Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Verkkokauppa.com's Q3 presentation. If you have any questions, please feel free to send them to investors@verkkokauppa.com, and questions will be then answered at the end of the presentation. Today, joining me and also available for questions, CFO Jesper Blomster and Head of Investor Relations Elisa Forsman. As always, I will start shortly about the market operating environment. Then we jump into the highlights out of the report published this morning, financials and how the strategy is evolving. Then a short outlook on the rest of the year, key takeaways, and questions if there are any. The operating environment here in the Finnish market has pretty much stayed the same throughout the year. The consumer confidence has been historically low for a longer period of time.
Also, the GDP is not growing at the moment in the Finnish market, so no tailwind from the market here in Finnish surroundings. If we then look closer to the consumer electronic market in Finland, we saw a few % points growth. If we correlate that to our performance, we can say that we were gaining heavily market share during the third quarter. That's actually the first highlight out of the report. We reported strong revenue development, revenue growing as much as 15% growth coming from all channels, all segments, and almost all categories. Especially for us, the core consumer online reported really strong figures, growing by almost 25%. Our B2B segment showing strong performance. In addition to the Finnish market, we were able to gain momentum in the international business, international sales growing by 34.5%.
If you look then from the category perspective, typically the third quarter is heavily impacted by back-to-school, back-to-business categories, and those categories related, especially computing, IT devices, mobile devices, were showing really strong performance. In addition, our own brands continuing nicely throughout the quarter. Margin has been the focus area for the company for a longer period of time. We reported solid margin levels of 16.6%. Significant improvement to the previous year, but it's fair to say that the previous year figures included stock locked out sale, taking the inventory levels down, making sure that obsolete stock is sold out, so it's not really comparable. That said, still a good performance from the absolute margin levels, as typically this time of the year, lower margin categories are of high demand.
The drivers are pretty much the same that we have seen throughout the year: successful commercial planning, operations, and supplier terms, category management, inventory management. The same recipe is showing good results. If you then go to the P&L, obviously the performance was heavily positively impacted by the revenue development accompanied with the strong margin levels. Cost efficiency totally in line with our expectation. If you look closer to the comparable fixed cost, they increased by 6.8%, so lower than the revenue development, mainly related to volume, parts of our volume increasing, parts in our business, and also planned additional investments in marketing efforts to gain growth and gain market share, which ends up in a comparable operating result of $3.9 million, significant improvement to the previous year, and even higher operating result of $7.2 million, which is impacted by a one-off as we sold our consumer financing business.
Inventory levels, I think I already mentioned it during the second quarter presentation that with the absolute levels, we are actually quite pleased at the moment. It reflects the demand environment that we are operating in at the moment. We want to make sure that the growth is enabled with our inventory, with high availability, and we are also preparing ourselves for the upcoming season. The financial position has been solid for the company already, and now with the sale of the consumer financing business, it fortified even more. The final purchase price was $32.6 million, and out of that, we reported a one-off gain of $3.2 million. Obviously, this impacted heavily our cash flow, our cash position, and also equity ratio improving clearly now above 20%, and we are still working on that. All in all, if we look at the financials of the company, they are really strong.
Also, investment-led business model, as usual, mainly related to improvement of our architecture, our technology stack, fast delivery capabilities, and online experience. Besides having financial performance and success from that, it's key for the company to make sure that long-term growth and profitability improvement is taken care of. One part of our core strategy is the fastest fulfillment capabilities. During the third quarter, one-hour deliveries grew as high as 59%, and this is one of the drivers of the success in online consumer business. The consumer is really pleased with the way we operate, the easiness of shopping, the fast delivery capabilities, NPS is really high, and we are always developing that portfolio further. Now we were introducing the fast delivery capabilities to additional 300,000 consumers in the Finnish market. I think nowadays we have roughly 2 million Finnish consumers that are within the reach of these great services.
If you then combine all of the fast delivery capabilities, the portfolio combined is almost one-fourth of the whole online business nowadays. It is really a big important part of our strategy. Our own brand development, own brand sale continued nicely, growing over 7%. Probably not the highest figures that we have been reporting, but it's important to understand that during the third quarter, the demand is heavily distributed to A-brands in computers, in IT devices, in mobile devices. Taking that in perspective, this is still a good outcome, and we are clearly within our targets to reach 10% of internal sales by the end of 2028. In addition to having success in the Finnish market, being the market leader, gaining heavily market share, this is not enough for our growth ambition. We want to have additional growth outside of the Finnish borders.
Again, reporting strong momentum, continuing growth, 34.5% within our partnerships in Central Europe, within the Nordic markets. Especially the Swedish market is of importance to us. We are penetrating that with our own sites, as we are selling directly to the Swedish market. We have cooperation with the Cedeo platform, and we have now ramped up a larger cooperation with Amazon, including over 10,000 SKUs. Now we are learning as we are going further with the partnership on campaigning, pricing, how to win the customer. We have implemented own brand stores to have better visibility and brand acceptance there. It is also totally in line of our expectations. A short look for the rest of the year, I think it's fair to say that the market will probably stay pretty much the same it has been throughout the year. Consumer confidence will probably be on a low level.
The GDP is probably not going to grow, so no tailwind from the market. Growth must come from own operations, from all my activities, which is fine for us. I think we have the right recipe. We have displayed that we can gain growth also in hard and difficult market surroundings, and we are confident that this will continue going forward. Therefore, no need for revisiting the guidance. We expect revenue to increase and comparable operating profit also to increase from previous year levels. If I sum up the quarter from basically all possible angles looking at it, it was a strong quarter from the company, and at this point, a big thanks to my team and their team and the whole staff.
We have been working hard to be in a position that we are at the moment, gaining growth, gaining market share, improving the profitability while determinedly focused on strategy execution and making sure that we have long-term growth capabilities and make sure that the situation of the company remains strong in the Finnish market. The financial situation of the company is strong, now even stronger with the sale of the consumer financing business, and we are well prepared for the most important part of the year, the last quarter, the last seasons, Christmas sale and Black Friday. Thank you, and I look to questions. I understand there are some questions, so please, Elisa.
Yes, we actually have one question from Pekka. First of all, he is congratulating us on a strong quarter, and his question is, what is your margin on online compared to in-store sales?
I think we have never disclosed that, but I think I have throughout the years many times commented that it is pretty close to each other. The main reason is that we don't differ those channels from our core business models and also core business values. We don't push any higher margin products throughout the store to cost consumer. We are not pushing additional services like maybe some others might do within the store. The store is there to help the consumer make the right decision, and therefore we don't have higher margins or significantly higher margins in stores. It might fluctuate from month to month or quarter to quarter, but in a bigger picture, it stays the same. It's a good question, but that is not the way we operate the business to have higher margin in certain channels. All right, thank you. That was all.
Have a nice day and see you then next year. Thank you.