Hello everyone, and welcome to Harvia's Q1 2024 earnings webcast. My name is Matias Järnefelt. I'm the CEO of the group, and with me I have Ari Vesterinen, our CFO.
Hi.
To begin with the presentation, I will cover first the highlights of the quarter, and after me, Ari will be covering the financials in more detail. First, top line: our revenue increased by 2.3% to EUR 42.4 million. Organic growth was 1.4%. During the quarter, we had some negative impact from the political strikes taking place in Finland. The sales results were supported by strong sales development outside Europe, both in North America and our APAC Middle East and Africa regions. On the other hand, we faced some severe headwinds in Northern Europe. Market continued to stabilize in Central Europe. However, the level of demand in Central Europe continues to be below its normal long-term potential. Our good performance in North America continued to support our sauna room sales since the majority of our business there is selling complete sauna kits or sauna rooms to the markets.
On the other hand, weakness in Northern European business impacted especially our equipment business, namely wood-burning heater sales. Profitability and cash flow were on a strong level. Q1 adjusted operating profit was EUR 10.1 million, which is around 9% more than Q1 last year. Adjusted operating profit margin was around 24%. Cash flow continued to be on a high level, and cash conversion was 95%. We were able to deliver these strong profit and cash flow results due to high performance in our operations, as well as our commercial execution, including pricing management to optimize for both sales and margin. At the same time, we also saw support from inflation being less in some of the key materials gases and components in certain key markets of ours. Going forward, we have a heavy focus on driving growth.
We already have a strong level of profitability, and the key lever for us to drive the value of the company is to scale the business up. We have been implementing a number of activities during Q1. One of them is that we've acquired land around our North American factory, which will support the continued development of the site for the years to come. We have also implemented our new organizational structure effective 1st of January, and it has started well. Overall, we stay very positive in terms of long-term outlook for the business where we are. A bit more detail for the Q1 results. As said, revenue was EUR 42.4 million. That's EUR 1 million more than the Q1 last year. At comparable exchange rates, revenue increased by 2.7%, and organic revenue growth was, as mentioned, 1.4%.
The difference between organic and overall revenue growth is due to our rather small acquisition of Phoenix El-Mec, a component manufacturer in Italy, last year. Operating profit was EUR 9.9 million, and adjusted operating profit, as said, EUR 10.1 million, which is roughly 800,000 more than the year before. Relative profitability increased by 1.4 percentage points to 23.8%. At comparable exchange rates, the adjusted operating profit was EUR 10.2 million and 24% of the revenue. Earnings per share during the quarter were EUR 0.40, and that compares to EUR 0.34 the year before. Operative free cash flow was EUR 11.1 million. We are very solid. Net debt was EUR 26.5 million, and our leverage is 0.6.
The rationale here is that we feel that there's plenty of opportunities for growth in the market, both organic and inorganic, and we want to make sure that we have more cash to invest when the opportunity arises. Equity ratio was 52.4%. During the quarter, we've continued to implement systematically our strategy. Increasing the value of average purchase essentially means we want to get more money out of every sauna built or every sauna renovated. One key part of that strategy is continuing to sell our full sauna kits or sauna solutions, and North American performance is heavily driven by our success here. Also, we have been selling well our premium range of offerings during the quarter, especially in Central Europe, where we see, on average, higher prices for the equipment compared to, for example, our Northern European region.
We are definitely working on an ongoing basis to deliver, in the future, even more exciting innovations to the market supporting this strategy. In terms of geographical expansion, over the past years, we've expanded our distribution, and currently, our products are sold in around 90 countries. Right now, our key priority is to make sure that we drive actively market-making and take share in the most important markets, for example, the U.S. and Japan, being examples. And I'm very happy to see that the results of this systematic work are also bearing fruit, as can be seen in our performance, for example, in the U.S. And Japan was a key driving force for our growth in APAC, Middle East, and Africa.
At the same time, we recognize that still the majority of our business is coming from Europe, and it's very important that we are able to turn it back to sustainable growth, and we are implementing a number of activities to support our European business in the quarters to come. One core pillar of our competitive advantage is that we are able to produce products that markets want and do that in a sensible, effective manner. There our operative performance plays a key role. Again, I would like to thank our team in Harvia for delivering such strong results again during this quarter, and we've continued also developing our capabilities for future improvements in productivity. As mentioned, we also acquired land around our West Virginia factory so that we can continue to invest both to continue to modernize production and also increase capacity as market demand requires.
The new organization model became effective from 1st of January, and I'm happy to report that it has started to perform well. Here we can see the geographical and product group split of our revenue. As communicated during last year, we changed somewhat our geographical segments. Now we have four regions, Northern Europe, which consists of the Nordic countries, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, as well as the Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. It also includes Iceland. The green one here is Continental Europe. That includes Germany and the other European countries. Red is North America, and yellow is APAC, Middle East, and Africa. Here you can see that 60% of our revenue came from the European regions, 28% came from Northern Europe, and 32% came from Continental Europe.
The biggest shift in this picture is that the Northern European weight of our total revenue distribution was less than the year before. One year ago, it was 34%, and this year, 28%. On the other hand, the North American role continued to grow from 27% of our revenue last year to 32% this year. Some slight increase also in our APAC and Middle East in terms of the share of the total pie. Revenue by product group still continues to be dominated by what I would call the equipment business, mainly selling heating equipment and control units. The blue one is saunas and Scandinavian hot tubs. The sales for saunas and Scandinavian hot tubs were supported by our strong performance in North America. However, Scandinavian hot tub sales declined, and that's why the share did not change too much compared to last year.
So here we can see the regional sales development. Of course, there's one glaring exception in this picture, which is the red on Northern Europe declining by EUR 2.4 million compared to Q1 last year. That's a 17% decline. This is basically a combination of a number of things. One is that in Northern Europe, the biggest market for us is Finland, and in Finland, the construction market and also the property market are at very low levels. Typically, when consumers make a sauna renovation, it has to have a trigger event like a move. Another trigger event, of course, is building a new house. And because of the property market and construction market being on a low level, that does have an impact.
Another big market for us in Northern Europe is Sweden, where, as mentioned already in our Q4 report during last year, there is a significant customer channel shift taking place as one of our key customers is restructuring their retail network in Sweden. On the other hand, we see a greater development in North America, and our North American business has already basically from 2019 to 2023, it's 4 times as big, and it continued to grow again by nearly 24%. Of course, this is a great performance and heavily supportive to our business and will continue to play a strong role in our strategy also going forward. APAC and Middle East and Africa also grew over 20%, and the main market driving this performance is Japan. We have been also taking a very active role in driving the market through our Harvia Japan Limited joint venture.
Continental Europe remained flat compared to last year. Revenue by product group is now not so big red marks anymore compared to, for example, some of the reports during the last year and more of blue, which is, of course, great. Saunas and Scandinavian hot tubs grew by EUR 500,000. That's 5% compared to last year. And as said, sauna room sales grew more than that, and Scandinavian hot tub sales declined. Accessories and heater stones also performed pretty well during the quarter. Now let's look at then our quarterly performance both in terms of revenue and adjusted operating profit since 2021 to this year. One of the things that you could draw your attention to is the fact that when we compared the quarters last year to this year, we can see that the biggest quarter during 2023 was Q1.
That was the only quarter during last year where we sold more than EUR 40 million worth of delivered more than EUR 40 million worth of revenue. We increased that. Looking at Q2 and Q3 from last year, we can see that the base in terms of comparison figures is much lower. Another point to make regarding Q1 performance is that actually with EUR 42.4 million, it's the second highest Q1 ever, with the exception being the Q1 2022, which was the all-time high at nearly EUR 51 million. In terms of adjusted operating profit, we delivered EUR 10.1 million, and that's more than during any of the quarters during last year. We see plenty of opportunities for Harvia to grow. One of them is that we want to play in all of the three global sauna types.
That's the Nordic sauna, the steam sauna, and infrared sauna, and also play more of the solutions game, which is a strategic priority for us. Right now, most of our revenue comes from selling equipment to the Nordic sauna, and the shift to solutions is supportive to our long-term growth ambitions. In the coming years, we have the ambition to significantly grow also our business in infrared and steam saunas. The strategic priorities, we continue to drive them systematically, increasing the average purchase value. As said, essentially, we want to get more money out of any sauna built or renovated. Geographical expansion is very much about being active in market-making in markets that matter, and productive improvement continues to be in the heart of our strategy also going forward. Now, Ari, you can go through the finances more in detail.
Yeah, thank you.
Okay, here we have the comparison table of the most important finances. Okay, the revenue grew 2.3%. This is the accounting revenue. There is something in the background also. Last year, we had really the pipeline quite empty. Order stock was very well shipped at the end of March. Now we shifted for certain reasons. The strikes in the harbors and also for the sake of effectiveness, some sales did the Q2. So this describes just the accounting numbers, but the effect is, well, over EUR 1 million at least in the comparison between the two years. But yeah, we are reporting the accounting numbers. Then what is important is here to see how the adjusted operating profit has improved in relation to the sales. We were having a 2.3% increase in the sales, but the adjusted operating profit increased almost 9%.
So our effectiveness of the company has been improving quite nicely. This time, it came, if you compare the interim report line by line, mainly from the difference in the material and service costs. We have been not anymore facing so strong inflation as in the past, and we have quite good pricing power in respect of the sales prices. So we have been improving our material margins quite nicely still. Then the basic earnings per share has been improving also clearly more than the sales increased. That's due to certain actions in tax planning and other financing costs, which have been going down thanks to the good cash position, which has been invested to earn some interests.
Net debt has gone down substantially compared to last year, and that's because of the strong cash position and tight control of the working capital, which has also gone down about EUR 9 million compared to last year and a couple of million EUR compared to the end of last year. So, the company has very strong financials, good profitability, and we are really happy about the situation where we are now after the recovery years from the COVID and so forth. As you see, we have been also able and willing to employ more people for Harvia Group. End of last year, we had 605 employees, now 20 more after three months. So we are growing in production and in operations. Here we see the development of the cash conversion and the free cash flow. It's always been very strong in Harvia, and that development continued also this quarter.
As we see from the left-hand picture, the interest-bearing net debt and leverage have been going down quite rapidly. The peak time in Q3 2022 was after the acquisition of the EOS minority, last 20%. And after that, we have been earning quite well money and controlling our working capital, not having too high investment volumes. So we are going down with the net debt quite rapidly. Actually, we had end of Q3 altogether EUR 51.5 million cash, and we tried to earn also interest with that. But it's also, as Matias mentioned, to be prepared for potential acquisitions. We would have, of course, the opportunity to also pay back the loans, but we don't do it right now. The net financial items have been quite stable, even if the interest rates have gone up.
But since we have some cash earnings, also interest income, so that stabilized the situation a little. Here we see the investments in tangible and intangible assets. They have been growing in Q1 2024, and that's mainly due to the investment in the plot of land in the U.S. around our current factory, 8.7 hectares roughly. So we have the opportunity to expand the factory and the logistic facilities also in the future. The distribution of the shares has changed quite much compared to last year. End of Q1 a year ago, we had about 5% less international investors, 39.5%, and now 44%. So the international investment funds have shown great interest towards Harvia, and they have been investing again in Harvia's shares. The share which has gone down are the Finnish households.
We have now there about 28% of the shares in Finnish households, and it was almost 6% more a year ago in this time. You can see that development also from the right picture, how the amount of the shareholders, there are mainly small shareholders, households, private people, that amount of shareholders has gone down. But at the same time, the market value of the shares has increased from roughly EUR 410 million to EUR 720 million. Harvia's long-term financial targets, as you may know, we target average annual revenue growth exceeding 5% and profitability over 20%, adjusted operating profit margin, which we exceeded clearly during Q1 also. The leverage target is between 1.5-2.5. Now we were at 0.6, so we've been quite strong in cash, and that means also that we are under the leverage range currently. Harvia pays regularly increasing dividends and biennially.
We had the organizational management changes from the 1st of January, as Matias said, and that has been implemented very well. And we are now going forward, based on the new organization for geographical regions and EOS as a special brand, and then the group functions. And internally in the management level, we are also reporting and targeting the results on that level. And Jennifer Thayer has also studied very well in the U.S. to manage the U.S. business. We had actually last week the AGM annual general meeting of Harvia. And the annual general meeting approved, based on the board of directors' proposal, EUR 0.68 per share to be paid as dividends and the remainder of the distributable funds being transferred to shareholders' equity. And the first installment will be paid actually beginning of next week, EUR 0.34.
And the other EUR 0.34 will be paid in late October 2024. Okay, questions. We have had some questions here coming through the chat, and I start just from the beginning, and you can answer, I can answer, and so forth. Any comments from the start of infrared saunas under Almost Heaven Saunas in the U.S.?
I think it's a bit early to comment on that. Overall, we see plenty of opportunities for a stronger role for Harvia also in infrared saunas in the U.S. market. We know that infrared plays a very significant part of the U.S. overall sauna market and that by being mainly focused on the traditional saunas in the U.S. has limited our market potential, and we are determined to change that. We see that there's plenty of very interesting differentiation opportunities for us in the infrared.
Of course, one example is so-called multimode saunas, that sauna cabins that come with both traditional heater and also infrared panels. But a key competitive advantage for us compared to the current competition is that we have a very efficient production facility in West Virginia. We have certainly plans to offer high-quality, very attractive, innovative, Made in America infrared saunas in America going forward.
Okay. Also, a U.S.-related question. Do you have more local production in the U.S. than the competition? Could this become a competitive advantage?
We have a very significant production facility in the kind of scale of Harvia in Lewisburg, West Virginia, as mentioned. You can probably read between the lines that the acquisition of land around that manufacturing facility is really opening up interesting opportunities for us to keep investing in our operational capabilities there.
In terms of the heating equipment manufacturing, we actually don't do it at the moment in the U.S., but of course also something that we will be assessing on an ongoing basis. Overall, we feel that compared to our main competitors, we are very well positioned in terms of our manufacturing capability in the U.S., and we, as said, are determined to keep investing in this and making sure that we stay ahead of competition.
When do you think the Swedish distribution issue can normalize?
Of course, this is something that is really driven by our essential key customer. It's related to this customer actually closing down their consumer-focused store chain. My personal assessment is that it will take the whole year before the kind of new kind of distribution landscape really kind of settles in Sweden.
Where have you been hiring the most people during Q1?
What countries or tasks? Do you see the need to hire more people in coming quarters?
Well, essentially, we are a growth-focused company. Some of the increase in the headcount that you saw there is related to an increase in production volume. That's under direct labor. We have also invested in indirect labor. That basically is, for example, sales. It's innovation and product development. You know the investment in people is really, I would say, balanced between different sort of capability areas of Harvia. One part of our strategy is to strengthen our regional presence. We can see that, for example, in the U.S. or in Japan, the fact that we have feet on the ground and are more active in really, I would say, taking control of our destiny in important markets does pay off.
You know our regional presence is something that we keep investing. Another area which we expect to keep investing in terms of kind of fixed cost or indirect labor is R&D because we really see opportunity to broaden our portfolio. We talk about infrared. We talk about multimode saunas. We talk about steam, et cetera. And these products will come from - they will not come from nowhere. We need to have the people who are experts in these areas. So we do plan to keep investing in these areas.
In the interim report, there is also one section, personnel, and there you see also the changes of the headcount, full-time equivalents, in different companies. And also one source of the increase in the headcount is the unit in Italy, 11 persons. A year ago, we didn't have it yet.
But as Matias said, we are planning to hire more people, and we need them definitely.
How much is the impact of strikes in Q1 in euros? In which segment sales—this is visible?
Is that maybe something you can—
Yeah. Well, this is a bit a soft area because there is always some shift of sales from one month to the other. And there we had also Easter, the long holiday season at the end of March. By the way, the main wood-burning sauna heater season normally starts after the Easter in Scandinavia. But we have to just estimate, and we don't have exact figures. But at the, let's say, in the middle of March, I estimated that shift from March to April to be about EUR 500,000 or something like that.
Actually now, when we look back to the shipments, what we didn't do, we piled them together and tried to organize the transfer as effective as possible and logistically wise. I estimate that that shift was about EUR 1-2 million at the end of quarter one. But as said, this is not an exact accounting figure. This is just an estimate.
Yeah, that's another question to the same topic. So it was partly strikes, but partly also the seasonality and the calendar position of Easter holidays.
Did the strikes in Finland postpone shipments, or were the losses permanent?
Well, maybe I can comment since you already—no permanent. So we should be seeing a positive impact in our quarter two figures. Essentially, it was timing, as Ari mentioned. Overall, we've, in my mind, managed the situation towards our customers in a very professional manner.
We've seen a lot of, I would say, understanding from our customers. The assessment is that there's not really a big damage done to our customer relationship or the customer's business.
Ignoring the soft market environment, what are the main bottlenecks holding back your growth?
Well, of course, when we look at the figures, we can see that our outside European regions are performing very well. And they are, of course, they have become also, in terms of absolute numbers, so important for us that continued growth in those areas, of course, is very critical. And that's why we systematically keep investing in increasing our commercial presence and also matching our supply chain that we can effectively meet the needs of those regions. We are also broadening our portfolio.
At the moment, I would say we are somewhat limited with our portfolio since it's so heavily skewed towards the Nordic sauna. We need to invest in a broader portfolio for infrared and steam in the coming years. Around 60% of our sales is currently coming from Europe. Given its large weight in our revenue portfolio, it's important that we also make that market move. It's at the moment quite significantly impacted by the market conditions. We are certainly working very hard to make sure that what's in our control, we do as best as possible and drive these regions also back to growth.
8% of revenues come from the APAC-MEA region. When do you expect the Japan joint venture to bear fruit in terms of significant revenue growth in that area?
I would say already now.
Of course, the starting levels in terms of absolute figures have been fairly small, but it has been growing fast. And looking at the 23% growth we delivered in APAC-MEA, the majority of it came from Japan. So it's very pleasing, actually, to see that areas where we decide to focus on and really drive determined action, it does yield results. And this just increases our confidence level that we are, of course, discussing internally whether we could multiply this approach in some other significant-sized Asian markets to really scale the business in Asia up. So it has basically two kind of contributions to us. One, in terms of absolute numbers, it starts to turn the needle in Japan. And the other one, it's a great learning platform for us, which we hope to scale also in other markets.
On the investment made in North America, how do you see capacity evolve over the next years?
In the U.S., our business has really multiplied in size. From 2019 to 2023, our revenue, actually, we are 4 times as big as in 2019, and we continue to grow this year. We already made quite significant investment in our capacity in 2021. And we are, again, seeing a need that we need to invest more into the site to fulfill the very positive demand in the market. There are many ways for us to manage demand.
Kind of one is that what we are doing, that during even the kind of lower seasons, like quarter two and quarter three, typically are a bit lower in sales, we actually keep the production lines running full steam, building inventories that we can then sell and deliver during the hot sellout seasons, like quarter four and quarter one. So this is, of course, one one one means for us to make sure that we have the goods available when there's demand in the marketplace. But it is clear that we also need to, in the coming years, increase our capacity as the demand keeps growing.
In light of your biggest competitor in Finland, Sauna360, being acquired by Masco, do you think you'll eventually become a potential target for bigger players in the home improvement or leisure sector, especially in North America?
Well, of course, we've taken note of the acquisition of Sauna360 by Masco, which is a large U.S.-based stock-listed company. There was another quite significant acquisition made by Kohler that's a privately held, similar-sized company as Masco. They bought KLAFS, a large competitor of ours, particularly in the high-end sauna cabin business in Europe. To us, this is a signal of a few things. One is that this is an interesting market, which has interesting long-term growth dynamics. That's the reason why big players are also eyeing on this market. I will not comment on Harvia being on anyone's target list, but it is clear that we have certainly our own target list because we see that there is a clear opportunity for consolidation in this still quite fragmented market.
If you think about the sauna products and solutions market, Harvia being last year EUR 150 million top-line business, and we are the market leader, and we talk about EUR multi-billion business, it tells that how fragmented this business still continues to be. With our brand, with our operational efficiency, best practices, financial position allowing for investment, we feel that we have a great opportunity to be a real consolidator in the market. That is something that we stay focused on our own game, both in organic growth, in operational efficiency, improving our product portfolio and completeness and competitiveness, and also looking actively at the acquisition market.
I can probably answer the next question. Could you explain why the general meeting rejected the revised remuneration policy for the company's governing bodies? As the resolution is advisory, what will be the consequences?
Well, first of all, this compensation remuneration policy was well passed through the AGM in 2020 when it was represented last time. The only change what was made after that time was the percentage of the annual bonuses, theoretical annual bonuses for the CEO of the company. It was raised from 50%-100%. That's really just an option for future. As you may have noticed, we had also the remuneration report in our annual report, and it passed the AGM very well. It was well accepted. We are still in the same practices in practice than what was stated in that report. There was a new option and probably a new climate also among the, let's say, voting proxies about these remuneration policies.
And parallel to that, our board of directors has also set up a new personnel and compensation committee, which will certainly thoroughly analyze the situation and the normal practices that next year in the spring 2025, the company will introduce the remuneration policy again to the AGM. And let's see what happens then. So let's see if we have other new questions here. Okay, Japan-related also, but I ask it once more. Will your joint venture with Japan give you a chance to enter the onsen market even indirectly?
Well, Japan overall is a very interesting market. As the person asking the question correctly pointed out, it has a very long kind of geothermal spa history, so onsens. And that's, I believe, one of the reasons why the uptake of sauna, kind of this healing with heat philosophy, is so well received in Japan.
Actually, Harvia is a company which has ample growth dimensions, growth opportunities. In the long term, you know, I see really opportunities in more, kind of, I would say, spa direction as well. But even in the, I would say, core sauna market, where we talk about steam, infrared, traditional Nordic saunas, but more in the solutions-centric way of selling, there's a lot of growth opportunities, geographical expansion, and really taking a stronger market-maker role in big countries. It is just about prioritization. It's managing our resources, making sure that, you know, when we focus on something, we really get results and get it done. And you know what I don't see for us is that we try to kind of spread our wings too far apart, and then our resources might be too thin.
It's better to concentrate on the key battles that we really want to win now in the coming years. And essentially, they are North America key markets in Asia, bringing Europe back to growth and strengthening our solutions business for Nordic saunas and strengthening our position in infrared and steam.
Okay. What do you think needs to happen to Nordic-European sales to recover?
Well, the Northern European situation is actually quite interesting. It's not just one thing that's affecting it. There are a number of things. One, of course, is the construction and property market. If you think about the Northern European market that we report, by far the majority is one country. It's Finland. And in Finland, of course, construction markets are significantly down. And also, because the property market is down, people are not moving that much.
So, of course, one thing that would really support us is that construction and property markets start to pick up again. Visibility for a more stable and maybe lower interest environment than during the past couple of years for sure would be helpful for us. And then, as said, there are some what I would call one-time changes. A big customer is rearranging their distribution in Sweden. That I would take in the assumption, as mentioned, that it will still impact our business in Sweden during this year. At the same time, we are really pushing innovation. We are broadening our distribution. For example, in the Swedish market, now that our key partner for consumer-driven hardware retail is changing its strategy, we are actively building new partnerships there. So there is certainly a lot of activities ongoing. Actually, then there are some things that are pretty much beyond anyone's control.
Like, actually, we had a really, I would say, long and Arctic winter in Finland this year. One of the key drivers for the quarter one sales in Finland traditionally is the wood-burning heaters for the summer cottages. The cottage season now, because of the winter conditions, really has shifted from like starting already in March to now really starting in April. So that's, of course, something that was out of our control. Years are not always equal. But we are certainly vigilant, building our capabilities. When the property and construction market starts to revive, we have what it takes to strike back.
Is there a need to increase marketing spend in the U.S., or does the social media channels and word-of-mouth work as well?
I would say we are very lucky that the category where we play is very interesting for media and also for celebrities. So you can, for example, take an exercise, go to Google and search. That's Cristiano Ronaldo, sauna, Instagram. And you'll see plenty of Cristiano's pictures that he's posted himself in Instagram stories. And as you might know, it would be very expensive for Harvia to pay for posts like this. And it's, of course, not just Cristiano, but there's Kim Kardashian's and Neymar's and Lady Gaga's, etc. So there's a lot of celebrities that create kind of market visibility that is worth actually $10 million-$100 million. At the same time, yes, I do see that there is some need for us to strengthen our marketing investments also in strategic markets.
We want that Harvia really becomes a true brand that is more widely known than just, I would say, within the kind of professionals within the sector and kind of real sauna enthusiasts. Over time, hopefully, Harvia will really be maybe not the household brand as such, but still something that consumers do recognize and appreciate as a real quality brand for healthy lifestyle.
Okay. Outside of Nordic countries, Japan and U.S., which seem to be the hottest markets for you, what is a country that has emerged in the last few years, let's say, post-COVID, as particularly promising growth-wise?
There are actually many. I can take some examples. If we go to, for example, Asia, Australia has performed very well, again, starting from low base but developing very nicely.
There, kind of the key logic is that you look at the U.S., and then you'll see some years later the same thing happening in Australia. So kind of the sauna boom in the U.S. seems to spill over to Australia in a very positive way for us. There are good developments in a number of other markets as well. So when we look at, for example, China, at the moment, it's still the kind of main purpose for China in our business at the moment is that we have one factory there that is also exporting internationally. So it's actually a more important manufacturing country for us. But increasingly, it starts to be a kind of a market for domestic demand as well. So we see certainly opportunities there. So there are a number of examples.
I could say even a place like India, which is just a huge country. And you could think that, wow, it's a very hot country. But then again, still, when we look at the U.S. as an example, we see Florida, always summer; Texas, always summer; Southern California, always summer. And they are great places for our sauna business. And we interestingly see also increasing interest in places like India.
Okay. Thank you very much. We don't have any further questions in the chat. Thank you for following. Let's stay in touch.
Thank you very much.