CFO Mikko Forssell and Investor Relations Manager Marja Mäkinen. If you have any questions, during the presentation, please feel free to send them to investors@verkkokauppa.com, and questions will be dealt at the end of the presentation in the Q&A section. As typically, I will start my presentation with highlights out of the report of this morning. Some insight on company strategy execution, and at the end, we have outlook for the rest of the year and key takeaways and questions. If we start with the market surrounding that we were facing during the second quarter, there are two major macroeconomic impacts that stood out. Increasing interest rates, and on the other side, prolonging high inflation levels, both of them combined, impacting the actual purchasing power and net earnings on consumer side.
We have not seen this significant drop in real earnings since the 1970s energy crisis, and this is impacting our business, not only in the consumer landscape, but also in the B2B landscape, as major part of that business comes out of small and mid-sized businesses. Secondly, if you look at the consumer electronic market in Finland, we saw intensified price fight from the first quarter, which also impacted our operations. Third part, the season sales really got to a slow start, and because of that, some operators started with the out-of-season campaigning as early as never before, and that also tampered the earnings out of those categories. The market, although being tough, it is the same for everybody.
Now that we have the fiscal reports out of the three biggest operators here in Finland, for the first time in history, Verkkokauppa.com is the biggest consumer retailer in the Finnish market. It has been a huge work for the company, and therefore, I would like to thank each and every colleague of mine, each and every Verkkis employee for this great journey until now. If you look at the report and start with the revenue development, the market, like I said, impacted our operations widely in basically all segments and channels, the revenue declining by 10%. Only in export segment we were able to get to the levels that we had previous year. From categories, we see the soft demand from consumer and the hesitance majorly in consumer electronics, in higher pricing categories.
In certain categories, we were able to have some growth to previous year, SDA and gaming, for example. Typically, in these kind of economical circumstances, the consumer is more tended into low pricing categories. Therefore, we were also able to have decent growth within our private label categories, which grew by 36%. The second highlight, and a positive one, is the margin development. Gross margin improving significantly from previous quarter. Two main drivers stood out and were the reason for this. First of all, we have been able to develop our internal process around pricing and campaigning and making that more profitable.
We have been quite successful in our assortment optimization project, where we are delisting roughly 15,000 SKUs, and we have been able to sell out these SKUs with a healthier margin than originally anticipated and estimated. We didn't have any positive impact from sales mix. Like I said, the season sale got to a slow start, and due to the sales, out-of-season sales starting as early as not before, we were not having a positive impact out of these categories, which are typically higher and above the average margin. We had a small positive impact from our private label operations, as these are also typically with a higher margin. The second highlight is tilted towards the profitability improvement. We have been successfully implementing our improvement in our cost efficiency.
Although we have lost revenue, we were almost able to mitigate the whole loss of revenue with the higher gross profit, gross margin, gross profit was only EUR 0.5 below that of previous year. The positive impact on our cost efficiency measures we can see in our costs in personal and other operating expenses, really having impact from the change negotiations and the changes that we took during the first half of the year. In other operating expenses, we see for the first time that lower inventory levels in our outsourced warehouse operations also have a positive impact on the total cost efficiency. Combining these components, we end up in an profit improvement of EUR 1.7 million, and comparable operating profit was at EUR 1 million, and also a nice improvement to previous year.
The third highlight, around the financial and our balance sheet. Inventory levels has been one of the focus areas starting end of last year already. We have been successfully taking that down, matching the demand environment. Also, during the second quarter, we were able to optimize our inventory levels. If comparing the previous year, it was below, minus 20% below that of previous year, and we will still be working around this topic and make sure that we don't get into situations where we have problems with obsolete stock. Investments during the first half, the half of the year, quite moderate.
Not because we are not able to make any investments, more that we have conducted those, the major part of these investments during the last couple of years, and now we see also the benefits coming out of this in our supply chain operations, in our logistical flows, for example. All in all, good development in the financial sides, cash flow significantly better than last year during the first half. Solid cash position, equity ratio, we still have room to improve, but all in all, a solid performance from the financial perspective. If we sum up the first half, revenue was down by 6%. If you take in consideration all the out of the business drivers and macroeconomic changes, I think this is pretty acceptable as an outcome.
A good performance we see in our gross profit due to the high gross margin and good development on that side. If you combine this with cost efficiency measures now really kicking in, we end up in a nice, comparable EBIT improvement as well. Let's jump into the second theme, strategy execution. At the moment, company is focusing on short-term activities and implementing long-term strategy at the same time. Short-term activities heavily tilted towards profitability improvement. We have two focus areas: our operational part of the business and then our commercial part of the business. Positive yields you see in the operational part of the business, in our cost efficiency measures, and on the other hand, we have been able to improve our margin and campaigning and pricing, so our commercial operations has also been developing nicely.
After the first half, we are basically totally on track with our internal targets, with all of the features and themes that we gave ourselves have been concluded. That said, we still have a big mountain to climb during the second half of the year. Most of the revenue and most of the EBIT is always done and secured, so we have a solid plan to make sure that we continue on this path. Long-term strategy execution around these topics that are familiar to you. Assortment improvement, basically, at the moment, concentrating on making our assortment optimized and more profitable, but we have also implemented the new pricing tool, which makes it dynamic. We have implemented this into certain categories already and will be probably taking this to a brighter amount of categories during the latter half of the year.
Supply chain operations, logistical flows have been improved quite a lot. We are faster, we are cheaper in our operations than before. Although many times cost efficiency measures impact marketing budget as well, despite this, we have been able to maintain a solid, strong brand position. Also, during the first half, we have updated our marketing visuals and also our marketing concepts and launched these. A biggest project this year has been the site renewal, really, basically making everything new within our site, all the functionalities, all the visuals, the category listing pages, the product listing pages, search, searchability, browsability, et cetera. Most of that job is now concluded.
We have still certain features that will be updated during the third quarter. The most and the biggest part of that project is done, and we are quite happy with the outcome. Second topical thing is to be the fastest in the Finnish landscape. This is high priority for us. We really want to set the bar when it comes down to delivery speed. Today, we are able to attract and serve over 600,000 people living in near Helsinki area, 24/7 throughout our pickup locker and during the mornings, days, and evenings with our fast deliveries within an hour, and this is something nobody else in the Finnish market is capable of doing at the moment. I am standing too still, so I need to move a little bit more.
How we see the latter half of the year evolve. Basically, the big drivers that we have been seeing throughout the year and also beginning of last year, at the end of last year, will be there also during the latter half of the year. High interest rates, inflation probably being on a quite whole high level, still impacting the purchasing power. It is likely that purchasing power will still slightly decrease before it then plateaus and at certain point starts to recover. We are not expecting any market recovery within this year, so that will be postponed until next year. This also will impact our B2B business, at least for this year.
What we are certain of is that our cost efficiency measures are in place, and we, as we have been during the first and second half, we will continue making sure that these measures also have impact on our profitability. We are also quite confident that we will be keeping on gaining market share, although the market is turbulent. We are also sure that our business model is best suited for this landscape, as retail is still going online, and that is a mega trend that continues. Because of this, there is no need to update our guidance. We are not able to be on the revenue levels that we have last year. We will be better off when it comes down to EBIT.
If I sum up my presentation, the macroeconomic environment and the competitive landscape made the second quarter tough and turbulent. We focused on things that are in our own hands. We saw nice improvement in a lot of areas in our operations. We make sure that these measures also bite and have an impact on our profitability. We have been executing our short-term and long-term strategy as planned, and at the same time, within these turbulences, we make sure that for the first time in company's history, we are the biggest consumer electronic retailer in the Finnish landscape. We are still working on our long-term strategy. We have identified few themes that we still want to work upon, and at the same time, we update long-term strategy targets.
We will updating this and distributing this to the market at the second half of this year. Thank you here, and we have actually one question. Marja, please.
Yes, thank you, Panu, for the presentation. We do have a one question from the online audience. As we are updating, currently our strategy, do we have plans to open our platform for third-party vendors, as both competitors, Amazon and Hobby Hall, allow third-party vendors to sell products through their platforms?
Yes. I mean, 3P has been on the table for in the company for few years already. We have been looking into it many times. I think it is a relevant topic that we will work upon, that this is one of the topics that we will work upon. Historically, we have always wanted to have all control in our own hands because of the position what we have in the Finnish company, make sure that we have the right quality, we have the right availability, we have the right pricing, and making sure that we stay on a high customer experience level.
That is certainly a topic that we will look into because the learnings from previous years were that if we expand too much our assortment, that also puts pressure on our logistical flows and also our logistical operations. We want to calculate quite closely on what is the most profitable way also, expanding the assortment in the future years to come. That's a topic that's on the table.
Thank you. Thank you for the question, and that was all at this point.
All right. thank you all for listening, tuning in, and have a great summer.