash upwards. Let's look at the first area. We have a well-diversified footprint. We are present in various subcategories. Gardening is about half of our business. Crafting, a fifth. What you see on the screen, outdoor, that's a sixth. That is our Gerber brand. Then cooking, a tenth.
We have all year-round relevance. We are skewed towards spring, but we have all year relevance with gardening in spring, back to school in summer, axes in fall, and snow tools in winter. When you look at our channel mix, we have a decisive wholesale model. 95% of our sales, we generate with our partners, retailers, and distributors. The DTC part that you see on the screen, the 5%, that is two specific channels. One is gerbergear.com. That's our online channel for the Gerber brand in the U.S. The other is through our sister business area, Vita, our cooking and crafting some of our cooking and crafting business that we sell through the Vita stores online and offline. When you look at our country footprint, we have a very balanced distribution between both sides of the Atlantic.
The other side, down to the Pacific. We have about 50% of our business in North America, and the other 50% is in Europe and Asia Pacific. On the screen, you see 25% rest of world. What's in there is also mostly developed markets. However, we do have an expert organization with a relatively wide reach into export markets as well. I just had the privilege this morning to meet 25 of our distributors that happen to be here today, that are also representing a large part of other countries. We're reaching more than 40 countries with that organization included. This is our business, but now I have a question to you.
Now, first of all, those that are online, please follow along, but those of you who are in the room, please show hands. Who of you is somewhat passionate about cooking? Good. Not eating, cooking. Who of you is passionate about gardening? Okay. Okay. That's the majority of our business, guys. Come on. Who is passionate about wood splitting? You're using the axe at least once a year. Okay. Interesting gender bias here. Lastly, who of you is passionate about crafting, decorating, quilting, tailoring? Okay, so quite a bit. I want you also online to think back to that one moment where you did the perfect cut. Now, if you're cooking an onion, that last one where you just cut all the way perfectly symmetric, no flipping over.
Pruning in the garden, you had that thick branch that you could barely fit between the blades. You did it all the way through, that kind of superhero sensation, performance, gratification. When you use an axe, there were quite a few that use an axe. That big log, lots of branches. You hit it. It just splits on the first strike. On crafting, when you have thick material like leather or cardboard or wobbly piece of cloth. You are very concentrated, you don't want to mess it up. It cuts perfectly all the way to the tip. That sensation of performance and satisfaction, that is what we work for in the Fiskars Business Area. That is what unites us, Gerber and Fiskars, our cutting competence. That's what we are about.
Now let's look at the service network that we have to bring this sensation to our consumers. We have a factory in the U.S. in Portland for Gerber, where we produce predominantly knives, and we have two warehouses, one in Canada and one in the U.S. In Europe, we have two factories in Finland, one in Sorsakoski, where we produce our cooking equipment, and one in Billnäs, scissors and axes. We have a factory in Poland, in Słupsk, where we produce primarily gardening tools. We have also two warehouses in Europe, one in Finland, one in Poland. If we look to the Asia-Pacific region, we have a warehouse in Australia, and we have contract manufacturing in Southeast Asia and China, where we complement the amount of products that we produce ourselves, from countries like China, Vietnam, Cambodia.
On the next slide, I'm highlighting a few strongholds that we have. Garden cutting, pruners, loppers, tree pruners we invented. Fiskars invented the current form. We have adult and kids scissors and crafting tools. We're a market leader in this space. For Gerber knives, Gerber is one of the companies in the mecca of knives in Portland. About half of the business of Gerber is also in multi-tools. Knives and multi-tools, that's a stronghold for us. Of course, I should add our ax business because we have a number of consumers. That's not me saying it. Legal disclaimer. We have a number of consumers that do say or tell us that they believe we have the best axes in the world, and we are very proud of them.
When I started beginning of 2024, and you saw some of the numbers from Jyri earlier, I made it my mission, after this development, I made it my mission to improve the structure of our P&L. The green line is our EBIT margin. The orange line is our sales in absolute. I made it my mission to structure the P&L so that we free up resources to invest more in innovation and in media to tell people about the wonderful products we have while delivering good profitability. While the orange line tells you that it's not sufficient, we've actually made good progress. In quarter one 2025, we grew 3% organically. Unfortunately, two days after the quarter was finished, tariff hit us, and that was a double-digit million hit for the Fiskars BA. In quarter one 2026, you saw the results recently.
We defended that sales level despite the Iran war starting on February 28th at that, what I dare to say is pretty spectacular EBIT margin. We have successfully moved resources from cost to invest, and at the same time, we were able to deliver strong profitability and cash. We will continue to plow through. This will fuel our growth model, which you see on the next slide. The growth model. Our growth model is very simple: innovation, distribution, and media. Differently said, we want to bring more products, a wider range of products to people that they can buy in more places where they shop, and we want to increase the audience we tell about that over time. More products in more places and telling more people about it. This model has started to deliver benefits.
We have an upgraded status with our customers because they see us supporting. We have increasing interest in our products from consumers, which we can measure in search volume and click-through rate as an example. As a result, I'll come back to that a little later, we have gotten some great feedback on pretty much all the things we launched in the last 12 months, which is an effect that we've been working on since the beginning of 2024. Let's look at this model and its components a little more closely. Innovation is our lifeblood. When I started in January 2024, within 20 days, not even 20 days, after 19 days, I had my global leadership team here because it was very obvious we need to do more in this area.
I had a two-day workshop with them to discuss how are we getting more innovation out the door and on the street to support net sales growth. Now in 2026, we start seeing the benefits. If you look at the net sales value of the innovation we are launching, which is of course a bit overcast by the external environment, that has more than doubled in the last 24 months. We have a pipeline built that we are now continuing to execute against to again double that. Here it says three years, but our ambition is to do that in the next two to three years. Net sales value from innovation. It's early, but have our recent launches been successful? Yes. What we're seeing is very positive feedback from the consumers.
You see some of the verbatims here. It's very exciting to see, to hear the consumers talk about our products and also our customers, what we get in terms of feedback. In a moment, I'll come back to power tools and show you the video that we'll have there. That'll in about a minute. Before that, I cover a bit of the other sessions, the other launches as well. We've gotten very good consumer feedback. We're also able to build distribution. The one thing I would wish is that we are able to build distribution faster. You all know about the macroeconomic environment, which understandably drives our retail partners to very conservative behavior. Retailers are very focused on minimizing working capital. They're also very focused on trying to keep costs down.
For example, expensive shelf rebuilds are tried to avoid. Given that we've seen the results of our launches and that we now have data evidence that proves that they are successful, I'm however optimistic that we can accelerate that build-up in the future, particularly as we have fast follow-ups. You see on the very right side of the slide, you see that all the spaces we went into, we now have a follow-up to further build and expand so that we have a launch and leverage model similar to what Daniel shared with the Bernadotte example. We have plans in place to continuously scale our innovation pipeline and to accelerate our distribution based on data evidence we have in the market that what we've launched has been working.
Retailers that did support us with the distribution see sellout above our expectations. It's probably interesting for you to know. Let's look at one example, the power tools. It's very exciting. We now have five SKUs in this space. Four products, one battery. You see the battery here. That is also a power bank currently charging my phone. It has a USB-C port, which is a unique feature in our industry, and it's only one battery that fits in all of our products. We are the only one that can truly say we have only one battery now and for the foreseeable future. Let's look at what consumers have seen ever since we launched these products in spring.
[Presentation]
Thank you. That's what we had live now for a while, and I think this is a showcase of what I believe truly sets us and our industry peer group apart. Our capability to do product design that is intuitive, high performance, highly ergonomic, which for professionals is very relevant. Ergonomics lead to less health issues when you're excessively using the products during the day, and also aesthetically pleasing. Our product design team is highly decorated. The Red Dot award is the largest design award in the world, and our team has been awarded 67 times to date. This year alone, we won three awards, amongst others, the highest distinction, Best of the Best for our new power products. We are doing this for the first time.
There are other players in the industry that have done this quite a bit. It's quite remarkable what killer of a product we were able to launch in this space. I'm very proud of my product team. That was innovation. The second point I said earlier is that we want to bring more products to more places where people shop. We build presence where the shoppers are. We focus on driving conversion by improving our shopability online, offline. We take responsibility for traffic, which our retailers look for, particularly when the consumer sentiment is low. This is reaping us benefits.
We have a wide range of solutions for our retailers, and because they acknowledge that, in turn, we were, A, able to build net distribution points, so the number of doors and the number of SKUs per door is net increasing for us in a market environment that is rather suppressed. We get a higher status as a supplier with our retailers. Retailers have classifications internally of how important you are to them, current business and also for the future. These upgrades give us more bandwidth with our retail partners to further fuel momentum and build our joint business together. The last element of the growth model I said is media. Brand management, marketing, and then putting our assets out with media. What you see on the screen is some of the results.
We've overhauled our brand management and media organization and our approach to it in the last 18 months. On the right side to you see the results on what's here, which is called a view-through rate. 65. View-through rate is when you're on YouTube, and you have the option to skip the video because you're not interested, how many people do that? The benchmark says that above 40 is excellent. All our four last launches have achieved levels above 60%, which is extraordinarily good. When we talked to the guys from YouTube and Google, they were checking the numbers if that can be true. For us, that means two things: A, we are in categories that are emotionally engaging, so people have an interest. B, we, with our advertising, are striking enough for the consumers.
They find what we show relevant and intriguing so that they hang on. That's the quality of our advertising and what we put out there. On the left side, you see the quantity. I said that we are here to build scale, reach a broader audience. This spring, in a number of markets and categories, we've achieved the highest search volume as far as we can go back, higher than the COVID peak. As far as we can go back, in most cases means until 2004. 22 years, highest level of search volume. That isn't sales, but of course, consumer interest is preceding sales, and I find that a very encouraging result. That was our growth model. Let's now look at how we're planning to scale for profitable growth and to further drive cash.
Our future launches are lined up to get into categories, subcategories where we see intrinsically growing demand. Inbuilt tailwind, if you want. I've selected now here six trends that provide ample of opportunity for Fiskars. The most defining is probably the battery electrification of cutting tools, reducing physically demanding tasks, the effort for physically demanding tasks, particularly in the context of an aging population. The second is emotionalization and ritualization, hedonism, active digital detox. We see, as an example for these trends, a resurgence of crafting in the U.S. The crafting market is growing, so people try to actively engage in occupations that have nothing to do with screen time. For Gerber in the U.S., we see this fascinating hybrid of glamping and bushcraft at the same location.
We have a portfolio that we can expand and to cater for these trends. The third trend is the growing professional market, so gardening services are on the rise. That means, in turn, that landscapers are an increasingly attractive target group because they're growing as a consumer for our business, and our current entry and presence amongst this group is underdeveloped, which gives us a great opportunity. The fourth trend, pet ownership, I think particularly for the analysts among here, is well understood. There's some interesting businesses in this space, focused primarily on pet care. Urbanization, you all know about this.
Even if it's currently paused, in general, there is an inflation in real estate prices, which makes people buy smaller properties. You have the trend to more dense populated areas, which then further reduces the space available. We cater for these, for example, with our indoor gardening tools. Lastly, sustainability. There's sometimes this question, is sustainability really something that the consumers are interested in and willing to pay for? I would say yes. The sustainability that the consumers are looking for, I would call lavish sustainability. Yes, people want lower carbon emissions. They want circular materials. They want compostability, and ideally they would want to have things that leave no trace, but without compromise. Consumers want also more performance and more experience and fun.
If you take the analogy of the car industry, electric cars were really interesting when they had a faster acceleration. You felt that you have electricity, which is better for the environment all in, not going into details, but when it was the faster accelerating car than a combustion engine, that's where it really became interesting. For me, this is the trend that is also interesting for us. Lavish, not frugal, sustainability. As I say, these trends create a lot of opportunity for us, and we will increasingly add new subcategories to our portfolio to grow. Having said this, we're not talking our plans until 2030. For the foreseeable future, our base business will be the lion's share of our revenue, so we must not lose focus on that. We are actively bringing leverage innovation to our existing categories.
You've seen this with our new generation of orange-handled scissors, with our Ultra Axes with DualAction . While we expand into categories, we will provide fuel to our existing footprint because we know that due to the scale, the lion share also until 2030, this will be the primary source for us to generate profit from growth. How are we going after these categories and how are we commercializing them? When it comes to new categories, we're looking for four things actually. Three on the screen. Is the subcategory growing? Is it structurally profitable? One thing that's not mentioned here that's self-evident is it big enough to engage? Is it also a natural fit with our brand equity?
We are looking for categories, when you think back, pet care, Ultra Axes , we look for things that build our P&L, they also need to help build our brand, what we intuitively stand for, so that we have that double whammy effect. For existing categories, we are primarily looking for next generation improved versions of our products that provide a superior value proposition for the consumers in use, for the retailers, category value, and for us, financial value. All of these categories we bring to market with a disciplined approach, with a specific priority by market and by customer that is broadly shared in our organization and everybody knows what is must win, what is rocket, what is foundation, which is the internal classification we use. How do we pay for this?
As I said, I made it my mission to improve the structure of our P&L. We have shifted costs to invest, and we'll continue on this path. What you see here on marketing and innovation, we want to double the impact we have in the market. Double the impact from innovation, which we measure as net sales value of what we're launching, and double the impact on the consumer, which means doubling the reach and the impact we have on the audience that we address. We are funding this from three sources. Gross margin. All the categories we launch need to be gross margin accretive, and all the things you've recently seen we have launched achieve just that. Every new launch that we had is gross margin accretive to the mix.
We continue our cost discipline, so bringing costs down. We look at our footprint. We've moved our warehouse from Poland to, sorry, from Netherlands to Poland to shorten transportation ways, reduce costs. We are constantly reviewing our make or buy choices. Bringing our landed costs down is the second element, and then SG&A. Of course, there is labor inflation and other areas that we have seen, but we have, in the recent past, in 2025, brought our SG&A down, and now we are in the effort to first tie it and then again reduce it as a percent of net sales.
The whole logic is that we basically find a number of points at the gross margin and then give one point to the bottom line and the rest into innovation and media, and then whatever else we can find in SG&A to accelerate our growth. On cash, we are in a good position on cash. We have consistent profitability. We have lean and disciplined approach to manage our working capital and our CapEx. Having said this, I see substantial opportunity to further improve. On one hand, on our portfolio productivity, SKU productivity, the amount of sales and profit margin we generate on average per SKU, which by the way, is not only interesting for us, it is also very relevant for our retailers. They are looking for faster turn rate and for more SKU productivity too. This is a complementary target where our customers and we have the same objective.
It also is beneficial for the shopper because if you have a tighter portfolio, it's easier to navigate and easier to shop for the consumer, which means on average, you actually see your conversion rate going up because it's not as intense to find the product that fits for you. That's one thing. SKU or portfolio productivity. The second area is terms, supplier and retailer terms. Supplier longer, retailer shorter. We're putting a comprehensive package in place now for the upcoming negotiations in fall that will make it a win-win for us and our partners. 'Cause otherwise you might wonder why should they say yes to that if it's a win-lose.
We think we have a package that makes it attractive for suppliers and for retailers to work with us on this topic. We expect some benefits for the Fiskars BA. The third area, I already alluded to it a little earlier, is reviewing our footprint. We have already done things to shorten the conversion and transportation time. I was just talking about the warehouse. We have also reviewed make or buy decisions. Some products are better done by others, not by ourselves. In general, we are looking at how we are reducing our conversion time on one side, but also the quite substantial transportation time we have, particularly when we think about Asia to Europe and Asia to the U.S.
We've talked a lot about what we want to do with the business, but I also want to talk with you, or I also want to share with you how we're developing our organization. I've picked here three topics as an update. The first one is that we want to increase the reflection of the markets we serve in our own organization. The number of nationalities we have here in Helsinki and in our headquarters in North America, close to Chicago for Fiskars and in Portland for Gerber, because we believe it is of utmost importance that we reflect the markets we serve in our own organization to be able to deliver value propositions that resonates with the markets we serve. The second area is younger colleagues.
We've recruited younger colleagues before, but we did have quite a focus on experienced hires, and we're now shifting that focus slightly more to graduates and young professionals. Digital natives just have a more self-evident access to artificial intelligence and media than the average of the presenters today. Lastly, women in leadership position. Our objective is that we reflect our workforce. We have 45% female colleagues, and we want to see that number also at the top of the leadership. In the last 12 months, we made one point progress, and we are now at 39.
There's some room to go, but we are taking this very serious because we think, as I said, with the cultural diversity, gender diversity is also an important source of sometimes friction, but it makes us better because we consolidate various viewpoints in the offers we make to the market. If we conclude and sum it all up, we have a healthy cash and structured P&L, where we successfully shifted from cost to growth to fuel profitable growth, and that's a path we will continue. We've started to prove our growth model, successfully scaling the quantity and the quality of our innovation, our distribution, and our media. We have evidence that we're able to attract additional consumer interest and retail space.
Lastly, we have a clear, simple, disciplined way forward, how we are scaling our model with a highly capable team to win with our most success defining stakeholders, our consumers, and our customers. Thank you.
Thank you, Steffen. Now we have time again for some questions, and we will have the joint Q&A still in the end, but let's take questions for Steffen. Do we have any questions here in the audience? All clear. Yes, go ahead, Maria.
Thank you, Roop, for a very clear presentation. I'm actually curious on your views because, I mean, as it's quite evident to see that you have managed this U.S. tariff situation very well what comes to the profitability, and I think me, and I think quite a few of my colleagues were surprised on Fiskars BU profitability in the first quarter. Can you walk us through that? I mean, what has been the key factors for that success?
I probably repeat what I had in the presentation. We are just very aware that growth costs money. Return sales comes after the investment. From day one, I said I need to make room in my P&L to be able to afford that. A classic mistake is that you do an annual plan. You start from a desired net sales result, you do the math all the way through P&L. You say, "Based on that, this is what I can afford." You start the year, the first quarter falls short because you haven't done the investment yet, you can't expect the return, you're in the catch-up mode. We haven't done that.
We work with a target picture where we have a realistic assumption of what we can get before that investment happens, and then we cut everything in place. When we had the tariffs, it took us a week to say, "What is the likely expectation on our P&L?" Then we basically went back to the war room and said, "How do we now need to cut the different elements in place to make it?" That, the benefit of that is that we can invest before needing the return because it anyways won't come in the same year, and that's the model we just continue.
I have to admit that, of course, last year, April 2nd, and now this year, February 28th, isn't exactly helpful because now you look at the commodities and you know that's again a hit, you constantly, every time we feel we can play offense, something externally happens to push us back on the defense. My mission and the discussion I have with my team is forget the market. The market is what it is. We need to focus on how we can grow this business because there's ample of consumer interest out there, and our job is to mine that, whether the market grows or not. How do we expand our portfolio so that we attract more people to grow even if the markets don't?
Thank you. My second question is on your sourcing model and the countries where you source. I mean, do you think you are currently optimally positioned, or would you think you need to review still your sourcing model going forward?
On the question, are we optimal, I think on July 24th we will know again if we are or not. The current tariff regime expires then, we expect Section 301 tariffs to kick in, which might change the landscape of what optimal means. We will have a review of our footprint in quarter three. We are looking for various reasons. Cost is one thing. Quality is another, also sustainable competitive advantage. There's a number of categories that I wouldn't want to be done by a contract manufacturer because I think we can build proprietary knowledge about how to produce certain things that are strategically important for us for the future, those we want to make in-house.
Yes, there is a review coming in quarter three for us internally, and yes, we will consider the tariff regime changes that are likely to happen on July 24th. To the optimal, right now I think we are in a pretty good shape, but the shape is depending on what shape you have, as I have expected to change in quarter three.
Any other questions for Steffen at this point? Okay. Thank you, Steffen.
Thank you.
It's time for Jyri to present the key takeaways of today before we head to the joint Q&A. Go ahead, Jyri.
Thank you, Essi. I know I'm now between now and the interesting part when we get to the Q&A, so I'll be very focused and brief. Few key takeaways that I hope kind of sticks with you today after this multiple presentations and deep dives into our BAs. The role of the group as an effective portfolio and capital steward, which is an enabler of value creation in the BAs. The new targets which I think is put nicely in the slide. As a reminder, it's not touching our guidance this year. They are reset from what somebody with perfect hindsight now can call was maybe discounted hopes and dreams.
Of course, in the boom of the post-COVID home nesting period that was maybe extrapolating some of the graphs that one could draw from the past years. Really recognizing the reality we live in. Steffen referred to July, when there will be for sure a change in the tariff regime. Let's see what comes there. We've tried to kind of take those things we can recognize that are in our current environment or in a way announced to be hitting when we work through what are the long-term financial targets for the company. I think Daniel covered well why and how a turnaround is needed with Vita. It's been kicked off. It's again something that's already ongoing, and we know some proof points that things are happening.
It's again not PowerPoints and Excels and plans. At the same time with BA Fiskars, where we have our robust foundation when you look at the margin, EBIT margin, despite all the swings, despite the tariffs hitting us, et cetera, but really rebuilding the sales growth momentum through innovation, distribution, and the brand relevance. Fairly condensed message for this. Important in my books is that when we look to the future, it's not just planning with a kind of a broad brush of some creating kind of the scenery, but it's based on things that have been already kicked off. We have proof points, new products here. We have other proof points, growth in Vita over the last three quarters.
Things are happening, so we are not doing the one single data point extrapolation, but we have already multiple data points where we kind of take the extrapolation for us. That is really the essence of our message today. 2030, of course, is the time when the verdict will fall. How did we do with the 2030 targets? Of course, that's kind of the ultimate test to this. I am shutting up now here because I guess the bigger value will come in our next part of the session. If I can ask the colleagues to come to the stage, we'll get some chairs.
Yes. Please hold for a while while we arrange the stage for the Q&A. If I can have all the presenters on the stage. Just as a reminder, you can type in your questions in the chat if you're following the event online. Okay. Maybe we start with any potential questions here in the audience, and I can see at least Maria has her hand up, so if Nora can bring the microphone.
I actually had one question for Jussi. I think, I mean, you are probably the best person to answer this, that I was a bit surprised to see how you define cash conversion, that you chose to have the, is it, denominator where you had EBIT excluding extraordinary items? I would have thought that, I mean, you would do EBITDA, which is something closer to cash that you can get.
That's very good point. Actually, we have been working with these financial targets now almost, I would say, last half year, making quite wide benchmarks with some of the advisors also. What's the most common way to report this? The reason why we gave up this free cash flow net profit was that we have lot of volatility there when it comes to changes in deferred taxes and that kind of thing, so we lifted it up. That seems to be the way. One thing to highlight here that EBIT, what we are using there, is then EBIT less those lease interest what we have. It is right comparable. Also, the new cash flow, how it's defined by unlevered free cash flow less lease payments. That's the way we have done it.
We are not the only one. When we made benchmarks, we found out that that's not so uncommon way to report it. We believe that it's now more less volatile than our previous KPI.
If I continue very briefly on that, while the targets are under the current GAAP, we know that there are changes coming to IFRS. IFRS 18 being now the number.
Yeah.
That will also highlight operating profit, which in other circles is called EBIT, is something that will become a mandatory measure in the template of an income statement. Maybe there was some foresight in terms of preparing to the new world where you can't go around the operating profit, also known as EBIT.
Yeah. Still not going too much into the details here when it comes to KPI, but using EBITDA there, then we should adjust it also with IFRS amortizations, which is make even more complex to explain.
Yeah.
Yeah. Let's do then I still had one more question directed to Daniel. Given that, I mean, you have been given this turnaround job, and is this something that, I mean, you have done before, that you have like a certain, like turnaround plan in your toolbox, and now you are just executing it for Vita? Is this something that, I mean, you kind of needed to come up with the scratch, how to improve the profitability or almost double the profitability, I mean, for the business? Actually, more than , just double. Yes.
Yeah. Yes. Well, thanks again for the question. Thanks for your other question at the beginning or at the end of my presentation. I guess is this in my toolbox? I think I have done over my experience, you know, some turnarounds and especially some scaling up. I've had the chance in a couple of roles under private equity ownership to scale, you know, businesses from EUR 400 million to EUR 1.2 billion in the span of four years. The top line helped a lot necessarily, but I think along the path as well, clearly had an eye for a return on investment and obviously not growing the SG&A as fast as top line.
I think this is, you know, there's some similarities to some of my past experiences to what we're going to go through here 'cause again, as I mentioned, there's a lot of different buckets of choices we've made towards profit accretive channels, brands, markets. You know, the skill sets to bring the global accelerators up, I feel, you know, obviously super comfortable. I think I've done that for almost my entire career. That helps a lot. That helps a lot. If we can get them to a certain trajectory, they're already profitable today, as you can see, that helps a lot the economic equation. Yeah, I feel, you know, super comfortable. I have to pull back from some of my past toolbox.
One of the most important things is going to be making sure that the brands in our portfolio today are desirable. I keep using the word desirable. Not replaced. Replaced the word luxury with desirability because it was leading on a different path, and I think the more desirable our brands are, you know, we'll certainly make it. It's just that I have to have different paths of growth for the different brands. Yes, you know, very comfortable. I have also made sure that the teams and in each of the brand houses and in the markets reflect the skill set that I'm looking for in those either as brands or those market resets as well.
I'm trying to tailor it to, obviously, the leadership team to the challenges we have, and that's super important. We're almost there, as well with making that happen.
Good. I see one question over here.
Yes. Thank you. One for Jussi as well. The net working capital and the inventory drawdown of roughly EUR 100 million-
Yeah.
... that you mentioned, you also mentioned that it's not gonna be short-term target. It's gonna take some while to get there. I'm just curious if you could walk us through the kind of your thoughts about the timetable, when you expect to be in the goal, and if the current environment, higher oil prices, et cetera, is impacting or has impacted in some way of your thoughts about that target.
That's very good point. First of all, if I start first around net debt to EBITDA when we said that target is to get it now to 2.5x in next two years' time, that's heavily linked to this working capital reductions, what we have in place. They go hand in hand. On that one, we see some development already this year. It's very year-end biased or year-end loaded, and therefore it's better to say that it takes 2027 when we start seeing some visible changes there. One thing is of course the current environment. Are there more this kind of black swans coming?
The good thing is that when we talk about working capital overall, there's also a supply side, sourcing side, which is very much in our own hand, and we have these kind of levers there we can pull to manage to get it down. I would say we have high conviction case in place to get it now done as planned, of course, big part that is in Vita, and already Daniel explained the ways we are getting it done.
Maybe on follow-up, do you see any risk that those moves could restrict your growth short term in any way, or is that completely separate issue?
As said, of course, we do need growth there to get inventories down. That goes without saying. As said, we have a lot of own manufacturing. We have a big sourcing organization. Those are the ones where we have only risk to pull. We do need top line. Do we need to top line this mid-single-digit growth or less? Actually, the plans what we have in place short term are now based on the situations what we are living at the moment.
All right. Thank you.
Maybe just to comment or build on Jussi's comment, and actually Daniel's comment, that the situation is not exactly the same across all the brands and the brand houses. There are differences, which then again, as you mentioned, some places we should or could have even more inventory to be able to sell-
Right.
... sell more. The good news is, in a way, that the issues are not all over the place, but they are more capsulated and hence, more focused actions are there to address that.
Thanks. I think we could take one question from the online viewers at this point, and Jussi, I think you could take this one.
Okay.
You highlighted in the materials that the intention is to reach the leverage target within the next two years. Let's say that the geopolitical tensions persist and consumer confidence doesn't pick up as expected, leading to continued subdued profitability development. In this scenario, would you be willing to relax on your dividend target in order to drive down net debt and leverage?
Hmm, uh-
A long question.
Yeah, a long questions and deserves long answer. First of all, we do have conviction case in our plans, as I said. Jyri just explains that we do have already many proof points there. It's not only one point what we are using now to predict the future. We have proof points and therefore conviction case in place to deliver the cash flow, which is ultimately the one big lever there to get this back to 2.5. That's one conviction case in place. Dividend won't be the first lever to pull if something needs to be done. We do have working capital, we have CapEx, we continue driving cost out actions and the likes. Therefore that's one thing. It's not the first thing to start figuring out.
The third one is that it's a policy not carved in stone. Having said that, of course, dividend ultimately is about owner's choice. Management is tasked to deliver the plan we have now put in place to deliver the stable dividend, what we have now guided as a policy.
Thank you. Are there any other questions here, in the live audience? Yes, Rauli, please.
Yes. Hi, Rauli from Inderes. One from Daniel. I think, looking at the brand positioning, at least Waterford and maybe some other brands of the WWRD acquisition has been kind of in the turnaround category for the whole 10 years that Fiskars has owned them. There has been quite a few people, I guess, trying to do the turnaround already. What can you do and will do differently to actually make it happen?
Okay. Good question. I don't know exactly what all of my predecessors have done. I'm sure they might have tried different recipes and so on and so forth. I guess my conviction is I'm spending as much time as I can with the teams in Barlaston and Waterford. The first one is really about collections. There's too many collections, so we have to make it much, much more simple along the lines of rooting out the icons and doing things that make them stand out. That's really important. There's a number of collections. I think we have a plan to reduce by more than 50% the number of collections and SKUs that go along with it.
We just had too much complexity, I guess I'm getting a little bit granular here, but we may have had a mindset in the past to produce what the markets would like, and I wanna stop that. We need to produce and develop collections that reflect the DNA of the brand, the values of the brand, and that have appeal globally rather than just serve different markets. That's very dangerous. That's a big, big change. The team is getting there. I think we're almost there on the collection, on the merchandising, on the future collections, which one they've chosen, saying these are the top seven. Here, we're gonna build on those and create global icons. I think that's an important one.
Also within Waterford, we have resurrected Marquis, which was the entry level, and I think that's an interesting play that can go to a different channel than necessarily Waterford. That's one of the, I guess, solutions there. Selective markets, I won't expand on that 'cause I think that's fairly clear. You know, the biggest market for Waterford is the U.S. Gonna double down on there. Wedgwood was China as well. It's just gonna change the model and not just do D2C only. Those things we're doing. It's the industrial footprint that you know. Here is probably we have a plan in action.
It's a challenging one, granted, and you probably know it, just on making sure that the investments and trying to optimize the costs that we have running the factories, mainly the crystal factories, and we need to bring more volume to those factories. We have plans in place to do that. We let go some of the volumes over the last three years. There's a very specific plan to build that up again. That will be very helpful obviously on the gross margin. This is one of the bigger challenges. I don't know if that's very different from the past. Probably not the last two. I think the first one is just a big key for me to success.
Yeah. Very clear.
I would actually like to build on what you said, Daniel, because this question that you just asked was one that I asked myself very intensely before I started. Now, I've been here a bit more than two years, but I also want to share some of the reflections and the themes that I think are in common. When I started, I considered myself the fourth leader on that business in a very short sequence. Those that have followed along a bit longer will know that there was quite some changes. I asked myself, "How do we make sure that I'm not just the fourth in further changes?
What will I do different?" There was one conclusion for myself, which was, "I don't need to postulate now my five-year vision." The people have heard this three different versions of it in the last two years. If I now come and say, "No, we are going there," nobody will believe me and nobody will follow because they go like, "I've heard this every 12 month. There's no point.
I think the common themes you hear there, and I think the differences in the execution is A, simplification. You heard Daniel talk a lot about that. You've heard me talk a lot about that. I think it's clarity of direction. We are not avoiding the trade-offs. We're making them, and we are also asserting them into our organization and say, "We don't want you to try to do it all. We want you to focus on a few priorities and make those things exceptionally well." I think the third thing, I had the privilege to be in one of the sessions that Daniel did when he announced this restructuring. What you did there, and what I think I have done with my organization, is that we make more effort to bring the organization along.
When this turmoil happens, a lot of employees are, of course, concerned. They have seen all the results. They have seen our profit warning. The first thing is, "Is my job in jeopardy? What is happening? Where are we taking this business?" We've introduced a measure on a monthly basis in our town halls to ask our people, "Do you understand our direction, and do you agree with it?" A monthly poll, quantified. We can see how the data goes up. The second is, "Are you clear what you need to contribute to this direction?" Again, we can see the measures up. When I started, we were about 3.1. We're now at 4.3 consistently. What we've seen at the early times is every time when something happened, it immediately dropped, and now we have basic resilience.
Iran was started, no change in poll, because people feel our direction is robust. Bringing the organization along, I think is what I'm seeing what you're doing is an effort. I would also considering, after I've spoken to my predecessors, by the way, my sense is that this is truly a difference, even if the concepts as such you might feel you have heard before.
True. Sorry, I build one last something I could add to that. I agree, obviously, with what Steffen is saying. Sometimes, you know, simplifying is much more powerful, for sure. One of the things also in these two brands, in addition to rationalizing but meaningfully, I'm talking like from many, many collections to very few, is the customer at heart. We have to modernize, and that's why I'm bringing new talents, new design talents to both brands to create products that are desirable for younger consumers, millennials. 'Cause we don't want all our customers to say, "I inherited this from my grandmother," or, you know, That's not good. I don't like hearing that. It's great, 'cause they're passed on, and they add value and time.
No, I want the cool 35, 40-year-olds to say, "I can afford it now. I love this brand. I love this design with a great designer, world-class designer," and to pick up that way too. That's a big focus of ours as well, not just on rationalization a lot, but also new designs to appeal to a younger consumer.
Okay. Great. Thank you for the very comprehensive answer. I have another one, hopefully a bit shorter to answer on Iittala, since it is now in the global accelerator, which sounds glamorous for Iittala, which was maybe known for more of a regional Nordic.
Yeah.
Japan brand. Are you planning to accelerate that in the new geographical regions or mostly the current ones?
No, that's a good question. I would say Iittala just made it into the beginning of the global accelerator. It's a junior global accelerator today. It's picked up. We had a good year last year. The profit picked up, et cetera. We brought it to that category because of all of our brands, it's one of the ones that has, I would say, the highest likability, also from an icon point of view, has a lot of incredible icons, like the Aalto vase and many others as well. Very strong appeal in the Asian markets. Japan, Korea is a big opportunity, and we think China as well one day. We just think that the brand has the right portfolio today. They play many categories, but well. There's a good degree of likability.
People recognize a little bit the brand globally because of mainly the Aalto vase, to be honest, and a few other icons. We thought it was just ready to scale. The countries, I will not scale as much as I plan to with Jensen. Jensen could be a really large brand, and it's ready for many markets. Iittala is gonna be step by step, mainly pointing to the Asian markets. Japan is our largest market outside of the Nordics. Korea, we're not big yet, but we think we have a big opportunity there. As I mentioned, China are key markets. The U.S. is more midterm. I wanna make sure that we build on strength on strength first before attacking or before launching in the U.S.
We have the U.S. more earmarked as a midterm plan. We think there's potential there as well. There's a lot of, you know, a lot of great things. We're working on a brand new collection in a year and a half, which will be multi-category with a big designer worldwide, as well. There's a lot of great initiatives on the brand, and we think it's just at the, you know, the beginning of its scaling today. It won't be the same as Jensen and Royal Copenhagen yet. Yeah, those would be the countries we're looking at. Online is, online too. Online, it's our second biggest channel for Iittala. We're going to try to, you know, obviously boost that as well.
Okay. I think we have a question here.
Yeah. Thanks, Joni Sandvall from Nordea. Maybe as Fiskars has a long heritage, so maybe question a little bit further to the future. I think historically you have been speaking that maybe Vita has higher margin potential compared to Fiskars, but given you're now maybe focusing more on the wholesale, so is there some structural change that could have changed this picture so that, you know, maybe Vita's long-term margin potential is not as high as before?
I'll take this. Here when you look at the extrapolation from the COVID, post-COVID, home nesting, that was something that was directing upwards. You recall in some of these strategic pillars, we had certain markets, we had gross D2C and gross margin as kind of key performance indicators for the business. In the belief if that trajectory would have been kind of staying, holding, then the consequent EBIT margins that were projected at that time would have been potentially quite realistic.
We know that the consumers are not living on that curve after the COVID where people stayed home and they made also some of their critical purchases and some of your tableware stuff, you actually can have over generations, maybe some other kitchen utensils and the frying pans, they wear out and so forth. There are new technologies which require people then to renew those. I think it's kind of the reality check to the economic realities and consumers' spending patterns. Growth, as you can see also on the target setting on the organic effects adjusted net sales growth, there we see more opportunity and kind of more potential from the category perspective and our geographical footprint and the reach out with the multiple brands.
There are some geographies on this planet where gardening is not a big business and there are some geographies where you are not allowed to be dealing much with sharp objects like knives, et cetera. There are that type of restrictions when I compare kind of the two businesses from my perspective.
Okay, thanks.
Okay, I think we could take a question from the online viewers. This is for Daniel. In your presentation, you said that closing some brands that are losing money could improve margin. You also said that that is not on the agenda. When will it be on the agenda?
Oh, God. It's not on my agenda right now. That's not the mandate that I have today. I said it because mathematically, yes, it just, it would be the case. Listen, I think today what our teams have built a long-term plan. We're in the process of finalizing our, also our long-term plan soon. We've had the lens of improving, you know, each brand at the right time, the right pace with the right levers. I don't know. I would just say just like on the M&A side, we didn't really talk about that. I think if there's, you know, a couple things. Organically, if we want to scale further a brand today and we see the potential, I think the group will get behind it.
I think that would be good. On the other side, listen, I think I can just say again, my mandate is to build, to improve the performance of all our brands today. You know, we're very attentive to things that could happen as well along the way, stay agile, but that's not the current mandate.
Good. Any questions here? Okay, we have one on the front row. If you wait for the microphone. Thanks.
Yes, Martin from Ilmarinen. What would be the magnitude of the Vita loss-making businesses, if there are such, like in terms of, let's say the free cash flow? Would it be like EUR 20 million that you could spare for your business? What would be the magnitude, just to get it right, because it's easier to cut than grow.
It's easier to cut than grow, especially when you are making the world's greatest cutting tools. That's of course, the recipe is from that perspective clear. We have not disclosed brand profitabilities. We have actually today disclosed the volumes of some of our key brands in the revenues. Easily when you look at the chart, you can see that some are performing less good than some others are. We have not gone into that detail of disclosure. That's, I know for your, and many others' Excel models in this room, might be interesting data point, but that doesn't help when the guys are visiting our customers and distributors, showing that, "Hey, here we make this much money." I know exactly what that would lead then as a discussion that, how much of that actually belongs to the wholesalers or distributors-
Yeah.
... retailers, how much better terms they need to do because we are doing so fine with a certain brand. They don't actually have any concern if there is a brand that's, kind of, feeling bad or even bleeding. You won't get that type of a support from distributors.
There's also maybe just a little added point on that. There's also, as we were mentioning, each brand has their own path, their own trajectory, and that's what we're guiding towards. You know, there are some brands that can have a more tactical business model as well. Some of the smaller brands on the reset, for example, can have a different model. i.e., exclusives by country with a partner or more of a partner model, that could be more beneficial for us as well and for the partner. There's also that can be part of the way forward as well.
There is a follow-up on the brand question I asked Daniel, now I need to ask it from Jyri, or that's the guidance from the viewer online. How patient, Jyri, are you with the small brands or the ones that are not, they're high above in profitability?
If they're really small, then that correlates somehow inversely to the patience. Of course, it's always the big stones you put to the jar and then the sand and then the water, and if it's kind of on the water category that fills the last spots, then the impact. It's about capital allocation. It's how much bang we get for the buck. If we invest in some of our global accelerators and get a return here, and then we have a small brand, by fixing it somehow, there might be a cost associated with that. The how much does it move the needle? We need to choose our battles because Jussi is not promising from the petty cash unlimited budgets for everything.
No. On that one actually releasing the cash as such is not only the brand issue. You have also different type of supply chain models you have in place, and I know that you have been already attacking or have attacked already on those ones. It's not only brand side, it's also supply chain side where we can release a lot.
I see that we still have at least two questions here in the chat. Are there any questions at the live audience? Maria.
The compensation report, I think you can look, I mean, what are the CEO compensation based on, like, what metrics. I'm not really sure that if that going to be included, I mean, for Daniel and Steffen going forward. Maybe in a bit more elaboration that, I mean, what would be the priorities, I mean, if we think about growth, profitability, return on capital employed? How, Jyri, I mean, you will compensate, I mean, for your, I mean, two leaders sitting besides you?
It's a-
That's a good question.
... combina-, What am I compensating? Oh.
Thanks for asking on my behalf, Maria.
That was a paid question apparently. The variable parts of these two gentlemen sitting next to me are related to top line growth, not with a huge weight because there are some fundamentals in the turnaround that need to be done. EBIT being a big one and quite equal weight with cash flow. Historically, how we could measure and how still the budgets for this year and the plans for this year were made, we didn't have the legal structure, so cash flow is a partial cash flow, which is the operating cash flow, including the CapEx element and the inventory change.
We were not technically able to separate accounts payable and accounts receivable because we had, in most countries where we had both businesses, one legal entity and even certain distributors were dealing with both products. Starting next year, that will be then a more total kind of net working capital performance, but now inventories is definitely something that these gentlemen can control in their domain.
Good. I think we're soon running out of time, so maybe short answers on the last questions. For Jussi, this one is for you. How do you see cost volatility affecting your ambition achievements?
Cost volatility on long term, i.e., for 2026, 2030 period. It's not-
It's not.
... specifically said there?
No. No.
You were asking for a short answer, yeah. Of course, the main component of what we have seen, the prices when it comes to logistic and that kind of things which are then oil related, those are the ones, especially Steffen, you have been successfully mitigated so far.
Those are the ones what we have. The main raw materials, be it aluminum, in smaller scale also gold and silver, what you have, those we have hedged. That's well in line. When we have planned our 2026, 2030 period, of course we have assumed a standard inflation in therefore. Having said that already earlier, if there are these kind of black swans to come which actually are peaking up then in cost side or dropping out the revenues, then we need to go back to those levers what we have to pull. We can run cost out programs. We can scale down some of the operations if so needed there.
Instead of having a very detailed plans how the cost volatility will impact, we are more focusing on that toolbox what we have to mitigate different type of ups and downs.
Thank you, Jussi. Then final one from the online viewers, Jyri, this one is for you. It's a big theme, digitalization, how is that seen as an enabler to achieving your ambitions for the Group and the BAs?
It's a very broad topic, digitalization. It has to do with our own efficiencies where we always have potential to improve, and that's what we are every day working on. Fortunately, there are many other companies around the world helping us in with their work, contributing with new tools and to improve there. In Daniel's presentation, the e-com topic was addressed when you look at the CapEx numbers, historical CapEx numbers in Jussi's presentation, you can see that there was a period where we invested a lot into digitalization that was a lot into the e-com, but different platforms, and then through acquisitions we inherited different platforms.
That's now all going under one SaaS type of a model where we are not taking kind of the role to develop the platform, and you mentioned Shopify, which probably is the largest of its kind in the e-com industry, than to ride with those developments and their budgets are slightly bigger than our revenues just to develop the platform. That's one of those elements. When we talk and read the newspapers, there is always AI mentioned in every places.
I have a hard time figuring out how AI would change the fundamental utility function of our products, meaning if you are a law firm and you are selling legal advice, it might be easier that some of the simpler stuff you might get through a dialogue with AI solved, but still your bushes in the garden won't be cut and when you eat and drink because we won't be Our nutrition won't be kind of, we don't plug in into AI ourselves, and we want to enjoy the nice moment with good food and then have the beautiful tableware and the glassware in front of us to enjoy, make that moment perfect. That's where digitalization is likely to have a very small role in our situation.
On the access to the market, getting the consumer's awareness, Steffen showed only one nice video, but there are many on the one-strike splits and so forth that people, consumers are watching through way more than any advertising of sports cars or anything like that. That describes that it's a channel topic, but I don't see it as a threat to us as a business.
Good. I think maybe it's good to end on those words and wrap up this Capital Markets Day. Thank you all for participating, and have a nice rest of the week.