Good morning, everyone.
CFO Miikka Tarna.
A very good morning to you all.
We will first hear from Cyrille, and after that, Miikka will go through the key figures. After the presentations, we are open to questions. Without further ado, Cyrille, if you may.
Thank you, Tuomo, and thank you very much to all of you again for attending our call today. It has now been for me one year since I have been entrusted with leading Rapala VMC with our global management team. We have delivered what we targeted in 2025 in a highly disrupted trading environment with fluctuating tariffs and slow consumption in our European markets. We have grown sales. We have improved comparable EBIT and improved our financing situation. A big thanks to our global Rapala VMC team for their hard work, passion, and dedication. If we look, as you see on the charts at the last five years, we are back in sales with brands we control. We are back at the level of the high time levels of 2021 and 2022.
Controlling the brands we sell is key for sustainable growth. Our comparable EBIT has grown 35% year-on-year through dynamic new product introductions, expanding our brands in new categories, and also strengthening our core positions. We are in a business with highly seasonal and weather-dependent demand, requiring a wide range of gear. Excellence in processes and supply chain agility are core competencies we are constantly developing. This has been the case in 2025, where we improve our stock turns and while we were faced with highly disrupted supply chains due again to the tariffs. We have improved our financing situation as well, lowering the nominal amount of our hybrid bond that was 3x oversubscribed last November, underlining the confidence in Rapala VMC from the investing community and trust in our brand-focused strategy.
We are really in line with what we believe we promised and in line with our transformation. I'll say a few words on one of our key items of our strategy, which is our cultural transformation that will fuel long-term sustainable growth at Rapala VMC. We come from a distribution culture, and we are now brand-driven. It's a fundamental change. We have exceptional brands in our portfolio, and Rapala, where I will focus, is one of them. Rapala as a brand is to grow and lead all our brands. I'll say a few words here on the achievements of our flagship Rapala brand in 2025. We will continue to drive appetite, connection, affection to our flagship brand that breathes innovation, performance, and excitement on the water. We are celebrating 90 years of our brand and growing its audience.
As highlights, our pro staff, you can see in the middle, Jacob Wheeler, was elected Angler of the Year multiple years in a row. Dustin Connell was third, three-time champion at Redcrest and in Europe. On the left, Mathias Holgersson and Jonatan won both 100 Hour and Pike Fight, having the most wins in Pike Fight history. This has led to explosive TikTok growth and doubling of viral videos that we had. If we look at our peers in our lure-focused brands, our peers, Rapala leads the game, you see, with 2.1 million fans. Growing audience is for us key, and that audience needs to be fed with innovation in products.
15% of our sales in 2025 for the Rapala brand were generated by new products introduced in 2024. It shows really the dynamics of our product development teams in the Rapala brand. Rapala, as you know, is the creator, is one of the creators of artificial lures and still leading the lure category. It has grown in other categories over the years and will grow further in strategy we are implementing. In 2025, as some of the highlights, we renewed and extended all our luggage and bags. We expanded our soft bait strong penetration with CrushCity with new products and delivered growth in that category. We won the two Best of Show products at ICAST in the U.S.
That's the in our core hard bait category with ClapTail and the Countdown Mag Elite. These will turn into sales in 2026. This was a short overview of some of the core actions on the brand side and on the product side for the Rapala brand as part of our overall house of brands strategy. We have similar approach with all our other brands, where we have now dedicated expert and passionate brand managers with dedicated brand teams so they can address dedicated identified market segments. We believe this is the way forward to globally fight for market share in the world of recreational fishing. To summarize, it was a troubled year but in line with our continuous improvement promise, which we renew for 2026.
I will now give the floor to Miikka, who will guide you in a more detailed manner through our financial results. Thank you very much for your attention.
Thank you, Cyrille. I also want to first thank our global team. I mean, this is a team effort, all the numbers that we have put together, all the sales that we have brought in, all the improvements that we have made. It's truly a global team effort to make these numbers happen. To summarize 2025 year, we continued our improvements and our recovery path as promised. It was underlined by successful new product launches and also improved operations. Our sales grew by 3% in reported exchange rates. Exchange rates as such, mainly USD, had a negative impact to us. In comparable currencies, our sales grew by EUR 12 million or 6%.
Most of the growth came from North American market, which proved very resilient despite all the tariff-related disruptions, and also the related price increases that we implemented during the year. In Europe, on the other hand, we had a decreased sales, which was coming from the lower consumer sentiment from the global trade disputes and also the political environment. On operating profit, comparable operating profit level, it improved by EUR 2.2 million from prior year and mainly driven by the increased sales both in the winter fishing and summer fishing markets. These two offset the winter sport sales, which was subdued and decreased from last year. Tariffs of course had a negative impact on our cost base.
With our carefully planned price adjustments, cooperation both with our retail partners and our vendors, we managed to reduce the negative impact that it had on our margin. Inventory value, inventory landed at the same level as last year. I'll talk about that a little bit in the upcoming slides, but maybe to say here that inventory turn improved from prior year. Looking at our short-term outlook, so again, we confirm our long-term trajectory and recovery path, so we commit to increase operating profit in 2026. If we go a little bit to the details behind that guidance, the North American consumer demand has remained robust despite all the uncertainties in the global trade and in the global political environment.
We have so far been fairly successful or very successful with mitigating the tariff impacts on our sales and profitability. However, of course, we have had to adjust our pricing in the North American market, and this impact of this to consumer behavior is difficult to predict, and there is uncertainty on how the consumer spending and the basket size will develop. European markets, we have experienced, as mentioned, slow consumer spending with the economic and political developments, and of course, we expect this to continue in 2026. Hence, we will continue our operational efficiency initiatives and scrutinize our cost base to lower our break-even point in Europe further. With the winter fishing seasons, we have now seen two consecutive good winter fishing seasons in the North American market.
This is always what it means to us when we sell to retailers, that the pipeline of products is pretty clean in North America, and we expect to have a good winter fishing pre-orders for the upcoming 2026, 2027 season. This guidance, of course, reflects our current conditions. Perhaps we don't mention the latest Middle East developments here on the slide, but of course, the recent increase in oil price might have an impact, is one of the unpredictable things that will impact us in 2026, mainly, well, all over the world in our main markets. Oil prices might impact foot traffic in the stores by consumers, amount of discretionary spending.
As we don't have direct to consumer sales or it's not significant part of our sales, we mainly sell to retailers, so it will, the impact to us will be somewhat delayed if any impact comes. Next on the key figures, our reported operating profit fell to EUR 4.2 million from EUR 8.6 million. I'll mention that in the next slides what contributed to that. Of course, the one-off items had a significant impact, and hence our net profit fell to -EUR 5 million, and earnings per share was EUR 0.23. Let's talk a little bit more about the geographical areas. In North America, our comparable sales increased by 14%. Currencies had that slight -EUR 5.5 million negative impact, mainly from the North American market.
We had two strong ice fishing seasons, so we had very good replenishment in the early part of this year and also good pre-load in orders delivered in the latter part of this year. The successful relaunch of the 13 Fishing product range, that's definitely boosted our sales, not only in the summer fishing, but also it had strong presence in the winter fishing segment. CrushCity continued to increase market share and sales. Of course, following CrushCity, it also boosted our VMC hook and rig sales. These are the brands that I will mention now, but we had solid momentum across all key brands. New product introductions also, as Cyrille mentioned, brought nice increase to the sales.
In the Nordic region, we had exceptionally low winter sports equipment sales, so cross-country ski business, the winter sports business, as we call it. We have had couple of years with poor snow conditions, and this is impacting the pipeline of products. Products in the pipeline are still higher than we would like it to be. They're not selling through, and this basically impacts our sales. This combined with subdued consumer confidence basically impacted our second half deliveries for the season. On a positive note, on the summer fishing, the main business, the summer fishing business, we saw growth. The organizational changes that we have mentioned earlier, they are still bearing fruit, and we increased our sales in the summer fishing segment in the Nordics.
Although the spring or summer season started a little bit late, we had good pre-orders, and actually the summer proved out to be okay. As the autumn lasted longer, we had replenishment sales almost until the end of the year. In the rest of Europe, beginning of the year, sales were negatively impacted by retailer carryover inventory from the previous season. There was too much products in the pipeline. This together with subdued consumer activity impacted our sales. Retailers remained extremely cautious with replenishment orders throughout the year. Of course, here as well, our approach that we are very cautious with credit risk and that it didn't limit our sales much, but maybe I would like to say that we are cautious with credit risk in the area.
Our focus remained on core brands in rest of Europe and Okuma brand continued its growth trajectory being the highlight of the area. In rest of the world where we have Asian countries and Latin American countries, the Asian markets, the sales there declined. The overall trade disputes weighed on consumer sentiment, and also foreign exchange volatility directly impacts our sales in that area. The competitive landscape changes as the Asian, mainly Chinese manufacturing, are more becoming competitors to us by increasing their marketing and brand investment in the area. In contrast to Asia, Latin American markets actually performed very well, supported by economic recovery and currency stability. Here as a highlight, the growth was partly driven by the new Okuma distributorship in Chile. To underline, cash flow remains the number one priority.
Our inventories were at last year level, very small change there. When we look at the factors behind it, we see that organic increase in inventory was EUR 4.3 million. Currency exchange rates decrease the inventory value by roughly the same amount. We had most of this increase, organic increase was from the U.S. tariffs, which are of course absorbed over time to our inventory values. Our inventory still remained at the same level if we exclude the tariff impact, so we are showing improved terms, although not as fast trajectory as we would like, and this will remain the focus for 2026. Cash flow from operations landed at EUR 5.5 million compared to EUR 23.4 million.
It's very noteworthy and important to mention that if we ex clude the working capital impact, our cash flow before the working capital impact was EUR 12 million positive compared to EUR 4 million last year. Last year, we released a lot of capital from working, a lot of cash from working capital. This year we tied a little bit more working capital, and this is mainly coming from a couple of things. We have the tariffs, which can be considered that they are now included in the working capital and no further impact from the tariffs is expected. The second one, sorry. No, I need to check the amount.
Ice.
Yeah. The second one, of course, being the ice business, which tied working capital. The season was much bigger. We have done the deliveries, but the payment term is mainly on Q1 and Q2 when we get the money in from that business. As a result of these factors, our gearing increased by 13.7 percentage points. Equity to assets are a little bit lower. We have little bit of foreign currency related impact here as well as pretty big part of our net assets are located in the U.S. Net interest-bearing debt increased by EUR 11.11 million from prior year, and this comes mainly. The biggest impact here is the refinancing. The hybrid bond of EUR 30 million was repaid and another EUR 25 million hybrid bond was issued.
This explains EUR 5 million of the increase in the net debt. Of course, we paid the hybrid interest as well, and we had the tendering of the old hybrid. We had altogether from refinancing and hybrid- related activities that actually explains the whole EUR 10 million increase in our net debt. We have now in December agreed on refinancing with our lending banks, and the whole facilities is EUR 91.5 million. We are compliant with financial covenants, and we will continue in 2026 to streamline our operations cash flow, and we expect to comply with the future covenants as well. Maybe here I would also, on this slide, I would like to mention those items that impacted our reported EBIT.
We had one-off non-cash item relating to the closure, final closure of the Russian and Indonesian manufacturing operations. There are translation differences that have been included and booked in our equity in prior years. Now as the facilities were finally fully closed, it's IFRS regulation that this EUR 4.2 million and EUR 0.5 million are now recycled through our P&L. The reported EBIT includes this one-off item, non-cash item, which comes from the equity and goes back to the equity, so it has zero impact on our equity or leverage ratios as such. I think we can move on to the Q&A section now. Thank you.
Thank you, Miikka.
Okay.
If you wish to ask a question, please use the raise hand icon in the web interface or dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. The next question comes from Joonas Häyhä from OP. Please unmute your microphone.
Hi, this is Joonas. Joonas from OP. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Yes, we can hear you. Yes.
Good. A few questions, please. If I'll start with the guidance. You're guiding for improving adjusted EBIT, and I think you discussed with some of the drivers a little bit. Apparently, you're looking for both sales growth and as well as improving profitability. Could you elaborate a little bit more the picture, which is the primary driver and what kind of sales expectations do you have for 2026, since you didn't provide any revenue guidance? The drivers for improving EBIT, please.
Yeah. Maybe if I start then Cyrille can elaborate more if needed. Basically, we are confident that we can continue on a growth path, and that is our ultimate goal to improve year-over-year. We know our financial position and the organization well. The whole organization knows our position and the direction we need to head to. Although the North American market, there's lots of instability, but the brand has proved out to be strong and has helped us. We expect to remain strong in North America. The European market is the one where we have the most to gain, and this is the focus area. We have projects ongoing in Europe with the cost base, so we improve our profitability in Europe.
Having said that, with the balance sheet constraints that we have, we are not. We want to be risk cautious. I wouldn't say risk-averse, but cautious with taking risk. Hence, we rather see the profits increase year-over-year continuously limiting the risk. As such, we might. With the turnover, we have to kind of find the balance of taking risk, capturing new markets, capturing new product categories. Picking the most cost-benefit projects in that sense.
Okay, thanks. To sum up, you're looking for growth in North America, and then in Europe it's perhaps more related to internal efficiency measures. Did I get that right?
Yes. That's where things have changed is we have more teams dedicated to product development than we had before. There's much more focus on our brands and on product development. This is what triggers in our industry and many industries as well, when you can enter the stores, bring exciting new products and market them. We have really increased our. We had a lot of management in sales, which we still have, but we have converted some sales to product development and brand owners, and they are driving growth, addressing core markets. The fact that we rely less and almost not at all or very little on third-party distribution gives us, as some of our competitors, a much more controlled approach on our growth.
When you sell other people's products, then you're also you rely on their innovation. If there's innovation pipeline, it's full or not. As well as you can lose these distributions, has happened to us in the past. The quality of our turnover is different to what it was some years ago. We see that we control it better than when a large share is from other brands that also control their innovation. I don't know if that's meaningful for the audience.
Yeah, thanks. That's added good color. Moving on to inventory. You've had ongoing ambition to lower the inventory level, yet at the end of the year, inventories were flat and actually grew organically, as you pointed in the presentation. How much room do you see to release tied capital from the inventory? Can you share any concrete examples of what kind of actions can or could be taken to reduce the inventory level going forward?
I'll start and you-
Yeah.
You know, we are in a leisure that requires a very high number of SKUs. Whatever we do, it's a. We provide gear for people that catch a marlin in the Keys or a brown trout in the Alps. That's our core. That connects our complete business. The diversity is related to, well, the environment, the targeted fish. Is it freshwater, saltwater? Our leisure is cultural. It's also related to the dimension, the size of the people. If you're tall, you can manage a larger rod just like a golfer. If you are smaller, you want a smaller rod. It's inherent to have a massive number of SKUs if you want to perform in that business. Then you have carp fishing.
Well, you have accessories, gears, and then you have price points. Our leisure is driven by this complexity. There is not one silver bullet to improve. What we are doing is that through our brand focus, we have cut the cake in multiple pieces, and we have now people that are dedicated to flows and improving them with their KPIs. They have GMROI as a core KPI. They need to improve their prices, they need to lower their minimum order quantities, they need to improve their lead times. It's a lot of small streams. Our sales are improving their forecasting. There's a lot of processes behind, and we know from what we do and how we work that we still have significant improvements. What is.
What you see, a year-end value, which is in our business. It's the one we published, but that's the one you see. In reality, we are improving much deeper than what you see from that year-end value. This you don't see, so you need to trust me. What we measure and how we measure our performance is average because we have winter, we have summer, we have trout opening, we have saltwater, we have north and south hemisphere. We have a lot of cycles that are mixed. What is for us very important is the tied working capital, the tied inventories throughout the year, and that is improving. That is turning better.
Okay. Thank you. You rather recently enlarged the distribution agreement with Okuma to cover the Australian market. Would you be willing to comment on the sales potential, what you see in that market regarding Okuma?
It will be. We have obviously strong ambitions. Okuma is really well-fitted for the Australian market with a strong saltwater offering. Now, the brand has been not really nurtured in that market, and competition is very tough with very dominant positions from our competitors. We have strong ambitions. It will be a slow ride, but step by step, we're quite confident. Offering matches competitive landscape is highly unfavorable for us because more even more concentrated than other markets. Our neighbor in New Zealand is very strong with Okuma, so we'll follow and we're working closely with our New Zealand partner. It's more symbolic for the group as a whole and in line with our overall strategy to consolidate a global partnership with Okuma.
Yeah. Thanks. Maybe a follow-up regarding Okuma. Would you be willing to provide any color on how much revenue is being generated in all of your markets from distributing Okuma's products? If I recall it right, when you started the cooperation, was it so that Okuma's sales in Europe and Russia, wholesale sales, I mean, were roughly EUR 10 million at the time of the signing of the original agreement.
Hmm.
Maybe I'll take this one. I'm afraid I have to give you the same answer that we don't disclose the brand-specific sales. What we can say that we have grown Okuma almost every year. There was the COVID disruption, of course, impacted us, but now Okuma is one of the leading brands which we are growing in Europe. Unfortunately, yeah, we don't disclose the number by brand.
Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. One maybe technical question regarding your cash flow statement. I see that in the financing part, you have a EUR 10.2 million outflow due to the hybrid bonds. So could you open up what does this item consist of?
Sure. The EUR 10 million, of course, we decreased the capital of the hybrid bond, so that explains EUR 5 million of that amount. We paid the interest on the EUR 30 million hybrid, so that's EUR 3.75 million annual interest roughly. As we issued the EUR 25 million new hybrid, we tendered the old EUR 30 million hybrid out from the market, and there was a premium of roughly EUR 1.4 million, EUR 1.5 million. Can't recall the exact figure. Roughly that much was the premium that we paid to tender the old hybrid.
Okay. Good. Thank you. Finally, you're planning to transition to quarterly reporting in 2026. Will you provide quarterly comparison figures at some time during the spring or how does this go?
Yes. Do we have any other questions on the chat related to that?
No. No.
No. Okay. Yes. We plan. When we publish our Q1, we plan to give two to three years of historical information to provide the kind of the trend of the sales and the profitability per quarter. When comparing, I think it was 2017 when we last time gave quarterly sales information. I assume you have checked those figures and that's kind of the baseline for your estimations. To elaborate on that a little bit, of course, the group now is very different from 2017 when we still had Shimano distributorship. We had the hunting business which brought sales in fall in Q3. Now when looking at our composition of sales, quarterly composition of sales compared to 2017. The company is different, but the percentage split by quarter actually has remained quite the same compared to 2017.
We still generate 55% of our sales in the first half, and then 45% on the second half. Maybe a slight difference that we have compared to those figures and also what we've seen in the last year or two, the trend in the market that our Q1 is maybe somewhat a little bit stronger than Q2. Instead of retailers taking goods in Q2, they might take them a little bit earlier in Q1.
Okay. You will provide the numbers in the Q1.
In touch with Q1, yes.
Okay. Not before. Okay.
Yeah.
Yes. Thank you. That's all I have at the moment.
Thank you.
Shall we go through the questions, Tuomo, in the chat?
Yes. I suppose there's no more questions online. Line's waiting for us, so let's move on to the chat questions.
Shall I take the first question from?
Yeah. First question that we have on the chat is that how far are you looking to expand the Rapala brand under the updated strategy? Should we expect introductions of new categories or mostly extensions within current categories? Cyrille, if you may.
Here, under our strategy work, we have defined the Rapala brand as a lure predator fishing brand. A predator lure fishing brand. That we will encompass all the gear that allows a passionate, competitive, angler to go on the water and live his predator fishing experience, whether freshwater and saltwater. Yes, we will continue to expand. We have been expanding in the last 90 years to accessories, to knives. We will go into a wider range of accessories. Tackle box storage, rods, all with innovation, clear branding. That's the strategy. Not diluting the brand value. That's Rapala brings innovation, excitement. It's competitive. It's for the pros competition, and that's what it will remain.
Also, connecting it with the core of its turnover still today, which is lures, where we really lead in terms of quality and the range that we cover in that category.
Okay. Maybe another question about
The strategy?
Yeah, on the strategy here. The question that we have here is that since you just updated your strategy, how would you summarize the main adjustments made? How do you expect growth to split up between sales of your own brands compared to distribution partnerships during the current strategy period?
We are growing faster with our own brands than with our distributorships. That's clear. We are not closing any doors for third-party distributorships. Today it's the world of recreational fishing is a market share game. If we have complementary brands to sell to our offering, we will take them if it is for a long-term partnership. But we are growing, focusing on product development, on our marketing. That's the future. Today, the main threats are direct-to-consumer sales from Asian manufacturing through Temu and through. The other difficulties are, like for every consumer goods, our customers are becoming our competitors with their own private brands.
The future of our leisure and where we are luckily very strong is our brand portfolio. It's growing our brands with unique selling points with a strong brand value in terms of innovation, sustainability, passion. We are here to animate and bring great times on the water to people who have fishing as a hobby.
All right. A couple of covenant-related questions. Do the KPIs tied to Rapala's covenants match the reported net debt and comparable EBITDA, or are there some adjustments made to these figures?
Yeah, that's a good question. Thanks for stating that, Tuomo. Of course, we have net debt and we have comparable EBITDA. In the leverage covenant, we compare net debt divided by EBITDA. The net debt is almost the same as our reported figure. There are some interest-bearing receivables that might be excluded from the net debt calculation. With the EBITDA, of course, it relies on 12 months rolling reported EBITDA. However, there are adjustments made which mainly relate to one-off items. For example, the earlier mentioned currency translation adjustments, which are non-cash items. There are also some other adjustments, one-offs which relate to, for example, sales of fixed assets, which are kind of not part of the ongoing operations. Naturally, of course, it's in everybody's best interest that we improve our operations and do restructurings.
Certain restructuring related amounts can be also excluded from the covenant calculations.
Okay, another question. Regarding leverage, there is not that much headroom in the covenant at the moment. Are there some measures other than improving profitability you could take to ensure that you don't breach the covenant in the coming quarter?
The coming quarters, Q1, Q2, we usually see with our seasonality of our business that we start to get cash inflows. Our biggest cash flows are in Q2. We have seen some cash flows in Q1, but mainly in Q2. It depends a little bit on how the summer starts, how the season goes. We don't have enough headroom in the leverage covenant. We are not happy with the level that we are, and we definitely are working to improve that, and we follow that closely. We have procedures and processes to follow our development, both in the net debt and also in the profitability that we stay within the covenants.
As stated, we have shown a good track record that we abide by all of our financial covenants imposed on us by our lending banks, and we expect to do so in the future as well. Profitability is, of course, one big factor to maintain the leverage within the covenant limits. Here, I think we also elaborated a little bit earlier that taking the right cost-benefit projects and limiting the risk, taking calculated risks, that's something that improves our profitability. That's the bottom line, that we improve profitability and also turn the sales into cash.
A final question that we will take is that, you discussed about the inventory situation already, but how should we think about the overall working capital developing during Q1 and Q2?
Yes. This is, I think I refer also to what Cyrille mentioned, that we only see in this report it is the stated year-end inventory. That tends to be on a high level because the Q1 load in sales begin in January, February. In Q1, we usually see inventory going down. In terms of cash flow, we see the cash flow, incoming cash flow somewhat in Q1 but mostly in Q2. In the whole working capital, that's something that with our main vendors, manufacturing partners, that's always a yearly negotiation and working together to where we plan our cash flow also that whether how the payments fall in Q4 or Q1 of the year. We still have working capital.
We have cash outflows in Q1 from the payables that we will deliver to our customers, retailers in Q1 and Q2.
Okay. We will now conclude this call. A recording will be available shortly as well as the presentation on our website. I thank everyone, wish everyone a nice day and tight lines for spring fishing season.
Thank you very much, everyone.
Thank you.