Good morning all and welcome to Verkkokauppa.com Q1 presentation. I will start my presentation typically with a highlight out of the report that was published this morning, then give you some insight on our strategy execution. At the end we have our look on the market guidance, and then if you have any questions you can send them to investors@verkkokauppa.com and then those will be handled at the end of the presentation. The market surroundings facing us have been pretty much the same throughout last year and time before that as well. If we compare maybe to the last quarter of last year the consumption was slightly on a higher level. It seems that consumers wanted to utilize or at least some consumption towards the Christmas sales. Now when we started this year we saw that the market dropped down heavily and consumption as well.
The uncertainties regarding geopolitical situations and customers' own finance have maintained on a really low level, which is impacting the purchasing decisions and impacting discretionary shopping. We also believe that the biggest bottleneck for purchasing power starting to increase again are the interest rates, which are abnormally high and have stayed on a high level in the Finnish market. This is really pushing down the purchasing power and therefore the consumption. If we then look solely at the consumer electronics in the Finnish market, it collapsed almost down by 10%. We have not seen these kinds of collapses often. Our sales in those reported categories were on the same level, so we maintained our market position in these tough surroundings. You can also see, bottom right, is the Finnish specialty retail market, which has also been decreasing for a year in a row now.
So, the tough conditions impacting everything with slightly higher purchasing price, items with a higher price throughout the market. So, our performance during the first quarter somewhat twofolded. If we look at the revenue development, we are far from being satisfied with losing more than 11% of revenue. But if we take into consideration that we were facing in the consumption in the market side, I think we need to be satisfied with the outcome, probably the best we could get out. The low demand impacting basically all channels or categories, almost all segments. Online channels may be slightly better than the average. Also positive is to see that our strategic cornerstones developing our assortment throughout private label products is having nice traction again. And categories in own brands and private labels increasing by 7%.
Now we have also for the first time disclosed the internal market share of own brands, which is 6% and this is something that we keep on focusing on. Easter, situated totally during the first quarter in March time, doesn't have a positive impact on consumer electronics. And it's fair to say that the weather conditions here up north in Finland have not really been having a positive impact on kickstarting the upcoming season. So no positive impact coming from pre-season sales for example. Some positive performance in certain categories, in home appliances we have been strong throughout the year and also office supplies and components. On the other hand, we can be pleased with the outcome on the gross margin side. Our gross margin improving from previous year and also from previous quarter.
Positive impact on the gross margin comes from own financial services, which is reported on that one. Also, own brands sales positive development is increasing the average margins. On the other hand, if we look at the product sales margin, which is heavily under pressure due to the price campaign driven market. So we defended that quite decently. We see in our own data that the share of campaign sales in our total revenue is increasing for several months now in a row. So the consumer is more and more tempted to purchase certain products and SKUs only if they are discounted. And this is something that we need to work on together with suppliers, that it's not always coming then out of our pockets. In the sales mix in total, no significant changes to be seen.
Due to these circumstances and due to the significant revenue loss, which we were not able to mitigate with higher gross margin, the gross profit dropped down and this impacted our comparable EBIT. Although we were quite cost efficient, we were able to mitigate inflation in other operating expenses. Personnel expenses actually going down almost by 10%. But despite these internal efforts, the comparable EBIT decreased from previous year, so stood at EUR 0.5 million compared to EUR 1.4 million previous year. Good to mention that in previous year comparability was affected by one-offs regarding the restructuring. And this year comparability impacted by one-off provision related to an administrative fine. Then if you look at the balance sheet and the finance, we have been quite successful in our category and inventory management. Despite market going down almost by 10%, we have been able to maintain a nice inventory turn.
Make sure that our obsolete stock is on a healthy level and there are no surprises to be from this side. We saw that the inventories increased from previous quarter. During the last quarter the inventories were aggressively driven down. Typically during the first quarter we are stacking up our inventory towards the spring and summer season. That is impacting our cash flow during the first quarter. Cash position is strong improving from previous year. Equity ratio going into the right direction. All in all it's fair to say that the financials of the company are solid. A few words about the sustainability work. We just released some weeks ago our sustainability report regarding last year's operation. It's good to mention and understand that sustainability is actually totally incorporated in our ways of working in our business.
How we conduct retail, how we sell for our costs, high quality products only for a need. Bringing low return rates, for example, always on customer side. So being a sustainable retailer for the customer. We are obviously working on double materiality at the moment. As all listed companies, we are identifying new focus areas and therefore updating our sustainability program, our targets, and what we report, then coming out of this year at the beginning of next year. So let's jump into the next topic: strategy execution. We released the new strategy end of last year. We believe we have a good, solid, and crisp strategy for cornerstones. The main focus, the main vision, is to accelerate online shift. We have identified that we have built capabilities in our fast fulfillment, in our supply chain operations, to be the fastest in Finland.
To deliver as fast and smooth products which are purchased online. We will be the ones accelerating the online shift. We built an assortment, a hero assortment, totally curated and tailored to fulfill these needs. Fast deliveries suitable for online, fueled by high quality own brands to improve the margin development. On top of that we are identifying new ways of making revenue streams or finding out profitability streams. Utilizing our platform, searching for new segments, new categories and also new markets in the years to come. These are the focus areas for this year pretty much in line with the cornerstones added with the brand work. To be the fastest and raising the bar in the Finnish retail landscape is the most biggest focus area for us.
We are also working on how we are known to be the fastest, the most preferred retailer, the most preferred operator in the consumer electronics. But also building up awareness outside the consumer electronics market is something that we are working on for future growth. We have actually set a new standard in the Finnish landscape in online business throughout our fast delivery capabilities. In the area where we have offered one-hour express delivery more than every fourth online customer is choosing that way of delivering. And on the other hand it makes everybody else look clumsy or slow. And this is the idea of raising the bar, rewriting the rules and making everybody else look quite not so fast as we are.
Also, what is important for us is that the customer satisfaction is not only measured in minutes; it's also measured that the customer is really truly happy with that certain service provided. And the NPS in fast delivery is as high as 95. It is the highest that we measure in all of our operations in NPS. So customers are really, really satisfied of us being as fast as possible. And this is the way of accelerating the online transition. This is not all. We have plans on expanding this service throughout Finnish landscape in all major cities. And this is, for example, a topic that we will be looking closer in the upcoming Capital Markets Day . So stay tuned. On a service level, new businesses, we are quite proud of our trade-in service which we have developed ourselves. It has been now up and running for a year.
It is not a huge commercial impact on the total business. But it can be in five or 10 years' time. So it's important to have new ways of conducting business in an even more sustainable way. Making life cycles of products even longer and therefore being another option for consumers who tend to prefer reused products for example. We have thousands and thousands of SKUs that we are taking in. Typically phones, tablets and computers. It's interesting to see that the consumer can conduct this in total digital environment. So 2/3 of all interactions are conducted through only online. So this is also a way of making refurbish or trade-in services digital and accelerating the online shift. And also interesting is that the average payback value is as high as EUR 133. So the customers have actually quite valuable items at home which are not used.
So it's a good reminder for the customer. If you have any SKUs, any kind of equipment that you don't use come to our site. We get it refunded for you and you can utilize that credit throughout our assortment in 70,000 different SKUs. And the products are brought back to life, back to life cycle. So at last let's have a look on the market. We will not promise or expect any market recovery coming months. And we believe that the market will not start to recover before the interest rates start to go down. Because it is the actual purchasing power which is it at the moment. So we know that there are no salary increases or any kind of other circumstances which impact positively the purchasing power.
Actually there was a political decision in Finland that starting 1st of September there will be a VAT increase from 24% to 25.5%. It's not a huge uplift. That's also something which is impacting the purchasing power and therefore it will be also impacting our line of business. We need to have some kind of positive signals from the market for the consumers, for them to start purchasing and increasing the consumption. What we do believe is that we have the best possible business model in these kind of circumstances. We strongly believe that we have made the right business decision on securing profitability, being most cost efficient, making sure that inventories stay at a decent level and therefore be ready when the market opens up. We also strongly believe that we have a good solid strategy which is then giving us direction.
We have a nice good roadmap on how to execute the strategy and make sure that we gain traction, gain market share and gain growth and profitability when the market opens up again. Out of these reasons at the beginning of the year there's no need to update any guidance of us. We all know that in retail during the third and fourth quarter revenue and EBIT is made. At this point it stays intact and no need to update our guidance. As a summary, tough market, maybe tougher than we expected, significantly tougher than during the last quarter of last year. Our market dropping down by almost 10%. We maintained market position. We defended our margins. We made sure that the inventory level stayed at a healthy level. We did cost efficiency measures to be cost efficient.
So we did all the things that we could and came out with a decent outcome. We were able to continue executing our strategy, pushing private label, pushing fast deliveries. So we believe that we are in a good position when the market opens up. We have done the right things in these stormy weathers. And when the wind turns and we have backwind we are ready for growth again. Thank you all and have a great Thursday.