Welcome to Kesko's Digital Hour. Digitalization has a crucial role in Kesko's transformation in these recent years, and can definitely be seen as a competitive edge. As the title indicates, we have an hour dedicated to Kesko's digitalization. We have a slight change in our original agenda as our President and CEO, Mikko Helander, had some flu-like symptoms and is not attending today. Not to worry, CFO Jukka Erlund steps in and presents Mikko's part. After Jukka's presentation, Anni Ronkainen, Kesko's Chief Digital Officer, dives deeper into digitalization. At the end, you have the great opportunity to ask questions via chat function in the web screens. Please note there's a slight delay before I get the message, so type in your question as soon as it arises. Without further ado, Jukka, please, the stage is yours.
Thank you, Hanna. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, on my behalf as well. Let's start with our operations first. As you know, we have three divisions with the retail sales of EUR 14 billion. The Finnish Grocery Trade covering both the consumer-driven retailing sales, but also the B2B-driven Kespro food service business. Our Building and Technical Trade in eight Northern European countries, serving technical trade professional customers, as well as builders merchant professional customers, and consumer customers in do-it-yourself operations. Car Trade in Finland having all the operations in the value chain from importing to retailing of new cars and used cars and services as well. Digitalization has a very important role in our strategy. It's one of the growth drivers in our strategy.
As you know, we have the growth strategy for all of our three divisions. I mentioned earlier, Grocery Trade, Building and Technical Trade, and Car Trade. Customer experience and digitalization play a very important role in all of those three divisions' strategies. Looking at our financial performance, digitalization, data utilization, and also technology have contributed strongly into our operations and profitability. Not just the top line driven sales growth but also improving our margin and our cost efficiency as well. When we look at the big picture, since 2014 we've been able to grow our operations substantially in our growth business areas, and our retail sales have increased more than EUR 4 billion during the last 10 years.
A lot of that growth has been enabled by the systems and the platforms that we have had already earlier in our operations. And that has helped us to gather substantial synergies and cost improvements and our cost ratio has come down substantially also during the last years. When we look at our digital sales, currently it's around worth EUR 1.4 billion. We have had good growth both in the B2B-driven digital sales, but also in the B2C-driven sales. If we look at, for example, our last 12 months' growth in our consumer-driven businesses in online, all of the businesses, groceries, building and home improvement trade, and sports trade, have increased their online sales by more than 50%.
As you can see from the graph here, B2B operations actually play a very important part of our digital sales, both Kespro's B2B customers around 40%, and also Onninen's Technical Trade around 35%. It's very important we understand that our digital sales are customer driven in all of our businesses and customer segments. We want to be the forerunner in trading sector digitalization, and we are using digitalization in two ways in a nutshell: to improve our customer experiences, and to make our operations more efficient. We'll do a deep dive to this in my presentation and also Anni's presentation a bit more in detail, but it's very important to understand that we, at the same time, target for better customer experience and better efficiency in our operations. A few words about the divisions at the very high level.
The Grocery Trade is well positioned to continue sales growth. We do believe that online sales will remain permanently above the pre-pandemic level and will continue to grow. We are using also, in the future, customer data to create store-specific business ideas and to use and utilize the data in our core processes in order to make our everyday decisions more wiser and more customer driven, for example, in replenishment, in assortment planning selections, and also in pricing. It's obvious that we will continue our strong development of our both digital services as well as the online sales in our Grocery division also going forward. Looking at the Building and Technical Trade, we have country-specific actions to support the growth.
It's needless to say that even though we have country-specific actions, we also want to get the synergies between the countries, and here digital IT and technology base plays a big role. As mentioned earlier, we have three segments here, main customer segments here. It's a professional customers in technical trade, it's the professional customers in builders merchant, and the consumer customers in do-it-yourself. Each of these customer segments need a tailored, online and digital services, and that's what we are currently doing according to our strategy. It's also highly important to understand that also the efficiency plays a very important role in building a technical trade. We are re-engineering our processes, utilizing our common core, ERP systems, et cetera, in order to drive our efficiency even higher, going forward. Shortly about the car trade.
The car industry as such is going through a transformation. And also our division is going through a renewal which is performing and proceeding really well and it's really forming the basis for our growth. Digitalization and customer experience is central to the car trade strategy and also the efficiency part is highly important also in our car trade strategy. We want to serve our customers the best possible way when it comes to selling new cars, used cars, and also the services. Good. Let's look very shortly at the efficiency side of our digitalization, IT, and technology before we go to Anni's presentation. When we look at our efficiency, I would raise three different areas here. It's about realizing the synergies, it's about process efficiency and automation, and it's about utilizing the data and analytics in our processes.
Let's go a bit deeper in all of these three areas. Realizing synergies is really coming from our core common architecture, our core common platforms and systems. It's about economies of scale, utilizing the platforms that we have currently, and especially when we talk about M&A acquisitions. The common core is important but also it's important to understand that we have a common IT function where we of course utilize the IT sourcing, vendor management, and IT service consolidation as the one source of our efficiency. We've been able to drive down our unit cost in IT quite a bit during the last years, so pretty much driving the sales up, and at the same time maintaining a really good efficiency in our IT cost side. The second part is the process efficiency.
Like I said, this is highly important because we have a long track record here when it comes to process re-engineering and here the ERP platforms especially play a big role. We continue developing our ERP platforms t hat's the common core of our operations. In addition to those ERP platforms, we also have already more than 200 processes automated with our Robotic Process Automation, the RPA. The latest technology that we have acquired is also about process mining, so this is the technology that we are utilizing in order to find the bottlenecks and further sort of automation possibilities going further. It's important to understand that we start with the processes, re-engineer those processes, utilize the ERP systems to the maximum, and then go to the RPA and process mining technologies.
The third is the data analytics. We want our processes to be really data-driven. We use data and algorithmic capabilities in our core retailing processes. Like I earlier mentioned, this goes to for example, replenishment, assortment planning, and pricing, even at the store level according to our store-specific business idea. Obviously, data-driven decision support is also highly important. Utilizing the data, IT, and technology to drive our top line growth, our gross margins and cost efficiency has been very fruitful. Our cost ratio on a comparable basis without the impact of the acquisitions has constantly come down during the last quarters and last years. We have been able to utilize the platforms that we have in our systems and generated more sales with these platforms.
Last but not least, a few words about the strategy. We have invested quite a bit also during the last years despite the pandemic situation. The store side CapEx is still the biggest part of our investments, but digital and IT has become more important all the time. As you could see from the previous slide, our IT costs are around EUR 100 million per year, so in that sense, the IT CapEx is not sort of telling the whole picture here. When it comes to new services, the focus area in IT especially and digital is really building the capabilities when it comes to data, when it comes to e-commerce, online offerings, digital platforms, but also the more traditional common core ERP systems and so on.
This is the journey that we will continue, yeah, and even speed up a bit going further. That in a nutshell, when it comes to our big picture of the digital agenda and the efficiency, and now Anni will come and tell a bit more about the customer experience side, technologies, and very interesting deep dives also in the different areas of digital. Thanks, Anni.
Thank you, Jukka, for the presentation. Anni, the stage is now yours.
Yes, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, on my behalf. I'm really happy to be here and share some insight about how we are doing and what kind of cases we are having in the field of digitization at K Group. As Jukka mentions, we are deploying a growth strategy and we believe strongly that in order to be successful here we also have to be successful in customer experience, digitization, and sustainability. In the following 30 minutes or so, I will touch more on the first two topics, customer experience and digitization. When we talk about digitization we always come back to the data. Data is actually in the heart of everything.
In Kesko, K Group, we aim to become a truly data-driven organization where with data analytics and AI, we support our businesses, as Jukka mentions, to both strategic and operative level and give value also to our customers. Where do we get the data? What are the kind of interesting and important data sources for us? Obviously there are several data sources, but when we are talking about the customer data, we have almost 25-year-old loyalty program called Plussa here in Finland. It's a vast asset for us. We have 3.3 million active K-Plussa loyalty customers in our database, meaning that they are regularly using Plussa card when visiting our online or offline stores.
We get information about customers when they are visiting our digital sites in Finland, for example, K-Ruoka or K-Rauta sites. We get tons of feedback from our customers on a yearly basis, more than two million instances of feedback from our grocery and digital service customers. All in all, we kind of get almost 40 million registered purchases per month at K Group's and K-Rauta's stores. This means that 40 million times a customer shows his or her K-Plussa loyalty card and registers the purchases. This is a great source of data for us. One more number to bring up is that we get 1.1 million visits to the K-Ruoka mobile app in a week.
In the Finnish context, this is one of the most famous or most used applications in the local market. In today's presentation, we have a strong focus on grocery trade, but at the end, we will also have a quick view on car and building and technical trade as well. Our data adds value to all stakeholders. It's good to remember that it's not just the customers. As Jukka mentioned earlier, we are using data and also developing various kind of services to all our stakeholders. This means to our own purposes so that we can develop our core processes to be more, for example, efficient in what we are doing in our daily routines.
We want to add real value to our customers by developing new services that helps our customers to have a better everyday life. Of course, super important role is our retailers. We want to provide our retailers with different kind of data sets and tools so that they are able to better run a store-specific business ideas in their particular stores. Of course, last but not least, our partners. Our vendors and suppliers, we are really trying to provide them with more data and information so that they will also be more successful in their operations in our network. Store-specific business idea, as you might know, it's one of the cornerstones in our strategy.
Every physical store has a store-specific business idea in the grocery business in Finland. This means that every single store is tailored to the clientele of the particular stores. This means that we want to equip our retailers with good data sets, with good insights about what their clients look like, what they desire, what is the purchasing power in the area, or what does the competition look like.
At the other hand, we help them with data to run their day-to-day operation and help them to make better operative decisions based on the facts. This is one example, but in addition to that, our retailers have a bunch of different kind of tools in use so that they can run their store-specific business idea. To mention a few, we have a tool to take care of the selection and product recommendations. We have a tool for marketing, w e have tools for online grocery operations, for customer feedback, and to store reporting. Obviously, it's super important that these tools are easy to use for the retailers and they have a very strong mobile access. Next example is about digital signage.
The digitization are entering in the physical stores as well, and currently we are building a nationwide retail media in Finland. Digital marketing streams bring the media inside the store, close to the purchasing decisions, and this combined with the data adds a big value to the advertisers and to suppliers, and also at the same time this improves customer experience in store. The other side of the digital store concept is electronic shelf labels, which have twofold kind of gains. First, they make store operations more efficient and also customer happier because we are able to minimize errors in pricing. We are able to save the store staff times as shelves' prices are automatically obtained from the cash-register system.
We are able to provide more information on diets and allergens automatically and also there's a sustainability angle on this. This saves tons of paper and discarded data strips are recycled into new plastics products as well. Third case is about personalized customer experience in digital channels. As an example, there's a K-Ostokset service, K-Purchase service, where we are sharing our customers' data with them. We are not only sharing the data but also providing customers with suggestions according to their wishes. What does this K-Ostokset service stands for? It's a service inside a K-Ruoka mobile app or website and we are delivering customers' data back to them in a very practical format. Customers have an insight over the past five years to their purchases from a category level into the detailed product level.
Secondly, they can have a look at what's a share of the domestic so Finnish produce in their grocery purchases. They can also set targets to increase the share of these products in the shopping baskets, and if they wish, they can also get some suggestions on matching Finnish products if they kind of wish to have more domestic products in their baskets. There's also health indicators, for example, showing how much customers have bought red meats, sugar, salt, vegetables, fish, and how these purchases match with national health recommendations. Last but not least, you can follow your carbon footprint. What's the share of your grocery purchases? What kind of carbon footprint have you created and what kind of tools or ideas you have to bring it a little bit down.
About online grocery. This is highly interesting topic in the market at the moment and obviously a really focal part of our strategy at K Group as well. According to customer feedback, K-Ruoka is the most user-friendly online grocery service on the market. We provide the largest selection of products, up to 30,000 SKUs, with very competitive prices. We have several kind of delivery options from home delivery to click and collect services. And our service network is nationwide from very south to up to north. K-Ruoka is currently a market leader in the online grocery in Finland. There is 500 individual grocery stores offering online grocery services to the Finnish customers.
The year-on-year growth in 2020 was almost 400%. For, during the first nine months this year, the growth has been about 25% year-on-year. As you can see on the graph here on the left-hand side, if you compare to the 2019, the current volumes are approximately fourfold over two years. During the pandemic, we have been successful in gaining market share. Our market share in 2019 was 41%, and 2020 about 54%. We really expect that online grocery sales will remain at high level in Finland also after post-pandemic and continue to grow. That said, however, the competition is intensifying and we are seeing new players entering the Finnish market.
We are investing and developing online grocery very holistically. First of all, we really believe that we have to win in the digital customer experience. Currently, the NPS shows that we have been quite successful on that. We have really invested in the development on a continuous basis. Currently, we are renewing both the mobile application and the website to really support the seamless customer experience between channels and enhance also the so many times earlier mentioned store-specific business idea implementation. We are developing in-store picking. Majority of the deliveries are picked in-store. Of course, the picking efficiency is super important for retailers. At the same time a few more words about that later. We are piloting the first micro-fulfillment center here in Finland.
We are developing various delivery models. Click and collect is one key driver in here. Our target is to increase click and collect volumes, as it brings both flexibility to our customers, and also it's very cost efficient for the retailers. Last mile logistics. We are developing fast deliveries further. We are investing in delivery planning and customer communication software so that we are really able to communicate to our customers about their deliveries when they are arriving and so forth. Kesko-operated delivery service for high-volume stores is already in place in several hypermarkets at the moment. Let's have a look at fulfillment models next. As said, we are focusing on several fulfillment models or delivery models, or which one is click and collect.
Click and collect has been underdeveloped in the market and overshadowed by home delivery. Our click and collect share has been around 36% and if you compare that share in Sweden, the corresponding number is 50%. Only 20% in the Helsinki region delivery, deliveries are click and collect. The development of click and collect services is important, as I mentioned, for further growth in online grocery and also to give more options to our customers. Currently, home delivery, the next one, is very much preferred by our customers. This Kesko-operated K Transport services is operational already in major cities for stores which have very high order volumes.
At the moment, we are further developing home delivery services to even have a better customer experience. As mentioned earlier, with better customer communication and versatile delivery windows and also trying to really manage the cost of that delivery channel. Last but not least, a few words about fast deliveries. As you know, fast deliveries is a growing global trend and we see the same trend happening here in Finland. We have had some pilots ongoing and the first results are very promising and we are developing the fast deliveries further. In this case, our primary focus is our nationwide network of local neighborhood stores. Why these?
Because the kind of average radius of deliveries is about 1.5 kilometers, we really need to have an intense network in here. Then about micro-fulfillment center. I know this is a very big interest to you. We recently announced that Kesko is building the first MFC in Helsinki to meet the growing customer demand and be able to deliver groceries faster and in a more cost-effective way. Currently we are building the first implementation. It will be located in K-Citymarket in Ruoholahti in Helsinki, very downtown. It includes 45 robots and is based on the micro-fulfillment center concept, for example, used by Walmart and Tesco.
The collection efficiency will be about fourfold compared to the manual in-store picking so a huge leap in the efficiency is expected here. But on top of that, we have access to the store-wide selections, including specialties, which is really, really important to our customers. The estimated average investment is EUR 10 million in this implementation and the completion should be done during the first half of next year. Dematic is our contractor and technology provider here. How does micro-fulfillment center work in practice? We believe that this is the way that complements our competitive advantages in online grocery. The picking happens from three different zones. Main volume comes from automation and fast picking area to ensure cost efficiency.
Goods to person picking covers major part of the volume, about 50%-60%, and the picking efficiency is as high as up to 650 rows an hour. We have the fast picking area covering around 30% of the volume, and picking efficiency is around 120 to 100 rows per hour. This covers all the temperatures, also frozen products. The smallest part but super important in terms of customer experience, is the in-store picking, covering from 5%-10% of the volume. As you can see, this is a reason why we need to improve our efficiency because the picking efficiency on average in stores is from 50 to 70 rows an hour.
This is the kind of the tip of the iceberg where we can add the specialties and the super important products to the customers baskets. Then from these three different zones, we marshal the baskets and then deliver groceries to our customers. All right. We a little bit move to another business areas and one part of our grocery division business is Kespro, which is one of the largest wholesalers of food in Finland. Kespro is really a digital player in the market. As you can see here, that over 80% of the sales goes through digital channels. It's a B2B service so the logistic logic is a little bit different here.
It's tailor-made service for each customer with a customer-specific selection, pricing, delivery times, and logistical models. As this is a B2B service, you can see very high conversion rates here as well. Customers are happy. NPS is more than 80 and value of the digital sales on annual level is approximately EUR 580 million. When it comes to digitization and building and technical trade, Jukka already mentioned earlier that in building and technical trade, we need to serve three very different customers and customer groups' needs. We have technical professionals, professional builders, and consumers. Where the technical professionals, professional builders value very wide selection, very high quality, and rich product information, together with very reliable deliveries at the agreed time.
Our DIY customers or consumers, they value good enough product information, high quality products, and competitive prices and delivery fees with very inspirational content. An example about building and technical trades success stories is Onninen. Onninen is in the business where they offer services for technical builders. So very much in digital sales comes very much in digital sales, almost 40%. They are selling huge variety of products. Their web stores are also tailored for the customer needs with EDI and PunchOut possibilities. Also they have a lot of tools for sales personnel in the store level. Onninen customers value these services a lot and the digital sales is valued at EUR 520 million on annual basis.
Last but not least, a few words about the car trade. The whole car industry, as mentioned, is going through a profound transformation, and digitization, once again, is a big change driver. We at K Group all obviously want to be part of this story. This means that also in car trade, the digitization has a remarkable impact in all our business areas, new cars, used cars, and services, but also to all supporting and back office functions such as finance and IT. In car trade, we are in the beginning of the digital journey but we see a lot of untapped potential here as well. From the current digital presence, a few key numbers, especially in service business, the role of digital channel is crucial. 50% of service bookings are made through digital channels.
Annual digital service sales is about EUR 25 million currently. Also, the digital channels as a customer acquisition channel is super important. We get millions of visits. People are configuring their cars, 250,000 completed car configurations so far. Also these configurations and visits, they are very important sales and service leads to our personnel. It's worth mentioning that 50% of media spent in car trades goes to online media. How we go from here on? Obviously, our digital journey continues. And as it's said that it's still early morning on the web but it's really early morning in utilizing data.
If we currently use about 25% of the data we are having, we believe that in the coming few years, our data utilization might be around 50%. That said, at the same time, the data assets get better and the opportunities to use data in our core business for our customers are getting more versatile. The journey continues from here. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Anni. Thank you, Jukka, for the presentations. I didn't introduce myself in the beginning. I'm Hanna Jaakkola, responsible for Investor Relations at Kesko. I have couple of questions here and you have now good time to send new questions. We have some 20 minutes to answer your questions until the hour is completed. Well, let's start with artificial intelligence, Anni. You mentioned that in the beginning of the presentation. Is Kesko now using artificial intelligence, and if so, how?
Yes. We are using artificial intelligence but we are only tapping the surface at this point. We are using AI for several purposes. We are using that for kind of building better, for example, building better customer experience, building better web services. We are using that for our assortment planning. We are using that a lot for marketing and I think that where we are at the foremost is especially in the marketing. Currently, we have tens of different kinds of cases in production already.
Thank you. Is there any examples in the marketing? What type of or how much marketing is in the digital way nowadays or could you comment a little bit on that?
Yeah. I think that the number is going up all the time. Retail has traditionally been a very kind of old media
[crosstalk] Mm-hmm
...driven but today our kind of ad spend goes more and more to digital. I would say that a little bit different depending on the business. As we
[crosstalk] Mm-hmm
...saw here in car business.
[crosstalk] Yeah
50% is going where we are using AI or marketing automation as such. I would say that it's all about further 50% of everything what we do. We also buy traditional media based on our data and AI.
About robotics, Jukka, you talked about optimization and robotics in your presentation. Are there any low-hanging fruits in the organization to increase that part of the-
Yeah.
[crosstalk] digitalization?
Well, maybe going a bit backwards first or the sort of starting point. I think it's important to understand that first of all, how we look at the situation is that we look at the processes first. Everything start with re-engineering the processes in a way that they are efficient. Then we try to utilize ERP systems and the core systems to sort of maximize the automation.
Mm.
On top of that, if that's not possible in the core systems, then we use robotics to sort of [crosstalk]
Mm
automate those things which are still manual in addition to the sort of ERP systems. Like I said earlier, we have more than 200 processes there. We have had that already for several years but as you know, there's a lot of manual things still in the organization and so on, so we constantly add those sort of new processes where we use RPA. But I think it's important to understand that at the same time we also think about the processes a lot and re-engineer those ones and also invest in the ERP systems because that's the sort of backbone of the whole automation.
To the online grocery business, you mentioned the competition is intensifying. There's a question, d o you have any comments on Oda entering the market? What are the advantages and disadvantages in competing for grocery market shares?
Yeah. Yeah. This is good question. We have. It's been a kind of public news already for somet ime that we are having new players on the market and the Norwegian Oda is currently piloting their services in the Helsinki area. Finland has been a kind of underdeveloped grocery market so it's been quite quiet. It is quite easy for the new players to step in.
Mm.
That's the first thing. On the other hand, I think that we all the players have a little bit different approach to the markets, and we strongly believe on our kind of store-specific business idea. We believe that we have a strong kind of. We can strongly lean on our retailers.
Mm
... which do their uttermost best to make customers happy. At the same time, I think that even though the competition is intensifying, we believe that the market is growing.
Mm.
Well, I think we are quite strong in our strategy and really delivering the strong kind of strong way and a wide variety of products to our customers and also, which is different from Oda, we've kind of giving several delivery options.
Mm
to our customers.
Anything to add?
Yeah. I think it's a combination of a number of things. Like Anni said, it's really about the assortment you can offer to your customers. It's really about the convenience to do the shopping, what are the delivery capabilities that you have, and then it's about the prices of the products and prices of the deliveries and so on. There's a number of things that you can sort of improve and so on. I think that we have quite a lot of those sort of different kind of capabilities.
We have the store network.
Yeah, exactly.
It's quite. According to our research we have done a few years back and continuing with that, there's only very small amount of people who only want to kind of do online grocery shopping. We are kind of agnostic with the channel and really want to offer the same experience both online and offline.
Isn't it? [crosstalk]
Also in grocery.
Isn't it so that the customers that are active on online channel are active also in our physical stores?
Yeah. They are very valuable customers for us.
Yeah.
Maybe one more thing. We always start from the customer and the customer needs to fulfill.
Mm
... those customer needs, and then we look at how can we do it as profitably as possible in a way. It's a combination of these but starting from the customer needs. I think that's important to highlight.
Very good. There's a question about the CapEx. How CapEx is going to develop in 2023 is the question. I think this is about everything but maybe you can comment on a general level and then IT as well.
Yeah, sure. We've been investing throughout the years in IT and digital and technology and we'll definitely continue that one, even speed up it. It's somewhat. Well, there's multiple areas. There's the data and those technologies which relate to data are highly important. E-commerce, online offering, and those technologies are highly important as well. Still the sort of more traditional ERPs and that kind of s ystems also need investments and so on. At least those are some of the marketing sort of technologies that we need to invest and go on. You know, technology is sort of improving all the time and we need to sort of be very agile in a way to utilize the new kind of technologies as well. This is the thing where we will never be ready in a way.
You showed us that in recent years the CapEx has been between EUR 250 and EUR 300 approximately. Are there any guidance to that?
Yeah, sure. I think that obviously during the last two years, 2020 and 2021, this has been the pandemic time and so on, so we have sort of needed to sort of focus a lot what we do and so on to secure the projects that they go well and so on. I think going forward, we are sort of able to boost a bit our agenda and that means also somewhat higher CapEx both the store sides but also the digital and IT and technology.
And then MFC. What kind of investments do you budget for MFC? Are investments fully scalable up and down? For example, is this EUR 10 million investment in Helsinki higher end than like a lower end? Comment on the MFC investment, anyone.
Yeah, I think that it's a kind of average kind of
Yeah
size of implementation
Yeah
... is around about 10 million. I think that it's kind of the size has to be certain size that it makes sense to have this kind of installations.
Yeah. Fast deliveries, will you be working with Wolt mainly or do you have other partners or alternatives?
We have piloted with Wolt so far. As I said, the customers have been quite happy with the service. Also, it has shown a lot of interest among our retailers. We are continuing piloting and really see where the market goes at this point.
Are there any surprises or are people buying mostly snacks and soft drinks, or are there any surprises what comes to the fast deliveries or?
Yeah. It's a different baskets.
Really?
If you think about, for instance, the basket size is much about 1/4, yeah, about average size in online grocery. It's kind of more kind of occasion-driven, so kind of food for movies or kind of ingredients for salad or candies for children and so forth, not kind of full, for example, lunch baskets or ingredients to make a food.
About car sales, used cars, is there anything you can elaborate about the used car sales digitalization? You mentioned all these different areas that we are focusing on in car sales. Is there anything about used cars? Matti was recently talking about pricing, maybe something digital coming into that.
Yeah.
Anything?
Yeah. Pricing is super important so that we buy and sell at the right price.
Yeah.
So we come to the dynamic pricing here and building capabilities to be better on that. Also, I think Matti mentioned also that the used car market is a really big market in Finland, and we want to be part of that game as well. Maybe some of the kind of Finnish people on the line has seen that there's a huge campaign going on in the media at the moment that K-Auto is buying used cars, so sell the car and you'll get a huge amount here Plussa points as well.
Yeah. You get like 100 [crosstalk]
100,000 [crosstalk]
thousand. Yeah, I saw that. It is amazing.
Yeah.
It's very good.
Yeah. It's super important. Yeah.
Yeah. Very good. Any other comments on the car trade digitalization or?
Yeah. Maybe just what I said earlier as well, that, you know, there's the whole customer experience side where we are working heavily and this pricing goes to that one as well. But there's quite a bit also in the process reengineering side and efficiency side as well. In that sense, a lot of work.
Mm-hmm
Already done but already ahead as well.
Yeah, I mentioned in my part really quickly, so we are digitizing all the back office and support functions.
Mm.
as well.
Yeah
including finance and all the. There's a lot of paper. There has been kind of traditional lot of paperwork involved in car business so we are digitizing that as well.
Are we able to buy a car online? Or is it something that you have to do physically?
Yeah. Technically it's possible and so on, and we even had some pilots earlier on. I think that like in all of our businesses, I think it's a great asset for us that we have this sort of omnichannel offering.
Mm
... having the stores as well as the digital channels. Car trade is a business where, you know, the unit is fairly expensive and so on. So a lot of the customers prefer searching the car online and checking out the specs and prices and so on, but still, of course, after sales and services and so on but also purchasing a car is something that they rather do in store. So I think omnichannel is.
Mm
the way to do that business.
Mm.
Yeah, you don't yet click the checkout.
Yeah.
... for [crosstalk]
Yeah. Yeah
... 100,000 cars in Finland.
Yeah, it's a big investment. [crosstalk]
We'll see what the future brings then in 10 years' time.
It might increase in the future and the customer need might be so that it's purely digital but let's see.
Interesting. About building and technical trade, how will this online stores will develop further in building and technical trade K-Rauta in Finland? What are their, like, biggest advantages at the moment compared to your competitors?
K-Rauta e-commerce?
Exactly, yeah.
Yes. If you're talking about kind of consumer business or DIY business.
Mm
The role of kind of online store is so different compared to the online grocery. We talk about webcasting and then show casting, meaning that you kind of explore the product on the web, and depending on, is it a tile or something, you really want to have a look in how does it look.
Mm.
in the physical world? It's kind of drives people into the physical stores as well. This is also very important to remember. We believe that this kind of, how would I say, web-assisted sales t he number will increase. That means that we need to have a really good product information there. We need to have, like, some instructions regarding. For example, installations or if you are buying some technical part we have to tell or inform our customers that you also need this part in order to install something.
Did you forget this or?
Yeah, install something.
Yeah. Yeah.
also very inspirational contents.
Yeah.
Because if we are talking about how home decoration and how you kind of paint your
Mm.
Paint your house or walls inside your apartment.
Mm.
You want to have some inspiration. These are the kind of really big kind of potential.
Mm.
that we want in the future offer to our customers as well.
Probably also deliveries, if you're making a terrace it's not easy.
Yeah.
to get there.
Yes. There are several delivery methods available.
Yeah.
Either you can collect them in store but if you're building a terrace that's probably not an option. You can have various kind of home deliveries as well.
Yeah.
Maybe just to add on that one, I think that in the do it yourself, especially in K-Rauta the store network is really a strength for us because many times t he consumers want the product immediately and therefore the sort of product availability and especially heavy products. It's super important that you know that is the product available and where is it available. And i t's a combination of sort of home deliveries and the stores.
Mm-hmm.
Like Anni said, product information is extremely important.
Yeah.
because there's hundreds of thousands of products compared to many other categories where we operate.
That's correct. Back to grocery trade which has been quite a topic today, of course. Your grocery online market share has increased from 41 in 2019 to 54 in 2020. What is your gut feeling for 2021, up or down?
The whole market is going up, remarkably up.
Yeah.
We are looking for the 50%+ still.
Mm.
That's my gut feeling.
Thank you. Then I think we have two more minutes of this, one last one if you have time. I will ask here about the data usage you showed us in the last page. In what business do you see the greatest opportunities to increase data usage?
I think that we have a lot of potential in all our businesses and I think that, for example, in grocery trade now we have implemented the most obvious cases.
Yeah.
like marketing.
Mm-hmm.
Recommendations and this so far, but we really haven't touched deeply in the core business.
Mm.
Really kind of bringing the beauty of the AI to, for example, our commercial business.
Mm-hmm.
This is important. Then there's a huge potential in building and technical trade and both in car. I believe that's other like cases. We need to do some data work beyond before.
Mm.
It's possible.
How about the synergies between divisions?
Yeah. For example, the customer data is one obviously. Even though the majority of the customer data get collected in the grocery businesses, the whole potential or the client potential sales, potential lies within these customers. Extremely important and useful for all businesses as well. I think that is the Plussa loyalty system is the one. Also the synergies we get is our K Data platform, which is kind of useful for other businesses.
Maybe just shortly to comment as well that, you know, it's the sales possibilities and our cross-selling and so on but also the sort of utilizing the same technologies.
Yeah.
Across our different businesses, so.
Absolutely.
That's highly important as well.
Very good. I think that is a very good end to our discussion and the presentation. Thank you both, Jukka and Anni.
Thank you.
If you have any further questions, don't hesitate contacting me and thank you.
Okay.
Thank you.