Welcome to Posti Group Q4 and Full Year 2025 results news conference. My name is Marja Mäkinen, and I'm heading Posti Group's Investor Relations, and I'll be your moderator today. Joining me here are our President and CEO, Antti Jääskeläinen; and CFO, Timo Karppinen. First, Antti will walk you through some of the highlights from the reporting period and Q4, as well as provide an update on our strategy execution. After that, Timo will present our financial performance in more detail. Following the presentations, we will be happy to take your questions. You can submit questions at any time during the presentation using the chat function on the webcast page, and we will address them in the Q&A section.
Please note that this presentation may include forward-looking statement that that are dependent on future events, and you can find the related disclaimer in the presentation. With that, let's move on to the result presentation. Please, Antti.
Thank you, Marja, and a very good morning to everybody online. Happy to start the presentation with maybe a familiar slide to you, reminder of Posti operating countries and businesses. We are one of the leading delivery and fulfillment companies in Finland, Sweden, and Baltics. Couple of highlights there, maybe 71.5 million parcels delivered in Posti system, up 7% from last year and from the previous year. Maybe another thing to note is our personnel number, 13,800. This is down from approximately 15,000 a year ago and reflects our transformation of our business mix. But now going to our Q4 and then full year key numbers.
So, we had a strong Q4, driven by our decisive actions during the year and a very operationally successful peak season management. We had good service quality, positive feedback from customers, and then our resource efficiency was on a very high level during the peak season. And, as you know, Q4 is seasonally also our strongest, highest quarter, and, during 2025, we kept improving our result during the year. So, Q4 always the highest season, but these results are not only due to the seasonality, but also the actions we have taken during the year to improve our efficiency, profitability, and to respond to the declining postal volumes during the year.
In Q4, the top line, EUR 390.4 million, that was -3.3%, compared to last year, fully driven by the Postal Business Group. We did see some growth in the ECD and FLS segments. Timo will come back to those later. And then, when it comes to adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBIT, improvement, clear improvement, from the previous year, which we are very happy about. And one thing to note is our relative profitability, 15.9 on the adjusted EBITDA margin and 7.7 in the EBIT margin.
These are the highest relative profitability margins that we have had in over 10 years in any quarter, and these reflect our relative competitiveness and the actions taken during the year, those actions that are in our hands to improve our profitability. In the end, we obviously strive for absolute profit growth and also top-line growth, but we're happy about the development in the relative margins anyhow. Going to the markets and volume development, so in these two pictures, the trends of the transformation of our industry and our company are very much visible. And now these trends were somewhat accelerating during the year and very visible in Q4, as well.
If we look to the left-hand side, the parcel volumes, we did see 11% growth in parcel volumes in Q4, and, as you see, that was somewhat accelerating during the year. The average for the full year is 7% . Recommerce, the second-hand products in the B2C side, that is the driver. The growth fully comes from the B2C side. Our B2B parcel side has been slower all along the year, and for the full year, those volumes declined with a small single-digit percentage. And this implies, as we have discussed before, a mix change inside the parcel volume. Then if we look at the addressed letter volumes here, ended up being -20% in Q4.
All along the year, we have seen somewhat higher decline percentages versus in previous years. So, now digitalization has accelerated and both in the government side developments as well as in the private sector, and this actually also impacts somewhat our seasonality. We'll come back to that later in the presentation, but obviously the good thing is that we have found a good strategy and way to adapt to this market reality and adjust our costs downwards with the same pace if not faster. But that said, these two pictures quite nicely describe the transformation of our industry and of our markets. Going then to the group business portfolio.
As a result of these changes, then, the relative share of Postal Services for the full year declined from previous year to 37%, and then the Fulfillment and Logistics Services business group and the E-commerce and Delivery Services business group, which operate in long-term growing markets, their share of the group sales reached 63% in last year. Then I want to share some highlights from our strategy execution during 2025. Some of them Q4, but also for the full year. So if we start from the commercial activities, it was in the first half of the year, but feels like long ago, but it was an important part of our One Posti approach. We moved to operate under one brand.
We have Posti in Finland and Sweden, and then in the Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia markets, SmartPosti. Then we have invested and developed our parcel locker and service point development. Almost 500 new expanded, automated parcel machines, including outdoor lockers in cities. And then also market and growth-driving development. We have Saturday deliveries, which have become more and more popular, and then the small parcel to door service, where we utilize the synergies of maximum shoe size packages are delivered in the postal network. And we continued to invest and continue to invest in this growing recommerce segment by making it more efficient, increasing consumer self-service capabilities, sending from lockers in Finland and in the Baltics.
This is something we continue to develop as the mix of the parcel business has been changing. OmaPosti has been developed, our digital app and the digital postal locker, and a lot of positive development in our sales capabilities, new sales organization, recruitments, higher sales efficiency, and this we certainly want to continue. On the operational side, I already mentioned the successful peak season management, and maybe there to note that, as we have developed already earlier, so these automation rates were again higher now also in the Christmas greetings or Christmas cards deliveries, and that was a big step forward in being more efficient.
These are traditionally handwritten notes, almost nine million of them, and now we were able to machine and automate handle majority of those and which brought further efficiency. We have continued to execute delivery model changes, resource optimization, sorting automation, I mentioned, and we have done several pilots to explore how we can advance further synergies in our delivery networks in Finland. In the fulfillment and logistics side, both in Finland and Sweden, we have executed warehouse consolidations, resource optimization, efficiency improvement, and we have a rollout ongoing of the new warehouse management system in Finland and Sweden, which we plan to gain efficiencies from. Then on the sustainability side, our own emissions, Scope 1 and 2, decreased by 25%.
We have advanced our clean vehicle roadmap in investments, but also better algorithms to route planning and optimization, which saves both cost and emissions. And then, I think not a bullet point on the slide, but obviously our personnel has personal engagement and satisfaction has been improving also. So, in a service business, this is highly important, and despite many of our changes and developments and efficiency improvements, we have continued to improve on our personal engagement. And these topics, both commercial excellence, striving for growth in the parcel and logistics services continues, and so does our work to improve cost efficiency and network synergies. But at this point, I would like to hand over to Timo for more details on our result.
Good morning. Thank you. Good morning from my behalf, as well. So let's start going through the key points here in our financials. In Q3, like I said earlier, our net sales decreased slightly, this 3.3%, in the group level. This is now driven by the Postal Services. If you look on the right, this is describing the how the sales development was in different business groups. So in the Postal Services, about EUR 90 million decline. One third of that is the unaddressed mail discontinuation, and then rest is kind of the normal volume decline that we are having.
But we are really pleased about the other business groups, kind of e-commerce and fulfillment and logistics services side. We start seeing the sales increases, although slightly, but still, sales increased in these business groups. And if you look at the quarterly development, so the sales declines are kind of decreasing from 3.65% level to 3.3% level, and these are clearly driven by our own actions. So the unaddressed mail is the big part of that.
But then, towards the later part of the year, we have been implemented actions to improve the sales, like price increases in the postal side, and then clearly see the parcel volumes now start growing, which was evident towards the latter part of the year. And then what we are extremely pleased about is the development of the profitability, and starting with the Adjusted EBITDA, that increased with the help of our execution in the operations, and the kind of bringing this improved operational efficiency in table.
So in the Adjusted EBITDA increased to EUR 62.1 million, EUR 8 million better than we did year ago, representing now record high 15.9%, and kind of percentage against the sales. And if you can see on a quarter-by-quarter during the year, we've been able to improve this relative profitability improvement. And in Q4 being the highest season for us is where we had remarkable results on the way we did and run the operations.
So, looking at the business groups, despite the fact that Postal had a negative sales of almost EUR 90 million, they actually were able to improve the profitability by 1 point or EBITDA by EUR 1.1 million. This is the key on this great operational kind of efficiency. And then what we are really happy about is the Fulfillment and Logistics Services now turning into profit making in fourth quarter. And the E-commerce and Delivery Services had a good quarter, good profitability, but the mix changes are kind of kind of slowed down the profit increases. But maybe this quarter or seasonal pattern that we have is start to be the norm nowadays.
So we are seeing that the Q4 is the one where the most of the profits are generated during the year, and other quarters, especially Q1, is start to be the weakest quarter for us. Then finally, on the unadjusted EBIT, as well, increased significantly, same EUR 8 million improvement compared to last year. And again, here, the EBIT margin was extremely good. Record high in our case, representing the 7.7% of out of net sales more than 2% improvement compared to last year. A same pattern with the businesses. So all the business group except the ECD improved the profitability.
And then on the other side is describing the good management that we have on overall our cost base. So most of that is coming from our own actions, how we have been able to kind of manage the cost outside the business groups. And then as well, there were minor costs that really were one-off in last year, but now disappearing this year. So quarterly pattern here as well. The Q4 really is bringing the biggest part of our profits, and this pattern is expected to continue this year. We wanted to mention about the special items, which was unusual for last year, and were unusual and unusually high, because of the listing that we did in October.
So, the special items totaled now more than EUR 5 million, more than it was year ago, up to EUR 17 million. And the main issue there is the listing costs. When we exclude the listing cost, our kind of the normal special items decreased compared to year ago. And obviously, this is impacting the net profitability that we had for the year. And but we can also say that this kind of the normal special items, which decreased from the last year level, we expect them to continue in this declining trend coming this year. Then on the investments, as we have been saying, our investments level are stable.
So in s table in meaning that the investment cash flow and the payments of lease liabilities would on annual level be around EUR 120 million-EUR 130 million level. Same continued in the last year in total, so we are now ended up on EUR 124.4 million level, very much according to our own estimates. Point to note is, we have added the strategic project CapEx, which was related to the building up a new warehouse in Järvenpää and the terminal into Tallinn. So those is now was EUR 23.4 million, or EUR 10 million-EUR 23.7 million last year, but it's now completed, and we do not have any more of this strategic CapEx going forward.
Then on the balance sheet, as well, the booked investments are remained and actually decreased from the last year level, EUR 175.1 million. And there, the kind of main increase is coming from the additions to the right-of-use assets, which are actually these lease liabilities increased. And these are now related to which we had quite a big increase in Q4, which are related to the certain existing logistic and sorting center lease renewals, where we secured our key positions and places to do the sorting in Finland, which were Tampere, Kuopio and Vantaa, and as well in Pirkkala. So those leases were renewed during the Q4.
Then, as well as the moving into new Posti headquarters, the lease liability came into the books during Q4. Then the balance sheet remained strong. So at the end of the year, the net debt to Adjusted EBITDA was 2.6x, but again consisting mostly of the lease liabilities. The financial net debt to EBITDA was only 1.1x, EUR 220 million, which is then consisting of the minor part of our kind of net debt to EBITDA levels. There were some increases to the lease liabilities during Q4. As I described, these are related to this renewal of the lease for warehouses in Finland, or the logistics center in Finland.
And now, the financial net debt itself remained low, and it was during the year. The only reason for that, why it increased, was the extra dividend of EUR 150 million that we paid prior the listing during the year. Then looking at a bit more closely on the segment level, the Q4 results, and starting with the E-commerce and Delivery Services. Here, the key point is that the parcel volumes continue to increase, and then the operational efficiency as well is improving, which then overall supports the profitability in these segments. So the parcel volume in Q4 increased by 11%. And like I said, this has been growing throughout the year.
The small items or mainly ecommerce market is the one that boosting now the volume growth. So there's minor kind of decline in overall sales, and this is mostly driven by the mix change in consumer parcels, and then somewhat continued sluggish market in the B2B side, which we as well expect to improve this year. But the adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBIT decreased slightly, which is coming from providing the services for the recommerce parcel volumes and then the change of the product mix. But overall, the profitable level, whether it's EBITDA or EBIT, remain at the good level.
Then what we are really happy about is the positive development that we had in fulfillment and logistics services side. So there was a positive development in warehouse market demand during the quarter. The net sales improved by more than EUR 3 million in the quarter, representing this 4.4% improvement in sales. And that was especially growing in Sweden, where the Sweden operation sales increased by more than 10% in Finland as well by 1%. And these are mostly all related to our own actions that we have implemented in managing the sales in these countries. And then what we are really pleased about is the profitability improvement.
So in Q4, there was a EUR 2 million improvement in EBITDA, and EBITDA margin improved by more than 2%. And the same thing with the adjusted EBIT level, where we almost made a break-even in this business. And it's kind of proving the fact that what we have been saying, that we can improve the profitability in FLS business. And these profitability improvements are coming from the warehouse consolidation that we put in place during the year. And then operational things like resource optimization and cost discipline overall has started to bring the results.
And finally, I said earlier, what we as well are extremely proud of is, in the Postal Services, how the kind of strong operational efficiency increased the profitability here significantly. And this happened despite the fact that the addressed letter volumes continued to decline, and it was almost 20% in Q4, one of the highest kind of volume declines that we have seen. But then, we have a good system to manage the volume declines, and implementing kind of new product offerings and then price increases, et cetera, which then limit the sales declines to a lesser level. So the sales only declined by 11% in Q4, despite the fact of volume decline by 20%.
But what is remarkable here is the extremely strong execution in operations. Here, the delivery model, the resource optimization that we have in place, and then, high level of sorting automation, has been now improving the profitability in this segment, you can say significantly. So Adjusted EBITDA improved, and EBITDA margin went up to 23% almost 24%, and then Adjusted EBIT here to 16% level. And these are the levels we have not seen in this business for many years. Then, moving on to the guidance that we are now be able to give.
So for the guidance for this year is that we are expecting our net sales to be in the range of EUR 1.4 billion-EUR 1.5 billion, and then Adjusted EBIT to be in the range of EUR 63 million-EUR 79 million in this year. And below is the ones that in how we did this year. And this is the kind of wider range of guidance that we are now able to give for the year. And just a sudden recap about the mid-term financial targets and our dividend policy. So we see our average organic net sales growth to be at least 2% in group level and at least 5% outside the Postal Services.
And then average adjusted operating result, meaning adjusted EBIT, to grow over 5% on average compared to last year 2025 and net debt to EBITDA to be less than 2.5. And this is how we see the coming year, starting 2026, to be starting to perform. And then on the dividend policy, which we are now stick as well from the 2025 results. So, we are now aiming to pay continuously increasing dividends where the payout ratio to be at least 60% of net income. And that leads to the proposed dividend payout for the last year.
So, here, the board is proposing for the AGM to decide that the dividend to be EUR 34 million in total, increased by EUR 1 million from last year level of 33, and then, dividend per share of EUR 0.84, increased from EUR 0.83, from last year. And this is now. And the payout ratio is high, 144.7%. And we can propose and do this with the help of the strong results, but as well, with the help of a strong financial position that we have in place. And that leads to the.
Thank you.
The final part of.
Yeah, just to b efore the Q&A session, just to recap, the key takeaways. So we delivered a strong Q4. Our EBITDA and EBIT margins are higher than they have been in over 10 years. Our relative profitability is good, and the seasonal operations were very successful. Second point, our market transformation continues, and it is even more visible in the Q4 numbers, where the market volumes continue to diverge. Faster growth in parcel with the changing mix, and then letter volume decline accelerated to 20%. And then the third one, which is related to the previous ones as well, we continued to execute our strategy.
We have excellent improvement in operational efficiency, and we have a recipe to adapt and adjust to the declining volume in postal. We certainly want to continue commercial and operational excellence to drive growth in parcel and logistics services. With these words, handing over to Marja.
Thank you, Antti and Timo, for the presentation. Now we will move into the Q&A. Just to remind you, if you would like to ask a question, please send it through a chat function on the bottom of the audiocast webpage. So, let's take the first question. Can you please add some more color to your sales and earnings guidance range for 2026? What would need to happen for you to reach the lower end versus the top end of the range?
Well, I can start. There are many elements that can impact this. One is, on a postal side, what level the volume decline will continue. But and as well, how our actions to mitigate the volume declines with the help of new product offerings or and price increases can impact. And as well, we are now making changes the way where the pricing actually is being done, which we are quite positive about. Then, and as well, it comes very much on how the market develops. So in and on ECD side, it's about the way the parcel volume will actually start moving.
And then overall, kind of volume movements in our rate business, which is then, like I said, a bit on market-related thing. And then on FLS business as well, it's very much on the market side. As we are seeing, you know, improvement in and transaction that we see, and the warehouse utilization is increasing, and the kind of product movements in warehouse is in an increasing trend. If that continues, it then will impact positively. So, difficulty being more specific, but they are, t hese are the ones impacting the ranges.
Further to say that if we are now moving towards the lower part of the ranges, we have definite actions in place to maintain the profitability, as we have been doing over the last year.
Thank you, Timo. The next question regarding the seasonality of our businesses: should we expect normal sales and result seasonality in 2026?
Yes, thank you. I can take that. So now the question is that what is referred to as normal? And maybe I would like to point out that as Timo was referring to, and we have also written into the report this seasonal background text slightly differently as before. So, if 2025 was more normal, similar pattern is something we expect, i.e., really the peak season is the Q4, and then Q1 was the worst quarter in 2025.
This, in the earlier years, there has been a comment that Q1 is a strong postal volume quarter, and this we have now changed in the text for the specific reason that what used to be a January, February high mail season when public sector tax authorities, maybe pension insurance companies, all different kind of bodies used to send banks, financial institutions, used to send their annual statements or different kind of mail items in the beginning of the year. Here, we see a big digitalization impact, and we have stopped in our report noting that Q1 is a strong postal season. It is not anymore.
Right.
Thank you, Antti. Then moving to our next question, it's about your sorting automation. So, sorting automation-related efforts, and other efficiency measures seemed to work really well throughout last year and Q4. How much more is there still to be gained within further automation or efficiency measures?
What are your plans on further m easures this year?
Yes. Thank you. So, yes, the automated sorting percentages start to be quite high, above 90%, and as said, the traditionally relatively manual process of Christmas card handling was taken a big step forward into automation and this kind of machine vision type of handling this year. There's still room to improve that on the next quarter. However, the automation percentages by default cannot be more than 100%, so there the benefits continue even though the automation percentage doesn't go up.
So the next stage of improvements and cost efficiency improvements comes from automation, but it comes indirectly that the automated sorting enables us to do fast and agile changes in our delivery routes, and that is the main source of efficiency already today, but going forward. And here, a note that our total delivery routes cost base is actually bigger than the sorting cost base. So automation continues to bring new and better cost efficiencies also in the future, despite the fact that it starts to be more than 90%.
Thank you.
So the next one, is there a B2B parcel volume decline solely due to softer markets, or have you seen any increase in competition-related pressure?
We don't see any, for example, new competition or new entrants, so from a market share and market participation point of view, it is relatively stable. Then as for the year, the B2B parcel market for the full year was a single-digit negative volume development. Those kind of markets typically then induce, of course, competition among players. However, I think the main reason for the B2B volume softness is really the Finnish economy. The industrial or trade or even the construction industry is partially one of the customer industries there in the B2B freight and parcel. So it is the underlying economic.
a low economic activity of these customer sectors in Finnish economy that we see as the main driver of softness, to say.
Right. Thank you. Then there is asked for clarification for the comment regarding the impact of the discontinuation of unaddressed mail in Q4. Will there be an impact from the discontinuation in 2026?
Yeah, I can say that. No, not, not anymore. So, that, this unaddressed mail product, we discontinued to do that, at the beginning of 2025. And the biggest impact of that is came in the Q1, but actually throughout the year, so, that product is not, in comparable terms, will not be there anymore in 2026.
Thank you.
But that's one of the items that enabled us to do the operational efficiencies, putting in place, which then became more visible towards the end of the year. So that's now need to be reminded. Yes.
Okay, thank you. The next question regarding the parcel product mix. So how much lower are the C2C parcel margins compared to B2C? What can you do to improve the C2C profitability over time?
Maybe I don't directly comment on the margins because the cost to service is different, and they utilize the same system, so there's a little bit of a allocation game also going. The price points of B2B parcels are, in very broad terms, they can be double or more compared to the recommerce or lower-end B2C parcels. So clearly, clearly one B2B parcel is more highly priced than a B2C parcel.
What we can do to improve the, o ur cost to serve and margins in this changing mix is, on the one hand, improvement of the sorting procedures in a way that the C2C or the recommerce parcels are the one area in our parcel product mix, which are, so to say, not in a hurry. They are not time-critical. Consumers are typically waiting for them anyways for five or six days, and even the senders have, depending on the platform, up to a week time to send. So it is a category where we can optimize transport and many things as we don't have a service promise necessarily for next day.
But then the other area which is really important is the optimization of the first mile. So, we have now enabled this automated and digital app-related locker-to-locker sending, which is self-service by the consumers, and we aim to continue to develop these self-services to consumers. So maybe a very simplistic parallel is that as in the airports and airlines, the check-in procedures have been already years ago moved to the consumer, and not done by, necessarily by personnel. This is the same development we want to see also in the consumer-to-consumer sending area, where we can have self-service printers, for example.
Good. Thank you. The next question is regarding postal service. So looking ahead, what can you still do to improve the postal service profitability as the sales continue to decline?
Yeah, these will be the similar actions that we are now have been putting in place, and which are very visible in the second part of the year last year. So, first of all, in the sales side, there are i f the volume decline was 20%, the sales decline was only 11%, so there are actions that we can do to improve the sales. But it's actually the most things are around the operational things. So, like Antti said earlier, we are now almost all or more than 90% is the sorting is automated. We can still increase that a bit.
But the things that we can then able to do is with the sorting automation, the delivery route optimization. And then actually as well, the optimization of our resources to do the deliveries. So there are similar level of cost decreases that we can continue to do in the coming years, as we have done in the past.
Good. Thank you.
Yeah.
So the next question, can you remind us of when did you implement the price increases in postal services, and when are you going to do further increases next time?
Well, there are several dates, but as a reminder, there were d uring 2025, there was the consumer stamp increase in May. There was a portion of the business-to-business letters end of June. Then there was a relatively big chunk of corporate customers in August. And then obviously, as the pattern is that we have done these price adjustments earlier, one might expect that we will continue to do them this year as well.
Good. Thank you.
Are there any recent changes in the competitive environment that you would like to highlight? Do you assess you were able to keep your market shares, market position in 2025?
Well, this is business by business obviously, but if we take one by one, so postal services, we have 14 companies delivering mail in Finland. There may be certain, let's say, low price, low-margin deliveries that we have chosen not to take or not to participate in certain biddings if we don't consider it profitable. So over the years, our market share in postal has gone to roughly 80%, and obviously it used to be 100%. But it's relatively stable. In the parcel side, we will see the official market statistics a little bit later, but we don't see big changes there either.
In the fulfillment and logistics side, Finland and Sweden, this is obviously a more slower-moving business, where winning a contract and then doing the transition may take six to 12 months. There, we have a strong pipeline, and we know of some, for example, in Sweden, certain publicly known exits by competitors where we have gained some new customers.
Good. Thank you.
And just still to remind you, please, you can send the questions through the chat function on the bottom of the audiocast webpage if there's still you have some questions. I have here one last one, yeah, in line: So how large was the discontinuation of unaddressed mail impact during Q4?
We have told last year that it's in a level close to EUR 30 million.
Thank you.
That was the full year? For the full year.
For the full year.
Yeah, so just below EUR 30 million.
Good. Thank you.
So now it looks like there are no further questions, so we will conclude the Q&A session. Thank you for all your questions and joining us today, and thanks to our presenters as well.
Thank you, everybody. Thank you.
So Posti's Q1 results will be published on April 29, 2025. We look forward seeing you then, and in the meanwhile, if there is anything I can help you with, don't hesitate to contact me. Thank you once again, and wishing you a great weekend.